settling down. He was closing his eyes tight, trying to hold on to the threads of thought. It was a long time before he spoke again: “I don’t know his reasons, but the Middle wants to tear down everything the old man built.”
“You mean—it’s us he’s going to tear down? Seekers?”
“It’s us,” Briac agreed. “Unless”—the words were coming, though he tried to stop them—“unless we are clever enough to change our own fate.”
“But his plan failed,” Shinobu said quietly.
“Did it?”
“The Middle Dread is dead.”
“Yes,” Briac whispered, “and the Watchers don’t know it yet. They are waiting for someone to command them.”
He took several slow breaths. Then he began to speak again, this time without any prompting, as though, despite the cherished value of his hidden knowledge, it was an immense relief to share it with someone else at last.
“While the Middle was getting rid of Seekers, he was hoarding things, keeping them There…” Briac began, and as he spoke, Shinobu cradled his own head in his hands, letting Briac’s words—some coherent, some not—flow over him.
Shinobu tried to catch hold of what made sense, such as when Briac explained about two hundred and about the real use of the focal and about a stone medallion, and he tried to ignore what sounded insane, such as Seekers justifiably killing each other’s families, and an Old Dread who was simply a flawed, aging man, too trusting and often wrong.
In the end, he’d heard enough to form a sort of plan.
The hospital storage room stank of dirty clothing, mildewed paper, and something sweet and sour, like apples that had been left to rot. And rats. He could smell them, and he could hear them scurrying across shelves and inside the walls. If there had been one rat back in the ward, this room was their home base.
Shinobu had put the focal back into the backpack. It hadn’t been easy getting it off Briac; the man had started crying and thrashing. Once the helmet was off, however, the disruptor sparks surrounding Briac’s head had immediately spun out of control, his thoughts had scattered, and his cries had quickly dwindled to incoherent mumbles as Shinobu slipped out.
It hadn’t been easy to keep the focal off his own head either. Shinobu had crept down the hall and into the storage room, but all the while he kept imagining the cool touch of the helmet between his hands and the electric joining of it with his mind.
But he did not put it on.
He had the answer Quin was looking for. He knew why Seekers had changed. They’d changed because the Middle Dread had turned them against each other. They’d changed because the Middle was trying to destroy all of them, while cleverly covering his tracks.
Now the Middle was dead, but those boys—the Watchers—were still out there. And the Middle had had other tools as well. One of the Middle’s tools was right here in this storage room.
Quin wanted to make things right, to figure out what Seekers should be. And Shinobu wanted to protect Quin. So, what if…what if he took control of all the Middle’s tools, including the Watchers?
Shinobu assessed the shelves before him. Patients’ belongings had been thrown into cardboard boxes that had been stacked haphazardly. It looked like the shelves had been ransacked repeatedly by hospital staff looking for valuables. The newer boxes were mostly intact, though—maybe the staff waited awhile before robbing their patients.
Something brushed against Shinobu’s fingers as he searched for the right box. Instead of drawing back in disgust, in a strange surge of curiosity, he thrust his hand forward and caught something warm and furry—a small black-and-white rat with a long tail and tiny eyes that gleamed wetly. It twisted frantically in his grasp to try to bite him, and without thinking, Shinobu smacked it against the metal shelf. The animal went limp, but he could still feel its heart beating rapidly, see its small chest moving. It will be good for a while, he thought, stuffing the creature into a loose pocket of his jacket.
When he finally located Briac’s box, he pulled it down and opened it to find only a few items inside: a long dark cloak, boots, and a coiled whipsword. He was amazed the sword hadn’t been stolen, but then it wouldn’t work for anyone but Briac, so it would have appeared to be a fairly useless object—a coiled whip that refused to uncoil.
He tucked the whipsword into his largest jacket pocket, then set about searching Briac’s