Shuttered Sky

Michael looked at her, not with disgust, or horror, but with pity. It was a look Lourdes could not abide. “What have they been telling you?” he asked.

“Only the truth,” she said. “That there is no God—there are no miracles—there is no meaning to anything we do; that the universe isn’t just indifferent, it’s hostile, trying its damnedest to get rid of us.”

Again that look of pity from Michael. “And you believe this?”

Lourdes felt her hands close into fists, and she knew if she wasn’t careful, she’d send another lethal pulse of anger out through the crowd she had gathered.

Just then, the three “Vectors,” as Tory had curiously called them, stepped out from their hiding places; behind a tree, behind a shed, behind a truck. They converged on the gazebo in a steady but un­hurried pace.

“They’re going to kill you,” Lourdes told Michael and Tory. “You must have known that when you came here.”

And indeed Michael and Tory did know. They knew these crea­tures were formidable enemies. They knew they would most likely have their own brief candles snuffed once more—perhaps this time for good, but they also knew they had to come.

If we die together again, thought Michael, then it will be okay.

But Tory, on the other hand, was not thinking about dying. She was running through her mind every possible way they might live.

She and Michael said nothing, only took in the faces of the three approaching creatures. A child, an old man, a cleft-lipped woman with witch-long hair. Tory could laugh at the hosts they had chosen to inhabit.

Temporal

Lateral

Leading

The identities of the Vectors were projected into her mind. Not so much names, as assignments. Three axes of dimension. The child— he was the leading Vector, and most powerful. The old man was Tem­poral, the woman Lateral. Then as they approached, they changed. They drew out from their hosts their true being, letting the false light flow around their bodies.

Tory almost fell to her knees with a very personal revelation of glory. “What do you see?” Michael asked. Tory couldn’t answer, the image was so vivid. It was a child with flaxen hair running through a cotton field. The young girl kicked up wisps of cotton that drifted high into the air, as if pulled toward the sun. “I see myself as a child,” she said. She saw the same image in all three of the Vectors. It surrounded her no matter where she looked.

Michael, on the other hand, saw his mother, who had walked out of his life when he was ten. The woman Michael saw now, however, was not as he remembered her, but as he wished he remembered her. Not the cold, bitter woman she was, but a woman with such inner warmth it could fill any needy child. This was a fun-house mirror distortion that took the ugliness of his memory and bent it into some­thing so desirable, he could not resist. It was something he didn’t realize he needed until now.

“They’ll make it easy for you,” Lourdes told them. “They will make you feel fulfilled. Complete. It will be the most wonderful mo­ment of your life.”

“And then they’ll kill us,” said Tory, unable to reconcile the thought with the visions of happiness the Vectors put into her head.

“You’re Shards,” Lourdes said, “so they can’t devour you like they devour others. Your souls will go . . . wherever the souls of Shards go. Where you went before, the first time you died.”

But they had no memory of where that might have been.

The Vectors came closer. They were at the entrance to the gazebo now.

“Come,” Michael heard them say deep within his mind in that gentle voice of his fantasy mother. “Come and I’ll rock you to sleep. Come, and I’ll make you believe once and forever that I loved you.”

“Come,” they said to Tory. “Come play in the field the way you used to. This is your heaven.” So innocent and so compelling were the youth­ful images they put forth, that the blade they each held in their sweet little hands hardly seemed to matter at all. “Just let me bring this across your neck and you can stay here forever.”

Both Tory and Michael wanted to, so overwhelming was the lure—but a lure was all it was. Tantalizing, enticing—irresistible. But a lie.

“Hold on to me, Michael,” Tory said. In an instant she felt Mi­chael’s hand around her, linking her to him. Then Tory reached out toward Lourdes.

“You should feel this,” Tory said, “before we die.” Then she grabbed Lourdes by the shoulder.

Syntaxis was sudden and powerful. At last their mismatched fields fell into place. This was a new variation for Michael and Tory—a different harmonic than syntaxis with Winston and Dillon, but every bit as satisfying.

For Lourdes, who had not experienced this before, she found her mind had no way to interpret the feeling. Time seemed to cease as all the darkness within her nurtured by the Vectors soaked in this new light. She could feel her own field multiplied by theirs. She could feel at once the beating of every heart within her sphere of influence. Not just in Taormina, but miles beyond, to the countryside; to the north shore; to the distant slopes of Etna. Her influence stretched halfway across the Island of Sicily. Finally when she could stand no more, she broke free to see Cerilla taking Tory into her arms then turning her around, bringing the knife to Tory’s neck.

“Wait!” Lourdes shouted.

The woman looked at her as if she might turn her blade on Lourdes instead.

“These two can help us!”

“They’d much rather die,” said Carlos. “And I’d much rather kill them.”

“Kill them and you’ll never gather enough hosts,” Lourdes told them. That stopped them and got them to listen.

“When I connect with them I can seize the wills and bodies of a thousand times what I can on my own.” Then Lourdes smiled. “Take them with us, and we can use them to gather the three hundred thou­sand you need.”

The pity Michael had shown before transformed into disbelief and horror. Good, thought Lourdes. That was an expression she could live with.

Free of the Vector’s spell, Tory and Michael tried to run, but Lourdes turned a dozen people at the marina against them. They were tackled and tied with such unceremonious ease, she almost wished the Vectors had killed them. At least in that, there would have been some dignity.

* * *

The fleet of ninety-three boats—everything from sailboats to speed boats, fishing boats to yachts—set out from Taormina. After more than a year of unbridled luxury, Lourdes took a curious liking to a well-seasoned fishing boat. The fact that it was named La Fuerza del Destino, after the Verdi opera, clinched it for her. She wasn’t much for opera, but how could she not sail on The Force of Destiny?

With more than eight hundred bodies and souls trained into her gravity, they sailed east from Sicily to the southern shore of Italy, the sole of Italy’s boot. As the fleet grazed the shoreline, Lourdes let her influence drag along the fishing communities they passed like a rake pulling up leaves. In each town a dozen new boats were added to their number as their owners were impelled to join them. However, as they set off across the Gulf of Taranto, trouble set in—not with the power of Lourdes’s control, but with the boats themselves. The Gulf of Taranto was ninety miles wide and many of the boats simply didn’t have enough fuel to cross it. Engines stopped; dozens were set hopelessly adrift in the water—and the fact that Michael kept the winds raging against them didn’t help. By the time Lourdes reached the far side of the gulf, all but the largest boats were running on fumes, and they had lost more than half their number.

Of course, the Vectors were furious. For all the acuity of their grand spirits, there were some simple things they could not grasp about this world of matter.

“The boats need fuel,” Lourdes explained to them.

“So get them fuel,” they insisted.

But the town of Gallipoli, where they had landed, did not have enough fuel for a fleet the size of hers, and even if it did, the logistics of bringing in each boat for fueling would take half a day. What then when her fleet grew