Seeker

Shinobu grabbed his father’s huge shoulders, trying to steady him. Alistair swung a fist at his son. Shinobu ducked, then found the big man’s hands tightening around his neck. But Alistair’s mind twisted away before he could do any damage. He released Shinobu and fell to his knees, beating his own head on the ground.

“Da. Do you know me?”

He pulled Alistair’s head around so they were looking each other in the eyes. The moon had risen, lighting the floor of the forest. His father was still for the briefest of moments, his eyes wide and blank, cuts along his eyebrows from smashing his head into the dirt. Then he lunged. His hands reached for Shinobu’s neck again, his fingernails grazing the skin. Just as suddenly, he stopped himself, groaning, and began beating his own legs.

The field distorts your thoughts. You form an idea, but the disruptor field changes it, sends it back to you altered. Shinobu was recalling Alistair’s own words. He had drummed the perils of disruptors into their heads for years. Your mind will tie itself in a knot, fold up, collapse. You will want to kill yourself, but how can you? Even that thought spins out of your control …

Smoke lay heavily over much of the estate, making it difficult to breathe or see. Shinobu had checked his own cottage, looking for the trunk full of guns, but had found nothing except a pillar of fire where his home had once been. He’d gone farther, to the cottages of the Dreads, hoping they might have weapons he could take. But those structures, while not burning, had been completely empty. The Dreads had taken their belongings and gone.

He and Quin had agreed to follow Fiona if they got separated, so he’d headed back around the commons and through the forest toward the workshop. Halfway there, in a section of the woods the smoke had not yet reached, he had come upon his father, staggering through the trees, caught in a web of sparks that would be the end of him.

Shinobu was ashamed to find that he didn’t feel sorry for Alistair. If his father had been disrupted only a few short weeks ago—before their first assignment—Shinobu would have been devastated. But now his heart was numb. Truly numb. Alistair had let him make the wrong decision. Yes, he’d warned him, but so gently there was no way Shinobu could have understood. How could he possibly have understood?

His father had let him go on that first assignment and swear his oath. Alistair had known what it meant, and he had let it happen. And then he’d accompanied them and Briac on more assignments, without saying a word.

“Why did you not stop me?” Shinobu yelled at Alistair. “I would have listened if you’d explained …”

Alistair was gritting his teeth as though fighting a battle inside his head. He cried out, and in the same moment managed to pull a knife from his belt. He lashed at the air with the blade, hit his own head with the hilt. Then he raised the knife and struck down wildly at Shinobu.

Shinobu blocked him and pushed. Alistair landed in the dirt, but his hand was still pressing against Shinobu’s with the knife. It was not the blade against his skin, Shinobu realized, it was the handle, and Alistair was shoving it into his hand.

Shinobu grabbed the knife, and his father rolled away, his fingers scratching at tree roots. Then he kicked at his son’s legs. Shinobu took a step backward, out of reach.

He should end this for his father. That was what you were supposed to do for a comrade caught in a disruptor field—end it. The field was permanent, and only a monster would let someone suffer like this.

If I am a monster, Shinobu thought, it’s because of you. You stood by and let me do it.

He tucked the knife into his belt and walked away.