Thief Of Souls

chael. In the end, Drew closed his eyes, and leaned back on the pillow, waiting for this mysterious gift.

Michael had no idea how to accomplish this, for he had never done it before. So he took a deep breath, and pressed his fingers to Drew’s face, in something that resembled the Vulcan Mind Meld.

Perhaps, thought Michael, this won’t be so difficult after all. He summoned up a depth of confidence he had only recently found in himself. Then, with hands pressed firmly against Drew’s forehead, he focused on the deep core of Drew’s nature, forced his way into Drew’s mind—an intrusion far more intimate than any­thing physical—and then Michael began to reroute the many feelings held within.

Somewhere outside, a single cloud began to turn it­self inside out.

***

That same afternoon, Okoya had advised Lourdes as well. Not with words of comfort, but with a single, unhappy suggestion.

While Michael stole song from Okoya, Lourdes brooded around the Rose Garden. After the day’s gruel­ing session of fixing, Lourdes tried to spend some time with Michael, but found herself performing another painful skate down Michael’s endless cold shoulder. Since the moment she had kissed him in Newport Beach and received nothing in return, she knew capturing his affections would be an uphill battle, but it had always been a battle she was certain she would win. Now she wasn’t so sure.

Okoya eventually joined her in the Rose Garden, and told Lourdes point-blank that Michael’s interests lay elsewhere.

“Watch him,” said Okoya. “Watch him tonight, and you’ll understand what I mean.”

So Lourdes did as she was told. She watched Mi­chael through dinner, she shadowed him throughout the evening—and late at night, when she heard the door of his room creak open, she followed in darkness through the winding corridors, and up the stairs to the Celestial Suite.

She knew very well whose room that was.

Standing at the closed doors, she couldn’t quite make out their whispers, but her imagination painted for her a picture as complete as could be—and never once did it occur to her that she might be wrong, because it made so much sense. In fact, it all made sense now: the strange way Michael and Drew had avoided each other’s looks in the light of day; the quarrel they had on the boat that led to Michael’s tornado; the reason Michael returned none of Lourdes’s affection.

Because his interests lay elsewhere.

For Lourdes, it felt as if a dislocated joint had suddenly, painfully, slipped into place. She stumbled through the cold hallways, and down stone stairwells, until she finally found herself in the kitchen . . . where Okoya sat, having a midnight snack.

Lourdes sat beside Okoya, and told her exactly where Michael was. She began to sob freely as Okoya put an arm around her to comfort her. No matter how bad things had gotten in the past, she had never cried like this.

“Poor Lourdes,” Okoya said. “Poor, poor Lourdes. A will so strong, you could control the movements of armies, but you can’t have Michael . . . and now you know you never will.” Okoya cut a huge wedge of cherry pie, its filling glistening in the kitchen lights, and piled it high with ice cream. Then Okoya pushed the plate in front of Lourdes.

Lourdes wiped her eyes. “I—I can’t,” she said. “I have to watch what I eat. If I don’t . . .”

Okoya handed her a fork. “If you don’t, then what?”

Lourdes thought about it. Then what? Gluttony had nourished the beast that once lived inside Lourdes, packing her flesh with fat. But that beast was gone now, and she could control her own metabolism, indulging herself as much as she wanted. She could eat like there was no tomorrow, and endow the fat onto someone else—anyone else she chose. And why not indulge? She deserved it. She had earned it—and God help any­one who tried to stop her.

Lourdes took a small scoop of pie on her fork, and ate it. Then she took another, and another, and another, shoveling its luscious sweetness into her mouth, just as fast as she could swallow.

“Eat, Lourdes!” said Okoya, with deep understand­ing and sympathy. “Eat . . . . Not because you have to, but because you want to.”

And Lourdes did.

***

Morning saw a bright day filled with muscular tufts of confident clouds that knew their place in the sky. Drew Camden, however, did not concern himself with the weather. He did not look out of the window. In fact, lifting his head out of the Celestial Suite’s toilet would have been a great victory. His body fought itself, like a patient in the throes of chemotherapy.

Michael’s night visit had been a strange and inex­plicable event. He had done nothing more than press his hands to Drew’s face—yet somehow he had done more than that. Michael had somehow entered Drew’s thoughts and feelings as easily as opening a cupboard . . . and then proceeded to rearrange the shelves.

Suddenly Drew’s whole world had changed. Drew had felt his mind and spirit stretched and folded like taffy, leaving him dizzy and confused.

He felt many new things now. He thought of the girls in school whose affections he always pretended to re­ turn—and suddenly he longed to be back there, finding he now had a lusty passion for them. He thought of the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated, and regretted that he had read the articles instead of ogling the pictures. He thought of his cousin Monica’s tits, and wished he could have a nice long talk with them.

But the more these images filled his mind, the more his head began to spin, and his stomach to churn. Per­ haps it was because of the other thoughts still with him. Memories of the feelings he used to have. All those secret, unrealized desires he had shared with no one. They were dead now, but their memories remained—and he now found them so repulsive, that he wanted to reach in through his eyes, and pull his brain out so he couldn’t think of them anymore.

But this is a good thing, thought Drew.A great thing. Michael has done for me what no one else could do. He monkeyed around in my head, and when he left, he left me straight. Drew clung on to that thought, as he heaved into the toilet again.

15. Doctor Doom And Nurse Hatchet

Shiprock was the key.

Two weeks into the siege of San Simeon, Dillon ze­roed in on the tragic news reports, and they became the key to deciphering the pattern of destruction. Since he had arrived, he had scoured the media and Internet, but until now his searches had yielded nothing but white noise. And then came the Shiprock Massacre, pulling his attention, narrowing his focus. It was a primer that helped him decode everything else. From that moment on, things began to fall into place, like a puzzle con­structing itself. In almost everything he saw and read, the pattern of destruction had finally begun to emerge.

“What pattern?” Winston asked when Dillon tried to tell the others. “I don’t see any pattern.”

Dillon had called the others to his suite the moment he was certain he could now read the language of the unraveling. So certain was he that he was blindsided by Winston’s skepticism.

“If there were anything to see,” challenged Winston, “then I would see it, too.” Winston stood there, his arms crossed. Michael, Tory, and Lourdes were there as well, and none of them was jumping to Dillon’s aid.

“You won’t see it,” Dillon told them. “Only I can see—you just have to trust me . . .”

Silence from the others—but more than mere silence. It was . . . a lack of connection. Not only with him, but with each other. The angle of their stances—the distance they stood from one another—it all spoke of isolation. Disunity. For the life of him, Dillon couldn’t understand why.

Dillon dragged his fingers through his hair in frus­tration, and for a moment he felt his hair stand at wild angles like a mad scientist, but a single shake of his head brought it back into place. “It’s not like I’m guess­ing