Thief of Souls

by Neal Shusterman

  When one quadriplegic had been relieved of a broken neck, he turned to them. “Who in God’s name are you?” he asked, with tears in his eyes.

  No answer was given, but Dillon caught Lourdes grinning at the question.

  Do they think of themselves as gods now? Dillon wondered. Are we?

  The fact that he had to ask was not a good sign.

  When the last of the wounded had been led off by Okoya for their “debriefing,” Dillon watched the other Shards dissolve away from one another, each surrounded by a clutch of followers that clung to them like lint. They made no attempt to push those followers away. Instead, the Shards seemed to take greater and greater delight as those around them jockeyed for position in their attempts to curry favor.

  THAT NIGHT DILLON LURKED in dark corners, secretly watching the others. He observed Lourdes in the Refectory. She sat with a host of followers who were more than happy to provide her with company as she gorged herself. She was clearly the center of her followers’ attention, in what appeared to Dillon like a distorted burlesque of the Last Supper. But by the look of things, this was by no means a final repast. In fact, it seemed like the first of many in Lourdes’s future.

  Dillon found Winston in the Gothic Study, absorbed in a thin volume with no title. He wore a hand-woven robe so ornate he seemed part of the scenery. The door creaked as Dillon entered, earning him only a fraction of Winston’s attention.

  “Quiet evening,” commented Dillon.

  “Is there something you need?” asked Winston.

  “Just making the rounds.”

  Winston turned a page. “Close the door on your way out.”

  Dillon spied Michael in the Billiard Room, playing pool against a string of followers who made sure that Michael always won. Then, when he tired of the game, he sent someone to fetch his iPod and went out for a jog. He passed Dillon on his way out of the castle. “Life is good,” Michael said with a wink as he passed, then turned to the Happy Campers in attendance. “Who wants to run with me?” There was no shortage of jogging companions. He put in his earphones, and ran off. Whatever music he listened to, Dillon noted, it must have affected him deeply, because the entire night sky shimmered with waves of color, like his own personal aurora borealis.

  As for Tory, she retired early, and Dillon found himself peering through her keyhole for a glimpse of what she was up to. Dillon played the voyeur, as she slipped into a full bathtub, and began to pour a luminous pink bath oil from a crystalline decanter into the waters.

  Have I become so suspicious—so distrustful of them—that I have to watch them in secret? He knew the answer was yes. What had brought him to this?

  It was here, as Dillon pressed his eye to Tory’s keyhole, that someone stepped out of the shadows. Someone with a video camera.

  “Shame, shame, Dillon—looks like I caught Big Brother spying.”

  It was Drew. His voice seemed to quiver as he spoke, and his camera hand trembled.

  Dillon tried to hide his own embarrassment at being exposed. “You can’t get a good picture if you don’t hold it steady, Drew.”

  Drew shrugged. “Won’t matter—it has a built-in image stabilizer,” and then he giggled unexpectedly. It wasn’t so much a nervous giggle as it was . . . inappropriate—as if Drew wasn’t quite fixed in the situation.

  Dillon had seen little of Michael’s friend since his life had been restored. For several days he had withdrawn into the Celestial Suite, as if cocooning himself. Then, when he emerged, there seemed to be something markedly different about him—but since Dillon hadn’t known Drew before, he had no real basis for comparison. All he knew was that Drew in recent days appeared to be a slippery character, never lingering long in anyone’s line of sight.

  Dillon took a step closer, but Drew took a step back. “What’ll you give me?” Drew asked. “What’ll you give me if I keep this video to myself, and don’t tell the others you were spying on them?”

  Dillon stopped short. His rapport with the others had frayed to a tether. If they knew he was secretly watching them, it wouldn’t help matters. He hadn’t been expecting to be blackmailed by Drew, though. “I gave you back your life,” he told Drew. “Isn’t that enough.”

  “Yeah, but what have you done for me lately?”

  Dillon took another step toward Drew, and once again Drew backed up—this time into a shaft of light, where Dillon could get a good look at him.

  Drew uncomfortably shifted from one foot to another, and back again, as if the ground were constantly sliding beneath his feet like the floor of a funhouse.

  Dillon quickly sized Drew up. No, this was not the same person he had fished back from death two weeks before.

  “I got an idea,” suggested Drew. “Why don’t I do the spying for you? Sure—the others’ll never suspect me. I’ll catch them all on tape, and in return, you could give me a bunch of ‘servants.’ Yeah! Just like the rest of you have. How does that sound?”

  “You’re kidding me, right?” But there was no hint of jest in Drew’s shaky voice.

  Drew lowered his voice to a whisper. “I could tell you things,” said Drew. “Things I’ve seen, that I’ll bet you haven’t. Like the way Winston reads—his eyes don’t even move, as if it’s not words he’s getting from the page, but something else. Or how about Michael—those playlists he keeps adding to his iPod—I tried to play one, but there was nothing on it . . . at least nothing I could hear. And how about Tory’s oils and perfumes? They have no scent! I could find out more for you . . . for the right price.” He offered a twitching, feculent grin. “Come on—you can trust me . . . .”

  Trust? Dillon didn’t think so. Of the many unusual things Dillon sensed in Drew’s current life-pattern, integrity didn’t figure highly. In fact, a lack of integrity—in every sense of the word—was what Dillon felt more than anything else. Drew was . . . “out of focus.” Each twitch of his eyes, every tremor of his hands, spoke of incohesion—he seemed to be falling apart from the inside out, and it wasn’t the type of thing Dillon could fix any more than he could fix the focus of a blurry snapshot.

  No, “trustworthiness” was not currently on Drew’s list of attributes. Still, the way Drew buzzed in and out of everyone’s business made him the perfect fly on the wall. The things he claimed to have seen—could they be true, or were they just figments of a mind out of balance? The latter was much easier for Dillon to swallow.

  “Tell you what: you keep a good videologue of everything you see, and maybe I’ll assign you an assistant.”

  Drew became more shifty, more fidgety. “How about two?”

  “Don’t push your luck.”

  Drew took another step back, stumbling over his own feet, and when Dillon reached out to steady him, Drew pulled out of his grasp with a violent jolt.

  “Don’t touch me, man!” Drew backed away, his posture a gangly knot of misdirected energies. “Just don’t touch me, okay?” And then he turned and ran, vanishing into the darkness.

  As far as Dillon was concerned, Drew’s behavior was just further proof that the world was falling apart.

  EIGHTY-FOUR PEOPLE TO FIX the next day.

  The busy-bee faction of the Happy Campers didn’t bother bringing the wounded into the castle. The vans and trucks that carried them, simply dropped them off in the huge courtyard between the castle and the guest houses. They were all laid out before him, beneath the unshielded sun, like a scene from a brutal war.

  Dillon knew he was still sidestroking.

  But it was more like treading water, wasn’t it?

  He wasn’t getting any closer to shore—he wasn’t anywhere near getting things under control. And all their good work wasn’t mending the fracturing world. Why was that? Each day there were more followers—not just the numbers of the healed, but others who had heard the stories and made the pilgrimage up the road from Coast Highway. There were always people coming up the road now, all hours of the day and night, longing to be a part of the Big Fix, longing to be part of somet
hing larger than themselves.

  “It’s human nature to see divinity in anything larger than oneself,” Okoya had said. Did these pilgrims making the trek to the castle think they were entering a new Jerusalem?

  Dillon found himself wondering what his followers did all day while he threw his energies into repair work. Today he found out.

  “We’ve tried to organize them for you,” said a woman with a clipboard as she stepped obliviously over the bodies beneath her. She had been there every day. Dillon had come to call her Nurse Hatchet, although she tended to speak more like a Realtor showing a house—which was probably her profession before she wound up here. “Broken bones and internal injuries are to the left, lost limbs and such to the right, and those that died during transport are by the fountain. Would you like something to drink?”

  “No thank you.” Dillon looked around, hoping Lourdes would show up, to ease the pain all around him. But the others, he was told, were taking their time in coming.

  “What about the sick?” asked Dillon. “Tory’s going to need to know where they are.”

  “None today,” said Nurse Hatchet. “Only wounded.” She offered him a clean white smile, with teeth straighter than they had been yesterday.

  Dillon didn’t return the smile. He wouldn’t force what wasn’t there. “What, have we cured all the sick in local hospitals?”

  Nurse Hatchet hesitated. “Well . . . yes,” she said. “That, too.”

  Dillon turned to her, feeling a fresh pit open in his stomach. “What do you mean ‘too’?” He tried to read a pattern in her face, so he could divine what she meant—but found her strangely void of patterns. Strangely empty.

  “To tell you the truth,” she said, “we gave up on hospitals days ago. Too much trouble. Besides—you never know what kind of people you’re going to get.”

  Dillon stared at her, still not understanding. And so she pointed to a battered man by an overgrown bush. “That particular client is an architect,” she said cheerily. “He’ll help us build dormitories when there’s no room left in the castle and guest houses.” Then she pointed to a woman in a makeshift neck brace, who gasped every breath of air. “And she’s a well-known attorney. With her on our side, we can keep the authorities away for as long as we want.”

  “What are you telling me?” demanded Dillon.

  “Don’t you see?” said Nurse Hatchet. “We made them for you to fix!”

  Dillon felt the realization begin to surround his spirit, suffocating him with a truth he couldn’t yet face. What this woman was saying was unthinkable.

  The woman grinned as if she had just sold a house. “And that’s just for starters. We’ve sent people out to bring you back some special orders. They’ll be showing up with some very important clients for you!”

  Dillon felt his balance slipping and fell back against the fountain, almost falling in.

  Eighty-four “clients” before him. People who had been in the best of health until the Happy Campers broke them, so that the Shards would have people to heal. Here was the reason why nothing they did made a difference! And what was even worse than the ruined people spread out before him were the hundreds of followers who saw nothing wrong with it.

  Dillon could imagine them stealing away in the night, selecting their victims, and brutalizing them in his name: breaking bones, tearing limbs, even killing them—for to the followers of the Shards, pain and death meant nothing anymore. To them, pain was a rite of passage, and death was merely a prelude to a miracle. How could he, of all people, not have seen this coming? That the consequences of healing was to create a bloody cult of sacrifice and resurrection. A surge was building in him now, rising like bile in his throat.

  “Well, look at that!” said Nurse Hatchet, grinning at the fountain as if it were a well-trimmed Christmas tree. Dillon’s hand had inadvertently touched the water, undoing its random, chaotic spray. Reversing its entropy. Now the fountain flowed backward.

  The woman showed her dimples. “My, you’re just one big barrel of miracles, aren’t you!”

  The doors of the castle swung open and the other Shards stepped out, with Okoya close behind.

  “Crowded today,” said Okoya, as he looked out over the dead and dying.

  “Not a problem,” said Michael, “I’m ready to rock-and-roll.”

  Dillon pulled himself together, knowing that he had no choice but to restore the hoards that had been battered for their benefit.

  And he told the others nothing, for fear that they wouldn’t care.

  OKOYA FOUND DILLON TO be a maddeningly hard egg to crack—and was already considering all the ways he might destroy this willful, uncompromising star-shard should it become necessary. It would not be hard to turn the other four against Dillon now, for they had chosen their paths. They were already set against one another, and were growing enamored of their new lifestyles, feeding off their exalted positions, and off their followers. If they perceived Dillon as a threat to that, they could, and would, destroy him. Or perhaps Dillon could be killed by his own followers. Okoya could find a way to reshape the situation, spinning the hordes of followers into a web that would ensnare Dillon, and tear him limb from limb.

  But these were only last resorts. He would only need to be destroyed if he turned on Okoya and tried to unite the others against him. Dillon was a most powerful tool, and could be used in a great many inventive ways. With Dillon beneath his thumb, this well-fattened world could easily pass into Okoya’s hands, for him to dine on, or do with as he pleased.

  And so Okoya waited, keeping his eye open for opportunities . . . until the day the fountain flowed backward, and Dillon discovered the deeds of his own minions.

  Later that day, while the other four Shards lounged around the castle, occupied with their own concerns, Okoya climbed the steps to Dillon’s chambers, and talked the guard into letting him in, which was fairly easy, as the guard had no soul. Okoya held in his hand a small statuette of a robed figure, carved in pink onyx. Conveniently sized at eight inches, and warm to the touch, the figure was a perfect gift for the Shard who had everything.

  Okoya found Dillon in the bathroom—the shower to be exact—sitting fully clothed beneath the running water, like a drunk trying to shock himself sober.

  Okoya turned off the stream of water that sprayed into Dillon’s face. “If you’re trying to drown yourself, you should try one of the pools. They’re deeper.”

  Dillon didn’t move an inch from the corner of the black marble shower. “Thanks for the advice. You can go now.”

  “I’m impressed by your melodrama,” Okoya said, “but I have something here that might cheer you up.” Okoya placed the figurine on the narrow edge of the tub, right in front of Dillon. “I found it deep in the basement,” Okoya lied. “Look at the craftsmanship! It might be thousands of years old, and its edges are still smooth.”

  Dillon eyed it, studied it, but this statue wasn’t meant for his eyes.

  “What an incredible story this piece must have to tell,” Okoya teased. “What delicious patterns of history you’ll be able to uncover just by touching it.” Okoya sat on the edge of the tub, sliding closer.

  “Touch it, Dillon,” he intoned. “Feel every pattern, every texture in your fingertips. Your hands have given so much to others . . . . Now it’s time to take something back . . . .”

  Okoya could tell Dillon was drawn to it, and for a moment thought he might seize it and lose himself in sensory overload, savoring the banquet of texture and pattern Okoya had so carefully layered into the figurine’s design.

  “Take something for yourself, Dillon. You deserve it. You’ve earned it.”

  But instead, Dillon stood, never touching the statue. “If I need to get off,” he said, “I don’t need that thing to do it.”

  Then he grabbed a towel and left the bathroom.

  Even in his frustration, Okoya had to smile. No, Dillon would not be snared by an object of desire—he was far too clever for that. Dillon’s ability to size u
p and sidestep a situation made him dangerously elusive, and all the more desirable a trophy. Okoya took the statuette and it disappeared into his pocket.

  In the bedroom, Dillon peeled off his sopping clothes, then dressed himself, keeping his back to Okoya. It was more a gesture of disdain than modesty. That’s all right, thought Okoya. This can be done without friendship. It will just take a bit more effort.

  “Do you know what our Happy Campers are doing?” Dillon asked. “Do you know what they’ve done?”

  “I think your followers have been doing you a great service. They’re doing everything necessary to make sure the ones you heal will have the greatest possible impact on the world.” Okoya positioned himself between Dillon and the door. “Didn’t someone once say, ‘The end justifies the means’?”

  “No, it doesn’t.” Dillon towel-dried his hair, and stood at the vanity mirror, looking at himself. Looking through himself.

  “You have a strange way of thinking, Dillon,” said Okoya. “You say you want to repair a shattering world, but you’re not willing to take hard action. You might as well be treading water.”

  Dillon’s eyes suddenly locked on Okoya’s, and Okoya suppressed a smile, realizing he had finally pressed a button.

  “What would you do if you were me?” asked Dillon.

  Okoya paused for a moment, and took a step closer. “If I were you, I’d stop feeling sorry for myself . . . and I would take control.”

  “Control of what?” snapped Dillon.

  “Of everything. Control is what you want, isn’t it? Control is what you need. Because the only way you’ll ever be able to protect the world is if it’s entirely under your personal control.”

  Dillon sat down, no longer angry, but scared. “That’s crazy,” Dillon said. “I can’t do that.”

  “Oh really?” Okoya began to raise his voice ever so slightly. “How many people were following you three weeks ago? None! But now that it’s started, it’s moving faster than you can imagine. There’s more than five hundred of them now—and every one of them is waiting for you to use them, but all you do is brush them off.”