Disruptor

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  And the Young Dread was teaching them.

  She had a practice dummy set up, and the children—no, they were apprentice Seekers now, she reminded herself—stood in a semicircle facing it. The youngest were only four or five years old, several were around ten, but most were in their early teens.

  “You will practice this,” she told them.

  She addressed herself to the dummy, performing a series of blows to its head and body, making the motions slowly so that the apprentices could follow.

  “Do you understand?”

  The apprentices nodded, all except the very smallest, who were staring at her with open mouths. Their swords were no longer than Maud’s forearm.

  “You will begin slowly, but you will practice until you become faster,” she explained.

  She attacked the dummy again and again, going through the pattern of blows more rapidly each time.

  “That’s fast,” whispered one of the older girls.

  “It is faster,” the Young Dread corrected, “but not fast. Fast looks like this.”

  She turned to the dummy, let time stretch out around her, and hit it with blows she knew the children would hardly be able to see. Then she did it again, faster.

  When she let her arms fall to her sides and allowed time to snap back to its normal pace, the apprentices were gazing at her, wide-eyed. The dummy tottered and fell to the floor. It was close to indestructible, but one of its arms had fallen off, and its head was loose, lolling about on the mat like the head of a drunken man’s.

  “Dear God,” one of the older boys said.

  The smallest child, a girl of four, burst into tears, and she ran to the Young Dread in terror. Maud looked up from the tiny apprentice to find John watching her, unable to conceal his amusement.

  She gently peeled the little girl off her legs, righted the dummy, and drew forward Kaspar, the four-year-old boy from the boar Seekers.

  “You show her, Kaspar,” instructed the Young Dread.

  Kaspar jumped at the dummy. As the little girl watched, he made a good show of following Maud’s motions. The Young Dread had noticed Kaspar already beginning to change his sense of time. A few of his strikes against the dummy were fast enough to elicit admiration from the older children.

  Late that night, as she lay on the bed that was far too soft, looking out the window of her cabin at the starry sky marching away aft of the airship, Maud thought about the smallest children. She wondered why the grip of their hands carried such a different feeling than that of her own grip on the hilt of a whipsword or the grip of a combatant trying to hold you and break you. Something about the children themselves imbued their touch with an entirely different quality.

  John woke in the middle of the night, unsure of what had roused him. The hum of Traveler’s engines was a comforting sound that recalled nights, long ago, when his mother had lived on the airship with him. The ceiling of his bedroom was a pale blue from the faint glow of the night sky. The room was still.

  He was startled when he saw the figure sitting atop the covers at the foot of his bed.

  “Maud?”

  She was so motionless, she might have been a store-window mannequin, except no mannequin’s eyes were ever that ancient. She wore a loose shift as a nightgown, a garment that had been stocked on Traveler but that looked, on her, as though it had come from an ancient wardrobe. Her light brown hair, which was longer than when he’d first met her, reached almost to the crook of her elbows, and it was blue gray in the starlight. John sat up and averted his eyes. It made him uncomfortable to see her beauty out in the open like this.

  She said, “Being in the world is changing me. I had lost the sense of what it is to be a person.” Her voice had become softer in the last month, but it still made John think of the cold water beneath the earth that could, over thousands of years, cut a path through stone.

  “Do you feel like a person now?” he asked. There was not one thing about her that reminded him of anyone else.

  “Not quite. But there are things I’d forgotten that I am beginning to remember.”

  The Young Dread’s light eyes were shadowed, but her gaze was penetrating as always. John became intensely aware that he wasn’t wearing a shirt. She’d made him train in almost no clothes countless times, but here, in these civilized surroundings, the lack of cover felt different.

  She was studying her hands, which lay carelessly in her lap. “For the longest time, a touch meant a slap from the Middle Dread, or a blow to the chest, or a blow to the back while we practiced, or a blow to my face to show me I was too slow.” It was hard to believe the Young Dread could ever have been considered too slow. How fast was the Middle Dread, then? “Or, in the worst moments, a touch was a stab with his whipsword, a kick as he left me to die.”

  Absently one of her hands touched her side, where John knew there was a long scar given to her by the Middle. She was looking over John’s shoulder, as if her history were painted on the wall behind him.

  “With my master, the Old Dread, there might be a hand on a shoulder to tell me I’d done something well.” She hesitated. “When I was a little girl, so much more was communicated by touch. My mother held me. My nurse dressed me. I walked arm in arm with the other children when we played in the market square.” Her gaze came back to John, and when it did, he fancied he could see the thoughts marching through her head. “That feeling of closeness with others…is that what it is to be an ordinary person?”

  John moved to the edge of the bed, glanced around his bedroom before answering. This room had once been Catherine’s. She’d been an angry woman when John knew her; the bedtime stories she’d told him blended triumph with revenge. He’d soaked them up and wanted to be just like her.

  “I’m not the best one to ask what it means to be an ordinary person,” he answered her eventually. It was the most truthful response he could give her. He searched for the right words. “Catherine and Maggie didn’t want me to be close to anyone. But there’s something about love. I’ve felt it, and it made me feel more alive than almost anything else.”

  “Love,” Maud said, testing out the word. “You loved Quin.”

  A touch of shame crawled over him, which he shook off. Maud understood him, and there was no need to be ashamed. “I did. I think she loved me too, though she shouldn’t have. But training with you also made me feel alive. I think I loved it”—he smiled—“even when I hated it.”

  The Young Dread moved, bringing herself, in one smooth motion, closer to John on the edge of the bed. From there she studied him with her lioness gaze. “I think I have loved it too, training you. Yet I feel such things only because I’ve been awake in the world so long. Too long. When I’m living as a true Dread, stretching myself out There and coming into the world for only a few days at once, I don’t think like this, I don’t feel like this. Love is a distant memory at most. More often, I don’t think of it and I don’t need it.” She tugged at the ends of her hair in a very human gesture. “I am a Dread. I’m a Dread who must find another to become a Dread with me.”

  “Me,” he said softly. When she broke eye contact, John realized that he’d been holding his breath, and only the fact of her looking away allowed him to inhale.

  “If you wish,” she answered. “But if you don’t, I still must find someone to train. Quin, perhaps.”

  “She would never give up Shinobu.”

  “You may be right. Love, again. But I will find someone. It could be one of the children here on Traveler. Kaspar learns very quickly.”

  John nudged her with his elbow and whispered, “Don’t give up on me yet.”

  “No? You told me you couldn’t trust yourself to be a Dread. Has that changed?”

  John shook his head. “The killing There…I hated it. But I’ve lived in Catherine’s and Maggie’s shadows for so long. I still think like my mother did.”

  “In time, your thoughts will surely change.”

  At this angle, the light through his window painted her cheekbo
nes with a subtle illumination, which made John want to look away again. It was too strange to see her as a girl, sitting next to him on the edge of his bed.

  He asked, “Does being a Dread have to be two people traveling alone through time?” he asked.

  “Not alone. We would be Dreads together.”

  “But it sounds as if we’d be alone. No love, our minds stretched out from resting There until we’re hardly human.”

  Her hand came to his face. Very gently she brushed his cheek with the backs of her fingers; then she slowly took in his physical self, his skin, his hair, his face. All the while John could see the girl inside the Dread. She was trying to come out of her primeval skin and into the room with him.

  “I am human, you know,” she whispered.

  “You are…for now. But you’ve said you’ll change when you go back to being a Dread. And I’d change if I followed you.”

  “When you’ve changed, you won’t mind. You will hear the hum of the universe more clearly.”

  He smiled at that description. “Could a Dread be something different than it was?” he asked her. “The Middle Dread is gone, and the Old Dread left you in charge. Couldn’t you decide what your life should be? Maybe less time spent There, more in the world. As long as you were doing the right things, is there any difference?”

  Maud regarded him in silence, and John wondered if he’d gone too far. Who was he to suggest that she change an ancient tradition so that it might be easier for him to take part?

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  He thought she was going to get up and leave. Instead she dropped herself back to lie on the bed. “Don’t be sorry. Your mother said something like that to me, many years ago.”

  “She did?”

  It was strange when Maud spoke to him about Catherine. The Young Dread had known Catherine when she was a teenager, and though that had been nearly twenty years ago, for Maud almost no time had passed. When she spoke of Catherine, it felt as if she were breathing life into his long-gone mother. He was desperate to know more but anxious about what she might say.

  “Would it bother you to hear about the night she was disrupted?” the Young Dread asked.

  “Maybe. Tell me anyway.”

  He lay down next to Maud, though no part of him touched any part of her. Instead, side by side, they stared up through the window at the stars.

  “I know you were there, under the floor,” she told him.

  They’d spoken of this the first time they’d ever spoken, about how a seven-year-old John had hidden beneath the floor of his mother’s London apartment when Briac Kincaid and the Middle Dread came to get rid of her. They’d dragged Alistair and the Young Dread along with them.

  “How much did you see and hear?” she asked him.

  John took a deep breath and allowed the memory of that night to get close enough to examine. The trick was not to think about it too deeply, because then it would overwhelm him. His mother had arrived at the apartment, already bleeding and badly wounded. She’d helped him hide in a secret spot beneath a bench, and from there he’d seen glimpses of others arriving, and after that the flash of a disruptor gun.

  “I closed my eyes and covered my ears,” he whispered. He remembered the strange, slow voice of the Middle Dread, and the harsher, louder voice of Briac Kincaid. But he couldn’t remember what they’d said—he’d been small and terrified. “But I saw you tying up my mother’s injury.”

  “It bothered me to see her bleeding,” the Young Dread told him. “Catherine was older then than when I had first known her, but she didn’t look much different from how she had as a girl. The Middle Dread had ordered justice against her—she’d tried to trap him into overtly breaking a Seeker law, tried to get proof of him killing Seekers, but she’d failed, and he was furious.

  “Briac had warned the Middle Dread of the trap, and he—Briac—was there to make sure Catherine didn’t survive.” Her hand touched John’s arm on the bed next to her to soften what she was saying. “Briac wanted your mother to help him, but when she wouldn’t, he wanted to get rid of her.” When she went on, it was in a low whisper. “Your mother bargained for your education. They wanted her journal. Before giving it to them, she made Briac agree that he would train you honestly.”

  John had failed to keep the memory at arm’s length. His throat constricted. He remembered the desperation in Catherine’s voice, even though he hadn’t heard her words to her attackers.

  “He didn’t train me honestly.”

  “I imagine not. She tried to bind him into helping you, but he had no intention of obeying Catherine in any way.”

  When the Young Dread said nothing more, John whispered, “Thank you for caring about her on that night.”

  “I didn’t argue or fight with the Middle Dread. I should have.”

  Maud turned onto her side, so that she was facing him. “My old master told me it’s not the clever mind that matters, or the cunning plans. It is the good heart, because a good heart will choose wisely.”

  John thought of his mother lying on the floor of her small apartment in London, a puddle of blood around her, drawing her last breaths before Briac disrupted her. Her thoughts had been of John and of what could have been.

  He faced the Young Dread, only a foot between them in the dimness of his room. “Are you saying what I was saying?” he asked her. “That you can choose what it means to be a Dread as long as your intentions are good?”

  “Perhaps. But for us to change what it means to be a Dread, you would first have to commit yourself.”

  They were both silent for a while, looking at each other. Her hair fell about her shoulders and neck, and the glow of the night sky glinted in her pale brown eyes. The weight of her gaze was like a physical force.

  “How can I live up to you?” he asked her quietly.

  “You are already trying.”

  John leaned forward. Gently, gravely, he touched his lips to hers. The Young Dread did not pull away from him, but neither did she kiss him back.

  When he drew his head away, she was looking at him curiously. Her hand went to her lips as if she could capture the essence of the kiss with her fingertips. John should have felt an awkwardness in this moment, but there was nothing uncomfortable between them.

  “So I have been kissed,” the Young Dread said softly. With a subtle inflection he recognized as humor, she told him, “Let it never be said that I’m not intimate or passionate.”

  John laughed. “Did you enjoy it?”

  She touched her lips again. “If I were to stay in the world much longer, maybe I would enjoy it very much.”

  He wanted to kiss her again, but a thought that had been nagging him for hours, even while he slept, abruptly came clear.

  “When Shinobu attacked Maggie, I thought he’d shown up just to stop her, like we did.” From the ocean, John had seen Maggie hovering in the sky, readying her weapon for another energy burst at Traveler. Shinobu had knocked her over and collapsed the anomaly. “But the more I look back over that moment, the more I think that’s not why he was there. He was limping, did you notice? He could barely stand.” He focused on the brief glimpse he’d had of Shinobu. John had been bobbing in the water, the anomaly dozens of yards above him, but even so, he’d taken in so many details. “Getting to his feet was all he could manage to do, yet he was dead focused on Maggie. And then he collapsed.”

  Maud thought about this and nodded slightly.

  “What if she brought him there and has been using him?” he asked. “She does that, finds a way to control someone…the way she made my grandfather help me. The way she made me help her.” He sat up, filled with the certainty of what he’d seen. “I know what would prove that I’m different, Maud.”

  The Young Dread sat up next to him, waiting for him to explain himself.

  “I hated Shinobu,” he told her. “Maybe I still hate him a little. He was better than I was, and he was the one who deserved Quin’s attention.” He stood, already contemplatin
g a plan of action. “I’m going to find him, and make sure he’s all right.”

  “How will that prove anything about yourself?” she asked.

  John ran his hands through his hair, found his shirt and pulled it on. “Because I really, really don’t want to help him.”

  The Watcher’s boot came down on Shinobu’s arm.

  The bone snapped, again.

  His wrist sagged.

  Shinobu moaned, because of course it hurt. But so many things had hurt for so long that he was starting to feel as if all this were happening to someone else. The focal buzzed around his head, its cool fingers combing through his thoughts. In a way, it was exciting to see his own limbs being damaged.

  She’s breaking me.

  It’s good to break things.

  “That’s enough.” Maggie shooed away the Watcher as he was raising his foot to stamp on Shinobu’s other arm. “One break is enough for today. I know you’re getting the point, hmm?” Her hands shook slightly, as they always did, but Maggie was calm and businesslike, and not unfriendly, as she began to set his newly broken limb.

  She’s cold-blooded.

  Life would be easier if I could be as cold as she is.

  Maggie had dragged him back to Dun Tarm after the mess with the Seekers There. He’d betrayed her, and she had not been pleased.

  Well, that was a vast understatement. The last week had been a haze of aching sleep punctuated by intense pain as Watchers—the ones who had been left safely at Dun Tarm while most of the rest marched through the darkness There and got themselves killed—broke his limbs one after the other, again and again.

  For the first few days, he’d thought she was keeping him alive because killing him swiftly wouldn’t be sufficient punishment. Now he thought maybe she’d grown to like him—or at least grown to like torturing him.

  He watched as she put splints on his broken arm and wrapped a bandage around them. It had become a routine, almost boring.

  She’s breaking me.

  It’s good to break things.

  “Look at your choices,” she said when she’d finished with the bandage. The sympathy in her voice was almost as bad as the torture.