Thief Of Souls

“We’re worried about feeding all these people,” said one of Winston’s flock. “What should we do?”

“Dig up the lawn beneath my balcony, and seed it with vegetables,” he told them. “You’ll have a full har­vest by morning.”

Drew used his zoom lens on Winston, because Win­ston had no patience for Drew, and couldn’t be both­ered with something as menial as their videologue. And besides, whenever Drew moved too deeply into Win­ston’s sphere of influence, he could feel his own hair growing, and it wasn’t a pleasant sensation.

Drew followed Winston’s gaze to the sky, where, to Winston’s irritation, Michael was upstaging him with a host of cloud creations. “That’s all he’s good for,” Winston grumbled to his followers.

Drew trekked to a clearing on the far side of the castle, where close to one hundred followers lay on their backs like a Peanuts cartoon, staring up at the clouds. In the center of them, Michael emoted in short, directed bursts. Drew could feel the pulses move through him like Morse code. In this way Michael carved and molded the clouds. He had whipped the high cirrus into a wispy spiderweb. Now he drew to­gether the puff in its center until a spider could be seen lurking there. Then Michael released his breath as if he had been lifting a heavy weight, and the web above began to dissolve into random vapor once more. His crowd applauded and cheered.

It was then that Dillon burst out of the castle with Okoya close behind. Drew quickly spun the video-cam to him, zooming in on Dillon’s intensely determined face. Dillon was searching for someone or something, and his mind seemed to race ahead of him like an en­gine pulling him forward. He stormed past the antifountain, which had become a little shrine all its own, and continued on toward the Neptune Pool. There were, no doubt, great wheels of creation turning in his head, as he devised complex, unknowable schemes.

***

Drew’s observation was, in fact, correct. Dillon’s mind had kicked into overdrive, and was practically burning a path before him. The thoughts Okoya had planted in his mind just a few moments earlier were germinating at the speed of Winston’s Rose Garden.

You can be the glue that holds together this failing world, Okoya had said, and Dillon knew he was right. He also knew that what he was about to attempt, if it succeeded, would change everything. It would alter the ineffective course of his actions. If he was able to do this, he would no longer be merely treading water.

In the Neptune Pool, however, there were dozens of people treading water, under Tory’s direction, of course. Tory had finally deigned to satisfy all the fol­lowers who kept asking for “cleansing,” which seemed to mean something different for each of them. No mat­ter; she had concocted an impressive little ritual that was a cross between baptism and synchronized swim­ming, with her as high priestess and Esther Williams all rolled into one.

As the joyous mobs bobbed blissfully in the water, Dillon strode across the pool deck, and began to run his hands determinedly across the marble railing, and over the statues that surrounded the pool. His strange actions took everyone’s attention away from Tory, and it annoyed her. The pool was her place, and these were her followers. What was Dillon up to?

Drew shuffled across the wet deck, putting the video camera in Dillon’s face. “Welcome to ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Godlike,’ ' he said. “Here we have Dillon Cole, performing some mystic ritual. Tell us, Dillon, just what are you doing?”

Dillon put his hand to a column, rubbing his fingers across it. “Trying to get a feeling,” he said.

“A feeling for what?”

“The pressure point,” was his enigmatic response.

Word had begun shooting through the ranks that Dil­lon was being weird by the pool. In the ad hoc shrines where Michael, Lourdes, and Winston performed their sideshow tricks, people ran past. “Dillon’s doing some­thing,” they shouted breathlessly. “He’s doing some­thing new!”

Soon the audiences had abandoned the other Shards, hurrying down to the pool to see what was up.

Dillon hopped the railing on the western edge of the pool deck. The pool’s west side jutted over the edge of the hilltop, so that guests could have an unobstructed view of the Pacific. Dillon fell eight feet as he jumped over the railing, but kept his balance. He turned, and facing the granite block wall that enclosed the pool, he ran his fingers along the weathered stone, and between the cracks.

Up above, Drew leaned over the railing, looking down on him, camera still rolling. Dillon’s fingers swept back and forth, until he centered in on a single block, and then he dragged his index finger across it in serpentine motions, until stopping on a single spot. He reached down, picked up a stone from the ground, and pounded the spot three times. Clack-clack-clack.

The sound echoed deep within the structure of the pool.

“Pressure point?” asked Drew.

Dillon looked up and called to him. “Get off the pool deck. Tell everyone to get off the pool deck!”

But by now there were so many people crowding the ledge, and the hillside around him, it seemed impossi­ ble to get the mobs moving without some sort of struc­tured retreat. Dillon searched the crowd until finding the other Shards, standing impassively twenty yards away, observing him.

“Lourdes,” he said. “You have to move these peo- pie.”

“I don’t take orders,” she grunted. “Ask nicely.”

“Please, Lourdes—and do it quick.”

Lourdes flicked her head, and focused on the crowd. She took a deep breath, bore down, and everyone— everyone—turned and marched away, leaving the area around and above Dillon clear.

“There,” she said. “You owe me.”

When the marching had stopped, the ground still trembled like the pounding of a hundred feet . . . . Stones half-buried in the hillside began to tumble, and from deep within the structure of the pool came a triplet of sounds growing louder as they repeated. Sounds only barely recognizable as the magnified, mutated clack- clack-clack of Dillon’s stone against the granite block.

Dillon stumbled backward, focusing all of his atten­tion forward as the pool echoed its resonant frequency through its dense structure, and back to its pressure point, until the granite blocks began to quiver; until the heavy railing began to crumble; until the entire west face of the pool fractured and collapsed in an avalanche of broken granite and marble dust.

Dillon was engulfed by that thick cloud of dust, and Michael, for one, didn’t have the patience to wait for the dust to settle, so he blew it away.

What remained brought the crowd to a stunned si­lence. Drew had to take his eye from his video-cam to make sure he was indeed seeing what he thought he saw.

Dillon stood there, amid the rubble. The statues and colonnade above him were gone. So was the deep end of the pool.

But the water had not moved.

Like the column of water in his room, the pool water held its shape, as if the face of the pool were still there. People still treaded water—from where Dillon stood, he could see the soles of their feet through the wall of water that stayed in place, touched by Dillon’s ever­growing power of cohesion.

It had worked!

And it hadn’t been any more difficult for Dillon than putting his finger in a dike.

The other Shards came down to get a better view of the feat, but each brought along their own sprig of sour grapes.

“Show-off.”

“That’s called vandalism.”

“Have you lost your entire mind?”

“What’s the matter, Dillon—playing Jesus wasn’t good enough for you? Now you have to play Moses, too?”

Dillon didn’t even hear them. “Pack your things,” he said. “We’re leaving.” He turned to the first Happy Camper he saw. “You! Tell all the others there are to be no more sick or injured brought to us. There are more important things to do now.”

“Yes, Dillon,” the man said, and hurried off.