Seeker

Quin emerged into the parkland behind Victoria Peak in Hong Kong sometime in the night. She had memorized those coordinates long ago, when her father had first taught her about the athame. The Peak was, her father had explained, like a freeway for Seekers—it had easy coordinates and it was sparsely populated around the athame’s entrance point, but it was close to crowds of humanity in which to quickly lose oneself and hide.

She walked her way down from the Peak, along steep and winding streets, then through tall apartment buildings and office towers and eventually down to the waterfront. From there, she walked west along the shore toward the Hong Kong Island end of the Transit Bridge. On the way, she passed a sign blinking the date and time and discovered that it was Thursday, and nearly midnight. She had lost two days again.

Entering the Bridge, its canopy of sails rising above her in the night air, she presented her hands and face to be scanned, was confirmed as a resident, then walked into the gloom, joining the foot traffic.

She found the Transit Bridge less familiar, now that her memories were back. It no longer felt as much like a home, nor quite so safe as before. There were lights on within her house, though, warmly inviting her inside. She discovered she was eager to see her mother, more eager than she had been all year. Quin was seeing things clearly now. Fiona was a casualty of Briac Kincaid, as she herself was, and Quin wanted to make up for the coldness she’d shown her mother lately. She opened the door.

“Mother? Are you here?” She heard someone in the examination room as she headed up the stairs, and she called over her shoulder, “Did Shinobu tell you I was all right? Come upstairs with me!”

She didn’t wait for Fiona’s response. She was chasing an image in her mind and was scared she would lose hold of it—the image of three ovals.

When she reached her bedroom, she ransacked her closet, throwing aside folded blankets and smocks from the floor. But what she was looking for wasn’t there.

“Ma?” she called. “I need your help!”

She paused for a moment, reaching her mind into the strange months when she’d been new to the Bridge and this house, when she’d been recovering from the near-fatal injury in her chest. Where had she put it?

She went to her mother’s bedroom and opened the wooden trunk at the foot of the bed. It was full of silk dresses, hair clips, ornate slippers—items to make Fiona a beautiful companion for the men who came to visit her on the Bridge. There were also, she was sorry to see, at least a dozen half-empty liquor bottles.

And at the very bottom was a small metal box.

“There you are,” she whispered.

For a year and a half, she’d tried very hard to forget about this box and its contents. Her hands were shaking as she removed it from the trunk and set it on the floor.

When she lifted off the top and examined the items inside, she was struck by a wave of dizziness. These were things she’d been carrying in her cloak on the day she arrived at the Transit Bridge. They were objects she’d never wanted to see again and yet couldn’t bring herself to discard. In their early days on the Bridge, she’d given them to Fiona to keep, and had pushed them from her mind.

There was an old knife, very sharp and well balanced for throwing. At the sight of it, she recalled a man falling from a horse as he clutched at his throat. There was a lock of horsehair from Yellen’s mane. The hair had been knotted around her fingers when Shinobu carried her from There into Hong Kong. There was a silk handkerchief with dried blood along the edge. It had been a gift from John, who’d brought it back with him after one of his yearly trips home to London. He’d given it to her beneath a tree in the woods, and then she’d kissed him … The blood along the edge was also hers, from the gunshot wound he’d given her on the night of the attack.

She forgot her purpose for a few moments, feeling light-headed. When the sensation eventually passed, she found what she was looking for. Beneath the other items was a thick book, bound in leather.

The cover had been worn smooth by the touch of many people over the years, but the dark smudges of dried blood along one edge looked more recent. Quin wondered if the blood was hers or if it belonged to someone else who’d had the book before her.

The volume opened supplely to her touch. Inside were pages and pages of diary entries, some in a modern feminine hand, others in the cramped and spidery scripts of former times. Entries had been pasted into the book, and there were loose sheets as well, some of paper, some of older and softer materials, parchment and vellum, folded and tucked neatly between pages. And there were dozens of drawings.

She flipped past simple illustrations of animals and rough ink landscapes. Then, in the upper corner of one page, she located the diagram she remembered: three interlocking ovals. This symbol had something to do with the origin of Seekers, of that she was sure. The script beneath the symbol was not in modern English but an older language.

Briac had always been silent about their history. Even the Dreads had been explained only briefly, as judges who would oversee the taking of their oaths. If Briac had been silent, it meant there were things he didn’t wish her to know. This symbol must be one of them. How much more was there for her to learn? She felt as though she’d been shown only the tops of the tallest trees, and there was an entire forest waiting to be explored.

After looking at the diagram of the ovals for a while and tracing its lines with a finger, she forced herself to close the book. The leather volume deserved long and detailed examination, but first she wanted to see her mother, to tell her everything that had taken place in the last few days. Quin brought her mind back to Hong Kong and the room around her.

“Mother! Fiona!” she called.

Clutching the book, she stood and turned to leave the room, and nearly walked into the two figures standing in the doorway.

Startled, she took a step back. Neither person was her mother. One was Master Tan, small and tidy in his healer’s smock. The other was a big Asian teenager covered in yellowing bruises. The excitement of finding the book evaporated. From the looks on both faces, she guessed at once what had happened.

“My mother—is she gone?”

Master Tan nodded solemnly. “Yes, last night.”

“Was it John?” she asked.

Neither of them seemed to have any idea who John was, but Quin was already nodding to herself. Of course it was John. He wasn’t going to give up until the athame was his. Fiona was a way to get it.

“Shinobu is very sorry about what happened,” the large boy told her. “I know he regrets how stupid he was to run away. He realizes that even an idiot or a small child would have checked first to see who was at the door. Shinobu isn’t a small child, but it’s possible he’s an idiot. I’m Brian, by the way. He and I were staying here.”

“Shinobu was here? Staying with Fiona?” After the fight on the Bridge, he’d agreed to tell Fiona that Quin was all right. But she hadn’t asked him for more than that. He’d seemed eager to get her out of his life.

“Yes. He saw your mother taken,” the boy explained. “He was supposed to be guarding her.”

“He was?”

Brian shrugged. “He thought it was a good idea. And it would have been—except for him running away.”

“He has gone to kill himself to make amends,” Master Tan added gravely.

“Kill himself?”

Quin looked from one to the other of them, hoping for a better explanation, or at least more urgency. When they both stayed silent, she said, “I never asked him— Is he— I mean … are you telling me he’s dead?”

“Oh, I think not,” Master Tan replied, shaking his head. “I would be very surprised.”

“Unlikely,” agreed Brian.

“Actually,” Master Tan continued calmly, pulling out an ancient pocket watch and glancing at it, “unless he has done something very unexpected—”

There was a loud bang and a wild chiming of bells as the front door was thrown open. Quin pushed past both of them and ran down the stairs, the two men following close behind her. For a fleeting moment, she imagined it might be her mother returning. But it was not Fiona.

Framed in the doorway was the very tall and very wet figure of Shinobu, who was completely naked except for a pair of underwear decorated with comic book characters. Shinobu himself looked very like a comic book character. With his lean muscles outlined by the streetlamps behind him as he dripped onto the floor, he might have been a demigod cast to Earth by an angry parent. His short hair was plastered to his head, and he was shivering rather violently.

“You’re still wearing my jeans,” Shinobu said as Quin stopped near the bottom of the stairs.

For some reason, this made her blush deeply.

Aside from the lack of clothing, something about Shinobu was very different from the last time she’d seen him. He was not looking to the side, or away from her, he was not looking at her from beneath the hood of his leather jacket or while studying his worn-out shoes. He was looking directly at her, with an intensity in his dark eyes that she remembered. It was the look he used to wear when they were fighting together, a look that warned you how strong he was, how loyal, how deadly.

If he’d worn that look a few days ago, she would have recognized him immediately. It made her want to walk over and touch him, as if this moment were their true reunion.

“I promise you we’ll get Fiona back. I have a plan. You won’t like it. Maybe you will. No, you definitely won’t. Quite, quite sure you won’t. No way.” The words were coming out of him in quick, erratic bursts. “But it’ll do in a pinch, which is what we’re in, since we don’t know what John’s planning. At least, I don’t. And you probably don’t either.”

“You’re talking strangely,” Quin said carefully. She was embarrassed by a sudden urge to put her arms around Shinobu. She took a step toward him but restrained herself from getting any closer.

“He gave me something,” Shinobu responded, pointing an accusing finger at Master Tan.

Quin turned to Master Tan.

“Completely natural, I assure you,” Master Tan told her. “But effective. I told you to go somewhere safe, Shinobu. Did you jump off the Bridge?”

“I was trying to kill myself, remember? And as soon as I got back to the surface, all the thinking I hadn’t done for the last year and a half was happening all at once.” He looked at the three of them, who were still watching him warily. “Can I have a towel? It’s not like they let me through the gate like this. I climbed back up. I’m freezing.”

Master Tan went to fetch one, calling back over his shoulder, “It would have worked just as well in a dumpster.”

Shinobu rolled his eyes. “The man and his dumpsters …” Then he turned to Quin and Brian. “My plan—”

“You’ll be leaving me out of this plan, won’t you, Barracuda?” Brian asked. “I still have a few ribs left that aren’t broken.”

“No, no, Sea Bass. You have the best part.”

The basement space was narrow and long. It was filled with ornate cabinets and trunks stacked neatly along both walls, with a small aisle between them. There was a strong sense of Asia down here. Quin had grown up with Shinobu in Scotland, had seen the Scottish side of him for most of his life, but here, beneath his mother’s house, she saw the Japanese half. There were no fewer than ten katanas, samurai swords, mounted in a shiny wooden rack above a black enamel wardrobe carved and inlaid with patterns of eagles—the symbol of Shinobu’s family. The wooden trunks stacked around the room looked ancient, all of them decorated with scenes from samurai life and everywhere were cabinets with traditional Japanese designs of dragons and monks.

Shinobu had settled down a little but was still moving at double the ordinary human speed. This meant he was keeping himself occupied and didn’t notice Quin’s discomfort. He’d thrown on some old clothes, but her mind kept returning to how he had looked outside her door, and to that expression that had said he would do anything required to help her …

He was at the far end of the basement, prying open a large metal box. When he got the top off, the sides fell away, revealing a jumble of straps, clips, and metal tubing. His hands moved quickly through the mess, sorting and assembling simultaneously. In a few minutes, it had begun to take shape.

“What is that?” Quin asked. It looked a bit like a skydiving harness with rockets strapped to it, which, in point of fact, it was.

“I jumped off buildings for a while when I first got here. Very, very fun. Scared the daylights out of my mother, went to jail a bunch of times. That wasn’t so fun, but I met loads of interesting people—jail’s like that.” The words were tumbling out, but he paused, noticing the way she was looking at the harness. “It’s perfectly safe,” he told her. Then he added, “No. Actually, it’s not safe at all. I’m not sure why I said that. But I didn’t die. Obviously. I’m right here!”

“How tall were these buildings?”

“Tall.”

“As tall as—” She broke off. The athame was still concealed in the sheath running down her left leg, and now it was tickling her. She grabbed it through her jeans and found that the stone was vibrating, very slightly. As she touched it, the vibration steadily increased, sending a tremor through her bones, all the way up to her teeth.

“What?” he asked her.

“The athame’s shaking.”

He reached over and slid his hand up along her leg, trying to feel it. Quin found herself taking a step back, surprised by his sudden closeness.

“It—it stopped,” she said. “That was strange. Something set it off.”

“There’s a subway line nearby,” Shinobu suggested as he went back to fiddling with the skydiving rig. “Maybe it’s picking up the vibration? I sometimes feel the subway in my feet when I’m down here. Except, when I’ve done Shiva sticks, it feels like everything is shaking, so it’s kind of hard to tell. But you haven’t done Shiva, so maybe that’s it.”

He was now pulling old rocket cartridges off the harness and setting them aside. When he was finished, he carried the rig to the front end of the basement and placed it by the door.

“Now clothes,” he told her. “Luckily, my mother already did that planning for us, ages ago.”

He threw open the wardrobe next to Quin, revealing an extensive assortment of body armor, some of it ancient and fit for a samurai, and some of it completely modern.

“My great-great-great—I forget how many greats—grandfather’s,” he said, nodding to the samurai armor. It had intricate pieces of lacquered wood held together with fine braids of silk.

“It’s beautiful.”

“It still works—against swords and things like that.”

“And the other stuff—why?” She was looking at several sets of high-tech body armor.

“When my mother first came here, she thought Alistair might be following soon, and maybe Briac would be coming after him. She thought there might be, you know, a huge battle. She shopped accordingly. She thinks ahead like that. And she’s the sort who buys three when one will do, probably because she has piles of money.”

He flipped through the items and quickly pulled out several that looked to be Quin’s size.

“This is sort of like chain mail,” he explained, studying a full suit of something thin and shiny as he held it against her body. He pushed it into her hands. “And maybe these?” he asked, handing over a matching set of gloves. Then he retrieved a bulletproof vest, which he tossed to her.

“Go ahead,” he told Quin as he began to assemble a similar pile for himself. “Put them on.”

She hesitated. The space between the walls was small. Quin couldn’t bring herself to take her clothes off in front of him, especially after she’d just seen how impressive his own body was.

“I just … I guess I’m shy,” she said awkwardly.

“Sorry. Wasn’t thinking. Of course I’d love to see you naked. I’ve been dreaming about what you look like since we were thirteen. Maybe earlier. Whenever I started being interested in naked girls. Maybe twelve. I got to undress a couple of girls down in the village, but you—” He broke off suddenly, blushing to the tips of his ears. He stared at her a moment in shock. Then he pushed the door of the wardrobe out, creating a kind of screen around her and hiding himself from view. There was a long silence. At last, from the other side of the door, he said, “I’m sorry. It’s the tea.” And then more quietly, she heard him mutter, “Unbelievable.”

Quin smiled. She couldn’t shake from her mind the image of him, unclothed and at her door. The idea that he’d thought about her filled her stomach with butterflies.

She began to undress, and she could hear Shinobu on the other side of the door, doing the same. She managed to get the shiny suit up over her legs and to her waist, but the upper half of the garment separated into several pieces that were supposed to attach to each other in ways that weren’t immediately obvious.

“Quin? Are you all right?” he asked after a while.

“I’m trying to figure this thing out,” she said, attempting, for the third time, to fasten the strips of the top together.

“Here, I can help.”

He put his hand on the edge of the door, preparing to move it aside, and Quin scrambled to cover herself. When he came out from behind the door, he was wearing the same thin armor, which, like Quin’s, wasn’t completely attached and so left half of his chest bare. Obviously still embarrassed, Shinobu kept his eyes away from her face as he studied her suit critically.

“Uh, that part comes up and attaches to the front,” he said, gesturing to one of the flaps hanging to her side. “Can you reach—”

She tried and nearly dropped the piece over her chest.

“Not quite,” she said, attempting to look unembarrassed as she struggled to stay covered. “It slips—”

“Here—” He slid his hands around her back, and she felt him connecting two segments of her garment. Then he eased the suit up her back. It slipped once, and his chest accidentally brushed against hers as he grabbed for it.Content protected by Nôv/el(D)rama.Org.

“Sorry,” he murmured.

“It’s okay.”

She found herself staring firmly at the floor as he smoothed the back piece up over her shoulders to attach it to the front. It was hard not to notice the warmth of his hands. And he was strong, she thought, strong enough to lift her if he wanted to, into his arms …

She stopped that thought. She kept her eyes turned away from him as she slipped her arms into the hanging sleeves, which he velcroed together into a snug fit. The suit was like thin, close-fitting long underwear with a metallic sheen.

“These connections give you a full range of motion in your arms, even if it’s tight,” he told her as she stepped back to put some space between them. “I’ve tried it out a couple of times when I’ve had to, you know, fight someone.”

Quin made a couple of practice swings of her arms and found that the armor was surprisingly flexible.

“Will you help with mine?” he asked, still keeping his eyes away from her.

She figured out how to attach the front and neck of his shirt properly. Then she velcroed the bottom of the shirt to his waistband. This required putting her arms around him for a few moments, and her heart ignored her orders and began to beat faster.

“It’s good for deflecting things like knives,” he was explaining. “If someone stabs at you full force, though, it won’t hold up. A straight hit will pierce it. But it’ll keep you from getting burned. Unless it’s really, really hot.”

She nodded. It was difficult to concentrate on what he was saying. She hadn’t really seen Shinobu, not since they were children. She’d been distracted by John. But she could see him now.

She made her hands drop to her sides. She had to stop this line of thought. He was probably right about the herbs making him say what he’d said. And anyway, they were cousins—of some sort. Was it third cousins? How related were third cousins? And hadn’t one of their distant great-grandparents remarried? She remembered learning that, which meant they really shared only half the expected amount of common blood, didn’t it? Their connection suddenly seemed distant—but Shinobu had always called her “cousin.”

“Now we cover it,” he said, turning around to face her.

They helped each other into ordinary shirts over the armor, still avoiding each other’s eyes. Quin imagined reversing all of this—taking off the shirts, taking off the armor, taking off the years that she had spent with John. Shinobu could carry her upstairs …

She turned away so he couldn’t see her face, and pulled on a pair of trousers. Shinobu slipped woolen long underwear over his thin layer of armor. And all of it, she assumed, would go under some more elaborate outer armor in a moment.

Now he was pulling the bulletproof vest around her and cinching it tight.

“How does that feel?” he asked.

“It’s good.”

His face was inches in front of hers as he adjusted her vest. She could see the roots of his hair, which were growing out in that deep red she remembered. He had removed the piercings from his face, leaving his clean, perfect features unblemished. Without asking for permission, her hands moved to his chest and stayed there, feeling his heartbeat.

“You’re warm,” she whispered.

He looked down at her, his dark eyes close to hers. His hands were at her waist. Was she imagining it, or were they pulling her gently toward him?

Quin could not stop herself. She leaned forward, and her lips brushed his—

An unbelievably loud clanging sound erupted a few yards away, beyond the basement door, and they sprang apart.

The door was thrown open to reveal Brian Kwon, standing at the bottom of the stone steps leading up to the yard outside. One of Brian’s hands clutched the handle of a large rolling pallet, which teetered at the top of the steps. This pallet was piled with several dozen metal canisters, many bundles of objects that looked suspiciously like fireworks, and a quantity of welding equipment that appeared to have spent a long time underwater. The noise had been caused by a very large and heavy canister rolling off the pallet, bouncing down the steps, and colliding with the metal basement door.

“Raided the salvage yard, Barracuda,” he said, groaning as he lifted the canister back into place. “I hope you’re not planning to ask for your job back. Also made a few other stops.”

Shinobu smiled and clapped Brian on the shoulders as he moved past him, up the stairs, and began inspecting the items. Quin followed, feeling herself flush as Brian looked at her quizzically.

When Shinobu was satisfied with Brian’s haul, the three of them packed all of the gear carefully into backpacks. Then they finished dressing, with Quin putting on Shinobu’s old cloak so she could conceal the athame and lightning rod in its pockets.

When they were ready, she and Brian stood outside as Shinobu disappeared into the house. Quin’s thoughts returned to the leather book she’d dug out of the trunk in her mother’s bedroom.

“Brian, do you have a phone?” she asked.

Sometime later, Shinobu appeared through a nearby window. He stood in the hallway of his mother’s home, his ancestor’s samurai armor over his bulletproof vest and motorcycle boots. As she watched, his mother and little brother, Akio, bowed deeply and formally to him, and Shinobu bowed back.