Disruptor

by Arwen Elys Dayton

She took his face in her hands and kissed him gently. “Shinobu, promise me one thing—no more focals.”

  “No more focals! I destroyed mine. Would you like me to track down the rest and destroy all of them? I’ll do it. I could make the world focal-free.”

  She smiled. “We’ll see.”

  His face darkened, and she could see that he was wrestling with something unpleasant. As if it were an admission of a terrible secret, he told her, “That big fellow took me to you. That’s how I found you. It wasn’t, you know, all my own doing. He helped. A lot.”

  “Dex?”

  “Yes, him.” He said this with much the same tone Dex had used when referring to Shinobu—thinly concealed distaste. “He told me he was the one who took you back to the world when I left you There.”

  “He did.” She thought about her days with Dex, the nights practicing in the castle ward, the strange places he had shown her. She was different now for having known him. “I’ll have to tell you about my time with him.”

  “Will you?” Shinobu was watching her closely, a pained look on his face.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.

  He swallowed. “Quin, you don’t, you don’t…I mean, do you…?”

  Quin tried not to laugh at his tortured expression. “Do I love him? Is that what you mean to ask?”

  Shinobu’s jaw set. He was a prisoner waiting for his sentence. He muttered, “I know he saved you. And he’s really tall. I think he’s not horrible to look at—if you like tall, handsome warrior types.”

  “I do like those types,” Quin said, running her hand through his hair and smiling at him, because he could have been describing himself. Shinobu was staring at her as though his life depended on each word she said. “Half the time I was with Dex, he mistook me for his wife and thought we were in love.”

  “What?” Shinobu was halfway to his feet. She pulled him back down.

  “But I reminded him that I was Quin Kincaid and my heart was already taken.”

  “So nothing…?” She could almost see the image in his head, of her and Dex alone, somewhere dark and private.

  “Nothing,” she told him. “I’m afraid you’re stuck with me.”

  Shinobu’s relief was so dramatic that Quin burst out laughing. She’d never seen him like this, and it charmed her.

  “I made you jealous.”

  “I was going to fight him to the death,” Shinobu told her. “Wipe that handsome smile off his face. Show him who’s—”

  She pulled him to her and kissed him, but a moment later she was laughing again at the look on his face. She kissed him longer, then asked, “Still jealous?”

  “A little,” he whispered. “Kiss me more.”

  He drew her to him, but they were interrupted by a gentle knock on the door. Fiona Kincaid stuck her head into the hospital room.

  “Mother!” Quin said, delighted to see Fiona there and well. “Where were you? I was so worried you were in the house or somewhere else on the bridge when—”

  “I wasn’t on the bridge,” Fiona reassured her. She crossed the room and kissed her daughter’s forehead, perched herself on the edge of the bed. “I was with Mariko.”

  “Shinobu’s mother?” she asked, confused. She hadn’t known that Fiona and Mariko knew anything of each other in present day.

  Fiona was nodding.

  “Our mothers have had an adventure in our absence,” Shinobu explained. “They found their way to Briac and…well, I’ll let her tell you herself.”

  He got to his feet, stretched his bruised arms, and slipped out of the room, leaving them alone for a while. Quin lay back to listen as Fiona recounted a wild tale of joining forces with Mariko MacBain. Together they’d located Quin’s father, who was still in the mental hospital outside London, barely coherent since he’d been partially disrupted during the fight on Traveler. With patience and, perhaps, a certain single-mindedness, the two mothers had wrung from Briac the names of other Seekers still alive in the world who had been accomplices of the Middle Dread. Fiona and Mariko had spent the last weeks tracking those few traitors down.

  “You killed them?” Quin asked. She was ready to believe anything at the moment.

  “No,” Fiona scoffed. “That wouldn’t have been our place. I’m not a killer, and none of them had athames. They were all fallen into a bad state, or the Middle Dread wouldn’t have let them live. Mariko and I merely told them we knew the ways they had broken Seeker laws and they should stay away from other Seekers—you in particular—or we would give their names to the Young Dread and let her determine their fates. I don’t think we’ll be seeing any of them again.”

  It was a fitting resolution, Quin decided, and one that seemed to please her mother.

  She remembered all the years Fiona had been cowed and terrified in Briac’s presence, and the years of her using alcohol to stay numb. Her mother looked, Quin thought, more beautiful than ever, as if her true self had finally been allowed to come to the surface.

  “And what about Briac’s future?” Quin asked. She was reluctant to speak about her father, but she sensed that Fiona wanted to tell her about him.

  Fiona cleared her throat. “After a great deal of thought,” she said, looking uncomfortable, “we decided to leave your father in the mental hospital. He can’t be trusted out in the world. Besides, he’s half-disrupted. A permanent madman. Well—he was always a bit mad, wasn’t he? But he’s an obvious madman now. The only other option would be the Seeker way—to kill him and put him out of his misery.”

  “That might be more kind,” Quin offered. She was thinking of Briac in a madhouse for all of his life.

  “It would be more kind,” Fiona said, an edge in her voice. “And when the years he kept Alistair and Mariko apart, and the years he trained you and Shinobu to kill people—when those years have been repaid, we may put him out of his misery. But not until then.”

  Quin had fixed Dex by gathering five master healers to work on him at once. Dex hadn’t been disrupted in the ordinary sense; he’d been the victim of an early version of the weapon, with different effects. Still, five masters might be able to help Briac. But when she imagined curing her father, it didn’t feel right. She had too many memories of what he’d been like.

  After a moment’s reflection, she accepted Fiona’s judgment in this matter. Let Briac stay where he was.

  —

  When Fiona had left, Shinobu returned, one hand behind his back and a mischievous quirk to one eyebrow.

  “What have you got?” she asked.

  “A present.”

  With a flourish, he presented her with an athame and lightning rod. On the pommel of the athame was a small carving of a ram.

  “How…?” she asked.

  “Do you remember a little Watcher called Nott?”

  “The one who attacked us in the hospital in London?”

  “And in several other places,” Shinobu said. “He brought it to me as a sort of peace offering. I also got the dragon athame during the fight on the bridge. So you and I are Seekers now, there’s no getting around it.”

  Quin was speechless. She was holding the ram athame, gone from her family for generations and now recovered. Not just recovered but lying in her own hands.

  Shinobu took her hand in his and said, solemnly, “I’ve brought you your athame, but I expect a favor in return.”

  “Anything,” she told him.

  “Try not to die again.”

  “I will make every attempt not to,” she promised.

  Quin climbed the old steps by flashlight, her footfalls echoing into the cavern beneath her. At the top of the stairs, she pulled the trapdoor down, tossed her heavy bag through, and crawled up after it into the hidden passage at the base of the castle ruins.

  In that muted space of ancient stone and close air, she walked past the murals of all nine Seeker houses. Some of those houses were gone now, destroyed entirely by Maggie. Others were rebuilding themselves. This passage, whatever it had been originally
, was now a shrine to the things that had been.

  She walked to the far end and stood in front of the last mural. James, Maggie, Desmond, and Matheus looked out at her, unseeing. Dark and light, combined in one family that had set the world of Seekers in motion.

  Quin took the focal and disruptor out of her pack and set them on the floor, arranging the focal beneath Desmond and the disruptor beneath Matheus, in such a way that they mirrored the painted focal and disruptor on the wall. Both objects had been damaged into uselessness in the Transit Bridge fight.

  She gazed at Dex’s likeness and thought about the real Dex, crazy for a time but good nonetheless. Though it felt childish, she spoke out loud to his image.

  “We’ve gotten rid of most of the disruptors. Well, most were crushed beneath the ruins of the Transit Bridge. The few that are left are sometimes used for training, but usually we keep them locked up.”

  Her voice came back to her in a dull echo. It felt as though she were speaking not just to Dex, wherever he had gone, but to the castle itself, to the ancient heart of Seeker-hood.

  “And the focals…there are only a few of those left as well. We use them now and then—carefully.”

  Quin paused, looking down at the helmet and weapon on the dusty floor. Why had she brought them here? As a tribute, she realized.

  “I want you to know that we have dedicated our lives to being true Seekers, in the Old Dread’s sense of the word.”

  She regarded Dex’s painted face and the face of the Old Dread, who was not old in this painting but a man in the prime of his life.

  “After the bridge, some Seekers went off into the world, just as you two did, to live their lives in a more ordinary way. The ones who wanted to continue came to the estate, and we’ve started over. The athames we have left are for common use. No one acts alone; we are all brothers and sisters, regardless of house.”

  She touched Dex’s painted hand and remembered his real hand clutching his medallion on the bridge, destroying all the athames in its path as he tried to remove his family’s influence from the world.

  “Dex, I think you and your father regretted your lives, regretted creating Seekers and our tools. But I hope not. We are keeping the athames among good hearts, and we will try very hard to choose wisely.”

  The focal and disruptor sat on the floor, a shrine to the people who had made them. The faces in the mural stared out at her blankly. It was up to Quin to decide if anyone might have heard her.

  —

  When Quin emerged from the castle ruins, she walked back to the heart of the estate. The day was fine, and apprentices were being instructed out in the open, among the trees at the edge of the forest, or in the commons.

  There was Kaspar, seven years old now, demonstrating his blinding speed to the older apprentices.

  “Very good, Kaspar. Again!” called Mariko MacBain, who had returned to the estate and was now a teacher.

  Mariko stood at one end of a clearing, a commanding presence despite her slight form. She wore a black training robe, and her hair was in an elaborate bun at the crown of her head, a Samurai warrior with her jewel-encrusted whipsword at her side.

  “Who is next? Akio!” Mariko ordered, calling out Shinobu’s younger brother to follow Kaspar. “We use swords this time!”

  Mariko inclined her head in greeting as Quin passed, and Quin did the same.

  There were newly built classrooms at the edge of the commons, with large windows facing the meadow. Fiona was inside one of the rooms, with a class of older children who stood completely silent, facing each other across the room. When apprentices developed the ability to read another’s thoughts, they came to Fiona for further instruction. Quin smiled at the sight of her mother, useful and happy.

  Inside the other room was a class of younger apprentices receiving instruction in grammar. Nott sat at the back, much larger than anyone else in the class, clutching a pencil as if it were a butcher knife, his tongue firmly planted at the side of his mouth, working desperately to learn his letters. His front teeth showed between his lips; they had, at last, been scrubbed clean of soot, and even seen to by a dentist.

  Quin could not help laughing at the former Watcher’s intense concentration and the trail of broken pencils littering the floor around his desk. She doubted Nott would ever be much of a scholar—he had taken this particular class three times already—but he was undoubtedly one of the best fighters among the apprentices. And when he wasn’t in class, Nott usually had a train of stray cats and half-trained squirrels and even a pet pig that followed him around the estate, to the delight of the younger children.

  Quin walked on, past the rebuilt dining hall, where later that day all Seekers on the estate would gather to vote on their next assignment. Quin was proposing a rescue of families caught in the midst of a civil war in South America. There were other proposals. With luck, they would be able to do them all.

  She found Shinobu in the center of the meadow. He was on his knees, holding up his hands while Grace, two years old, with flaming red hair, hit and kicked his palms with all the fury a toddler could muster.

  Grace noticed the change in her father’s eyes when he saw Quin. She spun around and ran toward Quin, shouting, “Mama! Mama! Daddy let me hold a knife!”

  Grace leapt into Quin’s arms with wild abandon.

  “A knife!” Quin said with mock distress.

  The little girl held her mother’s face in her hands and said seriously, “But it’s sharp.”

  Quin smiled. “That’s the truth with knives.”

  “And what have you been up to?” Shinobu asked as he kissed her.

  “Only saying a kind of goodbye.”

  He knew where she’d been and didn’t ask anything more.

  They wandered toward the dining hall together. It would be lunchtime soon, and Grace didn’t like to be late for lunch.

  Shinobu put an arm around Quin’s shoulders, pulled her to him. Grace hummed to herself and leaned down from Quin’s hip to let the grass of the commons brush against her hand as they walked.

  Quin was content to know that the future was theirs to choose.

  Dex came into the cool interior of the barn. It was a lofty space, with a glass-paneled roof to let in the sunlight. He stoked the stove at the center of the room with an armful of fresh logs, which began to crackle cheerfully, and then he went over to see what his father was up to.

  The perimeter of the barn was lined with dozens of worktables, sitting end to end, providing James and Desmond almost limitless space to tinker. His father was at a table already, had probably been in the barn since dawn.

  “Dex, there you are,” he said, looking up from his work. As always, he was overjoyed to see his son, and his happiness rubbed off on Dex. “I was thinking we’d walk to the quarry today. The weather looks fine.”

  There was a small stone quarry on the edge of their farm, where they could find the sort of stone James preferred.

  “Yes, of course. I’d like that.”

  “What’s happened?” his father asked. “You have a look.” James might have gotten quite old and given up his former life, but he was as perceptive as ever.

  Dex hesitated. “I felt her talking to me.” He didn’t need to explain who he meant. His father would know that Dex was speaking of the girl who wasn’t Quilla, not really, but who reminded him very much of Quilla.

  “And what did she say?”

  “That everything will turn out all right in the end.” Dex felt a deep sadness as he said the words. For him, for Quilla, everything had not turned out as they’d hoped.

  James put a hand on his son’s shoulder. “Ah, lad, come see this,” he said, shutting the door on questions of philosophy and focusing instead on what was here in front of them. On the table was an elaborate construction of pale stone and metal that reminded Dex of a Victorian birdcage.

  “Have you got it working?” Dex asked.

  James laughed delightedly, and Desmond thought how very youthful his father s
eemed, despite having lived longer than any human could rightly expect. James had begun to recover his energy on the date when his younger self, along with his wife and two small sons, had left the laboratory in Switzerland and begun their long journey through the past. As he had said before, the circle was complete. Everything beyond was a new life.

  “Watch this,” he told Dex.

  James tapped one side of his creation with a small piece of bent copper. The lengths of stone between the connecting lengths of metal began to vibrate one by one, each stone humming a slightly different note, and as they hummed, they spun in place, whirling to the harmonies they were creating. James continued to tap until his birdcage was ringing so loudly, it filled the barn. The song was eerie and lovely and infinite.

  “It’s beautiful,” Dex said.

  And if by chance this creation of his father’s was vibrating in more than the normal dimensions they could see around them, Dex was not going to complain. They weren’t opening up anomalies, they were not changing the world. His father was only acting on his most sacred ambition, to listen to the hum of the universe. Dex could allow him that.

  It was late in the Arctic night, and a driving wind pelted the Apprentice Dread with crystals of ice blown off the surface of the glacier. His hair and cloak were thick with frost. It was very cold, but cold meant little. He did what he must, regardless of discomfort.

  The moon lay beyond heavy clouds, and only a bit of its light found its way down to the glacier. This was enough; his eyes were learning to be as sensitive to light as they needed to be.

  At a hand signal from the Young Dread, he began to run. This was the first time he’d woken in a year, and he found that his body moved with the silent tread he’d been taught by his master. He carried himself along as he perceived time should flow—smoothly, steadily, rhythmically.

  He accelerated to match the pace of the Young Dread as she sprinted up the face of the glacier. It was like flying, the way they moved, so fast the snow did not have a chance to sink beneath their feet.

  A glint in the air. A knife coming at him. He reached without thinking, without pausing, without missing a step. He caught the knife and threw it back.