Нил Шустерман - Scorpion Shards

“Solitaire?” asked Michael as he approached Dil­lon.

Dillon didn’t break the rhythm of his shuffling. “A trick,” he answered.

“Can I see it?”

Dillon looked at Michael apprehensively, then handed Michael the cards. “Shuffle them and lay them face up,” he said.

Michael sat down, shuffled the cards, then spread them out, face up, showing a random mix of fifty-two cards.

Dillon picked the deck up again and began to shuffle it himself. “I never liked playing cards,” said Dillon, “be­cause no matter how much I shuffled the deck, the first card I always turned over was the ace of spades. The death card.”

“That’s not the death card,” said Tory as she came over and sat beside them. “Believe me, I’ve seen the death card, and it’s not the ace of spades.”

Lourdes came over as well, leaving Winston the only one refusing to talk to Dillon. They watched as Dillon shuffled the deck over and over, and when he was done he handed the deck to Tory. “Flip the first card,” he asked.

Tory flipped it. It was the ace of spades.

“Cool trick,” said Michael.

It was Lourdes who realized that the trick hadn’t ended. “Why don’t you flip the second card?” she sug­gested.

Tory flipped it; the deuce of spades.

“So?” said Michael.

Tory flipped another card; the three of spades; then the four of spades; then the five. She looked at Dillon warily, then turned the entire deck over and spread the cards face up.

The cards were in perfect order; ace through king, spades through diamonds! They stared, not sure whether to be aghast or amused.

“Pretty good trick, huh?” said Dillon. His eyes be­trayed the truth: this was much more than a mere trick.

“So what’s the big deal?” asked Michael as he exam­ined the deck.

“Entropy,” said Tory.

“Entro— what?”

“Entropy,” she repeated. “Newton came up with it— it’s one of the basic laws of the universe, just like gravity.”

“What is?!” demanded Michael.

Tory rolled her eyes. “That things go from a state of order to disorder. You know—mountains erode, glass breaks, food rots—"

“Cards get shuffled,” said Lourdes.

“Right,” said Tory, “but Dillon here . . . he’s breaking that law.”

They all stared at him. “Is that true?” asked Lourdes.

Dillon quivered a bit, and said, "‘Go directly to jail, do not pass ‘Go.’’ ”

While Michael chuckled nervously, and Lourdes just stared at the cards, Tory scoured the area for a way to test her theory. She finally settled on Carter, who had long since drowned all his sugar cubes, and was just staring into the bucket of water. She took it from him, and he hardly seemed to notice it was gone.

“The law of entropy says that sugar dissolves in water,” said Tory, bringing the bucket over to them. “Right?”

Everyone looked into the bucket. The water was clear; not a granule of sugar left.

“Dillon, put out your hands,” asked Tory.

Dillon did, and Tory slowly poured the water through his fingers.

What they saw, didn’t appear spectacular . . . at first . . . it just seemed . . . well, weird. As soon as Tory began to pour the water, granules of sugar appeared in Dillon’s hands, out of the clear water. The water kept spilling through his fingers, and his palms filled with the white powder . . . but it didn’t stop there. The grains seemed to be pulling themselves together as Dillon concentrated, and once the water had poured through his fingers and the bucket was completely empty, Dillon was left with not just a handful of sugar . . . but a handful of sugar cubes.

They stared at the cubes, stupefied.

“That’s awesome!” said Michael. “It’s like reversing time!”

“No it’s better,” suggested Lourdes. “It’s reversing space.”

Dillon put his handful of sugar cubes down, and they slowly dissolved into the mud.

“What do you do with a talent like that?” wondered Michael.

“What can’t you do with it!” said Tory. “It’s better than all of our talents put together. . . . It’s like . . . creation.”

The very thought made Michael pale. A chill wind blew and somewhere in the distance a small cloud began to darken.

“Don’t mind Michael,” Tory said to Dillon, “he gets a little bit moody.”

But it wasn’t just a matter of Michael’s being moody. He had something else weighing on his mind.

“So what happens now?” asked Michael.

The question had hung heavily in the air since dawn, but had gone unspoken. What now? Any urge they had felt to come together had long since faded away just as the light of the supernova had dimmed in the night sky. If anything, the urge was to drift apart. They all turned to Dillon for an answer—as if somehow he were the one now holding them together like crystals of sugar, and they needed his permission to go their separate ways.

“We do,” said Dillon, “whatever we want to do.”

It was a quiet declaration of independence, but seemed as profound a moment as when the exploding star first filled the night sky.

“I want to go home.”

It was Winston who spoke. They all turned to see him there, a fraction of an inch taller than he was just moments before. “I gotta fix things— change things, get my life moving,” he said, then he wiped a tear from his eye before it had a chance to fall. “And I miss my mom and brother.”

No one could look each other in the eye then. Thoughts of home that had been locked away all this time now flooded them.

“By the time I get home,” said Lourdes, “they won’t even recognize me. . . . It’s all gonna be new. . . .”

The shifting wind blew cold again. “What if we don’t go home?” whispered Michael.

“You will,” said Dillon.

Winston crossed his arms. “How the hell do you know?”

Dillon shrugged. “I can see the pattern,” he said. He studied the four of them—the way their eyes moved, the way they breathed, the way they impatiently shifted their weight from one leg to the other.

“You’ll leave here not sure of anything; not even the ground beneath your feet,” he told them. “But the further you get away from this place, the saner it’s all going to feel . . . and every place you stop, there’ll be people coming out of the woodwork talking to you—wanting to be near you, and not even knowing why. Waiters will tear up your checks—strangers will open up their homes to you; every­one will think you’ve gotten your lives all together, and you’ll laugh because you’ll know the truth. And each per­son you come across—they’ll take away something they didn’t have before—something pure, or joyful, a sense of control, something to grow on. At least one of those peo­ple will get on a plane. And then it’ll spread to places you’ve never even heard of.”

They stood there aghast. Michael stared at Dillon, slack-jawed. “You can see all that?!”

Then Dillon’s straight face resolved into a wide grin. “Sucker!!” he said.

Tory burst out with a relieved guffaw, and soon the others were laughing and razzing Michael, as if they hadn’t fallen for it as well.

Dillon’s grin faded quickly and that solemn melancholy returned to take its place. “You’d better all go,” he told them, “You’ve got a whole country to get across.” Then he glanced at Carter. “You can leave him with me.”

Somehow it didn’t seem fitting to say good-bye, so Tory reached out her hand to Dillon and introduced her­self.

“I’m Tory,” she said. “Tory Smythe.”

Dillon smiled slightly, and shook her hand “Dillon Benjamin Cole.”