Disruptor

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  Dex pulled her to her feet. Quin stopped at the incandescent, seething edge and looked up at the ceiling. It had been cut in half by the anomaly’s arch.

  “You shocked me into unconsciousness,” she said, remembering now. “Why did you do that?”

  Dex had the courtesy to look somewhat abashed. “You know I’m not supposed to show you how it works.”

  That was all the apology she was going to get. “How…” She searched for the question. “How long has it been open? Won’t it fall shut?” Her training told her that you used anomalies quickly and carefully.

  Dex shook his head. He wasn’t wearing his focal; it hung down his back from a leather strap around his neck. His shaggy brown curls were loose about his face, making him look boyish and young—and he also looked frightened. He pointed to the floor of the cave.

  “It won’t collapse until I collapse it,” he explained.

  Near Quin’s feet was a small stone disc. She recognized it—it was the medallion Shinobu had shown her back in the cliff barn. It lay at the center of the flat base of the glowing semicircle; the anomaly was flowing outward from the disc.

  “Where did you get that?” she asked him.

  Dex tugged her forward. “Please, before I lose my nerve.”

  She shook him off, leaned closer to get a better look at the disc. It wasn’t Shinobu’s medallion after all. Like Shinobu’s, it was carved with the symbol of the Dreads—three interlocking ovals—but the pattern along the edge was different. Dex hadn’t stolen this from Shinobu; so far, he hadn’t lied to her, and she really had no choice but to go along with him.

  She allowed Dex to guide her forward, and together they stepped across the threshold. The border was more than a foot wide, a bright band of hissing, swirling energy. Quin held her breath as she crossed over into what should have been the familiar darkness of the place between.

  “It’s not dark,” she said, surprised. The light coming off the anomaly’s border streaked out on either side like hazy guide lights in a tunnel.

  Dex smiled at her, a seasoned explorer with a naive companion. He stooped over the medallion, made a minute twisting motion with the disc between his hands. When he lifted the medallion up, the space around them warped, like a water droplet joining with other drops and changing its shape. At once the cave opening was far behind them, and they were well within the dark tunnel.

  Compared to the medallion in his hands, an athame was…a blunt instrument, just as Dex had said. The disc was manipulating the space between as a potter manipulates clay.

  The medallion held out on his palm, Dex began to walk. The smears of light on each side defined themselves into shapes. Quin saw the rock of the cliff they’d been inside, the water at the top of the falls, grass, and sunlight. These things were discernible within the blackness, as if the landscape were flowing around her and Dex behind a dark curtain, as if this tunnel they were in were pushing its way through the world.

  She recognized where they were immediately. The landscape spread out beyond this high meadow was the Scottish estate. The waterfall was the same fall she and Shinobu had visited a dozen times when they were children. Until now, she’d only been as far as the pool at its base and hadn’t known of the hidden cave to which Dex had brought her. It was as though he knew the estate better than Quin, who’d lived there for most of her life.

  “We walked through the cliff and now we’re above it?” she asked incredulously.

  “In a way.” Dex was keeping his eyes turned from the view. “The hidden dimensions are curled up at every point of our world. You can unfurl them all at once with an athame, or unfurl them as you go with this.” He held out the medallion.

  Dex made another series of adjustments to the stone disc.

  “Look,” he said. To their left, in time with the shifting of the medallion, the curtain became less substantial and the shapes more distinct. Quin could see a high open meadow, covered in spring grass and cut by the wide channel of the river above the falls. And there, at the water’s edge—

  “Yellen?” she whispered in astonishment.

  The horse grazed on the long grass. Quin could make out an uneven blaze down a broad, reddish-brown forehead. It was Yellen without a doubt.

  She’d lost track of her horse two years ago, when she’d jumped, on his back, through an anomaly and escaped from the estate during John’s attack. Quin had been shot in the chest, and tangled up with Shinobu, and neither of them had known what became of her horse.

  “How did he get here? I haven’t seen him in two years.”

  “I came upon him in no-space,” Dex said, as if that sort of thing happened to him every day. “Call him, if you like.”

  “Yellen!”

  The horse lifted his head, twitched his ears toward her, and whinnied. She whistled and clapped her hands smartly, the way she’d done when she was ten years old and had first taught Yellen to come to her. The horse approached warily, evidently not able to see Quin, though she could see him clearly. He still wore his bridle, the same bridle she’d put on him two years ago. She coaxed him closer by voice, until he’d poked his head through the gauzy fog and his muzzle touched her hand.

  “Come on,” she whispered, and she pulled him all the way inside the anomaly.

  Yellen whickered, and Quin touched the horse’s forehead with her own, overjoyed to have found him again. It was like finding a piece of herself she had mislaid.

  As soon as he was fully with them in the strange tunnel, the brightness of the meadow began to fade. Dex was manipulating the medallion and was walking again. Quin followed with her horse, soothing him as he tossed his head nervously. In a few moments, though, he had fallen into a docile state and was following her easily.

  Traces of the world moved by like ghosts on either side. It was as if they, inside the tunnel, were walking through the world, but also as if the world were being moved around them.

  Her mind kept darting back to Shinobu, and she wondered where he was and how she would find him. But this dance Dex was doing between the world and the hidden dimensions There was like nothing she’d imagined, and she couldn’t help losing herself in the experience as it unfolded around her.

  “Can I tell you a story?” Dex asked her, calling her thoughts back to him as she led Yellen behind him. Dex had visibly relaxed as soon as the meadow and river had faded behind the thick curtain of darkness that marked the edge of their tunnel. “It will help me, and you may find it interesting.”

  “All right.” The chances of his story making any sense were slim, but she wanted to hear anything Dex might say, in hopes of gathering a few useful grains of truth. His effortless use of the medallion in his hand was proof that he’d been trained as a Seeker far more thoroughly than Quin.

  “There’s a man, and he was in England—a different England from the one you would find if you traveled south right now, because it was before this time,” Dex began. He glanced at her, perhaps to make sure she was giving the tale proper attention, and then looked down again. “But it was England anyway. This man—Quilla, can you imagine?—he carried an enormous pack on his back, with all sorts of wonders stored inside it.”

  Dex fell silent, lost in the imagined details. Beyond the dark tunnel walls, Quin could discern open air and the waterfall, behind them now.

  “What sort of wonders?” she asked quietly.

  Dex nodded toward the objects made of stone and glass that Quin had tucked into her waistband and pockets. “Things like those. Those are wonderful, if you can remember how to use them.”

  “If I can?”

  “Or me,” he said, with a look of discomfort. “Or me, of course.”

  The ghost of a larger river appeared on Quin’s right, with the forests of the estate above it.

  “The man’s wife was with him,” Dex said, “though she came reluctantly, if we’re being honest. I want to be honest, finally. And his son was with him too, and a second son, who was so young that his mother carried him everywhere. He
liked that. Babies like to be carried—you know that from Adelaide.” He smiled a private sort of smile, the smile he reserved for Quilla. He said, “It would turn out the boys were very different from each other, but it was too early to know that then. How could they? When children are small, they can still be anything.

  “This family walked across the whole of England, down to the south and up to the north, back when the land was open and as wild as England has ever been.”

  “How long ago?” Quin tried to picture the world he was describing, as she watched the spectral shapes of a hillside and trees go by. Inside their dark tunnel, they were traveling onto the estate, her home.

  “We have to think about it in two ways,” Dex told her thoughtfully. He was gazing at something only he could see in the blackest part of the tunnel. “It was a long time ago, or maybe it hasn’t happened yet.”

  And with that, Dex’s brief spell of coherence came to an end. He stayed silent as thick woods slid by, dark and unformed. Quin and Dex were walking, and it was impossible to tell if they and the tunnel were moving through the world, or if the world were moving around them.

  “Is that all?” she asked Dex gently after a while.

  “To the story?” He laughed, softly and genuinely. “No, it’s very much longer, and there are different versions of the ending. But that first part is good—the four of them walking across wide-open land, hills and forests and mountains rising around them.” The idea of so much open space appeared to both appall and fascinate him. “The world didn’t eat them up, did it? Though the wild animals occasionally tried.”

  He paused, and then asked her, “Have you seen a medallion before? You seemed surprised to find this one in my possession.”

  For someone who slipped in and out of insanity as easily as breathing, he was very observant. Not sure what she should tell him and what she should withhold, Quin said, “A friend had one.”

  “You mean the one you want to find, don’t you? You love him. I can hear it in your voice.”

  “Or maybe you can read my thoughts,” she suggested.

  He gave her a sidelong glance. “Maybe I can, when you aren’t guarding them. And you’re not very good at guarding them.” Misreading her expression entirely, he added, “You fell in love with someone else. I don’t blame you, Quilla. We’ve been apart for so long. Is he good to you?”

  “I’m not—” she began, but she couldn’t finish the sentence. The expression on Dex’s face, in the half-light, was so vulnerable, so raw, she didn’t want to tell him just then that she wasn’t Quilla. He would remember soon enough. “Yes, he’s good to me…when he’s himself. And I’m good to him when I’m myself,” she murmured, thinking of the year and a half in which she’d forgotten herself and forgotten Shinobu too, leaving him to find his own dangerous way in Hong Kong.

  “Like us, then,” Dex whispered.

  Quin had no answer to that.

  She caught a spectral glimpse of the estate’s standing stone moving by on her left. She’d taken her Seeker oath in the shadows of that stone, on the night she’d discovered that her father was a killer. Where was Dex taking them?

  Dex nodded at his medallion. “There were four of these at first. I knew when I saw your clothes that it was time.”

  Quin could not judge whether she should engage with his bewildering statements, or whether she should let most pass without comment. But her curiosity, for the most part, got the better of her.

  “Time for what?” she asked warily.

  “To find the owners of the other three medallions,” he answered. He read her thoughts again, or perhaps her face gave her away, because he added, “I don’t mean the one you love. I mean the original owners.”

  That was disappointing. The idea that Dex might try to find Shinobu without Quin having to force him had given her a touch of hope.

  “Who are the other owners?” she asked. “Seekers?”

  He answered, cryptically, “You could call them that if you want. But they aren’t now who they once were.” His countenance became hard. It was a look she hadn’t seen on him yet, and it transformed him, quite abruptly, into a man you would not want to cross. “It’s time to take them out of this world,” he continued. “Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it’s time to take them into the world as other people know it. As they should have been.”

  The wild panic he’d fought in the cave was creeping back into his expression. Quin held her tongue.

  There was brightness ahead of them, the world taking solid shape again as he adjusted the medallion. Chunks of masonry, a courtyard littered with stones. He was bringing them to the castle ruins.

  “I could take us directly inside.” Dex’s words were little more than a mumble, so that it was hard to tell if he meant them for Quin or only for himself. “I could take us straight down. That would be easier. But we can’t bring a horse there, and I’ll have to face it sometime.”

  Quin almost asked him what he would have to face, but it was obvious—he was crumbling at the sight of the approaching world. He gripped her shoulder, and a moment later he stumbled. He knelt—or maybe he buckled—and set the medallion down.

  “You’re not supposed to see,” he whispered. “But you won’t use it against me, will you? You never did.”

  Quin knelt with him, tried to soothe him, even though she had no idea what she might use against him. “No, of course not,” she said.

  With shaking hands, Dex set a hand atop the medallion and adjusted it with a series of quick motions Quin couldn’t follow, each of which brought the world in front of them into increasing clarity, until it was fully formed. She was looking out through a large arched anomaly at the castle ruins and a half-cloudy Scottish afternoon.

  He murmured, “In the open sky, there’s nothing to contain me.”

  Quin felt the depth of his fear, even if it baffled her. She took his hand in her own and squeezed it. “I’ve got you, Dex.”

  With difficulty, because he wasn’t a small person, she pulled him to his feet, and as he kept his head down and his eyes shut, they stepped across the seething border and set foot in the castle ward.

  Yellen followed, whinnying as he scented the air of his home, and Quin pulled off his bridle and let him run.

  Dex slumped down onto hands and knees, crawled back to the medallion, which still lay on the far side of the anomaly border. He reached across the anomaly and pulled the medallion through, twisting it as he did, in a motion that reminded her of a magician turning an object inside out. The opening collapsed at once, vibration and all, as if a light switch had been turned off. Then he sat on the ground, his head against his knees. Automatically he slipped the medallion back into loops of leather around his neck, where it hung like a pendant beneath his robe. He pulled his hood down over his eyes, reached out for Quin.

  “Was what I saw a moment ago true? Is the castle in ruin?”

  Quin glanced at the decaying courtyard and the remains of the castle, which looked as they’d always looked to her.

  “Yes.”

  “You think time is nothing.” His hand shook as it clutched hers. “But it passes whether you feel it or not.”

  “How old are you?” she asked him. Had he really seen this castle in one piece? Or was he mistaking it for another place, just as he kept mistaking Quin for another girl?

  Dex laughed nervously. “Much younger than I look.”

  John crept as close to the big tent as he dared before rolling the smoke canisters out of his hands, one after the other. The canisters bumped across the muddy ground, hissing, and came to rest in the pool of fluorescent light that spilled from the tent’s wide canvas doorway.

  In moments plumes of black smoke were coiling out of the canisters to form ground-level thunderclouds that would cut visibility to almost zero. John felt the glee of destruction overtake him as he added the lightning—from his hiding place behind a battered aircar half-buried in mud, he threw a flare and a chain of firecrackers directly into the
center of the smoke.

  Soldiers streamed out of the tent, cursing and grabbing weapons, their faces washed in the red glow of the flare, their bodies no more than faint silhouettes in the smoke. John was at the far side of the encampment by then. He shoved a second flare into the gas tank of a parked van and then ran, through the humid, dripping night. He skirted the encampment and weaved through the edge of the jungle toward the ramshackle barn at the south end of the camp. He’d gone thirty paces when the van exploded, painting the night orange. Momentarily every leaf, frond, and raindrop came into harsh, beautiful relief, before the burst faded, and John felt a wild elation in being the attacker.

  He didn’t have to turn his head to know that Maud was following, running silently behind him. She’d warned him she would not help him in this task. It was his alone to carry out—his final test, if he was successful. He stopped the wild elation bubbling up within him. This attack was not about him. This night was about being a true Seeker, saving others.

  There were guards by the barn, of course, with guns and mud-streaked fatigues, but they were gathered at the camp side of the building, staring at the chaos breaking out around the command tent—the tent itself and half the camp invisible in the smoke. Orders were being called in the distance; men were taking defensive positions. The guards at the barn chattered nervously to each other, debating whether they should leave their post or stay put.

  The Young Dread has taught me to focus, and I will. John pulled his thoughts into a straight line. He emerged from the cover of the jungle behind the men. Sheathed in a leather strap across his chest was a row of small knives, their blades black with the substance Maud had helped him prepare. John drew four of the knives, not allowing himself to linger on the thought that he was using poison as a weapon and in doing so he was following in the footsteps of his mother, Catherine, and his grandmother Maggie.