Disruptor

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  He threw two knives, with a spinning launch for maximum power, a trick Maud had taught him. The closest guards twitched as though bitten by insects. Stepping silently between the remaining men, John struck them beneath their shoulders, sinking the tiny blades in as far as they would go. The men’s cries were cut short—the drug entered the bloodstream quickly. In a moment, all four had collapsed. They would remain paralyzed for several minutes.

  John crept around the barn to the jungle side. It was a prefabricated structure that had been crushed at one corner, and was now reinforced with sandbags and mud. He could hear murmuring within, many frightened voices trying to speak without being heard. They went silent when he pried open the far barn doors.

  Blackness inside. But the Young Dread had been teaching him to gather all available light and use it. He could make out dozens of dark, young faces staring at him with frightened eyes.

  “Come!” he said in French, the language they spoke here. “Come quickly. We don’t have much time.”

  The chaos at the far end of the camp was becoming organized. There were shouted orders to secure the perimeter. More soldiers would come to the barn in a matter of minutes. Maud was yards away within the line of trees, watching.

  The children didn’t need to be told twice. They streamed out through the barn doors and into the trees. They were mostly girls in their early teens, but there were boys too, even younger than that.

  A small girl caught John’s arm with desperate strength.

  “More,” she told him in French as she pointed back at the barn. “More are still inside.”

  John looked to the Young Dread. Without a word, Maud took over for him, ushering the children deeper into the dense greenery.

  John raced back into the barn, calling upon his eyes to let him see as he searched through the dried grass and plant fronds spread out everywhere. The air was heavy and foul. The children had been kept like cattle.

  Outside the barn, sporadic gunfire had died down, and now men were speaking in disciplined bursts. He heard a voice in heavily accented French yelling an order. “…the girls. Now!”

  Soldiers were coming to the barn. John thought of another night, two years ago, when he’d attacked the Scottish estate, set fire to buildings and terrorized the inhabitants. He had reveled in the destruction then. There were parallels between this night and that night, and yet the excitement of chaos had left him. He was thinking only of the children trapped inside this barn, awaiting their fate.

  He found three children huddled in a corner. He discovered quickly that none of the three understood him when he spoke, but by their urgent gestures they told him that the largest child, a girl, was ill and couldn’t move. He slid his arms under her back and lifted her to his chest.

  “Come!” he said, gesturing for them to follow. “Quickly.”

  John ran, clutching the girl against him, the other two children at his heels. They reached the open doorway on the jungle side just as a soldier forced open the far doors facing the camp. From the soldier’s perspective, John’s silhouette would be outlined clearly in the opposite doorway.

  “Go!” he whispered, gesturing for the smaller children to run.

  The Young Dread leapt from the greenery, scooped up the two stragglers, and disappeared with them into the jungle.

  The soldier raised his gun, seeing John now. John’s focus became absolute. Here. Here was the difference between that night on the estate and this night—he would save this girl in his arms, even if he died doing it. In one motion, he set the sick girl on the ground and pulled his own gun. The soldier fired, sending a spray of bullets above John’s head. Fiberglass screeched as they tore through the barn roof. Two other soldiers appeared, weapons raised. With three clear, deliberate shots, John took the men down. There was no joy in the action, only necessity.

  As soon as it was done, he took the girl in his arms and sprinted into the trees, throwing his hearing behind him as he went. More soldiers were at the barn already, yelling for reinforcements. The whole camp would be chasing them in moments.

  The children were huddled in a clearing in the dripping and steaming night, with Maud standing at their center. They were silent as John burst into their midst with the invalid child in his arms and set her among the larger children, who helped her stay upright.

  “Hold hands!” he told them in French. “Everyone holds two hands!”

  The children complied immediately.

  John pulled out his athame and lightning rod. When he struck them together, he drew a deep vibration from the stone dagger. He traced a large circle, and the athame sliced through air, cutting the world itself. Threads of light and dark, the fabric of space, snaked away from the athame’s blade, forming an anomaly.

  John could hear the men at the edge of the forest, tramping into the dense foliage. Fear was coursing through him, ice in his veins. What if he hadn’t been fast enough? What if he was not able to save them?

  “Go!” he said to Maud. “Go now!”

  The Young Dread was already going. She had two children by the hands, who themselves had hold of other children, and she drew them through the black doorway in two long lines, into the darkness that lay between.

  John saw vines moving only yards from the clearing. The men were nearly upon them. When the last child had passed into the anomaly, he stepped across the threshold himself.

  The first soldier reached the glade, gun poking through the foliage before his body appeared. The anomaly was losing its shape, becoming blurred. The man did not know what he was seeing, but there was John in a collapsing, black doorway in the middle of the jungle, and behind him were the retreating backs of three dozen children. Tendrils of dark and light were reaching across the opening toward each other now, mending the breach.

  The man fired his gun. John saw the muzzle flash, but the edges of the world had sewn themselves shut, and the anomaly was closed.

  John and the Young Dread watched the hospital from the dark alley across the street. They had rescued thirty-two children in all, and the last were now being escorted through the hospital doors into the flickering electric light of the interior.

  The child kidnappings had dominated the news here for several days, and John read both bafflement and joy on the faces of the hospital staff. For John, this night was the culmination of an intense and brutal month of training, and he had not expected the task to feel so good. It was a strange exhilaration, knowing he’d rescued thirty-two children from lives as slave wives and child soldiers.

  “You are smiling,” Maud said. Her hand touched his shoulder in a gesture of camaraderie.

  “This was a good night.” His smile faltered as he added, “You helped me. I didn’t do everything on my own. Does that change…the value?”

  Dismissively she answered, “Seekers rarely take an assignment alone. I helped you much less than a fellow apprentice would have. It was your assignment, John, and you carried it out.”

  He kicked at the mud in the alley; he nodded, accepting her verdict. Slowly his smile returned. Thirty-two children. But his happiness was marred by ugly doubts. Would his mother have approved of this night’s work? He had saved thirty-two strangers; it was the sort of thing Seekers were supposed to do. But it was not the sort of thing his mother had actually done. How had Catherine decided who should live and who should not?

  A month ago, John and Maud had followed a trail of questions and notes left by Catherine to an ice cave in Norway. There they’d discovered both a half-frozen boy called Nott and, carved into the wall, a clue to the sad history of Seekers. Using the symbols on that cave wall as a guide, he and the Young Dread had gone There, and they’d found a group of eight figures abandoned in the darkness.

  There were four men, two women, and two children. They were standing and sitting and lying, as still as sculptures. When John and Maud examined them by flashlight, they discovered blood, still wet, though it had been spilled years—perhaps untold years—before. Most of the adults were injure
d, some so severely that they might die as soon as they were brought back into the time stream of the world.

  On the wrists of the adults were brands in the shape of a boar. It was the emblem of their Seeker house, burned into their flesh when they’d taken their oaths. And it marked them as a house that had been an enemy of John’s own family.

  “We’ve found your missing boar Seekers,” the Young Dread had said.

  The Middle Dread had left those people there for decades or centuries, not dead but hardly alive.

  “Why?” John had asked.

  Maud had shaken her head. “Putting them here kept them out of the world without, perhaps, having to kill them outright,” she’d answered, though John could tell that she too was only guessing. They didn’t know why the Middle Dread had done the things he’d done, only that he had done them.

  John had turned slowly, shining his flashlight into the blackness. If there were boar Seekers There, might there be other Seekers from other houses frozen somewhere else in those dimensions? But his light had shown only a darkness that felt as thick as oil.

  When he looked again at the injured and abandoned boar Seekers, he’d wondered, What am I supposed to feel for them, and what am I supposed to do?

  They hadn’t brought those eight Seekers back into the world with them. Maud had suggested that John become a full Seeker himself and take his oath before choosing to retrieve them. Once he was sworn, he would be their brother, and he would have every right to help decide their future. In the meantime, they couldn’t die of their injuries while they were in the hidden dimensions, and thus they would remain safe.

  John had agreed, but his mind had returned, again and again, to their still shapes, waiting in silence for someone to help. Catherine, when he’d known her, would have told him not to think of them again. They were from an enemy house and of no consequence. But did he agree?

  John’s thoughts came back to the alley in which he and Maud were standing. John knew he’d changed in the last month, but as he looked at Maud in the light from the bare bulbs of the streetlamps, he realized how much she’d changed as well, after so much time awake in the world. Her sentences had become longer and more natural. There was still something fierce and Dread-like in the way she carried herself, but her movements had subtly transformed, become more like a human girl’s and less like those of a creature of the infinite. Even her face had altered in the last months; her age was no longer frozen at fifteen. She was moving forward in time along with the rest of the world, though perhaps not at exactly the same pace.

  Now here they both were, standing in an alley in Africa, changed. If John had proved himself tonight, he would be a full Seeker soon. What would happen then? Would the Young Dread move on?

  John looked again at the hospital across the way.

  “So,” he said to her, “have I proven myself?”

  If he didn’t yet know what he should think or feel, he hoped the Young Dread would lead him to an answer.

  “Yes,” she answered gravely. Then she spoke the words he’d been waiting to hear: “I invite you to take your oath.”

  Nott’s eyes hovered over the surface of the water with an expression of the blackest disgust. The bathtub stood outside the workshop on the Scottish estate, and he had filled it with a hose from the nearest spigot. There was running water here, even though almost every structure aside from the workshop had been reduced to piles of charred rubble. Nott had seen running water before, but its origin remained a mystery. He wondered if a living river had been funneled into a metal pipe.

  He should have taken his bath during the daylight, when the sun would have warmed him a little, but he hadn’t wanted to do that. The tub was in the open, with old trees on every hand, stretching away into the deepness of the forest; daylight would make him more visible to any potential observers, who would surely laugh at him.

  John had explained that Nott might heat the water if he liked, by boiling it in the large kettle they kept by the cooking fire.

  Bah, Nott had thought. Who needs warm water?

  Filling his bath with cold water had felt like a small measure of defiance against John and Maud. The problem was that neither of them was there to observe his disobedience, and now Nott was shivering.

  He closed his angry eyes and slipped beneath the water. His hand groped for the bar of soap John had forced him to accept. He’d been ordered—ordered!—to scrub himself, including his hair. He’d been taking baths every week, because his two companions insisted upon it. But John, investigating why Nott’s odor hadn’t markedly improved, had at last realized that Nott had been only wetting his hair and not washing it. Since Nott habitually rubbed pieces of deer flesh through his tangled locks so that the oils might make it softer, getting his head wet had actually made the smell worse.

  Why should anyone clean hair? Nott wondered. Hair was meant to be full of dirt. That’s what kept you warm. Dirty hair was like a second cloak.

  Nevertheless, he scrubbed his head over and over with the lump of soap and found it a strangely pleasant feeling. Before he realized what was happening, he’d used up all of the soap and was still scrubbing at his lathered head with both of his hands. Large clumps of hair came out. Apparently only the dirt had been holding everything together.

  Eventually he got out of the tub, in which the water had turned a dark gray, and dried himself with the towel John had given him, glad of the softness of the material over all the scars he carried on his skin. He dried himself quickly, worried that John might come back and see him enjoying any part of his bath.

  Nott had been a Watcher, one of the Middle Dread’s chosen boys, destined to put the world in its place. Now he was a child, being looked after by John and the Young Dread. But what choice was there? His fellow Watchers had sent him to his frozen cave to die, and his master, the Middle Dread, was most likely already dead.

  Nott went into the workshop, which was kept much tidier than he considered absolutely necessary. He turned on the light—the device didn’t use any sort of fire but instead illuminated one of those glass bulbs he saw everywhere when he went to cities. The source of the light was, like the source of the water, an unresolvable mystery.

  There were three piles of straw for sleeping, the cooking hearth, and rows of knives and swords along the wall for practice. The three of them hunted animals for their food, but he wasn’t allowed to leave the carcasses anywhere nearby, nor was he allowed to keep a little piece of the dead flesh in his pocket as all Watchers liked to do, as a reminder of his power to kill.

  What was he allowed to do? Hardly anything. They did let him practice fighting, he admitted grudgingly, but there was no reason to linger on that kindness.

  Nott had washed his cloak and clothing before his bath, and they hung by the workshop door, still wet. He pulled on the spare trousers and shirt John had scavenged for him from somewhere. They were modern clothing, luxuriously soft against his skin.

  Their softness cannot move me, he thought.

  It wasn’t until he checked on his bat that his black mood finally began to lift.

  “I’ve survived the bath, Aelred,” he told the creature. Aelred clicked and squeaked happily as Nott unwrapped the cloth he’d tied around it.

  He’d found the bat flapping on the forest floor, unable to fly properly. And though Nott hadn’t specifically asked permission, John and the Young Dread had not seemed to mind that he was keeping it.

  Aelred was about half as large as Nott’s fist, with huge ears and a fuzzy gray body. Nott thought the bat might be small for its age, and that was why it couldn’t fly yet. He liked that idea, because Nott guessed that he too was small for his age.

  “It could be that I’m hundreds of years old,” Nott reflected aloud as he stroked Aelred’s head with one finger. “If that’s so, then I’m very small for my age.” He laughed at that notion, for of course you didn’t keep growing every year until you died. “If you did,” he pointed out, “old men would be huge.”

 
; He dripped milk into the bat’s mouth from the tiny bottle he’d found at the back of the workshop and which he kept full just for Aelred. There were cows on the estate, and Nott had learned how to milk them—another chore that was beneath his dignity, though he didn’t mind quite so much now that he was giving milk to his pet.

  While the bat sucked greedily at the liquid, Nott gently extended the creature’s diaphanous wings and stroked the delicate edges.

  “Look how big you’re getting.”

  His finger paused. It wasn’t exactly normal to touch the creature in this way. A month ago, Nott would have kept the bat only for the excitement of hacking off its feet and wings one after the other, while he listened to its squeals of pain. Now the idea of ripping off Aelred’s wings caused him an entirely different sort of pang.

  Abruptly he folded the wings back against its body, wrapped the animal up, and tucked it into the pocket of his shirt, which was conveniently located over his chest.

  “I wasn’t petting you,” he told the bat. “I was only checking your wings.”

  There was a small, cracked looking glass on one wall. In it, Nott examined himself in his strange clothing. The difference in his hair was startling. It was still desperately uneven, but now it was a light brown and downy soft.

  He wasn’t sure how old he was—both because he’d never been told his own age and because much of his life had been spent There, waiting for the Middle Dread to bring him out into the world to train—but he looked about twelve in the mirror. In these clothes he might be any one of the soft children he’d seen in modern cities. Now that all the dirt was gone, his freckles were startling.

  “How old would you say I am?” he asked Aelred, whose head peeked out the top of the pocket. “And if you just met me, what sort of person would you think I am?”

  Aelred chirruped noncommittally.

  “That’s not very helpful,” Nott told it.

  Nott tugged at his newly clean hair and imagined wearing the metal helm the Middle Dread had given him. His fingers twitched at the thought, muscle memory taking over. There was always a slight shock when he pulled the helm on, a buzz through his skull, and then a cold tingling as his thoughts began to run clear and fierce.