Shuttered Sky

The man’s cheek twitched. A strange whine came from the back of his throat like the death cry of a small animal. When he broke Dillon’s gaze Winston could see how the pupil of one eye had spread, voiding out the iris completely, and how the other pupil had collapsed to a pinpoint. All at once the light above stopped flickering and shone bright. The walls became a brighter green and the scuffed floor re­newed. Then Dillon pulled his field back into himself once more, and he and Winston watched as the shattered security chief reached with a shaking hand for the gun beneath his jacket coat and turned to the green giant guard, who spoke no English and had no idea what was about to happen to him.

* * *

In two minutes Dillon and Winston were hustling down the ter­minal building. The melee that had followed Dillon’s surgical strike had left not one, but two guards dead and their grand inquisitor putting the barrel of the gun in his own mouth pulling the trigger over and over and over again, refusing to believe that he hadn’t left a single bullet for himself.

Winston had passed through the wake of Dillon’s destructive power before—but had never witnessed it firsthand until now. It was as horrible as his power of creation was beautiful. Now Dillon had drawn in and contained his power once more, just as Winston had, but it didn’t change what Dillon had unleashed in there.

“You enjoyed that, didn’t you?” Winston asked after they disap­peared into the milling mob of the failing airport.

“I did what was necessary.”

“You still didn’t answer my question.”

“Yesterday I told Tessic that we were weapons,” Dillon said. “I believe that’s true. We were put here to save the human race with the violence of our power. No, I don’t enjoy it, but I’ve come to accept it, and all that comes with it.”

They reached a baggage claim so stuffed with luggage the carousel flatly refused to turn. People had crawled into some of the larger lug­gage and made them into nests, their faces turned into a stranger’s clothes, their bodies curled up so tightly, as if they were trying to implode upon themselves. Things were falling apart at such an accel­erated rate, there’d be no telling what this place—what any place might be like tomorrow. Here before him minds were shattering before his eyes. Perhaps not with the detonating flash with which the security chiefs mind had shattered, but the end result was the same. The spirit of man was losing its integrity in the face of a coming “infection.” But was preventing that infection enough to justify what Dillon had done in there? Blowing out that man’s mind?

“Some things can never be justified,” Dillon told him, “but we have to do them anyway. In the past few years, I’ve managed to kill at least a thousand people—some of them intentionally. Does the fact that I brought back ten thousand stop me from being a mass mur­derer?” Dillon asked.

“Are you asking for forgiveness?”

“Not anymore. There was a time when all I wanted was to be forgiven, doing penance, longing for redemption. And then I wanted to be damned—because I was certain it was the only way to save the world. Now all I want is the one thing I can give everyone but myself.”

“And that is?”

“Completion.” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Let’s get to Thira, Winston. Let’s kill who we have to kill, resurrect who we have to resurrect to get there, and make our stand against the Vectors. And then, win or lose, we can finally rest.”

* * *

They found the owner of an amphibian plane and although they had no money to speak of, they persuaded him to drop everything and fly them across the Aegean sea. The only hazard Dillon and Winston could see was how clouded the man’s eyes were with tears as he took off. It was a small plane, a four-seater. Just enough room for Dillon, Winston, the man and his wife. His wife was thoroughly confused— too confused, really, to question much of anything—and with good reason. Until about a half-hour before takeoff she had been dead. Dead for about fifteen years. She still wore the dress she had been buried in; a teal gown the man had bought her for their tenth anniversary just weeks before she had died. He would have given his plane, his house, as many pounds of flesh as Dillon would have exacted, but all Dillon wanted was a ride.

Three hours later, Thira loomed in the distance, pushing up from the horizon’s edge like Atlantis rising. Its jagged, striated cliffs, tinged in maroon and violet, gave the eerie impression of the Grand Canyon submerged. So, I’m back in the Grand Canyon, Dillon thought. Half a world away, but he was still waging the same battle—only this time he understood what he was expected to do. Perhaps not how to do it, but that, he had to believe, would come.

The sun hung low this late in the afternoon, beneath troubled clouds, turning the jagged burnt purple of old lava into red flames, as if the island reflected the sulfuric fires of Hades itself.

“Beauteous, no?” asked the pilot. Perhaps under other circum­stances it would have been beautiful, but not today.

As they neared the island, the air became rough, and Dillon chose not to give them a capsule of order in which to fly. Letting the slightest bit of his power escape now would signal the Vectors that he was here. And besides, the roughness of the flight was a healthy dose of reality in an existence that had turned so surreal. Let me feel the reality of this place, he thought. Let me feel the harshness of what happened here before, and what is yet to come. Let it stir me into action; let it harden my resolve.

The clouds directly above Thira were high, and broiled with in­ternal lightning. They bubbled and bled like a living thing, and the small amphibious plane pitched with the tempestuous wind.

Michael’s wind, thought Dillon. He was somewhere nearby; this unsettled sky was his doing, and by the look of it, Michael wasn’t doing well. What did a sky like this betray of Michael’s feelings? Anger? Despondence?

“Soon,” the pilot said. “Soon Thira. Down wet.”

“He means we’ll land in the water,” Winston offered.

“I figured that one out, thanks.”

The woman looked at them and smiled awkwardly like a hostess with nothing to offer her guests, while up above them, the sky boiled.

As they approached the crescent-shaped island, Dillon could see that the center of this violent sky wasn’t over the island—it was a few miles beyond it, to the south.

“Tell him to take us around the island to its south side,” Dillon said. Winston translated, and the pilot turned to the right.

Beneath them now was the massive bay, almost closed into a circle by the curve of the land. Then without warning the plane took a violent, bolt-wrenching jolt. Anything loose in the cabin hit the ceil­ing, the woman cried out in Greek, and the plane dropped a few hundred feet before the pilot wrestled the plane under control.

“Air bad; boom boom,” the pilot said. His best translation of tur­bulence. But that batch of turbulence had nothing to do with air con­ditions. Dillon had felt it even before the plane did. He felt it within him, not around him.

“Winston?”

“I felt it, too.”

They will tear open an old scar, Okoya had said. Could this have been a vein of the scar they had passed through? A malformed thread of space that wove like a snake in and around Thira?

“Tell him to take us wide around the island,” Dillon said, not wanting to experience another tendril of the ancient scar.

As they rounded the island, the ocean in the distance glowed white. At first it appeared to be a particularly violent patch of whitecaps, until they got close enough to see definition within the many specks filling this corner of the Aegean. These weren’t waves, they were boats! Thousands of them, large and small, forging a wedge across the rough sea.

Forging a vector.

Dillon’s teeth clenched at the thought.

This wedge of ships seemed endless. It stretched to the horizon. The pilot looked nervously to Winston and Dillon for an explanation.