had crawled free, she’d looked up to see the Young holding the athame in her hands.
There. The coordinates were lined up along the dials between the Young Dread’s hands. They were suspended, perfectly still in Quin’s memory.
Her mind came back to the present. She took the athame from Shinobu and quickly turned each dial until they matched what she’d seen in that past moment.
“Here,” she said, handing the ancient dagger back to him. “This is where the Young Dread took the Old Dread, before she came back for us.”
She removed the focal then, and gritted her teeth through the noise in her ears and the headache and nausea that came on immediately. She sat heavily on the platform and closed her eyes.
Shinobu sat with her, put an arm around her. “Sorry. I know it feels bad when it comes off. It gets worse the more you wear it.”
“I’ll be all right in a moment.”
She breathed in slowly until she felt steady. When she’d recovered, she looked up to find that Shinobu had put the focal on the floor and pushed it some distance away.
“Show me,” she said, gesturing at the athame.
Shinobu nodded. He slid his thumb down the athame’s blade, dislodging the lightning rod. When he struck athame and rod together, the whole of the stone barn began to shake. Shinobu carved an anomaly into the air. Long threads came loose of their surroundings to twist away and form the humming border.
The threshold pulsed with flowing energy, and in the darkness beyond they saw a hunched figure, outlined in the light coming in through the barn window.
Shinobu took Quin’s arm. “Follow me,” he said. They stepped over the seething border, and in only a few steps had reached the figure.
“It’s him,” she whispered.
They were looking at the Old Dread. He stood perfectly still, his shoulders stooped, where the Young Dread had parted from him during the fight on Traveler.
His face had been shaved recently—Quin remembered that from the last time she’d seen him—and his cheeks and chin were covered with only the faintest white stubble, which made him look, somehow, quite modern. His eyes were closed and his hands were clasped before him. His robe hung about his frame oddly; it seemed the wrong size and didn’t reach past his ankles. He’d given the Young Dread his cloak, Quin realized. What else did he give her? she wondered.
“Get his legs, Quin,” Shinobu said.
“His legs?”
She looked up and realized Shinobu wasn’t talking about the Old. He was leaning over another figure that lay at the man’s feet. Feeling her way, Quin stooped down and grabbed on to two legs. They felt as stiff as a marble statue in her grasp, though they were still soft to the touch. Together Quin and Shinobu hefted the body upward, dead weight in their arms. They backed out through the anomaly, the body threatening to overbalance and topple to the side. When they were firmly on the loft floor again, they set it down with a dull thud.
Quin knew whom they were carrying, but the man’s eyes—open and gray and staring—gave her an unpleasant shock. In the dimming light, lying inflexible and motionless, a great wash of blood across his chest where the Young Dread had stabbed him through the heart, was the Middle Dread.
Shinobu looked down at the Middle with an equal measure of distaste and fascination.
“Now,” he told her, “let’s find out where he put things.”
“I know he’s dead, but I could swear he could start moving,” Quin muttered.
She and Shinobu were kneeling on the floor of the barn loft, removing the cloak from the frozen form of the Middle Dread. If he’d been alive, he might have been waking up by now, reentering the normal time stream. But he was, indeed, very dead. Only the blood on his chest had come back to life, trickling thickly from his fatal wound, filling the air with its metallic tang. The rest of him was gray and still.
“Check every pocket,” Shinobu said.
“What are we looking for?”
They’d gotten the cloak off the Middle’s stiff form and were rifling through it, pulling out knives and small tools and weapons. Shinobu examined what looked like a stone chisel, then threw it aside.
“If he was keeping people and things There, he must have some clue on him that helps him remember exactly where they are.”
“What if he simply memorized the locations?” Quin asked.
“That’s possible,” Shinobu admitted. “But the Dreads spend years, decades even, stretched out There. Doesn’t that do