“We can still prepare. Stop playing with your hair!”
“You’re doing it again!” she told him. She looked over to Brian, who was arranging their gear beneath the parapet.
“What—trying to keep us from being killed?”
“Yelling.”
“It’s noisy up here!”
Without comment, Brian handed a plastic bottle full of brownish-black liquid to Quin. She popped off the top and thrust it at Shinobu.
“Drink!” she ordered. “And not just a few sips this time. I want half of that gone before you say anything else.”
“You want me to vomit all over you in a few minutes, then? I don’t think that’s going to make our landing any easier.”
But he took the bottle and began to drink. He was, he knew, going through opium withdrawal, Shiva withdrawal, and probably a number of other withdrawals as well. Master Tan had brewed an enormous batch of a new and even more dreadful tea to help him overcome the absence of drugs, and Brian had bottles of the stuff stored all around their packs. The taste did not improve with continued drinking, but without it, Shinobu guessed he’d be curled in a ball somewhere, moaning and writhing. Which might, he thought, be better than what they were about to do.
Quin waited patiently as he gulped down half the bottle, then experienced a few minutes of cramping and shaking before his head began to clear.
“Sorry,” he muttered.
The view of London at night was beautiful from where they stood, but he noticed Quin keeping her eyes on things closer at hand. Brian remained hunkered beneath the parapet, avoiding the view entirely. Out of loyalty to their Seeker training, Quin and Shinobu had agreed not to explain to Brian how they were getting to London, and he seemed willing to go along with this arrangement. But since they had blindfolded him and dragged him through the anomaly from Hong Kong, the big Asian had stayed rather quiet. He was now cutting the rocket fuses to size and arranging them carefully by the launching mechanism, muttering to himself. Most of his words were taken away by the wind, but every now and then Shinobu heard words like, “witchcraft” and “insanity.”
“Does he actually know anything about rockets?” Quin asked, nodding in Brian’s direction.
“He knows enough. We used explosives a lot for the big salvage dives.”
“And fireworks?” she asked skeptically.
“They’re similar.”
“You do realize we’re not underwater?”
“We’re not? So we won’t be able to use the inflatable life raft I brought?”
She smiled at that, and he was happy he was no longer snapping at her.
“I’m nervous,” she admitted.
“How about some tea?” He offered her his bottle.
She smiled again. “No, thank you.”
“Try to put your mind on something else as long as you can.”
Quin’s eyes lit up with a sudden thought. “What happened to my horse?”
“Your horse?”
“Yellen. When we … came through to Hong Kong.”
Shinobu shook his head, remembering, as though from a dream, the tangle of arms and legs and saddle and reins they had been when they’d escaped to There after the attack.
“I honestly don’t know,” he told her. “I was worried you were about to die—which you did, by the way. I don’t think Yellen came through with us. But if he did, maybe he’s someone’s backyard pet now. You know what those estates are like along Victoria Peak.”
A thoughtful look came over Quin’s face. Then Brian began tossing them canisters. These they hooked to every spare inch of their harness straps. On Shinobu’s body, extra space was hard to find. He was already carrying rappelling rope and a plasma torch, with its huge fuel canister.
Once they’d managed to get everything attached, Shinobu moved experimentally, discovering that the gear bounced around like mad. It felt as though he were moving about with carpenter’s hammers hanging all over his body. No matter how perfectly they jumped, the landing was going to be painful.
“Need my guidance system, Sea Bass!” Shinobu called.
Brian tossed him a cylinder that looked very similar to the array of fireworks he was preparing. This got attached at Shinobu’s left hip. Then he and Quin pulled on their gloves.
Shinobu lifted himself, with all his heavy gear, up onto the edge of the parapet, where he took a seat, his legs hanging inward toward the roof. Quin followed, keeping her eyes up. The wind was stronger on top of the parapet, but the gusts were coming less frequently now.
Traveler was half a mile away, approaching from the south, its exterior reflecting the lights of the city. They put on their goggles.
When Shinobu had jumped off the Bridge in Hong Kong, he’d remembered what John once said about Traveler being “safe from Seekers.” He’d realized then that the airship must have been designed so an athame couldn’t get you on board. The coordinates they could reach with Quin’s athame were all stationary locations. The dagger could not bring them to a moving point like Traveler, whose coordinates were changing all the time. So he’d formed a plan to arrive by a different route.
“Are you ready?” he asked her.
“You weren’t lying to me, were you,” she asked, “when you said you’ve done this before?”
That was a matter of opinion. Shinobu had jumped off high buildings in Hong Kong many times, but never with so much gear, in such bad weather, or with the intention of hitting a moving target. At this moment, however, he didn’t want to split hairs.
“Of course I’ve done this before. Lots of times.”
Very, very cautiously he stood up sideways on the parapet, facing along its length. The ledge was two feet wide, but Shinobu himself, with everything he was wearing, was wider than that. He found his balance. Then he pulled Quin up, so she was standing in front of him, her back toward him, as she also faced along the length of the parapet. Brian steadied their legs from below.
Shinobu watched her glance down. The building dropped off in a sheer face, plummeting a hundred and ten stories to the ground. Quin chose her footing carefully, edging backward until she was only a few inches away from him. Hooking the rear of her harness to the front of his own with carabiners, he drew her flush up against him.
“Oh, God,” Quin breathed. She had turned her head toward the view, and he watched her eyes sweep the distance from where they stood to the approaching shape of Traveler. The ship was a quarter of a mile away and much, much closer to the ground.
“It’s all right,” he whispered into her ear.
Brian was standing at the parapet by their feet, also watching the ship approach. He hauled the launcher up onto his shoulder and slid the first rocket inside.
“Ready when you are, Barracuda,” he said.
“I don’t think I can do this!” Quin whispered. She reached back and grabbed Shinobu’s hand. He squeezed it tightly in his own. He could feel her shaking beneath all her gear. What they were doing was, he had to admit, completely terrifying. There wasn’t much he could say to change that.
“Quin?” he asked her.
“Yes.”
“Were you trying to kiss me in the basement?”
Her head was turned from him so he could see only part of her cheek and her left ear, but when both blushed deep pink, he knew he’d successfully distracted her for a moment.
Without giving her warning or any more time to worry, Shinobu leapt off the building, pulling her with him.
And in one awful, gut-dropping moment, they were falling, plummeting at a speed that felt far too fast and completely out of control. Quin screamed. Shinobu’s stomach clenched, and his insides tried to climb up his throat as his body told him that they were going to die for sure.
But he had jumped off buildings before. He assumed his free fall position, his body pulling hers into the correct stance beneath his own. Traveler was ahead of them. He could see it clearly. He angled toward it. Wind whipped at their faces, with gusts buffeting them.
“Pull the chute!” Quin yelled.
“Not yet!” he yelled back.
Thousands of windows streaked by in Shinobu’s peripheral vision, skyscrapers blurring past as the huge shape of Traveler heaved closer.
“Pull the chute!” she screamed.
A streak of black tore by on their left, heading straight for Traveler. A moment later, a burst of pink filled their field of view and a boom echoed past them. The first firework had exploded in front of Traveler’s nose.
“Pull the chute!”
“I know what I’m doing!” Shinobu yelled, marveling at his ability to sound so confident when his words were only vaguely true.
The ground was racing up to meet them. They were almost on top of the ship, the pink flashes of the firework and acrid smoke all around them.
“Shinobu!” she screamed.
He pulled the chute.
CHAPTER 56
MAUD
Atop a smaller building, the three Dreads stood watching Traveler’s progress above the busy London streets. Briac Kincaid was with them. He’d insisted it was his right, as the owner of the athame, to accompany them on their quest to get it back. Apparently, Briac did not trust any of the Dreads to fulfill their promise.
He was walking, thanks to whatever the doctors had put into his wound and thanks also to a large quantity of white capsules he had swallowed just before making the jump to London. Privately the Young Dread was glad he’d come. Though Briac’s leg was working better by the hour, he was still severely injured. In this condition, there was every likelihood that he would be killed.
The Young stood by the Old, peering out from beneath her leather helmet at the floating ship in the distance. She wondered what sort of machine could fly like that. Her master had told her, hundreds of years ago, that the world would be different each time she woke up, and yet the transformation she had seen in her last few wakings made all other changes look trivial.
The Dreads spent much of their time on the estate, or following new Seekers on their first assignments, so in her long life, she’d rarely been in a city. She had thought London was big the last time she’d visited, four hundred years ago. Now it must be ten times its former size, a giant forest of metal and glass stretching as far as she could see.
The Old Dread wore his monk’s robe again, but his face still looked strange, bare of its beard. His eyes were following the ship closely, as his fingers made adjustments to the dials on his stone dagger. They had followed Quin’s athame to London, and though she had moved from her entrance point, her ultimate destination was obvious.
From the Dreads’ current location atop a building, they must first go to that place, of course, and from there her master must accurately determine the coordinates of the moving ship. No other athame could bring a Seeker to a moving point, and no man but her master could find his way into something traveling as swiftly as that vessel. The ship had been created, the Young Dread understood, to prevent attacks by Seekers with ordinary athames. Yet whoever had designed the ship hadn’t understood that it could not keep away the Dreads, not when they had her master’s particular athame and his skill in using it.
“I will not kill her, Master,” she told him quietly.
She had moved close to him, while the other two were some distance away.
“I do not think you will kill her,” he agreed.
“It would be unjust,” she whispered.
“As you say.”
“Will we truly give the athame to Briac Kincaid?”
He did not answer immediately, his eyes on the ship in the distance. Traveler was closer, gliding toward them between tall buildings.
“Our promise is to set things to rights,” he told her, after some time had passed. “If that means putting the athame into the proper hand, should we not do that?”
“Who chooses the proper hand?” she asked quietly.
He did not answer her directly, but after a pause he said, “We three Dreads were not meant to be awake all at once. To decide what is just, one at a time should be sufficient—when all have been trained. An athame is a small thing. To give it to someone requires only one hand. Whose hand would that be?”
As Traveler moved closer, the Young waited silently for the Old to answer his own question. Instead he said, “Now is the time. Are you prepared?”
“I am.”
With that, he called Briac and the Middle Dread closer, made a final adjustment to the dials, and struck the athame against its slender lightning rod. As the vibration engulfed them, the Young Dread’s eyes caught movement far above, near a building so high that it was difficult to see the peak from where she stood. Throwing her sight, she focused on two shapes hurtling through the sky toward the floating ship. These shapes were people, a tangle of weapons and limbs.
Then explosions of color filled the night air, pulling her eyes away from the falling figures. Pink bloomed around Traveler’s nose, followed a moment later by blue, then green. Deep, rumbling booms rolled over them. Quin, it seemed, was arriving on the ship with tremendous fanfare.
The Old Dread carved a portal. The Young turned her eyes from the flashes filling the sky and stepped through the humming doorway after him. The Middle came next and then Briac, who pulled his bad leg behind him as he crossed the surging threshold between here and There.
Before the doorway had closed, her master’s fingers flew over the dials of his athame. Then he struck the lightning rod again. With the first anomaly still hovering behind them, he carved a new doorway, which opened onto a hallway and a cross section of flooring. They were looking at the interior of Traveler through a hole that had been cut between floors, without enough room for them to safely enter.
Without hesitation, the Old Dread’s fingers flew over the dials again, making a subtle adjustment. He struck athame and rod together a third time, turned slightly, and carved another portal. This one opened up into the same hallway, which was now directly in front of them. The Young experienced a moment of dizziness as she stared though both anomalies, each showing a slightly different angle of the same space.
Within both was chaos. The interior lights of Traveler were flashing, men were shouting, and bursts of colored light were coming in from overhead.
Drawing their weapons, the three Dreads and Briac Kincaid stepped through the doorway and onto the ship.
CHAPTER 57
QUIN
Shinobu pulled the rip cord, and the parachute yanked itself out of its casing, unfurled above them, and jerked them upward, abruptly slowing their fall. As soon as the chute was open, a gust of wind blew them higher and yanked them violently to the side.
They were going to die. Quin was fairly certain they were going to die. All around them, fireworks were exploding, sending burning embers everywhere. Her trousers were on fire. She tried to hit her legs together to crush out the flames, but a smolder of green firework fuel was eating through the fabric.
Traveler was just below them. Though it had seemed silent from far away, the enormous suspension engines made a thundering roar up close. Shinobu was cursing and yanking on their parachute’s control lines, but the wind was still gusting, so it was almost impossible to steer.
Another firework went off, sending blinding golden squiggles across the known universe. The noise was deafening. Shinobu began cursing more loudly. Quin craned her neck back and saw that a burning stream of golden ash had set fire to the lace braids of his samurai armor. It was also eating a hole through their parachute. They’d been blown far behind Traveler now, and Shinobu was obviously losing control.
“Hold on!” he yelled. “Turn away!”
Quin’s ears filled with the sound of igniting rocket fuel as they were sent into an accelerating spin. He had set off the thruster strapped to his left hip, and it was propelling them crazily toward the floating ship.
She was wrenched almost upside down, and then Shinobu had the thruster in his gloved hand, and he was aiming it behind them. They righted themselves, and suddenl
y they were above Traveler once more, its huge bulk hovering just below them.
“Hold on!” he yelled again as another firework went off.
Quin saw him throw the thruster away. Then he ripped their parachute loose, and they were both free-falling, no backup chute, no hope of recovering if they missed.
For two terrifying seconds, her insides turned to jelly. Then she and Shinobu hit the ship hard and began to roll. What had looked almost flat from above turned out to be a sloping surface. Quin’s hands and feet scrambled for purchase, and the canisters attached to her harness bounced around her body like small anvils. She and Shinobu slid for yards, Quin thinking at any moment they would be at the edge, then falling over. Instead they came to a stop against the fins of the rear suspension engines.
Shinobu was on his knees immediately, pulling Quin up beside him and unhooking the carabiners that connected them.
“Are you all right?” he asked her, looking shell-shocked. It was still windy, and he was almost yelling.
She moved her limbs experimentally, noticing that her landing slide had conveniently put out the fire on her clothing, though much of her trousers had been burned away, revealing the shiny armor beneath. It had kept her skin from being scorched.
“Nothing’s broken,” she said, amazed that she still possessed the power of speech. “You?”
“I might have wet myself. Not sure.”
They both laughed for a moment at the fact that they were alive and intact. Then Shinobu got to work. He located a burrowing piton in one of his pockets and slammed it into the hull. Its sharp metal point pierced Traveler’s skin, then automatically twisted deeper, giving them a solid handhold. They anchored themselves to this with the rappelling ropes and carabiners, as Shinobu had instructed when they were packing their gear back in Hong Kong.
Quin noticed his samurai armor was still smoldering, the embers flaring in the wind. As he adjusted the ropes, she pounded the armor with her fist until the fire died out.
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