Disruptor

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  “Higher power!” Dex said.

  He threw rocks and clods of dirt and one of the horseshoes they’d found lying around. Quin took cover behind a nearby pile as she hit the television with an adjusted burst from her weapon. The screen flared, brighter and brighter, and sparks began to fly through the cracks in the glass.

  “Now off!” he called.

  She adjusted the weapon, dialing its energy in the opposite direction. With a thump almost below the level of hearing, the blue glow vanished from the television.

  “It just looks like I turned it off,” Quin remarked. “We need a better way to see what it— Hey!” She pirouetted as he sent a stone the size of his forearm at her. It missed her by inches.

  “In a busy place, you will easily see when it works,” he said.

  “What’s the weapon called, Dex?”

  “A wave-pulse,” he answered without hesitation. He’d remembered.

  The wave-pulse, with its manipulation of electromagnetic waves, seemed a novelty out here in the Scottish countryside, but Quin imagined it would be a dangerous weapon in a crowded, powered city.

  Dex was teaching her things she would never learn from anyone else, even if he wasn’t sure how he knew them. That was why she’d been willing to give him time to recover his wits. Tonight, however, she was running out of patience. The sense of Shinobu calling her name would not leave her. Dex had told her several times, in lucid moments, that he would find “this person you love,” but Quin suspected that he didn’t know how. Still, she had no athame, no way to find Shinobu herself unless she could bring Dex back to sanity—and this nightly practice was what pleased and focused him. And if she were honest, it was also thrilling to be learning new skills.

  “They used the wave-pulse all the time, to disable other weapons,” he told her as he gathered up a new pile of things to hurl in her direction.

  He was speaking, of course, of the people in his story. He’d been telling it to her in bits and pieces.

  “How did he keep the boys from killing each other when they used the wonders?” she asked. “Small boys and deadly weapons seem a dangerous mix.”

  She silently heaved a rock at Dex’s back, but he turned at exactly the right moment and used the large stone in his hand to bat away the one she’d thrown. He always knew.

  “How do you do that?” she asked.

  “When I throw a rock, it looks fast to you, but when you throw one, it’s unbearably slow. I can see every foot it moves. It’s like a snail crawling through the air.”

  “I’ve never had the best throwing arm,” she admitted, slightly put out, “but I throw a little faster than a snail.”

  “I mean I can slow it down, or speed it up—what I see.”

  This was the most he’d ever told her about his own abilities. “Like a Dread?” she asked.

  The hood still shaded his eyes, but beneath it his mouth pressed into a line of dissatisfaction. “I’m not like a Dread. And I never said the father kept the boys from killing each other.” He hefted the large stone in his hands and sent it straight at her. “The impellor! The pile with three things.”

  Quin dove for the ground, feeling pleased. He’d remembered the name of the next weapon before she’d used it. It usually took him longer.

  She pulled out the impellor and shook it as she ran, keeping herself out of Dex’s direct aim as he unloaded his new pile of missiles into the air around her.

  “Push the top one off!” Dex called, punctuating the order with a horseshoe that came at her head in an off-center spin and knocked stones from the nearest heap.

  Atop a large pile were the three medical monitors they’d taken from the old barn, stacked haphazardly. Quin lined up the impellor’s seams of glass, focusing its energy tightly. The air around her grew thick.

  She fired the weapon, and the top monitor was blown off the other two as though struck by an invisible giant.

  “Now the bottom one!” he yelled.

  “The bottom one?”

  A stone whizzed by her face in answer.

  Quin brought the weapon’s focus down to the finest setting, feeling air pool heavily in her lungs. She aimed and fired, blowing the lower device out from beneath the other one like a coin knocked from the bottom of a stack. The remaining device landed roughly where the one below it had been.

  “The whole pile!” he called.

  She saw Dex raise his arm to throw. She twisted the cylinder, making a new pattern in the seams of glass. He was throwing something big, his whole body in the motion. Quin blew the heap of rocks to the ground, and then leaped backward as a head-sized block of masonry passed inches from her chest.

  “Bring it back, before I hit you again!”

  “You didn’t hit me!” she answered, and immediately wished she’d kept her mouth shut. There wasn’t time for banter; he was already hefting a new missile.

  Quin twisted the cylinder and fired it at the mess of stones and broken equipment. The impellor’s force was reversed. The rocks, branches, broken chunks of castle, and all three pieces of equipment lifted off the ground and rushed toward her.

  Dex’s clod of dirt hit her in the shoulder, and she dropped the weapon—not a moment too soon. The cloud of debris rained down around her as she crouched and covered her head.

  “Is that what you meant to do?” Dex asked. Quin was getting to her feet and brushing herself off. “Pull it all into a pile on top of yourself?”

  “I might have miscalculated slightly,” she admitted, rubbing her shoulder.

  Usually he would make her use the weapons several more times, but not tonight. Quin had learned to read his body language even with his hood obscuring his face, and Dex was looking thoughtful. Without a word, he took a seat, cross-legged, and pulled his hood back enough to look up at the sky. Quin came over and sat next to him, waiting to hear what he’d remembered.

  He pointed to the west, where the clouds were dissipating. A patch of stars was visible there.

  “Stars?” she asked.

  One of his hands disappeared into an outer pocket in his robe, from which it then reappeared, grasping a small, rectangular stone device—the one wonder that was not a weapon.

  “Put your head next to mine,” he said, lying back on the hard-packed ground of the castle ward and holding the device above himself.

  She lay beside him and from that vantage could see several stars through the glass panel in the stone device.

  “It’s warming up,” he explained when nothing else happened. He grasped the implement with more of his hand, perhaps to give it more heat. After a few moments, four numbers appeared at the bottom of the small, dark glass window where the stars were showing—it was the current year. Dex scanned the device over more stars, and the current month appeared next to the year.

  “It knows the date?” Quin asked, startled. The device looked hundreds of years old, so this felt like strange magic. Yet whipswords were also hundreds of years old, weren’t they? Their attributes were no less peculiar.

  “It knows the patterns of the stars and planets,” Dex explained, “and by their relative positions it calculates the date.”

  “More than a month since I was last here,” she whispered. And more than a month since Shinobu had last been with her.

  He let her hold the device, and she moved it to look at different sets of stars. The reading was the same for each.

  “It’s what their father used to figure out the date of their journey.” He sighed and put his hands beneath his head as he gazed at the night sky. “He wasn’t happy with the answer.”

  “He didn’t know the date?”

  “Not with any degree of accuracy. Not until that little tool you’re holding told him the truth.”

  “Had he been There for a long time? Like me?”

  “Is that where you’ve been?” he mused, and she knew he was speaking to Quilla instead of Quin. His voice caught as he whispered, “I thought you were dead. You used to ask—”

  “I’m Quin,
” she told him gently. She did not want him to sink back into delusion. “You know I’m Quin, Dex. You’re not losing yourself so easily anymore. Have you noticed? It’s time for us to look for Shinob—”

  “No, Quilla, please,” he said, sitting up. “You cut me off. When you push, you undo everything. You make me forget at just the moment when I’m starting to remember. Can’t you let me finish?” He looked toward the castle ruins, perhaps trying to catch hold of a thought before it disappeared. “You used to ask me where he kept all the important things. I wasn’t allowed to tell you. But there’s no stopping me now.”

  “Quin, isityou?” Shinobu slurred when he discovered himself awake again.

  His lips were swollen and cracked and he was so thirsty. It was dark, and Quin was in the darkness where he’d left her. He had to make his arms and legs work in order to go get her back.

  “Seeker?” came a woman’s voice, but it didn’t belong to Quin. It was that old woman from before.

  “They’re eating mlegsnarms,” he whispered. “Makemstop.”

  “Dramatic,” said the woman, amused.

  Shinobu pried his eyes open enough to make out her silhouette; then he closed them again. He’d expected to see the looming shapes of wild beasts feasting on his limbs, because that’s what he felt.

  “If he throws up, turn his head,” the woman instructed someone nearby. Her voice had the gentle, old-woman tremble in it, but Shinobu wouldn’t be fooled. There was nothing gentle about her. “Remind me of his name,” she added.

  “Shinobu.”

  Shinobu knew that second voice. He slipped in and out of consciousness as he tried to remember…Yes. The voice belonged to one of the Middle Dread’s boys—who’d attacked him and Quin in the hospital and on the estate and in Hong Kong. He hadn’t been at Dun Tarm with all the others, though.

  “Shinobu, can you hear me?” the old woman asked, poking him in the chest insistently.

  “Makem stop biting,” he murmured. With great effort, he added, “Please.”

  “Fetch me that over there, Nott.”

  Nott. That was the boy’s name. Little bastard. Shinobu remembered the boy’s terrible odor, though he wasn’t aware of it now—maybe Shinobu’s nose didn’t work anymore. No. He smelled mothballs and peppermint from the old woman, and he smelled lake and shore and stone. He was at Dun Tarm, and his nose might be one of the few parts of him that was still functional. How was he going to get Quin in this state?

  The woman inflicted a series of stinging pinches all over Shinobu’s body, and the agony receded. Painkillers! “Ohthankgod,” he breathed.

  “Does that feel good?” she asked.

  The animals stopped biting all the way through his flesh and were now only gnawing at the surface.

  “Ohgodit’sheaven…”

  “I used to think everyone mattered all the time,” the old woman was saying. Her trembling voice forced itself into his ears. “But you can’t live that way, not sensibly. You’ll die of caring.” There was another sting down Shinobu’s left arm, and again down his right arm, followed by more blessed numbness. “Eventually you learn to pick out who really matters—and who matters for the moment.”

  The woman was speaking in a low, creaky murmur, but he wasn’t listening. He’d hidden the athame of the Dreads behind a loose stone in the fortress wall. If he could stand up, after this woman went away and before the painkillers wore off, he could retrieve it. Once it was in his hands, he would find his way back to Quin. He imagined pulling her into his arms as she woke up from her time There, apologizing, kissing her. Hot tears sprang to his eyes.

  Another sting at his jaw, and relief spread through the bottom half of his face. Apparently wolves had been chewing on his chin, though he hadn’t noticed until now because so many other things hurt.

  “Shinobu,” the woman said kindly, bathing him in the scent of mothballs, “open your eyes.”

  “…were biting me?” he mumbled.

  “No one’s biting you.” The gentleness in her words made him deeply suspicious.

  Shinobu’s eyelids had been replaced by lead weights, but somehow he got them open. The woman was smiling at him, her gray hair tied neatly behind her head.

  “There you are. I’m Maggie.”

  “P—pleased to mmm—” he started, trying to say Pleased to meet you, which was ridiculous under the circumstances.

  “You won’t be pleased to meet me,” she told him. “But never mind that. Can you see yourself?”

  She held his head up so that he could look down his own body. Shinobu didn’t want to look—he was terrified he’d see only bloody pulp where his arms should be or find half of himself missing.

  It wasn’t that bad, though it was rather bad. His clothes were ripped, and every visible inch of skin was a dark purplish blue from bruising. His limbs were crooked, as though they’d been assembled wrong. He wanted to scream, but he thought screaming might break him into even more pieces.

  “You’ve got dozens of breaks, but I’m putting you back together,” she purred at him, stroking his hair. “It will feel like you’re being eaten alive, I’m afraid. That’s the cellular reconstructors I’ve been injecting into you. They do their work quite painfully.”

  Reconstructors. He should have known. He’d just gotten finished being reconstructed from his previous injuries before she threw him off the cliff.

  Maggie answered his unspoken question—How do you know how to use cellular reconstructors?—by saying, “There’s a lot you can learn about doctoring when you’ve taken care of dozens of children over hundreds of years.” She brushed Shinobu’s hair off his forehead, as he pondered what she meant by “taken care of.” It sounded as though, whatever she’d done, it had been far from nurturing. “I’ve seen you before,” she told him. “You broke onto Traveler when it crashed.”

  Shinobu narrowed his eyes, trying to think. He’d been right to associate her with Traveler, then. She must be a relative of John’s; that would explain the sweet surface over the rotten interior.

  Maggie pinched his cheek, bringing his attention back. “You told me you’re descended from the houses of eagle and dragon, is that right?”

  “M’mother’s side were dragons,” he answered. “M’father’s were eagles.”

  The pain had receded, but not far enough. He felt as though he’d been run over by a train, and then the train had backed up and run over him again.

  “The dragons intermarried with the true Seeker houses—the fox and the stag. There’s a good chance some of your blood comes from my own blood. A fortunate circumstance, Shinobu. I don’t care to poison my own.”

  “Poison?” he asked, thinking this was an alarming change of subject. If only she would leave for a few minutes, he could get away.

  Someone just out of Shinobu’s line of sight pushed him roughly onto his stomach. It was probably that boy Nott. When Shinobu tried to roll free, the boy sat firmly on his legs. This was agony.

  “Hold still,” Maggie told him.

  There was a pinch at Shinobu’s neck, and then the unmistakable sensation of a syringe full of liquid emptying into his bloodstream.

  “There’s a poison that lives in your body forever,” she explained calmly.

  “Did—did—did you—” he stuttered.

  “Did—did—did I what?” Her voice remained kind even as she mocked him. It reminded him of the cloying crystals used to clean up vomit. Soothingly she said, “I told you, I don’t poison my own.”

  So what did you inject? he demanded, though no words came out. She was rustling about inside a pack near his head, her motions slow, feeble, and yet somehow unstoppable. Shinobu could feel everything—the dull ache in his arms and legs and jaw, the pressure of Nott holding him down, even the cool breeze blowing through his hair—but he couldn’t move. Whatever she’d injected was holding him still. His plan to get Quin was beginning to feel very optimistic.

  Maggie pulled up his shirt, and cold pinpricks began between his shoulder
blades. There was pressure and pain as a dozen needles pierced his skin. It sounded like she was using a stone to tap the needles into his back. With each blow they sank into his flesh, as if she were driving in a row of nails.

  Maggie made a few sounds of effort, not grunts exactly but the sort of noise an elderly grandmother might make as she corrected a particularly complicated knitting stitch. Shinobu wondered if, when this torture was done, she would offer him a dish of sweets. Before he could find out, the lead weights over his eyes pulled themselves downward and he was unconscious again.

  —

  “Do you really know your mother’s and father’s families?”

  That was Nott, and the question seemed to be addressed to Shinobu.

  He blinked and discovered that his eyes were wide open. Perhaps they’d been open for a long while without him realizing. He was staring up at a broken piece of wall and a cloudy sky above that, and now that he thought about it, it was possible he’d been looking up at this view for some time.

  “What?”

  His voice, at least, was working. He made a quick and silent inventory and discovered he could move his arms and legs. They were unbelievably painful, but not quite as bad as the last time he’d woken up. If Maggie wasn’t nearby, he could grab his athame and get away. He tried to keep his breathing normal as he braced himself to jump to his feet—as soon as he made sure that the old woman was gone.

  “You told Maggie that your mother’s family was dragons and your father’s was eagles. Did you know them?”

  Shinobu turned his head to look at Nott. That was a mistake, because pain traveled up and down his neck in hot jolts. The boy was sitting nearby, petting what appeared to be a small bat, which hung upside down from his left hand. Shinobu stared for several moments, because he’d recognized Nott’s voice, but now that he could see the owner of the voice, Shinobu wasn’t sure it was the same person. This boy had light brown hair and a pale face with a spray of freckles across his nose and cheeks.

  “What happened to you?” Shinobu croaked.

  “Had a couple baths,” Nott explained, understanding the confusion immediately.