Traveler

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  Holding on to Shinobu, she pulled herself up to sitting and laid her head against his shoulder. Her temples were pounding.

  “Was it incredible?” he murmured into her ear.

  She nodded against him. A ripple of exhaustion passed through her, but the buzzing in her ears died out, letting her know that her mind was her own again.

  “You were right,” she told him. “You put your mind on something you want to understand, and you see it more clearly. So much more clearly. I saw a connection in what Catherine had written.”

  “Tell me.”

  She collected her thoughts, and as she did, she began to feel better. Inside the focal they had run through her so quickly and every thought had been connected to every other. But a few had stood out as important. “Those boys we saw,” she said slowly. “They kept saying ‘our master,’ and I thought maybe they meant Briac, but it didn’t make sense, because they treated Briac like…like an animal or something. But what if their master was the Middle Dread? What if that journal entry about two boys training with the Middle meant those two? The same boys?”

  “And they’re here now, and they’re looking for his athame,” Shinobu said, building upon her thought.

  “If he trained them so long ago, and they’re still around…then they’ve been resting There, and the Middle was doing things no one understood.”

  “Yes,” Shinobu said, grasping this immediately. He held her gaze with the hyper-alertness she’d seen in him before, the afternoon he wore the focal himself. It was as though Quin using the helmet had almost the same effect on him as using it himself. “How long have they been around, then?” he asked. “And how have they interacted with Seekers all this time?”

  He was propping Quin up with one hand, but his other hand was holding the focal, and now he turned it about and looked at it from all angles.

  “Don’t…” she whispered, when it looked as though he was going to put it on. “I know it’s given me this idea, but…I don’t think it’s good to wear it, Shinobu. I don’t want to wear it again.”

  He licked his lips nervously, then set the helmet on the ground and moved his hand away from it deliberately. His eyes lingered on it for a few more moments before he turned back to her.

  “I won’t,” he told her. “Don’t worry.”

  Holding on to Shinobu, she got back to her feet, and so did he. He handed Quin the focal, and she noticed he didn’t look at it as he passed it to her. She thought he might be scared of it, and now she understood the feeling.

  “There are a few pages in the journal I want to look at again,” she told him. “I might have an idea.”

  Nott stood guard while Wilkin and Briac used the glowing window to find the girl. Nott was perched on the back of the chair, his feet on the seat. The three of them were somewhere in the city of Hong Kong, in a dark corner of a long, low room filled with dozens of such glowing windows—Briac called them computers—each in its own little alcove with a chair in front of it. A handful of young men were scattered about, hunched in front of other computers, doing God knew what. Nott had seen many strange things since his master had taken him from his family, years and years ago. Computers were just one more oddity to add to the list.

  There was a small partition separating their desk from the others, so no one was looking their way. Please be more curious, he thought, his eyes boring into the backs of the other people in the room. He wanted to beat someone.

  The helm hadn’t been anywhere in the Hong Kong woods. They’d spent hours looking for it, all the while ignoring Briac’s cries of pain from the knife wound in his back. (Well, half the time Briac had cried out in pain, and the other half he’d seemed to forget that he was injured at all.) Eventually they’d given up the search, and Wilkin had had to admit that he might have dropped the helm in the darkness There, where they were never likely to find it. They’d both been so distressed by this conclusion that Nott had punched Wilkin directly in the face, and Wilkin hadn’t even tried to hit him back.

  Losing the helm meant they couldn’t properly follow their master’s orders without a great deal of luck, so even Nott had agreed they should continue searching for the girl in hopes of recovering their master’s athame, while they figured out what to do next.

  “Hold still!” Wilkin hissed, thumping Briac’s head.

  For a while, Briac had been fiddling with a board in front of the computer, pressing letters (Nott could read enough to know they were letters, though he didn’t know all the letters in the alphabet. He could learn them, if he wanted to. He was very clever. But Wilkin couldn’t read much either, so who cared?) but Briac was whimpering and biting his own fist now, because Wilkin was sewing up the wound on his back again. The stitches Nott had put in the first time had been so sloppy that Briac had never really stopped bleeding.

  “Shhh,” whispered Nott, watching Wilkin jab Briac with the thick needle, jerk the thread downward, and jab the needle in again. “Can’t you make him be quiet, Wilkin? Someone’s going to hear.”

  That was not strictly true. The nearest person was sitting at a desk halfway to the door and wearing something over his ears. But Nott enjoyed making things more difficult for Wilkin. Example: he had once hidden one of Wilkin’s boots for three days. Wilkin had hobbled around without it until he found his missing boot half underwater at the edge of Loch Tarm.

  Briac cried out as the needle poked him again. Nott shook his head and examined his own arms, where numerous puckered scars decorated his skin. To be alive, to put the world in its place, you needed to fight, and sometimes you got hurt. What did Briac expect?

  “Keep looking for her!” Wilkin ordered. He nudged Briac with an elbow until the man forced his eyes to the glowing window again. Nott had no idea how the computer could help find someone, but Briac insisted it could. And back in the madhouse, Briac had used another sort of computer—a phone they’d stolen from a nurse—to locate the London hospital where they’d found Quin, though Briac had been wearing the helm then, so he’d been able to think a lot more clearly. Watching him try to hold his mind together now was excruciating, which was one of the reasons Nott kept turning away.

  A soft scratching sound alerted Nott to a rat who was crawling through the darkest corner of their little alcove. He slid off the chair and inched closer. The creature was gray and black, with tiny claws skittering across the grime where the floor met the wall.

  Nott pulled his smallest knife from his waist and threw it in a slow, practiced arc. The handle struck the rat’s head dead on, and he snatched the creature from the floor. When he got back into brighter light, he saw that its eyes were shut, but one of its feet was twitching. Good. Still alive. Nott knew a lot about rats and how much punishment they could take before giving up the ghost, and he’d thrown the knife just right. He stuffed the stunned animal into a pocket in his cloak.

  Wilkin was nearly finished sewing up Briac’s back. As Nott climbed onto his chair again, the older boy pulled the thread hard one final time and tied it off, leaving a long, jagged row of stitches. He slapped Briac’s shoulder and said, “Perfect!”

  Briac didn’t seem to notice that the doctoring was over. He continued to bite his fist and stare blankly at the computer. At last, he grabbed his head and moaned, “I can’t—I can’t remember her name! I don’t know who she is.”

  Several people turned to look in their direction.

  “Quin!” Wilkin whispered. “We already know her name. Your daughter, Quin Kincaid!”

  Briac studied the computer glass for a few moments longer. Then he surged to his feet. Wilkin was thrown backward into Nott, who fell off the chair. The rat squeaked quietly inside his cloak, like a rusty door hinge.

  “Without the helmet, I can’t do it!” Briac shouted.

  Wilkin slapped a hand over Briac’s mouth and hissed, “We don’t have the helmet!”

  Briac twisted away and hissed back, “Then you have nothing!”

  He grabbed up the computer, raised it above his head, an
d before Wilkin could do anything, Briac smashed it onto the floor. With a tremendous noise, the machine shattered into hundreds of pieces, which flew in every direction.

  “I don’t know how to use it!” Briac screamed, grabbing his head again. The sparks were bouncing around his face. Whatever the helm had done to calm his thoughts was finished. He was completely crazy again. “It’s useless! Just like she is—Fiona, Quin, all of them. Pretending loyalty, and then they stab you, they stab you, they stab you!” He punctuated each of his screams by kicking the messy pile of glass that had once been the computer, sending chunks skating across the floor.

  Two young men were running toward them across the long room. Everyone else was moving briskly for the door.

  “You stop!” one of the approaching men said, his English strangely accented with the language of this city. “I’m calling police!”

  Nott wasn’t supposed to use his whipsword in front of ordinary people, so he pulled out a knife, his biggest one. He leapt off the chair and landed in front of the approaching men, bringing them to a sudden halt.

  “Shall we fight?” Nott asked them gleefully. He crouched down, ready to attack, and his knife glinted in the low light of the room.

  Both men recoiled and nearly collided with each other in their haste to get to the door. In a moment they’d followed their customers and disappeared out onto the crowded sidewalk, leaving Nott and Wilkin and Briac alone.

  Nott decided it was time for him to take control from the idiot Wilkin. He said, “You know our master’s always saying Watchers let their minds run everywhere, Watchers panic, Watchers can’t follow the simple plan! We keep going further from what we’re supposed to do.”

  Wilkin nodded. “We should have followed his orders from the beginning and woken the others immediately. And now we can’t, because we’ve lost the helm.”

  “We can, Wilkin. We have the other way, the way our master showed us, if we’ve no helm.”

  A spark of hope lit Wilkin’s eyes but quickly went out. “But…even if we make it to two hundred, the others will tell him we made mistakes—”

  “He’ll be angry either way—about us not following orders or about us losing the helm. We’ve already lost the helm, so at least we should try to follow orders.”

  Wilkin looked frightened, but he was also out of options. He nodded, then took a deep breath. “We’re done with you, ye madman!” he said, planting a fist into Briac’s gut. Briac sat down heavily atop the pile of shattered glass, where he continued to clutch his head and mutter to himself, as though he hadn’t noticed being punched.

  Wilkin drew out their athame. Nott bared his teeth, and together they adjusted the dials as they’d practiced so many times. This was what they should have done the moment their master went missing.

  When they’d gotten the symbols into the right order, Wilkin hit the athame against the lightning rod. The vibration tickled Nott’s bones and shook the desks as Wilkin traced a circle in the air. The threads of the world began to unravel, white and black, light and dark, twisting into each other, creating a gaping doorway.

  Nott grabbed Wilkin’s arm, and they faced each other.

  “Ready?” Wilkin asked.

  “Yes,” Nott said.

  Wilkin slapped Nott sharply across the face.

  Nott accepted the blow and slapped Wilkin the same way, his open hand hitting the older boy so hard, the noise of the impact echoed in the empty room.

  “Good?” Wilkin asked.

  “One more,” answered Nott.

  Wilkin struck him with the other hand, so forcefully that Nott saw blackness, then stars.

  “Another for me as well,” Wilkin said, leaning close.

  There were black spots floating before Nott’s eyes, but he managed to hit Wilkin a second time, just as hard as the first.

  Nott shook his head until his vision cleared. He felt what he’d hoped to feel—focus. The pain made his thoughts as sharp as a razor. Their master had taught them this trick, a method of last resort to keep their minds in line.

  “Now we count!” Wilkin said, gripping Nott’s shoulders.

  They grabbed up Briac and dragged him with them like an oversized and dangerous dog as they stepped through the anomaly, walking as the Middle Dread would, copying his strides.

  It took a great force of will for Shinobu to hand the focal back to Quin and let her take it away. When they’d climbed down from the roof back into her house and gone downstairs to the first floor, where the journal was still spread out across the counters, she’d run upstairs with the helmet to hide it from him again. Of course, he knew where she was putting it, so it wasn’t really hidden.

  She was right; he shouldn’t be using the focal. But he’d continued to use it secretly, at night, when Quin was asleep, and sometimes during the day, when she and her mother were at Master Tan’s office, helping him with patients. Though he’d never done a good job of following Mariko’s instructions for using the helmet, he’d begun to think of his time with it as a ritual—waiting until the house was completely still, going into the upstairs bathroom, folding his long legs tightly against himself on the floor, anticipating the electric hum of his mind, and pulling on the focal.

  It was not lost on him that this ritual was a lot like his old rituals of hiding from his mother to smoke Shiva sticks in the pool house, or losing himself in an opium den on the Transit Bridge with his friend Brian. Brian, who had stopped using drugs, and who must be somewhere nearby in Hong Kong. What would Brian say about Shinobu using the focal as a drug? Surely the helmet was different, though. Like a drug, it took away his physical pain while he used it, but its mental effects were unique. And it was odd, he thought, how the focal’s effects were changing over time. He no longer experienced only clarity and focus, as he had the first times he’d worn it. Now it was more like the focal was telling him things.

  That was a silly thought. It wasn’t as if the focal actually spoke to him. It was more like whispers at the edge of hearing, a voice in a distant room, whose words you can’t make out and yet whose emotion and meaning somehow reach you. He couldn’t say precisely what ideas the focal had been whispering to him, but he thought they might be, as he’d first glimpsed, hints of a grand plan. Those two boys were part of it. And the Middle Dread…he was part of it as well, though Shinobu was at a loss to explain how he knew that. It was a feeling more than a knowing. Such a strong feeling.

  He shouldn’t wear the focal. And he’d told Quin he wouldn’t.

  He could hear her upstairs on the landing now. He would admit what he’d done as soon as she came back down. It would be a relief, because then he could explain to her the feelings it had given him. Maybe they were important, maybe he’d glimpsed something they both needed to understand.

  Quin’s footsteps came lightly down the stairs. He would tell her before he had time to think. And then she would look at him the way his mother used to look at him when she found him passed out by the front door of her house. She would look at him like an addict, because that’s what he was, an addict unable to control himself.

  “Hey,” she said when she came through the door into her examination room.

  Shinobu noticed he’d been clenching his fists tightly. He shoved them deep into his pockets to hide them from her.

  He steeled himself and said, “Hey, Quin, I—”

  He stopped. Quin’s face was open and lovely. Her pale skin was still flushed from using the focal up on the roof. And she was preoccupied, he could tell, by the connection she’d made while wearing it.

  “What?” she asked, giving him her full attention when he fell silent. “Are you all right?”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have made you wear the focal,” he told her.

  She squeezed his hand, unaware of all the words he’d left unsaid. “I don’t have to wear it again,” she said lightly. “And now we can use our own minds—without the focal—to look at something it helped me see.”

  She let go of his hand and began wal
king slowly past the counter, studying each page of the journal as she went, searching for something in particular.

  The moment had passed. Shinobu wouldn’t tell her just now. He’d stop using the focal, and eventually—or maybe quite soon—he’d stop wanting to use it. It would be easy to tell her then, because it wouldn’t matter anymore.

  “Look. These are the pages I want us to study,” she told him. She pulled several sheets off the counter and knelt on the floor to spread them out in front of her. “If we focus on the Middle Dread—even if we only do it because Catherine focused on him—that will give us a place to start, a beginning in our search for where Seekers went the wrong way.” She looked at the pages on the floor. “These three journal entries about the Middle Dread seem…related. At least, I thought they were when I was wearing the focal.”

  Shinobu sat on the floor next to her. Viewing the pages she’d selected side by side, it was easy to see the vast stretches of time spanned by the journal. The earliest entry of the three was written in almost illegibly dense, ancient handwriting. Quin had transcribed this entry with her mother, and she now set the copy next to the original. The other two entries were more recent and so were legible enough on their own.

  She picked up her version of the oldest entry and read aloud as Shinobu tried to follow along with the original:

  It is the Year of our Lord 1433

  The Mydle hath crushed the life from the throt of the Young Dread.

  I hid among oaks by the riverbank a good journey from the stronghold and there saw Mydle and Young in full fyte with bare hands.

  It were all in play and practice untyl the Mydle bested Young and with hands tyte around throt did say Thou hast seen too much of me. And opened thy mouth to our Master. Now I close it for good and all.

  And when the youth expire, from my place among trees I did spy the Mydle binding his corpse, wading to the heart of the river, and disappearing, that he might send his remains into the deep.