Seeker

“Are you serious?” Shinobu said.

Quin had just asked him for his name. He started to laugh, but she didn’t look like she was joking.

“I’m sure I know it,” she said quickly, looking down at her hands, the backs of which were covered in thick, sticky blood. “I did know it. I’ll remember it, if you give me a few minutes. It’s just—it’s hard to think with this filth on me. I’d really, really like to wash my hands.”

Shinobu glanced around the bare rafters like he might have misplaced a sink and a big bar of soap somewhere nearby, then shrugged. Her jittery words seemed like an act. Quin had never been jumpy.

“Is there any on my face?” she asked, sounding more desperate. “It feels like there’s blood on my face. Is it near my mouth? Can you see?”

“Stop it! Quin.” Irritated, he shook her by the shoulders and watched as her eyes came into focus. There was, in fact, a good deal of blood on her face, but he thought it wiser not to mention it. “Don’t you know me?” he asked. “I’m Shinobu.”

“Shinobu.” She said his name like it was the answer to a riddle that had been driving her crazy, and also like it was a very odd name for someone to have. “I heard that name. He said your name when he was in my house.”

“He?”

“John,” she whispered.

“Right, of course,” he responded, feeling the deep annoyance he’d always felt when she spoke about John. Apparently she had no trouble remembering him.

She had become transfixed by her dirty hands again. “Do you have any water, Shinobu? Even if it’s just a little.”

“Forget about your hands!” He let out an angry sigh. He’d just saved her from a violent abduction, and she was worried about cleanliness? They had bigger problems, like John’s presence in Hong Kong with armed men, and the appearance of the athame.

“Whose blood do you think it is?” Quin asked. “Could it be mine? Maybe I’m bleeding.”

Shinobu felt a sudden pang of worry that she might have been injured without him noticing. He examined her more carefully than he had before. “You don’t look hurt,” he said after a few moments, relieved, but also a little disappointed—an injury might have explained her behavior. “At least not seriously.”

“I don’t think I am—except where he hit me,” she responded, more to herself than to him, like she was picking her way through a mental fog. She looked a lot like the girl he used to know, but she sounded like a crazy person. “It seemed like I had a knife,” she whispered, “and the knife cut one of them across the neck.”

“The knife cut one of them, did it? Tricky knife. That would explain the blood everywhere.”

“It’s just … I saved the life of a child this morning. He would have died. But I fixed him.” She couldn’t keep her eyes off the mess on her hands as she spoke. “I’m not sure it counts, though, if I … killed someone else.” The last words came out very quietly.

“If you’re counting, I think you killed two of the men up there,” he told her. “The one you hit first wasn’t breathing very well when we left.”

“I didn’t mean to kill them! You believe me, right? The knife was just … there.” She was looking at Shinobu now, her eyes wild.

He was annoyed by her unwillingness to admit that she had fought all five of those men by herself before he’d arrived. And it was unsettling to see her looking at him, with no deeper recognition of who he was. He felt a strong urge to slap her hard, to wake her up, but judging from the bruises coming in on her face, John and his men had already hit her several times.

“You’re not this squeamish, Quin.”

“You don’t know what I am,” she said petulantly.

He laughed dismissively. “You’re right. Maybe I don’t.”

She was quiet for a moment, then looked up from her hands. “I’m sorry. Thank you for saving me. Shinobu.” She pronounced his name very carefully.

He shrugged, no longer trying to have a normal discussion with her. “Sure. I had some free time.”

“Is your name Japanese? Are you Japanese?” It didn’t sound like she was trying to remember, more like an attempt at polite conversation.

“If you don’t recall who I am, there’s no point explaining.” The words came out more roughly than he meant them, but he was trying to hide the fact that she was making him sad.

“I do know you …” she said, as if she had finally spotted the outline of something familiar through a haze. “Like I know John.”

“Of course you’d remember John before you remembered me,” he muttered.

“It’s only that I saw him first. How did he find me? Wasn’t I … hidden, sort of? I think I was hiding.”

“He found you because he found the athame. Once he knew where it was, he probably had people start searching. You were nearby.”

“Athame.” She repeated the word, like it was something she had heard in a dream. “John called it that too.”

“Probably because that’s its name,” Shinobu said.

He reached into his leather jacket and drew out the athame. It was here, in their possession again. There were streaks of blood on the stone dagger, but other than that it looked undamaged. He set it on the plastic sheeting next to her, and she immediately moved away from it.

“Why did you take it?” she asked, her voice pitching into panic. “I don’t want it.”

“I don’t want it either. But I couldn’t exactly leave it with John.”

She didn’t answer that, but her silence indicated that she might agree with him. That was something, at least.

“Maybe we should throw it into the ocean,” she suggested quietly, like she was testing how the idea would sound out loud.

“You’re not the first person to think of that. Here.”

He put the dagger into her hands and gestured that she should toss it into the harbor. Quin got up from the nest and moved along a rafter until the water was clearly visible below. Shinobu watched her bring her arm up, preparing to throw the athame. But she didn’t. Instead she stood there like a statue with her arm over her head, staring down at Victoria Harbor.

After a few moments she let her arm fall to her side. She looked at the dagger carefully, as though inspecting an object that was entirely new to her. He watched her fingers tracing the fox carved into the base of the handle. Eventually she returned to the plastic shelf and set the athame down.

“I can’t throw it away.”

“Why not?” he asked, knowing the answer.

“Once it’s in my hand … I just can’t,” she said. She seemed to experience a moment of dizziness, but this passed.

“Shall I give it back to John?” Shinobu offered, a smile hidden in his voice. He was trying to irritate her now.

“No.” She looked away. “He shouldn’t have it. It wouldn’t turn out well.”

Shinobu laughed at the understatement and hoped Quin would laugh with him. But she didn’t. It was as though the pleasant parts of her had fled, leaving only seriousness and detachment. When she’d been quiet for a while, he asked, “So what do you want to do?”

“Why is he here?”

“Quin, you know why he’s here,” he answered, frustrated. “Think.”

“He wants to learn how to use the athame.” She said it quietly, as she looked at the dagger. “But I don’t remember how to use it.” Shinobu said nothing. “I could remember, maybe.”

She was silent for a little while, perhaps thinking of all she had done in the past year and a half. Shinobu wondered if buried memories were nosing their way to the surface.

“If I don’t want to remember, I’ll have to go away, won’t I?” she said finally. “He knows I’m here now. He’ll keep looking for me and the … athame. Maybe I can be a healer in Tibet or somewhere, where he’ll never find me.” Then, almost in a whisper, she added, “I wonder if my mother will come with me. I haven’t been very good to her.”

Shinobu sighed and moved to sit near her on the plastic. The drugs had fully worn off. There was a new, very unpleasant feeling looming on the horizon. He picked up the athame and held it in front of her.

“There’s a problem with that plan,” he said. “I threw this to the bottom of the harbor—this huge harbor, where hundreds of thousands of ships come in and out and mountains of garbage end up under the water. And here it is, back in my hand, a year and a half later. True, I’m the one who rescued it—but not on purpose.” He let the athame drop to his lap and ran a thumb along the blade. “And I promised myself I would never see you again, but here you are, sitting with me under the Bridge.”Published by Nôv'elD/rama.Org.

“You didn’t want to see me again?” she asked, her mind still running in the wrong direction and her voice sounding hurt by the idea.

“You didn’t want to see me either,” he pointed out.

“How do you know that?” Her dark eyes were searching his face now as though she actually wanted an answer.

“You forgot my name, Quin.”

“I’ve forgotten everything. Not you in particular.”

“You had a patient this morning,” he told her, trying another tack. “The one you saved. Who was it?”

“A little boy. Overdose. He got into his older brother’s drugs.”

Shinobu felt a surge of shame as he pointed at himself. “Japanese, reddish hair?”

He angled the top of his head toward her and watched as Quin slowly nodded, noticing that his roots were growing out red under the leopard dye.

“Your hair is red,” she said. For a moment she actually sounded less detached, more present, as if his hair color were one small detail she could grasp.

“Yes, my hair is red, Cousin Quin. The boy’s name is Akio.”

“You’re the brother?”

Shinobu pulled something large out of a coat pocket and held it up. It was the bag of herbs Quin had filled herself a few hours before, with Akio’s name written across it in her own handwriting.

He said, “Somehow, no matter how far we’re thrown, we all keep coming back to you.”

She thought this over for a little while as she rubbed the backs of her dirty hands against her trousers. “Maybe everything is coming back to you,” she suggested.

He shook his head. “You forgot me. John doesn’t know I’m here. My mother pretends I don’t exist. I’m a ghost, Quin. If John ever came after me, I’d—I’d become a ghost for real. I’m looking for an excuse.” The way she was rubbing her hands was driving him crazy again, so he grabbed them to keep them still. “But you—you seem to be stuck with John unless … unless you get rid of him.”

“What do you mean, ‘get rid of him’?” she asked, clearly understanding exactly what he meant.

“Don’t act so shocked,” he responded. “He’s forcing you to do something you don’t want to do.” Then he looked down at his dirty jeans. He was skirting an area of his own memories where he had forbidden himself to go. “You can get rid of him, Quin. Or you can give him what he wants. Usually you give him what he wants.”

He could hear the bitterness in his own voice. But it was true—she’d always chosen John. Even now Quin was quiet, as though maybe she wanted to spend a little more time with John before deciding whether he was really dangerous or not.

She was shaking her head, and now, her voice rising, she said, “I can’t ‘get rid of’ anyone. I’m a healer. I don’t hurt people—”

“Right, of course. And that blood just happened to get on your hands. The knife just happened to cut someone. You had nothing to do with it.”

“I didn’t mean it! You don’t even know for sure they’re dead.”

“Maybe that man’s neck grew back. It could happen.”

He turned away again. Whatever connection he had momentarily felt, it was gone. She was maddening.

“You don’t know me,” she said.

She was right. He didn’t know her. She’d become someone else in Hong Kong. She did not want his help, not really, and she was not his responsibility anymore. There were too many unpleasant things to remember when he was with her.

To herself, Quin said, “I like my life here. Why did this have to happen?”

Shinobu heard an ugly laugh come out of him. “Neither of us can have our lives as they were, Quin. I can get you off the Bridge. And I have something to give you, if you want it. After that, we can go our own ways.”

She nodded, looking through the rafters at the water beyond, which was turning dark gray as the afternoon waned.

Now that she was quiet, and looking away, Shinobu stole a glance at her. He could see a few traces of the old Quin, the one from a year and a half ago. There was even a little bit of the Quin he’d known before that. A light breeze was moving the dark hair around her face, as her dark eyes stared at the harbor. He could almost imagine that she and he were much younger, sneaking together through the tall grass at the edge of the commons—

He stopped himself. “The sun will go down soon. When it’s night, we can go.”