Disruptor

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  As he skirted the pool, he spotted an object in its shallows—a small black sheet of plastic, six inches by six inches. With a start, he recognized the vid screen he’d stolen from Maggie’s pack at Dun Tarm. He had kept it wrapped in the bandages around his ribs and forgotten about it entirely. It must have come loose when John knocked him into the water. He retrieved the screen from the cold pool, but before he slipped it into a pocket in John’s cloak, he noticed again the name scratched along the edge: Catherine.

  He listened; sharp echoes were entering the amphitheater from the land beyond the cliffs. John was out there, chopping wood.

  Shinobu walked around the edge of the amphitheater bowl until he was standing beneath the eagle carving. Was it residual madness from the focal or just his own imagination that made him think the bird was watching him and welcoming him as a member of its house? Had Alistair been here and planned to bring Shinobu?

  Below the eagle, the hexagonal rock columns ended above the ground in a jagged overhang. Shinobu ducked through the gentle screen of dripping water into a cave-like area between the overhang and the ground. Beneath his feet was a scree of broken basalt leading deep within the cliff.

  He found the silver locket because it stood out against the dark rock, even in the low light of this hidden place. The locket had been set in a small indentation in one of the natural columns, left there to be found. The pendant was large and heavy and ridged with designs, but he could only feel them with his fingers. It was too dark to see them.

  He peered farther into the space, toward what must be the very back of this little grotto. Though the light barely reached into that most secret spot, he knew immediately what he was looking at: there was a dead body back there. Shinobu had been to a place like this before, a small cave in northern Scotland that belonged to the Seeker house of the horse. There had been dead bodies in that cave too.

  The corpse lay in a niche where the basalt columns reached almost to the rocky ground. When Shinobu got close enough to discern details, he saw that the remains had been there a long time—probably longer than Shinobu had been alive, which was exactly how it had been at the other cave.

  He knelt by the cloaked figure, mostly skeleton now, dirty and picked over by the creatures that foraged here in the summer months. The teeth were carved in familiar patterns of athame symbols and packed with soot. This had been one of the Middle Dread’s Watchers. Killed on some excuse and left here to rot. One more of the Middle Dread’s victims.

  Fury at the boy’s presence overtook Shinobu, both because he’d probably been killed by someone he trusted, and because the Middle Dread had defiled this place that should have belonged only to Shinobu’s family. He promised himself that one day soon, when his own body hurt a bit less, he would come back here and bury this stranger properly.

  John had returned. Through the dripping sheet of water, Shinobu watched him dump a pile of cut wood by the fire, and then use it to stoke the flames. John looked up as Shinobu ducked out of the cave and back into sunlight. A moment later, John turned away as if he didn’t wish to intrude on Shinobu’s thoughts.

  In the brighter light, Shinobu examined the locket he’d found. The design was intricate, the central figures obscured by flourishes and scrollwork. It took him a few moments to understand that an eagle and a dragon were intertwined on the pendant’s face.

  He’d wondered if his father had ever been to this place, and here was the answer. An eagle and a dragon. His father the eagle, his mother the dragon. He was certain this locket was Alistair’s, given to him by Mariko, Shinobu’s mother. It was the sort of thing she would have designed. Their two house emblems wrapped around each other, his father and his mother wrapped around each other, though they were forced to spend years apart.

  As Shinobu traced the pattern with his thumb, he was overcome with emotion. He sat heavily on the rocky ground, beset by questions. When had Alistair left the locket? Had he come to this place after Mariko fled from the Scottish estate years ago? Had they hoped to meet here when Alistair got free of Briac Kincaid?

  Shinobu had been blaming John for so many of his own misfortunes. But as he thought of his parents, Shinobu conceded that things had turned bad long before John had made them bad. The Middle Dread had been inciting Seekers to kill each other for generations. They had all been victims.

  When he returned to the fire, Shinobu said to John, gruffly, “I don’t know if I’ll ever trust you.”

  John’s expression conveyed that he hadn’t expected anything else. “Here,” he offered, holding up a camping dish with some sort of stew on it.

  Shinobu took it gratefully and sat by the fire. The food was delicious, and he was ravenous. Between mouthfuls, he asked, “You made this here?”

  John took a seat nearby. “I brought it with me.”

  “Just because I’m eating this doesn’t mean I forgive you,” Shinobu told him. “But it does help.” He swallowed a huge mouthful of stew and said, “You know what else helps? Knowing that Quin doesn’t like you at all anymore.”

  “I thought she was going to kill me the last time we met.”

  “Pity she didn’t.” Shinobu tried to say it seriously, but he could feel his hatred of John leaking away.

  There were a few companionable minutes of silence as Shinobu ate. Then John said, “I might love someone else.”

  Something in the way he said it made Shinobu glance up sharply from his food. “I hope you don’t mean me,” he told John as he shoveled in the last bite of the stew. In spite of everything, they were falling back into the banter of their childhood. “That would be an unexpected twist.”

  John laughed. “No. Have you seen yourself lately? Someone else. I had to leave her to come get you.”

  “I interrupted you with a girl?” The thought delighted him. “The pretty, rich, spoiled boy didn’t get everything he wanted instantly?”

  “I won’t be able to be any of those things if I’m with her,” John muttered. “But…it’s nice to know you think I’m pretty.”

  Shinobu snorted. “She sounds good for you—probably too good for you.” He set down his plate, wishing he could eat several more helpings, but there wasn’t any more. He frowned at John. “Maybe the focal is still addling my mind, but I don’t want to beat your face into the ground just now,” he admitted.

  “Really? Then maybe I can show you something.”

  John lifted up his pack and pulled Shinobu’s focal out. Immediately Shinobu was overcome with the visceral urge to grab it and pull it onto his head. He curled his hands into fists to keep them at his sides.

  “You still want it?” John asked.

  Shinobu didn’t trust himself to answer.

  John hefted the large steel axe they’d found by their campsite in one hand, and he held up the focal in the other. Shinobu looked between them.

  “What do you think about this?” John asked.

  Shinobu hesitated. He realized that John wasn’t offering him the focal at all; he was offering Shinobu his freedom.

  It took a moment for Shinobu to force himself to speak, but when he did, he said, “All right.”

  —

  The focal sat on the ground looking harmless in the last of the day’s light. Shinobu adjusted himself to aim squarely at it. He lifted the axe and felt its weight balance above him.

  He paused only a moment, but in that moment he thought of the peculiar world the focal had shown him—less pain, more fighting skill, and an unending internal battle between his own thoughts and thoughts that pretended to be his own.

  The slightest move would send the axe one way or another, and his own life would follow.

  He brought the blade down onto the focal with full force. It cut deeply into the helmet. A shock ran up the axe handle, and Shinobu dropped it with a yelp.

  The broken focal hissed and spluttered, red sparks of electricity popping out through the cleft he’d made. The axe head was still inside, and fingers of electricity were crawling all over the steel tool
.

  “Look at that,” John said.

  He kicked the axe away from the focal and then picked it up. With another direct hit, he split the focal in half. He yelped just as Shinobu had, when another shock ran up the handle. They both watched as the two halves of the metal helmet sparked back and forth toward each other for nearly a minute before slowly dying out, spitting and crackling until the very end.

  Shinobu cautiously picked up both halves. Inside the body of the helmet, in the thin area between the upper surface and the lower, there was a complicated world like a miniature metal city—whorls and nodes and what could only be described as circuits.

  “What is this thing?” he whispered as he held out one of the halves to John.

  They examined it in silence, before looking up at each other with equally baffled expressions.

  “I thought focals were hundreds of years old,” Shinobu said.

  “They are. My mother’s journal mentions one in the 1500s.”

  Shinobu held up his half of the helmet, angling it so that John might see the interior circuitry.

  “This isn’t from the 1500s.”

  “But our whipswords are? And our athames?” John asked. “Nothing we have fits into the time period in which it was made. That’s why we live apart from the world. It’s the secret knowledge of Seekers.”

  Shinobu nodded. It was the narrative they’d been told as children. It made sense, to a point. “Oh, I have something for you,” he said, remembering. He retrieved the vid screen from the pocket of John’s cloak, which he was still wearing. “I took this from Maggie, thinking I’d give it to Quin. But it’s your mother’s.”

  The sun had set, and John sat alone beneath the basalt wall, with the vid screen in his hands. He ran a finger over the name Catherine that had been scratched into the edge. The screen was made of the sort of indestructible plastic used for emergency-route guidance maps, with the video hard-coded into it. Despite having been carried around in a bag by Maggie, perhaps for years, and recently dropped into water, it sprang to life immediately when he pressed his thumb against the indentation along the top. Catherine had wanted it to last.

  John was caught off guard when an image of his mother’s face appeared suddenly between his hands, looking directly at him. She began speaking at once.

  “John, they’re giving me something for the pain. They said it works slowly, but I don’t know how slowly. I might fall asleep,” the girl on the screen said, looking over her shoulder and then back to the camera.

  She was so young. Catherine was lying on a bed, and as she shifted the camera, John saw that it was a narrow hospital bed with a curtain around it. He could see her arm holding the camera, and it was just as if he were a small boy, lying next to his mother, with her hand resting on his head.

  “Archie’s dead. He was…and I…” Her eyes filled with tears.

  Her face was bruised, and there were streaks of dried blood in her hair and on her arm. John didn’t know what had happened to her before she’d turned the camera on, but whatever it was had happened recently. She closed her eyes, gained control of herself, and opened them again.

  “John. It’s strange to use your name, when you’re not even here yet. But they told me you’re all right. You’re all right.” She smiled with heartbreaking relief.

  She moved the camera. It took John a moment to see that she was touching her large pregnant belly under a hospital gown. That was him in there. The camera rotated back to his mother’s face. She didn’t look much older than John was now, but her eyes were hollow and tortured.

  “I’m calling you John because it’s the most common English name I can think of,” she whispered. “You’re going to stand out for a lot of reasons, but I will keep you as anonymous as I can.

  “I am a target, John, and you will be too.” She closed her eyes, passed a hand across her face. John could see dried blood in the creases of her fingers. “I didn’t really believe Maggie before today. But we are targets. We’ve been targets. We have no one we can trust, except each other. Maybe it’s always been that way.”

  She was not looking into the camera but at some point beyond it. For the first time since she’d begun speaking, he could see in her face and hear in her voice some of the madness he’d known when he was a child.

  “Many of them have been after us since the beginning,” she whispered. “They hate us. They hate us. I will do everything I can for you. I will keep you safe.”

  Her stare came back to the camera. Her voice broke as she said, “Archie was…he was…” A tear ran across the bridge of her nose and down onto the bed. “John, I love him. We were going to be…Maybe it was just a daydream—he thought it was—but it felt like it could be real.”

  A few more tears were running down her face. Her words were more disjointed—the drugs were kicking in—but the madness receded and this was Catherine, speaking sincerely to her son across eighteen years.

  “I thought you would grow up, become a Seeker, and when you did Archie and I would go on…You won’t know what a Dread is for a long while, but it’s someone good, someone just, and I thought we could…Why not?”

  She closed her eyes. When she opened them, she had stopped crying and was staring up at the ceiling.

  “They’ll never let me be, do you see? I will have to claw my way, every inch against them, take what is rightfully ours. John, it’s going to be harder than I ever thought.”

  This was the crazy Catherine again, the mother he’d known, who was vindictive, the Catherine who’d told him never to love, the Catherine who’d become a killer. He was seeing the genesis of that woman right here, as she lay on a hospital bed, with John’s father dead and blood all over her.

  She turned back to the camera. Her words were soft, almost inaudible as she said, “John, Archie loved you so much. I have to say it now, because he’s”—her voice broke—“he’s already fading from me and I want you to know. We both love you.”

  She turned from the camera. There was another voice in the room. Maggie, maybe?

  “Here,” Catherine said to whoever had come in. “Will you keep this?”

  She turned back to the camera and whispered, “Goodbye, John. I’ll meet you soon.”

  Her hand came up and the camera switched off. John waited, in case there was more, but the screen had gone blank, and a few moments later it shut off altogether.

  John discovered that his own cheeks were wet. He looked around, was surprised to find himself still sitting in the basalt amphitheater in Iceland, beneath the night sky. He had been in that hospital room with his mother for a few minutes.

  He wiped his cheeks and watched the video again. He’d lived with Catherine until he was seven, but this was his only glimpse of what she’d been like before she’d really changed. When he pushed the moments of Catherine’s madness aside and listened to what the real Catherine was trying to say, her message was simple. She had wanted to tell him about her love for him, Archie’s love for him, even though he hadn’t been born yet, and her love for Archie, with whom she had been planning her life. That was all.

  When John turned his head up to the sky, he found it lit with waves of green and purple, flowing across the stars. He was seeing the aurora borealis, which looked, to him, like his mother’s soul finding him after all these years apart.

  —

  “I’ve never seen it so bright,” Shinobu said. He was watching the aurora when John returned to the fire.

  “It’s breathtaking.” He was grateful that Shinobu didn’t ask him about the video. He did not want to share any piece of it with anyone else.

  “Is this yours?” Shinobu was looking at the cloak, which he’d spread out by the fire. He’d emptied all of its pockets and laid out the contents in neat piles.

  There were scraps of paper and parchment, basic medical supplies, and dozens of small knives and tiny, intricate metal tools of indefinable use. Separate from those things, Shinobu had made a row of larger items that combined glass and stone in
intriguing ways. Many looked like arcane measuring instruments, a few like weapons. John had glimpsed them before, but mostly the Young Dread had kept them away from him until recently. Now she wanted him to see them; she wanted his help understanding what they were.

  “No, it’s the Young Dread’s cloak,” John told him.

  “Does she know what these things are?”

  “The strange ones? No. She thinks I might be able to help her learn about them—” He stopped himself from adding if I make certain commitments. The Young Dread’s offer to him was for him alone to know.

  Shinobu was looking pointedly at John.

  “What?” John asked.

  Shinobu indicated the objects that looked like weapons. “Should we try to figure out what they do?”

  This was the test.

  Nott sat alone in his own little corner of Dun Tarm, with his new helm on his head. He’d been wearing it constantly since Maggie had given it to him, even through his violent illness after the beer and ice cream. He even slept with it on so that it might color his dreams.

  Now it was dawn, and no one else was awake. It was going to be Nott and Aelred, taking the measure of each other.

  Nott set out the tiny bottle, which was full of fresh milk he’d acquired in the Scottish village. (Maggie hadn’t minded him stealing it. In fact, she’d encouraged him.) He set out his longest knife. Bottle on the left, knife on the right.

  He moved the three large stones to reveal what he’d been hiding between them. Aelred’s tiny cage was there, covered in cloth to keep his little house nice and dark.

  Aelred clicked and squeaked when Nott removed the covering cloth. He was hanging upside down from the top of the cage, his translucent wings wrapped tightly about him, but he unfolded himself in Nott’s presence.

  A little crawling creature, Nott thought. It was a thought from the helm; he recognized that now. But he had wanted the helm’s thoughts, hadn’t he?

  What do I like to do to little crawling creatures?

  It’s obvious.

  He glanced at the knife.