A curtain had been drawn around one of the beds to separate it from the others, and beyond it Shinobu glimpsed flashes of multicolored light. A moment later, he was inside the curtain with a hand over Briac Kincaid’s mouth, shaking him awake.
Briac’s eyes snapped open. They were wild and unfocused, but when they eventually settled upon Shinobu, a look of pure terror overtook him. Briac whimpered and writhed against the leather restraints that held him to the bed.
Was it Shinobu’s imagination, or were the sparks around the man’s head brighter than they’d been before? In the dim light, they spun across Briac’s face like angry fireflies.
“Shhh! I’m not here to hurt you,” Shinobu whispered, but Briac showed no sign of understanding.
Shinobu took the focal out of his pack and held it up for the man to see. Briac’s eyes latched on to the helmet immediately, and when Shinobu’s intention became clear, Briac stopped whimpering and fell silent. An eager, greedy look came into his eyes.
With the focal in his hands, Shinobu felt an almost irresistible urge to put it on his own head. Its absence had left him with a deep mental ache, as though a piece of himself had been removed and he desperately needed it back to feel whole again. He licked his lips, forced his arms to move, and pushed the focal onto Briac’s head. Then he sank into a metal folding chair next to the bed, sat on his hands to stop them from shaking, and waited.
Briac’s thoughts had been scrambled by the disruptor sparks, but the focal, Shinobu was certain, would unscramble them—at least for a time. He’d seen it happen in the woods in Hong Kong, when Briac had taken the helmet from the first two boys. And he’d felt it happen in his own mind. The focal had made things clear.
Briac had stopped struggling. His eyes were closed and his body was relaxed beneath the restraints, except for the occasional twitch. He was unwinding himself within the helmet.
As the minutes passed, Shinobu fell into a half doze. He forced his eyes open when he heard motion, a skittering sound beneath a cot on the other side of the room. Small, clawed feet were running across the floor tiles. Was it a rat? The hospital was dirty enough for rats, or mice, or cockroaches. A rat would be the best. He could play with it—hurt it even—while he was waiting for Briac to open his eyes. A really fat one would be good. They squeal the loudest—
Briac was stirring. The disruptor sparks orbited his head now in lazy sweeps, much calmer than they’d been when Shinobu arrived; the focal had brought them into some kind of order.
“Electricity,” Briac said at length, his eyes coming open to stare at the dark ceiling. His voice was raspy, as though he’d spent days in silence.
“What?” Shinobu asked.
“Doctors. Sparks. They…can’t figure them out.” He nodded weakly toward the medical equipment arrayed around the head of his bed.
Shinobu noticed a device with foam-padded electrodes sitting on the other side of Briac’s cot. With an unpleasant start, he understood that this apparatus was designed to deliver an electric shock to a patient’s brain. The doctors in this dirty, state-funded hospital had seen the sparks around Briac’s head and had dug up an ancient electrical contraption to see what would happen. That explained why the sparks looked brighter. As much as he disliked Briac Kincaid, the thought made Shinobu shudder.
“Couldn’t put two thoughts together,” Briac muttered. “Or even one thought. I want to kill them, kill them, kill—”
“And can you put two thoughts together now?” Shinobu asked, cutting him off before he could begin to rant. The rainbow flashes gyrated more violently the moment Briac’s thoughts strayed.
“Yes,” Briac whispered. “You always come through for me, Alistair.”
“I have questions,” Shinobu said. He turned the man’s head to face him. “I am a sworn Seeker. You must answer my questions. Or I could be justified in getting rid of you.”
That was a bond, a law, between Seekers—whatever Seeker knowledge one had been taught must be shared with any other sworn Seeker who asked. Shinobu hoped Briac would honor this, if only out of fear for his life.
Briac laughed harshly. “I’ve never hidden anything from you, Alistair.”
“I’m not Alistair. I’m Shinobu.”
“Alistair, Shinobu, Fiona. Redheaded fools. Born to follow. I can say anything, anything at all, and you swallow it.”
Maybe the focal was working too well—bringing Briac’s true self to the surface, unvarnished. Shinobu wasn’t prepared for his own reaction; he imagined his hands sliding up to Briac’s neck and choking the life out of him. It would be easy—Briac was strapped to the bed—and more satisfying than hurting a rat.
Shinobu stopped the twitching of his hands toward Briac’s throat and said, “I want to talk about the Middle Dread.”
Briac’s dark eyes came into focus. “That’s not a question about Seeker knowledge. My oaths don’t bind me to answer that.”
“All right.” Shinobu reached for the focal as if to pull it off.
“No!” the man said quickly, twisting as far away as he could, which was not very far owing to his restraints. “No, please. I will answer. I knew the Middle Dread…maybe better than other Seekers knew him.”
“Tell me about those boys of his. I’ve seen them twice now.”
Briac said, “They found me here. Took me away and hit me, in Hong Kong and on the estate. They hit me, they hit me! Disgusting boys, disgusting—”
“Stop,” Shinobu said, putting a hand heavily on the man’s shoulder to settle him.
Briac made an attempt to control himself. “And then they put me back here,” he went on, “and the doctors were angry I’d escaped—”
“What did the Middle use them for?” Shinobu asked, cutting Briac off with another firm press on his shoulder.
“He called them his Watchers. What do they watch? Him? Us? Us?” Briac was losing the thread of coherence again.
“How many of them are there?” Shinobu asked.
Briac shook his head. “Lots, maybe. Lots! I don’t know, don’t know, don’t—”
“But you know about the focal?” Shinobu asked, trying a different topic, hoping the man would calm down.
Briac collected himself. “I used it as a boy,” he said. “My father stole one and had it for a time. And he let me use another one. Briefly. He handed out favors like that. For a moment, and then you never knew what would happen. A knife in your back, a reward, a sudden fight with someone who’d been your friend, torture. Anything, anything at all. I had him under control only because I stole Catherine’s journal and hid it from him. Blackmail. He was desperate to get it back, and treated me well. He was worried the Old Dread would read it, learn what he’d done…”
Briac’s eyes had drifted away, and the sparks swirled more vigorously around his face. Shinobu took hold of the man’s chin and forced him to make eye contact.
“The Middle Dread. He let you use a focal. He handed out favors. He was scared of the journal. He was planning…big things.”
Briac nodded carefully. “When he let me wear the focal, he was wrong, wrong—” his voice rose, but when he noticed the look on Shinobu’s face, he reined himself in and whispered conspiratorially, “It was a mistake, letting me use it. Because he’s in the focal. I saw things he was planning.”
“I might see them too.”
“And he told me things…”
“Tell me what he told you and what you saw,” Shinobu ordered.
Briac’s eyes snapped back to his. He pressed his lips together as though to seal them, and shook his head.
Shinobu reached for the helmet, and the man’s dark eyes locked fearfully onto Shinobu’s hovering hands. He began to mutter curses and threats, but these seemed to fall from his mouth automatically, with no real thought behind them. The disruptor sparks were dancing wildly.
“It’s all I have left,” Briac whispered. His eyes were pleading as he watched Shinobu’s hands get closer to the focal. “It’s all I have— Stop! If I tell you,
maybe you and I can follow what we saw in the focal together? Help each other.”
“Like you and my father helped each other?” Shinobu asked coldly.
“We’ve always looked out for one another, Alistair,” Briac said.
“How did you keep him loyal to you all those years?”
“You’d broken so many laws already, Alistair,” Briac said. “What other Seeker would partner with you?”
“You tricked him into killing.”
“You liked killing,” Briac said, something of his old nature coming back into his voice. “You were so good at it.”
“He never liked it.” The thought of his father enjoying a kill enraged Shinobu, and again he imagined his own hands around Briac’s throat. It would take only a minute or two, a minor struggle, a few muffled cries. “You made him a killer, you told him he could never be anything else, you took him from Mariko.”
“Yes,” agreed Briac, his expression brightening, “all of those things.”
“The Middle Dread,” Shinobu prompted. “If you want to keep wearing the focal.”
The expression on Briac’s face became awful, as though telling Shinobu any more would kill him, but the promise of keeping the focal on his head, even for a few minutes, won out in the end. He started to speak in a low whisper, as though the words were too precious to scatter about loudly:
“The Watchers are his…bodyguards. No, no, no, wrong word, wrong word—” Shinobu gripped Briac’s shoulder, hoping to help him focus. Briac gathered himself and continued, “They watch for him. One pair is always awake in the world, waiting for his signals, checking on him. But there are more, hidden There. If something happens to the Middle, the Watchers look for him here in the world, and they also know how to look for him There. If Quin hadn’t found the Middle and me, lost in the blackness after the attack on the estate, his Watchers would have come for him eventually. So he can never be lost or trapped There for long.”
The words flowed from him smoothly, as if he had, perhaps, committed this explanation to memory years ago and was now reeling it off by rote.
“But he’s dead,” Shinobu said. “The Young Dread killed the Middle on the airship. If they’re looking for him now, they’ll never find him.”
Briac looked tormented, as if he were waging, and losing, a fierce internal battle not to speak. “I promise you they don’t know that!” he said at last, the words tearing from him. “They have no idea he’s dead. They’re waiting for him to use them for their real purpose.”
“What’s their real purpose?”
Through gritted teeth, Briac answered, “Getting rid…of us.”
“Getting rid of Seekers?” Shinobu repeated.
“He’s been whittling down our numbers decade by decade,” Briac whispered. His face was red with the effort of speaking against his will. This information, Shinobu understood, was a treasure Briac had been hoarding to himself for a very long time.
“The Middle Dread has been getting rid of Seekers? Recently?” Shinobu repeated again, trying to grasp why and how this would be.
“He’s been getting rid of us for a long time.”
“That can’t be right,” Shinobu responded, almost to himself. The Dreads weren’t meant to interact with Seekers unless meting out justice or giving them their oaths. “There are entries in the journal that mention him killing Seekers—but that was centuries ago, and anyway the Old Dread stopped him—”
“Stupid!” Briac cried suddenly. “You deserve to be slapped, kicked, hit, hit, hit—”
“Stop!” Shinobu dug his fingers into the man’s arm.
Briac closed his eyes for a time. When he opened them again, he took a breath and said, so quietly Shinobu could scarcely make out the words, “He wants us gone.”
“He—”
“He turns us against one another. We kill each other for him. Sometimes we sign our killings with the emblems of other houses, to make Seekers take revenge on each other—to confuse them, to misdirect them. Maybe he gives us something in return. And the Seekers who help him think they’re the only ones, his favorites, safe. Until someone comes after them.”
Shinobu was silent as he tried to digest this statement. If the Middle Dread had been turning Seekers against each other…all at once a host of things made sense—the isolation and emptiness of the estate; the vacant apprentice cabins that had once been full; Briac’s and Alistair’s silence about other Seeker houses; Briac’s possession of the fox athame, even though it rightly belonged to John’s family; even the cruel, murderous use to which Briac had been putting that fox athame.
“Why would he do that?” Shinobu said at last. “Why would he want Seekers to kill each other?”
He watched the strained workings of Briac’s facial muscles. At last the man said, “When there are so few of us left that we’ll be easily disposed of, the Middle and his Watchers will put a final end to us.”
“He wants to put an end to us…because Seekers have been breaking the Seeker laws?” Shinobu asked at last.
Briac laughed, an unpleasant chuckle that quickly turned into something high and frightening. “He doesn’t care about the laws. He wants what Seekers have—our artifacts, our athames, our tools. He wants to control them…”
“Why?” Shinobu asked. “He’s already a Dread. He already has every—”
“Why? Why? If he has control, no one else does…” Briac was panting as the sparks circulated riotously around his head, accelerating.
“Explain that,” Shinobu said.
Briac took several shuddering breaths, attempting to quiet his thoughts. “He has his reasons, reasons, good reasons or bad reasons…How can I know them? It’s between him and the Old Dread. Those two…He hates the Old, always eavesdropping on his mind, seeing what the Middle does, punishing him when he does wrong. This is how he gets out from under the Old Dread’s control…”
Briac’s mind had scattered again, and the sparks were not settling down. He was closing his eyes tight, trying to hold on to the threads of thought. It was a long time before he spoke again: “I don’t know his reasons, but the Middle wants to tear down everything the old man built.”
“You mean—it’s us he’s going to tear down? Seekers?”
“It’s us,” Briac agreed. “Unless”—the words were coming, though he tried to stop them—“unless we are clever enough to change our own fate.”
“But his plan failed,” Shinobu said quietly.
“Did it?”
“The Middle Dread is dead.”
“Yes,” Briac whispered, “and the Watchers don’t know it yet. They are waiting for someone to command them.”
He took several slow breaths. Then he began to speak again, this time without any prompting, as though, despite the cherished value of his hidden knowledge, it was an immense relief to share it with someone else at last.
“While the Middle was getting rid of Seekers, he was hoarding things, keeping them There…” Briac began, and as he spoke, Shinobu cradled his own head in his hands, letting Briac’s words—some coherent, some not—flow over him.
Shinobu tried to catch hold of what made sense, such as when Briac explained about two hundred and about the real use of the focal and about a stone medallion, and he tried to ignore what sounded insane, such as Seekers justifiably killing each other’s families, and an Old Dread who was simply a flawed, aging man, too trusting and often wrong.
In the end, he’d heard enough to form a sort of plan.
The hospital storage room stank of dirty clothing, mildewed paper, and something sweet and sour, like apples that had been left to rot. And rats. He could smell them, and he could hear them scurrying across shelves and inside the walls. If there had been one rat back in the ward, this room was their home base.
Shinobu had put the focal back into the backpack. It hadn’t been easy getting it off Briac; the man had started crying and thrashing. Once the helmet was off, however, the disruptor sparks surrounding Briac’s head had immediately spun o
ut of control, his thoughts had scattered, and his cries had quickly dwindled to incoherent mumbles as Shinobu slipped out.
It hadn’t been easy to keep the focal off his own head either. Shinobu had crept down the hall and into the storage room, but all the while he kept imagining the cool touch of the helmet between his hands and the electric joining of it with his mind.
But he did not put it on.
He had the answer Quin was looking for. He knew why Seekers had changed. They’d changed because the Middle Dread had turned them against each other. They’d changed because the Middle was trying to destroy all of them, while cleverly covering his tracks.
Now the Middle was dead, but those boys—the Watchers—were still out there. And the Middle had had other tools as well. One of the Middle’s tools was right here in this storage room.
Quin wanted to make things right, to figure out what Seekers should be. And Shinobu wanted to protect Quin. So, what if…what if he took control of all the Middle’s tools, including the Watchers?
Shinobu assessed the shelves before him. Patients’ belongings had been thrown into cardboard boxes that had been stacked haphazardly. It looked like the shelves had been ransacked repeatedly by hospital staff looking for valuables. The newer boxes were mostly intact, though—maybe the staff waited awhile before robbing their patients.
Something brushed against Shinobu’s fingers as he searched for the right box. Instead of drawing back in disgust, in a strange surge of curiosity, he thrust his hand forward and caught something warm and furry—a small black-and-white rat with a long tail and tiny eyes that gleamed wetly. It twisted frantically in his grasp to try to bite him, and without thinking, Shinobu smacked it against the metal shelf. The animal went limp, but he could still feel its heart beating rapidly, see its small chest moving. It will be good for a while, he thought, stuffing the creature into a loose pocket of his jacket.
When he finally located Briac’s box, he pulled it down and opened it to find only a few items inside: a long dark cloak, boots, and a coiled whipsword. He was amazed the sword hadn’t been stolen, but then it wouldn’t work for anyone but Briac, so it would have appeared to be a fairly useless object—a coiled whip that refused to uncoil.
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