Shuttered Sky

The Temporal Vector pulled the lips of his host into a sinister smile and said, “This I will enjoy.”

* * *

Lourdes set up camp on the shore of the bay, at one of the few places where the cliffs receded far enough to allow for a rocky beach.

The clearing she created for herself was a perfect circle, and at its edge a ring of people stood at rigid attention, shoulder to shoulder. Pressed against them from behind was another row, and another, and another; twenty concentric rings that provided Lourdes with a dense protective layer of human flesh. Things had come full circle for Lourdes—once again she was surrounded by flesh, only now the flesh was no longer beneath her skin. They stood there, her private army, jaws locked, bodies and wills under seige. She did not see or acknowl­edge their faces. She didn’t care. To her these were no longer people and they hadn’t been for quite some time. They were cattle. Meat to herd and manipulate.

In the center of these protective layers, Lourdes had built a fire, and now stared across it at Michael and Tory, who lay unconscious, still bound in heavy handcuffs. This journey—this gathering of meat— had exhausted the two of them more than Lourdes, for they had re­sisted every mile across the sea. But even against their wills, their power had added to her own, sweeping across Crete, pulling together ‘the army she had promised the Vectors. Such power she had wielded! Such intensity! She had thought that having such power would fill her in some fundamental way, but like the food she ate, it only left her with a deeper void, craving more and more.

So she stared at Michael and Tory, hating them for fulfilling each other. Lourdes might have been thrust into this world as a broken fragment of a star, intricately intertwined with them, but she was not part of them anymore. She was part of no one. She looked around at the circle of standing bodies. This is my universe, she thought. A circle of flesh, with me at the center. There is nothing outside the circle.

But the Vectors lie. Michael had reminded her of that. It’s what they were; lies transmuted into spirit. But still, their words had cut Lourdes too deeply to heal. Out there was emptiness, held together by threads of hatred and hostility. The universe at large. She could feel that emp­tiness in her bones like a hollow where her marrow should be. Hope­lessness. Futility.

There came a shifting of bodies to her right, and she turned to see someone pushing through her meat- barrier. A man forced his way into the clearing; then her infantry closed the gap, shoulder to shoulder once more.

Lourdes stood to face him. No one should have been able to get through.

“Who the hell are you?”

“Do you not recognize me?”

She looked him over. He was tall, with closely trimmed, dark hair. A moustache. Early thirties, fairly attractive, and well built. His accent was markedly Mediterranean—maybe even Arabic, she wasn’t sure. No, she had never seen him before, nevertheless she knew who he was. It was there in his eyes.

“The Old Man.”

“I’m much better dressed now.” He held up his arms and showed off the muscular curves of the new human body he wore. “You like?”

“I’ve done what you and the others wanted. Now leave me alone.”

He took a step closer. “I was wrong about you, Lourdes. Memo was the smart one.” Lourdes noticed that he wore a coat, even though the dead air was a sultry, salty balm. He glanced at Michael and Tory who lay inert beyond the fire. “It was wise of you to use the two of them as you did—adding their power to yours. Your cleverness sur­prises us.”

“Enough to regret the way you beat me?”

He took another step closer. “A Vector moves forward always,” he told her. “No grudges, no regrets.” And then he reached his hand forward to her. “Come. We celebrate your success.” With his other hand he casually reached into the shadows of his coat.

What happened next came in a single fluid motion, like a step from a ballet. Something dark and shiny slid out of his coat, gripped in his right hand. Eight other hands reached from behind, taking him down to the ground. A bullet pierced the eye of one of Lourdes’s minions, and although he fell limp, there was another behind to wrench the gun from the Vector’s hand. In an instant the Vector was under a tackle of Lourdes’s puppets, and with a single thought she had them rip off his coat, revealing a second gun and a knife. Further exploration re­vealed another knife strapped to his leg. Lourdes stood over him while he struggled beneath the hands and bodies of her minions. “Is this how we celebrate my success?”

“You misunderstand!” he shouted. “Please! It was for them!” He pointed across the fire to Michael and Tory, still unconscious on the dark pebbles of the beach. “I come to kill them—not you!”

“Come on, say it like you mean it.” By now all of his weapons had been stripped from him, along with his jacket and shirt. Each weapon was trained on him now by her minions, poised at his head, his chest, his throat. “I suppose if I kill you, you’ll just slip into another host.”

“Believe me. Your two friends are the enemy—not you.” He let out a pained little laugh. “What purpose is killing you for? None. No, we let you live, and you keep to help us.”

Keep helping them? Would they have her do that? Was that the true definition of hell?

“You rule all people.” The handsome Vector tempted. “Control them. We want this from you.”

“The Queen of Cattle.”

He looked up at her quizzically. “I do not know this expression.”

“Never mind.” She took a step back, and loosened the hands that held him. He pulled free, but his weapons were gone, passed back through the crowd. He made no move to attack her, but she knew better than to turn her back.

“Your two friends—they must die—you know this. Let me do it now.”

“I’ll kill them,” she said. “They deserve to be put out of their misery by one of their own kind.”

He considered this and finally nodded acceptance. Then he looked her over, showing some amount of admiration. “This host has desire for you,” he said puffing out his chest. “Now we celebrate. Just you and me. This I will enjoy.”

“Get out of here.” With a wave of her hand her crowd advanced, engulfing him, pushing him back, layer by layer away from her inner circle. Then she pulled the mob even tighter together so that he could not squeeze between them again. Once she was sure he had been pushed completely out, she went around the fire to Michael. Dear, sweet Michael, who had once told her he loved her. Who had stroked her cheek, and looked into her eyes when no one else would as she lay on a stone floor, too fat to move. It was that lie that had destroyed her, even before the Vectors snared her on their line.

She knew what she had to do.

She found a smooth stone about the size of a skull, so heavy she needed two hands to lift it. Then she knelt beside Michael, and raised the stone above his head.

I’ll do this quickly.

Michael’s eyes fluttered open then closed.

Quickly before I change my mind.

And she brought the heavy stone down with all the force in her soul.

36. Sudden Death

It was deep into the night when Dillon awoke. The tinker was nowhere to be found, and as Dillon looked out over the bay, he could see the moon had traversed the entire sky. There were voices—many voices coming from the shore below. He tried to see through the window what the commotion was about, but saw only the dim shapes of the tinker’s mechanical graveyard.

Winston had fallen asleep as well, having crawled up onto the floor displacing the dogs from their mat— which was a better spot than Dillon’s, which was nothing but a wobbly chair and a window sill for his head. It was a far cry from Hearst Castle or the plush trappings of Elon Tessic. So now they were lying with dogs. Dillon couldn’t decide whether there was something wrong with this, or if such humility was a good thing; something to dilute their