Disruptor

  Shinobu desperately searched the area around her. As soon as he looked up, he discovered the source of her helplessness. The young man who had appeared by Maggie was clutching a medallion, and the stone disc was affecting both Maggie and Quin physically. He was killing Quin, perhaps without even realizing what he was doing.

  “Shinobu! Come on!”

  Everyone was through the anomaly, and John was standing inside it, yelling for him. The edges of the opening were already going soft.

  “Shinobu!”

  “Go without me!” he yelled.

  He turned back and screamed, “Stop! She’s down there! Look!”

  The young man with the medallion looked up and met Shinobu’s eyes. Maggie was falling toward Quin, and the canopy sails to the south, raging with fire, were collapsing. Traveler groaned and rolled in that direction, slowly at first and then like a boulder picking up speed down a mountain. Half the bridge was falling away, with Quin on it.

  “Quin!” he screamed. The canopy beneath her was billowing and shifting, and she was riding it downward, helpless. “Quin!”

  He ran for the edge to jump after her—

  Hands were on his shoulders, yanking him away. His vision shifted, as though a gray curtain had been drawn across his field of view. The Transit Bridge was farther below him; he was floating.

  “Quin!” he yelled again.

  She hit the water and disappeared beneath the surface.

  John and Maud came out of the anomaly with more than three dozen Seekers and children. The gray Scottish morning of drizzling rain came as a shock to everyone after the smoky mayhem they had just left. They had emerged into the commons, where the grass was so high that it obscured the heads of half the children.

  “Did Shinobu jump after Quin?” the Young Dread asked him.

  “I don’t know,” John answered, haunted by their last moments in the chaos. “The bridge was breaking and he disappeared.”

  In one moment, Shinobu had been at the edge of their particular island of canopy debris. In the next moment he had been gone—but whether he’d thrown himself over the edge or found some other route out, it had been impossible to tell.

  The Young Dread held up a slender athame with an emblem of three interlocking ovals—the athame of the Dreads.

  “You found it!” John said, hope swelling.

  “One of the Watchers had it,” she told him. She was already adjusting its dials.

  With John’s athame, it would take much too long to find their way onto the Transit Bridge. With Maud’s they could go back directly.

  She brought him There immediately. It took her several tries to open up an anomaly onto the place where the bridge had stood. When she did, they saw that there was nothing to be done. Through the opening, they beheld disaster: the center of the bridge had collapsed into the harbor, and their friends were nowhere to be found.

  Shinobu was plunging down, without plunging at all, directly in the path of Quin’s wild fall.

  “I’m Dex, and this is my father. You must be Shinobu.”

  The young man who’d grabbed him didn’t sound very happy about introducing himself, but Shinobu had no thoughts to spare on such details. Flaming wreckage rained down around them, though it never touched the three of them. The world was behind a veil and they were in a dark tunnel—a tunnel through the air. The broken bridge and canopy were sliding by on either side.

  Shinobu had a thousand questions, but none of them mattered. He understood that the medallion Dex held was allowing them to chase after Quin, and he didn’t care how or why. He only cared about getting to her.

  The world beyond the veil was moving more slowly than it should have been, as though Dex were regulating the pace—or at least regulating how fast Shinobu was seeing it.

  They descended straight through the surface of the water, which was surging with debris, and dove beneath it, the tunnel a shifting sleeve of dark space that kept them dry. The Old Dread lit a flare as soon as they were underwater, and then they were walking or gliding through the sinking debris, searching. Dex was following Quin’s path of travel, through billowing canvas and solid beams of torn steel. Was it even possible that she could be alive?

  They moved through a mountain of frayed cables…and she was there. Quin was pinned to the seafloor between a steel girder and a great swath of sail. Her hands were on the girder, as though trying to push free, but she was no longer moving. Dark hair floated about her head, and her dark eyes stared blankly.

  Shinobu rushed to the edge of the tunnel. Before he could reach through the shifting veil, the Old Dread yanked him back. “Patience,” the man told him.

  “She’s drowning out there! Let me get her! Can’t I reach through?”

  “It’s tricky with the water,” Dex said calmly, maddeningly, as he made tiny adjustments to his medallion. “Give me a moment.”

  “She doesn’t have a moment!” Shinobu cried. Quin was only a few feet away, dying before Shinobu’s eyes, or already dead. “Please!” he said, resisting the urge to shake Dex violently.

  Then the space around Shinobu warped. He was swept upward and tilted, as Dex and the Old Dread were shifted alongside him. The three of them hadn’t moved, and yet somehow their orientation to Quin was entirely changed. Shinobu was now standing above her, looking down at her in the light of the Old Dread’s gently hissing flare.

  The tunnel continued to inch downward in tiny increments until its dark border was partially through the steel beam holding Quin down. Another few excruciating inches, and they were through the entire beam.

  “Now!” Dex said. “Pull her now!”

  Shinobu reached, found his own arms moving through water. His head was in the ocean. He grabbed Quin’s waist, and water was pouring into the tunnel. He held her, dragged her toward him with a half-swimming, half-walking motion. He lost his sense of balance. He was both above her and beside her, carrying her without knowing which way he was going. The cold water of Victoria Harbor was all around his legs, filling the tunnel.

  Dex changed their orientation again, and the water stopped breaching. Shinobu had been rolled upward until he was hanging above the pool that had flooded in. He discovered he could set Quin down on…nothing, but a nothing that served just as well as ground. The tunnel continued to shift. Dex and the Old Dread were gliding them through the wreckage—searching for Maggie, Shinobu suspected—but he hardly noticed.

  Quin was cold, gray, and not breathing. When he felt at her neck, there was no pulse. Her hair was plastered over her face, which looked pale and dead. It was all Shinobu could do not to panic.

  “Quin, I’ve got you,” he whispered as he began to pump her chest. “Come on, please.”

  He counted the chest compressions, remembering the sequence from their years as apprentices when they had practiced it so many times. Alistair had gotten mad at them for joking during the lesson and he’d made them practice an extra hour as punishment. Thank God, Shinobu thought.

  He tilted back Quin’s head, put his mouth over hers, and breathed into her lungs. He wanted to give her every ounce of air in his body, every breath he had ever taken…

  Stop being romantic and save her! he told himself.

  He pumped her chest again, forcing himself to push hard, even though it was awful to see her body convulse beneath his hands. He was dimly aware of his two companions silently watching him and urging him on.

  “Quin,” he said, not whispering now but speaking sharply. “Quin, you weren’t under all that long. I saw Dex slow down the world—or speed me up—when he brought us to you. You sank to the bottom, but you weren’t under very long. I know you’re still alive. Quin! Quin!”

  He breathed for her again, imagining it was his own life he was pouring into her.

  Stop the poetry and concentrate!

  He put his hands to her chest a third time and began to pump desperately. Halfway through the sequence, she fought him. Her chest rose on its own.

  “Quin? Quin?”

&n
bsp; His ear to her mouth, he heard her breathing; he felt a pulse at her neck.

  “Please…” He squeezed her hand gently between his own. “Can you hear me, Quin? Quin!”

  She did nothing but breathe for a long while, and he watched each rise and fall of her ribs as individual miracles. (Stop it! he admonished himself.)

  At last, Quin’s hand twitched and she moved her lips. Shinobu leaned very close.

  She whispered, “Did I die again?”

  “I think you did,” he whispered back. “Just for a little while.”

  “I’ve got to stop doing that.”

  Shinobu laughed. “I agree.”

  “ ’Mglad you’re here with me…”

  Relief left him weak. He rested his head on her chest, which continued to rise and fall beneath his forehead, the most beautiful motion he’d ever felt, and he didn’t care if he was being romantic now; she was alive.

  After a time, he looked up, found Dex and the Old Dread turned away. The Old Dread was holding his flare up at the edge of the tunnel, and they were both peering out through the water at another shape tangled in the debris from the Transit Bridge.

  It was Maggie, her arms spread above her, one of her legs pinned beneath a heavy coil of cable. She was unmoving, except for her long white hair and her cloak, both of which shifted and billowed with the current. She looked, Shinobu thought, like a goddess of the sea, the sort of ancient deity who could be good or evil based on whim.

  She was staring at her husband and son with eyes that surely could no longer see, and yet they looked alive and intelligent.

  “What do you think, Father?” Dex asked quietly.

  The Old Dread gazed at the woman. A knife handle was visible between her shoulder blades. She had been dead before she fell from the bridge.

  “I think one of her followers has already passed his judgment,” the Old Dread said very slowly, pointing at the knife.

  All present understood that the wreckage of the airship and bridge and so many Seeker deaths could be laid at the feet of the woman out there in the water. Even now, the device that had brought Traveler down and turned off the power throughout half the city was around her knuckles as though she were planning to use it again.

  “The circle should be closed,” the Old Dread said, in his strange cadence. “We will leave her here.”

  Dex tilted his head in acknowledgment and added nothing to this verdict.

  Before they turned away, a single bubble escaped Maggie’s lips, the final sign of life. As it floated toward the surface, it was as if the last of her vital force floated with it, leaving only the body of an old woman, tangled in canvas and steel, alone on the floor of the ocean.

  “In my addled and exhausted state, I failed to give you the one thing you most needed,” the Old Dread said. His face was still cleanly shaven, which Maud found disconcerting. He looked like a modern man, except for the old robe.

  He and the Young Dread sat high up in the castle ruins on the Scottish estate, looking down at the river and the world beyond. Dex sat near his father, though he’d said very little since the older man had introduced him to Maud.

  The Old Dread had explained his family to her, but the idea that he had a son—two sons!—was not an easy one to swallow. She had thought of him as her own true father.

  The Old Dread was holding out a round stone medallion. The Young Dread took it and studied it, the emblem on the front, the concentric circles on the back.

  “What does it do?”

  “It does so many things, child. Dex and I will take this day and as many days as you need, to show you all of its tricks—and how to use every tool I left you. But the most important is the medallion, because it can wake you when you’re stretched out There.”

  The Old Dread still spoke in his slow way, the same way Maud had spoken before spending so much time awake. But his cadence was already changing. He was, hour by hour, speeding up, as if, on this waking, he intended to truly rejoin the world.

  “Master—” she began.

  “Child, I am not your master anymore, if I ever was.”

  “Who are you, then?”

  There was a long pause. When he spoke, she could see him weighing each word. “Dear Maud, I am only a man with a clever mind, who thought he could change the world.” He sighed and looked down at his hands, before he turned back to her. “You—you began in the past and have moved forward in time from the moment you were born to this moment here, sitting in these ruins together. I did not. I began here, or nearly here, and then things got out of order.”

  This explanation was unintelligible to the Young Dread, but then, her master had always been confusing on the subject of time.

  “Are you not a Dread, then? Were you never a Dread?”

  “Of course I was a Dread,” he told her. He had habitually tugged at his beard, but when his hand came to his chin, it found no beard there and hung, confused, in the air. “You were like my own child, and we did many worthy things together, didn’t we? I could have had no better daughter than you.”

  Hearing him call her his daughter provoked a feeling of happiness in Maud so intense that she required a moment of silence to take it in. He touched her shoulder, understanding.

  He said, “But you are grown now. The son I thought was dead is here. And I—” He looked to Dex for the words.

  Dex picked up the thought from the Old Dread. “We’re going to finish out our lives the way my father always intended. Anonymously, quietly, pleasantly. As part of the world in which we were born.”

  “An accident of calculation brought me to you,” her master explained. “And that same accident brought Seekers to the world. But now…now the beginning and end have joined. I’m no longer your Old Dread. I am only the man I was to begin with.”

  The Young Dread struggled to grasp what he meant for her to do. She asked, “Do you want Seekers and Dreads to end as well?”

  He looked away from her. Beyond the river was open countryside, beautiful and wild. Maud had been looking at some version of this view for most of her life, and often she’d looked at it with the old man who was now sitting beside her. Her master had been the anchor of her existence.

  “That is not for me to decide,” he told her after a time. “You once asked me if you were a person or a possession. Of course you are a person, you are a Dread, and it is your choice to remain so…or not. And as to Seekers, my son and I believe they lie safely in Quin Kincaid’s hands.”

  Maud looked down into the castle ward behind her. John was there, practicing with his whipsword, waiting for her. Her first instinct was to go to him so that they might talk this over together. Perhaps she was ready for a life beyond her master.

  “Is he your apprentice now?” the old man asked, following her gaze. “Are you training him to be a Dread?”

  She felt the unaccustomed pull of emotion as she watched John. “I don’t know. He may not choose to live as we live.”

  “And there is the real question, child. What is a Dread?”

  “One who stands apart from humanity so that she may judge clearly,” Maud answered. There was no doubt in her own mind.

  “That is what I wanted Dreads to be,” he agreed. “Tyrants and evildoers beware.”

  “Tyrants and evildoers beware,” she echoed.

  “The rules I made were intended to keep the Middle Dread in line. But you are not like him. If you choose to be a Dread still, you must decide what it means.”

  —

  The Old Dread, her master, the man who had taught her about the hum of the universe—he was only a man called James.

  As if to prove this point, he and his son Desmond changed into modern garb before they left the estate. The Young Dread took her leave of him with an embrace at the edge of the commons. After this goodbye, she watched the two men—ordinary men in ordinary clothing—walk south.

  She could have taken them to their destination by athame or by medallion—she had both remaining medallions, one for her, on
e for her future apprentice—but they had declined that offer.

  “We’re going to walk there,” Dex had told her. “For old times’ sake.”

  The Young Dread watched for a very long while, until the two of them had disappeared from sight. Then she turned to John and found herself at a loss.

  “Well,” he said, “what now?”

  Quin woke in the hospital. Shinobu was asleep beside her, his head on her bed, the rest of him sprawled in a chair.

  She was connected to an IV and a heart monitor, but she could see nothing wrong with herself. Her limbs moved properly. Gingerly she tested her lungs, and found that they took in air perfectly well.

  She let her eyes fall closed for a moment, and she was immediately falling with the Transit Bridge, hitting the water; the weight of the beam was pushing her down, and her lungs were burning…She shivered and opened her eyes. Fear of drowning. She would have to make room for it next to fear of heights.

  She studied Shinobu’s sleeping face on the bed. He had bruises everywhere, and his eyes looked sunken and exhausted. His arms and legs still gave the impression of having been put back together carelessly. He’d been through several very bad weeks, and at the end of them, he’d pulled her from the water and saved her.

  She ran her hand through his hair, across his cheek. He woke to her touch and took her hand between both of his own. He pressed his lips against her fingers as he met her gaze.

  “You’ll do anything it takes,” she whispered.

  “Of course I will.” He kissed her hand. “Quin, when I left you There, I, I thought—”

  She pulled him closer. “It doesn’t matter. I know you would never intentionally hurt me.”

  “I thought I was saving you. I thought if I kept you There, you would be safe while I tried to sort out the Watchers. They’d already attacked us, and I—”