Disruptor Page 25

  They had finished their long ocean crossing, and Traveler was now following a regular course over Hong Kong’s harbor. John would come here when Shinobu was safe. And this evening, when they were done in the great room, the Young Dread would bring the children to the windows to watch the evening dance of light across the buildings along the harbor front. It had become a daily ritual and a profoundly moving occurrence for the children, most of whom had never before seen modern illumination.

  The thump and pulse hit the airship as the Young Dread and her wards were gathering up their training implements. All lights on board went out. And then the engines began to whine.

  The Young Dread had been on Traveler before when it was crashing, and she recognized the engine strain immediately. When the second pulse hit them, knocking out the remaining engines, the ship became completely silent. Through the windows outside the great room, Maud watched them coasting toward the towering canopy of the bridge. If she were not mistaken, they would be crashing directly into it.

  Traveler’s engines were silent, but it coasted briefly on the aerodynamics of its body. It maintained itself aloft for a short time, but when it crossed some crucial physical point of no return, the ship’s nose dropped and its final thrust of forward momentum sent it plummeting toward the Transit Bridge.

  It’s crashing again, Quin’s mind screamed. It’s crashing on the other side of the world.

  And then it did crash. The impact was loud—a rumbling, tearing noise like a storm above her, but the result to Quin, standing among the lower rafters, was surprisingly light. She felt only a tremor through the heavy piers that held the bridge above the harbor, but soon aftershocks radiated out among the rafters.

  Far above, the bridge’s canopy shrieked as it warped. Other noises came to Quin, the very human sound of people yelling. There were rumbles that must have been buildings collapsing along the top level.

  Quin could hear everything, because the harbor itself had gone completely silent. Anything with an engine—every ship, every aircar, every automobile close to the Transit Bridge—had stopped running when the lights went out. That was what a wave-pulse did when it was used in a city.

  She looked to the massive support pier. She’d once climbed down that very pier with Shinobu and swum away into the harbor. There were metal rungs that would take her all the way to the water. Getting away would be the safest course. But Quin was not going to leave. Her mother might still be somewhere inside the massive structure. And Maggie. And if Maggie were here, Shinobu might be here too.

  She looked across the beam that would lead her back inside and formed a very stupid plan. Thinking that she might need protection against whatever was happening above, Quin tied the two disruptor shields Dex had left for her across her back. She retraced her steps down the narrow beam, back up the ladder through the hide of the bridge, and into the lowest levels.

  Shinobu dreamed of Quin. She was looking out across water and saying: It’s crashing again.

  “Shinobu, wake up! I’ve got to go.” John was shaking him. As Shinobu opened his eyes, John spoke to him urgently. “I’m going. Are you staying?”

  John was already gathering his things from around the campfire in a great hurry. Shinobu forced himself awake, unbearably sore after a full evening of him and John throwing and dragging each other around the amphitheater with the cylindrical weapon from Maud’s cloak. It was the only item they’d figured out how to use, and they’d used it far too much on each other.

  “Where are you going?” he asked John.

  “Hong Kong. Something’s happening.”

  “Is it Traveler?” Shinobu asked immediately. In his dream, Quin had been talking about Traveler, he was certain of it.

  Surprised, John said, “I think it is.”

  “Then we’re both going.”

  In moments, the Seekers in the great room had poured into the corridors and strapped themselves into the bracing stations that lined the walls. The Young Dread saw the medical staff securing patients and themselves in the adjacent medical corridor.

  Traveler coasted for a time, but the last seconds were a silent plunge toward the bridge. Children screamed. Almost everyone screamed.

  “Hold on tightly!” Maud ordered, cursing herself for being without an athame. All along the corridor, in the half-light from the sky outside, she saw frightened faces turned to her. Directly on either side of her, Kaspar and Sara were stoically holding the straps that secured them to the wall.

  The impact was sudden and at the same time infinite. The airship’s bow struck the bridge canopy at an angle, with a ripping, rending noise, and the force tore at them all as they pressed themselves against the hull. The impact continued as the ship plowed through the canopy and its underlying structure, drawing tremendous groans from the twisting steel. Maud saw the bow buckle up into the great room, was sure the ship would be torn in half and all of its passengers killed, and yet the force was not deadly—the canopy was shifting beneath the airship, absorbing its momentum. Next to her, Kaspar’s face was terrified and brave as he flattened himself beneath the straps.

  As the shriek of steel died out, they stopped in darkness. The creaks and moans of the damaged airship were swallowed up in the greater rumbles of the bridge outside.

  —

  The hallway had become a hillside, with a rectangle of light at the top. The crew were there, carrying the wounded through a tilted hatch.

  “We will be fine,” Sara, the seven-year-old girl, told Kaspar. They were holding hands as they all climbed upward toward the light. The ship shook with tremors from the structure beneath them.

  “We protect each other,” Kaspar said.

  At the hatch, the Young Dread was confronted with a twilight sky above them and the high peaks of the sail canopy all around. Traveler had crushed one such peak into the body of the bridge, creating a kind of valley among the sails and causing the neighboring peaks to angle dizzyingly toward them, their supporting frameworks creaking and stretching the canvas. Below the canopy were the sounds of people moving in great numbers and of structures falling. Distantly came the noise of a building fire.

  With the youngest passengers, Maud climbed down the emergency ladder from the listing airship onto the mass of canvas below. The airship’s crew were already taking the gravely injured away on stretchers, across the broken sail, toward any place that might provide them a way off the canopy and off the bridge.

  Maud and the children and the Seekers followed, as the bridge shuddered around them.

  Inside the Transit Bridge, Quin couldn’t hear the chaos, but the entire structure shivered, hinting at the ongoing destruction on the levels above.

  The bridge’s lower levels housed the machinery for air circulation and lifts, and Quin made her way through these dark spaces by flashlight. All of the equipment was silent.

  She was going up, into the heart of the tumult. The airlifts were dead, so she made her way into a staircase, which she ascended at a run. When she reached the lowest occupied level, where the cheapest, most crowded drug bars could be found, she came out into a mass exodus of visitors. Flashlights, glow sticks, and mobile phones lit the dingy corridors that smelled of opium smoke and Shiva sticks. People were pushing each other and yelling as the crowds moved toward the exits—not a stampede yet, but headed that way.

  Quin pushed against the tide until she reached another stairwell, one that was for Transit Bridge residents only. It would have been just as crowded if the entrance hadn’t been cleverly hidden in an offshoot of the main corridor. Inside the stairwell were fewer people and fewer flashlights. She could see well enough to head upward as the bridge shook, sending tremors down the handrails. There were residents on the stairs, yelling confused updates to each other between floors.

  “The bridge is starting to sway!” a young man above her said. “Level four has the least crowded exit route.”

  “It’s just the canopy,” another responded. “But it’s on fire.”

  “Do
you feel that shaking? It’s not just the canopy,” a third said, from far up the stairwell, near the door to the main level.

  Quin ran upward. The vibrations in the structure were happening more often and becoming more intense, though there was no regularity. The idea of the structure falling apart terrified her, but what if Shinobu was up in the mess above?

  “Stay off the main level,” a young mother called as she burst through the door from the second level. She dragged her child behind her as they ran down the stairs.

  “Why?” the first young man called after her.

  “There’s a fire. From one of the restaurants. The canopy is catching! Find the fastest way out.”

  The woman scooped her child up into her arms. Quin watched her disappear out the exit on the fourth level, where there was a passage straight to the Kowloon side. The fear in the woman’s eyes was infectious. Quin didn’t slow her pace, but internally she hesitated—what if Shinobu wasn’t up there? Should she follow the crowds and leave?

  No. She wasn’t leaving. She passed the hesitant young man on the final landing before the main level, and didn’t answer when he called after her, “Do you know something?”

  She did know something. There was smoke seeping into the stairwell. The bridge was on fire, and Traveler was somewhere above her. She would help if she could.

  The broken canopy sail was a wasteland of torn and piled canvas, rent beams, snapped cables. The other sails billowed and shifted in alarming ways. Though the crash landing hadn’t been fatal to the occupants of the airship, when Maud looked back at Traveler, enormous, lying askew, its engines crushed, she understood that the weight of the ship, even impacting slowly against a structure as large as this bridge, would create a grievous chain reaction.

  “I smell smoke,” Kaspar told her. He was climbing over a pile of rope and cable with the rest of his training group, all under the age of eight.

  The Young Dread had smelled the smoke as soon as they’d opened Traveler’s hatch. But the fire was much larger now. Some of it was on the levels below them, which was why smoke leaked through the holes in the crushed canopy, making the air heavy and harsh, but there was a larger fire behind Traveler, toward the south end of the bridge; she could hear its approaching roar. The children were coughing.

  “We can get down to the bridge itself here!” called the airship’s captain. He and the rest of the crew, carrying patients on stretchers, were far ahead, near the base of the neighboring sail.

  “Go!” she yelled to him.

  She watched his group navigate between torn structural beams and disappear through a great tear.

  The Young Dread looked at the slow-moving procession around her, made up of half-healed adult Seekers and fifteen children. She raised her voice, and said, “Anyone who can move faster should go and take the children with you. I’ll bring up the rear.”

  The adults looked at her and shook their heads. No one was going on alone. “It’s all right,” the woman who was once a Seeker instructor answered. “We’ll stay together.”

  “Check the houses!” came a loud voice above them.

  The Young Dread experienced a moment of awful realization: the voice belonged to Maggie.

  Maud and her companions searched the smoky air for the source of the voice. The old woman stood far above them, atop a pile of broken beams. Of course. Maggie’s weapon had brought down Traveler, just as she’d tried to do before. The Young Dread should have known immediately. Maggie had been waiting for them here.

  “Go! Now!” the old woman commanded.

  Who was she speaking to? Maud scanned their surroundings, realized that Maggie was not their chief concern. Twelve Watchers, almost all wearing disruptors, were ranged in a circle around them at various high points in the debris. Now, at the old woman’s command, they drew their whipswords and charged from all sides.

  Without a word, the Seekers arranged themselves in a tight knot around Maud and the children. The crash had interrupted most of them at practice, when they were already armed, and whipswords and knives appeared in almost every hand.

  The air grew thick. Maud felt her ears pop. She did not understand Maggie’s weapons, but she knew this was a sign that one of them was about to be used.

  “Down!” she ordered.

  Immediately everyone obeyed. They were hit with a rolling force that scattered them every which way. The Watchers were still coming, and the high whine of their disruptors had begun.

  John and Shinobu stepped out of the anomaly into a tiny secluded alley on Hong Kong Island, not far from the entrance to the Transit Bridge. Shinobu had set the coordinates on John’s athame—quite well, John noticed—and in only a few minutes, they came out onto the main road giving access to the bridge.

  Pandemonium.

  Hundreds, or maybe thousands, were streaming off the Transit Bridge onto the darkened streets of Hong Kong. Smoke rose through the bridge’s canopy into the evening air in a dozen places, and there was a fire, at the near end, burning up structure and canopy alike and nearly obscuring the huge black shape on the other side of the flames.

  “Is that Traveler?” John asked, knowing it was but unable to comprehend what he was seeing.

  The airship had crashed into the bridge at about the midpoint, flattening one of the enormous sails and causing the others to lean in precariously. Even from where they stood he could hear the creak of metal bending.

  “Power’s out here,” Shinobu noted, taking in the city buildings around them.

  “And on the bridge,” John said, observing that only the fire was lighting the Transit Bridge now.

  “She used that weapon again,” Shinobu muttered. “She was dying to use it.”

  There was no reason to answer. Maggie was certainly the cause of the havoc they were witnessing. The flood of humans continued to move past them.

  “John, I don’t think it’s out of line to mention that your grandmother is a horrible person.”

  “Yes, she is,” he agreed. “It’s good to know I’m not the only one who’s noticed.”

  Looking out at the bridge, Shinobu ran his hands over his head as if trying to concentrate. He said, “I can get us right to the canopy. I’ve done it before.”

  Without a word, John handed him the athame.

  —

  It took several tries, but in a few minutes they were looking through the seething doorway of a new anomaly at a shifting, swaying peak of the Transit Bridge canopy. Traveler was visible just below this particular sail, its huge mass crushing the canopy and the upper level of the bridge beneath it.

  “Use your knives to brace yourself!” John said.

  Shinobu nodded at him, understanding. Together they jumped out onto the sail with knives drawn and sank their blades into the thick canvas as anchors to keep themselves from falling.

  “It’s really moving!” Shinobu said as they clung to the sail.

  It was windy, and the smoke billowing over Traveler from the fire beyond was smarting in John’s eyes. Beneath his feet, the sail creaked and shifted, the framework supporting it permanently damaged, even if it was still upright.

  “The sail might collapse!” John said, feeling the instability through his feet. “Or even the bridge itself.”

  “Look!” Shinobu yelled, rubbing his streaming eyes on his shoulder as the smoke buffeted them. “She’s there! Attacking!”

  He was pointing down into the valley beneath the airship. John saw Maud down there. She was alive! But she and a group of Seekers were being knocked over like bowling pins by one of Maggie’s weapons. As they struggled to their feet, a dozen Watchers ran at them from all sides.

  John had the athame. Maud had nothing but a few weapons. For the first time ever, John saw the Young Dread in a fight and was worried that she might not be able to keep herself alive.

  “Let’s go!” he yelled.

  Shinobu waited as John pulled the cylindrical black weapon from his cloak, shook it to ready it to fire.

  “Okay!”
Shinobu yelled. He could barely hear the word above the gusts of wind, the creak of beams, and the roar of the distant fire.

  He yanked his knife out of the sail, pointed himself down its dangerous slope, and took the first step. In two yards he and John were both in an unstoppable slide as the sail groaned beneath them. He dragged his left arm against the canvas behind him, using his knife to arrest his descent and prevent himself from careening out of control. He could not spare a glance back, but he could see John just at the corner of his vision, following him with equal terror and determination.

  Near the bottom, they hit a shifting girder beneath the canvas, and, flailing, Shinobu jumped free, followed half a second later by John. When they hit the sail again, they both found themselves running headlong across messy debris toward the fight.

  In moments, they were within firing range of the Watchers, who were steadily closing in on their victims.

  “Now!” Shinobu called.

  John had already raised the impellor, and the air was getting thick about Shinobu. John fired their new weapon and sent half the Watchers in front of them sprawling down into the mess of Seekers below.

  “You missed Maggie!” Shinobu yelled.

  Maggie had stopped on a high perch, still well above the Seekers and Watchers. She turned toward Shinobu and John, her own weapon held out. The air in Shinobu’s lungs began to pool thickly, making him cough. He leapt out of the weapon’s direct line of aim as both Maggie and John fired at the same moment.

  Hitting the canvas, he watched the streams from both weapons collide, sending up thousands of sparks that lit the scene like fireworks. John was knocked over and his weapon rolled away down the slope toward the fallen Watchers.

  “Dammit!” yelled Shinobu, racing to help him.

  Quin climbed up from the main level of the Transit Bridge through a breach in the sail. It was no longer much of a climb; the canopy had been compressed down to the surface of the bridge beneath the airship. Below Quin the main thoroughfare was deserted. Whoever had not been directly beneath the ship or caught in the initial burst of fire was escaping off either end of the bridge.