Thief of Souls

by Neal Shusterman

  Michael nodded. “San Simeon it is.” He kicked up the engine, and turned his eyes forward. He could tell Lourdes was waiting for more from him—a hug, a grin . . . anything—and when Michael didn’t deliver, she stormed down to the cabin.

  “Who wants to find Dillon Cole anyway?” She pulled the cabin curtain shut behind her. Closest she could come to slamming a door, Michael supposed.

  So, if this trip wasn’t about finding Dillon, then what was it about? Michael wondered. But he already knew the answer. It was about the old times. It was about being so alone that they needed each other more than they needed their next breath. But it wasn’t like that anymore for Michael—and although he still needed many things, he wasn’t sure Lourdes was one of them.

  None of this was lost on Drew. He remained a silent observer as Michael cold-shouldered Lourdes down into the cabin, all the while crunching Chee-tos while he watched, like popcorn at the movies.

  Now Drew spoke up as the last trace of sun fell behind cloud cover. “Hey Michael!” he said. “You’ll screw up my tan—why don’t you do that trick with the sky!”

  “Not in the mood,” Michael told him. For months he had mined his own depths, and forced a happy face onto the world around him—but now that they were headed toward Dillon, there wasn’t a single vein of good cheer left to mine.

  Drew, on the other hand, seemed as comfortable as could be. The world could end, and Drew would wisecrack his way into oblivion.

  Michael was as envious as he was irritated. “Drew, this is serious shit here. I felt Dillon scream—and when Dillon screams, it doesn’t mean he stubbed his toe. Something major is going down, and I don’t know what the hell it is yet.”

  “Hey, I have faith in you, man,” said Drew. “You can do no wrong.”

  Michael had to smile. Drew’s trust was a powerful thing; something absurdly stable in the madness they were sailing into. But as far as doing no wrong, Drew was sorely mistaken. “You didn’t know me back east,” answered Michael.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know—you were a monumental asshole,” said Drew.

  “No. It was worse than that.” Michael put the engine on idle, and went over to sit beside him. “I had this parasite living inside me . . . . It drove me nuts . . . and kind of twisted everyone around me—”

  “—And so you all took a trip to Oz, killed a few of your Flying Monkeys, and then realized there’s no place like home,” said Drew. “Lourdes told me the whole story while you were asleep—but that was like another lifetime. Who you were, and who you are, are two different things. I won’t hold all that other stuff against you.”

  Michael glanced at the closed curtain of the cabin. “I just want you to understand why Lourdes and I get so weird at each other. It’s like you said—we were all different people. But Lourdes still wants us to be the same.”

  “So, how do you feel about her now?” Drew asked.

  “I don’t know,” Michael whispered. “When I try to dig down and pull up feelings about Lourdes, all I get are rocks.” Michael took a deep breath, and the smell of diesel fuel and seaweed cut a stinging path through his lungs. “I don’t think I feel anything anymore.”

  “Maybe it’ll come back,” suggested Drew.

  “I don’t think so.”

  Drew nodded. “Good.”

  Michael snapped his eyes to Drew curiously. “That’s good?”

  “Well . . . yeah. I mean, how are you two ever going to deal with this Dillon dude if all you can think about is each other? This way you’ll be able to give it all your attention, right?”

  Michael had to admit it made sense. “I wish we had you on our first trip,” Michael told him. “It would have been a whole lot saner with you around.”

  “I would have gone, if I knew you back then.”

  Michael laughed at that. “If you knew me back then, you’d probably be first in line to swing a bat at my skull.”

  But Drew shook his head. “No matter how screwed-up you were, I would have still been your friend.”

  Although he appreciated the sentiment, Michael knew it couldn’t have been true, but still, it was nice of Drew to say so.

  Drew put his hand on Michael’s shoulder in a gesture of friendship. “And whatever happens now,” continued Drew, “I’ll still be your running partner.”

  In a moment the disk of the sun seemed ready to pierce the dreary sky, and Michael felt a bit embarrassed that his emotions were as easy to read as skywriting. He wanted to tell Drew what it meant to have a friend so true—so devoted. But before Michael could offer his thanks, Drew’s face eclipsed the light of the clearing sky like the face of a full moon.

  A full moon on a collision course.

  Michael realized what was about to happen, and he tried to say something—anything—but suddenly found his lips otherwise occupied.

  . . . It did not feel right . . . .

  . . . It did not feel wrong . . . .

  It just felt . . . odd. Like stepping onto an escalator that wasn’t moving.

  Michael just sat there, too stunned to respond to Drew’s kiss. It went on for a slow moment, and a moment more, before Michael’s reflexes kicked in like an emergency generator. He grabbed Drew’s shoulders and pushed him away so hard, Drew nearly fell off the boat. Michael should have known what would happen next—but his brain was lagging way behind his gut in reacting to the new spin that the world had taken on. He began to feel long before he had the chance to think, and what he felt was not flowers and sunshine.

  Drew must have seen it in his eyes.

  “Michael, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean that!”

  Michael wiped his lips with the back of his hand, never taking his eyes off of Drew. The air around them began to thin, as hot air shot up through the clouds, and cold air spiraled down around it, picking up speed.

  “It was stupid. It was a mistake!” said Drew, his tan cheeks taking on a deep-red embarrassment.

  The boat was moving now. Not forward, not backward . . . but clockwise. The boat had slowly begun to spin, and the thin air around it gave way to a sudden horizontal wind beneath a sky that had turned a strange shade of green.

  Is this what Drew had been moving toward all this time? Not running partners. Not friends—but this?

  “Please forget it, Michael,” Drew begged. “I need you to forget it.”

  “Shut up!” Michael screamed, beyond hope of control. “You’re not my friend! You’re not anything!”

  Lies—everything he and Drew shared as friends was a lie! But worse, it wasn’t just Drew. Somewhere down in a place his own thoughts didn’t reach, Michael knew—but Michael had let it happen.

  His confused rage drilled a hot tunnel through the clouds, while a chill funneled down to the very place they stood, and the boat began to tilt as its slow, clockwise spin picked up speed.

  Lourdes stumbled up from the cabin. “What is it? What’s happening?”

  But Michael couldn’t speak to her, he could only stare at Drew, not even knowing who he saw anymore when he looked at him.

  “Michael, don’t!” shouted Drew. “Please, don’t!”

  The boat shuddered and tipped. Water began to slosh over the side, and they were all thrown to the wet deck. Michael, suddenly understanding what was happening around them, tried to take control of the swirling winds, but they were too far gone now, taking on a life of their own . . . and through the seawater that spat into his face, he could see the dark funnel of a full-fledged tornado.

  “Grab on to something!” screamed Lourdes, just as the floor fell away beneath them, and the boat was plucked out of the sea. Lourdes locked her strong arm around the steering wheel, Michael grabbed the base of the driver’s seat, and Drew was hurled down into the cabin. The boat was dragged at least thirty feet out of the water. The waterspout spun it around its waist twice, and then hurled it like a slingshot at the California coast a hundred yards away.

  ON PACIFIC COAST HIGHWAY, a businessman in a brand-new Lexus sped down the winding coastlin
e road, imagining himself the lead driver in the Grand Prix. So focused was he on hugging the random curves, that he didn’t see the cyclone a hundred yards beyond his tinted side windows. He thought the salt water hitting his windshield was just a sudden downpour. He thought the wind was just the resistance his powerful car created as it sped down the coast. And so he had no warning at all when the cabin cruiser hit the pavement in front of him, skidding toward him on the wet asphalt. He stomped on his brake and heard an awful crunch, which became the sound of an inflating air bag.

  BATTERED AND BRUISED FROM the short but violent flight, neither Michael nor Lourdes dared open their eyes yet. They just listened as car after car screeched to a sudden halt, and the violent offshore winds finally died.

  Michael turned to Lourdes. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m alive,” answered Lourdes.

  Michael’s wind-reddened eyes began to blink back into clearer focus. The world around him began to take shape again.

  The boat rested on the smashed starboard side of its hull. At this angle, its deck was closer to being a bulkhead than a floor. Before them, motorists stood by their cars, stunned and confused by this anomalous sight before them. It would have been funny if they didn’t hurt so much from the brutal ride.

  And then Lourdes asked, “Where’s Drew?”

  Michael felt a wave of nausea, chased by a wave of dread. Where was Drew?

  He had a vague memory of seeing him fall through the flapping curtain of the cabin, before their boat was flung to shore. Michael quickly climbed up the buckled deck, and flung himself into the cabin.

  All was not well down below.

  The fiberglass hull had crushed down to half its size, and there was the twisted, gold-plated grille of a luxury car, where the bed should have been. The driver tried to catch his breath . . . while steam spewed from his ruined radiator, into Drew’s half-open eyes. His body had been crushed against the bulkhead, pinned between the remains of the car and the boat. His chest had collapsed like the shell of an egg, and the life had been pressed out of him in an instant.

  The image kept hitting Michael’s brain and then bouncing right out, his mind refusing to accept it.

  “Noooo!” he screamed. It came out more like a squeal—the kind of awful sound Drew himself might have made if he had the chance.

  Lourdes began to warble something in incoherent Spanish when she saw him, paling and turning away.

  “Lourdes, help me! Help me!” screamed Michael.

  Together they wrenched Drew free from the grille of the car. “He’s breathing!” shouted Michael. “He’s . . .” But it wasn’t air bubbling out of his nose; it was blood. And even that flow quickly stopped, making it all too clear that there was no heart pumping. His chest was little more than a concave crater in his torso.

  There were other voices now—motorists who had left their cars to inspect the wreckage. They tried to peer in through the gap where the Lexus had shattered the hull.

  “We have to get out of here!” Lourdes tried to pull him away, but he violently shrugged her off.

  “I can’t just leave him!” Michael knew he was responsible for this. He had brought swift judgment on Drew, and had executed that judgment in a blink of an eye. Thanks to Michael, Drew had been crushed with the same unforgiving brutality of an old-fashioned stoning.

  As he held Drew, Michael began to weep, and the heavens answered with a silent rain, lamenting all the things that were lost in the span of ninety seconds.

  8. BOOK OF WISDOM

  * * *

  “YOU MOVE LIKE ONE UNACCUSTOMED TO HIS OWN LIMBS,” Okoya told Winston. “I was wondering why.”

  “I thought Tory already gave you the story.” Winston brushed the sweat from his brow, and looked around. “We’re not getting anywhere.” The three of them had left the train more than a day ago, and had since given up on hitchhiking, for the rural roads they traveled only zigzagged in pointless directions. They had taken off on foot, certain that Dillon was just a few miles west, across the bushy hills of central California; but it was more than just a few miles. They were met by endless wastelands where tumbleweeds gathered against neglected barbed-wire fences. They hiked for a good part of the night, and yet the morning landscape seemed no different from the scenery they saw at sundown.

  They had come across a stream a few hundred yards back, where Tory had insisted on bathing, and so Winston and Okoya went on ahead, scouting out the next hill. Winston was not looking forward to the view, because he was sure of what it would show them: more hills, and mountains for as far as the eye could see. No Dillon. No anything.

  Halfway up the hill, he decided to rest. His legs ached. In truth, they always ached from growing pains as his muscles and tendons fought to match the pace of his bone growth.

  “I’d still like to hear your side of the story,” said Okoya.

  “I don’t know why I should tell you anything.”

  Okoya sat down on a boulder and pulled out a book from his back pocket. A thin, maroon volume, hard-bound, but small, like an address book. “Then don’t.” He flipped it open, and gave it his attention. Winston found his indifference more irritating than his nosiness.

  “A year ago I was the size of a six-year-old, and growing backward,” Winston told Okoya. “My touch could numb you—paralyze you. And Tory—she was a human petri dish, covered with open sores that could probably spread every disease there is. That’s what we were like when we found each other.”

  “And then you both destroyed your titans,” prompted Okoya. “Tory told me about it.”

  “Whatever you want to call them; yes, we killed them. And now there’s a whole new problem.”

  “Problem?”

  “Yes. You saw our campsite this morning, didn’t you?”

  Okoya laughed, but Winston failed to find the humor. They had gone to bed on an open plain, and awoke in a forest of weeds that had grown so high you couldn’t see the color of the sky. Winston’s bedroll had been snared and it took both Tory and Okoya to pull him free. What amazed Winston was that Okoya had taken the event in stride—as if he had already come to accept their powers at surface value. If there was one thing about Okoya that Winston liked, it was his refreshing lack of awe.

  Winston glanced down at the little book Okoya held. “So, you going to write all this down?”

  Okoya shook his head. “It’s not a book for writing, it’s one for reading.”

  “Hualapai Wisdom?”

  “There’s only one kind of wisdom,” answered Okoya.

  “Can’t fit much in a book so thin.”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  Winston thought Okoya might give him a glance at it, but instead Okoya just slipped it into a back pocket. Winston grabbed his ankle and pulled his foot up behind him, in a hurdler’s stretch. The stitching at the tips of his sneakers popped open. Winston sighed, wondering what size his feet now were.

  “How much more do you think you’ll grow?” Okoya asked.

  “I’ll be six foot one, according to the doctors, and they’re usually pretty accurate.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  Winston let his foot go, and sat down on a boulder a few feet away, studying Okoya.

  “Intellectually, you’ve moved beyond most of the people in your life, haven’t you?” Okoya continued. “Tory must bore you to tears—you’re way out of her league.”

  Winston had to laugh at that. “I’ll tell you something, Okoya,” he said. “When I was in sixth grade, I had the word ‘sycophant’ in a spelling bee. Couldn’t spell it worth a damn then. But now I could spell it, define it, give you its etymology, and its usage in classic literature. So you might say I’m a little too smart to be won over by flattery.”

  But Okoya only grinned. “Are you telling me you read the dictionary?”

  “Only when I can’t sleep.”

  “You’re right, Winston. That’s not impressive, it’s just strange.” And then Okoya became serious, taking a long, i
nvasive look at Winston. “A flatterer thrives on telling lies,” Okoya said, “but I observe the truth. So what does that make me?”

  Winston thought about the question. Wasn’t truth what he quested in everything he read, in all the things he learned? And was it true that he had outgrown Tory, and perhaps all the other shards as well?

  “Dangerous,” he answered. “It makes you dangerous.”

  “Truth is never dangerous in the right hands,” Okoya said.

  They both turned at the sound of skittering pebbles. Tory, still buttoning her blouse, hurried toward them, her pocket radio in hand.

  “You have to hear this,” she said, turning up the volume.

  “Bad news?” asked Winston.

  “Just listen.”

  The radio spat forth a strange news report between bursts of static: BZZZ BZZZ . . . “freak tornado hurled the cabin cruiser” . . . BZZZ BZZZ . . . “multiple injuries” . . . BZZZ BZZZ . . . “Pacific Coast Highway” . . . BZZZ BZZZ . . . “closed in both directions.”

  Okoya beamed. “I’ll bet your friend Michael did that.”

  Winston had to admit, it did have all the signs of a Michael Lipranski weather pattern. But what troubled him was the fact that Okoya was so quick to figure it out. Now their companion knew everything about them, but they knew nothing about Okoya. If there was any skill Okoya had perfected, it was that of being a mirror, reflecting back at Tory and Winston their own sordid histories, while evading most conversations about himself.

  They continued their journey, cresting the rocky hill ahead, to reveal yet more hills before them, as Winston expected . . . but this time, something was different.

  “Looks like we’re getting somewhere,” Okoya said.

  On the ridge of the next hill stood a high chain-link fence, far more daunting than any of the halfhearted barbed-wire they had climbed through. This fence meant business.

  “Great,” said Tory. “What’s next? The Great Wall of China?”

  But Winston wasn’t listening to her; his eyes were focused ahead on a distant hilltop covered with dense trees far different from the dry scrub that claimed the land around it. There was a building within those trees as well. A large one.