Shattered Sky by Neal Shusterman
They both held on. They held on until they knew they had the strength to hold on as long as they had to. To hold on forever.
Something deep within Dillon changed, and for the first time, Dillon miraculously felt his field pulling back! Finally, after all these years his powers obeyed his will, drawing into his flesh, instead of radiating outward!
Winston curled into the fetal position, and Dillon stood there, arms by his side, fists clenched. He held within him now the wellspring of his luminous soul, and the sensation was different from anything he had ever felt—as if his senses and emotions were charged to a new high, and he could at last sense the boundary between himself and the world. He still felt the horror of this place, but now he was aware of something bright beyond the darkness, something eternal, that fueled in him a compassion for those who died here as immense as his power. But rather than stir them with the depth of his compassion, he would hold it.
When he opened his eyes he saw that the buildings had ceased their renewal. Nothing had renewed to the point of making a difference in the bleakness of the death camp, but the difference was in him. Something wonderful would be taken from this horrible place, and he marveled that the souls he had intended to bestow the gift of life upon had given him a gift instead. They had given him the ability to contain himself, and a knowledge that there was something beyond the dark places.
It took Winston a few moments longer, then the look of pain and fear dissolved from his face as well. He took a few deep breaths and struggled to stand. He, too, had triumphed. Mind over matter. Will over wonder. He, like Dillon, was finally contained.
“Are we there yet?” Winston asked.
Dillon nodded. “I think we are.”
THE AIR OF THIS place was getting to Tessic as it had every time he made a pilgrimage here to mourn for his people, and for his family that could have been. Today the hope, the fear, the expectation and the desperation roiled in him, churning up unexplored places within his mind. Had he been Michael, he thought, his storm would rage all over Europe.
Tessic waited outside the gate with growing dread. Then, not five minutes after walking in, Dillon and Winston came back, and they brought no one out with them. The look on Dillon’s and Winston’s faces was unreadable and something felt different about them, too. It took a few moments before Tessic knew what it was.
It’s that my hair isn’t growing, Tessic thought. It’s that my bones are once again subject to the slow decay of age. Dillon and Winston have shut down their own powers. Tessic found this more frightening, more distressing, than anything he had seen or felt before.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“We’re leaving now,” Dillon told him.
Tessic found himself stammering as he had several days before when his lion first defied the whip.
“You will go in there,” Tessic demanded. “You will wake them.”
“They’re not asleep,” Dillon reminded him. “They’re dead. They’ve been dead a very long time.”
“Why should that matter to you? To you death means nothing!”
Dillon’s calm stood in harsh relief against Tessic’s growing agitation. “I won’t invalidate their suffering. Let them rest.”
Tessic grabbed him by the shirt, practically lifting him off the ground. He’s just a boy, Tessic thought. A scrawny child, stupidly naive. “Do you think they want to rest here in this place?” Tessic screamed. “Is there justice in that?”
And then Winston spoke, his voice as calm as Dillon’s. “The evidence of injustice is sometimes as important as justice.”
Tessic let Dillon go, pushing him away. “Rhetorical garbage,” he sneered. “You two will be the criminals if you leave this place untouched. Hitler’s accomplices.” Tessic wanted to hit them, hurt them, to smash into their brains the importance of this. The necessity of it. How could they question the validity of his cause—of his calling, and of their own place in this glorious undertaking? How could they do this to him?
“I will lock you in your chair,” Tessic yelled, a froth of spittle building in the corner of his mouth. “I will lock you in your chair and force you.”
“No you won’t,” said Dillon with such unexpected empathy in his voice, it derailed Tessic, sending his thoughts flying for cover from his own anger. He stomped the ground like a child, he threw his hands up. He screamed to the colorless sky. Tessic’s entire life had been for this moment. Building up to it only to have the prize torn from him just inches from his grasp.
And then Dillon reached out and put his hand on Tessic’s shoulder, speaking again in that tone of understanding so deep, Dillon’s voice could have been the voice of God himself. “Listen to me, Elon: it was never your responsibility to bring back the lost. You truly were meant to be a maker of weapons; defensive weapons, that would protect. Today you’ve made your great work in me, and in Winston. We were never meant to be tools for the undoing of this Holocaust,” Dillon told him. “We’re weapons to defend the world against a coming one.” And then he leaned forward and whispered gently to Tessic, like a kiss upon the ear.
“Their weight is off your shoulders.”
Those were the words that healed him. He had always known of Dillon’s power to do this. To find the key to someone with simple, whispered words. But knowing and experiencing it were two different thing. Tessic felt his completion come to him like the final number of a combination turning into place. It was as if the shell of his own restraining chair had popped open, leaving him in a naked state of release. He felt a weightless joy that stood out in such stark contrast to the bleakness of Birkenau. And he cried. He cried for the joy that came with the completion that Dillon had given him and he cried with sorrow for every life here that would neither be avenged nor restored.
“Go,” he told them without looking up at them. “Take anything you need. Do whatever it was you are meant to do. Just go.”
And then he turned from them, looking out over the ruins before him. “Yitgadal v’yitkadach sh’ mei raba.” Alone he recited the mourners’ kaddish, for all those here, and the millions of others whose bones and ashes were spread across the fields of Europe. The millions whose lives were sacrificed so the world could know the meaning of injustice.
MADDY HAD KNOWN EVEN before Tessic did that their little endeavor ended here. She had been within Dillon’s field enough to know the instant his influence ceased. She had feared, at first, that he had died. But then he came out of that gate with Winston, wearing that beatific grin—an expression both leaden and weightless. Moses descending Sinai. One look at his face, and she understood. Whatever he was on this earth to do, whatever his so-called “purpose,” he had finally been primed. His will had triumphed over his power, and he had finally reined himself in. She found herself unexpectedly angered, but not for the same reason Tessic was. Maddy had always known that Dillon had a spark of something divine—but to see that spark kindle and her not be caught up in the flame—to be just another outsider like the rest of Tessic’s revival crew—it was too much to bear. The only thing that kept her from running AWOL right there was Tessic. Damn Tessic, crying at the gate of the camp after Dillon had denied him his final victory. Someone had to tend to the man.
Maddy had prepared Dillon’s way at Majdanek, then here, going before him like John the Baptist, preparing the way for the lord. In doing so, it connected her again, making her more a fulcrum than a gear in Tessic’s grand machine of revival. It was heady and glorious . . . but in the end it wasn’t meant to be.
As she watched Dillon walk away from Tessic, away from her, she suppressed her own emotions, and filled her mind with the reality that it was over. It was all over.
I will not be a victim of this.
She had to find the opportunity here.
My life will not rise and fall with the coming and going of Dillon Cole.
Tessic would need someone to clean up this mess. He would need someone to dismantle his machine and assess losses. She had to look out for
They all followed in Dillon’s and Winston’s wake back through Auschwitz I, to the parking lot, and the waiting gauntlet of helicopters. Dillon and Winston went to one of the helicopters—not the lead one that had brought them here—that was for Tessic’s personal use. Instead they approached one of the support helicopters, but Ari, Tessic’s personal pilot, began beckoning them back to the lead copter like a sideshow barker.
“Come,” she heard him say, over the confusion that now rose in Tessic’s ranks. “Come, I take you where you want to go. Come.”
There was something markedly off about his overtures. Before this moment it seemed all Ari had wanted to do was fly Tessic around and get into Maddy’s pants. Hearing him now—feeling the way he pulled Dillon’s attention—filled her with an unsettling vertigo. It was the sensation strong enough to send her to intercept.
She reached Ari before Dillon and Winston did.
“You’re Tessic’s pilot,” she reminded. “You need to get him out of here. Don’t go volunteering your services without his permission.” Then he smiled at her—a grin that crossed well over the line from mischievous to lascivious. If the time were different she might have put him in the hospital for such a demeaning, objectifying look.
Dillon called from somewhere behind her, and she didn’t turn to look. “One of the other pilots will do fine,” he told Ari. “You take care of Tessic.”
Again that grin from Ari. He didn’t meet Dillon’s eyes—he appeared to turn his face away intentionally. Instead he kept his gaze fixed on Maddy. “I fly you then,” he said. “Fly you to the moon, like the song. This I will enjoy.”
“Get in there, start it up, and wait for Tessic,” she told him, disgusted.
He broke his discomfiting gaze. “Of course,” he said. “I was only trying to do the good thing.” He sauntered off toward his helicopter calmly, as if they weren’t standing at the mouth of Auschwitz in the middle of three hundred empty, idling buses.
When she turned, she bumped into Dillon, who had decided to offer her a single shining moment of his time before disappearing into the blue.
“What will you do now?” he asked.
“Same as you,” she answered. “We’ll all get the hell out of here. You don’t linger at a failed mission.”
“And then?”
“Sorry, that’s as far into the future as I’m willing to think right now.”
Dillon glanced back at a helicopter where Winston was already giving instructions to another pilot. Tessic had arrived and was nodding his approval. With Tessic’s carte blanche, the two of them really could have hitched a rocket to the moon if they wanted. But apparently they had another destination in mind.
“Winston and I have a date in Greece,” he told her.
Greece, she thought. Do I want to know what this is about? She decided that she didn’t.
“For someone who’s supposed to bring order, you left a hell of a mess.”
He kissed her. It was tender, it was sincere, and she hated him for it, because they both knew it was a kiss good-bye. She was now a part of his past, and there was no chair she could lock him in to change that.
“Go,” she said. “I’ll clean up.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. She didn’t know which of the hundred things both large and small he was sorry for, but it didn’t matter. He was what he was. As Drew had said, he was a star. Stars burn, stars blind. Stars trap lesser bodies in perpetual orbit. This was the way with Dillon. Space curved around his luminescence, keeping him forever at the center of her longings, and still a million miles away.
She watched as his helicopter ascended and the sound of its beating blades dissolved into the wind.
When she turned, she saw Ari still lingering, watching her. Tessic was already in the helicopter, but Ari didn’t seem to care. He took his time in the turmoil building around him, smoking a cigarette.
“Do your job!” she told him. “Get Tessic out of here.”
He flicked his cigarette to the ground, tossing her another unseemly grin, then got in the helicopter.
There’s something wrong about him, she thought in the back of her mind, but brushed the thought aside. After all, everything here was wrong, twisted, and schizophrenic. Isn’t that what was happening to the world? Minds and emotions were disconnecting everywhere—why should Tessic’s pilot be different?
Much later, she would regret that she hadn’t taken this bit of intuition more seriously.
Part VI
The Shattered Sky
34. THE SHELL OF ATLANTIS
* * *
NINETY NAUTICAL MILES DUE NORTH OF CRETE, THE ISLAND of Santorini fought a losing battle to return to its traditional name of Thira. The crescent form of the island and its huge circular bay came by no ordinary means. Had the Minoans survived to tell it, there might be more records of the rumored isle where wondrous things occurred—where the god Zeus and his compatriots spent their summer through the harvest, because its beauty rivaled Mount Olympus. Had the Minoans survived they might have told of the day the earth ripped open and tore the heart of Thira from the world along with the gods themselves. They might have told, but so great was the cataclysm on Thira, that a wall of water a thousand feet high washed halfway across Crete, killing every last Minoan and leaving little more than broken pots, tumbled walls, and the legend that was stretched and chewed like a piece of gum until truth, rumor, and miscommunication molded it into a legend now called “Atlantis.”
Of course modern science knows that the volcanic mountain that once stood where Thira’s bay is, blew stratosphere-high in an explosive eruption; a somewhat rare thing, but not so rare when you take into account the grand sweep of time. One might think the evidence of this explosion would litter the floor of the Aegean Sea; massive chunks of volcanic rock blown from Thira. But no such mountain fragments exist. Perhaps because the center of Thira didn’t blow up. It was surgically removed from the world. It had plunged through a tear in the foundation of the universe, and now had the distinction of being the only mountain on the endless red plain of that lonely place that existed between the walls of worlds.
There was a palace on that displaced mountain, and in that palace were the dusty remains of twelve star-shards born to the Greek isles three thousand years ago, who had grown too arrogant to be allowed to live. And also in that castle rested another star-shard, her remains not quite as well seasoned, but her untimely death just as unpleasant. Her name was Deanna Chang, and her death, by the unwitting hand of her love, was a valiant one. For in her final days, the fear that had enveloped so much of her life had given way to a faith so overpowering, it had to be taken with her when she died. A faith that all things would run their proper course, and that time would balance the tide of unhappy circumstance to her brief life, and to the world.
OKOYA HAD NOT DEVOURED a single human soul, as he had promised.
He had instead suffered through hideous airplane food in a ridiculously cramped seat between fat businessmen, whose throats he would have slit on a better day. It disgusted him how in this absurd world of matter, the small-minded inhabitants were forced to burn the distilled remains of previous inhabitants just to power unshapely, cumbersome objects that carried them uncomfortably from point A to point B. Ridiculous. Had his own survival not been in question he would have thought nothing of someone obliterating this world with a well-placed comet.
His first flight ended in Amsterdam—as far as the money Drew gave him could get. He
Once there, he knew he need not do anything but wait. He was in the epicenter now; the focal point of all things to come. So he took himself a hotel room overlooking the stark white hillside buildings and sat out on a terrace, gazing out over the near-bottomless bay, and waited for the vectors and the shards to converge.
ON DECEMBER FIFTH, WHILE Dillon and Winston faced Birkenau, a wave of influence swept slowly across the Greek Island of Crete. It began on the northwest shore, then penetrated deep into the hills and mountains, saturating the cities, towns, and farms. It was a call to action that refused to be ignored, and took all prisoners.
Believing in the autonomy of their own free will, people stepped from their homes and workplaces, all the while believing that it was their choice to do so. Cars, bicycles, and buses made their way north. Boats sped around the coast. Those who could not squeeze into a vehicle walked, greeting friends on the way, as if this dawn were any other moment in time. What a nice day for a walk; a run; a drive, they would say. Doors were left open and livestock left unattended as the population of Crete impelled toward the northern shore.
By the time rural dwellers reached the north shore town of Hania, they knew that their hearts and minds had been seized by something they could neither explain nor fight. Here, so close to the source, the force of the gravity that pulled them from their lives was so strong, they could feel it like a tone in their ears—a frequency oscillating just above their hearing, creating unbearable pressure deep in their limbic systems; a place that knew only instinct and impulse. On the rare occasion that a man, woman, or child was willful enough to buck the spirit that controlled them, they found that their arms and legs still obeyed the marching orders, their bodies following the silent tune of this pied piper that sucked them all from home and hearth.