“Maybe when I’m bigger. Now I can remember her inside.” He touched a hand to his chest. “Like you do with my father.”
“Yes, like I do with your father,” Gavin murmured. He did not keep pictures of his dead son Archie around. Archie, who had died before he could marry Catherine, before John was born. Gavin said pictures of his son made it too hard to carry on with life. John understood that now. He too must carry on with his life—and it was going to be a dangerous one, a life that would require his full attention.
Gavin shut the box, hiding the photograph of Catherine from view. But John felt she was still with him, her older sister was still with him, all those who had been tortured and killed were still with him. He had them inside himself.
CHAPTER 26
QUIN
“In the beginning, there was the hum of the universe.”
Shinobu and Quin sat cross-legged on the floor of the practice barn. Alistair had dragged in the old blackboard. He was standing in front of it, looking as much like a teacher as it was possible for a large Scottish warrior to look. He had made a good start by wearing glasses beneath his messy and very red hair. He was, however, also wearing a tight, sleeveless exercise shirt that left bare his enormous arms. Beneath the shirt he had on his teaching trousers, which made an appearance every now and then. They’d been carefully pressed with a crease down the front of each leg, but the effect was ruined somewhat by the fact that Alistair was barefoot.
The big man repeated himself: “In the beginning, there was the hum of the universe.” He looked at his two students. “What does that mean?”
Shinobu’s hand went up.
“Yes, lad?”
“The vibration of all things,” said Shinobu.
Quin put her hand up.
“Yes, lass?”
“All matter in the universe vibrates,” Quin said. “Atoms, electrons, even smaller things.”
“Aye. Correct, both.” Alistair uncrossed his massive arms, picked up a piece of chalk, and began to draw an atom. He pressed too hard and broke the chalk twice before he’d finished the diagram. Quin smiled.
“Don’t laugh at me, child,” he said good-naturedly. “You’ll make me feel small, won’t you? Now. What is a hum but a vibration? When something vibrates, it needs at least two dimensions, does it not? At least up and down and side to side. Do you agree?”
Quin and Shinobu nodded, impressed by the sheer quantity of words coming from Alistair, who usually said as little as possible. Perhaps this lesson was as exciting for him as it was for them—hence his efforts to look scholarly. He turned and drew a diagram of a two-dimensional wave vibration.
Quin caught Shinobu glancing at her. They’d both turned fourteen within the last month, and though they’d been learning to fight for years, Briac had only now given his approval for the two of them to begin this particular instruction with Alistair. It meant he believed they would make it to their oath. Briac believed they were good enough to be Seekers. She smiled at Shinobu, excited for them both.
Alistair cleared his throat. “If you can’t even concentrate on the lesson, Son, maybe you should tell her, eh?”
“What, sir?” Shinobu asked, startled. He looked away from Quin quickly.
As Quin watched, Shinobu’s cheeks flushed bright red, and he seemed to shrink in upon himself. She guessed that his father had mentally caught him daydreaming about one of the many girls he knew down in Corrickmore. That would explain the absent way he’d been staring at her for the last few minutes—his mind had been wandering. He was so good-looking, it was no surprise those girls were after him. To give Shinobu time to recover, Quin raised her hand.
“How do you read minds, sir? And why can’t I?”
“How I read minds: not at all,” Alistair replied. “My son’s face had his thoughts written on it clear. No mind reading required.” He removed his glasses and carefully cleaned their rims with the hem of his tank top, giving his face a professorial expression as he did so. “Why can’t you read minds? The answer is, maybe you can.”
“I really can’t, sir.”
“Could be you can, girl, but there’s no telling if you will. It might happen of a sudden, at any point before you’re grown, when you’re training your mind as we are.” He put his glasses back on, and Quin realized there were no lenses in them—they were purely for show. “Once you’re an adult, you’ll know whether you can or not. I can’t. Your mother, Fiona, had it come upon her all at once when she was a girl. Overnight, she could read a mind like she was reading a book. But I think not so much anymore.”
“She still does, sir,” Quin offered. “Mostly when I’m thinking things I don’t want her to know.”
“Ah, of course. Now, if my son’s cheeks have stopped burning, we can continue the lesson. Tell me—could something vibrate in three dimensions?” They both quickly agreed that this was so. “How about four?”
Shinobu raised his hand.
“Ah, lad, you know this one. What is the fourth dimension?”
“Time, sir,” he answered. They had learned this before, of course, but its relevance was not yet clear.
“Correct. Master MacBain gets a lollipop after class. Which he is welcome to share if he likes.” Here he glanced knowingly at Quin, and Shinobu looked uncomfortable again.
Alistair pushed on. He drew a three-dimensional cube on the blackboard, then a long arrow beneath it. “Time. Any vibration happens through time. But there is a very strange thing in the universe—”
“Stranger than a man wearing a tank top with dress trousers, sir?” Shinobu asked.
Quin stopped herself from smiling. Since Shinobu’s mother had died, Alistair had been both father and mother to him, and he gave Shinobu plenty of room to fool around. But whether Alistair would put up with it during a lesson was never certain.
Fortunately, Alistair smiled and gave a very large sigh. “Have you no respect? This is my formal tank top, isn’t it? Now, please. There is a strange thing in the universe. The vibrations of atoms and electrons and even smaller particles dinnae quite add up. There is something wrong with them, isn’t there? Until we understand that they are vibrating in more dimensions than those we see around us.”
Quin’s heart beat faster with anticipation. Alistair was going to tell them something important. She could feel it.
“There are the three dimensions we see, and the one we feel—time. But there are more. Curled up within the smallest vibrations of the universe, there are other dimensions. These slide through our own dimensions like movable, interlocking threads.”
He turned back to the chalkboard and drew something like threads woven together into a piece of fabric. “Aye, and time. Here, it moves like this.” He pointed to the long, straight arrow in his earlier diagram. “But there?” He shrugged. “Time might not be so simple. What if you could unfurl those hidden dimensions? What if you could open them up and step into them? What would they feel like? Where would they take you?”
Both students were silent for a bit, staring at Alistair and his simple drawing.
Finally Quin asked, “Can we really do that, sir?”
Alistair set down the chalk and crossed his huge arms over his chest. He smiled.
“That’s all for today.”
PART TWO
HONG KONG
18 Months Later
CHAPTER 27
VICTORIA HARBOR
The tiny submersible moved through the depths of the harbor, photographing everything. It traveled in a zigzag pattern that allowed it, very slowly, to cover every inch of the harbor bottom. Each morning, it would surface to recharge its batteries in the sunlight and transmit its photographs back to shore. Then it would dive again, continuing along the ocean floor.
Somewhere on land, computers examined the pictures it sent, compared them to customers’ requests, and decided if there was anything of interest down there. In a harbor as old as Victoria Harbor, in a city as large as Hong Kong, there was always something of interest un
der the water.
On this day, when the submersible came to the surface and bobbed in the wake of a large ship, it transmitted, among hundreds of thousands of images, a picture of a slender object made of stone and buried almost completely in sand. To the human eye, it was nothing, but enough of the object was visible for a computer to match it with an odd request from someone on the other side of the world.
CHAPTER 28
QUIN
Beneath her, the water was very deep and very cold. Near the bottom, where the sunlight never reached, it was black. Something was down there, and it was moving. She could feel it rising from the darkness and the freezing depths, slowly climbing upward. As it rose, it moved faster, into water that was deep blue, then lighter shades. In a moment, it would break the surface. From there, it would continue rising, up through the rafters of the Bridge, through each of the lower levels, until it was here in the room with her, all around her. She could feel it now, enveloping her and pulling her back toward the ocean, where she would drown.
“We’re leaving!”
Quin woke.
She was lying in a bed near a small, round window. Her eyes moved over the room without recognizing anything. On one wall was a chart of the human body, showing acupuncture points and muscle reflexes. Near the chart was a calendar with a Chinese dragon along the top. There was an open closet with plain, dark clothing hanging in it. Next to the closet was a medical skeleton wearing a headband and a blue smock, and above the skeleton were photographs of people who appeared to be complete strangers.
Quin turned her eyes upward, and the low ceiling came into focus. There was a map pinned there, covering most of the ceiling. In the style of an old etching, it showed a dense city that covered an island and spilled over onto the mainland nearby. It was a map of Hong Kong—she could see the name written in ornate letters across the center.
On the map, between the Kowloon section of the city on the mainland and Hong Kong Island, a large bridge was visible. That’s where I am, she remembered. She was here, in her room, in the house she shared with her mother, on the Transit Bridge, which was a world of its own, running between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island, in the city of Hong Kong, continent of Asia. This was home, and maybe it always had been.
She turned her head to look out the window. Through it, she could see the high buildings across Victoria Harbor, and beneath her, the harbor’s gray water, running away from her with the tide. She felt a little dizzy as she watched the current. It appeared to be morning.
“You were yelling something.”
Her mother was standing in the doorway to Quin’s bedroom. Fiona wore a bright silk dress, her deep red hair tied up in an elaborate coiffure that framed her porcelain skin and blue eyes. She hesitated at the door, looking quite beautiful. After a moment, she took a seat carefully next to Quin on the bed, almost as if worried that her daughter might bite her. Quin noticed that her mother’s motions were sure and graceful—which meant she hadn’t started drinking yet today.
“Are you all right?” Fiona asked. “You were saying something about leaving.”
Quin closed her eyes, still feeling dizzy. The sensation from her dream had a hold on her, something rising and rising …
“Are you feeling all right?” Fiona asked again.
Her mother’s cool hand touched her forehead. The dream disappeared and her dizziness faded. Her own life settled back around her. She opened her eyes.
“There you are,” Fiona said, smiling down at her.
Quin wished her mother would take her hand off her forehead. When had Fiona last washed her hands? All the men Fiona spent time with, and the drugs down in the drug bars, everything her mother touched would be carried on that hand, small pieces of other people and places, now touching Quin. It made her feel ill.
She rolled away from Fiona, closer to the window, causing the hand to slip from her head.
“I’m not diseased, Quin,” Fiona told her quietly.
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.” Her mother stood and moved back to the doorway. “I have an appointment. I’ll be back for dinner. If you’re feeling up to it, maybe we can eat together.” When Quin made no response, Fiona turned and left the room.
She calls them appointments, Quin thought.
“They are appointments,” her mother called as she walked down the stairs. “Just as any businesswoman might have.” A moment later, the bells that hung from the front door rang as Fiona left the house.
Quin closed her eyes and pulled the covers over her head. She lay there for several minutes, but sleep would not return. Anyway, she wasn’t sure she wanted to go back to sleep—that dream might still be waiting.
She could feel the place where her mother had touched her head. Those tiny particles were there, on her skin. They might be invisible, but Quin could feel them.
She threw the covers off and walked to the bathroom, where she spent several minutes washing her face and hands, avoiding, as she always did, the sight of her bare left arm. When she finally felt clean, she pulled on a long-sleeved shirt, tugged it down over her wrists, and then looked into the mirror.
“Quin,” she said, like she was practicing her own name. Her dark hair was long, and her skin was as pale as it had ever been, from spending most of her time in the twilight of the Transit Bridge. Her dark eyes looked older, she thought, than her sixteen years.
From the skeleton in the corner of her bedroom, she retrieved the white headband, which she tied around her head. She took the blue smock from the skeleton as well and slipped into it. The smock and headband marked her as a healer. At sixteen, she was young for the profession, though of course she was still in training. Her eyes ran over the photographs taped to the wall. She recognized them now—her patients. She’d done something good for each of them. She was very lucky to have such a noble calling. In a small way, she was making the world better.
She leaned her forehead against the skeleton’s bony skull and whispered, “I will help someone today. If I am lucky, I will help many people. If I am very lucky, I will—”
A knock on the downstairs door interrupted her morning ritual. Before she was halfway down the stairs, the knock came again, much harder.
“I’m coming!” she called in Chinese.
“Emergency!” said the voice from the other side, also in Chinese. It was one of the few Chinese words Quin knew well. She threw open the door to find an Asian woman around forty years old, carrying a small boy in her arms.
“Emergency,” the woman said again, switching to English this time, after seeing Quin’s Western face.
“What happened?” Quin asked as she took the boy from the woman’s arms and immediately carried him to the back room. There, she laid the child on the treatment table that sat among the high shelves of Chinese herbs and racks of acupuncture needles she was still learning to use.
“It was some kind of drug,” the woman told her. Her accent was nearly impossible to detect, almost as though she spoke English natively. She was panicked, but she spoke clearly—she was not someone who easily lost control. “His older brother—he must have left something in a drawer. Akio found it and swallowed it. I don’t know what it was. Shiva maybe, or even opium …” Shiva was one of the drugs currently sweeping through the bars on the bottom levels of the Bridge.
“You know I’m only a trainee? We should get my teacher, Master Tan.”
“I have already been there,” the woman said. “Master Tan is away this morning. His mother pointed me here.”
Quin could imagine Master Tan’s ancient and tiny mother sending this woman to her. Quin was only three houses away from Master Tan’s, but that did not mean this was the best place for the boy to come. The woman was now studying Quin’s face, as though searching for something else there.
“Please …”
Quin had already begun to examine the boy’s limp body, his eyes, his fingernails, the color of his skin, all the places Master Tan had taught her to lo
ok for telltale signs. It was odd—the boy had his mother’s face, but his hair had a reddish tint. Something she’d seen before, maybe. She quickly inserted three acupuncture needles, at his head, wrist, and ankle.
“How long since he swallowed it?”
“Maybe a half hour,” the woman said.
“I actually think we should go to hospital—” Quin began.
“Quin?”
“Yes?”
The woman nodded to herself. “Quin, Master Tan trusts you. His mother said so. So I trust you, Quin.”
It was strange how the woman kept saying her name, just as Quin had been saying her own name a few minutes before, up in the bathroom. The woman put her hands on Quin’s shoulders.
“Please. It’s too late to go somewhere else. Help him.”
Quin nodded. She concentrated, willing herself to enter a state of heightened observation. Master Tan called this her special gift. He said most healers worked a lifetime to achieve what she could do so naturally. When he had seen her potential, Master Tan, one of the great healers of the Transit Bridge, had taken her on as his student.
Standing over the boy, Quin calmed her breathing. Her mind emptied of everything except the child lying in front of her. Her perceptions began to shift. After a moment, she could see things that lay beneath the level of ordinary sight. She observed bright, copper-colored lines flowing around the boy, his body’s electrical field. All people had such fields around their bodies—the fields could be measured with special instruments. But to see the field as Quin did was remarkable, a sign of intense mental focus. The boy’s bright lines were broken by dark, irregular patches hovering over the organs that had been affected by the toxin.
“He must pass out the poison,” she said. She’d helped Master Tan with dozens of similar cases—there were always problems with drugs on the Bridge—but she had never treated one so young. “Were you able to make him vomit?”