something. But what if their master was the Middle Dread? What if that journal entry about two boys training with the Middle meant those two? The same boys?”
“And they’re here now, and they’re looking for his athame,” Shinobu said, building upon her thought.
“If he trained them so long ago, and they’re still around…then they’ve been resting There, and the Middle was doing things no one understood.”
“Yes,” Shinobu said, grasping this immediately. He held her gaze with the hyper-alertness she’d seen in him before, the afternoon he wore the focal himself. It was as though Quin using the helmet had almost the same effect on him as using it himself. “How long have they been around, then?” he asked. “And how have they interacted with Seekers all this time?”
He was propping Quin up with one hand, but his other hand was holding the focal, and now he turned it about and looked at it from all angles.
“Don’t…” she whispered, when it looked as though he was going to put it on. “I know it’s given me this idea, but…I don’t think it’s good to wear it, Shinobu. I don’t want to wear it again.”
He licked his lips nervously, then set the helmet on the ground and moved his hand away from it deliberately. His eyes lingered on it for a few more moments before he turned back to her.
“I won’t,” he told her. “Don’t worry.”
Holding on to Shinobu, she got back to her feet, and so did he. He handed Quin the focal, and she noticed he didn’t look at it as he passed it to her. She thought he might be scared of it, and now she understood the feeling.
“There are a few pages in the journal I want to look at again,” she told him. “I might have an idea.”
Nott stood guard while Wilkin and Briac used the glowing window to find the girl. Nott was perched on the back of the chair, his feet on the seat. The three of them were somewhere in the city of Hong Kong, in a dark corner of a long, low room filled with dozens of such glowing windows—Briac called them computers—each in its own little alcove with a chair in front of it. A handful of young men were scattered about, hunched in front of other computers, doing God knew what. Nott had seen many strange things since his master had taken him from his family, years and years ago. Computers were just one more oddity to add to the list.
There was a small partition separating their desk from the others, so no one was looking their way. Please be more curious, he thought, his eyes boring into the backs of the other people in the room. He wanted to beat someone.
The helm hadn’t been anywhere in the Hong Kong woods. They’d spent hours looking for it, all the while ignoring Briac’s cries of pain from the knife wound in his back. (Well, half the time Briac had cried out in pain, and the other half he’d seemed to forget that he was injured at all.) Eventually they’d given up the search, and Wilkin had had to admit that he might have dropped the helm in the darkness There, where they were never likely to find it. They’d both been so distressed by this conclusion that Nott had punched Wilkin directly in the face, and Wilkin hadn’t even tried to hit him back.
Losing the helm meant they couldn’t properly follow their master’s orders without a great deal of luck, so even Nott had agreed they should continue searching for the girl in hopes of recovering their master’s athame, while they figured out what to do next.
For a while, Briac had been fiddling with a board in front of the computer, pressing letters (Nott could read enough to know they were letters, though he didn’t know all the letters in the alphabet. He could learn them, if he wanted to. He was very clever. But Wilkin couldn’t read much either, so who cared?) but Briac was whimpering and biting his own fist now, because Wilkin was sewing up the wound on his back again. The stitches Nott had put in the first time had been so sloppy that Briac had never really stopped bleeding.
“Shhh,” whispered Nott, watching Wilkin jab Briac with the thick needle, jerk the thread downward, and jab the needle in again. “Can’t you make him be quiet, Wilkin? Someone’s going to hear.”