by Jasmine Walt
Loren had said she’d learned my patterns and it was how she’d found me so easily on the first try. She’d only been following me for a few weeks. These men and their ancestors had been following me for over a thousand years. In the age of technology, they were getting better. Or maybe I was just getting more predictable.
The three ninjas charged, blades gleaming maliciously in the moonlight. It was time to stop playing around. They wouldn’t step back, aside, or out of my way. When they struck at me, they were aiming for blood.
About two hundred years ago, they’d overwhelmed me with their sheer force of numbers and bound me. I’d managed to get free of their trap. I might have been outnumbered, but I was still stronger than they were. However, I never wanted to learn where they’d intended to take me. Likely back to that altar in my nightmares.
As three pairs of feet, fists, and blades gunned for me, I dropped down. Once on the ground, I pulled my legs back into my body in a low crouch. I tucked and rolled, striking out my right foot and sweeping the leg of one attacker. Cobra Kai was my spirit guide tonight.
The man tumbled to the ground, still swinging. But I had the advantage of already being low. I jabbed him in the chest with a push kick. The stem of my boot aimed straight for his throat. He staggered backward, bile and blood sputtering out of his mouth. He fell to his knees, then keeled over.
I didn’t have time to take pride in my precise blow. The other two ninjas loomed over me, blades at the ready. I sent a dagger toward the heart of one. He turned, and it caught his shoulder. Not a second later, I sent the other blade to follow it. This one landed in his ear. The man blinked in surprise and fell to the ground.
By then, I was on my feet. I met the strikes and kicks of the third man blow for blow. He caught a lucky shot in my rib with his booted instep. The blow rattled me. He was strong, superhumanly so. But I was stronger.
I took a flying leap that landed me on the other side of the Reflecting Pool. The third man took the same gravity-defying, fifty-meter leap across the waters. But he was wounded, so he fell short and landed in the water.
I paused for a second. Waiting to see if, like in the high-wire martial arts films, he could run across the water. The water was less than two feet deep. The calves of his pants were soaked through as he charged toward me.
I had the time to flee, but I didn’t run. I couldn’t. They would only come after me again. And then again.
The last ninja standing came at me, thrusting his dagger at my torso. The blade sliced through the air, narrowly missing my neck. I turned with his motion and then delivered a roundhouse kick that connected under his raised arm. A second, lower kick shattered his kneecap. Finally, a punch to the jaw sent him off balance.
I reached for the dagger, pinning his shoulders to the ground with my knees. Holding the weapon at his heart with one hand, I unmasked him with the other.
That was a mistake. In the movies, no one mourned the faceless ninja horde that fell like flies under the hero’s hand. But when their masks are removed, people are reminded of their humanity. This man looked to be in his early thirties, Asian, with dark eyes.
“Why are you here?” I asked him.
He glared at me, but he didn’t answer. They never answered. Each one took whatever he knew about me and my past to the death. These were the men of my nightmares. I had hoped for centuries that their attacks were what my nightmares were made from, and not that I had birthed the nightmare born of actions I couldn’t remember.
I took a deep breath and voiced part of what I’d learned from Loren’s dragon bone. It was a phrase I had no knowledge of. But just because I didn’t know it didn’t mean I hadn’t lived it before.
“Is it the Lin Kuie?”
The ninja’s eyes sparked at the words I’d translated from the dragon bone. The English translation was akin to forest ghost. Something whispered in my mind, but I couldn’t grab hold of the memory.
“Do you know what that means?” I asked.
He only glared. I readied the blade, not expecting him to speak, so my grip loosened when he did.
“The blood of my ancestors is on your hands,” he said. “We will not stop until we trade your bones for our blood.”
He swiped the blade out of my hand and reversed our position, slashing the business side of the blade across my shirt. A gaping wound spread across the cotton, exposing my lace bra.
The man froze as he looked down at my skin, copping a look at my girls. I elbowed him in the face for the destruction of my shirt and the sneak peek. The dagger fell out of his hand. When my fist came back, I felt the tug of broken skin.
I looked down at the growing trail of red that wept from my chest and realized it was my blood that had transfixed him. He reached again for the weapon, but I beat him to it. With one slash, I gutted him like he’d done to my shirt. Then I let the blade fall out of my hands and rolled onto my back.
Dammit. It looked like I’d be making a trip to China after all.
7
The wound on my chest smarted as I reached for the controls. A human would’ve needed stitches for such a deep gash, but my skin had already begun knitting itself back together overnight. In the noonday sun, it looked like a week’s worth of healing had happened in only twelve hours. I disengaged the autopilot and began my approach. The safety harness gave no purchase and restrained my chest, causing the abraded skin to protest.
I wasn’t used to pain. It was such an infrequent experience in my long life. I’d heard women talk about how men could never handle childbirth or menstrual cramps. I didn’t have a menstrual cycle, which meant I would never have children, but also that I’d never experience either a cramp or a contraction. Hell, I’d rarely experienced a paper cut. So a wound along my torso, albeit a rapidly healing one, was a lot to manage along with flying a seaplane.
I loved flying. Loved flying more than driving. But I loved driving more than sailing. It was all about the speed for me. Planes could reach speeds that would leave cars in the dust and boats in the wake.
I would never be able to count the days of my life, but I did enjoy watching the tick of a speedometer. I loved the wind in my hair. I craved wide-open spaces where I could run, fly, sail, and whizz past life in the blink of an eye.
Pulling back the throttle, I heard and felt the sound of the engines give over power. I pulled the yoke and leveled the aircraft to the horizon. The plane made a smooth descent toward the crystal-blue waters of the Caribbean Sea.
Up ahead, I saw my home, my island. It was shaped like my name, my real name. A sandy beach jutted out on three sides, forming the bottom half of a box with an open top. In the center was a dense forest of green-topped trees. At the top of the island was a small mountain. The mountain range extended from the tip of the sandy beach and then sliced diagonally into the forest, cutting through some of the trees.
From above, the island looked like the letter U with a divot curling inward at the top right corner. Or, more aptly, like the number nine in Hebrew and Aramaic. That was me. And this was my island.
I called the island Noohra. The word was an ancient Galilean form of the word “light.” A young philosopher I’d befriended nearly two thousand years ago had called knowledge “the light.” He’d postulated that if humans were the repositories of knowledge, then they were the light of the world. He’d gone out to preach that gospel and was crucified for his preachings.
The small seaplane came in for a landing in the water. My tiny island of light was out in the middle of nowhere where no one would find it. Humans would nail me to a cross for the knowledge this place contained. I’d found the island when I’d been on a pirate ship in the early 1500s.
I’d been sailing back from the New World, as the British liked to call it in those times. I’d been in what would later be called the state of Florida. My skin coloring was decidedly darker than a European woman’s, but the slave trade hadn’t begun at that point. Still, travel wasn’t exactly safe for me. But I was stronger than any
man I met, and they soon learned to keep a respectable distance or they permanently lost the use of their family jewels.
On a journey back to Spain, the ship was commandeered by pirates. Unfortunately for the pirates, I was aboard the ship. I singlehandedly dispensed the pirates of their captain, first mate, and half the crew. For my troubles, my shipmates labeled me a witch.
The mob was able to shove me off the ship into the shark-infested waters. I made it aboard the pirate ship. The frightened crew decided to take their chances with the sharks instead of a witch. I sailed a few days, coming close to what felt like death before I found my island. It came at me out of the horizon like a city of light.
There were no locals who could happen upon the island without a motorized boat or a seaplane. If they did come upon it by chance, then they would have to walk through a mile of deep forest, and then another of swamp, in order to reach any of the treasures hidden within.
I made my way inland, walking slower than I normally would as every step tugged at the torn skin on my chest.
This was my fortress of solitude. It was where I came to rejuvenate. The place that refueled me. The one spot in the world where I left my blades at the door.
I reached the structure hidden at the base of the mountain. It was there that I’d built a cabin. I pulled the strap over my shoulder that held my bush sword. It was the same case from Honduras. I’d had the strap repaired while in D.C. I bent over, sliding my hands in my boots to extract the twin daggers I’d used last night in my battle with the ninjas. I’d cleaned the blades of blood after I deposited the three bodies where they might never be found in the polluted waters of the Anacostia River. Next, I released the sais that swung in a holster on my hip.
The beauty of piloting my own plane was that I didn’t have to argue with TSA about my weapons. No, I wasn’t expecting an air battle. Nor was I expecting to meet anyone on the grounds of my secret hiding space. But I had needed the comfort of the steel after the ordeal from last night.
I entered my sanctuary with empty hands, bare feet, and a weary spirit. Once I activated the solar-powered generator, my inner sanctum illuminated. Instantly, I felt lighter.
It had taken me nearly two hundred years to build the compound and move my trove here. I often came here after spending time with Zane. Partly because I was physically weak, but mostly because I was emotionally vulnerable. Leaving Zane was always as hard on my spirit as it was on my body. In those times, I liked to surround myself with my treasures.
I went deeper into the cabin. There were only two rooms. A space with a desk for me to write and work, and a smaller room with a large four-poster bed made from the tree trunks of the island’s interior.
On the desk was the last artifact I was working on. There were three scrolls encased in protective glass sitting out in the open on the table. The scrolls had been found in the Qumran Caves near the Dead Sea in the West Bank of the Jordan River. There had been hundreds of such scrolls found at the site in the middle of the last century. Most were now on display in museums. But these three spoke of twelve beings, men and women of great power, who never aged and never died.
I’d taken the scrolls from the site and disappeared into the night before anyone could question me. And no, that wasn’t tomb raiding. First off, the scrolls were in a cave, not a tomb. Secondly, I didn’t sell the knowledge off to the highest bidder. Because, thirdly and most importantly, this was knowledge that would be dangerous if it were shared with the world.
The scrolls had a good bit of detail on each of the twelve Immortals. I was trying to figure out who wrote the scrolls. It hadn’t been me. The current theory about the Qumran scrolls, or, as they were more commonly known, the Dead Sea Scrolls, was that they were written by the Essenes, which was a Jewish sect that had lived around Qumran centuries ago.
I had my doubts. In any case, I couldn’t focus on that mystery now. I had another to solve.
I walked through the work area and past the bedroom until I came to the door of my vault. Releasing the latch, I opened the door and began the descent into the interior of the mountain.
There was a reason why wine was kept inside underground caves, why many artifacts were found in pristine condition inside mountain caves. Caves were air-tight, conserved energy, and held cool temperatures.
I’d built shelves and units in my cave of knowledge. Like in a library, I’d organized things according to subject, culture, and era. I’d been using the system before Melvil Dewey ever learned his ABCs.
There was a host of texts from the decimated tomes of the Library of Alexandria. I hadn’t been able to save everything from the destruction, but I had gotten out the original canon of the Bible and the schematics of the Great Pyramid. The walls of my caves were lined with scrolls and tomes from further back than my mind could remember.
I admit, I might be a bit of a hoarder. But there was not one single thing in this cave that could be thrown away. These were also the treasures I thought better than to share with the rest of the world. There was some knowledge that was dangerous to mankind. My friend Yeshua had found that out when he tried to share the light of his knowledge. He was betrayed by his friends and his hands were nailed to a cross.
I’d dedicated my life to the preservation of history, cultures, and people. I didn’t fear death. How could I as a person who rarely felt pain or weakness?
Death was a loose concept to me. Nothing ever truly died. The dirt rebirthed and recycled everything and everyone. Yeshua had been reborn a prophet, and his knowledge was still spread across the world today.
But I’d also watched cultures be erased. Seen knowledge razed to the ground. I’d witnessed people be whited out. I’d observed history be rewritten. Being erased was the worst thing I could imagine.
After I sat down inside my cave, I pored through my personal diaries of world history, starting with the volumes I had on Asia. I had written about the Shang Dynasty and my time in what would become Mongolia. The Shang Dynasty lasted from 1600 to 1046 BCE. My written accounts of the Zhou Dynasty, who’d come after the Shang, and their medical progress were there. But there was nothing about the Xia tribe who had purportedly come before these two great cultures. Not a single word or reference. Just a gaping void in the historical timeline.
I closed the volumes and tried to open my mind. Shutting my eyes, I pulled darkness around me to focus. Had I ripped out those pages of history? But I would never do that. No matter how ugly a history, no matter how vile a truth, I always told the stories. Without fail, I kept the records no one wanted unearthed. Unfailingly, I got my fingers dirty in the mire of the past.
I let go of the blackness and opened my eyes to the dim light of the cave. There was nothing in my mind or on the page.
I hadn’t written down a single account of the ninja attacks over the centuries. Even now, my hand shook as I recalled the details of the one last night. I could write in every language known to mankind; I could read them all too. But I couldn’t form a single character about any of these attacks. Nor did I have a single account of the Xia.
There had to be something more going on. Realizing I couldn’t handle this on my own anymore, I decided to go to the one person who I thought might have some answers.
8
“Sister Una is in the gardens,” the young nun said to me in a voice that was barely above a whisper. She wore a coif that reminded me of an origami bird. The hat folded into a triangle over her forehead and the tips stuck out at the side like wings. Her Spanish cant told me she was from poverty.
In the early days of convents, the Church only accepted girls from wealthy families. These girls came with dowries that would be passed on to the Church. Sometimes the girls who came were young women with babes in arms. Other times, they were widows who chose to live a quiet life of service after the deaths of their husbands. In the old times, a convent was rarely a woman’s first choice.
This morning, there had been only a few sisters about the halls in the worn-down building
. Descending the cracked stone steps into a barren garden, I saw Sister Una, as she was calling herself these days, in the distance. She’d removed her habit, exposing her bare neck and shoulders to the warm Catalina sunshine. Sister Una was not poor, a widow, or young. And she’d had many options to live in other places, do other things, and be someone different. But being here was her choice.
A tickle struck the back of my throat as I walked through the blooms closer to the woman. On her back was a marking that looked like a cursive number four. In the ancient lettering, it was the first mark—aleph. I rolled my shoulder, feeling the phantom of a similar mark on my shoulder blade.
With a spade in her hand, the nun dug up a vegetable. A mole as large as her hand came along with it. The creature tried to squirm away, but the nun caught it and held it tight within her deceptively delicate-looking hands. The mole bit its sharp teeth into the spot between her thumb and forefinger, barely breaching the rough skin of the webbing between her fingers.
As I came a few steps closer, I felt the healed skin at my chest tingle at the proximity to another of my kind. The mole struck again. This time, there was a tear in that patch of skin. The nun winced, but it wasn’t from pain. It was curiosity.
“Why are you disturbing my peace, Tisa?”
“It’s good to see you too, Aleph.”
With her free hand, Aleph reached out for a ball of twine, then tethered the screeching, struggling mole until it was immobile. After that, she took a moment to examine her hand. It was only the tiniest of pinpricks now, but she stared at it as though it were something big and important.
“If you believe the stories, we were born in a garden,” she said, motioning around the barren garden with her uninjured hand.
Aleph believed that Immortals were the children of angels. She was waiting for our forefathers to return and collect us. Aleph figured since they’d marked us then, they’d return for us. It was why she was in a convent. Though nuns were said to marry God, she was waiting for a ride home to wherever she thought that might be. I no longer believed in Heaven, Hell, or gods.