Emma wanted to believe Akako, wanted to believe everything could work out. But she couldn’t. There were far too many questions, too many variables in the equation. When she was little everything had seemed so clear, but now that she was a grown-up everything had become hazy. Aggie’s advice came to her mind again, that she should just do her best. Maybe that was all she could do and hope for the best. “I’m sure you’re right,” Emma finally said.
“If you’re feeling up to it, Aggie’s got our transportation ready. Or if you want to wait until morning—”
“No, let’s go,” Emma said. After what had happened with Jim, it would be a great idea to put some distance between herself and Rampart City.
When Aggie had said she was going to prepare their transportation, Emma had assumed the witch meant some kind of vanishing spell or potion. What she didn’t expect was to go into Akako’s room to find a Persian rug hovering six inches from the ground. Aggie turned and smiled at her. “Well, what do you think?” the witch asked.
“A flying carpet?”
“It beats going commercial,” Akako said.
“Is it safe?”
“Of course, dear. How do you think Akako gets here and back?”
“Well, I suppose—”
“It’s perfectly safe,” Akako said. “I’ve used it twenty-five times already. Not a single problem yet.”
Emma looked at Aggie and then at Akako, who both smiled encouragingly. The idea to risk her life and her daughter’s on a piece of fabric four feet across seemed ludicrous. Then again, what part of her life wasn’t ludicrous anymore? “As long as it’s safe,” she said.
“Good,” Aggie said. Then she wrapped Emma in a hug. “Take care of yourself and that girl of yours.”
“I will.”
“I’ll see you in two weeks to take you back to the doctor. In the meantime, Akako will look after you. The archives really aren’t so bad once you get used to them.”
“So I’ve heard.”
Aggie kissed Emma’s forehead in a grandmotherly fashion. Then she turned and kissed Akako in an entirely different fashion, the same way that Emma kissed Jim. “Have a good trip, you two,” Aggie said once she’d pried herself away from Akako.
With that the two of them got on the carpet, which had room enough for Emma’s suitcases and a duffel bag that belonged to Akako. Emma settled onto the rug behind Akako and leaned forward to cling to the other woman for lack of anything else to hang on to. “Don’t worry, it’s perfectly stable,” Akako said.
Then the carpet rose a few more inches into the air. On its own it began to glide towards the open window in the bedroom. Emma ducked and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she was high in the air over the city, far above Jim—but not her troubles.
Chapter 6
The most comfortable position Emma found on the carpet was to lie sideways across it with her belly down. This allowed her head to dangle over the side so she could easily throw up into the Atlantic Ocean a thousand feet below. She remained in this position through most of the three-hour flight from Rampart City to Ireland.
Since the Persian rug didn’t have an oxygen system they had to stay fairly low; Akako said she usually kept it below three thousand feet. This made it so they could still breathe and kept them out of the major air routes. The only problem was the boats beneath them—everything from fishing trawlers to oil tankers to an aircraft carrier. The latter proved the most disconcerting as Emma worried they would soon find a pair of fighters on their tail, but the carpet’s radar signature was too tiny for any equipment to detect them and anyone who saw them with their own eyes probably didn’t believe it.
“It’s perfectly safe,” Akako said often enough that Emma wondered if Aggie’s friend wanted to convince Emma or herself.
“I’m sure it is,” Emma would mumble back if she weren’t engaged in throwing up yet again. To fly over the ocean on a rug that somehow managed to break the sound barrier seemed anything but safe to her. Besides a lack of oxygen, there were no seatbelts on the carpet. And of course there was the fact the vehicle was made from fabric that should be on the floor of Aggie’s parlor, not streaking two thousand feet over the waves.
Akako was smart enough not to have the flying carpet attempt any kind of maneuvers. They stayed straight and level most of the way, except when they had to climb slightly above a low bank of storm clouds. That was the only point where Emma dragged herself back into a seated position so she could cling to Akako. When she glanced down, she saw black clouds spread out below; occasional blue flashes of lightning erupted from within them.
“Don’t you ever worry about storms, or winds or anything like that?” Emma asked.
“It’s perfectly safe,” Akako repeated.
She went on to describe her first flight from the archives to Rampart City. Aggie had been along then to show her how the carpet worked. “There’s not much to it,” Aggie said. “You sit on it and let it do most of the work.”
Aggie had then taken hold of the front of the carpet to yank it back into a steep climb. Akako clung to Aggie the way Emma did to her now, her eyes closed. She soon learned firsthand why she should keep the carpet below a mile in altitude. Once they were above that, the air became so thin that she began to hyperventilate and her head felt as if someone had tightened a vise around it.
“Agnes—”
“Don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe.” Aggie reached back to pat Akako’s head. “Don’t be afraid. Open your eyes, dear.”
Akako finally did open her eyes in time to go blind as they plunged into a fluffy white cloud. She screamed and tightened her grip on Aggie until the witch cried out as well. “Agnes!”
“All right, I’ll take us down,” Aggie said. She brought the carpet down in a dive that prompted Akako to scream again as the steel-blue water rose up towards her. Aggie began to laugh like a maniac as the ocean came closer. At the last second the carpet leveled off without Aggie seeming to do anything. “See, the carpet has a safety system built right in if you fall asleep or anything like that.”
“That’s great,” Akako mumbled. The tops of the waves were close enough that she could touch them if she dangled her hand over the edge of the carpet. She could even see a school of dolphins in the water; she worried one might decide to jump onto the carpet. Aggie climbed up to twenty-five hundred feet, where the carpet cruised along while Aggie turned to kiss her.
“After what she put me through the other flights weren’t so bad,” Akako said to Emma.
“I guess so.”
“I won’t put you through anything like that. I think you have enough to worry about.”
“Thanks.”
After another half-hour, Emma caught sight of land. The carpet streaked over a rocky beach and in no time at all they were over the lush green fields of Ireland. She had never visited the country before, though she’d always meant to; her mother’s side of the family had Irish relatives, which Aunt Gladys said accounted for the red hair among the Cabot women, including Emma.
The carpet began to rise before they neared the suburbs of Dublin with no input from Akako. “It knows the way pretty well by now,” Akako said.
“I suppose it would.” Emma waited until they had passed over the skyscrapers and ancient neighborhoods of the capital before she leaned over to puke again. By the time she finished, Akako indicated they would land soon.
Emma sat up again and saw their destination over Akako’s shoulder. It was a green mound about a half-mile across. The level ground around it and the almost perfectly circular shape of the mound indicated it was an unnatural creation, made by primitive people at nearly the same time as Merlin and Marlin had formed the Order of the Scarlet Knight on the neighboring island.
The thought of Marlin prompted Emma to feel queasy again. She hated to lock him in her homemade box for the next three or four months. Though he was an ancient ghost, Marlin still had need for intellectual stimulation. She just hoped that being cooped up in there wouldn�
��t prompt him to lose his mind. At the very least it would take a while before he forgave her—if he ever did. Maybe she could make him understand eventually she wanted to keep her friends safe. There was no guarantee that the armor would choose Megan, or Amanda, or even Becky again, but Emma couldn’t take that chance.
The carpet set down gently on the grass beside the mound. Once the fabric touched down on the grass, it went limp, to become an ordinary carpet again. This allowed Akako to roll it up and carry it with her into the mound.
Very few people were ever let into the mound. The stated reasons were because of the danger of falling rocks or cave-ins and the sensitivity of the rock formations. While these were valid reasons, the lack of traffic was mostly because the coven had located their archives beneath the mound. To keep up appearances, they allowed a few handpicked scientists and tourists inside every year.
None of these were present as Akako led Emma through a modern wooden door, into the mound. Once inside, Akako played a flashlight around so Emma could see the limestone walls, rocks stacked up along the sides to support the mound’s weight. That any primitive people could manage such a feat astounded Emma.
“This is where they came to bury their dead,” Akako said. “It’s also believed that like Stonehenge it was used for seasonal rituals and as a kind of calendar.”
“Amazing,” Emma said.
Akako led her down a corridor that became narrower the farther they went, until Emma could barely squeeze her stomach through. “We might have to work on that over the next couple of months,” Akako said.
“I wouldn’t want to ruin anything.”
“We’ve been meaning to do it for a while now to make it easier for the tourists and camera crews and so forth. It’d just be speeding up the process.”
“We’ll see.” Emma managed to squeeze through the rocks and emerged with Akako into a round chamber. There were some primitive drawings and runes carved into the rocks, but otherwise the chamber was open. A circular pit about six inches deep rested in the center of the room, the pit ringed by flat stones.
Akako put her hand to one of the stones and then Emma heard the very unnatural sound of machinery whirring and grinding. She looked up at the ceiling to make sure it wasn’t about to collapse on them. “Don’t worry, it’s perfectly safe,” Akako said as if by rote.
A moment later, the pit split open to reveal a metal pad. “There’s the lift,” Akako said. She took Emma’s hand to help her down onto the pad, which shifted ominously for a moment. The pad didn’t make any sound at all as Akako stepped onto it. Then she touched a button and the lift began to clank down.
From Emma’s estimates they went about a hundred feet down before the lift jerked to a stop. Akako stepped off the lift first, into another cavern. This one had the same limestone walls, but the supports here were made of steel. At one end of the cavern was an ordinary wooden desk with a computer on top of it and behind this rows of servers. “Here we are,” Akako said. “Home sweet home.”
***
The archives didn’t prove to be such a bad place to live. Akako had already done a lot to add “a woman’s touch” to the side chamber that had been carved for the archivist’s quarters. They had only one full-size bed Akako insisted Emma use while she slept on a spare cot. At first Akako had put the cot in the “living room,” but Emma asked her the next day to move the cot into the bedroom, only a few feet from her bed.
The first “night” she spent there, Emma had experienced the same claustrophobia as when she’d been locked in a bunker underneath Sergei Bykov’s Russian estate. She didn’t feel that cramped, but still didn’t get more than an hour of sleep at a stretch. Whenever she closed her eyes, she imagined she could hear the walls crack, ready to give way and bury her under tons of rock. Why had she agreed to come here? There were at least a hundred motels in Rampart City where she could have stayed to avoid the assassin.
With Akako in the bedroom, Emma felt more relaxed. Akako was like the roommate Emma had wanted in college, the kind she could talk to for hours at night until they fell asleep. Emma listened far more than she talked; Akako seemed grateful for the opportunity to have someone to talk to after months of loneliness.
What Akako mostly talked about was her old life, the one she’d left behind to be with Aggie. Like the other parallel universes Akako knew about through her communication with the other Reds, it was largely the same as Emma’s world. The main difference there was that the Japanese had colonized America instead of the Europeans, so Asians were the majority there.
“When I went into English Literature, my parents thought I was nuts,” Akako said one night. Akako smiled in the dim orange glow of a nightlight she had installed so Emma could find her way to the bathroom. “Turns out it was really handy when I came here.”
Emma already knew why Akako had come to this world—she had been married to a man named Aggie Joubert, an assistant professor at the university where Akako was a graduate student. What Emma hadn’t realized was how much Akako had loved her Aggie. “We got married after only two weeks. Everyone said we were crazy. My family wouldn’t even go to the wedding. They didn’t want me to marry a white man, even if he was well educated. I didn’t care. I saw him in the library and I just knew we should be together. So did he. When we actually got up the courage to talk to each other, it was like we were already married. The actual ceremony was a formality.”
Emma reached across the gap between them to put a hand on Akako’s shoulder as she began to cry. “We were only married three months before it happened. We’d just moved into our new house—where we were going to raise our family—when Aggie died. He was on his way home from class and someone ran a green light. Then he was gone.”
“I’m sorry,” Emma said. She wiped tears from her own eyes at the sadness in Akako’s voice. She could imagine she would feel the same pain if something happened to Jim.
“That’s not the worst part,” Akako said.
“It wasn’t?”
“No.” Akako turned on the cot so that her back faced Emma. “I was pregnant at the time it happened. Not as far along as you, just about six weeks. I was going to tell Aggie when he came home from class that night, but he never did.”
“What happened to the baby?”
“I lost it,” Akako said with a sob. “I had a miscarriage a week after the funeral.”
“Oh no. That’s terrible.”
“That’s why when I heard her voice, I came here.”
“Her voice?”
“A little girl’s voice. She brought me to her sandbox and Red—the one who used to work here—was there. She told me I could replace him to be with your Aggie.” Akako sobbed again. “It made sense eventually. I mean, I didn’t have anything left there. Aggie was dead, our baby was dead, the house was going to be foreclosed on, and my family hated me. Why not start over here? At least here I have Aggie—more or less.”
It took another night for Akako to elaborate on that last sentence. “I love Aggie, I do, but it’s still kind of weird. I never experimented even as an undergrad and all the sudden here I am kissing another woman and—you know.”
Emma didn’t really know the full mechanics of sex between women, that wasn’t part of her usual studies, but she nodded. Clearly Akako needed to pour out her heart to someone and Emma was her closest friend other than Aggie. “It must be an adjustment.”
“In some ways it’s better. My Aggie wasn’t really experienced, you know? Neither was I. But Aggie—this Aggie—she knows what I want. I don’t know if it’s because she’s a witch or that she’s been around so long. I guess it doesn’t really matter. There’s still this part of me, the part brought up by my parents, that says what we’re doing is wrong.”
“But you love each other. That’s what matters.”
“That’s what I tell myself. Sometimes, though, I wonder if maybe I am just experimenting. Maybe this is a fling and eventually I’ll find myself a nice man like Mommy and Daddy wanted. How stupid would
that be after all this?”
Though Akako smiled, there were tears in her eyes. Emma had known it must have been difficult for Akako to leave her life behind to come here, but she hadn’t really understood how painful it was until now. Akako had to battle her own inner demons besides all of the other adjustments to live here. “You’ve been together eighteen months already. Some marriages don’t last that long.” The moment Emma said this, she realized her mistake. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“No, I know what you mean. I’ve thought about that myself too. This Aggie and I have been together longer than my Aggie and I, but still it feels temporary. I guess to her even if we are together fifty years it would still be temporary in the scheme of things.”
“I’m sure she doesn’t think of it like that. It took her a long time to get over Mr. Chiostro dying—and that was over a hundred fifty years ago.”
“She still has his name.” Akako smiled sadly again. “Maybe I’m not the only one who thinks of it as a fling.”
“Aggie loves you. She’s always happiest when you come back.”
“I guess you’re right,” Akako said and then fell asleep.
It was a month later, when Emma was nearly asleep, when she heard Akako sit up on the cot. Though her eyes were closed, Emma could feel Akako stare at her. “I really envy you for doing this,” Akako said quietly. “So many times I’ve laid in bed and tried to imagine hearing a baby crying—my baby crying. I imagine what she’d look like, whether she’d have my eyes or Aggie’s. If I try really hard I can even imagine holding her in my arms.”
Emma didn’t say anything; she pretended to still be asleep. She knew this was a confession she wasn’t meant to hear. She didn’t flinch when she felt Akako’s hand touch her stomach. The baby kicked in response to Akako’s touch.
“But how would it work? I’m stuck here and Agnes can’t live here, not without giving up her powers. I could never ask her to do that for me. And how could we even make a baby? We could go to a sperm bank, but it wouldn’t really be our baby. I don’t want some stranger’s baby; I want Agnes’s baby.” Akako patted Emma’s stomach as if to soothe the baby inside. “You’re so much braver than I am. Here you are having your baby alone and with someone trying to kill you and I can’t even talk to Agnes about any of this.”
Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis Page 69