Dawnbreaker: Legends of the Duskwalker - Book 3 (28 page)

“Sit down over here,” Haiku said, guiding Wren firmly to another chair. Wren let himself be led and did as he was told. Haiku crouched in front of him with a smile. “It’s OK,” he said. “I almost passed out too when I did it.”

Wren blinked several times, trying to chase away the dimness that seemed to be closing in on his vision from the sides. He sat still for a couple of minutes, allowing Haiku to clean his hand up. As he recovered himself, he noticed Foe was no longer sitting across from him, but was instead up by the table in the parlor, wrapping something around his own hand. It looked almost like a bandage. That was the first moment when Wren realized that Foe had shared the shedding of blood. Of course he had. The blade was double-edged. Though the oath had been Wren’s alone to give, Foe had participated in its sealing.

“Recite the oath often,” Haiku said. “Each morning when you rise, each evening when you lie down, as often throughout the day as you remember. It is your code, and if you hold to it, it will define your life. Each day will deepen your understanding of those words, and you will find that even a lifetime isn’t long enough to work out all their promise.”

After Foe had finished dressing his own hand, he approached and stood behind Haiku.

“And now,” he said, “we will begin.” Wren was still feeling shaky, but he didn’t want to say anything about it. Foe didn’t seem like he would be concerned anyway.

“As I said to you yesterday,” Foe continued, “the life you knew before is over. That’s the choice you’ve made, to turn away from everything that has come before. To that end, while you are here under my training, your world is only as big as I allow it to be.”

“I won’t try to communicate with anyone,” Wren said. “I promise.”

“The outside world no longer exists to you. And you, likewise, must not exist to it. To begin, I will hide you from it.”

“I’m already doing that,” Wren said. Foe’s eyebrows raised slightly, and he cocked his head to one side. “I had to,” Wren continued. “Because of my brother. I had to make sure he couldn’t find me.”

Foe smiled and shook his head. “Yes, I’ve seen what you’ve done, boy. And it is clever, in its way. But it would be easily defeated by anyone who had more than a passing interest in finding you. When I say I will hide you, I mean that you will, for all intents and purposes, vanish. I tell you this because you will likely find the sensation...” He paused, either searching for the word, or to emphasize it. “Disorienting.”

Wren felt a fresh burst of anxiety, from the revelation that his technique for masking his signal wasn’t as effective as he’d believed. Did that mean that Asher could have been tracking him all this time? And did that mean that what he’d taught Mama wasn’t really working either? Mama. That brought its own wave of emotion. If Foe made him impossible to find, what would happen if Mama came looking for him?

He knew he wasn’t supposed to be thinking about that now. He’d sworn an oath. But the reality of what it meant in practice was only now beginning to settle on him.

“Do not panic,” Foe said.

And before Wren could respond, a vast emptiness fell upon him, an overwhelming sense of his smallness, as if he had been instantly transported to the top of a skyscraper with the ground ten thousand feet below. He was lost, drifting in a sea of silence, utterly isolated. Conflicting emotions raced through him; it felt as if everything had collapsed in upon him, as if all the world had compressed itself into this one room, and yet he was filled with a loneliness so expansive, it seemed impossible that he alone could contain it all.

The isolation was so heavy it was almost tangible, but it was so foreign, so incomprehensible that Wren couldn’t process the source or cause. It was like the sudden loss of a sense, the deafness following an explosion, or numbness of a frost-chilled hand. He wondered with sudden horror if this is what it was to be disconnected.

“Breathe, boy,” said Foe, and he chuckled, apparently amused by Wren’s reaction.

Out of reflex, Wren tried to access something simple; with the flutter of an eye, he issued a request to the local grid to confirm his location. A routine process, normally so immediate that the interval between request and response was imperceptible. Instead, the request stalled, hung there in the ether, without even an echo to mark its existence. Nothing but the dull silence of a dead signal.

“What’s happening to me?” Wren said. “Did you...” The thought of it made him want to throw up. “Am I disconnected?”

“He’s insulated your signal,” Haiku said. “Nothing more.”

“All that you need is here before you,” said Foe, holding out his bandaged hand to indicate the room around them. “For you, nothing else exists, nothing else need exist.”

Wren wanted to believe that everything was all right, that there was no reason for the fear that dominated his every fiber, but his logical mind had no power over the instinct; he felt like he was being smothered.

“As your training progresses, I will allow your world to expand to suit your capacity,” Foe continued. “For now, any and all traffic along your connection goes through me.”

Internally, Wren thrashed against the suffocating presence, reached out through the digital and felt it now, Foe’s own processes hovering above him.

“Please,” Wren said. “I won’t do anything you don’t want me to. Please.”

“It’s for your safety, Wren,” Haiku said. “And for ours.”

Foe walked over and stood in front of Wren, placed his hand on top of Wren’s head. He tilted Wren’s head back and looked him in the eyes. Foe’s dark eyes were cool and steady; there was no malice in them.

“Right now, you think you’re strong enough,” Foe said. “You believe you have willpower enough to maintain the discipline of silence. And at the moment, I believe you do. But soon enough you’ll have exhausted your resolve, and I would not be a very good teacher if I were to leave you helpless in the face of temptation that I could otherwise remove.”

The mention of discipline hearkened Wren back to the words of his oath, and he returned to them, recited them.

In all ways, at all times, I seek truth. With clarity, I see that which is. In all ways, at all times, I master myself. Seen or unseen, I am the same.

It didn’t make the suffocating feeling go away, but it gave his mind something to hold on to, something to do other than flail.

Foe removed his hand and returned to the table in the middle of the parlor.

“Steady your breathing,” Haiku said, as he put the final touches on Wren’s bandage. He lowered his voice, as though he were sharing a secret. “It’s harder for you, because of your age. Usually when the training begins, the young ones haven’t become as dependent on connectedness yet. But you’ll be OK.”

“You went through this?” Wren asked. He forced himself to take deep breaths.

Haiku smiled and shook his head. “I was never connected.”

“Enough coddling, Haiku,” Foe called from across the room. “Come along, boy.”

Haiku stood and stepped back. Wren got to his feet, flexed his hand, testing it against the tension of the bandage.

“Thanks, Haiku.”

Haiku dipped his head in a scant bow. Wren crossed to Foe, who led him out of the parlor and into the stairwell. Moving seemed to help calm the vertigo. Each footfall found something solid beneath it, reminded Wren of his place in space. He found that running a hand along the wall or the railing of the stairs steadied him, as if the physical world served to anchor him in reality.

“My name is Wren,” Wren said.

“Mmm?” Foe replied, though the noise was non-committal; Wren wasn’t sure if the old man hadn’t heard what he’d said, or if he’d heard it and was merely acknowledging the statement.

“I said my name is Wren,” he repeated. “Not ‘boy’.”

Foe stopped, but didn’t turn around.

“You have not yet suffered enough to know your true name,” Foe said. “But you will learn it in time.”

The answer was wholly unexpected and completely confusing. Wren immediately regretted having said anything. They descended in silence past the ground floor and continued down three more flights before turning into another passage. Wren glanced back as they left the stairwell. The stairs continued down into darkness. He couldn’t help but wonder just how far down it went.

The lighting in the passage was minimal; thin fiberlights ran along the top and bottom of the walls and cast everything in a grey gloaming. Foe stopped briefly at a small box affixed to the wall just outside a door. He swept his thumb over a panel and the front of the case whirred open. The old man removed something from the box and dropped it casually into a pocket on his loose shirt, though Wren couldn’t see what it was. He closed the box and then opened the door next to it.

Wren followed him in. As they entered, the lights came up with a hum and washed over the room with a blue-white intensity. The room was a large square, maybe thirty feet to a side, but oddly constructed. Wren stood next to Foe on what seemed to be a ledge or catwalk about four feet wide. Beyond that, the floor dropped seven feet or so to a lower level. Where the catwalk was grated metal, the lower section appeared to be flat, pale blue concrete. Short, round poles or pillars, narrow and flat on top, stood scattered on the concrete with no apparent design or pattern Wren could detect. The catwalk ran all the way around the sunken portion of the room. A slick touch-panel was inset in the wall by the door, dark and dormant.

Next to Wren, Foe was busy taking off his shoes.

“You may want to do the same,” Foe said. Wren didn’t understand why, but he sat down and started taking his boots off anyway. While he was doing that, Foe went to the touch-panel. It lit up under his fingers. As Wren was wondering whether he should remove his socks as well, the walls of the room groaned and clanked. A hissing sound rose from the lower section, and a few seconds later water burbled up from some great number of unseen jets. Wren pulled off his socks.

Foe returned to him as he was standing up and held out his hand. Across his palm lay a small, horn-shaped device in silver and bright blue.

“Have you seen one of these before, boy?” Foe asked.

Wren shook his head. “No, sir.”

Foe nodded and gripped the device around the narrow end and pointed the rounded, blunt end at Wren. There was a tiny rectangle at the center. Wren was just about to ask what it was when the device clicked, the rectangle lit with a lightning blue, and a needle-prick pain lanced through Wren’s chest. He yelped at the pain, and pressed his fingers against the place between his ribs where he’d felt the jolt. Already the pain was subsiding to a mild burn. There was no hole or mark on Wren’s shirt.

“We just call them clickers,” Foe said casually as he held the device back out across his palm. “Go on, take it.” Wren took the clicker from Foe. Below them, water continued to fill the sunken portion. “Do you see how to operate it?”

Wren turned the device over in his hand, ran a thumb along its smooth back. There was a hint of play in the curve, just behind the broad head of the device. Wren made sure the blunt end was facing Foe and pressed. The device clicked. Foe didn’t react.

“Good,” he said. He glanced down at the water below, and then turned back to the panel. The hissing ceased. Foe went to edge of the ledge and turned around. “Down.”

He bent down and descended, making use of a ladder embedded in the side of the concrete that Wren hadn’t noticed. Wren waited until Foe was down and then followed after. The old man waded out from the ladder to the center of the pool, weaving through the poles as he went. Wren estimated the water was about two feet deep. And when his foot touched it, he sucked in his breath at the cold.

“Quickly, boy,” Foe called to him. Wren held his breath and forced his foot down into the frigid water. The water came up to the middle of his thighs, and drained all the heat from his body as he trudged his way out to where Foe was waiting. By the time he got there, his teeth were already chattering. Foe seemed disappointed. “You’ll want to control that,” he said flatly. And then, “Take a look around. Get a good sense of where you are, where I am, and what surrounds us.” He paused while Wren glanced around at the poles, the walls, the water. Wren wasn’t sure what exactly he was supposed to be looking for. He crossed his arms, hugging himself against his shivering.

“Have you seen enough?” Foe asked.

Wren nodded.

“This is the Waiting Room,” Foe said. “You will spend a great deal of time here, and it will teach you many things. But the most important thing you will learn here is
patience
.”

The idea of standing in freezing cold water didn’t sound at all like a good way to learn patience, Wren thought. How was Foe so calm? The water didn’t seem to be bothering him at all.

“For now, we will begin with something simple. You have your clicker?”

Wren unfolded his arms and held up his clicker. Foe drew a second clicker from his pocket.

“A simple game, with simple rules. When I tell you to begin, try to hit me. Don’t get hit.”

“That’s it?” Wren asked. Foe dipped his head in a nod. Wren glanced around again. The poles weren’t wide enough for him to hide behind completely, and they were only about three feet tall. Maybe he could use them for a little bit of cover at least.

“Ready?” Foe asked.

“Yes, sir,” Wren said. He hunched down, clicker at the ready. When Foe said to begin, Wren would feint to his right, and then dodge left. There was a cluster of poles that direction.

“Very well,” Foe said. Wren tensed, waiting for the signal. Instead, the lights went out. Total darkness.

“Begin,” said Foe. And in the next instant, a single spark flared and pain bored right through the center of Wren’s chest. He cried out at the shock, and Foe’s clicker glinted again, stinging Wren in nearly the exact same place.

In the surprise and confusion, Wren forgot all about his previous tactics and lurched to his right. Another click, another ember of pain, this one catching him in the neck just under his jaw. He splashed on, operating purely in reaction, with no plan or purpose.
Click, click.
Two more stings, one on top of the other in his shoulder-blade.