Seeker

Part 3 – WHERE ALL ROADS LEAD

“I’m not running errands for you,” Shinobu said, elbowing his way through the crowd on the main Bridge thoroughfare. A few people turned to stare at him. “Does it look like I’m speaking to you?” he barked at them. When they turned away, a few frightened, more of them annoyed, he began muttering again. “Still on the Bridge, still running your errands. You promised me I’d be rid of you. Yet here I am.”

He was, in point of fact, speaking to Quin, though some part of him realized she was not actually present. He hadn’t bothered using the air mask that hung at the exit of the opium bar, and he was weaving dangerously between other pedestrians as he made his way toward Quin’s front door.

When he saw her house swimming crookedly across his field of view, looming among many such buildings in the middle section of the Bridge, he made an effort to steady himself. The Bridge authorities didn’t look kindly on intoxicated visitors walking around outside their designated areas.

“You’ve always taken me for granted,” he told Quin. His words were rather blurry, but since Quin was absent from the conversation, he was fairly sure she wouldn’t mind. “Asking for what you need. ‘Find my mother.’ ‘Save me from being killed.’ ‘Give me a shower.’ What about what I need?”

He lurched to a stop at Quin’s door and rested his head against the wood for a moment, just to help him stay upright. Then he knocked softly. What do I need? he wondered. After all, Quin had only asked him to let her mother know that she was all right. He’d done that days ago. But he’d continued staying at Quin’s house.

The door he was leaning against was abruptly pulled open, startling Shinobu, who had forgotten that he’d knocked. He fell through the doorway into Fiona’s arms, ending up down on one knee, with Fiona pulling him up by his shirt. She didn’t look very steady on her feet either.

“What about what I need?” he said to her.

“What do you need, Shinobu?” Fiona asked him. Her red hair was disheveled, hanging loose about her face. “Tell me.”

She got the door closed behind him, pulled Shinobu through the front room, and eased him down into a chair in Quin’s examination room, nearly losing her balance as she did so. The treatment table had been turned into a bed, with sheets and blankets, and Brian Kwon was lying there, much like a baby whale, still recovering from his injuries.

“What do I need?” Shinobu repeated, trying to remember how he had gotten from the front door to the chair. “I need …” He wasn’t sure. It was something to do with Quin. He remembered her body pushed up against his, his arms around her. He could still feel the imprint she had left upon him.

“You don’t need opium, that’s sure,” Fiona commented, her words slurring a bit. “You’ve had more than enough of that.”

He focused his eyes with great effort, looking around the dimly lit room with its shelves of herbs, and the giant form of Brian studying him from the bed.Content property of NôvelDra/ma.Org.

“Only two pipes,” Shinobu told her.

“Your body tells a different tale.”

“It might have been twelve. A number with a two in it. Maybe twenty or twenty-two point two. Two hundred twenty-two …”

“Hmm,” Fiona said. She moved into the kitchen, attempting to tie her hair back as she did so. Then she busied herself making tea.

Brian was propping himself up on an elbow. “Be nice to her,” he said. “She’s … not feeling well.”

“She’s drunk.”

It had been three days since the fight on the lower levels, and the nasty cut on Brian’s shoulder was healing. His many broken ribs were wrapped tightly in a fashion that made him look like an enormous Chinese sausage.

“Sorry I didn’t bring you any, Sea Bass,” Shinobu said, assuming his failure to bring home drugs was why Brian was looking at him disapprovingly. “You know they don’t let you take pipes out of the bar. You must be dying for something.”

“I’m invited to Master Tan’s house for dinner,” Brian told him. “He says I can start walking more today.”

“Well, don’t expect any opium from him.”

Brian wasn’t laughing. “I’m not looking for opium. I have my tea.”

“Whatever you say, Sea Bass.”

Brian grimaced and swung his legs off the bed, so he was sitting on the edge. Very carefully he lowered one foot to the floor and then the other. His grimace deepened as he put his full weight onto his feet. But after a few moments in a vertical position he seemed all right.

“Not too bad today,” he muttered.

Shinobu watched him hobble across the room to his clothes, which were clean and folded on a nearby chair. With what looked like tremendous difficulty, Brian began pulling his shirt over his head. This involved many Chinese swearwords.

“Would you like some help?” Shinobu asked.

“I would not,” Brian responded. “You’d end up breaking more of my ribs.”

“That’s probably true.”

Fiona returned with tea, which she forced into Shinobu’s hands, sloshing some of it over the rim. With her help, Brian finally got all of his clothes on, shoes included, though Fiona seemed to make the process take longer. When he was dressed, Brian placed his feet gingerly one in front of the other and walked out of the room.

“Since you’re up now, I’ll bring you down to the lower levels tonight,” Shinobu called after him. “What do you say? Fiona can’t keep us locked up here forever.”

“What do you mean ‘locked up’?” Brian called back. “She doesn’t even want you here. You just keep showing up.”

“So you’ll come with me?”

“I’m done with opium.”

“Fine—I was thinking Ivan3 tonight anyway.”

Brian ignored him. With a jingle of bells, the front door opened, and before it swung shut, Shinobu heard him breathing heavily and cursing again as he walked off.

“Tea. Now,” Fiona ordered, pushing it toward his face.

Shinobu took a sip and then spit it back into the cup. It was one of those healthy concoctions Master Tan had been making for Brian.

“Where’s your tea?” he asked her.

Fiona looked daggers at him. She had put her hair up, but a large portion was still hanging down along one side of her face. “You will drink that tea or you will leave this house. And hopefully be arrested on your way off the Bridge.”

“Is it only tea for opium addicts? Not alcoholics?” It seemed ridiculous for her to lecture him when she was too drunk to stand up straight.

“You’ve no need to call me that,” she said, making an attempt to speak clearly. “If I have a little something from time to time, whose business is that? You fill your body with all sorts of nasty things.”

“It’s the same,” he protested.

“It is not.”

“Your poison comes in a bottle. Mine comes in a pipe, or sticks, or needles. That’s the only difference.”

“It is not the same.” She was busying herself by making Brian’s bed, but the sheets were not cooperating. “You don’t see what I see. You don’t listen to things you’d rather not hear, do you?”

“I listen to things I’d rather not hear all the time,” he retorted. “Come visit my mother with me, and I’ll show you.”

“Your mother?” she asked, confused for a moment. Then she grabbed back on to her train of thought: “Do you have a daughter, Shinobu? A daughter who’s hidden her past but sees things in her dreams? What if when she sees those things, there’s the chance you’ll see them also? That you’ll know exactly the sorts of things she’s done? What sorts of things I’ve let her do?”

Shinobu watched Fiona as she finished making the bed. Strands of red hair continued to fall down around her face, but she was getting less drunk by the moment.

“You get to see what’s on the surface,” she went on. “You’ve never been married to Briac Kincaid, have you? If you had been, you wouldn’t want to see inside his mind, I promise you. You might have a few drinks to make the world nicer.”

Shinobu had no answer for her. She might be a drunkard, but … wasn’t she trying to be a good mother to Quin? He was still dizzy, so he obediently began to sip at the revolting tea.

There was a brisk knock on the front door. Fiona composed herself and walked out of the back room to answer it. Moments later, Shinobu heard official-sounding voices requesting access to the house. They were looking for a few young men who had been involved in a disturbance on the lower levels of the Bridge earlier in the week.

He could hear Fiona, in a calm and reasonable voice, her words hardly slurred at all, asking why they had chosen her house. Shinobu didn’t wait to hear the response. The idea that he might be arrested by the Bridge authorities sent him into a panic. Bridge officials were very strict, and though they couldn’t put him in jail, they could easily cut off his access to drugs—perhaps permanently.

He launched himself to his feet and went quietly up the stairs and out the balcony door. He never heard what was said next, because by the time he saw Fiona again, he was up in the rafters above her house, looking down at the Bridge thoroughfare from a dark perch inaccessible to anyone but a sewer rat like himself. His heart continued to beat frantically for a while. Being banned from the Bridge would make life quite unpleasant.

It was from this vantage point in the rafters that he watched Fiona leaving her house, still walking a bit unsteadily. She was surrounded by several men, two of whom had their arms linked with hers, almost like they were forcing Fiona to walk away with them. As he crouched in his hiding place and observed them moving out of sight, a small thought tickled at the back of his mind: That’s odd.

It was not until his opium fuzziness disappeared, hours later, that he realized several things. First, the men who had taken Fiona were not officials from the Bridge at all—they’d had no uniforms. Second, one of the men walking with Fiona had been John. Third, Shinobu had been staying at Fiona’s house with the idea of protecting her (though he hadn’t wanted to admit it), but he had soaked himself in drugs and had run away at the slightest hint of danger—not even danger to himself but to his ready supply of intoxicating substances.

These three things made something else quite clear: he, Shinobu MacBain, former Seeker, current Scottish-Japanese salvage diver and opium addict, might tell himself he was still a good person, but he was, in fact, a completely worthless human being. He made the wrong choices when it mattered most, and others were left to pay: victims dead on his assignments with Briac, Akio nearly killed, his father ravaged by those dancing sparks, and now Fiona captured, right under his nose.