In the great expanses of Arizona desert, where imprints of life were scarce, sensing the direction of the shards was as easy as listening for cicadas in the dead of night. These shards were separate from one another now, but converging.
Star-shards on Earth once more!
If that were so, he would not make the same mistakes he had made the first time. He would no longer be a Bringer of Wisdom for this dim world, giving his gifts freely to the undeserving. This time he would serve his own voracious appetites.
And as for these new star-shards—he would find them, and he would bend them to his will . . .
. . . and if they would not bend, he would simply destroy them.
PART III - SIMEON SIEGE
5. Three’s A Crowd
Shiprock rose from the desert floor of northwestern New Mexico like a massive sentinel just off of U.S. 666. From a certain angle, the towering sides of the dead volcano appeared to be the wings of a great dragon, folded around something dark and unseen, and more than one local culture saw the end of the world rising one day from its hidden heart. Tory Smythe had come into the shadow of this dark sandstone basolith earlier that day, and now tried to wash away the day in a scalding bath. Yet, no matter how hard she scrubbed, she couldn’t strip away the strange feeling that had plagued her all afternoon.
A feeling that something was wrong in the town of Shiprock.
—wrong with the quiet couple who tended to the little gift shop.
—wrong about the woman who offered her a ride.
—wrong about the cluster of teens pumping gas into their van.
And as the late-afternoon sun cast the shadow of the rock over the town, the feeling got worse, and Tory felt the disquieting sense that her life was about to take a brand-new turn for the worse.
With exhaustion tugging at her limbs, she decided it was just fatigue, and figured that one night’s layover on her journey to Dillon wouldn’t kill her.
The town of Shiprock was no Shangri-la. Hardworking but impoverished people populated the flat-roofed homes that were sun-baked by day, and sandblasted by night, courtesy of the merciless desert winds.
She took a room at the only motel that had a room. Although it wasn’t the cleanest place, she knew every corner would be pretty well sanitized by the time she woke up in the morning. The way her influence had grown, she figured a single night in one place would fry every germ within a hundred yards—not to mention purify the minds of quite a few overnight guests.
As Tory soaked in the tub, she thought back to the woman at the reception desk. She seemed pleasant enough, and yet, there was something vacant about her expression. Something wrong, something wrong, something wrong, something . . .
“I’ll take whatever you have,” Tory had said, spreading out some crumpled bills on the counter. The woman presented her a key on a cracked plastic chain.
“Checkout time is at ten, and there’s a continental breakfast at eight. Aren’t you a bit young to be on your own, miss?”
“Is that a problem?” Tory had dropped an extra ten dollars on the counter, and the woman snatched up the ten-spot like a frog catching a fly. “You get yourself a good night’s sleep, honey.”
Although she was already looking like a parboiled lobster, Tory added more hot water to the tub. It wasn’t just the wrongness now. There was an uncanny feeling of presence. An unsettling sensation, like the powerful magnetic field around a high-voltage transformer. Even in the bath, Tory felt her skin fill with gooseflesh.
She tried to shake off the feeling by watching TV through the open bathroom door. There was a report on the news about dead fish in California, then an update on yesterday’s deadly plane crash. Tory sighed and sunk down until her chin touched the water. More bad news for a beleaguered world—Tory couldn’t stand it. She kicked the door closed, and reached up for a bar of soap . . . but as she did, something caught her eye.
On the counter sat a sorry potted plant. Overwatered and yellow, the little plant was not long for this world. But now as Tory looked at it, she was certain it looked different than it had just five minutes ago. The old, dying leaves had fallen off, and the plant had sprouted new shoots. Tory could swear she could see it growing in tiny spurts.
The exhaustion she felt suddenly seemed unimportant.
“Winston?” she called. “Winston!”
And from the room on the other side of the paper-thin wall came a voice a bit deeper than she remembered, but still familiar.
“Tory?”
Winston had always been a champ at guarding his emotions, but he couldn’t contain his excitement at seeing Tory. At last he could talk to someone like himself—someone who understood what it was like to change the world by your very presence, and yet have to hide that light so no one else would know. Someone who understood what a handicap true power could really be. They talked for hours—there was a year of strange tales to tell one another. . . .
“You won’t believe all the things I know,” bragged Winston. “Medicine, law, philosophy, I’m like a walking encyclopedia.”
“You can’t believe how I change people just by being around them,” said Tory. “I’ve turned hardened criminals into model citizens!”
Then, somewhere in their conversation, Winston asked the question that had dominated his thoughts since he had stepped foot into Shiprock. “Did you feel something strange when you got here?” he asked. “Something about the people?”
Tory nodded. “It’s like . . . they look fine on the outside, but on the inside, they’re black-and-white, while the rest of the world is color, you know?”
So it was a sensation they had both felt!— But neither knew what it meant.
At midnight, they ventured out to an all-night coffee shop down the street, sparsely populated by truckers and tired travelers. As they sat at the counter, devouring greasy burgers, a planter just outside the window became clogged with weeds and cactus, and at the table behind them, a grunged-out biker suddenly began cleaning his fingernails with his pocketknife.
“Our powers keep growing,” Winston told Tory. “No telling where it’s going to stop.”
“What if they don’t?” whispered Tory.
Winston, in all his newfound wisdom, had no answer.
Just then, a customer who had been sitting alone in a booth, sauntered to the counter and slid onto the stool beside them. Their chatter stopped abruptly.
“You can keep on talking, I don’t mind,” said the intruder, who seemed to be about twenty or so. “My name’s Okoya.” Like most people in town, Okoya was Native American, with long, black hair, and dark eyes.
It was those eyes that caught Tory and Winston. They were deeper than a person’s eyes ought to be.
“Do you mind?” said Winston, taking the defensive.
“Can’t I sit here?”
Tory shrugged. “Sit wherever you want.”
The intruder seemed far more comfortable than they were.
“You both seem excited but worried at the same time,” Okoya noted. “I wonder what that could be about?”
Winston shrugged. “What, do you poke your way into everyone else’s business?”
“Only when it’s interesting,” said Okoya, pushing a ketchup-covered, plate of fries to share with them. “The truth is, I’m just passing through town. I was hoping I could travel with some interesting people.”