Thief of Souls

by Neal Shusterman

  As the island dropped, the ocean began to spill back into the bay. The lush green lowlands were flooded first, swallowing man and beast. The many servants of The Twelve drowned as the sea washed over them.

  There must be nothing left of them, thought the Bringer. No evidence. There must never be an artifact found, or a site unearthed. This place had to be cut out of the Universe forever.

  With the palace collapsing around him, the Bringer dragged himself up the King’s private stairs, to the high stable. He was bloody and crushed from his battle with the King, but he knew the rift he had created beneath the island left him little time.

  He found the King’s mount in the high stable; a white, winged horse, kicking and neighing in terror. The flying horse was another one of Hephaestus’s creations to amuse the King. With no other way off the island, the Bringer climbed onto the back of the Pegasus, kicked it with his shackled feet, and the horse leapt off the ledge of the high stable, frothing at the mouth as it struggled toward the sky.

  Down below, the size of the rift was clearer, and much more impressive. The center of the island was collapsing in upon itself and sinking faster than the ocean could rush in to fill the void. It was as if a great sinkhole had opened in the ocean floor, and, as the entire island plunged through the hole, the Bringer caught a glimpse of the place he was sending it. Through the hole, he could see distant red sands far, far below. The hole had opened above a strange alien sky. A place of nothingness. An “unworld” that existed between the walls of worlds. This is where he had consigned The Twelve, their servants, and their miscreations. He watched from high above, as the island plummeted out of this world.

  Now all that remained of the island was a crescent of stone in the sea and a circular waterfall, miles wide, pouring down, through the hole in the world, into the strange sky of another. The hole quickly healed itself until the waters met, becoming a whirlpool, and then the simple crashing of waves as the tear sealed itself closed. The ocean would rage for days from the cataclysm, and people on far shores would say that Poseidon was angry. But the truth was, Poseidon was gone, along with the King and the Queen, the Blacksmith and the Beauty, the God of War, the Goddess of Peace, and the rest of their accomplices. In spite of their vain pretensions, and their powers, they were not the gods they claimed to be. In spite of their luminous souls, they were hopelessly human after all.

  It was now that the Bringer realized his own folly—for the Pegasus, however beautiful, was a useless beast, like so many of Hephaestus’s creations. Although it had wings, its stallion’s body was too heavy to stay aloft for more than a few minutes at a time. Time enough to amuse the King, and to generate a host of overblown tales among humans, perhaps, but not enough to reach the mainland. The Pegasus flapped futilely above the raging sea, already exhausted. A few moments more and it lost the battle. The beast and the Bringer plunged from the sky into the churning ocean.

  The Bringer might have found the strength to swim, had he not used everything he had left to tear the heart of Thira from the world. He might have floated on ocean currents if he didn’t still have shackles on his ankles and wrists—heavy shackles that weighed him down like anchors.

  The roar of the ocean became the muted churning of water as he sank beneath the waves, dropping toward the ocean floor.

  The winged horse lost its battle as well, and drowned, its heavy mass sinking into the depths with him.

  No survivors, thought the Bringer. Nothing left.

  Perhaps there would be stories of this place, but nothing more. Travelers would find the barren, crescent-shaped remains of the great island, and not know what to make of its cataclysmic demise. The legends would become twisted and confused, the tales divided and reformed age to age until not a single truth remained. The short reign of The Twelve would be remembered as curious invention from an ignorant time—excised from history and dropped into the boggy depths of myth.

  He had finally destroyed them, and his satisfaction was so immense, that it almost didn’t matter that he was sinking into colder, darker waters. The Bringer held his last breath of air until it was crushed from his lungs by the building pressure around him as he sank, and he felt the human body he wore begin to die. So he shed it.

  Tearing free from the human host-body he had used, he struggled to create a rift in space through which he could escape back to the universe he came from . . . but such a feat would take more strength than he had left. As the body drifted away from him down into darkness, he fought a battle to hold on to life. He needed a new host—some sea creature large enough to hold his being—for he had no flesh of his own—not in an earthly sense—but survival in this world required a body to live in. It was inconvenient and impractical, just like everything else in this universe of matter.

  He reached his mind out, but found no large sea creatures he could inhabit, and he knew he would die in this awful, awful world.

  It was the fault of The Twelve. It was their fault and the fault of every human infesting this place. His sole consolation was that the twelve star-shards—the only ones ever born to the undeserving human race—had been squelched. And soon, he imagined, this entire race would no doubt destroy itself with its petty and selfish ways.

  If it was in his power, he would do the job for them. He would draw out the soul from each human that ever lived, and cast their weak bodies to the red sands of the Unworld. He would blot out this world from creation, just to make sure no star-shards were ever born to humanity again.

  He held on to his anger and his hatred of human kind as his life slipped away. As he died, his spirit dissolved into the ocean depths, and his thoughts were carried by the currents to the far corners of the Earth. Lost in the waters of death . . . for three thousand years.

  Part II

  Spheres of Influence

  1. THE REPAIR MAN

  * * *

  DILLON’S ARMS HAD GROWN STRONG FROM HIS LABORS.

  At first, his back and shoulders had filled with a fiery soreness that grew worse each day as he worked. His biceps would tighten into twisted, gnarled knots—but in time his body had grown accustomed to the work. So had his mind.

  He dug the spade in the soft dirt, and flung it easily over his shoulder.

  The chill wind of a late-September night filtered through the nearby forest, filling the midnight air with the rich scent of pine. He shivered. With knuckles stiff from gripping the shovel, he struggled to zip his jacket to the very top. Then he resumed digging, planting the spade again and hurling the dirt, beginning to catch the rhythm of it, giving in to the monotony of spade and earth. He made sure not to get any dirt on the blanket he had brought with him.

  He realized he should have worn heavy workboots for the job, but his sneakers, though caked with mud, never seemed to wear out. None of his clothes ever wore out. He had just torn his jeans hopping over the wrought-iron fence, but he knew they would be fine. Even now, the shredded threads around the tear were weaving together.

  The fact was, Dillon Cole couldn’t have a pair of faded, worn-out jeans if he wanted to. He called it “a fringeless fringe benefit.” A peculiar side-effect of his unique blessing.

  The shovel dug down. Dirt flew out.

  “I got a scratch.”

  The small boy’s voice made Dillon flinch, interrupting the rhythm of his digging.

  “Carter,” warned Dillon, “I told you to stay with that family until I got back.”

  “But the scratch hurts.”

  Dillon sighed, put the shovel down and brushed a lock of his thick red hair out of his eyes. “All right, let me see your hand.”

  Carter stretched out his arm to show a scratch across the back of his hand. It wasn’t a bad scratch, just enough to draw the tiniest bit of blood, which glistened in the moonlight.

  “How’d you do this?” Dillon asked.

  Carter just shrugged. “Don’t know.”

  Dillon took a long look at the boy. He couldn’t see the boy’s eyes clearly in the moonlight, but
he could tell Carter was lying. I won’t challenge him just yet, Dillon thought. Instead he brought his index finger across Carter’s hand, concentrating his thoughts on the scratch.

  The boy breathed wondrously as he watched the tiny wound pull itself closed far more easily than the zipper on Dillon’s jacket. “Oh!”

  Dillon let the boy’s hand go. “You made that scratch yourself, didn’t you? You did it on purpose.”

  Carter didn’t deny it. “I love to watch you heal.”

  “I don’t heal,” reminded Dillon. “I fix things that are broken.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Carter, who had heard it all before. “Reversing Enter-P.”

  “Entropy,” Dillon corrected. “Reversing entropy,” and he began to marvel at how something so strange had become so familiar to him.

  “Go back to those people,” Dillon scolded Carter gently. He returned to digging. “You’re too young to be here.”

  “So are you.”

  Dillon smiled. He had to admit that Carter was right. Sixteen was woefully young to be doing what he was doing. But he had to do it anyway. He reasoned that it was his penance; the wage of his sins until every last bit of what he had destroyed was fixed.

  The blade of Dillon’s shovel came down hard, with a healthy bang.

  Carter jumped. “What was that?”

  Dillon shot him a warning glance. “Go back to the house.”

  “That woman won’t stop praying,” Carter complained, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, and back again. “It makes me nervous.”

  “You go back there and tell them I’ll be back in an hour. And then you sit down and pray with them.”

  “But—”

  “Trust me, Carter. You don’t want to see this. Go!”

  Carter kicked sullenly at the dirt, then turned to leave. Dillon watched him weave between the polished gravestones and slip through the wrought-iron fence.

  When Dillon was sure Carter was gone, he took a long moment to prepare his mind for the task of fixing. Then he brushed away the dirt, and reached for the lip of the coffin.

  LITTLE KELLY JESSUP, WRAPPED in a blanket, clung to Dillon Cole, shivering. Dillon braced himself as he carried her through the door of the Jessup home. Mrs. Jessup stood in the hallway, not quite ready to believe what her eyes told her, until the little girl looked up and said, “Mommy?”

  The woman’s scream could have woken the dead, if the job had not already been done.

  DILLON’S DREAMS THAT NIGHT were interrupted, as they always were, by the green flash of the supernova—a memory that had seared its way deep into his unconscious. It was the first flash of vision that there were five others like him out there . . . and the first inkling of what they truly were; the most powerful and luminous souls on earth. Shards of the fractured soul of the scorpion star, incarnated in human flesh.

  From there his dream took a turn into nightmare, and he knew where he would find himself next. The throne room of a crumbling palace, on a ruined mountain, within the red sands of what he could only call “the Unworld.” That non-place that existed between the walls of worlds.

  And before him stood the parasitic beast that had leeched onto his soul for so many years, its gray muscles rippling, its veiny wings batting the air, and its face an evil distortion of his own. It was a creature that would never have grown so powerful, had Dillon’s own soul not been so bright.

  I will be fed! it told him. You will destroy for me. I will feed on the destruction you bring.

  In the dream, Dillon saw himself raising the gun to shoot it, knowing what was about to happen, unable to stop it. He pulled the trigger, the beast stepped aside . . . and there was Deanna.

  The bullet struck the chest of the girl Dillon himself would die for.

  He ran to her, took her in his arms, while the beast flexed its muscles, absorbing this act of destruction, feeding on Deanna’s dying breaths.

  “I’m not afraid,” coughed Deana; “I’m not afraid”—for after she had purged the parasite of fear from her own soul, terror had no hold on her.

  Suffer the weight, Dillon, the creature said, as Deanna died in his arms. Suffer the weight of destruction . . . and every moment you suffer is a moment I grow strong . . . .

  Dillon was shaken awake by small hands on his shoulders. He opened his eyes to see Carter standing above him. By now this had become a regular routine.

  “Dreaming about the monster again?”

  Dillon nodded. The thing was still alive out there, Dillon knew. Both his beast and Deanna’s still stalked the sands of the Unworld. The other four shards had killed their parasites, and Dillon suspected that if his were dead too, it wouldn’t invade his dreams with such alarming regularity.

  “My dog had worms once,” said Carter. “They got to his heart and ate him from the inside out. Was that what it was like having that thing inside you?”

  “Something like that,” said Dillon. He sat up, taking a moment to orient himself. Where was he this time? What had he done here? He was in the Jessups’ home. Yes—that was it. Kelly Jessup had been dead almost a year now, and her parents driven insane. Dillon had undone all that damage.

  Dillon looked at his watch. Three in the morning. “Get back to bed,” Dillon told Carter. “We need an early start tomorrow.”

  Carter returned to the couch across the guest room. “Who do we see tomorrow?”

  “A family called the Bradys. There’ll be more work than here.”

  “What about my father?” asked Carter.

  Like so many others, Carter’s father had gone insane, and died a nasty death last year. Dillon’s failure to find his grave was something Carter loved to hang over Dillon’s head, and was a constant reminder to Dillon that there were still a million and one things and people screaming to be fixed.

  “I’ll find him,” said Dillon. “And I’ll fix him, just like I promised.”

  Carter shrugged. “No rush,” he said, far too pleasantly. “I like being called Carter instead of Delbert anyway.”

  The thought unsettled Dillon. When the boy had been found, last year, wandering the streets, he had been a mumbling, maddened lunatic, just like everyone else left alive here in Burton, Oregon. He hadn’t even known his own name.

  “Carter was the tag on your T-shirt. Do you want to be named after an underwear company?”

  “I don’t care.”

  And that was the problem. Since Dillon had fixed the boy’s mind, he had latched on to Dillon like a puppy. Dillon didn’t mind the company, but he knew it just wasn’t right. Life with Dillon was a poor substitute for life with his real family.

  Dillon, knowing he would not sleep again tonight, turned to leave the room, but Carter stopped him.

  “You were calling her name out in your sleep,” Carter said.

  Dillon sighed, wishing he could forget the dream. “Was I?”

  Carter rolled over on the couch to face him. “You know,” said Carter, “you could bring her back now . . . .”

  Dillon grimaced to hear the words spoken aloud. When Deanna had died, Dillon had had no skill in bringing chaos from order, life out of death. All he knew was how to see patterns of destruction and act upon them. But a year had honed his skills. Now it would be so easy to take Deanna’s broken body in his arms and bring her back to life, cell by cell. He imagined that moment when he could gather her life back and see her smile at him again. Hear the gentle forgiveness in her voice.

  But he could not get to her. She was sealed away in the Unworld—a place Dillon could not reach. He was trapped in the here-and-now, and the people around him were constant reminders that he didn’t deserve Deanna. All he deserved was the endless, exhausting task of fixing the disasters he had created—because he’d never be able to forgive himself for willfully feeding his parasite—until he had repaired every last bit of his decimation. From the moment the other four surviving shards had left him, he knew what his job was going to be. And one of the first things he bought was a shovel.
/>   “Yes, I know I could bring her back,” he told Carter. “Now go to sleep.”

  Carter rolled over, and in a few moments, he was sleeping peacefully. And why not? thought Dillon. He had repaired the boy’s psyche so well, he never had nightmares, in spite of the horrors he had been through.

  Dillon slid noiselessly out of the guest room. Downstairs he found Carol Jessup sitting in the family room. The air smelled of sweet cocoa and smoke from the smoldering fireplace. The woman lovingly held her sleeping daughter in her arms, absorbed in stroking the little girl’s hair as she hummed a lullaby. She had been doing this for hours, unable to believe that her daughter was alive again. She stopped humming the moment Dillon stepped into the room. It took her a few moments until she could speak to him.

  “I’m afraid to ask who you are,” she said, “or how you did what you did.”

  “It’s just patterns, Carol,” Dillon answered. “My mind can see patterns no one else can see, and my soul can repair them. That’s all I can do.”

  “That’s all you can do?” she said incredulously. “That’s everything. It’s creation. It’s reversing time!”

  “Space,” said Dillon calmly. “Reversing space.”

  The woman looked down at her daughter and her eyes became teary. “Maybe I don’t know who you are,” she said to Dillon, looking at him with the sort of holy reverence that made him uncomfortable, “but I know what you are.”

  Dillon found himself getting angry. “You don’t know me,” he told her. “You don’t know the things I’ve done.”

  But clearly she didn’t care what Dillon had done in the past. All that mattered to her was what he had done here, today. “When the virus came,” she said, “my husband and I got lost in the woods, wandering insane like all the others in town. When we finally came out of it, we were told that Kelly had drowned in the river. I wanted to die along with her.”

  “What if I told you there was no virus?” Dillon said to her. “And that they call it a ‘virus’ because they don’t know what else to call it? What if I told you that I destroyed this town last year—shattering everyone’s mind—and that, in a way, I was the one who killed your daughter in the first place?”