Shuttered Sky

“Yes,” Dillon said honestly. “I would.”

“Then why have they not returned?”

This time Winston answered him. “Maybe they’ve decided to go and resurrect the Minoan Civilization.”

This piqued Tessic’s interest, and Winston grimaced, realizing the information he had just leaked.

“Minoans,” said Tessic. “Why would they be going to Crete?”

“No reason,” said Winston, poorly covering. “I just hear the Ae­gean Sea is beautiful this time of year.”

“Thank you, Winston,” Tessic said, miming a tip of the hat. “Not only do I know where they are, but now, thanks to you, I know where they’re going. I’ll be sending a search and rescue mission by sea plane. A whole squadron if necessary.”

“I wouldn’t,” Dillon said. “Lourdes can pull them out of the sky.”

“So I’ve been hearing.”

“If they are meant to be back—they will be back,” Dillon told him. “What’s fated is fated. Bashert, isn’t that what you call it?”

But Tessic’s smile was forced.

“Your faith has given way to your ego, Elon,” Dillon told him.

To which Tessic answered, “Faith only goes so far.”

Their helicopter turned, and Dillon gripped his gut, feeling their destination before he could see it. When he looked out of the window, he could see down below, among the low, barren hills, two huge square patches, about two miles apart. The work camp of Auschwitz and, looming behind it like a tidal wave, the massive death camp called Birkenau. He could hear Winston hyperventilating—he could feel the presence of death, too; even from a distance it was exponentially worse than Majdanek or the road of the dead.

“So cold,” Winston said. “So cold.”

Dillon tried to speak to him, to calm him down, but found he had no wind in his lungs. It was as if the atmosphere had been sucked away from the planet, leaving beneath them this barren moonscape of gray rubble. Death was already screaming out to them and they were still miles away.

“We won’t be able to control this,” Winston hissed. “Once we’re there, once it begins, it’s going to swallow us like the millions it swal­lowed before.”

From here they could see that the road leading there, and the visitor’s parking lot were clogged with buses. Since many of the bus drivers had deserted after that first day, a fair number of the drivers were now men and woman raised from Majdanek. Tessic took pride in the poetic justice, for just as these masses were forced to assist their own extermination, now they were given the chance to assist in their resurrection.

They set down in a clearing beside the Auschwitz guard tower, the down-draft of the helicopter blasting away the snow, which scattered like ghosts from a grave. When the other copters had landed, Tessic opened the door to let in the bitter cold. But it wasn’t only the cold that came in. There was a presence, almost sentient, that peered in through the open door. When you look into an abyss, thought Dillon, the abyss looks into you. It was the eye of old murder.

“Dillon,” Winston said in a panicked whisper. “I’m scared. I’m so scared.”

“So am I,” he admitted.

“Why don’t we just leave. Why don’t we just—'

“Shhh,” Dillon said. “It’s going to be alright.”

“But you don’t know that, do you? You don’t know anything, do you?”

Dillon closed his eyes. Even that vile sense of the Vectors was gone here, obliterated by the static field of earthly evil that now enveloped them.

“Why are we here?” Winston whined.

Why are we here? thought Dillon. The easy answer would have been to blame Tessic—but Dillon could have delayed this visit. He could have detoured them to any number of sites, but he hadn’t, because deep down he wanted to come here. Could Tessic be right? Could they have been meant for this? Was this his own intuition telling him so?

“We have to face Birkenau,” Dillon told Winston. “We have to face it.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know yet.”

* * *

Tessic walked them through the oppressive Auschwitz gate—the wide brick arch through which a thousand trains of the condemned had once passed. Tessic pointed to red posts marking the ground. “We’ve used sonic imagery to locate the—' he broke off, his mind tripping over the thought—“to locate the spots most likely to yield new life. Begin wherever you wish.”

But Dillon did not need sonic imagery to know where the dead were. He could feel them, and they were everywhere. He could read their history in every inch of ground he crossed. There had been so many ashes, so many bones, there had been no way for the Nazis to dispose of it all. It was spread into creeks until the creeks choked. It filled ponds until the ponds were dry grey sores on the face of the countryside. And toward the end, the Nazis didn’t even try to conceal it. Within the camp and in the surrounding countryside were unnatural ash mounds that in the summer would sprout with weeds and wild flowers, but now in winter were as bald as granite, revealing their true nature.

They were led by Tessic and his entourage through the double fence, and into Auschwitz. Maddy was there supervising teams of workers that waited to assist. Dillon thought to say something to her, but changed his mind. What was there to say now? She had, in a strange way, fulfilled her military destiny, becoming a key cog in Tessic’s ma­chine. He felt an intense pang of regret as he caught her gaze, but it was quickly taken under the cold waves of death rolling in all around him.

“Begin wherever you wish,” Tessic repeated.

Dillon turned from Maddy, and picked up his pace rather than slowing down. He could sense the dead already beginning to gather around him—but not like in the other places he had been. Here, it was unfocused— diluted. A million souls, each grasping a tiny, tiny fraction of his power all at once. Not one had yet been revived, and already he felt drained.

This place will swallow us.

He felt himself a single grain of salt dissolving in a sea. So he didn’t slow his pace, for fear that he would dissolve entirely.

The rear gate of Auschwitz opened to a road that led to Birkenau, three kilometers distant, its guard towers clearly visible through the flurries of snow. To the right, in the open fields were storehouses of stolen memory. “The Fields of Plenty,” the Nazis had called them. Each structure was still filled to the brim with eyeglasses, photographs, shoes, watches. Anything and everything that could be stolen from the victims, down to the hair on their heads, shaved and awaiting shipment to German textile mills.

They made their way down the snow-dusted path. One kilometer. Two. With each step, the overwhelming presence of Birkenau grew stronger, making his knees feel weak with burden. There was a veil of darkness surrounding Birkenau that went beyond a mere absence of light. Dillon could feel this palpable pall of oppression— he could see it when he closed his eyes, darker than pitch; a pigment of black that could not be manufactured anywhere else on earth. Birkenau Black. It robbed the color from the countryside, washing everything in shades of gray.

“Like hell I’m going in there,” Winston said, but they both knew that he would walk through the gaping maw of the guardhouse arch right beside Dillon. A wind blew against them now, through the arch, and it was hard for Dillon to shake the feeling that the place was breathing.

Places had personalities. Dark deeds and cruel intents lingered, soaking into the porous soil, leaching into the rocks, until the place became permeated with it. This, Dillon knew, was the most evil place on Earth, where even the blades of grass that grew in the spring had an unnameable malevolence about them. This place was indeed alive, not with any kind of life Dillon understood, but with a living shadow. Darkness that consumed light. A place not full of the souls that had died, but filled with the shadows cast when they were murdered.

The living void.

And as he neared that horrible guardhouse gate, Dillon finally knew. He understood why he and Winston had to come here. This was a place as close to the living void of the Vectors’ world as there could be on Earth.

If they could face this then maybe—just maybe—they could face the Vectors! But what did facing Birkenau