Briac’s dark eyes came into focus. “That’s not a question about Seeker knowledge. My oaths don’t bind me to answer that.”
“All right.” Shinobu reached for the focal as if to pull it off.
“No!” the man said quickly, twisting as far away as he could, which was not very far owing to his restraints. “No, please. I will answer. I knew the Middle Dread…maybe better than other Seekers knew him.”
“Tell me about those boys of his. I’ve seen them twice now.”
Briac said, “They found me here. Took me away and hit me, in Hong Kong and on the estate. They hit me, they hit me! Disgusting boys, disgusting—”
“Stop,” Shinobu said, putting a hand heavily on the man’s shoulder to settle him.
Briac made an attempt to control himself. “And then they put me back here,” he went on, “and the doctors were angry I’d escaped—”
“What did the Middle use them for?” Shinobu asked, cutting Briac off with another firm press on his shoulder.
“He called them his Watchers. What do they watch? Him? Us? Us?” Briac was losing the thread of coherence again.
“How many of them are there?” Shinobu asked.
Briac shook his head. “Lots, maybe. Lots! I don’t know, don’t know, don’t—”
“But you know about the focal?” Shinobu asked, trying a different topic, hoping the man would calm down.
Briac collected himself. “I used it as a boy,” he said. “My father stole one and had it for a time. And he let me use another one. Briefly. He handed out favors like that. For a moment, and then you never knew what would happen. A knife in your back, a reward, a sudden fight with someone who’d been your friend, torture. Anything, anything at all. I had him under control only because I stole Catherine’s journal and hid it from him. Blackmail. He was desperate to get it back, and treated me well. He was worried the Old Dread would read it, learn what he’d done…”
Briac’s eyes had drifted away, and the sparks swirled more vigorously around his face. Shinobu took hold of the man’s chin and forced him to make eye contact.
“The Middle Dread. He let you use a focal. He handed out favors. He was scared of the journal. He was planning…big things.”
Briac nodded carefully. “When he let me wear the focal, he was wrong, wrong—” his voice rose, but when he noticed the look on Shinobu’s face, he reined himself in and whispered conspiratorially, “It was a mistake, letting me use it. Because he’s in the focal. I saw things he was planning.”
“I might see them too.”
“And he told me things…”
“Tell me what he told you and what you saw,” Shinobu ordered.
Briac’s eyes snapped back to his. He pressed his lips together as though to seal them, and shook his head.
Shinobu reached for the helmet, and the man’s dark eyes locked fearfully onto Shinobu’s hovering hands. He began to mutter curses and threats, but these seemed to fall from his mouth automatically, with no real thought behind them. The disruptor sparks were dancing wildly.
“It’s all I have left,” Briac whispered. His eyes were pleading as he watched Shinobu’s hands get closer to the focal. “It’s all I have— Stop! If I tell you, maybe you and I can follow what we saw in the focal together? Help each other.”
“Like you and my father helped each other?” Shinobu asked coldly.
“We’ve always looked out for one another, Alistair,” Briac said.
“How did you keep him loyal to you all those years?”
“You’d broken so many laws already, Alistair,” Briac said. “What other Seeker would partner with you?”
“You tricked him into killing.”
“You liked killing,” Briac said, something of his old nature coming back into his voice. “You were so good at it.”
“He never liked it.” The thought of his father enjoying a kill enraged Shinobu, and again he imagined his own hands around Briac’s throat. It would take only a minute or two, a minor struggle, a few muffled cries. “You made him a killer, you told him he could never be anything else, you took him from Mariko.”
“Yes,” agreed Briac, his expression brightening, “all of those things.”
“The Middle Dread,” Shinobu prompted. “If you want to keep wearing the focal.”
The expression on Briac’s face became awful, as though telling Shinobu any more would kill him, but the promise of keeping the focal on his head, even for a few minutes, won out in the end. He started to speak in a low whisper, as though the words