Нил Шустерман - Shuttered Sky

“Trust,” was all she said.

Not the voice of Maddy, not the voice of Deanna—but both at the same time soothing his panicked mind. Her touch stabilized him, strengthened him enough to bear down with the force of all the souls he held in his grasp, and the leading Vector could not withstand it. It imploded and its final death wail was stifled, stolen before it could even begin.

“We’ve killed them! The Vectors are gone!”

“But not the infection.”

“I see them!”

“Hundreds of thousands!”

“Shadow spirits.”

“Thieves of Souls.”

“Crossing over.”

“Escaping.”

“Too many!”

Now without the Vectors, their orderly grid had dissolved, and they crowded the edge of the inner breach like ants, gripping onto the jagged edge of the sky, fighting to get through.

Then, beyond the Unworld, beyond the outer breach, the Shards witnessed the death of a universe.

The living void Okoya had told them about was completely gone, consumed by two spirits—two parasites; one of destruction, the other of fear. They were Dillon’s old friends—the spirits he himself had unleashed upon that dark place a year ago. Now those insatiable beasts had consumed the full volume of space itself. And finally, when the last of that universe was gone, with nothing left to consume, the par­asites turned to one another. The blind snake of fear and the black-winged demon of destruction, now larger than constellations, wrapped around one another in an impassioned, but deadly embrace, and then began to devour each other. They grew smaller and smaller, their spirits disappearing into each other like a moebius strip, twisting fearfully, angrily, destructively, until they had devoured one another completely, and the universe that gave birth to Okoya and the Vectors blinked out of existence forever.

And now the soul-devouring shadow-creatures lingered at the breach, lethal refugees of that lost place. Dillon felt the magnitude of their presence, and knew that the power of the Shards was the only thing keeping them from crossing through. Dillon could hear the thoughts of his soul-mates as this infection loomed on the lip of the wound.

“Kill them.”

“Destroy them.”

“Every last one of them.”

“For what they have done,”

“for what they could have done,”

“for what they might still do someday.”

But a voice of wisdom rose above them all.

“No.”

Winston was the single voice of dissent. “No,” he told them. “It’s not our place. Our task is to stop the infection, not to wipe out a species.”

It was Winston’s wisdom in the face of their own fury that they listened to, for if ever there was a time to trust Winston’s judgment, it was now.

Hold them back. Keep them out. Let them live.

With their own power beginning to fade, Maddy held back their panic, giving them a final burst of courage. Lourdes moved them across the breach. Winston restored the gaps in space, Tory purified it, Mi­chael cauterized it. Dillon repaired the damage, pulling back the edges of the wound until the sky was whole, and the creatures were sealed out, trapped forever in the Unworld, condemned to haunt the walls between worlds.

When it was done, Dillon finally let go. He let go of his grip of the world, he let go of the five who were a part of him, and as he did he pushed forth the patterns he held through the battle. Patterns of the sea, and of the island and of the thousands of boats in the bay and of every soul in every vessel in those boats. He pulled it all back from the smithereens, restoring it all, until he could feel his own body again. Tory pressing his chest, Winston on his waist, Lourdes holding the back of his neck, Michael at his left hand and Maddy at his right. He thought that beyond what they had just experienced there could be nothing left to feel—but then came a final gift, the reward for what they had done, for what they had chosen.

It was as if an eye opened somewhere beyond the sky and projected forth for them from a perspective too vast to comprehend, a billion pinpoints of light that were not stars, but entire galaxies. This was their universe in its entirety, thirty billion light years across, alive, and puls­ing with living light. It was a glorious vision of life, of majesty, and a sense of their own wonderful, terrible, insignificance in the vastness of creation. Then, within that soup of swirling stars there came a sudden series of explosions. Not just a few, but countless stars began to det­onate, and with those blasts of light, billions of shards of life traversed the universe instantaneously towards them! Towards earth!

The vision faded and they pulled apart, separating into six separate spirits, their powers spent, used up once and for all—but the power of their final vision remained.

“What was it?” Maddy asked. “What was that we just felt?”

“A billion stars,” Winston said, his voice faint and wondrous. “A billion stars going supernova.”

“Did we do that?” Tory asked.

Dillon shook his head. “Unless I’m mistaken,” he said, “I believe that was God hearing the prayers of pigeons.”

They said no more of it, but each held in their own heart the knowledge that, from this moment on, nothing on earth would ever be the same.

Spring came early to Poland in slow increments after the winter thaw. For a brief time in December, grass had sprouted and trees had greened, but such an instant of growth could not last long. In a day, the leaves had fallen and the grass had withered under the numbing cold of northern winds. In April, when the snows had gone, the hills filled with green at a much slower pace, undetectable to the human eye, but steady enough to cover the countryside in a few short weeks. Ash mounds in and around Birkenau filled with wildflowers and rye, as if nature were somehow pining to ease the mind, without taking away the shape of the horror.

Ciechanow, which had once been a very small town, now had on its outskirts a pinwheel of 112 buildings. With each building thirty stories high and as long as a football field, the complex was twice as large as the rest of the town. Few of the brand new buildings were occupied—in fact, most of them had been donated by Tessitech to the Polish government, and now an entire wing in the Ministry of Housing was filled with bureaucrats working to fill them.

However, one small corner of the complex was occupied. Six buildings and part of a seventh, a drop in the bucket really, but a community nonetheless; close knit and still a little bit wary of the outside world, but that was only to be expected.

It was on a temperate day in April that Elon Tessic walked the paths of this towering apartment community with Dillon Cole.

“I did feel your joining,” Tessic told Dillon. “Your ‘fusion,’ as you call it.”

Dillon shrugged. “Everyone felt it.”

“Yes,” Tessic said. “But I understood what I was feeling.”

Dillon grinned. “I suppose now you’ll claim you were responsible for saving the world.”

Tessic smirked. “Well, you said it yourself. I did help to develop the world’s greatest defensive weapon, did I not?”

“That you did, Elon.” And indeed Dillon knew that there was credit due. And who’s to say that had Dillon not been put through Tessic’s unusual boot camp, he would have had the fortitude to fill his role in the stand against the Vectors?

“I even provided the means for imprisoning that creature you al­lowed to remain.”

The reminder unnerved Dillon, but he didn’t let it show. “How is Okoya taking to lockdown?”