“Looks like we’ve got ourselves a Greek chorus,” Winston said.
The shoreline was packed, and for each one who made it to shore, there were hundreds still stranded on boats in the middle of the bay—so many boats you could hardly see the water.
“Do we really want to go down there?” Winston asked.
“I can’t see as we’ve got a choice.”
They descended the steep slope toward the crowded shore, unnoticed, unquestioned as they moved through the crowds. It was clear to Dillon what was happening here. “Lourdes let them go. . . . ”
“She must have broken off syntaxis with Tory and Michael.”
Dillon nodded. When she broke off, her field would have gotten smaller. These were the ones who now fell outside of her influence. It would make sense—she only needed an expanded field long enough to get them here. And now, with the bay clotted with vessels, no matter how free these people were, they had nowhere to go. They went from being Lourdes’s captives, to captives of the island itself, and they’d all be here at dawn, when the vectors tore open the sky.
Of those who had reached the shore, some had climbed up the hillside, toward homes, or the lights of towns around the bay, but most just lingered on the shoreline, sharing with each other the experience of a journey they did not understand.
“The poor bastards—they think they’re waiting for something wonderful. A second coming. The opening of heaven.” Dillon could see the way they trembled with wonder and anticipation. No! Dillon wanted to shout. Get out of this place! It’s more horrible than death—more terrible than the flames of hell. You will see a glow of heaven, you will think it’s something glorious—but they will devour you, for they are the only beings in creation that can kill an immortal soul. He wanted to tell them this, but what good would it do? If they knew, where would they run?
“I feel Lourdes,” Winston said.
Dillon pointed. “Somewhere across the bay.” But there was another feeling as well; a dark, visceral stirring. Intuitively, his eyes turned toward the source; a square arch atop a nearby cliff, lit an eerie green and red against the dark sky.
“The vectors are up there,” Winston said. “That’s where it will begin.”
“If the vectors are there, then they’re not with Lourdes.” Dillon scoured the shoreline until spotting a small powerboat, and made his way toward it.
“What have you got in mind?”
“I won’t believe Lourdes has turned completely to their side.”
“Believe it,” Winston said. “Even before they got here, she had rotted all the way through. Remember, she threw me overboard.”
“She’s got Michael and Tory—we’ve got no choice but to face her.”
“And if she kills you?”
“If it comes to that,” said Dillon, “I’ll kill her first.” He tried to sound decisive, but still his voice quivered with the thought. They didn’t have Deanna—if Lourdes was too far gone to be brought back—if he was forced to kill her to save himself, and to save Tory and Michael, what would happen then? Would four shards be able to hold back the sky?
“You go,” Winston said. “I want to get a better look at that arch. Maybe get a closer feel of the vectors.”
“If they catch you—”
“They won’t.”
“We need to stay together!”
“We need to know what we’re up against!” Winston said. “The vectors have got to have a weakness—I know I’ll be able to sense it.”
Dillon knew better than to argue with Winston once his mind was made up. “I’ll meet you back here in an hour,” Dillon told him. “Be careful.” Then he started the small motor boat, and took to the water, taking a long look at Winston before he left. Like every parting glance he gave these days, it was laden with finality, as if he might never see Winston again.
DILLON WOVE THE SMALL motorboat in and out of the logjam of vessels filling the bay. The sea was calm now, the air hung still. Dead air. It was more troubling than a windy sky, because it meant Michael’s emotional affect was completely flat. Has he contained himself? No, that was too much to hope for. More than likely he had fallen into a deep sleep the way Dillon had, too exhausted to emote at all.
As he made his way between the overloaded crafts, the sounds of the crowds began to soften until all the voices came from behind him. He looked to the nearby vessels to see that they were just as crowded, but no one moved. People just stood, or sat poised, as if waiting their turn in a halted conversation. He knew he had crossed into Lourdes’s field of control. Bit by bit he crossed to the far side of the bay, where a huge mob pressed inward—an atmosphere of flesh around a hidden singularity. He left the motorboat, and tried to force his way through, but the crowd was defiantly dense. In the end, he had to hurl himself upon their shoulders and stumble over them, until finally tumbling headfirst into the circle at the center. When he looked up, he saw Lourdes standing there, holding a rock in her fist, ready to throw it at him.
The anger in her eyes almost made him look away, but he didn’t. She was surprised, even shocked, to see him, but in the end she regained her composure, and put the rock down.
“I thought you were the vector,” she said.
He looked around him. A fire burned at the center, casting shifting shadows on the stone faces of her army.
“Why couldn’t I sense you?” she asked. “Did you lose your powers?”
To answer her, he took a glance at the fire, and it began to burn blue, pulling in warmth, rather than releasing it; unburning. “You knew I had to crash this party.”
“The vectors knew you’d come. I hear they have something very special planned for you. Where’s Winston?”
“Parking the car.” There were two figures on the other side of the fire, but Dillon couldn’t see them clearly.
“Go on,” Lourdes said, deep bitterness in her voice. “They’re waiting for you.”
Dillon rounded the fire to find Michael and Tory. They sat up, groggy and weak. Drained. On their hands were handcuffs, but the chains had been broken.
“The rocks here are soft,” Lourdes said. “I almost couldn’t break the chains.”
He thought for a moment that Lourdes might have taken a turn for the better, but the icy expression on her face said otherwise.
“It’s good to see you alive,” Dillon said.
Michael slowly looked up. “Are we?”
Dillon turned to Lourdes again. He had played this moment over in his head a hundred times, so sure he would know the words that would snap her spirit into place, but now, standing before her, he had no idea what to say. For all her posturing and poisoned barbs, her actions here spoke louder than her words. She could have killed Michael and Tory, but had not. If that meant there was some hope veiled within her, Dillon had to find a way to access it. He had to plant a seed; a single thought that could take root and attack the battlements she had built around herself. He had once shattered a mighty dam with the tiniest of blows. Surely he could find a way to break through to Lourdes.
“It’s not too late,” was all he could offer her at first, and of course she laughed.
“It was too late the moment I was born,” she told him. “That is, if you believe in fate, and I know you do.”
“Do you remember,” asked Dillon, “when we first met? I mean really met? It was right after you had killed your parasite. You were still fat, but losing pounds by the minute.”
“What’s your point?”
“I had just helped my parasite of destruction kill thousands of people. In the end, it tricked me into killing Deanna. I thought I’d die from the weight—that there was no redemption for me—but I was wrong. I made it back. So can you.”
She was silent for a moment, mulling the memory.
“These creatures are going to destroy everything human,” Dillon said. “You know that, don’t you?”
“Name me one thing human worth preserving.”
“That’s not you speaking, Lourdes. Yo
u think they’ve turned you into some kind of demon, but it’s not true. It’s just another lie.”
The frown on her mouth twisted. “I’ve killed people for pleasure—not because I was tormented by a parasite, but because I chose to. I’ve even helped the vectors devour souls.”
“Did you let them feed you?”
Lourdes faltered. “What?”
“Did you let them feed you on souls?”
Lourdes turned away, and hurled another log on the fire. “What difference does that make?”
“You didn’t, did you? Because you’re not like them. You’ll never be. You’re still one of us, and we want you back.”
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 he 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. Dillon 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 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 backward—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 plexus 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.
Once they were gone, the woman brought the pole down again on Winston’s back, a bit higher, and twice as hard. Winston heard it whistle through the air before making contact, and this time he not only felt the fracturing of bone, but felt his spinal column sever like a sheared cable. In an instant he could feel nothing beneath his waist. She swung again, his shoulder blades taking the blow, but the next blow came at his neck. The pain exploded in his neck, but went no lower. Now he felt nothing below the neck, and he opened and closed his mouth like a fish gasping for air, unable to work his lungs.
The woman stopped and watched.
“Does it hurt real bad?” the boy asked—not out of malice but curiosity, which was worse. Then the boy giggled. “Most things on earth have no backbone—I learned that in school. Now neither do you.”
They were silent for a moment, waiting.
Then Winston felt the pain come back along his spine, first to his shoulder, then to his mid back, then exploding again through the small of his back, to his legs and feet which he could feel once more. He lost containment—his power spread forth from his soul. The weeds between the tiles grew denser.
The boy pressed his finger against Winston’s spine, prodding the broken vertebrae. “You can regrow your nerves, but you can’t fix the bones,” he said. “You need Dillon for that, verdad?”
Winston’s answer was another wail. His own body was the enemy now, forcing him to feel every ounce of pain, long after any other nervous system would have been rendered useless. He had never longed for death before through all he had experienced, but now he cared about nothing but ending the pain.
“We can’t leave him like this,” the boy said.
The woman agreed. “Dillon could still repair him. Even if he dies, Dillon could bring him back.”
The boy got closer to Winston, looking into his eyes. “Cut off his head, and take it with us,” the boy said. “Dillon can’t do a thing if we take that away.” And then the boy bounded out, playtime over.