Disruptor

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  Aelred, I told you that you might not like the Nott I chose.

  His hands shook slightly as he opened the small cage door and reached in for the bat. Aelred happily moved his feet onto Nott’s finger, and he clicked again as Nott withdrew him from the cage. When he held Aelred up in front of his eyes, the bat stretched his wings and chirruped.

  Nott laid him on the ground between the milk and the knife. Aelred objected when he was put on the cold ground, but he soon settled down as Nott stroked his head.

  “Aelred,” he whispered. “I was never really the boy who fixed broken wings.”

  He stretched out both of Aelred’s wings to their fullest extent. One wing was fully healed; the other was close. Despite the injuries, the bat had grown several inches since Nott had started taking care of him. The diaphanous wing tissue was thicker and stronger now. Aelred would be quite a flyer soon.

  Nott picked up his knife and very gently traced the lines of Aelred’s wing bones with the tip. He pressed on one of the joints a little harder, and the bat squeaked. Nott licked his lips.

  What do I like to do to little creatures?

  What I’ve done so many times before.

  He recalled hacking off the feet of dozens of rats and watching as they screamed and tried to run.

  He eased the knife blade into the crease where the wing met the bat’s body.

  “Sorry, Aelred.”

  Quin woke curled up in a chair in the corner of her examination room. She’d fallen asleep while waiting for Dex to revive after the healers had finished with him. Now it was afternoon and she found herself faced with an empty room and an empty exam table. Her patient was gone. She jumped to her feet.

  “Dex?” She stuck her head out of the room and called up the stairs. “Dex?” Then she called, tentatively, “Fiona? Are you here?” Quin’s mother had not been on the Transit Bridge when Quin arrived, but Quin kept hoping she would show up. Surely Fiona could not be lost too.

  Quin paused with her foot on the bottom stair. Belatedly she realized she’d seen something strange from the exam room. She went back through the room to the round window in the outer wall. The usual view, of Victoria Harbor and Hong Kong Island, was obstructed by an object in the sky. It took her a moment to credit what she was seeing: an enormous airship was hovering near the Transit Bridge. No, it wasn’t hovering. It was moving steadily, with a kind of relentless grace, in a pattern about the bridge. It was tracing a figure eight over Victoria Harbor, with the bridge at the intersection of its loops.

  “Is that Traveler?” she whispered aloud.

  It was. She’d parachuted onto the top of that airship while it was moving through London, and its shape was burned deeply into her memory.

  Did Traveler’s presence mean John was here? Why? Was he coming to take something else from Quin? What could he want this time?

  She spotted the note then. It had been folded and left on the exam table, exactly where Dex’s head had lain:

  Find me in Shinobu’s perch beneath the bridge.

  She stared at the very modern handwriting. “Shinobu’s perch” could only refer to one location. But how in the world would Dex have known about it?

  Quin pulled on her shoes and left the house, braving the foot traffic on the upper levels. In a few minutes she was retracing a path through the lower levels of the Transit Bridge that she’d once taken at a run, with Shinobu pulling her along as they tried to escape from John. Through seldom-traveled maintenance areas and a passageway almost too narrow to travel she went, and then she worked her way down a long ladder shaft that traversed the interior skin of the Transit Bridge. At last, Quin pulled herself out into daylight among the metal rafters that formed the bridge’s underside.

  She had not been terrified of heights the last time she was here, but that was no longer the case. She kept her chin lifted and her gaze straight ahead as she picked her way along a metal girder. Victoria Harbor lay a hundred and fifty feet below her. At the edge of her vision she caught flashes off the green water as it glinted in the afternoon sun, but she wouldn’t let herself look down.

  She remembered Shinobu walking in front of her the last time—the only time—she’d been here. He’d been wearing the torn and dirty clothing of the Hong Kong drug gangs, his short hair dyed in a pattern of leopard spots.

  How did you know this was here? she’d asked him.

  I jump off things, he’d answered, and I climb around inside them, and sometimes I swim under them. I have lots of hiding places in Hong Kong.

  They hadn’t been in love with each other at that particular moment. In fact, Quin had forgotten his name, just as she’d forgotten almost everything about their childhood together. But she had loved him, of course, without understanding that she did.

  To her left, she could see Traveler looping outward from the bridge, and again she wondered what John was doing here. What kind of trouble had he brought this time?

  A breeze blew through the rafters, ruffling Quin’s hair and daring her to look down, daring her to lose her balance and then her life. Dammit, Dex!

  He was sitting cross-legged on the perch, which was a few sheets of plastic that Shinobu had lashed to the crossbeams to create a crude platform and a private hideaway. Dex’s back was to Quin. He was looking north across the harbor. Her first thought was that he shouldn’t be here. This place was something between her and Shinobu, theirs alone. Her second thought was to wonder again how he could possibly have known about the perch at all.

  Without turning, Dex began to speak. “I was born this year, in a small town in Switzerland,” he said, “though both of my parents were English. I’ve never been to Hong Kong before.”

  Quin turned the words over in her mind, trying to make sense of this information as she came up beside him.

  “What?” she asked, failing.

  Dex turned to her. Quin had to stop herself from taking a step backward. His messy brown curls still hung loosely about his head, the hairdo of a teenager, but his face was entirely changed. During their time together, he’d shifted between a frightened child and a wild, unreliable warrior. Now only the warrior was left, and he was no longer wild but contained, like hot embers in a furnace. He was sitting, but he appeared much taller than he had before, his back straight, his shoulders no longer hunched but broad. His brown robe had concealed his muscular form. Now he wore modern clothing that did not.

  Quin, who prided herself on hardly noticing such things unless they involved Shinobu, was almost agape at how handsome he was. His eyes danced with intelligence. At the same time, she could now clearly see his resemblance to the Middle Dread, a condition that bothered her deeply.

  Reading her thoughts as always, he said, “Do you believe me now that he was my brother?”

  She nodded dumbly, unsure of how she should act around this new version of Dex.

  He indicated the small amount of room left on the perch. “I won’t bite you…or kiss you,” he assured her with a mischievous smile.

  She squeezed herself onto the ledge, pulling up her legs and leaning back against crossed rafters so that she wouldn’t accidentally catch a glimpse of the drop beneath them. She felt young and small next to him.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were scared of heights,” he said. “I came for the view, but I shouldn’t have dragged you here.”

  “How did you know about this place?”

  “I saw it in your mind so many times, whenever you thought of Shinobu,” he explained. “Something important must have happened here.”

  She thought of the afternoon she’d spent in this spot with Shinobu. He’d been withdrawing from opium, and she’d calmed his tremors. They had looked at each other differently then.

  Quin nodded. “I fell in love here.”

  “He must be quite someone to have won you over so thoroughly, Quilla.”

  Quin found it necessary to turn away from the full force of his attention. He was the same person she’d gotten to know, between bouts of his in
sanity, yet he was also wholly different; it was as though the volume had been turned up on his true essence. She could understand how easily Quilla, whoever she was, must have fallen into his orbit—and he was still calling her Quilla.

  “I’m only teasing you, Quin,” he said kindly. “I know you’re Quin. Not my Quilla.”

  He looked out at the harbor, and Quin followed his gaze. Traveler was making a turn at one end of its figure eight. If Dex noticed the airship, he apparently thought it belonged in the sky here.

  “Do I really look like her?” she asked. “You told me she had red hair and green eyes.”

  “You don’t look much alike, no,” he answered, studying Quin closely, as if for the first time. It was the first time, since he’d come back to himself. Unbidden, the memory came of Dex kissing her, lightly, as she woke up in his presence. But she was not his, and he was not hers.

  Dex leaned back and issued this verdict: “You don’t look much like Quilla, but there’s something about you that is very like her. Quilla was pretty, yes, but she didn’t care nearly as much about herself as she did about others. You’re like that too.”

  “Am I?” Quin could never hear a compliment without recalling the things her father had forced her to do when she’d become a Seeker. It was hard to think of herself as noble. “I haven’t always done the right thing,” she whispered.

  “Neither have I,” Dex answered with disarming sincerity. “But we must try.”

  “We must try,” she agreed.

  “Now,” he said, becoming serious, “we find Shinobu. I promised you we would. We know he’s been with my mother, and if I’m about to face her and those boys as well, there is something I should retrieve.”

  His focal still hung down his back on its strap. He lifted it up.

  “In no-space?” she asked.

  “Some of it will be.” He smiled. “When I began telling you my story, do you remember I said there were different versions of the ending?”

  “I think so.”

  He stood up and offered her his hand. “I meant that I would have to pick the ending. Will you help me?”

  —

  The ghostly world blurred along the sides of the anomaly tunnel, and Quin had the sensation of intense motion; they were tunneling farther through the world than they had on any of their previous trips. When Dex adjusted the medallion, a new view took shape in front of them. They’d stepped into the tunnel from the rafters of the Transit Bridge. Now they were looking down a steep slope at a village nestled against the base of snow-covered mountains.

  There was still a curtain of gray between them and this vista, but the separation was only a gossamer fog. Quin thought she could reach through and touch anything she liked.

  The houses were of dark wood, with steeply pitched roofs, and in their midst was a tiny church with a high steeple. Except for the modern vehicles on the tidy road, Quin could have been looking at a postcard from a hundred years ago.

  “Switzerland,” Dex told her. “I was born here. My mother used to describe the village to me and Matheus at bedtime, though we never got to see it like this.”

  “It’s beautiful,” Quin said.

  “Beautiful, but tame,” Dex mused. “I got to grow up with wolves and bears about. Maybe this would have been terribly boring. And I would have been different.” He looked thoughtfully at the village, said, “Come on, this isn’t the important place.”

  He began walking again, the medallion held in front of him. The view of mountains and village warped and receded, and the world became only streaks of gray light at the edges of Quin’s vision. A new view took shape quite soon. When it did, Quin and Dex were at the edge of the tunnel, high up in the air, peering down at a sprawling complex of buildings, some of which were enormous and oddly shaped.

  “What is this place?” Quin asked.

  “Did you know there’s a theory that the universe has more than the dimensions we normally see around us?” Dex asked her.

  Quin laughed, thinking he was making a joke. That was, of course, the basis of her Seeker training and the use of the athame. “I did know that. I believe our Seeker tools are built on that theory.”

  Dex cocked an eyebrow at her. “Well—the chicken and the egg. But I’m not talking about Seekers. I’m talking about people right here.” With a sweep of his hand he indicated the complex below them. “What’s the word? Physicists. I used to have trouble saying it, but my father made sure I could pronounce it correctly. Physicists believe there are hidden dimensions coiled up tightly at every point in space. And among all of the physicists there’s one who believes that, with the right key, you could unlock those hidden dimensions, unfurl them, even enter them.”

  He walked forward, adjusting his medallion, and their vantage point shifted dramatically. They had dropped much closer and were looking at one building in particular. It stood less than a full story aboveground but gave the impression that it was vast beneath the surface.

  “They’ve already begun to test their theories for accessing those dimensions,” he said. “It must be happening right now. And there will be strange side effects. Before they have the machines calibrated correctly, portions of the lab will warp or even disappear, and once, they worked for a day and a night straight, and when they left the lab, they discovered that only a few minutes had passed.”

  “They’d accessed no-space?” Quin asked, noting the way his tenses danced around as he spoke. As always, it was difficult to pin his story down in time.

  “Yes, they’d accessed no-space.”

  “Dex, what—”

  “What does this have to do with me?” he asked. “It’s why we began our family trip.”

  Matheus and Desmond’s father was called James, a common name, though his family knew he was not a common sort of fellow but an Important Scientist. They had built their lives around that idea.

  One evening, James came home from his place of work with news that he’d gotten special permission to show them his lab on a Sunday. Matheus was four years old and unbearably excited by the prospect. He’d been to his father’s lab before, but only the outer section, where tours were allowed to go. He’d never seen the inner lab, which was, his father had told him so many times, where all the wonders were.

  James’s wife, Maggie, was somewhat less enthusiastic. She knew that her husband and his colleagues had been running into difficulties for months. There had been a movement to shut down James’s lab in particular as not being run in the public good. The truth was that James had been acting oddly for weeks—not frighteningly odd, but cheerful and optimistic, when Maggie guessed there was little reason to be so.

  On the Sunday when they set out to visit the lab, she had a suspicion that her husband was about to be fired and was taking his sons to see the place because it was the last time that would be possible. The wistful looks he cast in his outer lab, as they passed through, tended to confirm her suspicions. He’s fired for sure, she thought. Why doesn’t he simply tell me?

  With baby Desmond strapped to his mother’s chest and little Matheus holding his father by the hand, they went through a security door to the inner lab. This inner lab was enormous. Matheus would later remember how their footsteps had echoed loudly as they walked across the dimly lit floor of the circular space, where looming machines were ranged along the walls, mechanical monsters waiting in the shadows.

  Near the center of the room was a series of paired upright bars, taller than a man, arrayed in such a way that they formed a sort of short passage.

  James showed his wife and son around, naming the equipment for them and describing the functions of everything in too much technical detail. After a while, as if it had just occurred to him, he asked, “Would you like to see how it works?”

  “You mean turn it on?” Maggie asked.

  Unconsciously she took a step back and put an arm around baby Desmond. He’d fallen asleep and was snoring—or at least, that’s the way Matheus would later describe things to his younger brot
her.

  “It’s perfectly all right,” James assured his wife. “Turning it on does nothing dangerous. There’s nothing dangerous in this lab.”

  He spoke so calmly that Maggie was reassured. She would always remember that—he’d used that tone of voice to soothe her, even though he’d been lying to her face and peculiar things had been happening in the lab for months. It was a breach of trust she could never forgive.

  “Come here, Matheus,” James said. “You will have to help me.”

  “I help?” Matheus asked with what some might have called a charming childhood lisp, which endeared him to adults, even when he was stunning squirrels with rocks and skinning them while they were still alive.

  “There’s something we have to do first,” James told his son conspiratorially.

  Maggie did not grow alarmed until her husband had wheeled a ladder into place, climbed it with Matheus, and allowed the boy to use a can of black spray paint to destroy a camera mounted near the ceiling.

  “What are you doing?” Maggie demanded, feeling the first true stab of panic that day. It would not be her last. Matheus, on the other hand, was delighted, because destruction always delighted him.

  “It’s all right, Maggie. I’m letting the boy have a little fun.” James spoke with that same assured calm; he was the scientist and she was not.

  “Again!” cried Matheus.

  “Yes, again,” James told his son.

  “Stop it! James!” Maggie said as she watched her husband wheel the ladder to the other side of the room. She wasn’t sure whether she should try to block him or retreat toward the door with the baby.

  James was already directing Matheus to take out the second camera. Maggie was at the bottom of the ladder when James came down. She didn’t want to show Matheus how upset she was, but it was hard to keep the anger from her voice.

  “What are you doing?” she hissed.

  James moved her aside as if she were an inconvenient piece of furniture, and walked to a bank of controls. When he flipped on the power, the whole room began to hum.