And they still could be. In a little while. She wouldn’t even know he’d been gone.
He stepped from the bedroom and shut the door behind him. In three quick steps he was in the bathroom. He was tall enough to push open the ceiling panel easily. And there was the focal, sitting atop a neighboring panel, glinting even in the low light. With his foot, he pushed the bathroom door shut. Then he took down the helmet, locked the door, and sat on the bathroom floor.
Before he could talk himself out of it, he pulled the focal onto his head.
20 Years Earlier
“How could anything be in there?” Mariko asked, peering through the metal grating to the dark tunnel beyond. “This place is crawling with tourists. There’s probably not one authentic item left anywhere on the island. It’s like Disneyland.”
“I didn’t realize you’ve been to Disneyland,” Catherine said. She was hunched over the edge of the grating, applying the cutting torch—which she was now very pleased with herself for bringing—to the final thick pin holding the grate in place.
“Of course I’ve never been to Disneyland,” Mariko answered indignantly, as though “Disneyland” were synonymous with “strip club” or “prison.”
“Ha, catch it!”
The metal pin broke in half with a popping sound, and the grate came loose. Catherine grasped one side, and Mariko took hold of the other, and together they lowered it onto the sandy rocks.
“There isn’t anything in here,” Catherine explained, answering Mariko’s earlier question. “If I’m right, we’ll find an empty space, sort of an underground cave. And we’ll learn a little something about my Seeker house.”
Mariko and Catherine were both wearing summer dresses, and Catherine was having a hard time getting used to how they looked. After years on the estate together, in drab training clothing, girlish attire seemed like a costume. Now at sixteen, in these clothes, they both looked pretty and, Catherine thought, frivolous. They looked like two of the tourists Mariko so despised.
They’d been waiting all afternoon, wandering steep streets until the tide receded enough that they might look for the tunnel Catherine was sure lay beneath the sea wall. By sunset, they’d nearly circumnavigated the tiny island’s beaches, when they’d finally found the tunnel’s opening under an old chapel perched high on the island’s southwestern edge.
The entry wasn’t well concealed. It sat only a few feet above the sand, like the mouth of an ancient dungeon. It wasn’t at all inviting, but any curious visitor with the right tools and no fear of arrest could have done what they were doing—removed the grate and entered the dark stone passage behind.
“Now check the beach,” Catherine instructed.
They were somewhat concealed behind a large shoulder of rock that stuck out through the sea wall and reached into the tidal flats. Mariko peered around at the rocky beach beyond. In the distance, groups of island visitors milled about, taking pictures in the last of the day’s light. Most were moving off the wet sand, up the old stone steps to the streets of Mont Saint-Michel above.
“Everyone’s leaving,” she said.
“Ready?”
Mariko wiped her hands on her skirt and brushed her long, dark hair out of her face. Then she looked skeptically into the dark passage. Catherine shone her flashlight inside, but the passage curved and they couldn’t see very far.
“It’s going to open up eventually,” Catherine assured her. She could hear her voice echoing in the tunnel.
“After how long?” Mariko asked. “Does your book tell you that?”
Mariko was referring to Catherine’s journal, which was tucked into the small backpack she wore. It hadn’t been Catherine’s journal originally. It had first belonged to her great-grandfather. Her grandfather had given it to her the year before. He’d decided not to pass it on to Catherine’s parents, who, he and Catherine agreed, would care very little about its contents since the journal did not provide an immediate road map to power and wealth. It was instead a record of Seeker history, although a very incomplete one at the moment.
Her great-grandfather had personally written a few entries in the book, but mostly it contained letters and writings from others, which he’d added over many years. Even with all of these, the journal was slender. Catherine intended to fill it up more completely. There were countless letters and diaries to be found in old, abandoned Seeker estates throughout the world, and Catherine had begun to find them.
She had recently discovered two letters, with great difficulty and a significant amount of travel that had been hard to explain to her parents. Both letters were written on ancient vellum, and both concerned the Middle Dread, who was Catherine’s particular area of interest, because so many Seekers had seen him misbehaving. She had carefully pasted these treasures into the beginning of the journal.
If she could gather enough evidence of the bad things the Middle had done in the past, and if she could show this evidence to the Old Dread, was it possible he would find someone better than the Middle to judge Seekers?
She had also found, in a storage trunk in her parents’ own cellar, a note from her great-grandfather’s grandfather, which is what had brought her here, to Mont Saint-Michel. This note described walking down to a beach on a small island, walking over rocks and sand for a long way until one found the entrance to a place—a special cave—that belonged to the house of the fox. He had written out coordinates for getting there, if you had an athame, but since Catherine didn’t have an athame, she was following his instructions for traveling by foot. Though information about the Middle Dread was what she chiefly sought, she was happy to learn anything she could of old Seeker knowledge. If she discovered anything interesting here on Mont Saint-Michel, she would add it to her journal.
“I don’t know how far the tunnel goes, but I’ve never known you to shy away from a challenge, Mariko.”
Mariko sniffed. “It’s lucky for you my summer has been very boring, Cat-chan.”
Catherine ducked low and entered the passage. The tunnel was narrow, with rough stones on each side that brushed her shoulders as she passed. Everything was wet and smelled of the ocean. Decaying seaweed lay in clumps on the floor and trailed from stones halfway up the walls, indicating that the tunnel filled with water whenever the tide was particularly high.
“Why did you let me wear sandals?” Mariko complained after a few minutes.
Catherine only laughed—she’d told Mariko at least five times to pick better shoes.
“Even with sandals, isn’t this better than listening to my mother lecture us about finding proper husbands?”
“Yes,” Mariko agreed, “but anything is better than that. Ow, bumped my head.” Then, irritated, she said, “Tell me again why you want to find this cave?”
“Don’t you trust me?”
Mariko snorted. Catherine had gotten her friend into trouble on numerous occasions, mostly by encouraging Mariko to ask their instructors lots and lots of questions they’d already refused to answer when Catherine had asked them.
“It was something Briac said, actually,” Catherine explained. As she spoke, she noticed that the floor ahead of them was slanting upward, and the only remaining seaweed here was very dry. “He said each house used to have a special place that was only for members of that house. It was sort of a gathering spot, usually a cave, I guess, but secret from everyone else. Does your family have something like that?”
“Not sure,” Mariko answered after a moment of reflection. “I think we used to have a sort of mountain retreat in central Japan.”
“Well, I think we’re going to find the special cave that belongs to the house of the fox. Watch out, the ceiling’s getting lower.”
“How wonderful,” Mariko said. “I was getting so comfortable.”
Catherine crouched down farther, so she was walking in an awkward half squat. The air was close, and Catherine was glad Mariko didn’t get claustrophobic.
“When Briac told you this, were you clothed?” Mari
ko asked. “Or had he managed to get you out of your undergarments?”
Only a fellow Seeker would make light of Briac attacking Catherine. Their constant brutal training allowed them to find humor in something that was not at all funny.
“Ha ha,” Catherine responded. “No, he told me about the caves before I broke his nose for trying to get at my undergarments.”
“I hope he tries again and you disable his manhood permanently with a swift, sharp kick. My father has trained me how to kick a man to ensure you will never have trouble from him again. Perhaps I should have steel-toed boots made for you, so you’re ready, Cat?”
“If you hate Briac so much, how can you stand to be around Alistair? They stick together, those two.” Catherine was using her free hand to pull herself along the low tunnel wall now.
“Are we crawling to hell?” Mariko asked.
“We must be nearly to the end. I feel a breeze.” She did feel a breeze, but in the beam of her flashlight the tunnel continued. What if there was nothing at the end and they had to back out the whole way? What if she was in the wrong location entirely?
Before Catherine could go too far down that line of thought, Mariko interrupted, picking up the thread of their conversation. “Briac and Alistair have been friends since they were small, and Alistair is loyal, but he’s nothing like Briac.” Catherine smiled at the fierce devotion she heard in her friend’s voice. “Alistair is kind—and so handsome, don’t you think?” Mariko added.
Catherine made a noncommittal sound. In her mind, Alistair’s friendship with Briac counterbalanced his looks.
“He’s a true gentleman,” Mariko went on a little dreamily. “Although…he’s not always gentle.”
Catherine stopped and turned the flashlight back on Mariko. Her pretty friend blinked at her innocently in the light.
“Have you and he—already, Mariko?” she asked.
“Well, not entirely,” Mariko answered, looking embarrassed. “My parents would be most displeased if I did that.”
“That’s one thing you and I have in common,” Catherine agreed, turning back and continuing on. Mariko’s parents were strict beyond all Western comprehension, but Catherine’s parents weren’t far behind. Centuries had passed since arranged marriages were popular in England, yet her parents had not quite caught on. “My mother and father seem to think they own me entirely, body and mind. They’ll be choosing the boys, and also which questions of mine deserve to be answered. Mostly they choose to answer none.”
Mariko sighed. “My parents don’t know the answers to any interesting questions. They gave up on Seeker lore generations ago.” Mariko was quiet for a moment before she spoke again. “My mother’s been introducing me to Japanese boys all summer, so they can settle on a match. Several have been quite attractive, fortunately.”
“Boys from Seeker families?”
“No, no. Sending me to the estate for training is only a family tradition. My father wanted me to be trained, he wanted me to take my oath. But he doesn’t expect more involvement than that. Our family athame has been gone for so many generations. I suppose he imagines it might magically reappear one day, and I should be prepared just in case.”
Catherine and Mariko had both taken their Seeker oaths before the summer. They’d gone on one assignment—to break an old Seeker out of a prison in Africa—and then they’d been called home, Mariko to Hong Kong and Catherine to England. Mariko had come to visit Catherine in London a few days earlier, and it was the first time they’d seen each other since leaving the estate.
“So…do you have to marry one of these boys, Mariko-chan?” Catherine asked her.
“Probably.” She sounded resigned and less upset than Catherine would have expected. “But…Alistair. His hair, Cat-chan, his shoulders. When he holds me, it’s like I’m being embraced by a battle robot.”
Catherine laughed at what she could only think of as a very Japanese description. “When you put it that way, I can understand the attraction,” she said. But privately she didn’t understand. They’d known Alistair for years; it seemed silly to be so smitten by a boy they’d watched grow up.
“Please tell me that’s the end,” Mariko said. “My neck is killing me and I’ve scraped everything.”
In the beam of the flashlight they could now see the channel opening up, and in a few moments, Catherine was stepping out of the tunnel’s confines and down into a large stone chamber. The space was roughly round, about thirty feet in diameter, with a ceiling about ten feet above their heads.
Catherine stretched as her friend came out of the passage and climbed down next to her. Mariko took hold of the flashlight and shone it around the space slowly. The ceiling was of natural rock, as were more than half the walls. Only the side where they’d entered was completely manmade—built from large, uneven stones packed tightly together. The rest of the room had been carved out of the hillside.
There were waterlines on the walls, some of them quite high. In a storm or during a very high tide, the room might fill with seawater. The floor and lower half of the chamber were covered with seaborne debris: bits of driftwood, gritty sand, and ancient seaweed, slowly turning to dust. In a few places, the seaweed was still green, though when Catherine nudged a pile of it with her shoe, it crumbled beneath her foot. Looking up at the ceiling, she discovered small openings. These were letting in the trickle of fresh air that was now brushing past her face.
The strangest feature was a shelf protruding from the wall at about chest height. It nearly circled the room and was wide enough for someone to sit on, but too high to be of practical use. Directly across from the tunnel, above the shelf, a fox’s head had been cut into the rock.
Catherine let out a surprised breath when she saw the fox. “I suppose there’s no doubt this cave belongs to my family.”
“There’s something else carved on the wall over here,” Mariko said.
They stepped closer and Mariko let the flashlight play over a series of numbers incised into the stone. Before Catherine could study them, something else caught her attention.
“Give me the light,” she said urgently. “There.” She trained the flashlight’s beam on an object that was partially visible on the shelf, directly across the room from them. “Do you see that?”
They waded through debris to the other side of the chamber, and Catherine reached up onto the shelf. Her fingers closed around something made of smooth stone. She pulled the heavy object down into the light, and they both stared at it, speechless.
“That’s…an athame,” Mariko said eventually.
And it was.
Catherine was holding a perfect stone dagger, every inch of it intact. She moved the dials of the handgrip, which spun effortlessly beneath her touch. She turned the dagger’s grip upward, to look at the base of the pommel.
She and Mariko both drew in a breath at the same moment.
“It’s—it’s—” began Mariko.
“My family’s athame,” Catherine finished.
Carved on the dagger’s stone handle was the tiny shape of a fox.
—
Catherine moved quickly up the stone steps from the beach into the village of Mont Saint-Michel, clutching her backpack to her chest. Inside was the athame, and the lightning rod they’d found next to it. A cold breeze had picked up, blowing in off the water, but there were still lots of people about, photographing each other with the abbey in the background, a full moon hanging behind its spire.
They’d left the underground chamber as quickly as they could. Catherine hadn’t wanted to speak—and had hardly dared breathe—until they were out of the tunnel with the athame. It would be too easy to be trapped down there if someone had been following them. But now Mariko caught her arm.
“Why are we going so fast, Cat?” she asked. She pulled Catherine close as they wove through a group of Germans arguing over camera settings. “The athame might have been sitting in that room for years. It’s not like someone’s looking for it now.”
“It wasn’t there for years,” Catherine said. “It was clean when I picked it up. So was the lightning rod. No dust, not salt from the ocean air. Like they’d only just been placed there.”
Mariko thought about this. “That chamber fills with seawater now and then,” she mused aloud. Then, coming to the same conclusion Catherine had, she added, “It would be a stupid place to leave an athame for any length of time. It could be washed away. You think it was left there recently for someone to find.”
Mariko began to steer them both, and Catherine was grateful for it. Her whole mind was wrapped up in the ancient implement she was carrying. It had been lost for a hundred years, maybe more. And here it was. Her heart beat against her chest. She’d found the athame of the fox. Of all her family in all its generations, she was the one to find it. They would be true Seekers again.
It was there in that dark chamber, a chamber that is supposed to belong to my family, waiting for…whom?
Mariko led them up more steps, until they were moving along the street in the shadow of the great abbey. Catherine wanted to walk more swiftly. “Whoever put it there might be watching us right now,” she whispered to Mariko. “We need to get out of here.”
But Mariko held her back with a hand on her arm, forcing them both into the meandering pace of tourists.
“If we’re being watched, Cat-chan, we should move slowly and not attract attention,” her friend reasoned. “But we aren’t being watched.”
“How do you know?”
“It would be an unbelievable coincidence,” Mariko whispered back. “I agree that someone must have put the athame and lightning rod there recently. But not right now. Think. You arrive here suddenly on the very day—”
Her friend stopped. She led Catherine to the low stone wall overlooking the village, a view of mainland France beyond.
“Look very carefully,” Mariko breathed, “by the steps up to the church doors. Moving down toward the beach stairs.”