Disruptor

  She turned in a circle. Two shapes were sinking around her. One was already on the ocean floor.

  The Young Dread dove and kicked and grabbed the shirt of the little girl who’d settled to the sandy bottom in a sitting position. She pulled the girl up to her, turned again, kicked, and caught a sinking figure. It was a grown woman, too slender to float well. The third was passing by, still standing, hunched over as he had been while There. The Young Dread caught his shirt with her foot and dragged all three of them to the surface with powerful strokes of her free arm. Her lungs burned, but pain was nothing. It is only pain.

  When she broke the surface, Maud allowed time to accelerate. John was holding two adult Seekers and drawing another toward him. He was yelling for help, striking out for the shore. Other adults were bobbing in the slight waves, still floating.

  “Get to the boat!” John said when he saw her.

  The crew of Traveler had spotted them in the water, and a small boat was heading their way, its outboard motor roaring. Maud hooked the shirt of another Seeker, so that she was dragging four of them, and kicked toward the boat.

  She swam on her back, looking up at the night sky. Maggie was there, standing in the center of a black opening, thirty feet above them. How? Maud’s anomaly had already fallen shut.

  The doorway around the old woman was a perfect arch, the edges glowing more brightly than the border of any anomaly the Young Dread had ever seen.

  “What’s she doing?” John asked. Then he knew the answer: “She’s going to shoot us!”

  Maud threw her sight and at once saw what John had seen—his grandmother was holding a weapon in her hands. It was not the dark cylinder that had thrown them all into the ocean. This one was different. It wrapped around Maggie’s hand and glowed with flickering energy.

  A burst of…something blew outward from the half-circle anomaly. It was as though the air itself had been charged with energy, like a dancing heat wave above a hot desert.

  “Dive!” she called to John.

  They pulled themselves beneath the water, still clutching the Seekers, as a deep thump reverberated through the ocean and through Maud’s bones. A few moments later, they surfaced. Nothing had touched them, and yet the boat heading for them had gone silent. Its motor had cut out, and the lights along its bow had been extinguished. The vessel was still coming, but only coasting on its prior momentum. The crew shouted orders to each other.

  Above the Young Dread, Maggie was still perched in the sky. She adjusted the weapon on her hand, lifted it to fire again. She was aiming at Traveler, Maud realized. Maggie wanted to disable the airship.

  A shape rose up behind her—a tall man, staggering out of the darkness.

  It was Shinobu.

  With a tremendous blow that made use of both fists, he knocked Maggie down, and then he ripped the weapon from her hands. He kicked at something near her feet, and the anomaly opening shifted, warped. Shinobu fell, limp, in the darkness. As he did, the anomaly folded in half, and then it folded in half again and again, until it was only a glowing white point of light, like a star, which winked out a moment later.

  “Grab hold. We’re trying to get the motor started.” It was one of the crew on the boat. Maud and the Seekers she was dragging had bumped into its inflatable hull.

  She pushed her paralyzed cargo into the waiting hands extended over the side. Someone threw a life preserver. Taking it under one arm, the Young Dread struck out across the water, back to their point of impact. She could hear John following.

  There was only one Seeker still bobbing on the surface, a man whose cloak had captured air beneath it as he fell and was now acting as a float. She passed him by, to be retrieved later.

  “How many more?” she called. “I threw six.”

  “So seven more are still in the water,” John answered.

  The Young Dread dove, gathering all the light she could as she kicked to the bottom. John followed, shining an underwater torch he must have gotten from the crew. In its eerie glow were cloaked bodies slowly sinking toward the bottom, the blood from their injuries coloring the water. She pushed three toward John and dove deeper.

  The final Seekers—a man, a woman, and a young boy—were gathered on the ocean floor in attitudes of rest, a family asleep on a bed of sand. Maud grabbed them by their clothing and struck out for the surface. Her lungs burned, her body ached for air, but it would obey her will as long as she was alive.

  When she and John reached the night air, they dragged all seven to the waiting boat. The crew hauled the motionless Seekers on board, and the Young Dread and John climbed over the hull and onto the deck.

  They were dripping as they checked on each of the rescued. Arms and legs stuck out at odd angles. The Seekers were still statues moved out of place, and none were breathing yet. Several were injured, but whether from the Watchers just now or from the Middle Dread ages ago, it was impossible to tell. And it hardly mattered. The blood was fresh. If John and Maud could get them onto Traveler before they rejoined the stream of time, the Seekers had a chance of being saved.

  The boat engine still would not start. John had gone to the back of the vessel to help the crew, but he was having no better luck. Maud went aft to him.

  “It’s not just us,” one of the crew said. “Look at Traveler.”

  Across the water, the airship was sitting lopsided at the quay. Of its six engines, which had been keeping it in a low hover, three had cut out, leaving Traveler hanging crookedly, with the lowest point only a few feet above the ground. Half the shipyard was without power as well. By the border of darkness in front of them, the Young Dread could infer the range of the weapon Maggie had fired.

  A moment later, the airship’s three disabled engines sputtered to life, sending Traveler through a series of drunken gyrations. Then all engines were firing. The security lights throughout the shipyard came alive dimly, and shortly flared to full strength. The boat’s motor started, and they turned and roared back to shore.

  When Quin was next aware of herself, she was standing at an impossible angle, looking down—or was it up?—at the colorless shapes of a city.

  “You don’t, you don’t,” Dex was saying. “I know you don’t.”

  He was standing beside her at the same impossible angle. Darkness enfolded them from behind, curved about them and converged with the gray cityscape below. The seam where the blackness met the light slanted crazily. Quin was sure she was about to fall down through that watery gray sky into the buildings below.

  Dex’s head was bare and his eyes were calm. He’d been wearing a focal, hadn’t he?

  “You don’t,” he said again.

  Quin’s hand came to her mouth, and she registered that she’d been speaking. “I hate you,” she said, and she knew that she’d been repeating those words over and over.

  Something must have been different about the way she said them this time, because Dex looked at her curiously and asked, “Are you back with me?”

  She wanted to say yes, but in truth she didn’t feel fully in possession of herself. She was not lost, like she would have been in no-space, but she felt muted, stretched out slightly, her mind dulled by whatever strange place they were in. He’s brought me here, to some half place, to stop me from getting angry at him.

  Why would she be angry? She looked at the darkness behind them until she remembered: the last thing she’d seen was murder. The Watchers had killed a group of Seekers in a bloody mob, and she’d been floating away, doing nothing. She’d seen the faces of the dead, staring into the blackness…

  Quin’s eyes filled with tears.

  “Don’t cry, please,” Dex whispered. “We couldn’t have stopped her. She was going to kill them no matter what. It’s why they have to leave this world. They could never control themselves, and he refused to control them.”

  She didn’t want to listen to his insanity. “I could have stopped them. I took the impellor. I thought I’d charged it by leaving it in the sun, but it didn’t fire righ
t.”

  He shook his head. “Complicated weapons don’t work well in no-space. They require too much energy from the world. Haven’t I explained that? That’s why the impellor worked the first time you tried it, but then did nothing.”

  “You saw all of that?” She’d thought he retreated long before she engaged with the Watchers.

  He leaned toward her, tall and strong and concerned. He wiped a tear from her cheek. “I wasn’t going to let her get you, not again.”

  Quin pulled out of his grasp. His tenderness, his intimate voice, they were maddening. Even if her mind wasn’t completely her own, anger was bubbling to the surface.

  “You did nothing, Dex. You should have helped me. You should have tried to save those people.”

  “Quilla—”

  “I’m not Quilla! Stop trying to kiss me. Stop acting like I belong to you. You’re a coward! And you made me leave Shinobu There. She’ll probably kill him.”

  She couldn’t stop the tears now. She turned away from Dex and hugged herself. She was high up; the city below her was swinging across her field of view as she moved. In a moment, she was dizzy and sick. She closed her eyes tightly, but tears kept rolling down her cheeks.

  When Dex spoke, his voice was hollow. “I don’t think she’ll kill him. She has him under her thumb. She likes them like that.”

  “Great. That’s very reassuring.”

  “I know I’m a coward. But if I face her before I’m ready, there is no point. If I lose myself when I see her, I will miss my chance.”

  “Who is she?” Quin asked, her eyes still shut. A strange thought came to her. “Did you love her?” She turned to Dex. “Did you know her when she was young? Have you been There that long?”

  “I did love her when I was younger.”

  “She’s Quilla?”

  Dex almost smiled, but it faded into a sickly expression. “No, she’s not Quilla. God, no.”

  He sat, though what he was sitting on, Quin could not have said. He floated in the semidarkness just as she did, the faded city tilting below them. She crossed her arms and stood in front of him.

  “Who, then?”

  He shook his head, apparently unable to say. His eyes had retreated from her into the deep part of himself that trapped him.

  Quin wanted to hate him for his insanity and his secrets, but even when she was furious at Dex, she couldn’t think of him as someone evil. The idea wouldn’t stick. Beneath the madness, Dex felt…decent. That was the only way she could describe it. He was like an overgrown apple tree, its branches tangled and full of dead wood and rotting fruit. But if you could prune all of those things away…

  She only had to keep him talking and he would find his way again. “How did you pull me away from the fight? You took me up above them.”

  By stages, she watched his thoughts come back to her. “I know no-space so well,” he murmured. “It’s been my home. There’s no up and down, no air, no light, only what you bring with you. Do you see? You bring a light and it works a bit, you bring your air and it lasts while you think it lasts. You bring your sense of direction and gravity. I have only to change my orientation to pull you upward, because there is no up. There’s only where I am.”

  It made sense as he said it, though Quin guessed it would make much less sense later, when she was thinking straight.

  “We might not have been able to save them,” she conceded, thinking of the vicious boys and their weapons, and the way Shinobu had collapsed as soon as the fight had begun. Those Seekers, swimming in the sea of infinity, hadn’t stood a chance. She fought back tears again. “I could have saved a few of them.”

  “And paid with your life.”

  She couldn’t argue that. Without the impellor and with no athame, she would have been at their mercy. Still, she could have tried.

  “Who is she, Dex?” She asked it quickly and softly, hoping to slip the question past his defenses.

  His eyes shot this way and that, as if he were truly in a labyrinth, following a thread to see where it took him. “She is Maggie,” he said at last.

  “Not—not John’s grandmother?” She had never seen John’s grandmother, but he’d told her stories about the fierce woman who had dominated his childhood.

  Dex’s mouth quirked up. “That could be. I don’t know which John you mean, but Maggie has raised a lot of children.”

  Quin buried her face in her hands, trying to marshal her thoughts. “You are so confusing, Dex. Who are you talking about?”

  He stayed quiet, looking equally bewildered. He broke the silence when it had grown overwhelming. “Do you know this city?”

  She raised her eyes to gaze down at the gray cityscape hanging crookedly below them. She’d been avoiding a direct look, because the height might paralyze her, but now she gave the city a sweeping glance.

  “It’s London. Are we really hanging above it?”

  “Yes. No.” He tried again: “It’s like my tunnel, but more of a bubble, between no-space and the world.” He swept a hand at the dark behind them and the city below. “You can see both sides, and like in the tunnel, I don’t need the focal here. I used to watch the world like this for years.”

  “Years?”

  “The city was different then. And then, for a long time, I couldn’t look at even this much of the world.” He touched her shoulder, searched her face with pleading eyes. “I am so much better now. I’ve been out in the air with you. I’ve looked at the sky.”

  “By accident,” Quin pointed out.

  He ignored this. “I didn’t collapse entirely when I saw her the second time, in no-space. I thought I would, but I didn’t.”

  Quin tried again. “Who is she to you?”

  Dex was looking at the city, but after a few moments, with that question hanging between them, his gaze returned to her. “It’s not that I don’t want to tell you. It’s that I’m finding my way to the words, like someone blind in an unfamiliar room.” He paused and then said, “She was there when Desmond died. And Quilla too.”

  He continued to speak, his brown eyes holding her own, his words coming like thoughts in a dream. It took a few moments for Quin to realize that she was hearing him out loud and not in her head. Maybe she heard him in both places.

  “Desmond and Quilla’s daughter was Adelaide,” he whispered. “Matheus hated the little girl, and he hated Quilla. He and Desmond had been inseparable all their lives, two brothers facing the world together, and Quilla changed that. Matheus thought that Desmond wasn’t allowed to make up his own mind anymore. He thought Quilla was making up his mind for him. Adelaide made it even worse, because Desmond loved his daughter beyond words.

  “And Quilla did change Desmond. He noticed Matheus’s failings more now, his fascination with dangerous things. The brothers argued. Matheus insisted that Desmond wasn’t allowed to teach Quilla the things they knew. He mustn’t show her his medallion, he couldn’t tell her about no-space, he couldn’t teach her how to use any of the weapons. She wasn’t allowed to be trained, even though they were training so many others. Matheus refused to let Quilla be a Seeker. Their father agreed—only to keep the peace between them. And their mother agreed for her own reasons.

  “Desmond thought Matheus was being hateful.” Dex’s eyes came back to the present for a moment, and Quin saw a flash of defensiveness in them. “He was being hateful. They quarreled for two years, but one day it wasn’t just an argument. They fought. And…and Desmond was killed.”

  The word floated between them, heavy and demanding. The reverie they’d both been in, as Dex tiptoed through his labyrinth, was broken with one word.

  “Desmond was killed,” she repeated.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re alive, Dex. You’re not from the Dark Ages. Listen to how you speak.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  She stuck her fingers against his neck, where his pulse beat strongly. “Alive!”

  He had no answer for that. Indeed, he looked confused as he stared f
rom the view of London to the darkness behind them and then back at Quin. She could read the thought behind his eyes: Why have I brought her here?

  Quin looked again at the watery expanse of the city. She’d thought London was frozen, but when she peered through the billowing curtain of the anomaly, she saw that it was in motion. There were blurs where street traffic flowed, lights flicking on and off in buildings. She was seeing the city in time lapse, racing forward. The traffic was flowing down there. The sun was moving across the gray sky.

  “Is the world really moving so fast?” she asked in alarm.

  “Yes.”

  “How much time since we left?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Dex, those boys were murdering people! Shinobu is helpless.” She grabbed his medallion. “Take me back!”

  They’d made a Seeker training camp in the great room of Traveler. The airship was crossing oceans slowly, making its way along the shoreline of Africa. They were heading, by a winding ocean route, to Hong Kong. Quin lived in Hong Kong. She was the only other Seeker John knew, and it was right that they consult on what to do with their brothers and sisters who had been rescued from the dimensions between.

  The Young Dread was no longer concerned that John might choose violence against any of the Seekers he’d brought back. His confrontation with Maggie in the darkness had changed him, and she could see this change in his eyes, which looked at the world with a clearer gaze.

  Through the windows in the airship’s outer walls, one could see the distant African coast, but here in the great room, they had the glass ceiling, making the Young Dread feel as though they were standing inside the sky itself, which, she supposed, they were.

  The adult Seekers they’d rescued were almost all wounded, a few so gravely that they might not survive. But of the fifteen recovered children, only a few, the oldest, had been injured.

  Thirteen eager Seeker children, all of whom had disappeared from the world decades or centuries ago, were gathered in the great room, with wooden swords, learning how to fight.