Traveler

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  “You’ve seen them before?” John asked, huddled beside her.

  Quin nodded. “You too?”

  “Yes. They run if you challenge them.”

  “They don’t run from me without a huge fight first,” Quin told him grimly. “I don’t have anything you want!” she called again.

  It was true enough. Shinobu had taken the focal and the athame of the Dreads, which also meant she had no easy way to escape the boys. Where had Shinobu gone? Her body still ached painfully from the last fight. Facing a new one without him was an unpleasant idea.

  Mentally she made a quick inventory: she had her whipsword and a few knives. She had been walking around armed since their last fight with the boys, in case they showed up suddenly again. But she hadn’t expected them to find her on the Bridge, not really. And she wished, for once, that she’d chosen to wear a gun, though they were hard to come by in Hong Kong and against the Bridge’s rules.

  “Then let us search you!” one of the older boys called back. This was a dark-skinned one. She’d fought him on the estate.

  “Your master is dead!” she called out to them. “If you had let me get a word in before you attacked us yesterday, I could have told you. You have no one to retrieve the athame for.”

  “Shut your mouth!” the dark one snapped.

  “You’re a liar!” yelled Nott.

  “Who’s their master?” John whispered.

  “The Middle Dread,” Quin whispered back.

  The third boy stepped out from behind the others. He was in his late teens, with dark, dark skin, and he’d been their worst opponent on the estate. He was wearing a focal on his head…

  And he had a disruptor strapped across his chest.

  “Lying girl!” he spat.

  Quin realized she’d been hearing the disruptor’s high whine for some time, but the sound had been obscured by the noises of the Bridge. Before she could react, he fired the weapon.

  “Oh God,” she and John said in unison, dropping to the ground. The disruptor sparks hit the metal bins and ricocheted off in a hissing, flashing mess.

  “I don’t have what you want!” she yelled. “Your master is gone. I watched him die!”

  “Stop saying that!” yelled the boy in the focal.

  He fired the disruptor again.

  She and John pressed themselves low against the bins as a new swarm of sparks collided. A handful bounced through a gap, soared past Quin’s face, and smashed into the metal stairs behind her.

  She could smell the boys. Death hung about them like an invisible cloak.

  “Come out and show us what you have or haven’t got!” the oldest one ordered, and he fired the disruptor again.

  “How is he firing it so fast?” she asked. Unlike the disruptor she’d trained with on the estate, this weapon took almost no time to recharge.

  “He sounds like he wants to disrupt you,” John whispered, “like he’s dying to do it whether you come out or not.”

  “Shinobu and I injured them pretty badly. They’d probably rather not fight.” Indeed all three boys looked wounded, with dirty, blood-caked bandages in various locations. “And they think I have an athame. They don’t want to give me a chance to use it.”

  “And they really don’t like what you said about their master,” John said.

  He was right. The boys were arguing as they got closer. Quin heard Nott say, “He can’t die. She’s a liar!”

  “Course he’s not dead!” said the oldest one. “And we’ll put her in her place.”

  The disruptor was whining higher, preparing to fire again.

  “We charge them and get out onto the thoroughfare?” John proposed.

  “No. The narrow alley, the fast disruptor. They’ll hit us easily.”

  “You’re right.”

  She nodded toward the back of the alley. “We should go up and over,” she said.

  Behind them, the alley ended in the outdoor staircase of her house, which led to the bedrooms on the second floor. Beyond the stairs was the steel latticework of the Bridge itself, the barrier between its upper level and the open air beyond.

  The boys’ voices were coming to them in a furious jumble as they argued with each other. The disruptor fired from much closer this time, and the sparks rattled among the bins in angry flashes. She and John took that moment, the brief pause before the disruptor would be able to fire again, and ran in a crouch straight up the stairs toward her second floor.

  Someone was there. Three figures had been crouched down on the balcony, and they now stood. One was the older boy who’d attacked her in the hospital, Wilkin. And he too was wearing a disruptor. Behind him were two more boys she’d never seen before.

  “They’re multiplying,” John breathed.

  He and Quin were caught halfway up the staircase. The disruptor above was emitting a high squeal, ready to fire, echoing the sounds of the first disruptor below them.

  The boys below had moved in and were standing at the bottom of the stairs. The dual whine of the disruptors was like a physical object piercing Quin’s ears.

  “Stop your lies about our master,” the largest boy below said. “If you put your hands up and get on the ground, we might not disrupt you.” But his expression said he would gladly disrupt her if it meant shutting her up and avoiding a fight. A bright red splotch had appeared in the center of the dirty bandage on his shoulder. An earlier wound had opened up—probably when he’d thrown that first knife. He was wounded and angry.

  Quin wasn’t about to submit. A glance at John told her that he understood and agreed. They began to lift their hands in surrender…

  Then Quin leapt onto the stair railing and leapt again, with John right behind her.

  Both disruptors fired. Quin caught herself on the steel lattice behind the stairs. Through its slats, she glimpsed Victoria Harbor, waves, ships, Hong Kong Island beyond.

  John landed next to her. Above them, the lattice stretched almost endlessly to meet the Bridge canopy.

  “Climb!” Quin yelled.

  She began hauling herself up the grid work as the disruptors fired again.

  Could their master really be dead? Nott wondered. He didn’t think so. But even if he were dead, Nott supposed they would still have to retrieve his athame from Quin—no thieving girl should have it. And also she had Nott’s helm.

  The helm.

  Nott had been without the helm long enough to realize that it clouded his judgment. He still loved it, he still needed it, he still planned to kill another of the Watchers if necessary to get his hands upon a helm. But even so, he could now see the device’s limitations. And he understood that the helm was clouding everyone’s judgment.

  If their master wasn’t dead—and it was doubtful, in Nott’s mind, that the man could actually die—he might as well sack this whole lot of Watchers and start over with new boys, because Nott and the others were idiots. But of course, it was their master who’d made them use the helm. He was the one who’d taught them to trust it. So he’d made them into idiots.

  The two half-trained Watchers—the babies, as Nott liked to think of them—had used the magic of computers to point them to the Bridge in Hong Kong, where Quin lived. Now Geb wanted to use the disruptors to take away Quin’s fighting skills so it would be easy to grab the athame back. Geb was also furious that she kept telling them their master was dead—and Nott understood this, because he was furious too. But what if she didn’t have the athame just now? She was yelling that she didn’t have it. If that was true, how would they ever find it if she were disrupted?

  They should concentrate on capturing her, even if it meant getting wounded again. What were a few more injuries at this point?

  They had climbed the steel latticework after Quin, and they were now all up among high metal rafters. She’d probably been trying to get across one of the large beams that spanned the Bridge and down onto the main thoroughfare, but the Watchers had blocked her and she’d been forced to go up higher instead.

 
The rafters up here were a maze of steel limbs, crisscrossing and intersecting each other beneath the Bridge’s canopy, so that he and the others were crawling between and around beams as they tried to keep her in sight. She and her companion (who was, oddly enough, the same fellow who’d thrown a knife at Briac Kincaid) were above the Watchers, right up against the great sloping canopy that was the Bridge’s roof. The babies, Jacob and Matthew, looked scared and exhilarated by the chase, which showed how truly idiotic they were, since Quin could make mincemeat of them if it came to a real fight.

  Nott wondered how his brother, Odger, would have gotten the others to act sensibly. He imagined asking: Odger, what should I do now? But Odger, too amazed by the modern world to be of any use, would only answer: What about some of them comfortable shoes I see on everyone’s feet, Nott? Could you get me a pair of those?

  I could not, Odger, Nott replied, ’cause you were dead and buried ages ago.

  Why, after all this time, was he thinking of Odger? He’d left brothers and families and all of that in the past.

  Geb wiggled between two beams (having a hard time of it with the heavy disruptor strapped across his chest), saw an opening, and fired. Half the disruptor sparks collided with a rafter a few yards away and bounced wildly off the metal, nearly rebounding into Geb’s own face. He ducked quickly. The rest of the sparks died out long before they reached Quin. Geb was proving himself to be as idiotic as Wilkin. Example: everything he’d done since they’d woken him up.

  “Stop using the disruptor!” Nott yelled.

  “Shut it, Nott!” hissed Wilkin, who was right behind him, a huge bruise on his left cheek visible even in the dim light among the rafters. He too was struggling to climb with a disruptor on his chest. At least Wilkin was clever enough not to fire it.

  “Geb almost disrupted himself!” Nott whispered defiantly. “We shouldn’t fire it unless we’re in the open!”

  “Then go faster!” Balil said, roughly pushing Nott through a tight spot.

  There was a blinding flash of light up ahead. Quin had cut or ripped a piece of the Bridge’s canopy, and she was pulling the material back, exposing the sky beyond. And then she and her companion disappeared though that flap of canvas and out onto the canopy itself.

  Quin stepped through the hole she’d cut, out of the darkness of the rafters and onto the exterior of the Bridge’s great canopy. She was hit with a gust of wind and, even though the day was cloudy, nearly blinded by the light of the open air. She almost lost herself in a rush of dizziness. It was so very high. The canopy itself swept out and down, a great sail spreading below her and then rising again at its far edge, where it overhung the Bridge like the eaves of a roof. Beyond the edge and far, far below was the gray water of Victoria Harbor, and beyond that was Hong Kong Island.

  She clutched the rough canvas material behind her. She was as high up now as she’d been with Shinobu on that night they parachuted onto Traveler. Her stomach felt as though it had become disconnected from the rest of her body and was sliding down toward her feet. Her hair flapped crazily about her face in the strong gusts, adding to her dizziness. Her new fear of heights made it hard to breathe. John grabbed her arm to keep her from tumbling forward.

  “Maud, please!” she heard him mutter beside her.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Where can we go from here?” he asked, gesturing to the steep sail below them.

  He looked tense and serious but not panicked, and Quin had a fleeting thought that whatever the Young Dread was teaching him was having an effect.

  She turned from the panoramic view and concentrated on the canopy itself. From a distance it gave the impression of enormous ships’ sails moving across the harbor. Up close, it was a series of steep mountains plunging into valleys. They had come out about midway up the height of the canopy. The steepest peaks rose far above them, and below, the sail upon which they stood dropped away quickly, until it bellied out into a valley, then rose again at the edge of the Bridge.

  “We go down,” she said, “and at the bottom we find a place where we can cut back inside—away from them.” She jerked her head toward the flap they’d just crawled through. “Then we climb down to the thoroughfare and get help.”

  The sails were supported by cables and a hidden framework of rafters, but out here, only the canvas was visible, stretched taut in some places, rippling in others in the ocean breeze.

  There was a whine and a buzzing behind them, audible over the wind. Quin turned as a mass of disruptor sparks hit the canvas, lighting it from inside in a kaleidoscope of color. A handful of sparks burst through the cut she’d made, missing her and John by luck only and dispersing in the air.

  Her eyes swept down to the distant ocean, and she felt desperation rising, threatening to blot out all rational thought. The idea of plunging down the face of the sail was terrifying, but there was little choice, and she couldn’t imagine her pursuers following her with live disruptors on their chests. That would be madness.

  “I’m going!” she said.

  Without waiting for John’s response, or for her courage to fail her, she plunged forward, down the steep curve of the sail. In a moment, she was sprinting headlong, her feet sinking into the canvas and sliding as she went. It was more like skating than running, and she was moving much too fast. At every moment it felt as though she would pitch forward over her feet and roll wildly out of control.

  She did lose control at last, her forward motion overtaking the pace of her feet. She sprawled onto the sail, then careened downward, end over end, the canvas absorbing each fall and sending her onward.

  “They’re coming!” John yelled from above as she at last pitched to a stop in the belly of the sail.

  He was right behind her, still on his feet, but moving so fast she wasn’t sure he’d be able to stop. He threw himself forward and rolled the rest of the way, fetching up a few yards from her, the sail rippling beneath him.

  High above, all six boys were coming down the steep incline, like the Mongol hordes galloping across the steppes of Russia.

  The wind carried the whine of the disruptors straight to Quin’s ears.

  Atop the high roof in Kowloon, the Young Dread had examined every item from within her cloak and had returned them to their pockets.

  Had John found Quin? Had he brought his thoughts of Quin under his own control? Would he continue to be her student?

  If the answer was no, what would Maud herself do? Every day the Young Dread spent awake in the world, in this time and place, was a day lost from her life as a whole. And yet she couldn’t return to sleep now, not while she was the only active Dread. She did not even know how to wake herself.

  John was an apprentice Seeker, but in recent days Maud had caught glimpses in him of a potential to be more than that—if he could commit himself.

  Maud, please!

  She heard the call in her mind and knew at once that it was John. Their minds had never touched before, but his thoughts came to her clearly, urgently. He was in a panic, running for his life. Maud, I need your help…

  In a single practiced motion, the Young Dread stood and wrapped her cloak about her shoulders. Her athame and lightning rod were in her hand as she stared across the dense buildings of Kowloon toward the Transit Bridge.

  Nott’s frustration at his fellow Watchers was obliterated in a rush of fear when he burst through the flap in the Bridge canopy. They hadn’t even paused to come up with a plan. Geb had herded all of them after Quin at a run, yelling that they mustn’t let her get away.

  At once, the cloudy Hong Kong sky was above them, the endless drop of the sail was below, and the six Watchers were careening down the canvas faster than Nott had ever run in his life. After only a few steps, they were moving too fast to stop. All twelve of their feet made divots in the sail with each step, and each divot created ripples, so the canvas was moving in fiercer and fiercer waves under him as they ran.

  Nott didn’t want to look anywhere but directly in fron
t of his own feet, yet he had to know if he was going to run right off the edge of the Bridge. He glanced up and was relieved to see that it would be impossible to do so. The sail swooped down and down to create a valley at the bottom; then it rose again, up to the edge. Quin and the other one were in that valley now, doing their best to run away.

  Just in front of Nott, Geb was flailing his arms to keep his balance. One of his hands knocked against the disruptor on his chest, and the weapon fired. The sparks buzzed and hissed in a swarm, hit the surface of the sail, and bounced in all directions. They were stepping on remnant sparks as they hurtled downward. It was lucky disruptors didn’t damage you unless they got to your head.

  One of Nott’s feet hit the sail wrong as he tried to avoid the sparks, and then his legs were behind him and he was rolling instead of running. He crashed into Geb and Balil, taking both of them down. The impact of all three with the sail was enough to topple everyone else. A moment later, all six Watchers were rolling, bouncing, flailing down the slope in a maelstrom of arms and legs and knives and heavy metal disruptors. Nott heard both disruptors fire in the middle of the turmoil.

  The six boys ended up in separate heaps in the valley at the bottom of the sail. The canvas was still rippling and shifting, adding to the dizziness of the long roll. When he could finally see straight, Nott spied Quin fifty yards away, running for the neighboring sail.

  “She’s getting away!” yelled Wilkin.

  Geb rose up, the disruptor hanging crookedly across his chest. He looked furious.

  Someone was screaming. It was Jacob, the skinny half-trained Watcher who wore glasses. He convulsed on the canvas, a storm of disruptor sparks about his head and chest. Sounds of animal agony came out as he beat his own head, then scratched helplessly at the sail beneath him. Nearby, his baby partner, Matthew, was staring with an open mouth.

  “Everybody up!” ordered Geb. “Go!”

  The Watchers—all except Jacob, of course—scrambled after Quin. Geb paused long enough to plunge a knife into Jacob’s chest.