ALSO BY ARWEN ELYS DAYTON

Seeker

Traveler

Disruptor

The Young Dread
(an original e-novella)

RHCP DIGITAL

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First published in the USA by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2017

Published in Great Britain by Corgi Books 2017
This ebook published 2017

Text copyright © Arwen Elys Dayton, 2017

Jacket art: background copyright © Stuart Wade, 2017

Swords jacket art copyright © Bose Collins, 2017

Scottish Estate map copyright © Jeffrey L. Ward, 2017

Fox, ram, and atom icons copyright © Shutterstock, 2017

Bear, boar, eagle, fanged cat, dragon, horse, and stag icons copyright © John Tomaselli, 2016

The moral right of the author and illustrators have been asserted

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978–1–448–19267–0

All correspondence to:
RHCP Digital
Penguin Random House Children’s
80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL

The blackness of no-space swallowed light. Any illumination here could reach only faintly before darkness closed upon it, extinguishing it as though these hidden dimensions were composed of black water.

Dex was like a fish in that water, slicing steadily through the darkness, never stopping, but never moving fast. Like a fish, he glowed a faint silver, as though covered in shining scales. The glow came from the stone medallion around his neck, which gave off a light as weak as the first nearly invisible glimmers of dawn. Yet Dex’s eyes had learned to gather any illumination and use it sparingly, which meant the carved stone disc was bright enough for him to see by.

After ages of quiet, the medallion trembled against his chest, startling him. There was only one reason it would shake of its own accord—another medallion was calling, and Dex’s was vibrating in response. He gently grasped the disc and changed his infinite course through no-space, to see who was coming and going.

Dex was leading a horse by its reins, and with a gentle tug he pulled it along with him. He’d come upon the horse only moments ago, it seemed. The animal was neither awake nor asleep. No-space had its hold upon the creature, but it was not the same hold it had on humans. The horse existed in a half-life, patient and obedient.

After a time, the medallion stopped shaking, but by then Dex could see where he had to go. There was a flash of light in the distance, so bright it blinded him. He was looking at a round doorway back into the world.

The world. It’s still there, burning under the sun. It never stops.

When he reached that doorway, he would discover which of the old family had called him—except the light was gone long before Dex got near it. That was no matter. He continued to follow its afterglow.

Now he passed through the space where usually a circle of boys stood, silent sentinels in the blackness. He’d seen those boys many times, smelled the odor of death that hung about them like a fog. But they were gone.

Only a lone figure was left near the collection of weapons the boys had once guarded. Dex stepped around a row of disruptors, feeling an involuntary shudder.

The solitary figure was a girl. There were girls stuck in no-space, of course, and Dex had seen all of them, had come to know everything here in this place outside the world. But this girl was new. The horse made a sound, low and faint, a dream whicker, as though it had caught the scent of someone it knew. A velvet ear twitched.

Dex couldn’t see the details of the girl’s face. He decided, after a long, anxious deliberation, to use more light. In the pocket of his robe, his fingers met the cool cylinder of his flare. How long had it sat there, unused? To him it was days, but to the flare it was a long spool of time that had been unwinding without measure.

His thumb clicked the striker once, twice, three times. A white flame bloomed. In the first moment it was brighter than his memory of the sun. He turned his head away until his eyes adjusted. When he could look again, he examined the girl.

He knew her. The first glimpse of her was like looking into his past. Or into his heart.

But no. This girl was not that girl. How could she be?

Her pale cheeks were flushed with some strong emotion, and her expression was worried—angry, even. Her mouth looked as though it had fallen still in the middle of speech. Her hands reached to hold on to a companion who was no longer there.

There was no medallion in her hand, so the disc that had called Dex belonged to someone else—someone who had left her here and escaped back into the world through the blinding doorway that had already closed.

He touched the girl’s mind with his own, stirred the thoughts that lay like stones within her head. Very slowly, those stones shifted.

Quin, her mind told him at last.

The disappointment was overwhelming. Quin. He had hoped . . . Dex banished this thought, though it left him very reluctantly; she was a different girl and her name was not important. Only her clothes mattered; they were modern, with stitching that spoke of factories and machines.

Something was wedged into a pocket of her trousers. Dex carefully drew out a crinkly packet with a picture of grains and berries on it. Food. The label was in English and Chinese. He couldn’t read Chinese very well, but modern English was easy.

There was an expiration date, which he read several times.

Here we are.

“So,” he said aloud. He marveled at his voice after having been silent so long; the single word was like a foghorn, and it twisted his mouth into odd shapes. How much time had passed since he’d last spoken? A hundred years? A thousand? Ten thousand? Surely not so long as that. He spoke again, testing the waters: “It’s time to go.”

Gently he bent down and pushed his shoulder into Quin’s waist, slid an arm around her, and lifted her as he stood. She was entirely frozen, so he balanced her on his shoulder like a wooden beam. She knocked against Dex’s metal helmet, but it remained firmly on his head, just as it had since the dawn of . . . all this.

He reached for the medallion hanging around his neck.

He would have to get used to sunlight all over again.

The thought was terrifying.

Quin floated on a dark ocean, unconscious of anything. Then, by slow degrees, she became aware of herself. There was light coming from somewhere, blue-tinted and dim. She was lying down, and the surface beneath her was hard and uneven and cold.

Someone was there. A warm touch on her lips, so soft and fast, she wondered if she’d imagined it. Noise surrounded her, a sound like a distant deluge of rain, but much too fast, as fast as the breeze across her face.

She remembered. She and Shinobu had gone There, but she was losing herself, and he was begging her for help. She had to claw her way back to him. Right now!

Quin sucked in a lungful of air and lunged to her feet.

“Take me out, Shinobu!” she said. “Carve an anomaly!”

Her voice was slow and rusty, and she was no longer There. A moment ago there had been the glow of a lantern, and Shinobu’s dark form in front of her, and beyond that the deepest blackness. They’d discovered that the Middle Dread had been turning Seekers against each other for hundreds of years, while keeping himself “blameless” in the eyes of the other Dreads by getting others to do the actual killing for him. Quin and Shinobu had gone There to find whatever the Middle had been using to sow discord. But where was she now?

Somewhere new. A cave, rough surfaces colored by bluish illumination from an opening high up in one of the walls. The light was changing, as though it came from a sky with fast-shifting clouds. The noise was still there, far away and close, the sound of rushing water.

She could see Shinobu’s silhouette. He was here with her, wedged into a corner of the space, as confused as she was.

Quin stumbled toward him, discovered that her body wasn’t working properly. The walls lurched and teetered, but it was her own muscles that weren’t functioning. She recalled the Old and Middle Dreads closing in on her on the Scottish estate, months ago. Their movements had been uneven, out of sync with the world around them, because they’d been lost in the hidden dimensions for years. She was like that now, buffeted by the stream of time.

“Shinobu! How long were we There?”

She laid her hands on the dark form in the corner. It turned toward her. Too fast. Everything was too fast.

A face she didn’t know, a young man, towering over her. Unruly hair and eyes that were dark in the cave’s dim light. He was wearing a focal; his expression was wild. This person wasn’t Shinobu at all, and he was reaching for Quin.

“It’s good you’re awake.” He spoke so rapidly, Quin nearly missed the words.

She’d lost herself There when she was supposed to be keeping an eye on Shinobu. Had they run into this man? Had he taken Shinobu’s focal and spirited Quin away? She lurched backward, trying to pull herself properly into the world. Her hand found the knife at her waist.

“Shinobu? Shinobu?” Maybe he was nearby.

The strange young man came for her, moving so much faster than she could move.

“It’s all right,” he said.

It was not all right. What had he done to them? How much time had passed? Quin felt his hand grip her elbow. She wrenched free, drew her knife—slowly, too slowly. The walls moved by in fits and starts as she pushed herself away.

“Shinobu, are you here? Answer me!”

The cave was small, more a widened channel through rock than an actual chamber. She blundered down the only route available.

“Stop, stop!” the stranger called, sounding both angry and afraid.

The channel narrowed dramatically after only a few steps, but it then opened up again. Quin squeezed through the tightest spot, moving as if in a dream, and found herself in another chamber. She heard him behind her at the narrow neck, too big to follow her easily.

The noise was louder here, a thundering of water in the rocks, so rapid it was like hearing a recording on fast-forward. There was less light. Quin felt her way along the darkened channel for several yards, and the air around her changed, became moist as the noise drummed harder into her ears.

“I can’t follow you!” he called. “Please!” There was something awful, desperate, in the way he said it.

“Shinobu, are you here?” Her voice was still slow and heavy.

The channel narrowed again, and now the floor beneath her was dark with water and the air full of mist. Quin stepped around a sharp bend and found herself abruptly washed in early dawn light and staring directly down the face of a cliff. The channel had ended in open air, and her front foot hung several inches out over the ledge. Droplets festooned the atmosphere, dazzling her with rainbows. She was behind a waterfall, at the edge of a sheer drop, the cascade thrumming and reverberating as it launched itself over the craggy headland above her and out into the sky, where it plummeted down and down and down.

With a nauseating jolt Quin felt herself rejoin the flow of time. For one moment, she was whole; she then lost her balance in a rush of dizziness. The height . . . the height . . . She dropped her knife, grabbed for the walls of the crevice in which she stood. The stone was solid beneath her fingers, but her foot, hanging over the edge, gave her the sensation that she was falling. Her knees buckled. She clutched her meager handholds as hard as she could, overcome by vertigo, pleading desperately with herself not to let go.

Hands were on her arms, drawing her away from the ledge. “I’ve got you,” the stranger said, his voice no longer fast but natural. “You’re all right.”

Her companion held her up, and together they staggered back the way she’d come. When they reached the narrow spot, Quin slid through, and with difficulty he squeezed himself through after her.

She collapsed where she’d woken up, head against the wall as she hugged her knees. “Oh, God,” she muttered, pressing herself into the rock hard enough to ward off the memory of her foot hanging out over that edge.

It took her some time to recover her wits. She focused on her breath, following it in and out until she returned to herself. When she opened her eyes and the cave came into focus, she discovered the mysterious young man crouching a few feet away, watching her anxiously.

“There you are,” he said. “I’d hoped you would wake up all right, but that didn’t go so well.”

Quin’s eyes shut again. She found her knife on the ground by her leg. He must have retrieved it for her. Why would he do that? She gripped the hilt and drew strength from it; Shinobu had given her this blade.

Quin opened her eyes to discover that the light in the cave was growing brighter, showing her new details. Her companion was young, but older than she was, perhaps in his midtwenties. He wore something like a monk’s habit, made of a coarse brown material. His curly hair was brown as well, as were his eyes. He would have been handsome except for those eyes, which were large and distorted by some power that had him in its grip. They made his face dangerous.

“Should I take it personally that you prefer to plunge to your death rather than sit in a room with me?” he asked. It was a joke, though he didn’t look amused or relaxed.

“Did you take me from There?” she asked him, coming back to herself more with each moment that passed.

“You were stranded in no-space.”

She’d never heard that term before, but she knew immediately it must be another word for the hidden dimensions.

“Shinobu was with me.”

“He wasn’t. I know no-space better than the back of my hand. He was gone before I found you.” His voice shook, but whether with fear or anger, Quin couldn’t tell. Something was wrong with him.

He was a Seeker, obviously, and she was going to find out what he’d done. Was he a pawn in the Middle Dread’s scheme to turn all Seekers against each other? “Did you take his focal?” she demanded, meeting his wild eyes with her own. “Did you leave Shinobu There, helpless?”

“If he was there, he left before I found you. And you—” He looked upset, wounded by her question. “It’s my focal. It’s always been mine. I rescued you.”

Quin walked herself through the hazy, slow last moments with Shinobu. He’d been in trouble. He’d wanted her to take off his focal, but she hadn’t been able to move by then.

She studied her volatile companion in silence, realizing that it was entirely possible that Shinobu had gone off on a fool’s errand. It had been her job to keep an eye on him, to make sure the thoughts from the focal didn’t overpower his own. If this stranger was telling her the truth, then Quin had lost herself, and after that she’d lost Shinobu somewhere as well.

“Where are we, then?” she asked, trying to take the accusation out of her voice. Maybe this person had rescued her.

“We’re in the world,” he answered in tones of awe, as if he didn’t quite believe in the world. As if this were his first visit.

She said, “And where—”

“You want a place name, something specific.” He was shaking his head. “I can’t think that way. Give me time!”

His voice trembled badly. She saw that he was making a great effort to hold himself together, but he looked ready to jump out of his skin at the slightest provocation. With a sweeping glance, Quin estimated him as an opponent. He was big, perhaps twice her weight, and agile. She’d grown up around fighters and knew a dangerous man when she saw one.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, as if reading her thoughts. “You’re welcome to that knife you’re clutching. I don’t mind. I waited here with you for hours until you woke up. If I’d meant to hurt you, I would have. I don’t like fighting.”

The words carried a ring of sincerity. Despite his feral look, she was inclined to give him a measure of trust. Unbalanced did not necessarily mean evil.

“Who are you? Which house?” she asked him. “Where did you train to be a Seeker?”

“I don’t know specifics so quickly.”

“But your name—?”

“I saw your clothes and your food and I knew it was time,” he said angrily. Apparently she had pressed him too hard. She watched him master himself, but his voice quavered as he added, “Your clothes and that food are modern. As modern as I needed them to be.” He gestured at a wrapped food bar lying on the floor, which Quin vaguely remembered stuffing into her pocket at some point. He edged closer to her, on his knees. “Would it offend you if I took your hand?”

“What?” Was he asking to hold her hand, or was he so crazy that he was asking permission to remove it? She tightened her grip around the knife hilt.

A surprised laugh escaped him. “Held your hand,” he corrected himself. “I didn’t mean I wanted to cut it off. I only ask because I’m not used to this much light. I—I haven’t got any weapons on me, though there are a few in the cave. And wonders.”

What did that mean? As if the sky had heard her question, the light shifted abruptly. Clouds outside had parted, allowing a glow of yellow to flood through the high, natural window in the rock and show Quin her surroundings clearly at last. The space where the two of them sat was large enough for six or seven people crammed in at close quarters. There was no way out except the cliff plummet off to her left. And she could now see a couple of whipswords lying haphazardly nearby, along with a few other objects—strange items that she didn’t recognize, made of stone and glass, items that looked both ancient and intriguing, like things the Young Dread might carry, like things her father should have taught her about during her Seeker training. Wonders, he’d said.

The young man was still moving closer, avoiding a beam of sunlight as though it were poison. In the brighter light, she saw his focal more clearly, and could hear the crackling of its electricity. It was not Shinobu’s helmet. That was the truth. It was quite different, larger, maybe cruder, and there was a D melted into the temple, by a child, she guessed, looking at the rough design of the letter.

“I told you it was my focal,” he said, noticing her gaze. “It’s the oldest one there is.”

His large hand enclosed her own, and Quin allowed this because she was pondering what he’d just said: His focal was the oldest focal? What family did that put him in? And how had he come by the artifacts on the floor?

“I need your steady hand,” he said. He glanced at the sunlight, which shone on the wall only a few feet away from his shoulder.

“Are you worried it’s going to burn you?”

“A little bit.” He took a deep breath, in and out, as he pressed her hand between both of his. “Will you pull off my helmet? There’s no escaping it—it’s got to come off. And then we can get out of here.”

The thought of leaving was plainly terrifying to him, but it energized Quin. She had no athame and therefore must cast her lot with this unpredictable companion if she wanted to get somewhere—anywhere—familiar and begin looking for Shinobu.

After extricating her hand from his, she gently removed his focal while he watched her with tortured eyes, bracing himself for pain. He collapsed the moment it was off, and with a deep groan pressed his forehead into the floor. When she set the helmet aside, she could hear the buzz as its streams of energy severed themselves from him like a swarm of dying bees.

Quin caught only a few of the muttered words that flowed through his gritted teeth: “. . . It’s supposed to focus . . . I never wanted it to tear . . . should have done better . . .” He spoke as though he had a long and rough history with his focal, and she wondered if it affected him in the same way Shinobu was affected.

“Stop! Come here,” she told him. He’d made a gash across his temple against the jagged floor. She pulled his head up, and when he felt her touch, he clutched her, a drowning man holding a piece of driftwood.

“I hate wearing it and I hate taking it off,” he said against her knees. “And the sunlight hurts.”

She steadied him with a hand on his cheek. She let her vision shift into the healer’s sight she’d been taught by Master Tan in Hong Kong. When her eyes lost focus, she could see the lines of electrical flow around his body, bright copper streams just below the level of normal sight. In an ordinary person, these lines flowed slowly in a regular pattern, and as a healer, Quin had learned to manipulate them. In her companion she saw something entirely different. A bright shower erupted from his right temple, flowed swiftly down across his body to his left hip, where it rejoined into a single stream that disappeared within him. He was like a waterfall himself, with violent bursts cascading into him and out of him over and over, temple to hip. His terror and his evasive answers were now rather less mysterious; such an energy pattern could not be pleasant to live with.

Quin wondered if she could heal him. But a few moments of watching that bright, savage flow put an end to that thought. She’d never seen a pattern like his and doubted she had the skills to make a dent in it. She would have to coax him along until he took her out of this cave.

Eventually he became calmer, and when that happened, she let her eyes settle back into ordinary sight. He was marked, she saw, by those strange energy lines. A patch of hair above his right temple was devoid of color—almost clear, as though it were dead. She wondered if she would find a matching scar on his left hip.

His chest was still against her legs. “Thank you for coming back to me,” he whispered.

“You found me,” she told him gently. “And maybe you’ll help me find Shinobu.”

“Shhh.”

He released her and lay on the cave floor, gazing up at the roof. He looked drained, but no longer distressed, at least. His features were finely shaped and somehow, she thought as she studied him, familiar to her. He gave an impression of nobility that she couldn’t quite pinpoint. Perhaps it was the loose, shaggy hair, like the locks of a medieval knight in one of her mother’s very old novels.

“We’re both alive together now, Quilla,” he whispered, in a tone different from the one he’d been using. He was calling her by another name, the name of someone he must have loved. “I can hardly believe it.”

She tried to match the softness in his voice as she said, “Where’s your athame?”

“I have no athame, nor do I need such a blunt instrument.”

She’d never heard a Seeker describe an athame that way—as if it were something inferior. “Then how did we get here?”

“In the usual way,” he whispered, and he laid a hand across his heart. Something in the gesture suggested he was crazy all the way through. And yet, there were hints of information here that Quin wanted to pursue. Had he brought her back from There without an athame? She had been separated from Shinobu while they’d been in the process of discovering the long-hidden secrets of Seekers. Had she stumbled upon someone with some of the answers?

“What’s ‘the usual way’?” she asked him carefully, hoping a gentle question might sidestep his defenses.

He turned suddenly toward her. “You know I want to tell you. I would have died in your place if I’d gotten to you in time.” He spoke so lovingly, as though they knew every detail of each other. “I’d much rather you and Adelaide were alive than be alive myself, Quilla.”

“I’m—I’m not Quilla,” she said softly, feeling a pang of sadness at this glimpse of his story. Suddenly she remembered the light, warm pressure she’d felt on her lips as she woke up. “Did you kiss me before?”

“You’re so like her,” he said, as if in a trance. “What if you are her?”

She touched his shoulder. “I’m Quin.”

He looked puzzled but undeterred. “But will you help me?”

“I’ve got to—”

“Stop telling me about Shinobu!” he cried savagely. In one violent motion, he twisted up to a sitting position and glared at her. “Whoever he might be, I’ll find him, if that’s what you want. I’m only asking for a little bit of help first!”

Quin bit back any response. She needed him to get her out of this cave, and then she needed to find Shinobu and keep him from doing something mad. But when she looked again at the glass-and-stone “wonders” and at the odd focal her companion had been wearing, she found she had already decided. She and Shinobu both would want to learn from this wild young man, if they could only get beneath the insanity.

“Who are you?” she asked him tentatively.

His gaze on her was like a physical force, heavy and uncomfortable. He looked like he was struggling to stay friendly. “I’m Dex,” he said at last, succeeding in reining himself in. “We can go now, if you want. I know most people don’t like small, dark spaces as much as I do.”

“How do we go?”

He cast about on the floor and gathered up the wonders. “You hold these as a token of my commitment. You help me, and I promise I will help you.”

She took them from him and asked, “Are these old Seeker tools?”

Her calmness was calming him. “They’re at least as old as that,” he said. “They must be used in a big open space, which is why I need you. I’ll teach you the things I refused to teach you before.”

Very slowly, as if afraid of being hurt, Dex extended his left hand into the beam of sunlight coming through the opening. When the sun fell on his skin, Quin saw a tiny stone-and-glass device that was looped over his middle finger and lying in his palm.

“What is that?”

“Catching all of them won’t be easy. But they need to be caught, Quilla.” He looked down at her with his big brown eyes, and Quin thought fleetingly that Quilla, whoever she’d been, must have enjoyed the warmth of that gaze, no matter how crazy he was. “They’ve messed things up royally, and it’s time to stop.”

She wasn’t about to ask Dex who he was talking about. She’d pushed him, she guessed, nearly to the end of his tether. He’d said they would leave—she could hold her tongue until he’d shown her how.

But when he took his left hand out of the sunlight and slid it around the back of her neck, she backed away.

“Don’t . . .”

“I’m not going to kiss you,” he assured her softly, the hint of a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. His hand was at her neck, and the warm stone of the strange object in his palm was pressed against her skin.

A shock traveled through her spine and up into her head. Quin went limp in his hands, and was, almost instantly, unconscious.

Shinobu stood on the crumbling ledge of stone, biting his fingernail as he surveyed the mess he’d made. Twenty Watchers—twenty!—lay about the broken floor of Dun Tarm. The ruined fortress was wedged into the water of Loch Tarm, and half of the structure had fallen to rubble and slid into the lake. What remained was mostly open to the sky, the floor a patchwork of ancient flagstones, pitted and out of alignment and covered in moss and puddles of rainwater. There were even trees growing up between the flagstones, gnarled and stunted oaks with the bright green leaves of spring.

Shinobu stood with his back to the cold water and the granite peaks that rose up beyond the lake. The day was beautiful and mild, and the sun touched his back with late spring warmth where it peeked out between towering clouds. He noticed none of these things. He was watching the Watchers, who were sprawled in positions unsuited to lying down, exactly as they had been since he’d brought them into the world. They were so still that they might have been carved out of Dun Tarm’s discarded stones, but they were slowly, moment by moment, relaxing into natural poses as they rejoined the stream of time. When they did, they would be awake and dangerous.

This is madness.

No. It’s how I keep Quin safe. I tame these boys and use them.

His mind was arguing with itself as it now did almost constantly.

He slipped a hand into a pocket of his cloak and withdrew the medallion. It was a stone disc, about four inches in diameter and perhaps an inch thick at the center. He noticed more details now that he was studying it in bright sunlight. On the face was the symbol of the Dreads, three interlocking ovals. The back, which he’d thought was mostly smooth, was actually pockmarked and scratched—or perhaps not scratched but etched with lines forming concentric circles. And had it been vibrating? He’d been focused on retrieving all the Watchers, but hadn’t he felt it shaking in his pocket when he was in the darkness There?

The medallion was heavy with unknown properties. All Shinobu knew was that it was his talisman to control these boys. It had belonged to the Middle Dread, and the Watchers had already shown him that they respected it as a symbol of authority. With it, he was their master, just as the Middle Dread had been. Looking at all twenty of them, however, he had his doubts. He’d fought four of them once, with Quin, and he and Quin had barely made it through the fight alive.

Why do I want them? They’re dangerous.

Quin wants to understand Seeker history. If these boys aren’t on our side for that, they’ll be against us.

“But I don’t have Quin to check on me,” he whispered aloud. At once he closed his lips tightly, as if that might prevent the boys from hearing what he’d said.

You left her There to keep her safe.

I left her. I left her.

The hand of one boy twitched. Another boy’s foot shifted on the stone floor; a head jerked to one side. They were almost awake.

They were all dressed in dark, scratchy-looking cloaks, as though the Middle Dread had found them in medieval European villages. He must have gotten them from everywhere, though, because they were of all sorts, Asian, Indian, and African. They filled the air with the scent of death, which came, Shinobu had discovered, from bits of rotting animal flesh they carried around in their pockets.

They’re terrible.

He tried to run a hand through his hair, but he was thwarted by the metal focal. How long had he been wearing it? He was supposed to keep track.

Why was the sun so warm? Scotland had been cold when he and Quin were last here. When had that been?

How long has she been in the darkness alone?

Each moment There is safer than here.

Is it?

A boy nearby was groaning and feeling for his knives. Another was muttering something. Then, quite suddenly, twenty boys were stirring, and twenty pairs of eyes opened and latched on to Shinobu.

How long has she been in the darkness alone? Shinobu asked. He sounded far away and confused. Each moment There is safer than here.

Is it? Quin tried to ask.

“Quin, do you want to get out of the cave?”

She was awake in a sudden rush. There was still the rumble of the waterfall in the rocks around her, but there was another sound—a deep, low hum penetrated her lungs and her stomach, almost making her sick. Quin sat up and clamped her hands over her ears.

“Come!” Dex was yelling to be heard over the competing vibrations in the air.

Directly behind him, where the wall of the cave should have been, there was something else entirely. It was as though the rocks had been ripped out and replaced by blackness.

No, not blackness exactly.

“Is that an anomaly?” Quin asked him—shouting—trying to grasp what she was seeing. How had she fallen asleep? The noise was so distracting, and she knew she was forgetting something.

“Do you mean an opening to no-space?” Dex yelled back. “Yes, that’s what this is! And when it’s open, it’s the strongest note in the hum of the universe.”

The opening was larger than any anomaly Quin had seen. The whole wall had disappeared, and instead of a circular border as would appear after carving an anomaly with an athame, the glowing edges of this opening were thicker and held the shape of a huge semicircle, like a tunnel carved through the mountain, with streaks of light smearing backward and leading the way deep inside.

Dex pulled her to her feet. Quin stopped at the incandescent, seething edge and looked up at the ceiling. It had been cut in half by the anomaly’s arch.

“You shocked me into unconsciousness,” she said, remembering now. “Why did you do that?”

Dex had the courtesy to look somewhat abashed. “You know I’m not supposed to show you how it works.”

That was all the apology she was going to get. “How . . .” She searched for the question. “How long has it been open? Won’t it fall shut?” Her training told her that you used anomalies quickly and carefully.

Dex shook his head. He wasn’t wearing his focal; it hung down his back from a leather strap around his neck. His shaggy brown curls were loose about his face, making him look boyish and young—and he also looked frightened. He pointed to the floor of the cave.

“It won’t collapse until I collapse it,” he explained.

Near Quin’s feet was a small stone disc. She recognized it—it was the medallion Shinobu had shown her back in the cliff barn. It lay at the center of the flat base of the glowing semicircle; the anomaly was flowing outward from the disc.

“Where did you get that?” she asked him.

Dex tugged her forward. “Please, before I lose my nerve.”

She shook him off, leaned closer to get a better look at the disc. It wasn’t Shinobu’s medallion after all. Like Shinobu’s, it was carved with the symbol of the Dreads—three interlocking ovals—but the pattern along the edge was different. Dex hadn’t stolen this from Shinobu; so far, he hadn’t lied to her, and she really had no choice but to go along with him.

She allowed Dex to guide her forward, and together they stepped across the threshold. The border was more than a foot wide, a bright band of hissing, swirling energy. Quin held her breath as she crossed over into what should have been the familiar darkness of the place between.

“It’s not dark,” she said, surprised. The light coming off the anomaly’s border streaked out on either side like hazy guide lights in a tunnel.

Dex smiled at her, a seasoned explorer with a naive companion. He stooped over the medallion, made a minute twisting motion with the disc between his hands. When he lifted the medallion up, the space around them warped, like a water droplet joining with other drops and changing its shape. At once the cave opening was far behind them, and they were well within the dark tunnel.

Compared to the medallion in his hands, an athame was . . . a blunt instrument, just as Dex had said. The disc was manipulating the space between as a potter manipulates clay.

The medallion held out on his palm, Dex began to walk. The smears of light on each side defined themselves into shapes. Quin saw the rock of the cliff they’d been inside, the water at the top of the falls, grass, and sunlight. These things were discernible within the blackness, as if the landscape were flowing around her and Dex behind a dark curtain, as if this tunnel they were in were pushing its way through the world.

She recognized where they were immediately. The landscape spread out beyond this high meadow was the Scottish estate. The waterfall was the same fall she and Shinobu had visited a dozen times when they were children. Until now, she’d only been as far as the pool at its base and hadn’t known of the hidden cave to which Dex had brought her. It was as though he knew the estate better than Quin, who’d lived there for most of her life.

“We walked through the cliff and now we’re above it?” she asked incredulously.

“In a way.” Dex was keeping his eyes turned from the view. “The hidden dimensions are curled up at every point of our world. You can unfurl them all at once with an athame, or unfurl them as you go with this.” He held out the medallion.

Dex made another series of adjustments to the stone disc.

“Look,” he said. To their left, in time with the shifting of the medallion, the curtain became less substantial and the shapes more distinct. Quin could see a high open meadow, covered in spring grass and cut by the wide channel of the river above the falls. And there, at the water’s edge—

“Yellen?” she whispered in astonishment.

The horse grazed on the long grass. Quin could make out an uneven blaze down a broad, reddish-brown forehead. It was Yellen without a doubt.

She’d lost track of her horse two years ago, when she’d jumped, on his back, through an anomaly and escaped from the estate during John’s attack. Quin had been shot in the chest, and tangled up with Shinobu, and neither of them had known what became of her horse.

“How did he get here? I haven’t seen him in two years.”

“I came upon him in no-space,” Dex said, as if that sort of thing happened to him every day. “Call him, if you like.”

“Yellen!”

The horse lifted his head, twitched his ears toward her, and whinnied. She whistled and clapped her hands smartly, the way she’d done when she was ten years old and had first taught Yellen to come to her. The horse approached warily, evidently not able to see Quin, though she could see him clearly. He still wore his bridle, the same bridle she’d put on him two years ago. She coaxed him closer by voice, until he’d poked his head through the gauzy fog and his muzzle touched her hand.

“Come on,” she whispered, and she pulled him all the way inside the anomaly.

Yellen whickered, and Quin touched the horse’s forehead with her own, overjoyed to have found him again. It was like finding a piece of herself she had mislaid.

As soon as he was fully with them in the strange tunnel, the brightness of the meadow began to fade. Dex was manipulating the medallion and was walking again. Quin followed with her horse, soothing him as he tossed his head nervously. In a few moments, though, he had fallen into a docile state and was following her easily.

Traces of the world moved by like ghosts on either side. It was as if they, inside the tunnel, were walking through the world, but also as if the world were being moved around them.

Her mind kept darting back to Shinobu, and she wondered where he was and how she would find him. But this dance Dex was doing between the world and the hidden dimensions There was like nothing she’d imagined, and she couldn’t help losing herself in the experience as it unfolded around her.

“Can I tell you a story?” Dex asked her, calling her thoughts back to him as she led Yellen behind him. Dex had visibly relaxed as soon as the meadow and river had faded behind the thick curtain of darkness that marked the edge of their tunnel. “It will help me, and you may find it interesting.”

“All right.” The chances of his story making any sense were slim, but she wanted to hear anything Dex might say, in hopes of gathering a few useful grains of truth. His effortless use of the medallion in his hand was proof that he’d been trained as a Seeker far more thoroughly than Quin.

“There’s a man, and he was in England—a different England from the one you would find if you traveled south right now, because it was before this time,” Dex began. He glanced at her, perhaps to make sure she was giving the tale proper attention, and then looked down again. “But it was England anyway. This man—Quilla, can you imagine?—he carried an enormous pack on his back, with all sorts of wonders stored inside it.”

Dex fell silent, lost in the imagined details. Beyond the dark tunnel walls, Quin could discern open air and the waterfall, behind them now.

“What sort of wonders?” she asked quietly.

Dex nodded toward the objects made of stone and glass that Quin had tucked into her waistband and pockets. “Things like those. Those are wonderful, if you can remember how to use them.”

“If I can?”

“Or me,” he said, with a look of discomfort. “Or me, of course.”

The ghost of a larger river appeared on Quin’s right, with the forests of the estate above it.

“The man’s wife was with him,” Dex said, “though she came reluctantly, if we’re being honest. I want to be honest, finally. And his son was with him too, and a second son, who was so young that his mother carried him everywhere. He liked that. Babies like to be carried—you know that from Adelaide.” He smiled a private sort of smile, the smile he reserved for Quilla. He said, “It would turn out the boys were very different from each other, but it was too early to know that then. How could they? When children are small, they can still be anything.

“This family walked across the whole of England, down to the south and up to the north, back when the land was open and as wild as England has ever been.”

“How long ago?” Quin tried to picture the world he was describing, as she watched the spectral shapes of a hillside and trees go by. Inside their dark tunnel, they were traveling onto the estate, her home.

“We have to think about it in two ways,” Dex told her thoughtfully. He was gazing at something only he could see in the blackest part of the tunnel. “It was a long time ago, or maybe it hasn’t happened yet.”

And with that, Dex’s brief spell of coherence came to an end. He stayed silent as thick woods slid by, dark and unformed. Quin and Dex were walking, and it was impossible to tell if they and the tunnel were moving through the world, or if the world were moving around them.

“Is that all?” she asked Dex gently after a while.

“To the story?” He laughed, softly and genuinely. “No, it’s very much longer, and there are different versions of the ending. But that first part is good—the four of them walking across wide-open land, hills and forests and mountains rising around them.” The idea of so much open space appeared to both appall and fascinate him. “The world didn’t eat them up, did it? Though the wild animals occasionally tried.”

He paused, and then asked her, “Have you seen a medallion before? You seemed surprised to find this one in my possession.”

For someone who slipped in and out of insanity as easily as breathing, he was very observant. Not sure what she should tell him and what she should withhold, Quin said, “A friend had one.”

“You mean the one you want to find, don’t you? You love him. I can hear it in your voice.”

“Or maybe you can read my thoughts,” she suggested.

He gave her a sidelong glance. “Maybe I can, when you aren’t guarding them. And you’re not very good at guarding them.” Misreading her expression entirely, he added, “You fell in love with someone else. I don’t blame you, Quilla. We’ve been apart for so long. Is he good to you?”

“I’m not—” she began, but she couldn’t finish the sentence. The expression on Dex’s face, in the half-light, was so vulnerable, so raw, she didn’t want to tell him just then that she wasn’t Quilla. He would remember soon enough. “Yes, he’s good to me . . . when he’s himself. And I’m good to him when I’m myself,” she murmured, thinking of the year and a half in which she’d forgotten herself and forgotten Shinobu too, leaving him to find his own dangerous way in Hong Kong.

“Like us, then,” Dex whispered.

Quin had no answer to that.

She caught a spectral glimpse of the estate’s standing stone moving by on her left. She’d taken her Seeker oath in the shadows of that stone, on the night she’d discovered that her father was a killer. Where was Dex taking them?

Dex nodded at his medallion. “There were four of these at first. I knew when I saw your clothes that it was time.”

Quin could not judge whether she should engage with his bewildering statements, or whether she should let most pass without comment. But her curiosity, for the most part, got the better of her.

“Time for what?” she asked warily.

“To find the owners of the other three medallions,” he answered. He read her thoughts again, or perhaps her face gave her away, because he added, “I don’t mean the one you love. I mean the original owners.”

That was disappointing. The idea that Dex might try to find Shinobu without Quin having to force him had given her a touch of hope.

“Who are the other owners?” she asked. “Seekers?”

He answered, cryptically, “You could call them that if you want. But they aren’t now who they once were.” His countenance became hard. It was a look she hadn’t seen on him yet, and it transformed him, quite abruptly, into a man you would not want to cross. “It’s time to take them out of this world,” he continued. “Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it’s time to take them into the world as other people know it. As they should have been.”

The wild panic he’d fought in the cave was creeping back into his expression. Quin held her tongue.

There was brightness ahead of them, the world taking solid shape again as he adjusted the medallion. Chunks of masonry, a courtyard littered with stones. He was bringing them to the castle ruins.

“I could take us directly inside.” Dex’s words were little more than a mumble, so that it was hard to tell if he meant them for Quin or only for himself. “I could take us straight down. That would be easier. But we can’t bring a horse there, and I’ll have to face it sometime.”

Quin almost asked him what he would have to face, but it was obvious—he was crumbling at the sight of the approaching world. He gripped her shoulder, and a moment later he stumbled. He knelt—or maybe he buckled—and set the medallion down.

“You’re not supposed to see,” he whispered. “But you won’t use it against me, will you? You never did.”

Quin knelt with him, tried to soothe him, even though she had no idea what she might use against him. “No, of course not,” she said.

With shaking hands, Dex set a hand atop the medallion and adjusted it with a series of quick motions Quin couldn’t follow, each of which brought the world in front of them into increasing clarity, until it was fully formed. She was looking out through a large arched anomaly at the castle ruins and a half-cloudy Scottish afternoon.

He murmured, “In the open sky, there’s nothing to contain me.”

Quin felt the depth of his fear, even if it baffled her. She took his hand in her own and squeezed it. “I’ve got you, Dex.”

With difficulty, because he wasn’t a small person, she pulled him to his feet, and as he kept his head down and his eyes shut, they stepped across the seething border and set foot in the castle ward.

Yellen followed, whinnying as he scented the air of his home, and Quin pulled off his bridle and let him run.

Dex slumped down onto hands and knees, crawled back to the medallion, which still lay on the far side of the anomaly border. He reached across the anomaly and pulled the medallion through, twisting it as he did, in a motion that reminded her of a magician turning an object inside out. The opening collapsed at once, vibration and all, as if a light switch had been turned off. Then he sat on the ground, his head against his knees. Automatically he slipped the medallion back into loops of leather around his neck, where it hung like a pendant beneath his robe. He pulled his hood down over his eyes, reached out for Quin.

“Was what I saw a moment ago true? Is the castle in ruin?”

Quin glanced at the decaying courtyard and the remains of the castle, which looked as they’d always looked to her.

“Yes.”

“You think time is nothing.” His hand shook as it clutched hers. “But it passes whether you feel it or not.”

“How old are you?” she asked him. Had he really seen this castle in one piece? Or was he mistaking it for another place, just as he kept mistaking Quin for another girl?

Dex laughed nervously. “Much younger than I look.”

John crept as close to the big tent as he dared before rolling the smoke canisters out of his hands, one after the other. The canisters bumped across the muddy ground, hissing, and came to rest in the pool of fluorescent light that spilled from the tent’s wide canvas doorway.

In moments plumes of black smoke were coiling out of the canisters to form ground-level thunderclouds that would cut visibility to almost zero. John felt the glee of destruction overtake him as he added the lightning—from his hiding place behind a battered aircar half-buried in mud, he threw a flare and a chain of firecrackers directly into the center of the smoke.

Soldiers streamed out of the tent, cursing and grabbing weapons, their faces washed in the red glow of the flare, their bodies no more than faint silhouettes in the smoke. John was at the far side of the encampment by then. He shoved a second flare into the gas tank of a parked van and then ran, through the humid, dripping night. He skirted the encampment and weaved through the edge of the jungle toward the ramshackle barn at the south end of the camp. He’d gone thirty paces when the van exploded, painting the night orange. Momentarily every leaf, frond, and raindrop came into harsh, beautiful relief, before the burst faded, and John felt a wild elation in being the attacker.