Seeker (28 page)

“And it will,” he said. “It will end up with me.”

She said nothing to this.

“When I have gotten it back,” he went on, “I will need training to use it properly. Don’t you think it would be fair for you to help me with that?”

She sat in silence for a while as a thought formed in her head. Finally she told him, “That is not my duty.”

It was then that he noticed her scar. She tried to hide it with her arm when she saw the direction of his eyes, but it was too late. He asked her how she’d received the injury, and she told him. She was not sure why she told him, other than her strange sense of obligation to him, which had begun on that night years ago.

“If your own companion left you to die, your duty to him is done, don’t you think?” he asked. “But if you believe you owe him your loyalty, couldn’t you teach me to use the athame, then return to him after I’ve learned the skill—if you wish to return to him?”

“If I wish,” she repeated, trying to understand the meaning of those words.

“Or you could stay with me,” he suggested. “Teach me. Be your own master.”

Her hand flashed out, grabbed his left arm, and turned it over, her fingers like a vise. She studied his wrist, which was perfectly smooth, with no athame burned into it.

“You have no mark. You are no Seeker,” she told him.

“Briac has done me an injustice.” He must have seen something in her face, because he added softly, “You’ve seen part of that injustice, haven’t you?” He looked down at the soft, old leather of her shoes. “I always wondered who the smaller person was. Until one day I realized I did know. It was you.”

She didn’t answer, but she recalled John as a young boy, huddled in that hiding place beneath the floor, closing his eyes tight as though that could stop the terrible things he was seeing. They had done too much then; they had done things that were not their duty at all. Could one do other things to make up for those?

“He wouldn’t finish my training,” John went on, “but you can.” He was looking at her in that way ordinary people did, as though she would suddenly feel what he was feeling and understand what was important to him, just by looking into his eyes.

But she could not feel what John was feeling. She was the Young Dread. She had existed for hundreds of years in her fifteen-year life, and her duties were far different than his. She and the other Dreads took turns stretching out through time, waking to oversee the oaths of new Seekers, holding themselves apart from humanity, making just decisions. This apprentice was as new as a fresh shoot of grass. He could not possibly understand.

Except
 … her mind had responded.
Except many decisions were not
just. Justice has become a shadowy thing, and so many things were done while I was asleep
.

She had moved away from John then and stood staring into the fire. Eventually he’d left.

After the apprentice had gone, she’d had one thought for a very long time:
What am I?

Now, all alone on the estate, the Young Dread entered the workshop with her pail of milk. She had stopped thinking of ways to kill the Middle Dread and was thinking instead of what John had said. And when she had her small meal that afternoon, the thought in her mind was this:
I wonder if John will come back. What will I do if he does?

Quin hit the bystander on the Bridge so hard they were both thrown to the pavement. She continued moving, rolling over his body and into the legs of several other pedestrians. John was in the doorway of her house, just yards away, and somewhere in the house behind him was that stone dagger. She’d left that dagger and most of her memory in the past, and she’d sworn they would stay there.

She pulled herself up to her knees but found she couldn’t stand. Her head was pounding from slamming it into John’s forehead a few moments ago, and it took her a second to realize that the Asian boy she’d knocked over was, in fact, holding on to her.

“Hey!” he said, clutching her more tightly. “What are you doing?”

Quin realized he was a boy only if by “boy” one meant “very tall teenager with scary clothing.” She tried to pull herself free but only succeeded in pulling him closer. One of her shirtsleeves had gotten pushed up in her fall, and the sharp metal studs of the boy’s bracelet were cutting into her left wrist. She was starting to bleed, and the pain made her look down at her arm. Next to her own wrist, she could see the boy’s wrist, with its thick bracelet, and beneath
the bracelet, on the underside of his arm, was a dagger-shaped scar imprinted on his flesh. With a sick jolt, Quin noticed the identical scar on her own wrist, in the spot she tried very hard never to see.

She stopped struggling finally and looked at the boy’s face. He had jewelry in his nose and through his eyebrow, and his hair was dyed to look like a leopard. But none of these surface details mattered. He was …

He was looking at her as well.

“Quin,” he breathed. His hands released her.

From the corner of her eye, Quin saw John in the doorway of her house. And there were other men in the shadows nearby. She untangled herself from the Asian boy whose name she did not actually know, and got back to her feet, pulling her sleeve back into place as she did so. She was already moving, her hands automatically feeling at her waist, as though expecting to find weapons there.
No weapons allowed on the Bridge
, her mind chattered.
You know this
. So why did it feel like part of her arm was missing?

Quin glanced back to see John and those other men moving through the crowds. The next few minutes were a blur. A herd of Western tourists was choking traffic on the thoroughfare. She pushed her way through them, sensing every moment that John’s men were getting closer. Then she was falling down an airlift, moving so quickly the lift hardly had time to catch her before she moved out onto a lower level, where there was loud music and denser crowds. She caught glimpses of her pursuers, farther behind her now.

Another airlift down, then out into more frightening swarms of visitors outside the cheap drug bars. She kept turning to the right, realizing too late that her pursuers were herding her in that direction.

She moved frantically down another airlift, this one smaller and open only to Bridge residents. When she stepped off this time, she was in an empty passage and a man was running toward her from a
stairway. She ran left—the only direction available to her—and found herself moving down a wide, dark corridor.

This was a part of the Bridge she had never seen before. It was empty of humans, inhabited only by huge pieces of mechanical equipment that filled the space with a rhythmic vibration and the hiss of steam. The man’s footsteps were behind her, getting closer, the sound of his shoes combining with the pulse of the machinery. He would catch her, the past would catch her, and it was happening so easily. She hadn’t even cried out for help.

Quin’s eyes shut without her realizing. Even running for her life, she lost herself for a moment, or perhaps it was many moments. When she forced her eyes open, she was at the very end of the hall, among huge air-conditioning units giving off a heat that smelled of engine oil. She wasn’t running anymore. She turned slowly, discovering there were men all around her. She was cornered.

There were five of them. A few were young, but all were much older and larger than she was. She recognized the one closest to her—she had glimpsed his face, with its growth of dark stubble, during the chase.

Her back was against one of the giant air-conditioning units. The men were in a loose semicircle around her. A few had knives at their waists, even though the screeners at the Bridge entrances were supposed to catch anything dangerous before it entered the Transit Bridge. Quin sensed herself preparing for a fight, as though instinct were taking over.

The one with the stubbly chin threw something to her. On reflex, she caught it. The moment her hand touched it in that dim light, she realized she was now holding the stone dagger. She threw it away as though it had burned her. The man intercepted it before it hit the floor, and he shoved the dagger back into her hand.

“Please don’t throw it again,” Stubble Chin told her.

Quin felt the cool stone as her fingers wrapped around the dagger’s handgrip.

“Tell me you understand,” he said.

Quin nodded.

“Very good. You will demonstrate,” he ordered.

“Demonstrate?” she asked.

He gestured to the dagger.

“Demonstrate what? I don’t know how. Does—does John know what you’re doing?”

Despite the obvious fact that these men worked for John, some part of her mind told her that everything would be all right if she could only put down the dagger and find him. John was desperate—she’d seen that in his eyes—but he didn’t want to hurt her. He loved her.

The men parted slightly to allow her a view behind them. John was there, crouched against a wall. He was staring at her, his eyes tortured.

“John …” She took a step toward him, but the men held her back.

“Please, Quin,” he said. “I need you to do this. I need you to help me. Don’t say no.”

She was shaking her head. “I can’t … I don’t know how …”

“You can remember, like you remembered me.” His voice was pleading. “You can show me. Just show me.”

She could feel herself growing hysterical. “John, please! That’s not me anymore.”

“Quin, I need this.”

“I can’t!” she said, hearing how wild her voice sounded but helpless to change it. “I just can’t.”

John forced his eyes away from her. Staring at the floor, he nodded slightly. Then his head was falling into his hands as his men closed in, hiding him from view as before. Quin was dizzy again.

“Demonstrate,” Stubble Chin ordered.

“I can’t!” she screamed.

He swung his fist at her. Automatically Quin ducked to the side. His arm crashed into the metal of the air-conditioning unit behind her, making a tremendous noise. He roared with pain, and one of the other men grabbed her from behind, pinning her arms at her back.

Stubble Chin swung at her with his other arm. She was unable to pull free, and this time his fist connected with her stomach, doubling her over in a burst of pain. She couldn’t breathe. He had knocked the air out of her.
The past can stay in the past
. Master Tan had promised her. She did not have to remember.

The man standing behind her released her arms, sending her crashing to the floor. There was another jolt of pain from the old wound in her shoulder, and her forehead was throbbing where she had smashed it into John’s head. And the floor—it was touching her skin. Dirt, germs, all of it. Panic was taking hold.

“I’m just a healer,” she managed to say. “Why—”

“Show us,” the man said again.

She stared up at him, the dagger still in her hand. The thought came to her suddenly:
There’s something missing!

“I can’t,” she gasped.

Above the rumble of the machines around them, she heard a high-pitched noise. The fifth man, who’d been standing behind the others, stepped forward. Across his chest was strapped a large, ugly object that looked something like a small cannon. It was made of an iridescent metal that sparkled faintly, even in the dim ambient light. As the high squeal coming out of it grew louder, there was a crackle of electricity around its barrel.

“You don’t want to use that,” Quin said, the words coming on reflex. She had promised herself she would never hold this stone dagger again. She had also promised, she was quite sure, never again to lay eyes on that weapon across the man’s chest. She felt her terror rising.
Colored sparks
 …

On the concrete floor, Quin gripped the dagger.
I could use this to get out of here. If only … If only
 …

The man ran his hand along the side of the weapon, and its hum intensified. There were dozens of tiny openings across the face of the thing. She saw a fork of electricity crawl over the man’s fingers as they hovered near the trigger.

“I’ll show you,” she whispered. “I’ll show you.”

Two men helped her to her feet. There was a movement among the other men. John was edging closer to listen. His face was ashen, wounded, as though the men had beaten him instead of her.

“These dials,” she said, touching the stone rings in the handgrip with the symbols carved into them. There were six rings, with a different set of symbols around each. “You turn them. They are your … coordinates.” She said the words without planning them. It was like tapping into a script that existed only subconsciously. Fear of death—
not death, something worse!
her mind told her—was bringing the explanation to the surface. “First, like this”—she lined up a set of symbols along the dials, somehow knowing they were correct—“which will take you
There
.”

“What do you mean,
‘There’
?” the man closest to her asked.

“Shh,” said John. His eyes met hers, and she saw shame in them, but something else as well: he looked immensely grateful. He seemed again like a drowning man, one who had just been thrown a life vest. “Let her finish. That symbol on all dials, to go
There
. Please continue, Quin.”