Disruptor

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  She hates me. I’d rather hear her hate.

  No, she cares for me.

  She held up two different needles, which swam across Shinobu’s vision, because his arm was killing him.

  “This one is the permanent poison”—she waggled one syringe and then the other—“and this one has the reconstructors that will mend the fracture.” She was his doting grandmother, offering him his choice of two different sorts of candy. He imagined washing the words off himself with a long hot shower. When he tried to turn away, she held his chin. Firmly.

  I wish she would just kill me.

  But Quin…

  “Which one?” Maggie asked him.

  Shinobu slowly located his own jaw and tongue and made them move. Inside the focal, with his arm throbbing, this was like operating a piece of machinery from across the room. He heard himself say, “The re…re…recon…the good one.”

  “You still want to live? I’m so pleased.”

  He felt the prick of a needle at the very spot where his bone had just been broken. Cold and pain rushed in as she emptied the syringe. He didn’t know which one she’d used. With each bone break she’d kept up the suspense—had she injected the poison or the medicine?

  She’s going to kill me.

  She’s going to mend me.

  While he was waiting to discover which, she mused, “I love taking care of young people. It’s a calling close to my heart.” Shinobu had been treated to a number of such friendly chats while preparing to die. “Boys are all right—you’re all right, I’ve kept you here, haven’t I?—but girls are my favorite, and if they’re foxes and stags, I know they’re mine.”

  Shinobu wanted to close his eyes, plug his ears, but he was mesmerized by her face and voice. She’d been telling him some version of this all week.

  Finally the burn of the injection became the pain of his bones being forced, beyond all normal expectations, to knit themselves together. He allowed himself a sigh of relief; she’d injected him with the cellular reconstructors. Again.

  The relief was short-lived, because the reconstructors soon became agonizing. Maggie went out of focus above him. He was losing consciousness.

  Do I want to be alive?

  I do, if Quin is real.

  Quin, are you real?

  What if Quin were nothing more than a fever dream, an opium vision, a ghost in his focal?

  Distantly, Shinobu felt tears on his cheeks.

  Quin, are you real?

  Quin opened her eyes to complete darkness. Her first thought was that Dex had taken her to no-space again. But that couldn’t be right. She was clearheaded, and the stale air carried the taste of old stone.

  She touched cold rock beneath her, and reaching out a tentative hand, she met a rock wall. She groped in the other direction, and her fingers found the flare, as though it had been left within her reach. She clicked it on, and the small room was filled with its white, faintly hissing glow. The space was no bigger than a large closet, four walls, with a series of nooks in one of them, designs carved everywhere.

  “Oh, God,” she said when she saw Dex.

  He sat in a corner with blood all over his face. She crawled over to him, found him awake and staring. The blood had come from a gash in his forehead, which was still dripping.

  Quin dug around in the outer pocket of his robe, where she’d learned he kept necessities of first aid, and pulled out a length of clean cloth, which she pressed to the cut. His eyes were focused on the middle distance, and she wasn’t sure he saw her.

  “I was trying to get out,” he whispered.

  Quin looked around and saw blood on one of the walls where he must have smashed his head. She drew in her breath with a hiss; how hard had he hit himself? “Dex…couldn’t you have used the medallion? You must have brought us here with it. It could have gotten you out of wherever we are.”

  “Sometimes I can’t make sense of what to do.”

  “You were supposed to take me to Shinobu. Where are we?” She had felt Shinobu’s mind a moment ago, which meant he was alive somewhere. He was alive! They only had to begin to look. “Dex—”

  “I die here,” he said quietly.

  Quin couldn’t keep the sharpness out of her voice. “The wound on your head won’t be fatal,” she snapped.

  “I don’t die from this!” He was indignant, which brought him a little closer to sanity. He pointed at the center of the floor. “I die right there.”

  She took Dex’s hand and positioned it over the cloth on his forehead. “Hold that tight,” she ordered.

  While he held the bandage to his head, Quin took the flare and examined the spot he’d indicated. She had no idea why she was humoring him or what she expected to find—a painted outline of his body on the stone? But he’d told her enough truth so far to make her investigate.

  At first glance there was just the gritty floor of a chamber that felt as though it had been untouched since time out of mind. But some impulse made her look more closely—perhaps it was a slight unevenness to the pigment of the rock. There was a patch of dark, dark brown, almost black. It was faint but spread across the floor like a puddle. And there were smears in a few places, as if a hand had run through the dark liquid. If it had been liquid, it had dried up lifetimes ago and was now no more than a flaky layer on the surface of the rock.

  “This was blood?” she asked, intrigued now, despite herself.

  “Yes.”

  “Hmm.” It was not an unreasonable claim.

  She came back to Dex and dug again through the outer pocket of his robe, drew out the small flask and the needle and thread, which she’d used on him before. She doused the needle with the alcohol from the flask—he never drank it; it was only for doctoring—and then removed the cloth from his forehead. The cut wasn’t too bad, now that she could see it properly.

  “They fought,” Dex said as she held up the needle. “Matheus wanted to get rid of Quilla. He said to his younger brother, ‘You’ve had your time with her. It’s enough. Let’s end it.’ ”

  His face was troubled and he said no more for a while. In the silence, Quin made three careful sutures, with Dex oblivious to the pain of the needle. When she was finished and examining her work in the light of the flare, she said, “Dex, can we—”

  “It’s good when you’re with me,” he said, not hearing her. He put a hand on her shoulder and pushed himself up to his feet. “You’ve stitched my head, and somehow you’ve put that other thread back into my hands.”

  Before Quin realized what he was doing, Dex had touched two patterns carved into one of the walls of the tiny room that confined them. The patterns compressed beneath his fingers—they were, in fact, intricately designed latches. With a shift of his weight and a press of his hands, the whole wall moved, swinging outward like a door.

  “There we go,” Dex said.

  Quin came up beside him and was surprised to see that they were looking out at a familiar space. “We’re in the cavern beneath the castle ruins?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She walked out into the vast, echoing chamber and got her bearings. The “door” she’d just stepped through had been concealed ingeniously in one of the cavern’s side walls.

  “You brought us directly to that little room with your medallion?”

  “I couldn’t find this room when we were here before,” he explained. He was crossing the cavern floor as if following a will-o’-the-wisp. “I couldn’t remember…and then I did. When you were angry at me.”

  He stopped near the base of the stairs that would lead them up to the castle crypt.

  “Desmond was here,” he said. “Matheus was there, where you’re standing.”

  Matheus and Desmond faced each other across the torch-lit cavern. They’d fought with whipswords until they were exhausted, and now they’d each retreated to a different side of the cave to rest. Desmond hoped they were done, but he kept his whipsword loosely in his hand in case Matheus didn’t yet see reason. His brother was s
tubborn when he was angry.

  “We’re too evenly matched,” Matheus called. “Neither of us will win with whipswords!”

  “Yes,” Desmond agreed. “So why are we fighting? I’m not giving up my wife. I would never ask that of you.”

  “You and Father ask more of me all the time. More training, more work, more rules.” Matheus slashed his whipsword and sent the blade through a series of shape changes on reflex. The weapon cast moving shadows over the walls.

  Even for Desmond, it was difficult to read Matheus’s face. His brother had lately carried a permanent look of hatred, regardless of what he was feeling.

  “You’re cleverer than I am,” Matheus called, “but an idiot in some things. The important things.”

  With a sound of dissatisfaction, he collapsed his whipsword. Desmond did the same, expecting that they would shake hands and be friends again. Matheus approached across the cavern floor, and Desmond went to meet him halfway. Desmond should have noticed the air growing thick, but the air beneath the castle was always heavy with dust and age.

  His older brother’s dark hair was wet with perspiration, his face flushed. Beneath Matheus’s usual scowl, Desmond saw traces of a smile. He realizes how ridiculous he’s being, Desmond thought, relieved. He’s going to apologize.

  The brothers neared, and as if in proof of this sentiment, Matheus said, “We’re done here, Brother. No more arguing. No more fighting.”

  “I’m so glad—”

  Desmond never finished the sentence, because Matheus fired the impellor that had been concealed in his sleeve. Desmond was flung off his feet like a child’s doll. Before he hit the ground, he saw that there were no longer traces of a smile on Matheus’s face—his older brother watched him with a full grin.

  Desmond was stunned by the impact. By the time he’d gotten his wits about him, Matheus was approaching with the disruptor strapped across his chest. Its heavy, iridescent body, with a thousand holes across its wide barrel, was pointing directly at Desmond.

  Desmond wasn’t frightened, because he’d designed the disruptor himself. The worst it might do to him was make his thoughts run in circles for a few hours—undignified, but not harmful. He was still too dazed to sense the true danger.

  “Are you going to do something unpleasant to me while my thoughts are going round and round?” Desmond asked as he pushed himself back up into a sitting position.

  He shook his head to clear it, felt at his chest where he might have broken a rib. He was so unaware of what his brother had in mind that Desmond was actually worried about whether a broken rib would make it too painful to ride a horse. (He and Quilla had planned a journey to the market town the following day.)

  “Am I going to do something unpleasant?” Matheus repeated. “Isn’t that what you’re always accusing me of doing?”

  That was when Desmond noticed what was happening to the disruptor. It was hissing and crackling, and little blue forks of electricity were crawling across Matheus’s hands where they touched the controls. The weapon had never done that before.

  Matheus wore an entirely different expression than Desmond had ever seen on his brother’s face. He still had the hint of a smile, but his gaze was as intense as a fire. It was as though Desmond were a squirrel that Matheus was about to skin for sport.

  “You’ve done something with the disruptor?” Desmond asked, finally scared.

  “Oh yes.” The weapon began to whine, a high, piercing sound that hurt Desmond’s ears.

  “You made it worse?”

  “No,” Matheus answered. “I’ve made it better.”

  Desmond tried to lunge to his feet, but he was dizzy, and found that he had wedged himself between two jutting seams of rock. “Matheus, please—”

  Matheus fired the disruptor before Desmond had even finished speaking.

  There were so many more sparks than Desmond had expected. They came at him in a wave. He lifted his hands to ward them off, but they covered his arms, his head; they coated his body. They ran over him like water, and then they moved, took shape, became a river, a waterfall.

  Desmond staggered. He couldn’t see anything properly, except the sparks running around his body in a storm. He swiped at the air, to push Matheus away and find his way out.

  “Where are you going, Little Brother?” Matheus asked.

  Desmond couldn’t keep his thoughts straight, but he heard the pleasure in his older brother’s voice and knew he would not be getting out of the cavern alive. Matheus had planned this, perhaps had been planning it for a very long time.

  Desmond made it as far as the wall of emblems before Matheus took hold of him again. He grabbed his younger brother by the hair, pulled out his knife, and stabbed him in the belly three times. Desmond felt the blows and the pain and could do nothing.

  Matheus pushed him to the floor.

  “You can die now, Little Brother,” Matheus said.

  Desmond lay on the ground, wondering if he was already dead. When Matheus said and did nothing else, Desmond began to understand that his brother was gone. He had left before Desmond died, so Matheus could tell their parents honestly that he hadn’t been there when it happened.

  But Desmond was still alive. He crawled along the floor, hardly able to see where he was going. He crawled until he reached the little room off the cavern. His thoughts were spinning away, but there was one he kept hold of: if I can hide, if I can disappear, I can survive.

  Inside the little room, his blood was leaving his body. The blood was warm, but as it trickled out, he was cold.

  And then…blessed luck.

  A box in the corner, a latch, a lid. Inside, his blind, grasping hands found his mother’s store of medicine, packed by their father all those years ago and still able to save his life. It took him a very long time to organize even one new thought, but when he finally did, he injected himself, and kicked shut the door.

  He lay there, hidden and alone in the darkness, invisible, until the blood stopped.

  As he finished his story, Dex crossed the cavern and returned to the tiny cell behind the cavern wall. Inside the small space, he crouched on the floor and touched the faint dark stain that he claimed was from Desmond’s blood.

  “It wasn’t a disruptor like you have now,” he told Quin, who had followed him and was standing in the doorway. “If he’d been hit with a modern disruptor, there would have been no hope. That disruptor had the first modification of many. Very bad, but not quite fatal. It took Matheus many years to make disruptors as bad as they are now.”

  Quin watched Dex’s hands tracing unconscious patterns on the floor, as if his muscles remembered struggling here for his life.

  “When they finally thought to look in here,” he whispered, “Desmond was gone—I was gone.”

  “So you didn’t die? Desmond didn’t die,” she said, when she dared to say anything at all. Every time she thought Dex was closing in on a profound revelation, the inconsistencies overwhelmed her.

  “To them I died, and I never came back to life. But this part of me”—he touched his face and his chest, as if they were foreign objects, possessions he had acquired in some far-off land—“this survived.”

  A long silence fell between them. Dex was staring up at her, using her as a lifeline to pull himself back into the present. When she thought he had arrived, she asked, “You injected yourself?”

  “It saved my life.”

  “But…what do you mean, ‘injected’? If Desmond—if you—were from the Middle Ages, there was no injection, Dex. They were using leeches and bleeding people.”

  “You have to stop doing that,” he whispered.

  “Asking questions?” In her frustration, she said the words sharply. She controlled her voice and added, “You can’t expect me not to ask any questions.”

  “You can’t expect me to know the whole story until I’ve felt my way through it.” He got back to his feet, looking flustered. “You keep asking me what’s at the end of the thread, but I haven’t gotten
to that part of the labyrinth yet. I’m making my way by inches.”

  He paced for a while, eventually stopping by the little room’s back wall, which had folded stone nooks all along it. He looked as exasperated as Quin felt. His hands were twitching as he said, “Can’t you understand? When the sparks hit, everything Desmond had been thinking became permanent. Everything he’d been thinking poured into and out of him, over and over.” Dex directed his restless hands along the wall’s many ridges as though searching for something to hold. “He was terrified. He hid his head, covered his eyes, couldn’t face his attacker, or he knew he’d die. He wanted to hide to save himself. That’s what he was thinking when the sparks hit, and those thoughts became who Desmond was.”

  He touched a spot on the wall that seemed to be meaningful to him. He paused a moment before his hands continued searching.

  “After Desmond had gone, his mother and father found the blood. They knew what Matheus had done. He denied it, but they knew.”

  “How do you—or Desmond—know what they did after he left?” She asked it in the softest possible tones, probing the contradiction, so that he himself might notice it.

  Dex made a noise somewhere between a sigh and a laugh. “Oh, I watched them. That’s how I know. Desmond hid outside their camp, followed at a distance, spied on them at night. But he couldn’t speak or bring himself to approach another person for years afterward.” He located another spot that seemed to mean something to him. “Quilla was dead too,” he said roughly. “Matheus did it. Lay in wait for her in the woods. By luck, Adelaide was with her grandmother and she lived.” He turned to Quin and whispered, “It wasn’t really luck. Desmond’s mother arranged things in order for Matheus to dispose of Quilla. She’d never been fond of her. But she wanted her grandchild.”

  His hands slid inquisitively across the wall again.

  “The father suspected what the mother had done, and the mother blamed him for Matheus’s actions. The way he’d brought them all there, the focal, the harsh training—all of that had driven Matheus crazy, she said.