Disruptor

  When she pulled the vines free of the wall, five painted Seekers were revealed—a man and woman and three children, all cloaked, their eyes blue and green below their hoods, peering out at Quin from centuries ago. Painted above them in a dark red pigment was a ram, the emblem of her own house. She had been told almost nothing about her ancestors. Were these five the first family of ram Seekers?

  There were more paintings along the passage: three Seekers beneath an eagle, Shinobu’s ancestors; four beneath a saber-toothed cat; another four beneath a stag; and so on. The first murals had been near the end of the corridor, where the vines were thick. The farther she went toward the center, however, the fewer the plants and the brighter the pigment. At the midpoint of the passage, the paint had never been touched by sunlight or growing things. The faces there, beneath the bear emblem, were clear and unique, as though they were true portraits of living people.

  The murals ended after the nine Seeker houses had been represented, but Quin continued on. The silence here was heavy, broken only by her footsteps and her breath, and, she fancied, the occasional phantom noise of the ancient rock beneath the castle. She studied the floor and walls as she went, looking for hidden doors like the one she’d come through. Might there be a way to get from the passage up into the higher reaches of the castle ruins? How big was the maze? And how had Dex known about it?

  At the far end of the corridor, where the exit had been bricked up, she found a tenth mural. The vines here were thicker than they’d been at the other end; it took some work to pull them free. But when she’d cleared the wall, she had uncovered a painting unlike the others. Whereas the nine Seeker murals had shown the simple poses of daily life, these four figures were arranged carefully and formally—almost like a royal portrait.

  The man stood with one hand on his hip. In the other hand were two whipswords, one collapsed into its resting, coiled state, the other extended as a sword. He held them up as a king might hold a scepter. The woman sat on a throne. Her hands were cupped in front of her and, strangely, were holding a dark liquid that looked a lot like blood.

  “Why?” Quin whispered as she leaned closer to examine the artwork. A drop of the red liquid had fallen from the woman’s hands and was now forever suspended halfway between her fingers and her lap.

  Above the man and woman was the symbol of the Dreads—three interlocking ovals, like a simplified representation of an atom.

  There were two young men sitting cross-legged beneath the adults. The first held what was obviously a focal on his lap. He looked out at Quin with grave eyes beneath a shock of unruly hair. The second held a disruptor against his chest. He was not looking at Quin but away, his face in profile, his one visible eye partly closed.

  “Desmond and Matheus,” she breathed. “Hello.”

  Here was Dex’s legend, brought to life by an artist centuries ago. She was looking into the deep past of Seekers.

  Quin was startled from her examination by a noise like the creak of stone against stone. She’d been so intent on the mural that she’d forgotten where she was. Holding the flare aloft, she peered down the passage. The noise came again, as if something were shifting in the earth. But when she heard it a third time, she recognized that it was not a creak but a human scream, carried up from deep in the caves below.

  —

  She found Dex in the center of the cavern, lying on his back, clutching the rock floor with both hands as if to stop himself from plunging upward into the ceiling. He’d been in complete darkness while she was gone, and when Quin knelt beside him with the flare, his pupils remained huge. She wasn’t certain he could see anything.

  “Dex? What happened?” When he didn’t move, she took one of his hands into her own and squeezed it. “Dex? Dex?”

  Slowly his pupils contracted, his eyes came into focus. “Quilla?”

  “Well…it’s me,” she answered. “Are you hurt?”

  “When I see what happens here, I can’t stop it,” he whispered. “It’s a torrent and I drown.”

  “You aren’t drowning,” she told him gently. She set his hand over his own heart, so that he could feel it beating fiercely. She smoothed his hair away from his face. “What did you do while I was gone?”

  “I remembered. I’m still remembering.”

  He looked as if he’d slipped out of sanity, as he often did, but as Quin watched him, she understood that a more profound shift was occurring. If he’d been recovering small pieces of his life over the last few days, now he was remembering something monumental, something that exerted a gravitational pull over him.

  “Can you tell me what you’re remembering?” she asked him.

  A small cry escaped him, after which the words came in a wild stream. “He was blind to his own family and turned loose two terrors. And others paid for it, again and again, all these years. Good and weak or destructive and strong, those aren’t the choices.” Dex moved his hand back to the ground and dug desperately for leverage in the rock floor.

  Something in Quin had shifted as well. Perhaps it was seeing the mural of Desmond and Matheus—proof that Dex was telling her something real. Or perhaps it was the days alone with him, seeing his good nature beneath his confused exterior. But however the change had come, she was pained by his disorientation. She didn’t only want to help him so that he would help her find Shinobu. She simply wanted to help him.

  “Dex—will you let me try something?”

  “Yes,” he whispered.

  She shifted her vision, and immediately the lines of energy around Dex came into sharp relief. Before, in the cave behind the waterfall, she’d seen his energy cascading out of his right temple, down his body, and back into his left hip. Now that cascade was a flood. She was watching fireworks, almost, pouring out of his head, streaming down his chest, and then gathering together and piercing his hip. The flow must also have been traveling back up through him to burst again from his temple. It was as if someone had connected him to power lines and cranked up the voltage. The current was so strong that it looked as though it might fold him in half. He was gripping the floor, she realized, to stop his body from collapsing in upon itself.

  Quin had worked with all sorts of patients, but she’d never seen or trained for anything like this. Steeling herself, she plunged her hands into the river across his torso.

  The cascade of energy pooled around her fingers, flowed like lava across his ribs as she worked to bleed it off the main line.

  After a long stretch of intense concentration, she had created tributaries that snaked everywhere about his body, scattering the central force. Soon the fireworks dimmed, though they were far from being extinguished. Dex released the floor from his grip, and his breath came more evenly.

  “There,” she whispered. It was as much as she could do right now. She felt dizzy as she leaned over him, her hands still hovering above his chest.

  “You can see the energy?” Dex croaked.

  “I can when I look in the right way,” she answered. “Can you see it as well?”

  “You have to let go. It’s pulling you in too.”

  Quin gazed down and saw the actual result of her work. Her own energy field had joined with Dex’s into one pattern. She’d broken up the river across his body into dozens of streams, and those streams now flowed in one continuous route through him and through her.

  This explained the strange tugging she felt at her mind, as if all of her energy were being siphoned away. Did it also explain her fading vision, which until now she’d attributed to the inconstant glow of the flare?

  There was a brightness in her abdomen, a vortex of streams. Looking at it gave her vertigo…

  Quin fell. Her head came to rest on cold rock, one of her hands on Dex’s chest. She had to break the contact, but she couldn’t muster the energy to move. She was being stretched and contracted at the same time…until Dex pushed her hand away and the connection was broken.

  “What happened to you?” Quin asked. She was still lying on the floor wh
ere she’d collapsed and had no idea how much time had passed.

  Dex lay a few feet away, staring up into the darkness. Calmer now. She saw in his face that he understood what she meant: What caused that violent flood of energy around you?

  But he ignored her question and whispered, “Matheus wanted the disruptor to make its victim truly mad, but Desmond wouldn’t do that.” The flare lay behind him, which threw his face into shadow, yet she could see him now looking steadily at her. Whatever had shifted in him was coming to the surface. “So Matheus posed a lighter challenge. ‘Could you make a weapon to confuse people?’ He got Desmond interested in the puzzle of it. They’d seen crazy people, of course, whose thoughts scattered this way and that. Could Desmond design a device that did the same thing? Was he clever enough?”

  “I saw them up in the passage. Desmond with the focal and Matheus with a disruptor.”

  “That’s kind of an official portrait, I guess. Maybe not particularly accurate.”

  “You’ve been up there before?”

  “Of course. Many times.” He didn’t elaborate. Turning his gaze up toward the dim cavern ceiling again, he said, “The first version of the disruptor made your thoughts run around in circles. They tested it on their dog.” Dex paused and smiled as if he particularly enjoyed this part of the story. “Imagine, Quilla—the dog would run after a stick, stop before he fetched it, run back, look at them quizzically, return to the stick, stop, come back…It went on like that for hours, and the boys thought it was the funniest thing they’d ever seen.

  “On another day Matheus snuck out and tried it on a woman from the village. When Desmond finally found him, he’d been watching the woman trying to get water from the well for more than an hour. She would lower the bucket, and then forget about it and turn back to her cottage, get halfway home, and then walk back to the well and try to lower the bucket again, before she turned back toward home, on and on.”

  “How did she ever stop?” Quin asked.

  He glanced at her, and his smile faded. “Oh, the effects wore off after a while,” he said. “It was nothing terrible. Desmond wasn’t trying to make something permanent. It was…it was a game to him.” He studied Quin for a few moments, reached for her hand, and before she knew what he intended, he brought it to his lips. “Don’t you know his true temperament, Quilla? You’ve heard this story before.”

  “Please, Dex.” Quin gently pulled away. It was harder to do than she’d expected. When he thought she was Quilla, she felt the full force of Dex directed at her. He reached for her again, but she stayed away and whispered, “Please. Tell me more of the story.”

  Dex rolled onto his back. She watched him wrestle with an angry thought, and she saw the thought win. His expression was cruel when he turned to her. “He left you, Quilla. I didn’t want to tell you before. He abandoned you in no-space.”

  “You didn’t see him. You don’t know what he did.”

  “I didn’t see him because he opened an anomaly back to the world and escaped without you. I saw that much.”

  Quin said nothing for a moment. How could she explain that she knew Shinobu must have left her? She should be devastated…or furious. But she didn’t feel either of those emotions. Quin knew what the focal did to Shinobu’s thoughts. And more than that, she knew Shinobu, the boy she’d grown up with and who had promised, so many times, to protect her. How could she explain that whatever misguided course he’d taken, she didn’t believe that he’d meant to hurt her?

  Dex pressed on, his voice becoming wild and unfocused. “You love someone who doesn’t care about you, Quilla. I’ve seen it happen, and you’ll never be the same as long as you cling to him.”

  “He does care about me. He thinks—he thinks he is taking care of me!”

  “I would never willingly leave you,” he said. “You were always naive, Quilla.”

  “But I’m not Quilla,” she answered quietly.

  Dex made a noise of frustration, retrieved the flare, and stood. He pressed his hands against his head as if trying to hold his thoughts still.

  “You’re Quin,” he whispered.

  Slowly the anger drained from his face. Then, with a shaky tread, he walked toward a far wall of the cavern.

  He went back to his story without rancor. “Desmond always thought Matheus was tinkering with the disruptor to make it do worse things, but he could never catch him doing it.” He touched the rough cavern wall, as if his story were inscribed there. “They kept that first disruptor a secret from their father, because he was strict about creating new tools. It had to be done with him present and with his blessing, all of that. So they hid it. But it didn’t stay a secret for long.”

  Now he was skirting the cavern, looking into the uneven spaces where the walls of rock blended into the floor. When he crouched down to examine something more closely, he looked to Quin like a homeless man picking through street-side rubbish. Then he stood to his full height and made an entirely different impression, of someone large and quick and dangerous. He’d picked up some loose stones, and he let these scatter across the floor as he continued walking.

  “Can you read minds?” he asked her.

  “Sometimes.”

  “Were you always able to do it?”

  “No,” she answered. “It happened recently.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t really know. First I heard one person’s thoughts in a moment of danger. Now I hear others. It’s confusing sometimes.”

  He stopped again, crouched down by a declivity in the cavern wall, felt about with his hands. “That’s how it started with them.” He’d found something else, which he examined in the light of the flare. “They were ordinary people at the beginning, closed minds. But one day, in the course of training themselves to do all sorts of things, their father began to see Desmond’s thoughts. That’s how he learned about the disruptor. He was disappointed with his younger son for breaking the rules, but that was soon forgotten—because he began to hear Matheus’s thoughts as well, and those were much, much worse.”

  He came back to Quin and, like a young child, held out his discovery. It was a small metal rod, not much longer than his palm, bent at one end, so that it formed a sort of L.

  “I knew there would be at least one of these about,” he muttered. Before Quin could touch it or ask what it was, Dex had moved away again, back to the wall of emblems. “Matheus liked to hurt things, did I mention? He’d been killing animals for years, and he’d started hurting people too, when he thought he could get away with it. His family didn’t know, but now he couldn’t hide it because they could read his mind.” He added thoughtfully, “Maybe their mother knew what he was like, all along. History is silent on that point.”

  He studied the wall and was quiet for a long while, so long that Quin got to her feet and came over to him. She found him looking at the carved emblems in a sort of trance.

  “Dex? Have you gone again?”

  “Ask me something.” His voice was whispery and urgent, as if, indeed, he were slipping away and needed her to pull him back. “My hands are clever when I talk to you.”

  “Did—did Matheus get punished?”

  “Their father beat him for the bad things he did, but it didn’t make much difference,” Dex said slowly. “I’ve always wondered if Matheus liked pain.” He held up the L-shaped rod and studied it. “They were training other people by then, other Seekers, lots of them. Their father had created whipswords, and they’d all learned to fight. Don’t you love whipswords? They did. He had the idea that he could use the things he knew, his inventions, to help history along, to make the world more fair.”

  “That’s what we’re all meant to do as Seekers, isn’t it? Tyrants and evildoers beware.”

  “Yes, that’s what they say.” Dex shot her a weary glance before he went on. “He made Matheus train twice as hard as anyone else. He said Matheus would learn through exertion what it means to do good.”

  When he fell silent again, Quin prompted, ??
?Did it work?”

  “I don’t know. There was a girl. Once he met her, Desmond stopped caring what Matheus was doing.” His fingers twitched in the air, as though tucking back a lock of hair on someone standing in front of him. He said, “Her name was Quilla.”

  “Quilla,” Quin repeated. How many Quillas were there in the world? “Your Quilla?”

  “Of course,” he answered. She watched some internal struggle play out across his face. At last he said, “Desmond, Dex, boy holding focal. Surely you know by now. I’m all of them.”

  For one moment, Quin felt the thrill of revelation, but in the next moment it was gone.

  “But…” It was true, Dex told the story like he’d done those things himself, and the thought had crossed Quin’s mind several times. But he couldn’t be the ancient figure he was describing. He spoke as a modern person would. He hadn’t been surprised at the television she’d found on the estate, or aircars, or any of the signs of modern life. He was a Seeker, like she was, who had become confused, and in his confusion, he’d mistaken a legend for his own life.

  “Quilla had red hair like a fox’s,” Dex said, enraptured and oblivious. “And green eyes flecked with gold.”

  The description sat between them for a while. Quin hid her surprise and, strangely, her disappointment. The famous Quilla didn’t sound at all like her.

  “But you are alike,” Dex told her, as though she’d spoken out loud. “Your face, the way you move. You could be the same girl painted with a different brush.”

  How did Quilla fit into the story, then? Was she part of the legend or part of Dex’s own life?

  Dex withdrew his medallion from the leather straps around his neck. Placing his palms flat on the top and bottom of the stone disc, he twisted and made an adjustment. Holding the medallion between thumb and forefinger, he raised it to the carved fox emblem, and with a deft motion, fitted the medallion into the cavern wall. It clicked into place in a shallow recess, covering the fox.