by Zoe Chant
She wandered to the bedroom, staring down at the bed in which she now slept alone, still on her side, the other side flat and clean, as if Robert were about to climb under the covers.
She looked down at herself. Maybe all this intensity was just a hormone spike. She still had periods, though they’d slowed down to three or four a year.
She stood in the middle of the bedroom, restless, uncertain. This past couple of years, she had indulged her secret wish to write fiction, which Robert had never understood—the last novel he read had been in his senior year English Lit class. Jen hadn’t been able to explain her craving for other worlds and wild impossibilities like magic. They had traveled to some of the most beautiful and dangerous places on Earth, but Robert never wanted to linger. They always kept moving in search of the truth of whatever ecological disaster or corrupt CEO or nasty politics they were investigating next. However, those wonderful, fascinating places had been seeping into her story ideas as she lingered over memories in ways she hadn’t been able to linger in the places when she was actually there.
She knew that these past couple of years she had been writing as a way of escaping the sense that her life had become a narrow box.
But. . . it wasn’t enough.
Then she remembered that Friday was coming up, and she had promised the other three of the Gang of Four that she’d have pages to read. She enjoyed reading aloud, and she knew that they liked to see her writing. Whether or not her stories were any good, she sensed that part of their gladness was that writing meant she was getting over the grief they were helpless to fix.
She showered and got on her bike to return to the studio for her evening classes.
On her return, she walked into the living room and sat down at her laptop. This latest story had begun with a setting inspired by Robert’s and her stay in Finland, where she had been entranced by the Northern Lights whenever she could steal a moment from work. But as she began typing, bits of her memories of the Aegean coast began slipping in: first, the scent of spices in the air. Then her first taste of lemon soup, and then the little goats following her everywhere . . .
She came out of the scene realizing she has transformed everything—including the hero, who now had intelligent black eyes, soft, curving lips with a wicked dimple at one side that only appeared when he laughed, and long hair tied back in a ponytail.
Ooops.
Well, no one would know, she thought as she firmly changed that ponytail back to a blonde crew cut, then saved the file and shut down for the night.
When she climbed into bed, she curled on her right side, as had been her habit for years, hand tucked between the pillow and the side of the mattress to anchor her. But then she rolled onto her back. And tentatively, first her hand, then her foot, ventured onto the other side of the bed. She lay there like a starfish, hogging the entire bed.
The world did not collapse.
She slid into sleep, and woke up more refreshed than she had for a long time.
Full of energy—and, she admitted to herself—curiosity and anticipation, she hastened through her morning routine, pausing long enough to swallow down some instant oatmeal and a scrambled egg for protein. Then she set out at a slow jog for the kung fu studio, which usually took between twelve and fifteen minutes, whether she ran, biked, or on rare rainy days, took the bus.
When she reached the studio, she found Cleo and Petra out on the sidewalk, waiting with Bird. “I brought the girls to your class,” Bird said, a little breathlessly.
“No Nikos?” Jen asked, startled at the sharp sense of disappointment that gripped her.
“He’s still with Mikhail and Joey at the archeological dig. Nikos knows something about the artifact they think is buried there. So I brought the girls myself.”
Before Jen could ask how Bird had managed to convey two girls when she only owned a bike, Bird went on quickly, “But I have an appointment. When it’s over, could you take them to the beach? Their guardian is there with Mikhail and Joey, over at the landslide.”
Jen was about to admit that she no longer had a car, then reflected that the shore was barely a mile away. “Sure,” she said, aware that she would get to see Nikos again.
Bird was already edging away. “Thanks, Jen. Have fun, girls!” Bird wheeled her bike around, and peddled away.
Jen turned to the pair of excited, expectant faces. “Come on inside. Stash your shoes and warm up—”
“Hi! Oh, new students?”
Jen whirled, to see Ximena Valdes, Master Reynaldo’s daughter, who had just begun college. Ximi was working on her second degree black belt.
“Ximi,” Jen said. “Petra and Cleo are out of town visitors. Could I turn them over to you while I set up class?”
Ximi, popular and outgoing, grinned. “Come on! Which one is Petra? Cool name . . .”
Chattering introductions, the three girls raced inside ahead of Jen, who brought out the weapons racks and protective gear.
Jen hadn’t realized how much she’d looked forward to sparring with Nikos again until he wasn’t there. Still, she fell into the rhythm of class. The hour went by fast, as it always did when the students were eager.
After the lesson and partner sparring, Ximi pressed the girls to demonstrate their own weapons forms. Though Jen had to divide her time between all the students, she noticed the three girls bonding over Petra’s scimitar form, which was so cool the class spontaneously clapped when Petra whirled the sword up behind her and took a bow.
After class ended, Jen was not at all surprised when Cleo exclaimed, “Ximi invited us to go in a car, to see a movie! In a movie house! And then a beach picnic.” She sounded a lot more awe-struck at the first, though she was clearly excited about all three prospective treats. “Can you take us to our kyrios so we can ask permission?”
“If we jog, it’s only a few minutes away,” Jen said.
Ximi spoke up. “If you tell me where to go, I can drive us all.”
Cleo’s eye widened. She whispered, “We get to ride in a car now?”
Petra whispered back in their language, and Cleo blinked, then said with a sudden assumption of vast sophistication, “Of course we know all about cars. But not American ones—”
Petra interrupted. “Thank you,” she said to Ximi.
They got into Ximi’s car, Cleo claiming the front seat, and Petra sliding in beside Jen, who was distracted by Petra’s watching intently as she clicked her seatbelt on. Maybe seatbelts in Greece were designed differently? She couldn’t remember any difference, but the Greece trip had been years ago.
In the front, Cleo examined the dashboard. She was still marveling over it when they pulled up adjacent to the old parking lot on the top of a cliff. Most of it had been closed off by yellow tape. Big slabs of cement had been upturned at the other end of the lot, before the abrupt end of the cliff above the landslide.
A small group of people stood around some kind of digging equipment. Jen’s gaze blipped past some strangers, Joey Hu, and Mikhail Long, to land on Nikos. He was one of the tallest, the sea breeze tangling with his blue-black, wavy hair.
The girls left the car, and as the visitors ran ahead, Ximi joined Jen. “I was going to wait in the car, but I thought that their dad, or whoever that guy is, might want to meet me and ask a lot of questions.” She shot Jen an inquiring look that Jen interpreted immediately.
“I think he’s more like a chaperone—their martial arts teacher. And if he asks, I’ll vouch for you.”
“I hope that’ll be enough. Well, he can always call my dad,” Ximi said doubtfully.
But when they caught up to Petra and Cleo, who were talking fast in Greek, Nikos turned Jen’s way. “These people are known to you?”
Jen nodded. “For pretty close to twenty years.” She was about to add that she’d babysat infant Ximi every chance she could get, but remembered Doris telling her once that talking about their infancy was embarrassing to even the most easygoing teens.
“We’ll be back before
ten,” Ximi said. “I have a curfew when I’m driving.”
Nikos gave a small nod. “Petra. Cleo. Do you remember Mikhail’s and Bird’s address?”
“Yesyesyes!”
“We do.”
“Have a good time.”
And that was it—no third degree, or demands about insurance and so forth. It was clear that on their home island, things were a lot simpler than they were here.
Cleo bounced and Petra gave a blinding smile, then the three ran back to Ximi’s car, as Jen made herself look away from Nikos. She now had absolutely no reason to be there—whatever was going on.
But then Joey caught her eye and waved her over. “I know you’re a journalist. Are you interested in old petroglyphs and the like?”
Jen wasn’t sure how to respond to that. Robert would have asked if there was a story in it—that is, a wrong to be righted, or some kind of crooked deal going on that needed investigating. If so, yes would always, always be a right answer. But was it her answer anymore?
Jen remembered stretching out across the entire bed—and the world hadn’t ended.
“I’m interested in everything,” she said firmly.
“This’ll be going on for a while.” Joey indicated the digging machinery parked next to the rubble. “We’ve borrowed some equipment from the geology department at the university. These two are grad students who know how to operate the machinery.” He indicated two women, the younger, Asian one who was probably a college junior or senior, and a white woman almost as tall as Jen, and probably her age, who was intent on transferring numbers from her tablet to the screen of a machine that reminded Jen of a gigantic insect with a drill at the front. “We were in the process of examining some very old caves down below when the collapse happened—I’m sure you remember it.”
“We thought it was another quake,” Jen said. It had happened around the time Bird had met Mikhail, that much she recollected.
“We’re hoping that we can get past the rubble with a camera to take a look around down there,” Joey explained. “We invited Nikos, as he’s familiar with similar excavations in the Aegean. If you’ll stand over there with Nikos, I think my colleague Ann is ready— ”
It was so smoothly done that Jen found herself within touching distance of Nikos, looking in complete ignorance at the machine squatting sinisterly over a pocket in the rubble that had once been a sizable cliff.
But the older woman looked up at the mention of her name, and scowled. “No, we can’t. The camera, or the retractor arm that we borrowed from the oceanography lab, or both, aren’t communicating.” She turned to the student. “Miyoko, one of us has to go back to the lab. Seq says he’s got another arm to swap out.”
Miyoko said, “I’ll go, Professor, since we came in my car.”
While the student departed, the professor walked aside with Joey and began an earnest conversation. Mikhail was pacing slowly around the machine, examining it intently, leaving Nikos and Jen alone.
She felt the urge to speak. “So I take it you have an interest in ancient artifacts?”
“They are more a part of my life,” Nikos said, after a slight hesitation.
Jen glanced at the machinery, and thought, Greek isle. Right. “I guess your island is wall to wall archeologists digging up ruins?”
Nikos smiled. “As it happens, my island is in better shape than many, in that it has few ruins and fewer visitors.” His smile was so warm, his black eyes glinting with reflections from the sparkling sea below.
“Well, I should go,” she forced the words out—and then, to her horror, It happened again. “ . . . though I will say your island is probably as beautiful as the few I saw when I was there once, some years ago, for a story—of course I can’t pretend to know all the islands in the Aegean, as I know there are many, and maybe even people who live there can’t count them all, but one of the things I remember most are the goats bleating everywhere—not that the people weren’t great, but it’s just, in California there aren’t goats wandering in and out of houses and pooping right and left—”
Rubber chicken! She clashed her teeth together in a heroic effort to shut down the inane word tsunami.
Now she should really leave.
But he spoke, with quiet seriousness, as if she hadn’t just been blathering about goat poo. “There are many islands on which only animals live, and some that are bare of any life except very hardy grasses. Everything comes down to water.” He lifted a hand. “I understand that Southern California has something of the same sort of climate conditions?”
She stared, astonished he wasn’t running for the hills. “We can go six months and more without a drop of rain—”
The sound of a loud engine nearly drowned her voice. She turned, wondering what sort of a rattletrap that student was driving—and blinked as a big car pulled up much too fast. It barely stopped before all the doors swung open and burly guys ran out, straight toward them.
Jen stared. What the heck was going on? The next thing she knew, Mikhail charged at them. Voices rang out, but the sense of the words escaped as years of habit took over. For some reason, these guys were attacking Joey and Mikhail!
But she wasn’t going to just stand by.
Neither was Nikos.
Fighting at fifty-five means conserving your strength. Even with jogging to work every day and working out with the students, Jen didn’t have the speed and stamina she’d had at twenty-five, much less thirty-five, and bruises took longer to heal.
That meant keeping her moves to a minimum, calculated to have maximum effect: early on one of the men turned on her, apparently with the idea of taking her hostage against the others. Two feints, one side-kick to a knee, and a palm-heel strike to the solar plexus convinced him to curl up on the ground around his knee, gasping for breath, instead.
That gave her a moment to catch her own breath as she cast a quick look around. Joey had snapped out both ends of what she’d taken to be a metal measuring tool. It was now staff length, and he wielded it with humming expertise, sending three would-be assailants backpedaling so fast they kicked up rubble. Mikhail whirled with deceptive slowness between two big thugs, his movements even more economical than hers. And effective—one guy dropped, howling over a broken arm.
Ann seemed to have vanished like smoke. Jen had time to sweep once more, in case the professor had fallen and was hidden by stone slabs, but she was definitely gone.
And then a big brute with surfer hair turned a sneering grin toward her and charged. She sidestepped at the last moment, kicking his knee. He pivoted to deflect the power of the kick, bringing around a haymaker, but Nikos was right behind her, delivering a punch that spun the man around before he dropped.
“Nice work,” she breathed—and there was no more time for more than that, as a fresh set of attackers leaped at them.
Nikos took up a stance beside Jen, and once again they fell into a rhythm as if they had fought side by side all their lives. She kicked a guy twice her size to Nikos; a short time later, whirling between two assailants, he spun one of them her way, who she put out of action with a sidekick to the jaw. The second one tried to bash a rock over Nikos’s head from behind. She took him down with headbutt to the chin, followed by a palm heel strike powered from the hip that snapped a bone in his forearm. She and Nikos backed one another, keeping the menacing circle from flanking Joey.
While it was going on the fight seemed endless, and then it was suddenly over, with three guys running for the nearest car. Others picked up the ones who had fallen, and—snarling threats and curses—slammed back into the two other cars.
“We know where you live, Hu,” one bellowed, then they peeled out, leaving the stink of burning tires.
“I didn’t even see the second car arrive,” Jen said, as she leaned her hands on her knees and concentrated on taking deep, slow breaths.
Nikos stepped up, his cheeks glowing with color, his breathing fast. “You all right?”
“Yes. Thanks. You?”
“Same,” she said, breathless with the rush of after-battle adrenaline. That threat was still echoing in her ears. “Who are they? What’s going on?” She turned to Mikhail and Joey, who were talking in an urgent undervoice.
The two faced her, glanced at one another, then away.
“Thank you for the backup,” Joey said, more serious than Jen had ever seen him. “That was . . . unfortunate.”
“It was crazy,” Jen said. “Did they want to steal that digging thing over there? How would they even drive it through the streets without the police being after them in ten seconds flat?”
“Speaking of . . .” Suddenly Ann was back, her short hair ruffled as if she’d been running. Jen hadn’t even seen her arrive. “The police are on their way—should be here in seconds.”
As she finished speaking, they heard the wail of a siren. It was a few blocks away.
Joey snapped the ends of his staff back inside the smooth gun-metal gray wand, and it looked like a tool again. “Coming from the opposite direction Cang’s minions raced away in.”
“Cang?” Jen said. “Who is that?”
“A thief,” Mikhail spoke up from behind.
“What’s he after?” Jen asked, glancing dubiously at the digging machine.
“Ancient artifacts,” Joey said. “Rumor has gone around that there might be something of that sort down in the collapsed cave.”
Jen remembered the one guy shouting We know where you live . . . Why would they care where Joey Hu lived? Joey was a college teacher, living in a plain old ranch house with students coming and going at all hours. Not exactly Indiana Jones. She said, “If there was that kind of treasure down there, the kids who used to go into those caves to party would have found it ages ago.”