Нил Шустерман - Shuttered Sky

“Those three creatures,” she asked. “What are they, and what are we suppose to do to stop them?”

Even before the Vectors took their place in the Thiran Gate, Tory put all of her attention into finding Winston. Winston’s sudden burst of energy somewhere on the top of that cliff had taken Tory com­pletely by surprise—because until that moment she hadn’t even felt his presence there at all. Now as she searched for him, she realized how that could be. “Containment,” Dillon had called it. An ability to cloak oneself from detection, and reserve one’s energy until it was needed. It was a skill she would have liked to have learned, but there would be no time for lessons today.

The growth spurt Winston had incited had quickly tapered, fading even before they left Dillon to find him, and although she could now feel Winston’s uncontained presence, it was faint—dangerously faint. Tory had thought she had seen a shadow drop through the corner of her vision, but she wasn’t certain until she climbed an outcrop of rocks, and saw him wedged deep in a crevasse.

“Winston!” She tried to ease her way down into the crevasse, but lost her footing and slid to the narrowest point, where Winston was wedged. His body was mangled in an unnatural serpentine twist, and through his torn shirt, she could see terrible ridges poking from his back like a stegosaurus spine. His eyes were open, but only barely. A weak moan escaped him—the only hint that he was still conscious.

“Hurts . . .” he murmured.

“We’ve got to get you out of here,” but there was no way she could see to do it.

“My Mama . . . " he said. “Damned if I don’t hear my Mama’s singing, you hear her?” He grinned faintly in his delirium.

“Yes, Winston,” she said, doing everything she could to placate him, “I hear her.”

“That witchy woman up there’s got to be even uglier than you.” Then his eyes opened from slits to half mast, and he looked at her. “Hey, swamp thing—you ain’t ugly no more.” He reached up to touch her face, but didn’t have the strength.

Her affection blossomed into tears. “I haven’t been that way for a long time, Winston.” She thought back to the oozing mess she had once been in the days when the strange light from the supernova had filled the sky. Had that been her? “I’m not ugly, and you’re not shrink­ing.”

“Wish I was,” he answered lazily. “Wish I was back home . . .”

“So do I, Winston. So do I.” Being outcasts in rural Alabama had been horrible, but simple. Did she ever dream back then that she would have the fate of the world in her hands—back in the days when every­one in that same world was her enemy? When her only thought was surviving through the night without being eaten alive by the sores that covered her rancid, unclean body.

She saw Winston’s eyes fluttering—fading, and she spoke to him to keep his thoughts focused, as she tried to shift her position enough to get a grip on him. “I wish we were back there, you with your Mama, and that silly little brother of yours.”

Winston sighed. “Thaddy.”

“Yes. Thaddy. Screaming bloody murder about some bogey-man coming to steal him through his window.”

“Taily-bone,” Winston mumbled, then rattled in a sing-song voice. " ‘Taily-bone Taily-bone all’s I want’s my Taily-bone.’ I used to tell him Taily-bone was coming for him if he didn’t shut his mouth.” Winston let out a wheezy laugh, then grimaced. “Damn fool Thaddy don’t know enough to run from a train.” He grew solemn for a mo­ment, tears filling his half-shut eyes. “They gonna kill him, Tory. They gonna eat Thaddy from the inside out. Taily-bone comin’ for him after all.” He coughed a splatter of blood onto her shirt.

“We’ll stop them, Winston.”

“I’m gonna sleep first,” he said. “You tell me if I dream.”

And he closed his eyes.

“Winston, no.” She tapped his face, and lost her footing, wedging deeper in the crevice.

And then something happened.

A pulse of heat passed through her body. But it wasn’t heat—not exactly—it was something else. Then again, and again. She looked up to see waves of color expanding across the slit of sky above the crevice. Whatever this was, it touched her deep within, scraping against her, like the flint of a lighter flicking, flicking, flicking, to ignite the flame.

And suddenly she did ignite!

She felt her power explode from her in a breathtaking rush, cleans­ing, purifying. Not just the island, but the ocean beyond, for miles and miles.

A sterile field, she thought. I’m setting up a sterile field. My part in this has already begun!

And if these strange waves of light had affected her so, it must have affected the others as well; she could feel that it did, and Winston, as weak as he was, even in this unconscious state, was pushing out his greening waves of growth. Ragweed above them grew to maturity and broke open, sending loose a mad flurry of airborne seeds, like a child blowing a dandelion, and those seeds took root in the stone, their roots breaking the stone to bits. Something was moving down below. Something was alive in the darkness of the crevasse.

She heard them before she saw them—the awful clicking and scraping, then they rose into the light. Insects. A horde of insects— millions of them—spawning, reproducing like a plague beneath them. She screamed as they bubbled up from the depth of the chasm like living magma, but as the mass of insects grew closer, Tory realized that this was no plague, but their salvation. As the wellspring of insects reached their feet, she grabbed Winston in her arms. He moaned, but didn’t open his eyes. That’s alright, Winston. Keep dreaming.

She closed her eyes, trying to ignore the sensation of them crawling in her clothes, against her skin. They began to rise, carried by this living eruption, until they were lifted out, the insectoid eruption surg­ing over the edge of the crevasse, running down the hillside to the shore.

“Tory? Winston? Jesus—what the hell is this?”

With Winston still in her arms, she stumbled against Michael, and he caught her.

“What happened to him?”

She opened her mouth to explain, but again her breath was taken away—not by the surges of light but by something entirely different. A feeling within as comforting as those waves of light were disturbing. It was the sense of something falling into place—something that they had gone so long without, they had grown accustomed to its absence.

Tory knew at once.

“Deanna?”

Michael pushed his hair back from his face with a shaky hand. Up above, the clouds shredded, not knowing which way to blow. “Son of a bitch, I think you’re right!”

Further down the shoreline, in the midst of all that was going on, Dillon was holding someone’s hand.

“That’s not Deanna! What is he doing?” Michael said.

With Winston’s weight divided between the two of them, they hurried down to the shore toward them. Winston was still as broken as he had been back in the crevice, which meant Dillon still kept containment. Now, when they needed his power more than ever, he still held it back.

When they arrived, Dillon turned to them from Maddy, his eyes glazed in a sort of puppy affection totally inappropriate for this dire moment.

“Dillon, Deanna’s back,” Tory informed him. “I don’t know how, but she’s here somewhere. Somewhere close—can’t you feel it?”

Dillon only smiled. “She’s right here,” he told them. “Only you’ve got the name wrong.”

Their minds stumbled, trying to grasp what the hell he was talking about.

“Her name’s not Deanna,” he said. “It’s Maddy. Maddy Haas.”