“To think it was built by mere human hands,” Okoya said, when he saw the view. “It rivals the Pyramids, and the Colossus of Rhodes.”
“Take a good look,” said Dillon. “It’s your last chance.”
Just a few short days ago, Dillon had felt threatened by Okoya’s presence; mistrustful and suspicious. But such feelings felt small and distant as he stood on the hilltop. Nothing could threaten him now.
“What will it be like after tomorrow?” Dillon wondered aloud.
Okoya sat beside him. “Once, the world was flat and sat at the center of the universe,” Okoya said. “But people learned otherwise, and they adjusted. We are on that precipice of change again. Tomorrow the world will be a very different place.”
“People will have no choice but to accept us.”
Okoya agreed. “You are too powerful to deny, and too dangerous to challenge.”
Dillon tried to imagine the days ahead. Would they usher in an era of peace? Would they find themselves in the company of kings and world leaders? He could barely imagine himself meeting world leaders, much less instructing them on global affairs. And yet that would be the task set before him.
The thought was too immense to grasp, so he laughed at it. “I wonder how they’ll feel to have the world in the hands of a pack of sixteen-year-olds.”
“You won’t always be sixteen,” said Okoya. “And it doesn’t surprise me that you’ll be rising to the throne of humanity. What surprises me is that it’s taken you so long.”
“Did you know,” said Dillon, “that I can find no pattern when I look in the eyes of some of the followers?”
“Really? That’s odd.”
“No,” said Dillon, thinking he understood why. “It makes sense if you think about it . . . . Now that they’ve dedicated their lives to the cause, they have no pattern but the one I give them.”
“Blank slates,” suggested Okoya.
“Yes—waiting for me to write on.”
“What could be better?”
Okoya stood and kicked a rock down the hillside. It tumbled, kicking up dust on the way down. “I’m worried about Michael,” Okoya said.
“He’s a loose cannon,” Dillon admitted.
“We may need to take care of him,” said Okoya.
Dillon waved it off. “Yeah, yeah—I’ll take care of everybody.”
“No,” said Okoya. “That’s not what I mean.”
Dillon stood, finding an unexpected seriousness in Okoya’s face that he couldn’t decipher. Then Dillon burst out laughing. “Very good! You had me going there. And I thought you didn’t have a sense of humor!”
Okoya laughed too, dismissing his own grave expression.
“Ruling the world is easy,” said Okoya. “Comedy’s hard.”
They chuckled a few moments more, then Okoya became pensive. Reflective.
“You remind me of someone I once knew in the Greek Isles. He was a lot like you at your age—although not nearly as gifted.”
“The Greek Isles?”
“Just because I come from a reservation, it doesn’t mean I haven’t traveled.”
Dillon took a pointedly invasive look at Okoya, to once again divine the source of his worldliness—but all he found were the simple patterns of a rural life. But that was somehow untrue. It was merely a facade, someone else he was hiding behind.
“Who are you, Okoya?”
The expression on Okoya’s face changed then, becoming open and unambiguous. “I’m someone who wants to put the world in the palm of your hand.”
Okoya left, and as night fell, Dillon found himself still transfixed by the view, eerily lit by a rising blood moon.
He resolved to remain there till dawn, preparing his mind for the task at hand. Meditating on himself, Dillon thought of the network of connections already spreading forth, linking Dillon and the Shards with signs and wonders in millions of people’s minds, as they turned on their evening news. Tomorrow those numbers would flare, as they became witnesses to the impossible—a miraculous wake-up call to the world, too huge to deny.
Forty-five days from now, there would be no doubters. That day would see an end to war, disease, and despair. There would never be another Shiprock Massacre—he would see to that. His binding strength would be a protective sheath around the world.
He looked again to the view before him. Lake Mead stretched to a rocky shore, and before it, the concrete expanse of Hoover Dam arced across a deep ravine, holding in the lake. Dillon smiled.
Tomorrow this troubled, crumbling world would believe in miracles.
19. Blind Run
Drew Camden was no sleuth. Constantly distracted and uncharacteristically clumsy, he was poorly suited to spy on Okoya. However, the carrot Michael had hung in front of him was powerful motivation.
He positioned his bedroll in view of Okoya’s tent, into which the mysterious Indian had retreated after dinner. For hours he listened to irritating songs around the campfires, and heard stories. Storytellers were emerging in this new order, weaving lofty dramas about the Shards that had no basis in fact whatsoever: how the Shards were ancient and ageless; how their semblance of youth was only a guise. Drew didn’t bother to contradict them.
Other followers had been assigned the task of receiving new arrivals, who drifted in from the Boulder Highway in a steady osmotic flow. By two in the morning, most everyone but the posted watch had settled down.
The night was much colder than it should have been, and the sky up above was punctuated by a brilliant spray of stars. If Michael and the others were illuminated with the fragmented soul of a star, Drew wondered as he lay there, what did that make him? What did that make everyone else? Tiny, insignificant smithereens? He wondered how long until the Shards would find people too small for their attention!
Well, thought Drew, better take my share of favors now, before Michael’s pedestal gets too high.
There was a flap of fabric, and Drew rolled over to see Okoya step from his tent. Drew slipped out of his sleeping bag and followed, taking his video-cam with him. He kept his distance as Okoya strolled among the sleeping campers. There seemed to be no destination; he merely meandered, glancing from face to face of the ones who slept beneath the open air—as if looking for someone.
Finally, Okoya stopped by a clutch of sleeping bags behind a larger tent, out of view from everyone else.
Drew watched as Okoya knelt, then put a hand behind a sleeping woman’s neck, and tilted her head slightly back, as if he were about to resuscitate her. Then, the space between Okoya and the woman arced with a wave of soft, crimson light that lit their faces for a few moments, then faded.
The woman rolled over, and pulled her sleeping bag up to her shoulders, never waking up. Okoya moved to the man beside her, repeating the same procedure.
Drew wasn’t sure what he was witnessing—but he did know that he must have hit the jackpot. Whatever this was, it was information for Michael—and that meant Michael had to make good on his promise.
Okoya moved on to a third camper.
All it would take to clinch this would be a video! The light created by Okoya’s strange encounters would create enough of an image to see. Drew quietly raised the video-cam to his eyes, slid his thumb over the red button and pressed it.
The machine beeped twice as it went from standby to record . . . And in the silence, those two tones might as well have been the chimes of Big Ben. The glow died suddenly, and Okoya’s head turned as smoothly as an owl’s, directly to Drew.
Drew suddenly felt like a small rodent caught in Okoya’s owlish gaze, and he bolted. Tripping over campers, barreling into tents, he tried to make it to where the Shards slept.