Disruptor

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  But she didn’t take it away, and she didn’t drink her beer either. When Maggie noticed where Nott was looking, she asked, “Would you like some beer?”

  He nodded, even though it occurred to him, very late, that she was being much too friendly. Nott had drunk ale as a boy, just like everyone did, but it had been a long while since he’d tasted anything alcoholic, because the Middle Dread had not found alcohol the least bit helpful in training his Watchers.

  Maggie pushed the glass over to him, and Nott took hold of it with sticky hands and drank off half before taking a breath.

  “Do you know if I hurt Traveler’s engines when I fired at it?” she asked him.

  Nott took a deep breath, steadying himself. The beer hit his stomach in a rush, which added to the shivering excitement of the ice cream.

  “They were talking about that for hours,” he told her. “The engines stopped, but after that they started again. The captain wasn’t happy about it. You frightened them.”

  He touched the glass, and when he saw no objection on Maggie’s face, he downed the rest of the beer in three gulps. It was nothing like the ale he used to drink. He could swallow this stuff by the gallon.

  “That was bad luck I couldn’t finish the job. The ship wouldn’t have flown again quickly if I’d fired a second time.” She was speaking to herself in a soft voice and fingering something in her jacket pocket. Nott was curious if she had another strange weapon in there.

  Soon a second beer arrived, and Maggie automatically pushed it toward him. Nott couldn’t believe his luck, and he found that he’d entirely stopped worrying about the old woman’s motives. He pulled over the new glass and drank.

  Maggie let him eat his ice cream and drink his beer for a long while, as she sat in thought. Eventually Nott had difficulty aiming the spoon at his mouth.

  When she broke the silence, it was to ask, “How many Seekers did they rescue? And do you know their houses?”

  Nott nodded, dizzyingly. “Oh yes.”

  He nearly overturned the beer as he tried to make the flat bottom of the glass meet the tabletop properly. “They’ve got’ther houses drawn’n their beds, or on, on their arms.”

  “Tell me.”

  Nott’s mouth wasn’t working right. His words were slipping away and tangling with each other and popping out of him like bubbles, but he continued to forge ahead. He told her everything he could remember about the Seekers and their children who were living on Traveler, and the old woman peered at him all the while and seemed to understand him fine.

  When they got up from the table sometime later, Maggie steered him down the street to a little park, where Nott flopped onto the ground beneath a tree. The athame—the Middle Dread’s athame—was in Maggie’s hands.

  “We’ll wait for you to sober up before we use this, I think. But I have something for you, as promised.” She produced a metal helm from her pack and put it into Nott’s hands. “You can keep this one, Nott. I won’t take it from you again.”

  Nott squinted his eyes to focus. Was she giving him his helm? Disappointment plunged through him when he got the metal helmet properly in view. “ ’Snot mine!” he said, and tried to push it back into her hands. “Won’t feel the same.”

  The slap came so quickly, Nott didn’t realize what had happened until he felt the sting in his cheek. He stared at Maggie, who looked stern. She was holding up a small branch from the tree. That was what she’d hit him with. She pulled Nott’s hair painfully and swatted him again.

  “Your helm is gone,” she croaked. “It was on Shinobu’s head. This one may not be exactly like yours, but it was worn by your old master—my son—many times. You’ll learn to enjoy it.”

  She stuck the helmet onto his head. At once Nott experienced the electric buzz, followed by the cool sensation of the helm’s energy joining with his own thoughts. The beer eased the transition, made him feel as if he were floating gently into the helm’s embrace.

  “ ’Snot so bad, this one,” he said.

  Dex glowed evenly. The torrent of energy that ordinarily poured across and through him was being pulled to every extremity. Five master healers stood around Quin’s examination table, all ten of their hands submerged in the erratic storm around Dex’s body.

  Master Tan, Quin’s teacher and the most famous healer on Hong Kong’s Transit Bridge, stood at Dex’s head. He was slight and graceful, with a face that was nearly unlined despite his age, and eyes as bright as any child’s. Master Tan’s four most trusted colleagues—Masters Zou, Ren, Shi, and Ando—each stood by one of the patient’s limbs. They’d succeeded in pulling copper-colored tributaries off the central current, so that Dex’s body now lay beneath a spider’s web of smaller lines.

  Quin had never seen more than two bridge masters working on one patient. Five was unheard of.

  Master Tan, unaware that this patient was possibly an ancient figure of historical significance to Quin, spoke to Dex in his typical way: “Relax,” he murmured gently. “All that is pulling at you, you may let go of it.”

  Dex had slipped first into a trancelike state, and was now completely unconscious. But Quin herself had been the recipient of Master Tan’s calm words, and she suspected they could reach even the deepest sleeper.

  The five masters had been at it for nearly an hour. They were working much more slowly than Quin had during her failed attempt with Dex. Dispersing his energy by tiny degrees, they had avoided becoming, themselves, embroiled in it.

  Quin sat cross-legged on her counter, watching the procedure as an amateur athlete might watch a championship game. There was very little conversation. The masters needed only brief glances and small gestures of the head to communicate.

  The reversal came without warning. In one moment, Dex’s energy pattern lay about his own body. In the next moment, it appeared to leap out and instantly consume the five master healers. All at once, a single web of shining current flowed out from him through each person who touched him. Master Tan looked to Quin in dismay. Almost immediately, every master showed signs of dizziness.

  Quin leapt down to the floor.

  “Stop, Master Tan. Let go.”

  The others looked to Master Tan, questioning. But he shook his head.

  “I fainted when that happened,” Quin told him urgently. “Let go. We can try again later.”

  He shook his head, merely a twitch to convey his firm decision. “Quin, we’ve gotten the current away from him.” He spoke calmly, though he was having difficulty staying upright. His narrow shoulders were swaying. “All we need is something larger.”

  He nodded at the metal pillar in the corner of the room. This beam ran vertically through Quin’s house and was one of the structural members that joined her home to the framework of the bridge itself.

  Quin understood. This amount of energy required something immense to ground it. She grabbed the copper key to her front door in one hand, and with the other took hold of Master Tan’s wrist. At once she felt the strange, altered pattern of Dex’s energy destroying her own equilibrium. She did not pause to let it overwhelm her this time, but reached immediately for the pillar and touched it with the key. In the moment before the key came in contact with the pillar, a nasty blue spark jumped between the two. Once the metals were joined, the energy streamed off Dex, through the masters, through Quin herself, through the key—now blackened, as Quin’s hand would have been, had she touched the pillar unprotected—and into the vertical metal beam. The bright copper lines became blue streaks of lightning as they discharged into the structure of the bridge.

  The lights of Quin’s house flickered and went out as the storm of energy blew itself away.

  The five healers and Quin collapsed. She succeeded in catching Master Tan before he hit the floor. In his usual unperturbed manner, he blinked up at her as the lights came back on, and said, “That was unexpected.”

  Slowly they got back to their feet, to discover Dex still unmoving on the exam table, his eyes closed. There was no trace of e
nergy at all around his body anymore.

  “Could we have…” Quin began, but she didn’t want to finish the question. She nudged the damaged copper key with one foot, marveling at the strength of the electrical discharge that had traveled through it. Had they pulled all of Dex’s energy away and killed him? Was that possible?

  She reached to feel for his pulse, but Master Tan held her gently back. “Wait a moment,” he instructed, with that same infuriating calm.

  For a time, nothing changed. Then, a flicker. A trickle of copper became visible above Dex’s heart, flowing outward. Quin and the masters watched the trickle grow and spread, an expanding web of gentle current.

  When the web reached his extremities, Dex looked as any other patient might look, ordinary and whole. The damage that had been done, hundreds of years ago, was gone.

  John was awakened by the pleasant sensation of being kicked in the ribs. His eyes flew open in time to see a fist coming at his face. Instinct made him reach up, grab Shinobu’s arm, and pull. Shinobu’s momentum thwarted his attack and sent him tumbling into the remains of their fire.

  John sprang to his feet. It was daytime. The rock walls were lit by early sunlight, but the bowl where they stood was still dark.

  Shinobu flailed in the embers, fighting his way back upright and out of the ashes. His ragged cloak was smoking as he stared balefully at John.

  “You,” he growled.

  He lunged with renewed fury. John turned aside at the last moment, but it wasn’t easy to elude Shinobu a second time. He got hold of John’s shoulders and shoved him.

  “Where’s my focal?”

  John stumbled backward. If the focal was the first thing Shinobu was asking about, John reflected, dodging to stay out of reach, then he’d been right to worry about Shinobu wearing it while he slept. It must have gotten its hooks into Shinobu’s mind, as Maud had warned John it could.

  Shinobu took a swipe at him, but John stayed clear. “I got rid of it,” John said. It was in his pack, in fact, but Shinobu didn’t need to know that.

  “Why would you do that?” Shinobu demanded.

  He threw himself at John, and in a moment they were grappling, Shinobu trying to hurl John to the ground, John trying to stay upright. This was harder than he’d anticipated, because it was very cold here and his arms and legs were stiff. But for his part, Shinobu was hampered by any number of injuries. His face was turning red with the effort.

  “I want the focal!”

  “You’re out of luck.” John was firm.

  Shinobu succeeded in hooking a foot around John’s leg and pulling it out from beneath him. As John fell, he speeded himself up dramatically, rolled out of Shinobu’s reach, and popped back to his feet some distance away.

  “Great, she’s been training you like a Dread,” Shinobu said, glancing from the spot where John had been to where he was now standing. “Were you the most selfish person she could find? Did she say to herself, ‘I’ve searched the entire world, and I can’t find anyone worse, so I’ll train John’?”

  “I never meant for you or Quin—”

  “Shut it!”

  Shinobu rushed at John, landed two punches against his chest. His short red hair stood out from his scalp in uneven clumps, giving the impression that his head was on fire with the anger pouring out of him. John dodged as Shinobu came after him like a boxer dancing toward his opponent.

  “Don’t pretend you care about Quin! You shot her, you almost killed her. You would have killed all of us.”

  Forcing himself to remain calm was a great effort, but John batted away a blow and said, “That wasn’t what I intended.”

  It was the wrong thing to say. Shinobu went after him as if John were a training dummy that needed to be broken into kindling. John tried to simply defend himself, but it quickly became an all-out boxing match.

  “Didn’t intend to hurt anyone?” Shinobu said between punches. “You disrupted my father. He bashed his head on a rock to put an end to himself! Can you imagine a worse way to die?”

  “The disruptor went off by accident,” John told him. He pushed Shinobu away as they circled each other. His face was swelling where Shinobu had struck him, but the pain felt good. John hadn’t waited around to see Alistair die, and he’d tried to avoid thinking about what it must have been like. Why shouldn’t he finally hear about the reality?

  “It was my fault, because I brought the disruptor to the estate,” John admitted, “but I never meant for anyone to fire it. That device your father used to tune his athame, it made our muscles spasm. The disruptor fired by mistake.” He’d wanted to explain this to Shinobu for nearly two years, but Shinobu wasn’t listening.

  “You shot Quin. She came this close to dying,” Shinobu said.

  John didn’t want to hit him anymore. Shinobu was only telling the truth. John had done those things.

  He retreated until he was backed up onto the scree at the edge of the bowl. When he slipped on the scattered stones, Shinobu kicked his leg out from beneath him again.

  “She almost died, John!” He leaned over and aimed a punch at John’s face. “Because you wanted an athame. Because you were greedy.”

  Shinobu struck, but John moved before the blow landed. That last word had finally gotten to him. He’d never done anything out of greed, only a sense of obligation.

  Back on his feet, John demanded, “Greedy?”

  “So greedy!”

  When Shinobu lunged, John grabbed him, and they were wrestling again.

  “You knew Briac hated me, that he never intended to make me a Seeker,” John said as they struggled. “You knew and you were happy, because if I was out of the way, you’d have Quin for yourself. You wanted me to fail!”

  He got a hand free and punched Shinobu in the gut. Shinobu returned with a furious uppercut to John’s jaw that laid him out flat and sent his head spinning. When John was on the ground, Shinobu grabbed his ankle and yanked him closer.

  “Quin found me There and was saving me,” Shinobu hissed. “Even after what I did, she came for me. How could you ever hurt someone so selfless?”

  “What did you do to her?” John asked, honestly curious now. He’d stopped the dizziness with one of Maud’s focusing techniques.

  “Shut up!”

  Shinobu swung a fist to knock him out, but John was done with this fight. He rolled back, got his feet under Shinobu’s chest, and thrust him away. Shinobu stumbled backward painfully, lost his footing, and fell into the deep pool of water that lay at the base of the amphitheater’s walls.

  John saw a flailing mass of limbs and ragged cloak beneath the water, and when Shinobu didn’t surface immediately, he ran to the bank. How injured was he? John pulled his cloak off to dive in, but before he got to the water, Shinobu broke the surface, gasping. He hauled himself up the steep bank, wet and shivering, a redheaded Viking emerging from a northern ocean.

  He glared at John as he limped onto the shore, but the cold water had drained the fight out of him. He stripped off his cloak and began to remove his sopping clothing without a word. Beneath his shirt John saw bruises, old and new, all over his torso. Things had not gone well for Shinobu recently.

  “I did those things to Quin, to your father. Even if I didn’t mean for the worst to happen, I caused it,” John said. “Telling you I’m sorry doesn’t amount to anything, does it? So I’m trying to make amends. Why do you think I took you away from Maggie?”

  Shinobu threw the last of his clothes down onto the rocks, and John tossed him his own cloak. Without looking at John, Shinobu gave him a grudging nod and wrapped the cloak around himself.

  Hours passed before Shinobu stopped shivering. He sat hunched in front of the fire John had built for him, with John’s heavy cloak around his shoulders. He had been by the fire for so long, he’d used up most of the wood, and John had gone off in search of more.

  From time to time, Shinobu lifted his eyes from the flames to study his location. At some point in the distant past, a great flow o
f lava had cooled here and formed tightly packed pillars of basalt. The basalt rose up around him to form an intricately carved natural amphitheater. The arms of the amphitheater reached in nearly a full circle, enclosing a gently sloping bowl in their center. All along the steep walls, water ran inward over the edges in a steady flow, forming not waterfalls so much as vertical streams. These joined up on the rocky ground in the deep, frosty pool that John had thrown Shinobu into. At the low edge of the pool, a small river snaked its way out into the world beyond. Above the pillared walls was a cold blue sky.

  Shinobu was in a place that looked as though it had been created at the dawn of the world, and it belonged to his own family. This fact was made plain by the immense carving of an eagle in full flight halfway up the cliff wall. The uneven surface gave the animal’s beak and claws a fierce aspect. Water trickled across the eagle’s body, and the sun, which now hung near its zenith, glinted off the deeply cut eye, as if the eagle were pinning Shinobu beneath its hunter’s gaze. It was, he thought, one of the most beautiful places he’d ever seen.

  His head was killing him. His arms and legs were, mostly, killing him. But now that his teeth had stopped chattering, he thought maybe he wasn’t going to freeze to death or die of his injuries.

  The chattering had done one good thing—it had kept his mind off the focal. But now he was warm enough for his thoughts to wander, and they went immediately to the metal helmet. He hated it, but only sometimes. It tricked him, but it made everything hurt less—so much less—and in an awful way, the focal turned the world into a more sensible place. Maggie became something other than an old woman who was torturing him. And Quin…Quin…

  Shinobu stood up, pulled John’s cloak more tightly about himself. His bones had been broken and partially mended so many times that he could gauge where he was in the process. The reconstructors were frantically knitting; beneath the pain was the deep itch of tissues repairing themselves.