Disruptor

  They both smiled, though John’s smile was not entirely natural. How would Maggie judge him now? They had always been working toward the same goal—their own house restored and others’ torn down—or rather, Maggie had always made sure that John understood that goal and the rules of the game. She would not be pleased to know what he had just done.

  Maggie took over and said warmly, “We’ve found each other now.”

  “Gavin’s dying.” He nodded to the room behind him.

  “Aye, I see that.”

  John glanced down the hallway to where the Young Dread stood. She had retreated, allowing him privacy for his business with his family.

  “How did you get off Traveler? When it crashed, we found everyone—everyone but you. I thought you maybe…” He shook his head, remembering the chaos, the endless emergency vehicles, the ongoing count of everyone pulled from the airship. “I didn’t know what to think.” Hadn’t a small part of him been relieved to think she hadn’t survived?

  “I got off the ship.”

  “But how?” he pressed. The shock of finding her alive was wearing off, replaced by questions. “And where did you go?”

  “That is easier shown than explained. The Middle Dread’s death is an opportunity for us.” John was surprised that she knew the name “Middle Dread” at all, but before he could formulate this thought into a question, Maggie had put a hand on his shoulder and was saying, “Come with me and I’ll show you. We have urgent matters, you and I.”

  “Go where? Maggie—Grandmother,” he whispered, falling back into what he’d called her when he was a child, even though he knew she wasn’t his grandmother, not really. Catherine too had called Maggie “Grandmother,” and yet Maggie hadn’t been Catherine’s grandmother either. Maggie had always told John that their connection was more distant than that, though she loved him as much as anyone could love a grandson. When she said that, he’d always felt the implication: It’s hard to love grandsons, but I will try.

  A group of nurses walked down the hall, and Maggie lowered her voice, drew John near before he could finish his thought. “Do you have it?” she asked. “Do you have it with you?”

  “What?” John asked, confused. She was speaking—indeed had been speaking since the first words out of her mouth—as if they’d been in the middle of a conversation just that morning, as if the two months of silence and fear that she was dead had never happened.

  “Our athame.” Her eyebrows drew down in a familiar look of vexation as though John were being intentionally slow. “The athame with the fox carved into it, John. I saw it in your hands when you ran away from the site of the crash.”

  “You saw me in London? After the crash?”

  “Don’t be a parrot. Where is our family athame?”

  Anger welled up, and before John could control his voice, he was hissing at her, “You’ve been all right since the crash? You saw me? Where have you been, then? Gavin’s been here dying. You could have come to him with his antidote immediately. You could have saved him anytime. Now you show up when it’s too late and act as if it doesn’t matter? Where have you been, Maggie?”

  She took his arm, gently steered him down the hall in the opposite direction from the Young Dread. Nudging open the door to the nearest stairwell, she took John inside.

  “I was elsewhere for a time. I’m often elsewhere, John. I needed a while to set my mind straight, to come back to myself after the shock of the attack on the ship, and to think about the Middle Dread’s death and what he left for us.”

  “What he left for us? What are you talking about? My grandfather’s been dying!”

  “The antidote wouldn’t have done much good anyway, John. It was failing. You know that. He needed more and more to have any effectiveness. The poison has run its course and so has your grandfather.”

  She said this with such sympathy, but John wanted to yell. Before he could, Maggie put a placating hand on his arm. Medical personnel were coming up the stairs, so she led him slowly down to the relative privacy of the landing between floors. Irrationally this frightened John; Maggie was bringing him closer to the ward with the boar Seekers in it.

  “Gavin’s been good for us and bad for us for years.” She leaned close to keep her words quiet. “Very bad once he became unstable. Now he’s at the end, and even though it saddens us, there’s nothing we can do. His time has passed.” After the briefest of pauses, she added, “He left you his fortune?”

  John said yes automatically. He felt, as he had so often as a boy, that his own anger was being brushed aside for something more important. With Maggie, there had always been something more important.

  “Then he’s done all that he could for us, hasn’t he? Now, tell me—do you have the athame?”

  Before he could think through the answer, he said, “Yes, I have it.” He had to rein Maggie in, tell her that he was not automatically on her side. But instead, stalling, he opened his jacket and revealed the hilt of the fox athame sticking up from his waistband. “I’ve finished my Seeker training, taken my oath. I have my mother’s journal.”

  Maggie smiled radiantly. “So you’ve done almost everything Catherine wanted.” She kissed John’s cheek as if he were a small child being praised for eating all of his vegetables. “The timing is perfect, John. We have the Middle Dread’s boys. All of them.”

  “How do you—”

  “He used them for petty things, but we can use them to do what Catherine herself wanted.”

  She began down the stairs, as if they would take action immediately and she expected him to follow. When he didn’t, she turned back.

  “What do you mean, ‘what Catherine herself wanted’?” he asked, though he knew exactly what she meant.

  Above him, the stairwell door was ajar. Maud was there, listening.

  His grandmother, or whatever she was to him, looked at him with an equal measure of pleading and displeasure. “Everything you and I have talked about since you were a little boy. When I came back and found the condition of your family, when Catherine was a girl…” She shook her head at the memory. “Other houses plotting against us. We will put things to rights, John. We will become what we were in the beginning, the fox Seekers, the house at the center of the world.”

  Those words were a mantra that had been drummed into John until he’d stopped questioning their meaning. It was why he’d had to train as a Seeker, why he’d had to recover their family’s athame. He still believed in those words, but he wanted to find his path in his own way.

  “How will I do that?” John asked her, knowing what her answer would be but needing to hear her say it.

  “We’re going to find the other Seeker houses, the bears, the boars, the rams, the fanged cats, the horses, you know the list.”

  “What if I’ve already found them? What if I know where they all must be and I don’t want your help—I don’t want you involved at all?”

  “Have you found them, John?” Pleasure and suspicion vied for control of Maggie’s face as she walked back to him. She ignored the last thing he’d said entirely and smoothed his knitted brow. “Don’t trouble yourself. We only kill the houses who’ve harmed us, and not because we enjoy killing.”

  As happened now and then when Maggie spoke, she seemed to shed her years, and a very young woman, alight with passion, looked out of her old eyes. John removed her hand from his forehead, took hold of her frail shoulder.

  “You raised me, Maggie, but I’m going to make my own choices now.”

  Maggie’s smile retreated in a series of baffled stages. A doctor made her way upstairs past them, and John’s grandmother was forced to get very close to him. “I knew your mother,” she hissed. “You were only a small child when she died. I’m leading us to—”

  “What if most of the Seekers you think are against us have been trapped for a long time, Maggie? Not out in the world,” John whispered, voicing the conflict that had been brewing within him. “I believe we have enemies, but all of those houses couldn’t hav
e been doing all the things you told me they’ve been doing. Were you even there to see?”

  Her face twisted and transformed. “I didn’t have to be there to understand what was done. You’ve seen the photographs, John! Men, women, children.”

  “I’ve seen photographs of dead people. I haven’t seen pictures of who killed them,” he answered. The memory of Maggie’s pictures of carnage was vivid in his mind. There must be truth behind some of her accusations, but the sense that his grandmother had been manipulating him for all of his life swamped John. “I decide what to do. I’ve seen the missing boar Seekers. They’re here, being cared for, because I decided to bring them. Some of them are children themselves!”

  He and his grandmother stood face to face as the color rose in her cheeks and disgust settled across her features. She pulled her shoulder from his grasp with a feeble, resentful motion. Then she became very still.

  The Young Dread had come silently down the stairs and was standing just above the landing.

  “Stay away from me, unnatural girl,” the old woman said quietly. “I recognize you, from your gait, from your bearing.” Maggie backed away from John and the Young Dread, her voice quavering. “You’re no child of his, no matter what he called you.” She looked venomously at Maud and took a farther, trembling step away. “Or were you trained and bound to the other one, the Middle Dread?”

  Not taking her eyes off the old woman, Maud replied, “I am my own.”

  “You are not your own.”

  The door above them opened, and a large group of hospital staff poured into the stairwell.

  Maggie turned from Maud to John and whispered, “This is who you choose to ally yourself with? I thought you were learning from that harmless Seeker girl. Not this thing.” She gestured at the Young Dread. “You may have no loyalty, but I will still do what’s right, John.”

  When the strangers reached the landing, Maggie turned on her heel and joined them, leaving John and the Young Dread staring after her.

  John was so relieved to pry himself loose from his grandmother that he was blind to the truth, the promise, that flashed across her eyes before she left him. She looked frail as she made her way down the stairs. But she was not.

  They should not have let the old woman go. Within half an hour, Maggie had killed every one of the Seekers they’d rescued, except for the children. She would have killed them too, Maud supposed, but there hadn’t been time.

  John and the Young Dread had been outside the hospital when the sirens began. They’d followed the police up into the ward where the Seekers were being kept. That ward was now a chaos of patients, nurses, and policemen, and Maud and John stood in the middle of it, watching the dead being wheeled out one by one.

  A bystander, his voice clinical with shock, described what he’d seen. “An elderly woman came in. I thought she was a relative. And she—she stabbed them, one after another, like she was chopping up vegetables. Her arm shook, you know, like the knife was heavy, but that didn’t slow her down.” The witness swallowed, touched his throat. “Then she simply walked out when a nurse came, as if she was going on about her business.”

  The Young Dread and John had brought eight boar Seekers to the hospital. Six were dead. Maud caught a glimpse of the two children. They were awake and terrified, a girl of eleven and a boy of four, behind a cordon of police officers at the far end of the ward. The small boy’s dark eyes darted around the room, looking for something—anything—familiar. When had that boy last been awake in the world? A hundred years ago? Five hundred? Perhaps everyone he had known was now gone.

  Eventually the pandemonium began to die down and there was nothing else to do in the hospital. The children wouldn’t be left unguarded again. John’s expression was unreadable as they exited the building. His eyes had retreated deep within himself; something was burning in there, but whether it was anger or a different emotion, Maud could not tell. She guided him into a narrow alley, where they were alone and would be unobserved.

  After a time John’s gaze came back to the world around him. “I told Maggie the boar Seekers were there,” he said. “I was trying to show her I was in control, and I got them killed.”

  The Young Dread recalled the old woman’s twisted face in the stairwell. She could not deny that John was right.

  “What else did I tell her?” he asked. “What other ideas have I given her?”

  Maud reviewed the words she’d overheard while waiting at the top of the stairs. “You told her most Seekers were trapped outside of the world.”

  John licked his upper lip nervously. “I don’t know if she understands about the other dimensions.”

  “She knows about the Old Dread,” Maud told him, replaying the woman’s words in her mind. You’re no child of his, no matter what he called you, Maggie had said; she had clearly been speaking of the Old Dread. “And she knew about the Middle Dread,” Maud added. “She got off Traveler safely before it crashed. How did she accomplish that if not by athame?”

  “If she had an athame all this time, wouldn’t she have given it to me?” John asked. He put a hand to his head, as if the last few minutes were finally overwhelming him. “She killed them on the spur of the moment—because she discovered they were in the hospital, within her reach. She means to kill all the houses that she counts as enemies.”

  “You haven’t told her where they’re hidden. We ourselves have found only the boar Seekers.”

  “But can’t we find the rest, Maud? If we go to the caves of each Seeker house, don’t you think we’ll be able to find them all?”

  The Young Dread had thought this through already and suspected John was right. They had learned the code, and now it was only a matter of locating each cave.

  “Probably,” she admitted.

  “If we can find them,” John asked, “couldn’t Maggie find them too?”

  He buried his face in his hands as a small boy might. When he spoke, his voice was miserable. “Why am I thinking of stopping her? She’s only getting rid of those she has reason to fear. Isn’t that fair?”

  The Young Dread did not answer. John was not in a state to listen to logic.

  “For a moment,” he said, “when I saw those dead Seekers in the hospital, I…” She thought he was going to say I was relieved. But John shook his head, as though changing his mind, and continued, “She’s not giving them a chance.”

  Shinobu had slept the rest of the afternoon and into the evening, as the cellular reconstructors marched through his body. He was dead to the world until Maggie returned to Dun Tarm in a blinding rage.

  “Is anyone ever grateful?” he heard her demanding as he clawed his way back into consciousness. Her voice trembled with both age and fury, and though she was speaking too softly to be accused of yelling, there was no mistaking that she wanted everyone in the fortress to hear her. “The boy owes me so much. Everything. He belongs to my family.”

  From his place up against the wall, Shinobu opened his eyes. The fortress was lit dimly by the remnants of two cooking fires, and in that light, Maggie looked exhausted, her excellent posture flagging. She was waving the black cylindrical weapon at the huddled shapes of Watchers, who were trying to hide themselves. Half of them, like Shinobu, had just woken up. But no one was sleeping now. “Is it wrong to expect loyalty from a boy you raised, whose welfare you put above your own? Do any of you know anything about faithfulness?”

  She turned here and there, trying to catch the eye of any Watcher unlucky enough to be staring right at her, but they were all huddling in the shadows of the broken fortress walls. The effort of brandishing the cylinder further drained her. She let the weapon drop to her side as she caught her breath.

  Shinobu realized that he was still lying on Maggie’s pack. He’d been using it as a pillow all afternoon. When the old woman’s back was turned, as she hunted for a proper victim to berate, he scooted away from it. He didn’t want her to find him and the pack together, now that he’d stolen something from it.

&n
bsp; “What is it?” Maggie was demanding waspishly of someone. She croaked, “Are you asking me for your focal again? After this day I’ve had? For your sake, I hope you aren’t asking me again.” She must be talking to Nott, who could not shut up about his focal.

  The air was getting thick. Shinobu, still sore in every place where it was possible to be sore, pushed himself backward with his elbows, behind a piece of rubble and into deeper shadows as air began to pool in his lungs. Maggie shook the cylinder and pointed it at anything that moved.

  “Are you all running from me? I could have used your help today in London. I’m an old woman who’s never liked killing. I had to do it myself, because you lot are worthless.”

  She sounded ready to pass out, but she clung to the cylinder with manic intensity. Some foolish boy began to speak—Nott again!—and Maggie fired the weapon. Shinobu saw, as he peeked around the block of masonry, Nott’s black-clad form fly through the air and land badly.

  Is the boy incapable of keeping quiet? he wondered.

  The other Watchers were slinking away in every direction, in case their mistress should begin firing indiscriminately at all of them. But she didn’t.

  Instead she was coming for Shinobu. He rolled onto his back and closed his eyes, made himself relax, as if he were genuinely asleep. He heard Maggie stop and retrieve her pack, and continue her approach.

  She stood over him, breathing heavily. When she stepped on his ribs, he winced in pain, and then he feigned grogginess as he opened his eyes.

  “Get up,” she told him, a note of pleading in her voice. “Get all of them up and out by the lake. We’ll practice the rest of the night. Fighting you, fighting each other. I want to see boys who can do as they’re asked.”

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t like to rest a bit?” he asked her. “You look worn out.”

  She smiled wearily. “You all wear me out. But I will be awake tonight, Shinobu.”

  She made a small motion with her left hand so that he would see the controller there. With one press of a button, she could paralyze him again. The memory of his muscles letting him collapse, of his limbs as dead weight, made his heart race. She let her thumb slide across the button, taunting him. “Now!” she snapped.