Seeker (29 page)

She looked at the dagger and the dials, but her explanation had
dried up. All eyes were on her, waiting for her to go on, but there was something else she needed if she were going to show them anything more.
Something for my other hand
, she thought.
He doesn’t want to hurt me; I can see he doesn’t want to hurt me. I could help him
 … For a moment, she was frozen as she stood there holding the stone dagger.
If I help him, I will become whatever I was before. And John, he will become
 …

I’m thinking!
she scolded herself.
It’s going to make me fail
. She forced her mind to clear, and all at once saw a course of action. She was still free to choose what she wanted.

“I turn the dials,” she said, gripping the dagger harder, “and then I take it in both hands and lift it above my head.” John was watching her raptly. “I swing it, like this—”

She brought the stone dagger down as hard as she could, straight toward Stubble Chin’s neck. His arms came up to protect himself too late. The butt of the weapon crashed into his throat.

Quin found her hands moving to the man’s waistband on reflex, and then his knife was in her right hand. She kicked his body toward the other men. A second man dodged around Stubble Chin’s flailing form and grabbed for Quin’s arm. She whipped her right hand up, slashing him across the throat with the first man’s knife.

There was a high whine, hurting her ears, and then sparks fired from the weapon attached to the fifth man’s chest.

Disruptor!
her mind screamed.

She dropped down onto the floor crawling on hands and knees. Someone was grabbing her, trying to pull her to her feet. A weight collapsed onto her, then rolled away. A man’s arms and legs were thrashing on the floor as rainbow-colored electric sparks danced around his head and shoulders.

John was yelling at them not to hurt her. Another man was grabbing her and she was lifted off the ground. She slashed with her
knife, but someone else caught her arm. She kicked, and the man dropped her. Then someone was kneeling on her back, pressing her face against the floor. She was getting dizzy again. She stabbed out with the knife, felt it sink into a shoe. A man screamed, but still she couldn’t move.

The fight was going on without her somehow. Blows were being exchanged. The man pinning her down put a wet cloth to her face. A smell hit her, like medicine and gasoline mixed together. She held her breath and struggled, fighting a wave of dizziness. The knife had been ripped out of her hand. She was trying to push the man off her. She was desperate to take in a breath. She began to inhale. Whatever was on the cloth was entering her lungs—

Then the weight was lifted. She was on her feet, and someone’s arm was around her waist. She shook her head, breathed deeply.

“Come on,” the person holding her whispered.

It was the boy with leopard hair. He broke into a run, pulling her along. It took a moment for her to get her legs to work, but then she was running beside him. The sounds continued behind them as they sprinted down the dark corridor, toward a lighted area ahead.

“Who are they fighting?” she asked.

“My friend Brian. Probably chasing him now. But he’s faster than he looks and knows the Bridge much better than they do.”

He pulled her past the airlifts and into the corridor stretching along the opposite side of the Bridge.

“They were going to, you know,
sparks
 …” Quin said as he pushed her to the right, into a small alley.

They were walking now, through a space too narrow to move any faster. They dodged right again, then squeezed through a tiny opening between a huge gas tank and a concrete wall. He pulled her to a stop and edged past her. At the base of the wall there was a large patch of darker black, which looked like an opening of some sort.

“Here,” he said, still quietly. “This shaft goes down. There’s a ladder inside. Grab hold after me.”

He ducked, and a moment later disappeared through the tunnel. Quin followed, feeling her way into the darkness and onto a metal ladder. As she began to climb down the rungs, she could just make out his shape below her, moving quickly. She tried to keep up with him. At one point there was a chink of light across the rungs, a crack in the wall. Looking through it, she could see water. They were moving along the inside of the Bridge’s skin.

The ladder shifted right and left a few times, and after they had gone a very long way, Quin saw open air below. They were coming out the bottom of the Bridge.

“Careful,” he told her. “The last part is tricky.”

Beneath her, he reached out of the ladder shaft, caught hold of something, and hoisted himself out of sight. Quin crawled down more rungs and found a break in the casing of the shaft, opening onto daylight. Leaning her head through, she saw him perched inside a framework of metal rafters. He grabbed her hand and pulled her up next to him. They were standing together among the rafters, Victoria Harbor a hundred and fifty feet below, the bulk of the Transit Bridge above.

He led her along a narrow metal beam. As he walked in front of her, Quin distracted herself from the drop beneath them by studying his clothing. He was dressed like a member of one of the gangs that bought drugs legally from Bridge suppliers and sold them illegally on the streets of the city outside.

“How did you know this was here?” she asked.

“I jump off things,” he said without turning around, “and I climb around inside them, and sometimes I swim under them. I have lots of hiding places in Hong Kong.”

He led her through the rafters to a place where sheets of plastic
had been lashed to metal crossbeams to make a kind of bird’s nest perch where someone could sit almost comfortably.

“Will someone else find us here?” Quin asked him. “I mean, people you … work with?” After escaping one gang, she was not eager to encounter another.

“No one else likes it here,” he answered. “They’re worried about falling to their death or something.” He glanced down at the water of the harbor. One wrong step, and either of them would be tumbling into oblivion. He smiled. “Personally, I find it relaxing.”

Quin climbed onto the plastic nest, noticing as she did that both of her hands were covered in blood. And there was filth all over her body. Now that she was safe for a few moments, she could sense the microbes on her skin.

“I need to wash,” she whispered to herself, “I need to wash.” She took a deep breath. She would not let herself panic again.

The boy was studying her, running one of his hands through that short and strange hair. She noticed his knuckles were torn in several places.

“You’re different, aren’t you?” he asked her.

“I’m so sorry to ask you this,” she said, “but can you tell me your name?”

“Are you serious?” Shinobu said.

Quin had just asked him for his name. He started to laugh, but she didn’t look like she was joking.

“I’m sure I know it,” she said quickly, looking down at her hands, the backs of which were covered in thick, sticky blood. “I
did
know it. I’ll remember it, if you give me a few minutes. It’s just—it’s hard to think with this filth on me. I’d really,
really
like to wash my hands.”

Shinobu glanced around the bare rafters like he might have misplaced a sink and a big bar of soap somewhere nearby, then shrugged. Her jittery words seemed like an act. Quin had never been jumpy.

“Is there any on my face?” she asked, sounding more desperate. “It feels like there’s blood on my face. Is it near my mouth? Can you see?”

“Stop it! Quin.” Irritated, he shook her by the shoulders and watched as her eyes came into focus. There was, in fact, a good deal of blood on her face, but he thought it wiser not to mention it. “Don’t you know me?” he asked. “I’m Shinobu.”

“Shinobu.” She said his name like it was the answer to a riddle that had been driving her crazy, and also like it was a very odd name for someone to have. “I heard that name. He said your name when he was in my house.”

“He?”

“John,” she whispered.

“Right, of course,” he responded, feeling the deep annoyance he’d always felt when she spoke about John. Apparently she had no trouble remembering
him
.

She had become transfixed by her dirty hands again. “Do you have any water, Shinobu? Even if it’s just a little.”

“Forget about your hands!” He let out an angry sigh. He’d just saved her from a violent abduction, and she was worried about cleanliness? They had bigger problems, like John’s presence in Hong Kong with armed men, and the appearance of the athame.

“Whose blood do you think it is?” Quin asked. “Could it be mine? Maybe I’m bleeding.”

Shinobu felt a sudden pang of worry that she might have been injured without him noticing. He examined her more carefully than he had before. “You don’t look hurt,” he said after a few moments, relieved, but also a little disappointed—an injury might have explained her behavior. “At least not seriously.”

“I don’t think I am—except where he hit me,” she responded, more to herself than to him, like she was picking her way through a mental fog. She looked a lot like the girl he used to know, but she sounded like a crazy person. “It seemed like I had a knife,” she whispered, “and the knife cut one of them across the neck.”

“The knife cut one of them, did it? Tricky knife. That
would
explain the blood everywhere.”

“It’s just … I saved the life of a child this morning. He would have
died. But I fixed him.” She couldn’t keep her eyes off the mess on her hands as she spoke. “I’m not sure it counts, though, if I … killed someone else.” The last words came out very quietly.

“If you’re counting, I think you killed two of the men up there,” he told her. “The one you hit first wasn’t breathing very well when we left.”

“I didn’t mean to kill them! You believe me, right? The knife was just … there.” She was looking at Shinobu now, her eyes wild.

He was annoyed by her unwillingness to admit that she had fought all five of those men by herself before he’d arrived. And it was unsettling to see her looking at him, with no deeper recognition of who he was. He felt a strong urge to slap her hard, to wake her up, but judging from the bruises coming in on her face, John and his men had already hit her several times.

“You’re not this squeamish, Quin.”

“You don’t know what I am,” she said petulantly.

He laughed dismissively. “You’re right. Maybe I don’t.”

She was quiet for a moment, then looked up from her hands. “I’m sorry. Thank you for saving me. Shinobu.” She pronounced his name very carefully.

He shrugged, no longer trying to have a normal discussion with her. “Sure. I had some free time.”

“Is your name Japanese? Are you Japanese?” It didn’t sound like she was trying to remember, more like an attempt at polite conversation.

“If you don’t recall who I am, there’s no point explaining.” The words came out more roughly than he meant them, but he was trying to hide the fact that she was making him sad.

“I
do
know you …” she said, as if she had finally spotted the outline of something familiar through a haze. “Like I know John.”

“Of course you’d remember John before you remembered me,” he muttered.

“It’s only that I saw him first. How did he find me? Wasn’t I … hidden, sort of? I think I was hiding.”

“He found you because he found the athame. Once he knew where it was, he probably had people start searching. You were nearby.”

“Athame.” She repeated the word, like it was something she had heard in a dream. “John called it that too.”

“Probably because that’s its name,” Shinobu said.

He reached into his leather jacket and drew out the athame. It was here, in their possession again. There were streaks of blood on the stone dagger, but other than that it looked undamaged. He set it on the plastic sheeting next to her, and she immediately moved away from it.

“Why did you take it?” she asked, her voice pitching into panic. “I don’t want it.”

“I don’t want it either. But I couldn’t exactly leave it with John.”

She didn’t answer that, but her silence indicated that she might agree with him. That was something, at least.

“Maybe we should throw it into the ocean,” she suggested quietly, like she was testing how the idea would sound out loud.

“You’re not the first person to think of that. Here.”

He put the dagger into her hands and gestured that she should toss it into the harbor. Quin got up from the nest and moved along a rafter until the water was clearly visible below. Shinobu watched her bring her arm up, preparing to throw the athame. But she didn’t. Instead she stood there like a statue with her arm over her head, staring down at Victoria Harbor.

After a few moments she let her arm fall to her side. She looked at the dagger carefully, as though inspecting an object that was entirely
new to her. He watched her fingers tracing the fox carved into the base of the handle. Eventually she returned to the plastic shelf and set the athame down.