Seeker

Shinobu was sweating. He could feel wetness trickling down his forehead inside his face mask, despite how cold the water was. He blinked the sweat out of his eyes and adjusted his headlamp as he swam deeper. His friend Brian was diving next to him, both of them wearing heavy reclamation tools around the belts of their dive suits. Brian’s big gut made him look like a giant sea bass as he swam down into the darker water. And I am a barracuda, Shinobu thought. He had gotten so skinny in the past year that his ribs were visible even through his thick wet suit.

They had just entered the Trench, a deep cut in the bottom of Victoria Harbor where the ocean currents swept and buried all kinds of debris from the harbor floor. As they passed between the Trench’s high walls, the water became much darker and much colder. In the light of their headlamps, the shadows were moving wildly, and Shinobu had to blink his eyes every few seconds to clear the perspiration.

“Brian!” he yelled. “It’s haunted down here.” He wasn’t actually speaking, since his mouth was full of his breathing regulator, but a garbled stream of sound came out along with a lot of bubbles. As usual when he tried to have conversations underwater, Brian was ignoring him.

The sweat was driving Shinobu crazy. He lifted his goggles and let water wash over his face. Then he blew out the mask and swam to catch up with Brian.

A group of real bass was swimming by, their outlines eerie against the trench wall. Shinobu had done Shiva sticks that morning, burning and inhaling the drug’s smoke in the horrible room he and Brian shared above a movie theater in the slums on the outskirts of Kowloon. Shiva changed the way you saw and heard things, so it was never a good idea to do Shiva before a day of physical labor, especially labor as complicated as diving, but Shinobu had a hard time enjoying himself unless he was scared out of his wits.

He grabbed Brian’s shoulder.Content © NôvelDrama.Org 2024.

“The shadows are following me!” he yelled, again sending up an avalanche of bubbles.

Brian pulled the clipboard at his waist around to the front and wrote on the back of it with his special marker:

SHUT UP.

“You shut up!” Shinobu said, spewing bubbles and accidentally inhaling a mouthful of seawater. He coughed it out. Then he laughed, terrified and exhilarated. Diving was as different from his old life as you could get. Even more different than throwing oneself off high buildings and bridges, which was how he’d spent his first six months in Hong Kong.

They were nearing the floor of the Trench. The bottom was covered with tall drifts of silt, which hid all sorts of treasure. In a city the size of Hong Kong, with a harbor that had been open to ships for hundreds of years, there was no end to what you might find. Using an underwater blowtorch, Brian and Shinobu had once salvaged an entire Rolls Royce, piece by piece, from the Trench’s south end. Another time, they’d used explosives to blast their way through a steel hull of an ancient Japanese supply ship to recover a cache of World War II weapons.

Brian was following the navigation bar of a device strapped to his arm. As they swept the area with their lights, the shadows got crazy again. Shinobu could swear there were other divers hanging just out of sight, darting off whenever he turned his head.

He grabbed the clipboard from Brian and wrote:

THEY’RE WATCHING US.

Brian batted Shinobu’s hands away. Below them, the drift contained shards of cookware and an old television with an eel hiding in the broken glass screen.

Shinobu grabbed up the clipboard again and flipped through the waterproof sheets to their work order. He had left the paperwork to Brian before they’d started the dive, and he hadn’t even bothered to check out what they were looking for. On the upper half of the page was an image of the object they’d been sent to find, as photographed by a submersible traveling along the ocean floor. The item was partly buried, and hard to make out in the picture. Next to the photograph was a drawing of what the entire object was supposed to look like. It was some sort of dagger—the hilt of which was made of several separate stone rings stacked on top of one another, each ring carved with symbols.

Shinobu experienced a rush of panic. With his altered Shiva senses, it felt like an icy hand had gripped his intestines and was squeezing them. They had been sent to find the athame he himself had thrown off the Transit Bridge a year and half ago.

“We can’t do this!” he said to Brian.

Just like before, nothing but bubbles came out, and Brian didn’t even turn, so Shinobu reached for Brian’s shoulder.

“Stop! We have to go back.”

He was so agitated, he forgot himself again and breathed in a huge amount of water around his mouthpiece. While he coughed it out, Brian continued searching along the drift, ignoring him completely. By the time Shinobu could breathe normally again, Brian was waving to him with a look of triumph on his face, and he was holding the athame in his left hand.

Moving as fast as he could through the water, Shinobu swam over and hit the stone dagger out of Brian’s hand. It spun away, sinking toward the bottom of the Trench.

Brian went after it immediately, but Shinobu caught his ankle and yanked him backward. Brian Kwon was big and friendly and very slow to anger, but he got angry now. He kicked out at Shinobu. Shinobu ducked aside and pulled Brian again, bringing him farther away from the athame, which was now stuck in the sand ten feet below them.

Brian shoved Shinobu. Shinobu grabbed Brian’s arms and wouldn’t let go. Brian twisted a big, meaty hand out of Shinobu’s grasp and swiped at his chest, yanking the hose out of Shinobu’s mouthpiece. A stream of bubbles flowed out, his oxygen spilling into the water. As Shinobu flailed his arms to try to stop the bubbles, Brian dove deeper.

The threat of death forced Shinobu to control his panic. He calmed himself, did not follow Brian, and instead reached a hand carefully around to his tank’s master valve, which he cranked shut. The bubbles stopped.

It took a while to reattach the hose to his mouthpiece. When he had finally gotten his air back on and was gasping in deep lungfuls, Brian was swimming up toward him, the athame tucked safely into his belt. His big friend stopped in front of Shinobu and pulled his clipboard around. On the work order, beneath the picture of the athame, was the salvage fee they were being paid for recovering it. Brian’s finger jabbed at the fee several times: they were getting triple wages for bringing the stone dagger back to shore in perfect condition. Then Brian turned and swam for the surface. Sea Bass wins, Shinobu thought. He’ll never swim away from that much money.

Shinobu floated in place for a moment. The Shiva sticks were wearing off, and his head was starting to ache. He slowly made his way after Brian, turning his head from side to side periodically, in hopes of catching any stray divers who were lurking just out of sight.

It was in one of these moments that he saw it. The lightning rod was almost completely buried in a drift of sand. Only the end of the flat blade stuck up into the water, next to a broken toilet. Shinobu swam over and pulled the rod from the sediment.

The stone implement was exactly as it had been eighteen months ago—its trip to the bottom of Victoria Harbor and then along the seafloor to the Trench had done it no harm.

He looked up at Brian, swimming far ahead of him. Apparently, no one was searching for the lightning rod. And without it, the athame was useless. He gripped it in his hands and lifted a knee, thinking he would break it in half. But he stopped himself halfway through the motion. He had been able to throw it away all those months ago, but actually destroying it was another matter. He thought about burying it in the silt, but found he could not do that either. It was in his hands now, one of mankind’s most precious artifacts, as his father had always told him.

My father … He did not want to think of him. And yet he could not escape the feeling that Alistair wouldn’t want him to discard the lightning rod.

“Dammit!” he yelled, filling the water around him with bubbles.

This object had been used for … things he did not wish to think about. But those things were not, strictly speaking, the lightning rod’s fault. Shinobu hovered in the water for a while, muttering bubble-laced curses to himself, the rod held between his hands. Eventually he slipped it into the pouch at his waist.

He caught up to Brian, and the two of them glared at each other as they hung in the water at their waypoint, waiting to decompress so they could swim the rest of the way to the surface. After a couple of minutes of angry staring, Brian wrote:

WHAT DID YOU DO THAT FOR?

Shinobu took the clipboard and wrote:

SORRY, SEA BASS. MY MISTAKE.

His big friend seemed to accept this, and by the time they were walking up the shore at the salvage site, Brian was smiling and thinking of ways to spend their money.

“More Shiva sticks?” he asked, shoving Shinobu in a friendly way.

“No, I’ll never sleep.”

“Since when do you sleep?” Brian asked.

“You have a point.”

They were speaking in the combination of Chinese and English that was popular among young people in Hong Kong. That worked reasonably well for Shinobu. He was Japanese, not Chinese, of course, and all the Chinese he knew had been picked up in the last year and a half—but he was a quick study.

They’d exited the water in an area called Kwun Tong, which gave a view southwest along the harbor. From where they were walking, Shinobu could see the huge, high bulk of the Transit Bridge crossing the water, its upper canopy designed to look like a mass of sails from Eastern and Western ships. And beyond the Bridge, on the other side of the harbor, the slender skyscrapers of Central were just visible in the midafternoon haze.

Shinobu glanced at the athame, still tucked in Brian’s belt, and wondered when it would be delivered to whoever had asked for it. And who would be asking for it?

His question was answered almost immediately. Walking down the salvage site toward them, across the piles of reclaimed electronics and car parts and pieces of old ships, were two men. The first was their foreman, a tiny Filipino who yelled at them constantly but was never actually angry as long as they brought up what he wanted from the harbor floor. The second man was white and young, and completely careless of his trousers and shoes as he walked through the mud.

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.