Thief Of Souls

Shards did not bring up their little summit meet­ing from earlier that day, and so neither did Dillon. He merely watched them, and listened.

“You’re all so damned slow,” Winston commented to the other Shards as he moved from one amputee to another, as if he were on an assembly line.

“Can’t you hold still?” Tory snapped without a shred of patience, at a woman whose infection she was trying to purge.

Lourdes grumbled about all the places she would rather be, and Michael just sat there, peering out of the window, aloof and apart, letting his sedate mood settle on the wounded behind him.

It wasn’t just that they had gotten good at the work— they had also developed an immeasurable distance from the patients over whom they loomed, as if their lives were now on some exalted plane. If the people lying before them were to die in their arms, and Dillon weren’t there to revive them, Dillon doubted that the four of them would care in the least.

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 Walkman 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 on his Walkman, 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—and 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. Some­ one 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, as he peered through the eyepiece.

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 watch­ ing 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 shitload 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 CDs he keeps feeding into his Walkman—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, in­ tegrity 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 as­ sistant.”

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.