Seeker

“Quin, you f-fell asleep.”

Someone was shaking her. Quin came awake slowly. She discovered that her face was wet and pressed up against a sheet of hard plastic. Wearily she pushed herself to a sitting position. She’d been crying in her sleep.

“Oh, God.” Her hands were caked in dried blood, and some of it had moistened from her tears. There were reddish smears on the plastic beneath her. She desperately needed to wash, and every muscle ached.

They were in the rafters on the underside of the Bridge, and the sun had gone down. Her thoughts felt much sharper than they’d been earlier, as if her tears had cleared some of the clouds from her mind.

“We h-h-have to g-go, okay? You’ve been s-sleeping for a while.”

Shinobu. The redheaded Shinobu, whose hair wasn’t red now. He was sitting on the edge of the plastic sheet, shivering violently. The air was a bit cold, but he was wearing a heavy leather jacket, which should have kept him warm enough.

“Oh, G-God, you look awf-ful,” he said as she sat up.

“So do you.”

The healer in Quin looked him over in the faint light. There were dark circles under his eyes, and he was much, much too thin. He was shaking so hard, his hands were knocking against the plastic sheet.

“How are we getting out of here?” she asked him.

“Swim,” he replied, smiling. His teeth were starting to chatter.

Quin laughed, then realized he was serious.

“We climb d-down the pillar, swim a l-little. Not far.”

“You’re in withdrawal,” she told him, realizing it as she said it. Looking at him with an educated eye, she asked, “Opium?”

“H-hard to say,” he answered, smiling weakly. “Sh-Shiva, opium, could be anything, really. Wasn’t p-planning on rescuing you this afternoon. Supposed to spend the day in drug bars.”

“Lie down.” She liked the firmness she heard in her own voice. Even the blood on her hands bothered her a bit less as soon as she decided to take care of someone else. “Climbing down hundreds of feet isn’t a good idea when you’re shaking like that.”

“P-probably right,” he agreed.

He lay down in front of her, and Quin knelt at his side. She centered her thoughts and gradually shifted her vision. It was like letting her eyes go out of focus until hidden aspects became visible. She could see copper-colored lines of energy flowing around Shinobu’s body. On a healthy person, these lines would form a regular pattern, almost beautiful in its symmetry. The field around Shinobu, however, was broken by dark patches almost everywhere.

She closed off her mind to everything else and concentrated on the energy running down her own arms. Spreading her fingers wide, she floated her hands above his body. Then she imagined her energy as a river flowing down and spilling over her fingertips, into the dark blotches that hovered over Shinobu’s organs. Her river of energy would wash the dark areas away.

It took a strange sort of concentration, like a muscle that was always slightly tensed, to see the energy this way. She worked a long time in silence, until the patches began to break up and Shinobu had stopped shaking. He lay looking up at her as she finished, and in the half-light she could see past his clothes and hair and piercings. At last she saw a face she recognized. Of course, she thought. Shinobu. My beautiful cousin.

She was overcome by a feeling of sadness then, at his ribs visible through his shirt, at his filthy clothes, at his addiction. You weren’t always like this, she thought. This is new.

“It suits you,” he whispered. He lifted a hand to touch her cheek. He was at least as dirty as she was—probably much dirtier—but she didn’t draw away.

“What does?”

“Using your mind for something good.”

His eyes stayed fixed on her face, as if he wanted her to lean closer to him. He had seemed angry at her before she fell asleep, like he could hardly stand to be in her presence, but somehow that anger was gone.

“I don’t want to bring you any more trouble,” she whispered, leaning her head nearer to his. “If you get me off the Bridge, you’ll be rid of me. I promise.”

“I’ve been trying to get rid of you for a long while,” he told her, looking away. “You won’t stay gone.”Content bel0ngs to Nôvel(D)r/a/ma.Org.

That stung her, but Shinobu was right. She’d brought John and the past back into his life. He was a drug addict who had enough difficulty looking after himself. Whatever they’d once meant to each other, it was not his job to take care of her now. She must sort out her troubles on her own.

A short while later, they worked their way across the rafters to an enormous vertical piling. Metal rungs were buried in its concrete face, and Shinobu climbed down these, with Quin following a few steps behind. Though the sun had set, the moon was now out, and they moved down the rungs toward its reflection floating on the water below. In every direction, she could see the bright lights of ships moving about the harbor, but the water directly beneath them was empty and still.

As they neared the waterline, Shinobu pointed out a rectangle hovering just above the surface of the water, midway between the piling they were on and its twin, sixty yards distant. The rectangle was the top to some kind of shaft leading down beneath the harbor.

“Are you sure?” she asked. It seemed a long way to go through the uninviting dark ocean.

“It’s a maintenance shaft for the subway and tunnels across to the Island side. The harbor’s full of them. Brian and I once counted more than fifty, and we only stopped counting because we were running out of air. We can use it to cross under the water to Kowloon.”

“Do I know how to swim?” she asked, knowing how strange the question sounded. But she truly didn’t remember.

“Ha!” He smiled. “Let’s find out!”

With that, Shinobu leapt off the rung and into the water. A moment later he surfaced, waiting for her.

Before she could change her mind, Quin jumped. There was a freezing jolt as the harbor enveloped her; then she broke the surface and discovered that she did, indeed, know how to swim. Together, she and Shinobu struck out toward the shaft, the moonlight on the water always a few strokes ahead.

Finally she washed. No shower had ever felt as good as this one. Quin scrubbed her skin and hair a dozen times, until every remaining trace of dirt and blood was gone. She was in the pool house, tucked in the back corner of a large garden. When she was sure she was clean, she stepped onto the heated floor of the changing room and pulled on a robe. She looked at her old clothing, lying in a heap outside the shower. Under no circumstances would she be putting those items on again. She stuffed them into a rubbish bin and washed her hands another time.

Shinobu had disappeared toward the main house. Quin moved quietly from the pool house and through the garden until she was below one of the home’s lower windows. The house wasn’t large, but it was beautiful, tucked into the nicest neighborhood she had ever seen in Hong Kong. They had arrived here after an hour-long trek through dark tunnels beneath the harbor, down ridiculously crowded nighttime Kowloon streets, and finally in the back of a taxi, with the reluctant driver eyeing his two damp and dirty passengers in the rearview mirror.

Shinobu was visible through the window, coming out of a large closet with a bag clutched to his chest. As she watched, he paused by a small bed that stood against one wall. Sleeping there was Akio, the boy Quin had seen that morning in her healing office. Shinobu leaned over his brother’s slumbering form and whispered something for a long while. Then he kissed the boy’s forehead over and over again. Quin ducked beneath the window when Shinobu stood up, so he wouldn’t see her watching that private moment.

“Here,” he said when he came outside. “Some clothes. They’re mine, so they’ll be too big, but they’ve been in Mum’s house, so they’ll be clean.”

Returning to the changing room, she slipped into Shinobu’s old jeans and a sweater, rolling up the sleeves that hung over her hands and tucking the long trouser legs into her damp boots.

Shinobu was sitting on the grass by the pool when she came out, the athame on the ground next to him. Lying by it was another weapon, one that looked like a whip with a sword’s handle.

He was rolling up the left leg of his jeans as she approached. A flat stone blade lay against his calf, its tip shoved down into his boot. After drawing it out carefully, he set it next to the other items.

Quin took a seat on the ground nearby and pointed to the curled weapon.

“A whip?”

“Whipsword.”

“Whipsword.” She repeated the word. It seemed obvious now that he’d said it.

“I kept it for you,” he told her. “When you were hurt. You should have it back.”

“It’s mine?”

“It’s yours. You really don’t remember?”

“It seems like I should know it. But I don’t, exactly, not yet.”

She studied the whipsword without touching it.

Shinobu was thoughtful for a while, staring at his scuffed boots. Then he said, “You were almost dead when we brought you to Master Tan. I think you actually were dead, for a couple of minutes, before he revived you.”

Quin did not remember that. Yet something subtle was changing in her mind. Things that had once lain deep on the ocean floor were floating a little closer to the surface.

“Master Tan didn’t know if he could bring you back,” Shinobu went on, a slight tremor in his voice. “He said you didn’t want to live.”

That she somehow remembered. “How did he know?”

“He’s Master Tan.” Shinobu tapped his head. “He knows things—and you kept pushing us away every time we tried to help you. Later, you were lying on his table. I thought for sure you were gone. But when Master Tan told you that you could have a new life if you wanted it, that you could leave the old one behind, you started to breathe again.” He looked away from her. “We’re the Seekers, Quin, we’re the ones who do strange things. But Master Tan put a spell on you.”

“Why do you use that word?” she asked quietly.

“What word? ‘Spell’?”

“No. ‘Seekers.’ ”

He turned to her, as if gauging the honesty of her questions. When he saw she was serious, he said, “It’s what we are, Quin.”

Carefully he removed the thick, spiked leather bracelet from his left wrist. Then he reached over and pushed up the sleeve of Quin’s sweater. Holding both of their wrists side by side, he traced the identical, dagger-shaped scars. Quin forced herself to examine the figure burned into her arm. It was not a blemish as she kept telling herself. It was something very different: she’d been marked.

“A Seeker,” she whispered, trying out the feeling of it. She did not like it at all.

“Not what we are, I guess,” Shinobu said more quietly. “What we were. What we hoped to be.”

He was looking down at the grass, his head turned away from her. There was a sparkle of reflected light on his face, and Quin realized it was a tear running down his cheek. Its presence felt unnatural. It was like seeing a wild animal cry.

Shinobu brushed the tear away with the sleeve of his jacket, smearing more dirt across his face. She looked away, embarrassed.

“My mother was here the whole time. All these years,” he said, so quietly it could have been to himself.

Quin made the connection. The woman in her healing office this morning—she’d known her before, a long time ago … in Scotland. She felt an onrush of an emotion that was a mixture of sadness and dread. She was starting to remember …

“My mother was dead,” Shinobu went on. “That’s what I thought. That was what he told me. Only she wasn’t. She was here with my brother. When she found out she was pregnant with Akio, she and my father made a plan to get her away. My ancestors owned property here. My father lived without her for seven years, so she and Akio would be free. He couldn’t tell me, couldn’t warn me, because Briac … But he was always trying to get us free as well, so we could be a family again.”

“Free of Briac,” Quin whispered. Briac, her father. She had seen him in a dream. I promised myself I would kill him, she thought. So I could be free, and Fiona too.

“I left my father there, dying.” Shinobu’s voice had gone hollow. Quin reached for him, but he moved away from her immediately. “One day I’ll forget to eat, forget to check my air tank, take too many pipes at the bar. I’m not a Seeker. I don’t think I’m even a person anymore. I’m a ghost waiting to die.”

They sat together in heavy silence. At last, Quin said, “I feel the same. Except maybe I’m a ghost waiting to live.”

Carefully she picked up the whipsword. The grip fit perfectly in her right hand. Without allowing herself to think, she let her wrist move automatically. The whip unfurled with a crack, and Shinobu ducked away from her as she sent it through five different sword shapes in quick succession. Then she gripped its blade, watching it melt around her fingers. She looked up at Shinobu.

“It knows me,” she said.

“Of course it knows you.”

She flicked the whipsword into more shapes—a scimitar, a rapier, a long sword. Then she grabbed its blade again, letting oily, dark puddles run over her hand.

“I was never a Seeker,” she murmured. “I was a pawn.”

He didn’t respond. He was starting to shiver again, hopefully from the cold.

“I was my father’s pawn,” she continued. She wasn’t sure if this was a memory returning, but somehow she knew it to be true. “I was always his pawn. And now John’s …”

Quin flicked the whipsword into the shape of a dagger, then stuck it into the grass.

She overcame her reluctance and picked up the athame to study the symbols along its haft. Then she slid it through a belt loop.

She lifted up the flat stone rod that had been concealed in Shinobu’s trouser leg.

“Lightning rod,” he told her.

“Lightning rod,” she repeated.

She slid the lightning rod through another loop, lodging the two stone weapons in her borrowed jeans like six-shooters. The whipsword got dirt on her clean hand as she pulled it from the ground, but she didn’t allow herself to wipe it off. She’d been huddled in her house on the Bridge for over a year, scared of her own shadow. Today she had saved a child and killed a man, maybe two. Perhaps the dirt could wait.

She got to her feet.

“I don’t want to be a pawn anymore.”

She clipped the whipsword to her waistband, then drew the athame and lightning rod out of her belt loops. She watched as her fingers lined up the symbols along the athame’s dials. Her heart was beating quickly all of a sudden. She was terrified, and it felt good. It felt like she was alive after more than a year asleep.

“Show me,” she said.

Shinobu stood up and moved over to her. He studied the symbols she had aligned and nodded.

“Yes—that will get you There. Then you need the coordinates of wherever you’re going after there.”

“What do I say? Teach me again.”

Shinobu stood behind her and held her arms against his own, positioning the athame and lightning rod so she could strike them together. With his body against hers, his shivering began to stop. He was so much taller than he used to be, she realized, and despite how thin he’d become, he was very strong, like a wall at her back, supporting her.

“In the beginning, there was the hum of the universe,” he whispered into her ear.

With that sentence, it was as though he’d turned on a faucet in her mind. The words began tumbling out of Quin so they were saying them in unison: “The athame finds the way, cutting through the trembling fabric to take us There.”

“Now the chant,” he whispered. “Say it with me. Knowledge of self, knowledge of home, a clear picture of …”

“… of where I came from,” she continued, “where I will go …”

“Where will you go?” he asked.

His body was warm and steady behind her now, but Quin herself had begun to shiver.

“Where do you think?”