“But, Emmy, how did he know to get off the train in Kunming?” Li Li asked.
Stone looked at her with watery eyes, and everyone seemed to recognize that no fully rational explanation for how he’d found them at just the right moment would be forthcoming. But that didn’t stop Emily from reading the rest of his scribbles anyway.
“The train line ended there, and he saw signs for the bus station and followed them toward the lake until he found us… and I’m so glad you did, my brave boy.” Emily threw her arms around his neck as she read this last bit, and he smiled and grunted as if his heart would burst.
They all chewed over the details of this story until the food was gone, and Emily pleaded fatigue. Hsu Qi shooed the others out and accompanied Emily back to her bed.
“Would you sit with me for a moment?” Emily asked, and Hsu Qi was happy to comply.
“You look different, somehow… I mean apart from the injuries and violence you endured.”
“Yes, that was awful. It was all I could do to keep Li Li safe, and in the end, I didn’t have the strength to do it on my own.”
“You had help, then?”
“The vagabonds Li Li was so eager to talk about… they came to us in a moment of need.”
“But that’s not all, is it?”
“No. It was as you said… do you remember?”
“They came to you, the ghosts, didn’t they?” Hsu Qi asked. “I can see it in your face… a certain lightness.”
Emily smiled to think how important Hsu Qi had become to her, and how different her perception of people was. She’d hobbled back into this woman’s home, a weary, wounded spirit, her body broken, and this is what she notices, “a certain lightness.” Not many people would have known to look for that in her face.
“Yes, most of them.”
“… and how did they respond?”
“Just as you said. They passed on, though not all willingly. One or two I had to chase away.”
Hsu Qi laughed. “Some spirits are like that. They fear eternity and cling to the world, even if it means reliving their destruction. But once confronted, they don’t usually return. Some things are more distressing than oblivion.”
“I didn’t see the most important ones.”
“Your uncle David, you mean?”
“Yes… and my father.”
“Your father will never leave you… and you wouldn’t want him to.”
“… and my uncle?”
Hsu Qi had no reply to this question, and perhaps it was cruel to expect her to offer any. But Emily could guess what it would be. David was too close, too enmeshed in her personality for her to be able to consign him to oblivion – the others could be safely forgotten, but not him – and for his part, he’d bound himself too closely to this world in life and was unable to detach himself from it in death. He’d stalk the Earth for an eternity, if necessary, but he’d avoid her until he was ready to depart it.
Emily felt faint just thinking about him, and let her head sink back into the pillow, but she reached for Hsu Qi’s hand.
“You said I was the moon’s child last summer, do you remember?”
“It was so easy to see. It still is.”
Emily squeezed Hsu Qi’s hand and felt the world tilt again, as if she might fall off. She took a deep breath, as deep as she could manage before the pain in her ribs became a distraction.
“What do you mean, easy to see? What are you seeing?”
“The sun is powerful, the source of life, but she depends on the moon. He makes her power fruitful. That’s how it is in the ancient cults.”
Emily nodded, though Hsu Qi’s language was unsettling. Still, it was a sensation she recognized, familiar, primal. Amaterasu-omikami, the great goddess of the sun in the Shinto faith of Japan, had dominated her teenage dreams, so much so that she began to think of her as ‘Granny.’ But it never felt quite right. Her heart was dark, her mind dark, too. The brightness of the sun seared whatever it touched inside her, and she’d always felt another spirit, another kami, shielding her from the fire. How else could she have survived it?
“But the goddess of the sun gave me her sword, and I wielded it to do her bidding.” Her head began to throb again as she spoke, as if the weight of these thoughts might tip her over, or even crush her completely.
“Are you sure? Perhaps you gave it to her?” Hsu Qi placed a hand on Emily’s forehead. “You’re burning up.”
Thinking back to her tumultuous last year of high school, and remembering how she’d come into possession of the sword, Kusanagi-no-tsurugi, it occurred to her that Hsu Qi was right. Perhaps she really had brought the sword to Amaterasu, or to her descendants, at least, when she returned it to the imperial household. But, then, how had it come into her possession in the first place?
Her father had left it for her, having kept it safe for two decades, but it was never his, and for all she knew he’d never felt the electricity surge through the handle when he wrapped his fingers around it. Before him, the sword had come through her mother’s line, from her mother’s mother and her grandfather in turn, all the way back to a Momoyama-era samurai retainer of one of the Genji clans. At least, that’s what the functionaries in the Imperial household had told her, though she’d never entirely believed it.
“Tsukuyomi-no mikoto, he’s the moon god in my mother’s religion, and they say his brother, Susanoo-no-mikoto, the god of sea and storm, found the sword inside a dragon’s tail and presented it to his sister, the sun, to appease her anger.”
“You hear it, too, don’t you? It’s the truth everyone knows… the life-giving energy of the sun and the day takes turns with the night…
“… and darkness has no limits, unless it is ruled by another power.”
“Now you see, don’t you? That’s who you are… the child of the moon. You prefer the darkness. It’s where you feel at home.”
Once the shivering had subsided, and Hsu Qi’s voice had faded into the distance, Emily felt herself free to slip down, as if through a hole in the Earth… perhaps more a shaft than a cave, and though she could make out the edges of the passage, there seemed to be no source of the light. The descent drew her on, welcomed her, and she let herself follow, even though there was no longer any distinctive direction, down or up, one side or another, and she began to feel the deeper impulse to dissolve herself into the all in all.
Here was the meaning of the infinite darkness that had always tantalized her – dissolution promised rest and oblivion. But something tugged at her, an obligation and an affection, the love she felt for her mother, and her children, for Li Li and Stone, even for Perry. There it was, finally, the thought that had guided her these last few months, and she heard the ancient stories reverberate in it, and perhaps this was why she’d never met her father’s ghost – he didn’t want to give her permission to take leave of the world.
When Amaterasu went into hiding and the world went dark, Tsukuyomi so loved his sister that he protected her world from dissolving itself into the infinite, lightless void. He presented the sword to her, not as a weapon, but as a symbol of the sharp edge between light and dark, the boundary that gives shape to the world.
Emily knew she could trust Connie to bring the children home safely – a terrifying maternal figure who would stop at nothing to keep them safe – but she couldn’t leave them entirely to her care. They needed her to teach them to make sense of all the joys and traumas they would experience in life. This was her purpose, the essential role of a child of the moon, to define the darkness and give meaning to the light.
33
Back in Beijing
Eventually, even good times weary the palette, and Li Li and Stone grew anxious to get home, even though Emily needed to take a longer rest in the house behind the temple complex in Kutkai. After a day or two, Connie and Ip saw the kids returned to Japan, where Yuki and Andie awaited, and Michael apprised SECNAV and the Marine Commandant of Emily’s situation, since she’d been absent from her post for almos
t three weeks now. Jepsen had wanted to bring the full weight of the Attaché office’s disapproval down upon her in one harrowing official sanction. But perhaps even he had begun to recognize that the higher-ups were not going to oblige him, not this time.
A week later, she’d begun to find her old routine, waking up early in the apartment she rented from Mrs. Gao, and running to the embassy by an ever-changing route through the streets and parks and bridges of Beijing. Her strength returned day by day, perhaps more quickly the more she accepted Mrs. Gao’s hospitality at dinner or on the weekends, and her exercise regimen gradually assumed its former dimensions.
The pleasure of an early morning run for Emily was not just the endorphin high, or the satisfaction of pushing a physical limit, but mainly the chance to commune with herself, to hear the voices in her heart. Blood pulsed through her veins and arteries, and her heart beat out the familiar four-four rhythm, and her breath went in and out, and she could reach out beyond the limits of perception to seek a place for herself in the cosmos.
On this day, her route took her along the levee coursing the Bahe river, and she glided from light into shadow as each bridge passed overhead. The breeze was cooler off the water this morning, and the surface of the river grew choppy. Other than a cyclist and a few morning joggers, she had the river to herself and the birds that had preferred sheltering in the crossbeams running under the roadway to migrating.
A buzzing sound persuaded her to pause and dig the new phone Michael had given from her backpack. She glanced at a nearby bridge and remembered half-expecting to find him in such places each morning. The black hemispherical eye of a security camera peered down at her from a lamppost, and she walked on by. Jiang would not have hacked into this one.
Michael had been calling almost daily since she’d returned to Beijing. Sometimes the calls were instigated by Yuki or Andie, or the kids, and sometimes they were almost official in nature. Today, he wanted to know all about Hsu Qi and Tammy, not exactly for official purposes, but mainly to understand who else he was now indebted to, and Emily laid out what she knew.
“From what I could see, it’s the sister who runs things. The brother handles all the logistics, especially when it comes to keeping her safe, but it’s her the people follow.”
“… and as she goes…”
“So goes the northern half of the country.”
Emily knew rather more than she let on about the pair of saophas who’d organized the resistance to junta rule, and Michael had already known enough to get a call through to Connie through Tammy’s network. What he didn’t need to know was the role a certain retired spec-ops sniper played in training the Shan militia, or that a current operator from US Naval Intelligence had contributed a bit of her own grisly skills to blunting a recent incursion into the Shan Highlands by three Tatmadaw battalions.
“We betrayed their father a few decades ago. He’d offered to suppress heroin production in the Golden Triangle in exchange for military aid against the junta. According to the reports, the folks at Justice and State didn’t think he was trustworthy….” When Emily didn’t respond right away, Michael caught himself. “I had nothing to do with that, of course.”
“Of course.”
“I wasn’t even in government service in those days.”
“But now that you know what they did for us…”
“The CIA cannot actively give them aid, not without a signed directive from the president. It would overturn policy decades in the making.”
But Emily wasn’t asking for any official action, or even unofficial action. It was enough that the Director of Clandestine Services at CIA understood that she had more than one friend in the Shan highlands. Some squabbling in the background indicated that other voices wanted access to the phone, and Michael squeezed in one last word, before being pulled unceremoniously away.
“Others may have been tracking a gray sedan in Yunnan province. Our friend may still need to tread carefully.”
Emily would have to pass that information on to Jiang, whenever that might become possible again. But in the meantime, Andie and Yuki wanted to hear more about the billionaire playboy, as they did at every opportunity, and it was beginning to seem likely they’d never let it go.
“It really was nothing, Mom. The paparazzi got a few pictures and made up a story to go with them. They practically fabricated the whole thing out of nothing.”
“Who exactly is Connie’s new protegeé?” Andie asked.
“You mean Ip? At this point, I suspect you probably know more about her than I do. Did they get off all right?”
“Yes, we put them on a plane out of Osaka the day be fore we left.”
“Connie is full of surprises.” Emily had to smile just thinking about the many odd turns life had a way of taking around her friend.
“Well, Li Li is totally smitten by her.”
“Let me guess. Has she taken to wearing ironed blouses?”
“It’s practically a uniform now. Pressed jeans and a crisp cotton blouse.”
“Things could be worse. She could become a goth.”
Once Andie and Yuki’s curiosity had been satisfied, Emily put the phone away, and ran the rest of the way to the New Embassy Compound, pushing herself to sprint stretches here and there, just to see what sort of shape she was really in. Something about the wounds she’d sustained at Wudangshan had taken longer to recover from than ever before, and some mornings she even felt a new sort of mortality in her heart and lungs, as if she’d paid a larger price this time than she’d realized. Her arms and legs were strong, but something closer to her center line seemed different.
Once she’d showered and settled in at her desk – she wouldn’t stay long, but she couldn’t help taking a certain pleasure in seeing Jepsen’s desire for retribution thwarted – Nyquist stormed in and slapped down the latest Hong Kong tabloid, a glossy magazine featuring Wu Dao beaming from the cover with some other girl on his arm.
“What can I say? It looks as if I’m not the flavor of the month anymore.”
“You disappointed me, Tenno,” he said, with an air of innuendo.
“I guess I’m not cut out to be an operative.”
“Stuff like this can haunt a career.”
Emily let him cast veiled threats at her for a bit longer. Perhaps she owe him that much, since she hadn’t been forthright with him from the start – though how straightforward one ought to be with one’s wannabe handler is probably an open question, at least from the moral perspective. Once he’d had his fill, she went in search of her lunch partner.
Out in the hall, the clippings from other tabloids had disappeared from the bulletin board, the one’s showing her flirting with the billionaire’s son. She could almost imagine Nyquist tearing them down in a fit of pique, or perhaps Jepsen, though he’d have been in the grip of rather different passions.
On the way to Margie’s new favorite French bistro, she caught a glimpse of another magazine at a sidewalk vendor’s booth, and couldn’t help clucking over it. In fact, she was so intrigued by it that Emily bought her a copy and teased her about it over bowls of onion soup, risotto and sole meunière.
“I thought he was a keeper,” Margie said. “All that dough.”
“Too high maintenance.”
“Him or you?”
“Maybe both of us. It was doomed from the start.”
“Check out the new girlfriend. She’s all glamour from head to toe. Hard to compete with that.”
“Oh, that’s just Xiao Xiao.”
“You know her?”
Oh, yeah. He’s known her for years. We went to clubs together, before… you know, the incident.”
Emily hadn’t told anyone at the embassy the details of the past couple of weeks, and for the most part, no one would notice a few extra scars. But Margie had noticed some-thing different about her, and had ferreted out at least a general outline – a very general outline – after having been sworn to absolute secrecy.
“Is she that pret
ty in real life?”
“Prettier. But the tabloids have it all wrong. She’s not interested in him.”
“How do you know?”
“Because she doesn’t give a damn about his money. Her family’s loaded, too… and there’s someone else.”
“You Marines get to have all the fun,” Margie said, practically snorting fizzy water out her nose. “I really need to reevaluate my career choices.”
“You know what they say, the grass is always greener. I might not hesitate to trade my world of cares for yours without giving it a second thought.”
“Yeah, right. You’d rather be a dull functionary than a dashing officer, jetsetting around the world at the drop of a hat.”
“I’ve turned over a new leaf. It’s the quiet life in a subsidized apartment in Sanlitun for me next time.”
Joking aside, Emily had often turned this equation over in her mind these last few days. Would she prefer Margie’s quiet life, or one like it? There were some things that gave her pause, and more than one secret she still kept form her friend. Perhaps there was time for one more night on the town before she had to seal the deal.
Another morning, long past dawn, the hour when a Marine ordinarily gets up, the sun gave the window shades an orange glow and threatened to pour in around the edges. Emily awoke with a snort and sat bolt upright in bed, head throbbing, and the sound of the shower running. “Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap.” She pulled a sheet off the bed as she rose to investigate. “Yes, there’s definitely a naked man in my shower.”
Peeking around the door, she saw no steam in the bathroom. “What is it with these Daoists?” she muttered, and flipped the switch on the water heater. It would take another few minutes before the water would get warm. She let the bed sheet fall away and paused to consider her reflection in the mirror, and after suppressing a sob over the newest scars – at least the ones she’d gotten last summer had almost completely faded – ran one hand across her belly absentmindedly. “Thirty eight, thirty seven, maybe thirty six, at worst,” she said out loud, as she ran through an age-old calculation in her mind.
Girl Goes To Wudang (An Emily Kane Adventure Book 7) Page 35