Disruptor

  She picked her way across the destruction of the canopy toward where she knew Traveler must be, the air getting smokier with every step. The roar of the fire and the creak of girders was louder out in the open. It felt as though she were walking into a storm.

  When she’d crested a twisted heap of rafters and canvas, she could see the crashed airship below her. In Traveler’s shadow was a substantial hand-to-hand battle that looked like little more than a free-for-all. It took her a moment to grasp who was fighting. There were Watchers in a circle, armed with disruptors, and they were dragging people. Their victims were fighting back with whipswords and knives.

  Those are Seekers! In a flash of understanding, Quin divined that she was looking at forgotten Seekers and their children—the Young Dread must have kept them alive and brought them back from no-space. Quin would have been elated if there had been time, but on the heels of this realization, there was a sudden burst—it had to be an impellor—and everyone, Watchers and victims alike, were flattened.

  Quin searched the smoky air until she found the person who had fired the weapon: Maggie. The older woman was perched above the fray, looking down on the fight like an orchestra conductor. The crashed airship, the broken bridge—these were Maggie’s doing. She had gone after Seekers in no-space, and now she was going after any Seekers who were left.

  Below, victims and attackers were getting back to their feet and engaging with each other again. Quin caught sight of red hair. Shinobu. He was so tall, he was half a head above most of the others. Grateful relief swept over her to see him back under his own control, but she paused only long enough to pull the shields from her back and strap them to her arms. She uttered a quiet thanks to Dex for thinking of the shields, which were probably going to save her life.

  Maggie was firing the impellor again. Quin saw John in the fight below; the old woman was so intent on killing that she was even attacking her own grandson.

  Quin ran across the sloping canvas, cracking out her whipsword. When she was in full charge, Maggie noticed her, turned, and lifted her impellor toward Quin. Not slowing, Quin raised her left-hand shield and twisted the lever in her fist. The concentric rings of the shield began to spin as the air thickened and Quin felt her jaw click to the side. The impellor’s burst hit the shield, and the force sheared off away from her, sending loose cables and sections of canvas flying while Quin was driven back, her heels digging channels in the canvas as she tried to hold her position.

  When the burst ended, she risked a peek over the lip of the shield to locate Maggie, and the woman fired the impellor the moment she saw Quin’s eyes. Quin raised her shield, but her feet were not steady as the second burst hit. She was lifted from the surface and thrown sideways down the slope. When she hit the canvas, she managed to stay upright with the weight of the shields counterbalancing her, but she had to keep moving to avoid falling. In a moment she was running out of control toward the Watchers below.

  The Watchers and Seekers were still recovering from Maggie’s last impellor blast, getting to their feet or grappling with each other on hands and knees. In the moments before Quin collided with the nearest of them, she saw something amazing: Four small figures were weaving out from among the tangled mass of adults. They moved like the Young Dread, in a blur of limbs, until they’d each found a Watcher as a target. Then the four children paused, came into focus, and sank knives into the Watchers’ legs. The Watchers moved awkwardly with the heavy disruptors on their chests, and when they struck out in retaliation, the children were already gone.

  Quin plowed into the two nearest attackers just as Maggie flattened everyone with the impellor again.

  As soon as Maggie began walking down toward the Young Dread and the Seekers, Nott quietly backed away from the fight, inching toward the big tear in the neighboring sail. He knew Maggie was going to sort those Seekers and children into who should live and who should die, and the Watchers were going to kill the ones who should die—and probably some of the others.

  Nott was wearing the helm, but the things it whispered did not make him very happy. He could see that little brat Kaspar down there, who’d been so irritating back on the ship. Yet when he focused on the boy and imagined going after him, Nott couldn’t get excited.

  I don’t think I want to kill him, he grasped with some shock.

  It didn’t require much force of will to pull off the helmet and toss it away. Nott watched the helm roll down into a little depression, where it got lost beneath a jagged rafter.

  “Hopefully no one ever finds it,” he said out loud.

  He touched Aelred’s head in the little pocket just inside the flap of his cloak. “If we keep walking the other way, Aelred, we’ll be out of sight and then we can use the athame.” Maggie had let him carry an athame this time. It hung, ready, at his waist.

  Aelred chirruped—nervously, Nott suspected. “I’m not going to cut you up,” Nott told him soothingly.

  It was smoky here, and the bridge was making frightening noises. Aelred was healed enough, Nott thought, to fly away and save himself.

  “Maybe you should go, Aelred,” Nott said.

  He unwrapped the bat, and the creature flapped his wings a few times but clung tightly to Nott’s finger, clicking thoughtfully.

  “Do you think so?” Nott asked.

  He looked back toward Maggie. Only the top of her head was visible from where he stood, but she wasn’t very far away.

  “Hmm.”

  The Transit Bridge was moving. The shivers had been growing stronger and more frequent, but now Quin felt something else, a swaying of the whole structure.

  There was no time to think about it. The Seekers, the Young Dread, the Watchers—all were now intermingled at close quarters, getting back to their feet. The high whines of the disruptors cut through all other noise. Quin shook off her dizziness and nausea—she’d hit the canvas harder than she’d realized—and pushed through a tangle of people toward three Watchers who were grabbing Seekers, examining their wrists. A disruptor fired. The Seeker victim was overrun with sparks.

  The Young Dread was there, her knife at the throat of the Watcher who’d used the disruptor. She dispatched him, cocked her knife to take out Maggie, still far above them. The air was getting thicker.

  “Look out!” Quin yelled at Maud.

  But Maggie had already fired her impellor, and Maud was knocked backward with everyone else.

  “Check the houses!” the old woman was yelling.

  Quin watched Maggie reverse her impellor and drag a Seeker out of the crowd. Two Watchers got to their knees and grabbed the man’s wrists.

  “A bear!” one of them called.

  The Young Dread was running to stop them.

  “Maud!” Quin yelled.

  She took the shield off her right arm and threw it like a discus directly into the Young Dread’s hands. Maud got between the disruptor and the injured Seeker a moment before the swarm of sparks rained down around her.

  “Twist the handle!” Quin yelled.

  The Young Dread was already doing it. The concentric circles on the shield’s face began to spin. As a second barrage of sparks hit the metal, the shield crackled and hummed, and then it threw the sparks back in a fantastic display that lit the night. The two Watchers were consumed by the recoiling storm.

  Quin was here. She was in the fight. As she threw a shield to the Young Dread, a Watcher took aim at her with his disruptor. Shinobu leapt over the body of a Seeker covered in disruptor sparks, grabbed Quin’s shoulders, spun her around so that her shield would protect her. She lifted it on reflex as the disruptor fired.

  “Shinobu, you’re here! I’ve been—”

  “So have I!” He ducked behind the shield with her as the sparks swarmed against it. “I’m here and John has an athame.” There was no time to say any of the other things he wanted to tell her, only, “If we can get clear of the Watchers, we can get everyone out of here.”

  “All right!”

  With a shift of
her fist, the shield sprayed sparks back at her attacker.

  “Stay close!” Shinobu called as he ran off again. Another Seeker was being dragged away at the far side of the fight. Shinobu pulled the Young Dread with him, and together they saved the woman.

  He expected Maggie to hit them all with her weapon again, but when he glanced up, he saw that the older woman was distracted. A tall young man stood just yards from her, and they were arguing. Behind the young man was someone it took Shinobu a moment to recognize, and when he finally did recognize him, he was unable to make sense of the man’s presence. It was the Old Dread.

  “Get everyone away!” John yelled, breaking Shinobu’s gaze from those odd new arrivals.

  John was herding as many Seekers and children as he could to the north, away from Traveler, now that Maggie wasn’t firing on them.

  Shinobu was helping the injured to their feet when his attention was drawn to one of the dead Watchers. It was a dark-skinned boy called Geb, and at his waist was the athame with a dragon on it—the athame that belonged to Shinobu’s mother. He’d seen this athame at Dun Tarm, but only now, out of the focal and free of Maggie, did he feel his own connection to it.

  He grabbed the stone dagger and lightning rod from the dead boy, and then he looked for Quin. She was far from the others, fighting the last two Watchers.

  He turned to her, and the world changed.

  All but two of the Watchers were dead or disrupted, and Quin was fighting them. They were wounded and striking at her with weaker and weaker blows, but they wouldn’t stop fighting. One of her attackers, too exhausted to remember what Quin’s shield could do, fired his disruptor in last-ditch frustration. Quin sent the deadly shower of sparks back at both of them. With that, the hand-to-hand clash was over.

  Quin tried to catch her breath in the smoky air as she looked around. Maggie wasn’t visible from where Quin stood, but wherever she was, she had stopped firing her impellor. The Young Dread, Shinobu, and John were far off to Quin’s right, moving Seekers away. The fight was done, and they could get out of here. Quin ran toward Shinobu.

  She made it two steps before the Transit Bridge lurched.

  The canopy to her right surged upward dozens of feet. The flattened space where Quin stood shifted sideways, throwing her down as debris moved violently around her.

  In the space of a breath, the Young Dread, John, Shinobu, and the Seekers were far above Quin, as if on a separate structure entirely. She was still in the shadow of Traveler, and now she could see Maggie just above her, but where Quin stood and where Maggie stood had both moved lower relative to the other half of the bridge.

  “Quin!” Shinobu was yelling down at her.

  “Quin!” That was the Young Dread yelling. She stood near Shinobu, with children grouped around her. “Climb!”

  “Quin!” yelled Shinobu again, pointing urgently. “The Watchers have athames! Use one!”

  On her island in the shifting canopy, there were five Watchers. Three dead and the two who were still thrashing in disruptor sparks. She ran for the closest one. There was an athame right there. She reached for it…

  …and her muscles seized up. Her bones shook, her teeth gnashed, her legs cramped so severely that she could hardly move them. She was caught in a stream of energy raining down from above.

  Dex. He was there, above Quin, with Maggie. He was holding up his medallion like a weapon pointed at his mother. He gripped it so tightly, his knuckles were white and the medallion was glowing—and the terrible vibration was coming from it. Maggie was consumed by the energy too, frozen in place, her fists clenching.

  Quin thought of Dex in the little cell off the cavern, placing his medallion in the center of the wall. I’ve made it a weapon, he’d said. She’d asked him what sort of weapon, and now she knew.

  Quin tried to call his name, but she couldn’t speak. Dex didn’t know she was there, paralyzed by whatever he was doing to his mother.

  “…have you been alive all this time?” That was Maggie, speaking to two men who had appeared on the sail out of nowhere—which meant, of course, that Nott knew exactly where they’d appeared from.

  He’d been sneaking closer to Maggie for a few minutes. He was just above her now, on a higher portion of the destroyed sail, peering down at her and her two strange companions.

  “Mother, I left for a few minutes to find my father and bring him here,” the younger man said, “and in that time, look what you’ve done.” His angry glance took in the crashed airship, the fire beyond it, the wilderness of the canopy. “Call off your Watchers. Put an end to this!”

  Mother? Nott thought. The witch has children? He supposed he should have known, since she’d mentioned grandchildren, but the idea of having Maggie for a mother was the stuff of nightmares.

  “I am putting an end to it, Desmond.” Maggie was using her friendly voice, full of sympathy, which Nott dearly hoped he would never have to hear again. “I’m putting an end to the houses who attacked Adelaide and Catherine. It’s what Matheus was trying to do as well, in his way. People who harmed him, people who obstructed him. We’re almost free.”

  “That is not what Matheus was doing. You spent so much time in no-space, you didn’t see,” the young man said. “Matheus was preparing to get rid of everyone. All Seekers, and his family as well. He would have disposed of you, Mother. You’ve blamed other Seeker houses for the things he did. Matheus is the one who set Seeker on Seeker. You kept him safe, and by keeping him safe, in a way, you caused the hatred you’re fighting against.”

  The older man spoke then, in a slow, steady voice that reminded Nott of the Middle Dread. Were they related? “Come with me,” the man said. “You were not meant to be this person. You were not meant to feed yourself on hate. Let’s finish our journey. The farm is waiting for us.”

  Nott could have told the fellow that Maggie wouldn’t listen. He saw her lifting that black cylinder to pitch both of those men far away from her. Nott didn’t know these men or have any reason to care about them, but he’d had enough of that old woman throwing people around.

  Without pausing, so that he couldn’t change his mind—If she looks at me, I’ll change my mind!—Nott drew a knife, and with the twisting throw the Young Dread had taught him, the throw that doubled the force of impact, he cast it directly at Maggie’s back.

  It struck her between her shoulder blades and sank in to the hilt.

  She hadn’t been aiming her weapon, Nott realized belatedly. She’d been lifting her medallion, trying to use it to escape.

  “Oh,” he said.

  Maggie stood, unmoving, Nott’s knife handle sticking up from her back, her body paralyzed in some kind of fit. The younger man had his own medallion in his hand. It began to glow as he held it out.

  Nott scuttled backward and away, reaching for his athame. He didn’t know what these men were up to, and he wasn’t going to wait around to find out.

  He whispered to the bat, “Shall we go now?”

  Aelred chirruped his agreement.

  Quin forced her body to move. She had to reach the athame at the nearest Watcher’s waist and get off the bridge, or she would surely die here. Using her limbs was like carrying herself along with inanimate blocks of stone. She shifted one leg and then the other, after which she fell to her knees, arms outstretched, the athame almost within reach.

  The vibration got worse, as though Dex had doubled its intensity. Quin’s jaw clamped shut, her arm muscles seized up. When she brushed the athame with her fingertips, the ancient stone implement burst into gritty powder. She watched in helpless dismay as the other athames at the waists of the Watchers around her exploded, victims of Dex’s medallion.

  Above her, Maggie’s hand was outstretched, her own medallion nothing more than gray dust in her palm. Then the old woman, paralyzed just as Quin was, toppled off the edge of her perch down toward Quin.

  But Quin was falling too. With a sound like the jaws of hell opening up, the bridge was tearing apart.

&nb
sp; To her left, the great black bulk of Traveler was shifting, rolling away from her through the neighboring sail, which was, she now saw, fully aflame. Quin herself, with Maggie and the lifeless Watchers, was thrown backward and down—the rafters and the levels below all groaning and breaking beneath her.

  Her face turned skyward, Quin watched as Dex caught sight of her. Then he was gone, and Quin was no longer paralyzed, but it didn’t matter. She was falling with half the Transit Bridge, the canopy beneath her flaring like a great parachute between steel girders. Cables were snapping and swinging wildly. Quin’s little island of sail was dropping away from the body of the bridge, which itself was falling. With her last logical thought, she grabbed a great swath of canvas still attached to the peak of one of the bridge towers. The sail swung her out farther, but that tower too was toppling, and Quin descended with it.

  She hit the water. She was tangled in the canvas, weighted by cables, and she flailed in the debris, trying to swim free. When Quin opened her eyes beneath the cold water, she could see only the faint orange of the fire above her. She couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t breathe, and she was being pulled down and down into darkness.

  The Transit Bridge was falling apart, and somehow Shinobu was on the solid half and Quin was down below him on the half that was collapsing.

  John had already opened an anomaly. He and the Young Dread were driving the Seekers and children through it at a run. But Quin was down there. Alone. And he could not get to her in time.

  “Quin!” he yelled, seeing her salvation. “The Watchers have athames! Use one!”

  Quin heard him, ran toward the Watchers. After only a few steps, she was walking stiffly, and then she was not moving at all. Something was wrong. She fell to her knees, still reaching for an athame but not close enough to grab it.