I thought it likely he had also used coercion to make them accept him as an ally and to gradually raise him from his Misfit status. I did not think he had possessed more than an inkling of awareness of his Talents back then, or he would have done much more and much worse than he did do. Nor did I think he knew when he began serving Alexi and Madam Vega that he had the potential to locate and wake the ancient weaponmachines that had destroyed the Beforetime. Most likely the knowledge of the dark possibilities in his future had come to him little by little as he began to understand what Alexi was trying to learn from Marisa’s research. Indeed, this might have been how he had become the Destroyer, with the capacity to find and to wake the weaponmachines that had caused the Great White, and to bring a final doom to the world, if I failed in my quest.

As to when he had known what I was, that was harder to tell. It might have been when I had found myself strapped to the Zebkrahn machine being tortured to see if that would enable me to gain the knowledge Alexi desired from his stepmother’s papers. A partial mind link with Rushton had enabled me to bear the pain to which I was subjected, until the device had overheated and exploded into flames, burning my feet and legs terribly. The agony I had experienced had wakened the potent black killing power that lay at the bottom of my mind like a coiled and sleeping serpent, and it was this power, I understood now, that had enabled me to see not only the original map that Marisa had destroyed as well as the specifications carved in the doors to Obernewtyn, but also the very place they indicated: the murk-filled chasm where Sentinel stood. Horrified at the thought that someone might find the weaponmachines that had destroyed the Beforetime, I had contrived to have the original doors to Obernewtyn burned after we took over.