Disruptor Read online

  “What are you doing, James?” She raised her voice this time and followed him across the room.

  “I told Matheus he could see it turned on,” James replied evenly. “I’m turning it on.”

  The hum grew louder as the lab’s machinery warmed up.

  “Stop it. Stop it! I don’t want the boys in here.” Her husband appeared to be transforming into someone else before her eyes.

  James looked over at her with a raised eyebrow. “I built most of this room, my dear. Nothing bad will happen.”

  As if on cue, an alarm began to sound, not in the room they were in but outside, throughout the building. Maggie moved to the security door, where she peered through the small window. Lights were flashing in the outer lab.

  “You’ve set off an alarm, James!”

  She tried the huge lever on the door, first gently and then frantically, but it wouldn’t budge. There was a pad next to the lever, where the user had to place a hand to open the lock. She pressed her palm against it, but nothing happened.

  “James! What have you done?” She was becoming wild with fear. The baby woke up and began to cry loudly.

  “The alarm is only because I disabled the cameras,” James said, unperturbed, as he continued to adjust the controls. The hum in the lab grew louder. It seemed to be concentrated on the array of parallel vertical beams. “The guards noticed two cameras out and they set off the alarm. That’s all. Standard procedure.”

  “But—won’t they be coming here? Are they going to take you, or arrest you?”

  “Yes, if they get inside.”

  “James—!” All sense had deserted him, and Maggie didn’t know what to say. She tugged on the door lever again, to no avail.

  The humming around the upright bars grew so intense that Matheus covered his ears and Maggie covered the baby’s ears. Desmond was wailing now, adding to her panic.

  Then little Matheus saw something amazing. The vertical bars began to be eaten by fire. Matheus would later describe the sight as being like white and black snakes twining their way up each of the beams until the structures were seething with energy. The hum grew even more intense, but Matheus had forgotten to keep his ears covered. He was entranced by the glowing pathway in the center of the lab and began to walk toward it.

  “Get away from those, Matheus!” yelled Maggie.

  She wanted to run across the room and retrieve him, but she didn’t want to bring the baby any closer. The alarm had increased in volume and the lights were flashing more quickly in the outer lab.

  “They’re here, James! They’re going to stop you!” she told him desperately.

  “They were going to stop me anyway,” he responded, not even looking up from the controls. “The government banned my research, and all of my equipment is slated for disassembly and recycling.”

  So Maggie had been right. James was about to be fired, and in the face of that he’d gone crazy.

  A group of guards had reached the outer lab. To Maggie’s eye they didn’t look particularly fierce or well trained, but they were armed with guns. They rushed to the inner door, so that they were face to face with her through the small window. Maggie gestured at them frantically.

  “We need my pack, Matheus,” James said calmly. “Will you help me put it on?”

  Matheus nodded. He was amazed at the havoc his own father was causing.

  James’s pack was hidden between two of the machines along the wall, and when they pulled it out, Matheus discovered that it was immense. James had been preparing it for months, and it looked like nothing so much as an upright body bag full of more than one body. James was forced to kneel on the floor with his back to the bag while Matheus helped pull the straps over his shoulders.

  “Open it, please!” Maggie cried at the men outside.

  The guards had been fiddling with the outer lock for several minutes. One of them was on the phone, and the others were poking uselessly at a security pad.

  “Can’t you get it open?” Maggie asked them, though they could hear nothing through the door.

  James was on his feet, wobbling as he got used to the weight of the pack. “Now,” he told his son, “get ready to be astonished.”

  At the control console, James made a final adjustment. Matheus’s mouth formed a round O of surprise. Maggie stopped jiggling the door handle and turned to gaze at the center of the room.

  The seething energy around every upright bar reached a blinding intensity, and when it did, the glowing lines leapt across the empty air between the two parallel sets of bars and joined each other, forming a string of incandescent ovals. From where Matheus stood, these ovals were the edges of a passage leading between the two rows of bars. And through them he could no longer see the other side of the lab. He could see only darkness.

  There was a creak from the laboratory door. Outside, the guard on the phone was dictating instructions to the others. Another creak, as if the mechanism inside the door were trying to release.

  “They’re coming in here, James,” Maggie said, forcing calm into her voice. “Shut it down. Before they get inside. James!”

  He ignored her, scanned the controls, touched one or two, tweaking their positions. Then he walked over to Matheus and took the boy’s hand.

  “Come on,” James said to his wife. “We’re walking through, and they won’t come after us.”

  “Matheus! Come back here!” Maggie ordered. She was torn between remaining by the door and running to grab her older son.

  Matheus looked at his mother and his baby brother, who was still screaming and kicking his feet. He shook his head. His father was doing something against the rules, and Matheus wasn’t going to be left out of it.

  The door creaked again, more seriously. The guards were making headway. Maggie saw the lever on her side shake. Only a minute ago, she’d been desperate to open it herself, but now she hesitated. What would happen after those men got into the room? The baby’s crying was making it hard for her to think. Would the guards understand that she hadn’t been party to this act? What would they do to her family? And what was James going to do to Matheus?

  “They’re coming in! James! Please stop.”

  “Yes, they’re coming in, Maggie. They can catch me and put me in prison, or you can come here and walk through with me. I cannot explain this to you just now, but you will see in time. On the other side, we’ll all be together. I can’t promise that the same will be true if you don’t come.” The door shook and groaned. “It won’t take them much longer,” James said. His calm was finally breaking. “Maggie, please. I can get out with my research and my dignity, and they won’t know where we’ve gone.”

  Maggie peered through the window. The guards were hunched around the hinges of the door. She looked back to her husband and son, standing before the blinding row of ovals that outlined a dark pathway before them. She made a choice. Crossing the room, she joined them. The hum coming off the bars was so strong, she worried it would damage the baby’s ears just to be near it. But she would not retreat now.

  There was another loud creak from the door.

  “What does it do?” she asked James.

  “It takes us home to England.”

  Behind them, there was a tremendous wrenching sound, as the top half of the door peeled open on one side. One of the guards stuck his arm through the opening and strained to reach the inner door lever.

  “Come on,” James said to his wife.

  With their small son in hand, they stepped over the seething border of the first oval and into the darkness. Once they’d crossed the threshold, they could no longer see the ovals ahead of them. Blackness surrounded them, and only the glowing border behind them was still visible.

  James, Maggie, and Matheus (and perhaps baby Desmond, though he was too young to remember) immediately felt the pull of time lengthening around them. James had thought there might be an effect like this, and he walked briskly, tugging Maggie and Matheus along with him. In a few steps, he could make out the distant
oval opening ahead, with the English countryside visible through it.

  He looked over his shoulder to watch as the guards poured into the inner lab. They rushed toward the opening between the bars, where they stopped, confused by the hum and by the blackness hanging in front of them.

  The oval behind them, marking the border into the lab, began to waver. James watched until he saw the top half collapsing; then he turned back toward their destination. They were only yards from the new opening, beyond which meadow grasses were waving in a gentle breeze.

  They stepped over the second, seething border, out of the darkness and into the grass and sunlight. Both parents lifted Matheus up, so that to him it felt as though he were flying into the new landscape. Behind them, there was nothing left to see but a black pathway. Soon the second opening wavered and slowly fell apart. As they watched, the world stitched itself back together, leaving no trace. They were standing in open grass with rolling hills all around them.

  Maggie knelt and examined Matheus and Desmond. Her children were unharmed. Slowly she got to her feet and took in their surroundings. She was shaking and still panicked.

  “Are we really in England?” she asked her husband when she had looked to the horizon in every direction.

  “We are,” he said. “And there’s our new home.”

  He pointed to a nearby hill, but there was no house upon it. They walked to the crest anyway to survey the landscape beyond, in case James had mistaken one hill for another. But there was no house anywhere. Matheus and Maggie saw the confusion on his face, which would slowly turn into panic and then, much later, desperation. The shape of the hills was correct, but the world around them was devoid of any signs of modern life.

  It took James several days to discover why. He and his family had been the first to walk into an open anomaly. He’d made his calculations very carefully and checked and rechecked his work in the weeks leading up to their escape.

  James had succeeded in taking them to the very spot in northern England where he had meant to arrive. But in his inexperience he had not controlled the massive energy levels generated in his lab. The anomaly had not only unfurled the hidden dimensions and allowed them to pass between; it had blasted a tunnel through time. They had emerged from no-space into England in the year 506.

  While Dex was telling his story, he had tunneled them away from the laboratory complex. When he finished speaking, they had arrived at an isolated and lovely farm in northern England. Through the gray curtain of the anomaly, he and Quin were looking at a small stone farmhouse with painted shutters.

  “This was supposed to be our house,” Dex said. “My father had stuffed his backpack with everything he would need to continue his research in a small way, to create simple tools to manipulate the hidden dimensions. He thought he’d be living here anonymously and working on whatever he wanted for the rest of his life.”

  Behind the house was a large stone barn, which must have been meant to serve as the Old Dread’s workshop—James’s workshop.

  “So you’ve never seen this place before?” Quin asked.

  “Not the farmhouses, no. But I recognize the countryside. This is where we first camped, so many hundreds of years ago, where my father first set up his portable workshop. We came back many times when we were still a family.” He allowed himself a moment of nostalgia as he took in the view. “In my father’s laboratory, they’d used machines with massive amounts of energy to tear through the fabric of space, but there were gentler ways, natural materials that could produce the correct vibration.”

  “Your medallions?” Quin asked.

  “Exactly.” He studied the medallion in his hands before adjusting it and beginning to walk again. The countryside twisted as the tunnel changed around him. “He’d made the medallions inside the anomaly in his lab. That means they count time equally well in no-space and in the world.” Dex flipped his over, showing her the concentric circles and notches on the back. “The medallions don’t only move us through no-space. They are how we wake ourselves when we’re in the hidden dimensions. They are our many-dimensioned alarm clocks—though nothing except the original laboratory equipment could allow travel backward in time.”

  The farm disappeared behind them, and the edges of the tunnel became entirely black. Dex must be taking them There now. They were leaving the world entirely.

  “The athames are made of the same stone?” she asked.

  “Yes. They’re cruder, but they can still unfurl no-space and bring you back.”

  He shifted the medallion, and Quin had the sense of the space around her warping and changing. Time was lengthening, and her mind began to slip.

  “Knowledge of self,” she whispered, “knowledge of home…”

  “We won’t be long,” he assured her. “I won’t let you get lost. I promise.”

  She felt his hand on her shoulder, grounding her. A short while later, he stepped past her. In the beam of Quin’s flashlight was a small pile of metal objects. Dex bent to pick them up.

  “I noticed that Maggie and her Watchers overlooked these when they took the disruptors,” he said. “She never could be bothered to understand much.”

  —

  Quin and Dex returned to the underside of the Transit Bridge, where they stepped out of the anomaly and onto the little perch from which they had begun the trip.

  Dex arranged the objects he’d brought back from no-space so that they were bathed in the sunlight coming through the rafters. They were three metal shields, which Quin recognized because she’d hidden under just such a shield during the fight with the Watchers atop the Transit Bridge. They had holes all along their rims, and the shield faces were made of concentric circles. Quin touched them curiously.

  “Maggie put disruptors on her Watchers. It’s only prudent that we carry disruptor shields,” Dex told her. “We’ll let them soak up the sun for a while.”

  “Disruptor shields—that’s what these are called?”

  He flipped one of the shields over and pointed out the handgrip on the underside. “If you pull this lever, the shield will absorb disruptor sparks and spit them back at your attacker. It’s quite easy to learn to use them and a good defense to go along with the impellor.”

  As the shields absorbed the sunlight, Dex sat with Quin and demonstrated how to use them. They were both entirely engrossed in his explanation until a deep, resonant thump traveled through the structure of the Transit Bridge.

  Startled, Quin looked up. “What was that?”

  “I know that sound,” said Dex.

  “Was it a wave-pulse?” Quin asked, realizing that she too knew the sound.

  “Look.” He pointed across the harbor.

  The sun was dipping below the horizon, and lights had begun to come on throughout Hong Kong and Kowloon. Except a large swath of Hong Kong was now dark.

  “Maggie is here,” Dex said. His expression changed to a look of urgency. He reached for the medallion hanging around his neck.

  There was another thump, which Quin felt in her bones. More of Hong Kong’s lights went out. Someone was using a wave-pulse, and the city was going dark. Not just the city—

  “Look at Traveler,” Quin said. “That’s not the course it was following.”

  The airship had fallen from the altitude it had maintained all afternoon. Its engines had been running with an audible but tame rumble. Now several of them were silent. The remaining engines ran with a high, unstable whine that Quin recognized very well from the last time she’d been on Traveler. There was another bone-shaking thump, and those engines too cut out.

  The airship was going to crash into the harbor.

  “Dex, what’s she doing?”

  But when she looked to Dex, he was already gone.

  Traveler’s great room was full in the hours before supper. The older apprentices were practicing together with whipswords in training mode, which meant that the weapons melted harmlessly against their skin. They were instructed by a formidable woman from the house of
the stag who was still recovering from wounds but who’d insisted she was well enough to resume her role as instructor after a hundred-and-fifty-year interruption.

  The other adult Seekers who were recovered enough to walk were practicing with whipswords if they had them and other weapons if they did not, in the way Seekers had sparred for hundreds of years. Not one of them had an athame any longer—the Middle Dread had confiscated those and redistributed them to his Watchers—but Maud supposed the exercise would do all of them good. What they would become when they’d fully recovered, she didn’t know.

  She herself was working with a group of smaller children, the ones whose sense of time was the most flexible.

  Sara, seven years old, stood between Kaspar and the training dummy. Kaspar gripped the knife—a real knife for the first time—and stood, unmoving, gazing intently at the dummy.

  “Kaspar, the knife must not touch Sara, do you understand?” Maud asked the little boy.

  He nodded gravely.

  “You are only to try to get past her,” the Young Dread instructed him. “Now go!”

  Kaspar dodged right. Sara quickly blocked him. He dodged left, and she was there before him again because she was faster and had a longer reach. The only hope Kaspar had of getting to the dummy was to speed himself up, as the Young Dread had been teaching him to do. He was blocked again, Sara shifting in front of him with the agility of an eel, and the little boy grew frustrated.

  “Kaspar! As I showed you!”

  Sara thwarted him again, and Kaspar, in his exasperation, instinctively changed tactics. He became a hazy, boy-like shape as he swerved first left, then right, and then moved all the way around the girl before she had any idea where he was going.

  Suddenly the knife was stuck in the leg of the training dummy and Kaspar was standing behind it, far away from his opponent, who had to turn all the way around to locate him.

  When the other children clapped, Kaspar looked very pleased with himself.

  “Good,” the Young Dread told him. She gestured for another child to come forward and take the knife from Kaspar. “Now you, Julia.”