Shuttered Sky

that they hide with their darkness?

Lourdes found herself stumbling over her own thoughts, wanting to close her mind to Michael’s voice but unable to.

“They want your faith to be in hopelessness,” he said, “because you’d never surrender to them unless you had no hope.”

Her cheeks red from anger and confusion, her head pounding, she latched onto her anger, the only companion that was stalwart and consistent, and spat her words at him. “When you died, Michael, did you see the face of God? Did you get lifted up to heaven or dragged down to hell?”

Michael looked away. “I don’t know.”

“HOW COULD YOU NOT KNOW?!”

Michael took his time in answering. “Maybe memory is something stored in our flesh. We don’t take our memory with us when we die, and nothing comes back with us when we return.”

“Wishful thinking!” she shouted. “You remember nothing, be­cause there is nothing.”

“I didn’t bring anything back from death,” Michael finally admit­ted, “except for this: I’m not afraid to die anymore. Maybe that’s because my soul knows something my memory doesn’t.”

She tried to dismiss the thought, but found that Michael’s words lingered. Lourdes was no stranger to death. She was, in fact, its jaded comrade now. But she recalled her first unhappy introduction to it. It was when her grandmother died. Lourdes was all of seven. Her mother had put her to bed that night, and told her how Grandma was in a better place. Reunited with Grandpa. Lourdes had pictured them there together running through the clouds; the old woman free of her crip­pling arthritis, still the same person she had been, only somewhat more transparent.

Then, when Lourdes had become fat, pitied, and hated, she had dismissed heaven out of hand. People dressed in white, playing harps in the clouds. Ridiculous! A Bugs Bunny cartoon without a punch line. That’s all folks. With heaven gone, God wasn’t far behind. It was harder to dispense with hell, however. That idea lingered until she decided her own life fit the description.

The thought was so hideous it forced something out of Lourdes— something she had no idea she would say. “You were the only damned thing I ever really wanted. Why couldn’t you have just loved me?”

“Because we don’t connect to each other, Lourdes,” Michael told her with far too little passion one way or the other. “You connect to Dillon, and to Tory, but you don’t connect to me.”

In defiance of his words she reached out to him. She intended to grab his neck in her hand, but found herself cupping his cheek gently in her palm. And although she felt some connection between them it was only an echo of what she wanted to feel.

* * *

When Lourdes went back on deck night had fallen. The moon was a full blue beacon overhead. She could see the hills painted in subtle indigo tones, and in the harbor, her minions continued to hope­lessly pump invisible gas from empty tanks. Lourdes closed her eyes, took a deep breath, then released it . . . . . . and let go.

It took every ounce of her own will to do it.

It was harder letting go than it was grabbing these people and holding them.

She watched in the moonlight as the disoriented masses found their bodies and spirits under their own control once more. For a minute, there was quiet confusion, and then the fear that should have gripped them in the beginning, gripped them now. They ran from the docks; they leapt from the boats. Anything to get away from Lourdes Hidalgo.

“What are you doing?” Memo’s voice was so commanding it was hard to imagine it came from the body of an eight-year-old boy.

She turned to him. In this dim light, she could imagine him for what he was. An ancient spirit that moved in a singular, relentless, trajectory. Self-serving, manipulative, but never changing course. It was this she so admired in the Vectors. And hated in them as well.

“We can’t bring these people to Thira,” she told him. “It’s too far away. We’ll travel south to Crete, and I’ll collect your army on the shores there. From Crete’s north coast it’s only eighty miles to Thira.”

And for the first time Memo deferred to her judgment. She won­dered if he noticed that this was also the first time she called the army his, and not her own.

33. Birkenau Black

Auschwitz was no longer run by the Third Reich. Now it was administered by the Polish Ministry of Parks.

It was preserved as a museum; hundreds of barracks, the execution wall, Mengele’s chamber of death. But Auschwitz II, also known as Birkenau, was a different story. The heart of darkness where more than a million and a half people were murdered was left exactly the way it was found, untouched—untouchable. Crumbling barracks stretched further than the eye wanted to see, behind the remains of the three massive crematoria and gas chambers, now no more than skeletal fac­tories of death. Although the SS tried to blow the crematoria up before the liberation, they were not entirely successful. The twisted rubble that remained still testified to the atrocity.

The current curator was a middle-aged man who had not lived through the horror, but was born in its aftermath. His deepest personal connection was the coldness of his childhood winters, because his par­ents refused to burn wood in their fireplace, the stench of the smoke reminding them of the stench that blew across the miles from Auschwitz-Birkenau for four long years.

On the morning of December fourth, the curator ate his standard ham and eggs breakfast, kissed his wife and children good-bye, then headed out in his aging Citroen over the snow-dusted road connecting the town to Auschwitz, twenty miles away.

The “Facility,” (which was the accepted euphemism among the administrators) did not open until ten o’clock, but he found the road already crowded with buses. There were always buses on the road. Buses coming, buses leaving and on his weaker days the curator often wished that the abandoned railway that had once brought so many across the border from Hungary to their death, could be used now for the shuttling of tourists back and forth.

It was only after riding between two buses for ten minutes that he realized that they both were empty. In fact—they all were. Drivers, yes—but no passengers.

This did not bode well. A fleet of empty buses was unnerving in and of itself, but that coupled with bizarre rumors from some of the other memorials left him in a deepening state of dread. Rumors that they had been seized by foreign forces. Rumors that mystics were disturbing the bones and ashes of the dead.

He now recalled that several weeks ago some workers had come to his Facility from the Ministry of Public Works, with high-tech divining equipment. They claimed to be checking the state of the watershed, but when he phoned the Ministry they denied sending a team of workers. He hadn’t been concerned at the time—he knew that when it came to government, the right hand rarely knew what the left hand was doing.

But now, as he drove into the parking lot, he suspected that those workers had not been state workers at all. Buses already filled half the lot—at least thirty of them. All identical. All empty. What’s more, there were teams of laborers waiting at the gate. Their beige uniforms suggested some utility, but was nondescript enough to defy any defin­itive association.

“We were sent by the Ministry of Health,” the curator was told by a young woman as he approached the gate. “We believe your aquifer is contaminated, creating a risk to public health.”

“Funny that a representative from the Ministry of Health would talk to me in English,” he told the young woman, whom he took to be an American even before she had opened her mouth, by the way she held herself.

“Would you like to see our permits? I think you’ll find everything in order.”

She held out some official looking documents. “No doubt,” he answered and waved the papers off. She folded them and put them away.

The night guard, who had his own unspoken suspicions, had re­fused to let them in. Now the guard