Нил Шустерман - Shuttered Sky

“Ah . . . your so-called miracle!”

“It wasn’t supposed to be a miracle. I guess I just can’t help myself.”

Again that unsettling grin. It was even more troubling than the things Dillon said. That and the pulse of his heartbeat like an electric charge throbbing through the room. “A thousand years ago,” the profiler said, “if a man prayed to the heavens, and it just happened to coincide with an eclipse, he was pro­claimed a prophet. Does that make him one?”

“That depends. Was the moon anywhere near the sun at the time?”

“There’s a logical explanation for what happened at Hoover Dam, and someday we’ll find it. You just happened to be caught in the circumstance of coincidence.”

“Then I suppose I have a talent for coincidence.”

“And now you’re having nightmares.” The profiler sat back, his eyes steady, taking the tiniest sadistic pleasure in the discomfort his mention of it brought Dillon.

“Just one,” Dillon corrected him. “It keeps coming back.”

“Tell me about it.”

Dillon grinned. “It’s not in your files?”

“I’d like to hear it in your words.”

Dillon slipped into himself for a moment, then he seemed to return, and his eyes became sharp and focused again. “Three figures, standing on the edge of some sort of platform. A man, a woman, and a child. The smell of perfume.”

“Go on.”

“There’s someone else in the dream as well. A man. Balding. He’s in a leather chair, but it’s a strange color. Sort of pink, or purple. It’s a recliner, and he’s leaning back.”

“Images from your past.”

“No,” he said, “from my future. They’re bringing something horrible— something unimaginable, but of course you won’t believe me. You won’t believe anything until it’s too late.”

“I didn’t say a thing.”

“You don’t have to. Everything you are—everything you think and feel is in the way you move, the way you breathe, the way you blink.”

The balance had shifted, like a ship listing from starboard to port. Without moving an inch, without flexing a muscle, Dillon had seized control of the interrogation. It angered the profiler how easily he was able to do it.

Dillon’s eyes probed him again, this time even deeper than before, as if he were reading a biography in his clothes and body language, in the care lines of the profiler’s face. “You took early retirement,” Dillon divined, “but you were called back for this one last interrogation. You didn’t want to come—but you did it as a favor.”

The profiler lifted his arms from the armrests, just to assure himself that he wasn’t the one shackled to the chair. “There are a dozen ways you could have known that. You could have heard someone talking—"

Dillon wasn’t listening. “What I’m wondering is why you were called in, and not someone else?”

Again, the invasive look: a radar scan that left the profiler feeling naked and vulnerable. “We’re here to talk about you,” he said impotently.

Then all at once Dillon drew a breath, and beamed as if suddenly infused with a powerful new awareness. “You’re not well!” he said, excitedly. “Worse than that—you’re dying, aren’t you?!”

The profiler threw a sudden gaze at the two-way mirror on the right wall. He regretted it instantly. It was on par with an actor looking at the camera. Entirely unprofessional, but his subject had chewed through his professionalism like a chainsaw. Dillon never took his eyes off of him—gray, unreadable eyes except that they seemed charged both with youth and weariness, as of an in­nocent who has seen too much evil in the world for his own good.

The profiler was determined not to break eye contact. A million ways he could have known. A million ways. “So now you’re telling me you read minds.”

Dillon scoffed. “I don’t have to. It’s written in the patterns of everything you do. The way you breathe, the way you sit, the inflections of your voice. It’s a blood disease, isn’t it? AIDS? No . . . No, leukemia. How many months do they give you?”

“I can’t see how it’s your business.”

“How many?” Dillon demanded. Then when he didn’t get an answer, Dillon sniffed the air, and cocked his head slightly, as if listening for some resonant frequency beyond that intolerable pulsing of his heart. “Six months,” Dillon said. “You’ve been in remission before. Twice . . . maybe three times. This time you’re refusing treatment. You plan to die with dignity.”

The profiler pushed back from the table, infuriated by his own lack of restraint. “What is it you want?!”

Dillon was as composed as his counterpart was agitated, and calmly said, “I want someone to scratch my nose.”

The room suddenly seemed too small, and the table too meager a barrier between them. “This session is over.” The profiler tried to maintain a sense of professional control as he stood from the table, but his voice betrayed how shaken he was. “You will be locked away, and believe me, your friends will be caught!”

“Only if they want to be caught.”

“We caught you.”

“Exactly.”

The interrogator reached for his notepad on the table—forcing temper to his trembling hands—and as he did, Dillon jiggled his hands. All he did was jiggle them, and the cuffs snapped open, and clattered off. “Your old boss didn’t send you here to do a profile,” Dillon said, “he sent you here for this.” Then Dillon thrust an arm forward and grabbed him by the wrist, tightly. The profiler could feel his ulna pressing toward his radius—and the concussive power of that terrible heartbeat. But it wasn’t the beat of the boy’s heart at all, was it? It was something else. It was more like a blast of radiation, luminescence from some unknown reach of the electromagnetic spectrum. It resonated through the profiler’s body now, and he could feel the change within his bones and joints. Something inside him was coming to order! He could actually feel genetic order returning to his mutated marrow!

Then the boy let go. And scratched his nose.

“There. Don’t say I never did anything for you.”

A bruising crunch of guards exploded into the room, grabbing Dillon, forcing him back down into the chair, Dillon offered no resistance, but the guards still struggled as if he had. The profiler backed away. He had thought his training and experience had prepared him for any madness he’d come in contact with. But what if the boy’s touch coincided with a complete and total remission of his disease? Would that be madness? Would he still call that coincidence?

“You’re going to need more than handcuffs,” he told the guards, and he ran out, hurrying home where he could cry in the arms of his wife.

The nuclear reactor never went on line.

The entire plant was beset by such incredible bad luck and untimely mishaps, it precipitated a storm of rolling heads from Michigan Power and Light, leaving a trail of blood all the way up to the Nuclear Reg­ulatory Commission. Inferior bolts from questionable vendors, leaks in the coolant system, pipes that seemed to do nothing but terminate in solid concrete. No one with an ounce of sense was bringing uranium within a mile of the place.

For years the stillborn power plant stood dormant and cold in the rural community of Hesperia.