Thief Of Souls

caustic hiss of a shop owner sand­blasting decades of soot from his building. Strolling all around them were sparkling-clean men and women oozing an almost Victorian refinement. The whole neighborhood had become a strange mix of accidental ubermenschen—an anomalous set of people suddenly rising above the random violence and lewd behavior that had once been a part of their lives, repulsed and mortified by the sights and smells of urban decay. Turns out, the Miami Miasma cleaned up real good; now, not even the garbage smelled.

It was still hard for Tory to understand and accept that she was the cause of all this. Not by anything she did, but by her mere presence. It was an aura that pen­etrated the streets around her like radiation, cleansing it, body and soul.

Of course, just a few blocks away, the wretchedness still lived on in the places where her light did not reach.

“Tory, are you sick? Do you have a fever or some­thing?” asked Max. “Maybe you’re getting the flu.” It obviously hadn’t occurred to him that no one in this part of Miami had come down with the flu this year.

“Max,” Tory dared to ask, “do you remember what you were like before?”

Max blinked at her in total innocence. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, when I first met you?”

Max’s shoulders twisted in a shiver. “I was awful. Let’s not talk about it.”

The fact was, he had been worse than awful. He was a gang-banger with neither conscience nor remorse for any of the brutal things he did. He bragged about his gun, and longed for the day it would take a life. Tory had despised him. The way he and his cohorts would hang out on the corner, shouting rude, lusty comments at her as she passed had made Tory hate leaving the small apartment she and her mother shared. She had feared that one day the verbal assaults might turn phys­ical when those thugs were too drunk or aroused to care.

But then Max began to change. The gun went away first. Then his attitude. He became caring, and good, without even noticing the change in himself. His gang slowly turned as innocuous as a team of eagle scouts, and their street-corner greetings became a caress rather than an assault.

There was a time several months ago, when Max’s hair was still long, and his spirit still untamed, that Tory loved him deeply. That’s when the newfound goodness of his heart was tempered by mischievous unpredictability.

But the changes continued. He cut his hair short and neat. His fun-loving grin became the blank smile of total innocence. And every single word he thought to utter was pure and wholesome. Tory had sanitized him.

Tory realized she was crying. She wondered if Dil­lon, wherever he was, could feel her cry, the way she had felt him scream. She thought of the other shards, who were suddenly at the forefront of her mind, and for the first time in many months, began to feel herself being pulled toward them, as she had been pulled that first time, when the light of the supernova had filled the night sky, filling them all with the overwhelming need to find each other. But this time it was Dillon’s call beckoning her to come west.

Max regarded her tears with deep concern. He was so clean it made her feel dirty. It made her feel like slipping into a scalding bath.

“Tory, I’m worried about you,” he said.

Tory looked deep into the eyes of this handsome, wholesome boy. There was no question he was better off than before—after all, it was far worse to be un­conscionably bad, than to be pathetically good. Still it saddened her.

Tory leaned toward him, wanting to kiss him, but he leaned away, shocked and embarrassed.

“Tory, no! We’re in public!”

“Please,” begged Tory. “Just this once.”

“Oh, all right.” Max leaned forward and endured the public kiss. There was tenderness in the kiss, but noth­ ing more. No passion or urgency. No hint of mystery. No spice of unknown intentions. His thoughts were as pure as the smell of his breath and taste of his kiss— flavorless as distilled water.

“Good-bye, Max,” she said sadly, then strode away from him without looking back, heading west toward Dillon Cole, and to escape the effects of her own scour­ing presence.

3. Coast To Coast

That same morning, toward the eastern end of Long Island, Lourdes Hidalgo concentrated on the five girls around her as the volleyball arced over the net toward them. None of these girls were on the vol­leyball team, and yet, over the past month, they had become a curiosity in their phys-ed class, and had gained the attention of the volleyball coach—enough of his attention, that he helped schedule today’s chal­lenge match against the real volleyball team of Hamp­ton Bays High. No spectators were officially invited, but word of mouth had brought at least two dozen.

The ball cleared the net, and Andrea, the girl to Lourdes’s right got under it, passed it to Lourdes, who was the setter of their unofficial team. Lourdes passed it to Patrice in the front row, who spiked it to win yet another point. Cheers from the sidelines. The coach shook his head. “Incredible!”

Meanwhile the real volleyball team scowled in dis­belief. “Who are you rooting for anyway?” shouted the team’s Amazonian captain.

Coach Kline scowled right back at her. “If you’re a team, then play like one.”

Lourdes smiled. Now she and her friends controlled the court like a team that had trained together for years. They functioned with the precision of a Swiss watch, as if they were all being controlled by a single will.

The truth is, they were.

As setter, Lourdes was the leader of the squad, but rather than merely positioning the ball for the net play­ ers to spike, Lourdes set the players themselves. She gripped each of them with her will, subtly pulling their strings and manipulating the movements of their bod­ies. She could adjust their metabolisms in microsec­onds, causing adrenaline to flow, and muscles to contract faster, with added energy, as if they were all part of a single being, with Lourdes at the center. It was a gift Lourdes was learning to brandish well.

She forced them to work as a perfect team, and as volleyball was ninety percent teamwork, no one could beat Lourdes’s machine.

Her team served, and the real volleyball players fought valiantly, returning the ball over the net in a powerful spike—but Lourdes was ready. She raised Pa­trice’s hands to save the ball, then got under it herself for the second tap. Next, she willed Andrea into posi­tion to slice it over for the final point. It couldn’t have been easier if all twelve hands, and all twelve feet, were hers.

The ball was still in the air when Lourdes got the mind-blast from Dillon Cole. Her head swam, her vi­sion faded, as if she had stood up too quickly. He was calling for her—for all of them. He was being smoth­ered by a crowd. . . . She felt faint, but only for a mo­ment. When her vision cleared, the team on the other side of the net was suffering the agony of their humil­iating defeat.

“That’s match,” said Coach Kline.

As the players cleared the court on both sides, the coach pulled Lourdes aside. She reigned in her frazzled thoughts and emotions, refusing to be befuddled in this moment of victory.

“I have to admit, Lourdes,” he said, with deep ad­miration, “you’ve really come into your own this year. You’ve come a long, long way.”

Lourdes had heard that a lot, but she never tired of being reminded. She had gone from being a 350-pound outcast, to one of the most admired girls in school, at half the weight. True, her figure wasn’t exactly that of a model—the large bones of her frame wouldn’t allow for that—but she was as slim as she needed to be. She felt comfortable in her clothes; her many chins had melted away; and when she looked in the mirror, she liked what she saw, from the front, and from the side. Ralphy Sherman told people that she had undergone a high-risk experimental liposuction technique at a Swed­ish clinic—and since no other explanation surfaced, people actually believed him. In any case, “fat” was not the word that came to people’s minds when they saw Lourdes Hidalgo these days. “Impressive,” maybe even “powerful,” but not “fat.”

“You’ve surprised me, Lourdes,” said the coach. “I never thought you’d turn out to be so . . . athletic.”