Нил Шустерман - Shuttered Sky

Lourdes looked to Michael and Tory. “I think they can tell you how likely that is.”

Michael shook his head. “It’s no use.”

“Then why did you set them free?”

Lourdes shrugged, as if it were nothing. “I’d rather see you all die fighting. More interesting that way.”

“When the Vectors find out you released them, they’ll kill you.”

“They need me to help herd and process the world’s masses.” But Dillon could hear doubt in her voice; doubt that they would truly need her and perhaps a deeper doubt of her own capacity to stomach such a terrible mission. Dillon focused his thoughts on this minute crack in her facade, searching for a seed to sow in that fine fault of doubt. He took a step closer. “Will you watch?” he asked. “When we make our stand, will you at least be a witness to what we tried to do?”

“It’s SRO,” she said, “But I plan to have a front-row seat.” She waved her hand, and her circle parted to the left and right, revealing two miles of empty shoreline. This part of the bay, all the way to the arch on the cliff, was under her stringent control. No one was coming ashore without the captain’s leave.

Michael and Tory struggled to their feet, helping each other up, gaining strength from each other as they touched. Lourdes watched them, disgusted. “Go before I change my mind and have you torn to pieces instead.”

Dillon concentrated for just an instant more, and finally found the words he needed to plant.

“I’m not surprised this is what you’ve become,” he told her in a precise, matter-of-fact tone that bordered on pity. “You always were the weakest of us.”

It appeared to have no effect; she was as recalcitrant as when Dillon arrived.

“Don’t slam the door on your way out.”

Dillon turned from her and left with Michael and Tory. The mob closed the gap once they were outside of Lourdes’s little world.

Dawn was already hinting on the horizon. He had told Winston an hour, but how long had it been? It had taken at least that long to cross the bay. He looked at the uneven shoreline. It would be slow going, but the powerboat would be even slower, winding through the crowded bay. “There’s an arch on a hillside a few miles away. That’s where we have to go, and we have to move.”

“And what do we do when we get there?” Tory asked. “Look for this ‘infection’?”

“I don’t think we’ll need to look for it,” Dillon told her. “It’ll be about as easy to miss as a hydrogen bomb.”

A cold and unforgiving breeze began to blow, pulled by Michael’s fear. Michael gripped his arms. “I can already feel the nuclear winter.”

But Dillon was shivering even before he felt the wind.

Winston kept low as he made his way through the shrubs around the stone arch. This close, he could feel the scar slicing through it, filling him with a discordant energy that felt like ants crawling through the hollow of his spine. Feeling the Vectors so close did not give him a sense of their weaknesses—only their imperviousness.

Something lay in the dust a dozen yards away and with no sign of the Vectors he stepped out into the open to take a closer look. It was a twisted body in the dust, left in complete disregard.

He turned to leave, but then a voice spoke out.

“Winston Pell.” It was a child’s voice, with a slight Latin accent. “Lourdes has told us so much about you.”

He turned to see two figures step out of a doorway of a small church. He turned to run, but a third one stepped out from behind the arch.

“You give people back their lost arms and legs,” the boy said. “For you, things grow; people grow in any way you want. But not today. You see, nothing grows in this rocky soil.”

The largest of the three Vectors rushed him, tackled him, and ef­fortlessly wrenched him into a choke hold as if he had been trained to do just that. Although Winston couldn’t see his face, there was a smell—a stringent and musky cologne. He knew that smell. Why did he know that smell? Then it struck him that this same aroma had been aboard Tessic’s plane that had first brought him to Poland. It had been aboard the helicopter that spirited them to Majdanek and Auschwitz. How could that be?

The Vector pushed Winston through the door of the church, and as Winston finally made the connection, he discovered that the sickly sweet aroma wasn’t the only thing that had been dragged here from Poland. The Vectors had brought a prisoner.

It had taken many deaths to transport the Temporal Vector to Po­land. The first had been the Old Man. Once freed from that host body, the Vector had leapt from the boat to the Italian mainland, where he covered as much distance as he could before inhabiting a woman, who slept while he devoured her soul. He quickly realized that traveling within a physical body would not grant him the speed he needed, but neither could he travel discorporate for more than a few miles at a time. His solution, he felt, was most inventive. He forced this new body to drown itself, and it freed him for another leap. He found his range to be about twenty miles as a discorporate spirit, before having to take another host, which he immediately forced to take its own life. In this way he hopscotched across Europe, leaving a trail of death behind him, until reaching northern Poland just as Dillon and Winston stepped into Birkenau.

In the body of Ari, Tessic’s pilot, he tried to lure them, but was obstructed by Maddy Haas—a woman who, by the memory of the pilot, wielded some power over Dillon Cole’s heart.

Before he could bypass her, Dillon was already skyborne for Greece—but he had an alternate plan. He already knew what it would take to render Dillon impotent. He had a secret weapon—an insurance policy now. He brought it with him all the way from Poland. Beating her into submission had been some heavy task, as she was well-trained in defensive arts—but then so was his own host’s body. She was almost his match. Almost. And for Maddy Haas, almost was the difference between freedom and being bound and gagged in the pulpit of a small Thiran chapel.

Winston couldn’t look Maddy in the eye—couldn’t bear to see the woman who had meant so much to Dillon so brutally subdued. Her face was bruised and her mouth gagged, but her eyes were alert and more furious than frightened.

“What did you do to Tessic?” Winston asked the Vectors.

“He served us no purpose,” answered the ugly woman. Did that mean they killed him or left him alone? Winston wondered. They were just as likely to have done either.

The chapel was in a state of disrepair, windows broken, weeds growing between the earthen tiles. Ari brought Winston down the aisle and forced him down on the altar. The child just stood by and watched, but Winston could see in this child’s eyes that there was nothing childlike about him. He thought back to the days when he was growing backwards—when he had “the stunt” on him, as his mother had called it. Fifteen, but trapped in a body of a seven-year-old, growing younger day by day. Did he look like this child looked now? Winston now noticed that the woman held a steel pole in her hand.

“These bodies—they feel so many interesting things,” the boy said. “Pain is something we are just starting to explore.”

The woman brought the pole down across the middle of Winston’s spine. He felt the pain shoot out from his solar plexis to his brain like his soul exploding within him. He screamed.

“Why do humans scream?” the. boy asked. “Doesn’t it just make the pain worse?”

The boy told Ari to let him go. Winston wasn’t going anywhere now. “Take the girl to a place where Dillon can see her,” the boy said. “I want to play with Winston some more.” And so the pilot left, dragging Maddy struggling through the door.