Traveler

  Catherine looked. There were at least twenty other people between them and the abbey, but she saw immediately whom Mariko meant—a man walking through the shadows of the high, dark building, heading the way they had just come. He wore ordinary clothes and a hat, which left his face in shadow, but there was something about the way he moved, about the tightly controlled motions of his limbs.

  “He moves like a Seeker,” Catherine said.

  “Or an apprentice, at least,” Mariko agreed.

  “Do you recognize him? Could it be Emile?” Catherine felt hopeful for a moment—how wonderful if she could discover Emile to be alive and well—but the feeling died out quickly. “No, it’s not him.”

  Mariko shook her head. “Definitely not Emile. Too big. I don’t know him.” She grasped Catherine’s shoulder and studied her closely.

  “What?” Catherine asked.

  “Catherine, how did you figure out where that underground room was?” Mariko asked. “Tell me exactly.”

  Catherine tried to compose her thoughts as she watched the man disappear down the path she and Mariko had taken. It was as if he were following the same set of instructions Catherine had used.

  “I told you. I found that note from my great-grandfather’s grandfather…or some ancestor, at any rate—I have the family tree back home, which shows—”

  “That part’s not important,” Mariko said.

  “Right.” Catherine regrouped. “The note described how to find this place, that chamber—”

  “Your ancestor’s note said the cave was beneath Mont Saint-Michel?”

  “No. That was the missing piece. The note spoke about the cave, with instructions to find the tunnel once you were on the island, but he didn’t say where the island was. I only figured that out yesterday.”

  “And how did you figure it out?” her friend pressed.

  “There’s a picture of a small mountain—a hill, really—in my family crest. My whole life I’ve wondered where it was. No one in the family is quite sure—like the cave, it’s knowledge that’s been lost over time. But all at once I realized: the mountain in our crest is the outline of Mont Saint-Michel, minus some of the more modern buildings, and looking at it from the sea side, not the land side. And I wondered if these coordinates he wrote out were meant to bring someone here.”

  “Catherine, you’ve stared at your family crest your whole life, and you suddenly realized this yesterday?” Mariko whispered, her Japanese accent surfacing the more quickly she spoke.

  “I agree it sounds odd, now that I say it. I don’t know how to explain, except that the thought came into my head: Mont Saint-Michel. Mont Saint-Michel. The idea was there when I woke up, so strong it was almost frightening.” Catherine laughed nervously, recalling the strange mixture of excitement and terror that had overtaken her at that moment of realization. She continued: “I looked it up and found pictures, compared them to my family crest, and it was obvious.”

  “So you thought we should hurry over to France immediately and look for this cave that belonged to your family hundreds of years ago?”

  “The thought was so clear, I was excited to see if I was right,” Catherine whispered back. “I didn’t expect to find anything inside! I didn’t even expect to find the cave, not really.”

  She glanced down the cobbled street again, wondering how long it would take that man to find the tunnel entrance. They’d propped the heavy grate back up in front of it, but that could be moved in moments. When he reached the end of the tunnel and discovered the athame missing, what would happen? What was he prepared to do?

  “Catherine—Mont Saint-Michel ‘came into’ your head. You thought it was important to come here now.”

  “I looked at the crest and figured it out.”

  “No, you didn’t ‘figure it out’!” cried Mariko. “Cat-chan, don’t you see? You looked inside someone else’s mind. You heard someone else’s thoughts. Someone else’s urgent thoughts. You were eavesdropping on the mind of whatever person—whatever Seeker—put the athame here. Or whoever is coming to fetch it.” She gestured to where the mystery Seeker had walked.

  “Come on. Are you being serious?” Catherine scoffed. “You don’t believe in that, do you?”

  They’d been taught that Seekers often developed, as a by-product of their mental training, the ability to read others’ thoughts. But Catherine had always been of the opinion that there were lots of other explanations for what Seekers took to be telepathy.

  “You don’t have to believe in it to do it,” Mariko pointed out. “We got to that hidden chamber moments before someone else came. I was in the middle of telling you that it was an impossible coincidence, when we saw a person following in our precise footsteps. How else can that be explained?”

  Reluctantly Catherine saw her point. She recalled again the cold fear that had accompanied her initial vision of Mont Saint-Michel, as though the thought had come from someone dangerous. Perhaps it had come from the very man who had just passed by, and if so, he wasn’t someone they wanted to confront without preparation. “Maybe,” she admitted.

  “And he’s about to discover that it’s already been taken,” Mariko whispered.

  Catherine looked at her friend. “We need to go,” she said.

  “Yes,” Mariko agreed. “Quickly.”

  The remains of Traveler were a six-story broken mass that had once been a beautiful airship. The ship’s reflective metal hide was bent and crushed in places, showing the park’s trees and the city’s buildings in the warped manner of a carnival mirror. Traveler was surrounded by security lights all night, and during the day, emergency crews crawled over every part of it, methodically disconnecting every source of power, in preparation for moving the ship outside the city, where it would be put back together. And one day soon, if John prevailed over the other branches of his family, it would be flown again.

  It was nighttime now, and he and the Young Dread were inside Traveler. She’d brought them there with the athame, blindfolding John as she always did.

  Though the salvage workers were gone at this hour, the blinding exterior lights remained, glaring through every window. All around was the drip and trickle of broken pipes and the smell of burned electrical wiring. Water leaked from the ceilings of the crooked corridors, hissing into steam as it came into contact with surfaces that were still hot. Misshapen shadows lay everywhere.

  John’s grandfather Gavin, already weak and close to death, had nearly been killed in the crash. He remained unconscious at a London hospital, where John’s relatives were gathered day and night, waiting to see if Gavin would live and, regardless of what happened, ready to start a fight over control of his wealth.

  That wealth was John’s by right. He should be there with those relatives, laying a claim to everything that was his—his because his mother had amassed the fortune for him, so that he might be protected from enemies as she had never been. But legal battles would have to wait. The Young Dread might have agreed to this nighttime visit to Traveler, but she would never agree to him returning to London for something so mundane as fighting his cousins in court. Until his training was complete, he must step away from the ordinary world and ignore his relatives as long as he could.

  John understood that his absence might be a death sentence to his grandfather. Years ago Catherine had poisoned Gavin as a way to keep him under her control. The poison lived in his body permanently, and he required a daily antidote to stay alive. Now Maggie was gone and John was with Maud. There was no one in London to give Gavin his antidote. Without Maggie, John didn’t even know where he might acquire it. He could only hope his grandfather’s doctors had figured out a way to counteract the poison and the old man would live. Gavin was, after all, John’s only true ally, and no matter how crazy the old man had become, John loved him.

  Maud had carved an anomaly directly into Traveler’s great room. From there, John led them carefully through the ship to a narrow, half-destroyed passage on one of Traveler’s lower levels. I
n the middle of this passage, they arrived at a metal door that was wedged open against the buckled floor of the hall.

  “My grandmother Maggie’s room,” he told Maud.

  Inside was a tiny space—a bed, a small desk, and a closet held shut by the crushed ceiling, everything thrown into disarray. John ducked into the room, clipped a light to the end of the bed, and switched it on, illuminating the cabin.

  Everything he needed was on the floor. Maggie’s room had been decorated with several framed photographs and pieces of art. These had all fallen violently when Traveler crashed, and they now lay broken across the floor amidst shards of glass. He knelt down and began to pick them up.

  “What happened to your grandmother?” the Young Dread asked from the doorway.

  The question surprised John. When he’d first begun training with Maud, she’d spoken as little as possible and would never have asked a personal question. Her conversation was becoming easier the more time they spent together, as though John and the normal world were rubbing off on her.

  “They didn’t find her body,” he told her. His own voice sounded too even, too detached, but this was a topic he didn’t want the Young Dread to take an interest in. Maggie’s cold-blooded views would not be to Maud’s liking.

  “You believe she got out?”

  The rescue workers had found everyone on the ship—some dead, most alive—except for Maggie.

  “Yes,” he answered, “I believe she got off the ship somehow.”

  The Young nodded at this and took a seat in the corridor. As John watched, she removed Catherine’s journal from a pocket of her cloak. He’d allowed her to keep it since the previous night.

  When he turned back to the broken frames on the floor, his mind stayed on Maggie—who wasn’t really his grandmother but a more distant relative. He’d thought about her often since the crash. He did believe she’d gotten out of the ship, though he couldn’t understand how. And where would she have gone? If she were alive and well, why hadn’t she contacted him?

  Truthfully, he didn’t know if he should feel sad or relieved. Maggie had raised him, after his mother was gone. He had loved her, of course, but he’d hated her sometimes as well. She’d made him scared for his entire childhood that someone would be coming to kill him, just as someone had come for his mother and so many others. He should be worried about Maggie, worried that she was injured or lost. But he felt something different—a deep disquiet about where she might be and what she might be doing.

  His grandmother had once told him a bedtime story about a woman who lived deep in the forest, away from all of mankind except a chosen few. The story had felt like something more than a fairy tale; Maggie had sounded as though she were describing something she’d actually done. Could she be doing that again, living somewhere remote from London, biding her time?

  He stacked the broken picture frames on the bed and picked off the last shards of glass. Each frame held more pictures than one would expect—several were concealed behind whatever had been displayed under the glass. Now John tore the backs off the frames, slid photograph after photograph from their hiding places, and laid them across the bedspread.

  The hidden pictures were not pleasant. Each captured a scene of grisly death. The images were of men, women, and children, killed by knife, by sword, by gun, by drowning. The oldest pictures had been taken a hundred years before, or more, but the photographs spanned the last century, in black and white and in color. Maggie had first shown him these pictures when he was eight years old. Each dead person was an ancestor of his, a member of the house of the fox. Here was photographic evidence of all the ways the other Seeker houses had victimized his own. The pictures had convinced John to dedicate his life to revenge, just as his mother had dedicated hers.

  They think we’re small and weak and helpless. Easy to kill, his mother had told him as she lay dying. Are we easy to kill, John?

  “No,” John murmured aloud now, as he had then to his mother, “we’re not.”

  Looking over the piles of photographs, however, he thought his family had been easy to kill. They’d been victims again and again. But no more. The killers would not get away with this carnage.

  John thought, This is my list of who will pay.

  While John occupied himself in his grandmother’s cabin, the Young Dread sat on the slanted corridor floor within Traveler, studying Catherine’s journal. She hadn’t wanted to look at the journal at first, hadn’t wanted to see evidence of the Middle’s crimes. She’d been forced to coexist with the Middle Dread since she was a small girl, and that had been possible only by turning a blind eye to the worst parts of his nature. After she’d killed him, it had felt good to imagine that she’d wiped away every trace of him—but the journal told her otherwise. It told her that, while she’d known a few of the Middle’s misdeeds, there were countless more of which she’d been completely unaware.

  There was an entry near the middle of the book that had drawn her attention the previous evening. She read it again now.

  April the Twelfth, 1870

  Father,

  The Middle Dread returned not three days past. He did not announce himself, but Gerald was hunting alone and spied him by the loch and fortress.

  Shall I make some acknowledgement of his presence? I do not wish to offend with forwardness, nor with lack of respect.

  Further, something new. There are two youths with him, of lowly families by their dress and speech. The Dread instructs them in swordplay. They do a strange arithmetic among them, counting numbers, and always they sum to two hundreds.

  What are we to make of this?

  My love to you and my brothers.

  Thomas

  This was written in a fairly modern hand, using modern spellings, and Maud could not make out every word. The earliest pages of the journal were the only ones she could properly read. But she understood “two youths…of lowly families,” being trained by the Middle Dread.

  My great-great-grandfather saw the Middle Dread training others, Catherine had said, years ago, in the forest. This was probably the very letter that Catherine’s ancestor had written, Maud realized. And the two strange boys Maud and John had seen on the Scottish estate—was it possible they were the same youths described here? Last night, sitting by the fire, Maud had become quite certain the answer was yes. Catherine had mistaken the boys for additional Young Dreads. Of course they weren’t that. They were something else, and they belonged to the Middle.

  Maud was convinced he’d taken a whipsword and cut it in half and given it to them, and perhaps he’d given them the boar athame as well. This letter had been written nearly two hundred years before, so those boys were spending time There, stretched out, which explained the Dread-like flavor of their physical motions.

  The letter was dated 1870. Was I awake in 1870? the Young Dread wondered. She knew, in a general way, how long she’d been stretched out, and when, and how long she’d been awake, but she put little emphasis on exact years and so couldn’t be sure where she was in 1870. She might well have been There while the Middle Dread was out and about in the world training those boys. But what was he using them for?

  She flipped to the earliest pages of the diary, seeking out, as she had done several times already, one particular entry. Written on parchment was a description of the Middle Dread killing a Young Dread, centuries ago. It was not the murder she’d witnessed but an even earlier one.

  This scrap of parchment is proof the Middle killed at least two Young Dreads before me, she thought. This is surely more than my master knew. If he had known everything, would he have gotten rid of the Middle sooner? She feared the answer was no. The Old Dread had acknowledged the Middle’s old crimes, but he’d been tied to the Middle somehow, unable to bring him to justice, until Maud herself had taken matters into her own hands and killed him.

  The Young Dread looked up from the journal and found an unexpected glint of metal in her line of sight. To the right of the cabin doorway, a broken section of wa
ll hung out into the corridor. Through the break was a dark space. Maud pushed the loose piece of corridor wall aside and peered into what must be John’s grandmother’s closet, which had mostly collapsed in the ship’s crash. Its jumbled contents lay in a heap, and among the tangled scarves and shoes, something large and metal caught the light. When the Young Dread wrested this item out through the break in the wall, she recognized its familiar weight and size immediately.

  It was a metal shield, such as a sword fighter might wear on his arm. The shield’s face was made of several concentric circles that spun independently of each other. She knew what it was at once—a disruptor shield. Though they had been common among Seekers in the past, the Young hadn’t seen one for at least two hundred years. Her master, the Old Dread, did not put much faith in such tools—he believed one should rely more on swift reflexes—but Maud had occasionally trained with such a shield when the Middle Dread was instructing her.

  She ran her hands over the concentric circles on the shield’s face and set them spinning. When rotating, the rings created the disorienting illusion that the shield surface was spiraling toward you and away from you at the same time. The shield was designed to withstand the direct onslaught of disruptor sparks, and when used skillfully could do many interesting things with those sparks.

  If John gets a bit better, perhaps I will allow him to try this, she thought.

  There was something else inside the closet, visible now that she had removed the shield. Maud thought her eyes might be deceiving her, and so she reached in quickly to snatch the object out. It was another tool she hadn’t seen in generations: an iridescent metal helmet, a focal.

  The Young Dread studied the helmet and the shield, and began to make plans for John’s further instruction. When she heard John speaking quietly in the cabin a few minutes later, she set down the objects and moved inside.