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his cheeks reddened at Alistair’s comment, an effect quite noticeable on his fair skin. John was handsome, with a finely carved face, blue eyes, and brown hair with the faintest tint of gold. He was strong and quick, and Quin had been in love with him for some time. He flicked his gaze to her and mouthed silently:
Are you all right?
She nodded.
    “Today you must prove yourselves,” Alistair continued. “Are you Seekers? Or are you poxy lumps of horse dung we’ll have to shovel up off the floor?”
    Shinobu raised his hand, and Quin suspected he was going to say,
It happens I
am
a poxy lump of horse dung, sir…
    “This is no joke, Son,” Alistair said, cutting Shinobu off before his quips could begin.
    Shinobu was Quin’s cousin, the son of the giant red-haired man who had just attempted to decapitate her. Shinobu’s mother had been Japanese, and his face had taken the best features from the East and the West and combined them into something nearly perfect. He had straight, dark red hair and a wiry body that was already taller than that of the average Japanese male. He turned his eyes to the floor, as if to apologize for making light of the moment.
    “For you and Quin, this may be your final practice fight,” Alistair explained to Shinobu. “And for you, John, your chance to prove you still belong here. Do you understand?”
    They all nodded. John’s eyes, however, were fixed on the disruptor strapped across Briac’s upper body. Quin knew what he was thinking:
Unfair.
And it was unfair. John was the best fighter of the three of them…except when there was a disruptor involved.
    “Does this bother you, John?” Briac asked, slapping the strange weapon on his chest. “Does it hurt your focus? It’s not even on yet. What will happen when it is?”
    John wisely did not answer.
    “Take your weapons out of practice mode,” Alistair ordered.
    Quin looked down at the grip of her whipsword. At the end of the hilt was a tiny slot. Reaching into a pocket in the old leather of her right boot, she drew out a small object like a flattened cylinder, made of the same oily black material as her sword. She slid this into the slot on the handgrip, her fingers automatically adjusting the tiny dials on the attachment. As the last dial moved into place, the whipsword in her hand gave off a delicate vibration, and immediately it felt different, as if it were ready to do what it was made to do.
    She grabbed the tip with her left hand and watched it melt and puddle around her skin. Even “live” it would not harm her flesh. But everyone else’s flesh was now fair game.
    Quin’s heartbeat was speeding up as she watched her father and Alistair taking their own whipswords out of practice mode. A “live” fight was no easy task. But if she did well, she was minutes away from her father’s approval, from joining her ancestors in the noble duties of a Seeker. Since early childhood, she’d been listening to Alistair’s stories of Seekers using their skill to alter the world for the better. And since the age of eight, she’d been training to develop those skills. If she succeeded now, she would finally be one of them.
    John and Shinobu had finished adjusting their own whipswords, and the barn was now filled with a different sort of energy, a sense of deadly anticipation. Quin’s eyes met John’s, and she gave him a look that said,
We can do this.
He nodded subtly back to her.
Be ready, John,
she thought.
We’ll do this together, and we’ll be together…
    A high-pitched noise cut through the barn, so piercing that Quin wondered for a moment if it was only in her head. The look on John’s face was enough to tell her different. The strange cannon-like gun her father wore, the disruptor, had come to life. The base of it covered her father’s whole chest and had to be held in place with straps over his shoulders and around his back. The barrel was ten inches wide, and instead of a single hole, there were hundreds of tiny