You were always the weakest of us.
Dillon had planted that thought into her, and she could not tear it free. The words echoed within her, fracturing her resolve. She was the weak link. This was not happening because she chose the vectors, but because she was not strong enough to resist them—and in this moment when she should have shared the triumph with the vectors, she could feel nothing but defeat, loss, and her own sense of inadequacy. With a single thought, Dillon had stolen her victory.
I hate him, she said to herself. I hate them all for making me responsible. I hate them for needing me. I hate myself for needing them. For loving them still.
She raced toward them across the pebbles of the beach. The earth shook and boulders fell from the mountainside. The stairs leading to the gate crumbled, but she avoided the falling stones until finally reaching the five of them, frozen in that perfect connection. She knew her place there. She felt it without having to be told. The vectors would kill her for her betrayal, but what would that matter now? They would kill her anyway. She pressed her way between them, cupped her hand gently around Dillon’s neck, pressed up against Deanna, and reached out to put her hand on Tory’s shoulder.
The moment she closed that final circuit, the world she knew, the life that she knew ended with an explosion of light and sound as her spirit fused with theirs, and she added to their powers the one thing they were lacking: absolute and perfect control.
THE WORLD HEAVED AGAINST the flow of entropy and eternity for a single sparkling moment, feeling the touch of the fused shards of the Scorpion Star like an embrace:
In Africa, a brown, barren plain grew green and fertile.
In India, the last vestige of smallpox bacteria quietly extinguished from the bloodstream of a carrier who had never known what he was on the verge of passing on to his friends and family.
In the halls of Oxford, a random number generator that for years had spat out chains of randomness, now put forth a growing series of sequential numbers in bold defiance of reason.
In a South American convalescent hospital, a paraplegic man stood from his wheelchair without even realizing he had done it, and crossed the room to turn down the heat.
In a fresh grave in Arlington, Virginia, Lt. Vincent Gerritson became aware. Not aware enough to know or understand his final disposition, but enough to acknowledge that he existed—enough to lend the force of his spirit to the wind of life flowing through him.
In Southern California, where the sun had just set, Drew Camden had a sudden jolt of connection as he sat in his bedroom. A satori filled with joy, and hope. As he looked out of his window to the clear, dark sky, a vine slithered across the pane like a garter snake, sprouting leaves, budding with red trumpets. It took his breath away, because in that instant he knew. Without a doubt he knew that the shards, whose lives had, for a short time, been so intertwined with his own, had finally received their destiny.
And in Poland, Elon Tessic, sequestered in his dacha, felt a blast of such enormous hope and light that he knew it could only be the finger of God.
DILLON WAS AT THE center.
The moment Lourdes touched him, he could feel himself the core of something infinitely powerful and intense. He—they—were no longer shards; his own power of completion had reversed the entropy let loose in the death of the Scorpion Star, and their souls forged into a single great soul, with six minds. He was no longer just Dillon—he was the sum of all of them—and he could hear their thoughts as clearly as his own.
As their spirits ignited, it burned away their bodies, incinerating the shore, the island, and miles of the Mediterranean, penetrating deep into the earth’s mantle and beyond the ionosphere. They were as a star igniting on the surface of the earth, and yet even as he felt it all burn away, Dillon held the patterns in a mind now so powerful and vast, it could remember every molecule, every cell, every soul caught within the fusion flame. He held the memory of every pattern with the ease he could remember a name, a face, a feeling.
In that glorious moment, the soft swirl of clouds dissolved around the globe, leaving the earth a naked, unblinking eye in the cradle of the heavens, and a wave of spirit swept out across the globe, encompassing it, penetrating the dust and revitalizing the spark of every soul that had ever lived. Dillon held the history and essence of life together in this instant of resurrection, linking every spirit drawing on their energy, making them one with himself. It only lasted for an instant—but that instant had the essence of eternity.
A moment of enlightenment and ascension.
A moment of unmitigated faith;
of singular will;
of untarnished purity;
of unclouded joy;
pulled together and fused into a single force of life.
This was their weapon against the vectors; not six beacons, but a single spirit at the center of billions of points of light all focused on a wound in the flesh of space!
Dillon wanted to relish this grand expansion of their spirit—but—
“—The vectors.”
“Yes, the vectors.”
“I see them.”
“I sense them.”
“At the breach.”
Lourdes thought, “Move toward them.” And their spirit impelled toward the breach at her command. As they moved, they now experienced the world no longer with senses of the flesh, but with a vision of sprit; a mind’s eye that saw in all directions at once, altering their perceptions of everything around them. The space they moved through was not a sky—not an atmosphere, but a thick, gelatinous plasma; a living plasma that mere fleshly senses could not perceive. Now that plasma was violated by the breach, and at the edge of the breach they saw the true form of the vectors; not angels, nor beings of light, but beings of living darkness cloaked as light. Soullessness swallowing souls.
They approached the temporal vector, immobile now like an animal caught in their light.
“I feel its fear,” Maddy said. This creature had been encapsulated in flesh long enough to gain a rudimentary arsenal of human emotions. Terror, fury, and hatred enough to level a city. They enveloped the creature, cutting it off from the others.
Now it was up to Dillon.
He knew that his power of creation and life was only half of what he needed to do. Each of their lights cast a shadow and Dillon’s shadow was destruction. With that in mind, Dillon pushed forth a single thought into the vector’s tumultuous, furious mind:
Cease to exist.
It was the most horrible, most devastating act of destruction he had ever wished upon a living thing. The creature screamed, fighting the power of Dillon’s terminal directive, straining against his will, but it had used too much of its power tearing open the hole. Michael injected it with fear; it panicked, and its spirit finally succumbed to Dillon’s will. The temporal vector shattered, breaking into smaller and smaller fragments of anti-life until its consciousness was gone and its fragments imploded into nothingness.
The shards moved on to the lateral vector—the one who had abided within the woman. They surrounded it. Imploded it. Their light swallowed it.
“Like antibodies.”
“An immune system.”
“Surrounding.”
“Isolating.”
“Devouring it the way it meant to devour us.”
As their spirit crossed the breach to the leading vector, they caught a glimpse of the infection. Thousands of dark entities spilled into the Unworld, crossing the outer breach from their own dying universe, all ready to cross the chasm to the inner breach. The leading vector was calling to them, reeling them in. This had to be stopped—but this last, most powerful vector tried to elude them. There was nowhere it could run from their light; it was caught in their gravity, spiraling toward them until it reached the center of their spirit. It was the strongest, this creature that had hidden within a child. It lashed out now, probing its tendrils into their weakest points, trying to tear them apart, break them into pieces once again—and Dillon thought
it might succeed, that their spirit would detonate from the pressure, separating into shards once more. If that happened, it would be over. The vectors would triumph and the shards’ deaths would light the path for these infecting entities. The infection would take root and spread from this point to the rest of the earth and beyond. Dillon felt weak with the thought, and that weakness gave the leading vector the upper hand. He felt himself losing concentration, losing this battle of wills . . . but then Dillon felt Maddy in his heart.
“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 the 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! Toward 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.
39. LUCK OF THE DRAW
* * *
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 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 did
n’t let it show. “How is Okoya taking to lockdown?”
“Far better than you did. He is content to stay in the cell—he actually seems to like it there.”
Dillon was not surprised. The containment dome of the Hesperia plant wasn’t exactly like being chained to a mountainside and left for the birds. This was a cushy exile, and in it, Okoya finally could find what he always wanted. He was the center of his own private universe with an entire facility devoted to his personal maintenance. He was out of sight, but never out of mind.
The path down which Tessic led Dillon came to a place where grass had not been sown, and the buildings before them were barren and bleak. Although Dillon slowed, Tessic seemed to know where he was going.
“There is a park around this next building. Another island in the ghost town. You will see.”
“Do you still think of what might have been?” Dillon asked, as he looked around at the vacant buildings.
“Of course,” he answered. “But then I look around and see what is. There are almost eleven thousand there—a single one brought back from the death camps would have been a miracle—and we have eleven thousand! I look at these faces around me, and know that I will go to my grave a happy man,” he said. “Although, I hope it’s not in the too near future. I intend to enjoy my retirement.”
“What could you possibly do that you haven’t already done?”
“I have a goal, remember,” Tessic answered. “I intend to die broke. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get rid of my kind of money?”
“It’s not easy being the twelfth richest man in the world,” Dillon scoffed.
“Twenty-third,” Tessic corrected. “Building this place was quite a blow to my standing.”
“Is that why you called for me, Elon, to see this place?”
Tessic hesitated. “My pilot—Ari—he was my nephew. You didn’t know that, did you?”
Dillon looked away. “No.”
“He was my only real family.”
“I’m sorry,” Dillon said. He wasn’t certain if Tessic knew the circumstance of Ari’s death. How he’d been taken as a host by the temporal vector. “I hope you’re not considering making me an heir—that is, if you can’t lose all your money.”