Seeker (48 page)

When he’d taken Fiona, he’d expected Quin to arrive in London to try to negotiate with him for her release. Since her athame couldn’t get her on board
Traveler
, he’d felt confident that he and his men would see her coming a long way off—this was the advantage of living on the airship. But clearly he’d been wrong. Half of his men were down on the streets of London, looking for Quin. But she had something else in mind.

Through one of his apartment windows, he watched fireworks burst against the ship’s starboard side. Every few seconds the explosions of light outside overloaded all of their exterior cameras. He felt a moment of doubt and wondered:
Is it only Quin who’s coming?
What if the Dreads were also after him? They had meddled with his family before, but now he had nothing of theirs—no athame, no book, and he was not even a Seeker. No, he had planned to lure Quin to London, and here she was, coming to get her mother.

He checked the seal on his gas mask and walked back out into the corridor.
Traveler
was descending further into chaos. Men were passed out now, sprawled across walkways. He knelt by two of them and felt for their pulses. Their heartbeats were strong—the gas was effective but not poisonous.

She’s not a killer
, he thought.
And neither am I. Together we would make good choices. We would spare the people who should be spared
.

He came to a group of three men who were still conscious, crawling toward a stairwell in search of fresh air.

“There are masks on the second floor, end of the corridor,” he
told them, helping them up. “Go. Find weapons—but don’t shoot unless you hear me order it!”

The men staggered off down the stairs.

John slid his hand down the side of the disruptor, bringing it to life. Its unsettling electric whine cut through the noise around him, helping him concentrate. He was carrying a sort of fireworks of his own now. If he could terrify her into listening, he could put an end to this madness without a fight.

Shinobu clung to the aft end of the ship, his tether holding him in place as the wind and rain tried to pry him loose. His job was to throw
Traveler
into darkness, then join Quin inside.

He had torched his way through the outer layer of one of the ship’s engines. Just below
Traveler
’s exterior skin was a tangle of valves and wires and tubes feeding into the engine itself and snaking off toward the body of the ship. The one thing he’d forgotten was a flashlight, and it was difficult to see into the well around the engine—except for the moments right after a firework went off, when it was so bright, he became half blind.

Online he’d found suggested electrical schematics for the famous airship
Traveler
, but he now realized, when confronted with the actual ship, that those drawings were completely worthless. He would have to rely on his own knowledge of wiring, which was based almost entirely on cutting up old machinery while underwater.

Squinting, he found a network of electrical wires and traced these until he located a bundle as thick as a man’s arm. He reached in with the plasma torch and delicately sliced through the lot of them.
Except there was nothing delicate about the torch. It wasn’t just the wires he’d severed. He’d cut through everything underneath them as well—nearly a foot of cables, valves, and other mechanical items that looked fairly important.

Immediately the engine beneath him began to make a stuttering sound, and through the windows off to his left, he saw the lights go off inside the ship. Then the entire vessel lurched, and an alarm began to sound, so loud he could hear it quite clearly out in the wind and the rain.

He waited, clicking the torch off as he checked his weapons in preparation for entering the ship. But the alarm died out a short while later, the lights came back on, and he felt the ship’s engines right themselves. There were undoubtedly backup systems, and backups for the backup systems.

He looked around for other items to cut.

The Young Dread needed to breathe, of course. Yet she could go a long time without breathing when it was necessary. She and the others made their way through the smoky hallways of the great airship, following the noise of people not yet unconscious from the gas. The Young, like the other Dreads, had thrown her mind into her lungs and heart, and she was forcing her body to keep moving, her blood to keep circulating, without any further oxygen intake from her lungs.

She could not do this forever, but ten minutes was possible. She had held her breath that long once, underwater, with the Middle Dread holding her down.

Without warning, the ship lurched to the left, throwing them off balance, and all of the lights went out. A high wail began, so loud she wondered if her ears would survive it. They continued walking, disregarding the noise.

A moment later, the ship steadied, and different lights came on. These were dimmer, leaving the corridors in partial shadow. The wailing stopped.

Briac Kincaid was not keeping up. He’d held his breath as long as possible and now was gasping air through his cloak, which was wrapped tightly around his face. This did not completely filter out the gas. Coughing, he fell to his knees next to the Young Dread, then pitched forward onto the floor.

The Old Dread stared silently at the Young as if to say,
Briac has collapsed. What would you like to do about that?

Before she could form an answer, the Middle ran up the corridor ahead of them. He returned moments later with a clear mask, which he must have taken off another man’s head. After slipping this over Briac’s face, the Middle pulled him to his feet, and Briac gulped in clean air. Eventually his coughing died out and they continued to walk.

Those two keep each other’s secrets
, she thought, yet again, as she pressed forward.
And they keep each other alive
. She knew what she would confront in her future, but had put off facing it. When her master went back
There
, to stretch himself out again for hundreds of years, she would be left alone with the Middle and with Briac. She’d now attacked the Middle openly and expressed her desire to kill him. There was no reason to suppose either he or Briac would allow her to live.

Shinobu had made several more incisions to
Traveler
’s wiring, which the ship had absorbed without complaint. He had expected to be inside helping Quin already, and he was now cutting more aggressively as he searched for the electrical lines that would shut off the internal power while still leaving the vessel aloft.

A thick twist of insulated electrical cables ran around the engine casing. He’d been avoiding it for fear of damaging the engine, but now, tilting the torch nozzle sideways to minimize its impact, he aimed it at the cables.

“Please don’t hurt the engine, please don’t hurt the engine …” he said aloud, the wind carrying away his words.

The torch made a long, deep gash, easily severing the electrical lines and instantly breaching the engine. For one moment he glimpsed the blue flame of the torch sinking deeply into the ship’s whirling propulsion apparatus; then furnace-like air was gushing out around him, creating clouds of boiling steam in the rain.

“Dammit!” Shinobu yelled, ducking sideways to avoid the scorching
blast. His goggles saved his eyes, but he could feel fiery streaks of pain across his cheeks where the steam had burned him.

The engine was making an awful noise, and now the ship bucked violently and Shinobu was thrown free of his tiny perch. He fell, then was yanked to a stop, dangling from his rope and piton as the immense bulk of
Traveler
appeared to tilt toward him. His vision was suddenly filled with the streets of London moving dizzyingly far below.

New pain shot up his leg, and he realized the torch nozzle was bouncing around by his ankle, burning through his samurai leggings, through his clothing, through the layer of armored heat-resistant underclothes, and right through his skin. He screamed and kicked at the nozzle, then tried to grab it, but he and the torch were swinging wildly through the air.

The ship caught itself, the other engines screaming as they worked to keep it stable. He kicked frantically at the flaming torch again and again, and finally it went out.

He hung at the end of his rope for a moment in relief, then scrambled to get hold of the ship. His ancestor’s armor, though half burned from the fireworks earlier, was still so tight that he couldn’t extend his arms fully. He dug his fingers into the charred sections of silk braiding, ripped the armor off, and tossed it toward the streets below, mentally apologizing to his mother.

Grabbing desperately for handholds, he managed to pull himself back up onto the hull. But before the relief of being on firm footing could sink in, another engine blew out with a deafening boom, and the ship swung nose-first toward the ground.

Shinobu was thrown up over the aft engines and found himself flying above the upper hull of the ship, far past the original hatch he had cut through, in the direction of its nose. His rope caught him,
violently, and he slammed into the glass covering the bow. A moment later, the engines fired and arrested the ship’s fall, as he struggled to fill his lungs with air after the impact.

His face was pressed up against the glass when he started to breathe again. It was dark inside, but something was moving. Rainbow-colored sparks were dancing around in the darkness. Suddenly the sparks were directly in front of him, whirling along the other side of the glass, inches from his face. Someone inside was firing a disruptor. And very likely, it was being fired at Quin.

The glass was slick from the rain, and Shinobu’s feet skated around as he maneuvered the plasma torch in front of him. His ankle and cheeks were burning, his ribs were aching, but he hardly noticed these things as he sparked the nozzle back to life.