Disruptor

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  “Shinobu was with me.”

  “He wasn’t. I know no-space better than the back of my hand. He was gone before I found you.” His voice shook, but whether with fear or anger, Quin couldn’t tell. Something was wrong with him.

  He was a Seeker, obviously, and she was going to find out what he’d done. Was he a pawn in the Middle Dread’s scheme to turn all Seekers against each other? “Did you take his focal?” she demanded, meeting his wild eyes with her own. “Did you leave Shinobu There, helpless?”

  “If he was there, he left before I found you. And you—” He looked upset, wounded by her question. “It’s my focal. It’s always been mine. I rescued you.”

  Quin walked herself through the hazy, slow last moments with Shinobu. He’d been in trouble. He’d wanted her to take off his focal, but she hadn’t been able to move by then.

  She studied her volatile companion in silence, realizing that it was entirely possible that Shinobu had gone off on a fool’s errand. It had been her job to keep an eye on him, to make sure the thoughts from the focal didn’t overpower his own. If this stranger was telling her the truth, then Quin had lost herself, and after that she’d lost Shinobu somewhere as well.

  “Where are we, then?” she asked, trying to take the accusation out of her voice. Maybe this person had rescued her.

  “We’re in the world,” he answered in tones of awe, as if he didn’t quite believe in the world. As if this were his first visit.

  She said, “And where—”

  “You want a place name, something specific.” He was shaking his head. “I can’t think that way. Give me time!”

  His voice trembled badly. She saw that he was making a great effort to hold himself together, but he looked ready to jump out of his skin at the slightest provocation. With a sweeping glance, Quin estimated him as an opponent. He was big, perhaps twice her weight, and agile. She’d grown up around fighters and knew a dangerous man when she saw one.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, as if reading her thoughts. “You’re welcome to that knife you’re clutching. I don’t mind. I waited here with you for hours until you woke up. If I’d meant to hurt you, I would have. I don’t like fighting.”

  The words carried a ring of sincerity. Despite his feral look, she was inclined to give him a measure of trust. Unbalanced did not necessarily mean evil.

  “Who are you? Which house?” she asked him. “Where did you train to be a Seeker?”

  “I don’t know specifics so quickly.”

  “But your name—?”

  “I saw your clothes and your food and I knew it was time,” he said angrily. Apparently she had pressed him too hard. She watched him master himself, but his voice quavered as he added, “Your clothes and that food are modern. As modern as I needed them to be.” He gestured at a wrapped food bar lying on the floor, which Quin vaguely remembered stuffing into her pocket at some point. He edged closer to her, on his knees. “Would it offend you if I took your hand?”

  “What?” Was he asking to hold her hand, or was he so crazy that he was asking permission to remove it? She tightened her grip around the knife hilt.

  A surprised laugh escaped him. “Held your hand,” he corrected himself. “I didn’t mean I wanted to cut it off. I only ask because I’m not used to this much light. I—I haven’t got any weapons on me, though there are a few in the cave. And wonders.”

  What did that mean? As if the sky had heard her question, the light shifted abruptly. Clouds outside had parted, allowing a glow of yellow to flood through the high, natural window in the rock and show Quin her surroundings clearly at last. The space where the two of them sat was large enough for six or seven people crammed in at close quarters. There was no way out except the cliff plummet off to her left. And she could now see a couple of whipswords lying haphazardly nearby, along with a few other objects—strange items that she didn’t recognize, made of stone and glass, items that looked both ancient and intriguing, like things the Young Dread might carry, like things her father should have taught her about during her Seeker training. Wonders, he’d said.

  The young man was still moving closer, avoiding a beam of sunlight as though it were poison. In the brighter light, she saw his focal more clearly, and could hear the crackling of its electricity. It was not Shinobu’s helmet. That was the truth. It was quite different, larger, maybe cruder, and there was a D melted into the temple, by a child, she guessed, looking at the rough design of the letter.

  “I told you it was my focal,” he said, noticing her gaze. “It’s the oldest one there is.”

  His large hand enclosed her own, and Quin allowed this because she was pondering what he’d just said: His focal was the oldest focal? What family did that put him in? And how had he come by the artifacts on the floor?

  “I need your steady hand,” he said. He glanced at the sunlight, which shone on the wall only a few feet away from his shoulder.

  “Are you worried it’s going to burn you?”

  “A little bit.” He took a deep breath, in and out, as he pressed her hand between both of his. “Will you pull off my helmet? There’s no escaping it—it’s got to come off. And then we can get out of here.”

  The thought of leaving was plainly terrifying to him, but it energized Quin. She had no athame and therefore must cast her lot with this unpredictable companion if she wanted to get somewhere—anywhere—familiar and begin looking for Shinobu.

  After extricating her hand from his, she gently removed his focal while he watched her with tortured eyes, bracing himself for pain. He collapsed the moment it was off, and with a deep groan pressed his forehead into the floor. When she set the helmet aside, she could hear the buzz as its streams of energy severed themselves from him like a swarm of dying bees.

  Quin caught only a few of the muttered words that flowed through his gritted teeth: “…It’s supposed to focus…I never wanted it to tear…should have done better…” He spoke as though he had a long and rough history with his focal, and she wondered if it affected him in the same way Shinobu was affected.

  “Stop! Come here,” she told him. He’d made a gash across his temple against the jagged floor. She pulled his head up, and when he felt her touch, he clutched her, a drowning man holding a piece of driftwood.

  “I hate wearing it and I hate taking it off,” he said against her knees. “And the sunlight hurts.”

  She steadied him with a hand on his cheek. She let her vision shift into the healer’s sight she’d been taught by Master Tan in Hong Kong. When her eyes lost focus, she could see the lines of electrical flow around his body, bright copper streams just below the level of normal sight. In an ordinary person, these lines flowed slowly in a regular pattern, and as a healer, Quin had learned to manipulate them. In her companion she saw something entirely different. A bright shower erupted from his right temple, flowed swiftly down across his body to his left hip, where it rejoined into a single stream that disappeared within him. He was like a waterfall himself, with violent bursts cascading into him and out of him over and over, temple to hip. His terror and his evasive answers were now rather less mysterious; such an energy pattern could not be pleasant to live with.

  Quin wondered if she could heal him. But a few moments of watching that bright, savage flow put an end to that thought. She’d never seen a pattern like his and doubted she had the skills to make a dent in it. She would have to coax him along until he took her out of this cave.

  Eventually he became calmer, and when that happened, she let her eyes settle back into ordinary sight. He was marked, she saw, by those strange energy lines. A patch of hair above his right temple was devoid of color—almost clear, as though it were dead. She wondered if she would find a matching scar on his left hip.

  His chest was still against her legs. “Thank you for coming back to me,” he whispered.

  “You found me,” she told him gently. “And maybe you’ll help me find Shinobu.”

  “Shhh.”

  He rel
eased her and lay on the cave floor, gazing up at the roof. He looked drained, but no longer distressed, at least. His features were finely shaped and somehow, she thought as she studied him, familiar to her. He gave an impression of nobility that she couldn’t quite pinpoint. Perhaps it was the loose, shaggy hair, like the locks of a medieval knight in one of her mother’s very old novels.

  “We’re both alive together now, Quilla,” he whispered, in a tone different from the one he’d been using. He was calling her by another name, the name of someone he must have loved. “I can hardly believe it.”

  She tried to match the softness in his voice as she said, “Where’s your athame?”

  “I have no athame, nor do I need such a blunt instrument.”

  She’d never heard a Seeker describe an athame that way—as if it were something inferior. “Then how did we get here?”

  “In the usual way,” he whispered, and he laid a hand across his heart. Something in the gesture suggested he was crazy all the way through. And yet, there were hints of information here that Quin wanted to pursue. Had he brought her back from There without an athame? She had been separated from Shinobu while they’d been in the process of discovering the long-hidden secrets of Seekers. Had she stumbled upon someone with some of the answers?

  “What’s ‘the usual way’?” she asked him carefully, hoping a gentle question might sidestep his defenses.

  He turned suddenly toward her. “You know I want to tell you. I would have died in your place if I’d gotten to you in time.” He spoke so lovingly, as though they knew every detail of each other. “I’d much rather you and Adelaide were alive than be alive myself, Quilla.”

  “I’m—I’m not Quilla,” she said softly, feeling a pang of sadness at this glimpse of his story. Suddenly she remembered the light, warm pressure she’d felt on her lips as she woke up. “Did you kiss me before?”

  “You’re so like her,” he said, as if in a trance. “What if you are her?”

  She touched his shoulder. “I’m Quin.”

  He looked puzzled but undeterred. “But will you help me?”

  “I’ve got to—”

  “Stop telling me about Shinobu!” he cried savagely. In one violent motion, he twisted up to a sitting position and glared at her. “Whoever he might be, I’ll find him, if that’s what you want. I’m only asking for a little bit of help first!”

  Quin bit back any response. She needed him to get her out of this cave, and then she needed to find Shinobu and keep him from doing something mad. But when she looked again at the glass-and-stone “wonders” and at the odd focal her companion had been wearing, she found she had already decided. She and Shinobu both would want to learn from this wild young man, if they could only get beneath the insanity.

  “Who are you?” she asked him tentatively.

  His gaze on her was like a physical force, heavy and uncomfortable. He looked like he was struggling to stay friendly. “I’m Dex,” he said at last, succeeding in reining himself in. “We can go now, if you want. I know most people don’t like small, dark spaces as much as I do.”

  “How do we go?”

  He cast about on the floor and gathered up the wonders. “You hold these as a token of my commitment. You help me, and I promise I will help you.”

  She took them from him and asked, “Are these old Seeker tools?”

  Her calmness was calming him. “They’re at least as old as that,” he said. “They must be used in a big open space, which is why I need you. I’ll teach you the things I refused to teach you before.”

  Very slowly, as if afraid of being hurt, Dex extended his left hand into the beam of sunlight coming through the opening. When the sun fell on his skin, Quin saw a tiny stone-and-glass device that was looped over his middle finger and lying in his palm.

  “What is that?”

  “Catching all of them won’t be easy. But they need to be caught, Quilla.” He looked down at her with his big brown eyes, and Quin thought fleetingly that Quilla, whoever she’d been, must have enjoyed the warmth of that gaze, no matter how crazy he was. “They’ve messed things up royally, and it’s time to stop.”

  She wasn’t about to ask Dex who he was talking about. She’d pushed him, she guessed, nearly to the end of his tether. He’d said they would leave—she could hold her tongue until he’d shown her how.

  But when he took his left hand out of the sunlight and slid it around the back of her neck, she backed away.

  “Don’t…”

  “I’m not going to kiss you,” he assured her softly, the hint of a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. His hand was at her neck, and the warm stone of the strange object in his palm was pressed against her skin.

  A shock traveled through her spine and up into her head. Quin went limp in his hands, and was, almost instantly, unconscious.

  Shinobu stood on the crumbling ledge of stone, biting his fingernail as he surveyed the mess he’d made. Twenty Watchers—twenty!—lay about the broken floor of Dun Tarm. The ruined fortress was wedged into the water of Loch Tarm, and half of the structure had fallen to rubble and slid into the lake. What remained was mostly open to the sky, the floor a patchwork of ancient flagstones, pitted and out of alignment and covered in moss and puddles of rainwater. There were even trees growing up between the flagstones, gnarled and stunted oaks with the bright green leaves of spring.

  Shinobu stood with his back to the cold water and the granite peaks that rose up beyond the lake. The day was beautiful and mild, and the sun touched his back with late spring warmth where it peeked out between towering clouds. He noticed none of these things. He was watching the Watchers, who were sprawled in positions unsuited to lying down, exactly as they had been since he’d brought them into the world. They were so still that they might have been carved out of Dun Tarm’s discarded stones, but they were slowly, moment by moment, relaxing into natural poses as they rejoined the stream of time. When they did, they would be awake and dangerous.

  This is madness.

  No. It’s how I keep Quin safe. I tame these boys and use them.

  His mind was arguing with itself as it now did almost constantly.

  He slipped a hand into a pocket of his cloak and withdrew the medallion. It was a stone disc, about four inches in diameter and perhaps an inch thick at the center. He noticed more details now that he was studying it in bright sunlight. On the face was the symbol of the Dreads, three interlocking ovals. The back, which he’d thought was mostly smooth, was actually pockmarked and scratched—or perhaps not scratched but etched with lines forming concentric circles. And had it been vibrating? He’d been focused on retrieving all the Watchers, but hadn’t he felt it shaking in his pocket when he was in the darkness There?

  The medallion was heavy with unknown properties. All Shinobu knew was that it was his talisman to control these boys. It had belonged to the Middle Dread, and the Watchers had already shown him that they respected it as a symbol of authority. With it, he was their master, just as the Middle Dread had been. Looking at all twenty of them, however, he had his doubts. He’d fought four of them once, with Quin, and he and Quin had barely made it through the fight alive.

  Why do I want them? They’re dangerous.

  Quin wants to understand Seeker history. If these boys aren’t on our side for that, they’ll be against us.

  “But I don’t have Quin to check on me,” he whispered aloud. At once he closed his lips tightly, as if that might prevent the boys from hearing what he’d said.

  You left her There to keep her safe.

  I left her. I left her.

  The hand of one boy twitched. Another boy’s foot shifted on the stone floor; a head jerked to one side. They were almost awake.

  They were all dressed in dark, scratchy-looking cloaks, as though the Middle Dread had found them in medieval European villages. He must have gotten them from everywhere, though, because they were of all sorts, Asian, Indian, and African. They filled the air with the scent of death, which c
ame, Shinobu had discovered, from bits of rotting animal flesh they carried around in their pockets.

  They’re terrible.

  He tried to run a hand through his hair, but he was thwarted by the metal focal. How long had he been wearing it? He was supposed to keep track.

  Why was the sun so warm? Scotland had been cold when he and Quin were last here. When had that been?

  How long has she been in the darkness alone?

  Each moment There is safer than here.

  Is it?

  A boy nearby was groaning and feeling for his knives. Another was muttering something. Then, quite suddenly, twenty boys were stirring, and twenty pairs of eyes opened and latched on to Shinobu.

  How long has she been in the darkness alone? Shinobu asked. He sounded far away and confused. Each moment There is safer than here.

  Is it? Quin tried to ask.

  “Quin, do you want to get out of the cave?”

  She was awake in a sudden rush. There was still the rumble of the waterfall in the rocks around her, but there was another sound—a deep, low hum penetrated her lungs and her stomach, almost making her sick. Quin sat up and clamped her hands over her ears.

  “Come!” Dex was yelling to be heard over the competing vibrations in the air.

  Directly behind him, where the wall of the cave should have been, there was something else entirely. It was as though the rocks had been ripped out and replaced by blackness.

  No, not blackness exactly.

  “Is that an anomaly?” Quin asked him—shouting—trying to grasp what she was seeing. How had she fallen asleep? The noise was so distracting, and she knew she was forgetting something.

  “Do you mean an opening to no-space?” Dex yelled back. “Yes, that’s what this is! And when it’s open, it’s the strongest note in the hum of the universe.”

  The opening was larger than any anomaly Quin had seen. The whole wall had disappeared, and instead of a circular border as would appear after carving an anomaly with an athame, the glowing edges of this opening were thicker and held the shape of a huge semicircle, like a tunnel carved through the mountain, with streaks of light smearing backward and leading the way deep inside.