Seeker (25 page)

It was John. Of course. For the past year and a half, he’d probably been checking with salvage companies all over the world, and now the athame had brought him directly to Hong Kong. And, inadvertently, right to Shinobu himself.

A distant part of Shinobu knew he should kill John. He should run up the shore right now and finish him, without a moment of hesitation. That would be the honorable thing to do. But already, he knew that he would not. It was because of John that Alistair had ended up the way he had. It was because of John—and yet, it was not
only
because of John. It was very much because of Briac, and even because of Alistair himself. His father and uncle had chosen to do certain things … things Shinobu did not allow himself to think about anymore.

Other things were John’s fault—Quin’s injury, for instance, and her obsession with him. And yet … Quin was no longer Shinobu’s responsibility. He had said goodbye to her and left everything from
Scotland behind him, his father included. What he really needed right now was something to stop him from remembering.

“What should we do, then?” Brian asked, frustrated at Shinobu’s silence. “Maybe one of the fancy opium bars?”

“Yeah, sure,” Shinobu agreed absently.

He was still in his dive gear, and his red hair had been shaved short and dyed in a yellow-and-black leopard pattern. He had piercings in his nose and eyebrow, and he was taller and skinnier than he had been before. Still, he and John had spent years together, and in another thirty yards, John would be close enough to recognize him.

“Well, which one?” Brian was asking. “I hear there’s a bar on the fourth level of the Transit Bridge. It’s like an opium den from imperial China—”

Shinobu drew back an arm and punched Brian directly in the face midsentence. The blow dropped Brian’s considerable bulk to the ground, and Shinobu jumped on top of him and began raining fists onto his head. As he had hoped, Brian grabbed Shinobu around the neck and rolled over, pinning him to the wet ground. Instead of swinging at Brian’s face again, Shinobu grabbed handfuls of stinking mud and smeared it all over his own hair and face.

“What did you do that for?” Brian yelled. “We don’t have to get opium. You can pick whatever you want!”

He was choking Shinobu now, and Shinobu stopped smearing mud on himself and began trying to pry Brian’s large, sausage-like fingers from his neck. The foreman was running toward them, yelling for help from his workers. A moment later, a dozen arms were pulling Brian off of him.

Someone helped Shinobu up, and he sat on the ground, coughing and gasping, completely covered in mud. From this position, he watched John walk the rest of the distance toward them, his face
showing concern that something might have been damaged in their fight. The foreman was examining the athame critically, making a big show of berating Brian for getting mud all over it.

“It was at the bottom of the ocean anyway, boss,” Brian pointed out.

Then John was standing right above Shinobu as the foreman wiped off the athame and handed it to him. John took it almost reverently and held it up, examining the stone in the sunlight. It was undamaged, perfect. His thumb stroked the bottom of the pommel, where, Shinobu knew, there was a small, delicate carving of a fox. John’s face held a mixture of hope and relief that was almost painful to see. Then he tucked the athame inside his coat and walked back up the muddy slope without a glance in Shinobu’s direction.

Shinobu wiped a hand across his forehead as he watched the foreman counting out their fee and handing it over to Brian. Shinobu was sweating profusely again and felt an intense thirst coming over him.

“Here, let me help you.” Brian put out a hand and pulled Shinobu to his feet. As soon as he was up, Brian punched him in the jaw, sending him back down into the mud.

Shinobu looked up at Brian and spit out a mouthful of sludge. “What’d you do that for?”

“What the hell’s the matter with you, Barracuda?” Brian muttered.

“I just had a sea bass sitting on top of me!”

They both laughed. None of it mattered. Their work was over for the day, and the drug bars waited.

They hosed themselves off with the filthy water that came out of the salvage yard hose, and changed back into street clothes. Street clothes, for Shinobu and Brian, meant tight jeans and leather jackets, ripped T-shirts held together with safety pins, and bracelets with
metal studs so sharp, it was a wonder they didn’t poke their own eyes out. Shinobu liked to wear his thickest bracelet on his left wrist, where it covered up an old scar he preferred not to see.

He had gotten so thin that his jeans weren’t as tight as they used to be, and he was able to slip the lightning rod down a trouser leg, with the end of the dull blade shoved into his left boot.

He noticed a message from his mother then, which had come through on his phone while he was underwater. It asked him to contact her urgently. It must have been important—she never tried to reach him. His mother, who was not dead, but very much alive, and with whom he had been reunited only a year and a half ago, had already grown disgusted with him. And he couldn’t blame her.

He started to call her, but then Brian was banging on the changing room door, telling him to hurry up. He slipped his phone back into his pocket without another thought. Together, he and Brian walked off the salvage site and into the city, the stone rod tap-tapping against Shinobu’s leg.

Quin was in the back room of her healing office, tidying up after mixing a bag of herbs for the little redheaded Asian boy. The bells on the front door rang, alerting her that someone had just entered the waiting room.

“Mother?” she called. For the first time in a long while, she was eager to see Fiona and tell her about saving the boy.

She moved into the front room and discovered it was not Fiona.

It was a young man. He was about her own age, quite nice-looking, with fair skin and light brown hair. He stood with his back to the entry door, and his blue eyes were looking at her like he was drowning and she might save his life.

Somehow she lost control of her hands and dropped a canister of herbs. It fell to the ground, spilling its contents across the floor.

“Quin,” he said softly. “Is it really you?”

She’d been worried that his voice would be different, twisted, terrifying even, but it was not. He sounded quite ordinary, and very, very familiar.

He was watching her closely, as if worried she might do something
dangerous or wild. His eyes followed her as she bent to pick up the herbs. She too felt like she might do something unpredictable. But what?

She took her time retrieving the canister from the floor and setting it carefully on a counter. Her motions felt awkward all of a sudden, like her muscles had stopped working properly in his presence.

“Quin,” he said again. She knew his voice. She knew it so well. And him. Of course she knew him. He was important in her life somehow.

“Do you know me?” he asked. He took a step toward her.

“Of course.” She said it automatically and found herself backing into the doorjamb of the room behind her. It was good to feel the solid wall there. She did know him. She could imagine herself walking over and laying her head on his chest. But there was good reason, her mind told her, that she did not remember him. “Of course I know you.”

He took another step toward her, like he couldn’t keep himself away.

“What’s my name?” he asked.

Quin bit her bottom lip. His name was right there, on the tip of her tongue. It was something common, and yet she couldn’t think of it. It was part of that gray area in her mind, where other people thought memories should be. The gray was like her own Victoria Harbor, drowning the first fifteen years of her life.

He was getting closer. The way he moved … She had seen him in a barn, in a field, far away from here. There was a river in the distance. These things were like marks left on an ink blotter after you’ve taken your paper away—she could feel them more than she could see them.

He was standing right in front of her, and Quin was pressed against the wall. He smelled of soap and salty ocean air.

“What’s my name, Quin?”

She whispered, “John.”

The sensation of dizziness rolled over her. Her knees gave out, and she was sliding down the wall. John caught her. She pushed herself up and away from him, moving into the back room.

She could not remember, and yet not remembering was exhausting. It was hard to walk. She was staggering. She knocked over another canister of herbs, heard it spill all over the floor. She should not be with him.

“I was so worried,” he was saying. “I thought—ever since that night—”

“No.” Instinctively her hand came up to stop whatever he was going to say. There was John’s face. She’d seen it looking at her through a hole, while numbness spread across her chest …

“Thank God you’re all right,” he breathed, now following her as she tottered around the examination table.

She pulled another few canisters off a shelf as she tried to hold herself up. The old wound in her chest was aching. She was actually falling; her legs had collapsed.

Instead of hitting the ground, she was lifted into John’s strong arms. It felt so natural. Even though he was dangerous. He was dangerous, somehow. And so was she. Together they would be very dangerous.

“I’ve got you,” he whispered. “I’ve got you.”

He was carrying her up the stairs to her bedroom, and it was like being on the deck of a rocking boat. She didn’t mind that he was touching her, didn’t care where his hands had been. She let her eyes close. Then they were in her bedroom, and he was laying her gently on the bed.

The dizziness was worse. This had happened to her before, during her first months in Hong Kong.
It’s your past trying to overtake your
present
, Master Tan had explained patiently.
You may leave it in the past, if you wish. You must simply wait for the moment to pass
.

“I’m here,” he whispered. “I’m here with you. I’ve missed you. God, I’m so sorry …”

Why was it dangerous to be with him? It didn’t make sense. She could sleep, because he was there to stand guard. Things were right again, because John was here.

“I missed you too,” she murmured, holding one of his hands in her own as she drifted into unconsciousness.

Shinobu peered at the object in his hand through a haze of opium smoke. It was vibrating. He worked hard to focus his eyes and eventually discovered it was his phone. Who would be calling him? It was the middle of the day. The crew he and Brian usually hung out with didn’t even wake up until after dark.

He exhaled another cloud of smoke from the opium pipe cradled in his arm. It was his seventh pipe, and he was reaching that perfect state when he was balanced between his body and the sky: no worries, no troubles, no people.

But the phone kept vibrating. It had been vibrating for hours, though that was in opium time. In real time it might only have been a few seconds.

“Please shut up,” he whispered to it.

It didn’t listen.

Clumsily Shinobu set the pipe on its tray and struggled up onto his elbows, irritated. He rubbed his eyes and stared at the phone.

“It’s my mother.”

He shoved at Brian Kwon, who was curled up next to him on the
pallet, his own pipe lying by his face. Brian grunted in response and mumbled, “Barracuda mom.”

The phone had stopped vibrating, and now it beeped, indicating there was a message. His mother never called. Something tickled the back of Shinobu’s mind. Earlier that day, hadn’t she called him another time? Two calls from his mother in one day was remarkable. Being hit by a meteor while salvage diving was more likely. The last time he’d seen his mother, she had found him unconscious in the kitchen, with burning Shiva sticks all around him and his little brother collapsed in the hallway from the smoke. Mariko had thrown a large cooking pot at him and screamed that he was never, ever to come inside her house again. That had been months ago, and he hadn’t heard from her since.