Girl Takes The Oath

by Jacques Antoine

  “I don’t follow you, sir.”

  “If you’re convicted of treason, it’s at least a prison term, maybe worse,” Everett hissed at her.

  “But if you help us track Kano’s network,” Horton added, “you can just work off your commitment to the Navy and go free.”

  Emily listened as Agent Everett traced out the consequences of failing to cooperate, for herself, her family and friends. The fact that she hadn’t committed any crimes or participated in any conspiracies—at least not any that could be tied to the death of Dong Zhuo, at least as far as she knew—weakened the force of Everett’s tale of horrors. But the question of her loyalty found its mark, since even she found herself questioning that almost every day. And even though she knew a full inquiry would find no wrongdoing on her part, her friends’ careers could well be ruined by it.

  Still, the strangeness of the proceedings struck her more forcefully than any other aspect of the conversation. Could Kano really be a party to a conspiracy? Was she, without realizing it? All she knew about conspiracies was the one Kano and the Crown Princess warned her about, the one targeting herself and Princess Toshi. And she trusted them absolutely, at least as far as Toshi was concerned. But Horton and Everett seemed to have the meaning of events entirely reversed, thinking she was a conspirator rather than a target—the deadly irony of that error taught her what sort of use she could make of them.

  “I’m not signing this, whatever it is,” she said.

  “It’s the best deal you’re gonna get,” Everett snarled at her. “At least that way you can avoid prison, maybe even be allowed to earn an honorable discharge. If you don’t sign, you make yourself into the primary target of our investigation.”

  “I appreciate the advice, ma’am. Are we done here?” When she stood, Agent Horton stepped between her and the door, standing over her, looking down, but careful not to touch her.

  “I don’t think you realize the gravity of your situation,” he said in his most intimidating, official tone of voice. When Emily looked up into his face—neither afraid, nor angry, nor even resentful—she let him see the full depth of her resolve, and he fell silent, transfixed by whatever it was he saw there, at the bottom of her eyes. After a moment, he stepped aside wordlessly and allowed her to pass.

  ~~~~~~~

  Everett stared at her partner for a moment, the big hulk just standing there, frozen like a department store manikin.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you? You just let her waltz on out of here, like everything’s okay. Weren’t we gonna sweat her a little longer?”

  Horton turned to look at his partner, his face pale, looking bewildered, like a rabbit who’s just felt the shadow of a hawk pass over him. “There wasn’t any point,” he said, finally, in a voice she didn’t expect to hear coming from such a large man.

  “Whaddya mean, no point?”

  “She wasn’t gonna sign, no matter how hard we pressed her.”

  “We’ll never know now, will we?” Everett said. The bigger they are, the harder they fall, she thought.

  “Why don’t we ask the DSS guys what they think?”

  “Fine,” she said, and leaned her head out the door, and called down the hall to Braswell and Padgett.

  “Nice work,” Padgett sneered at Horton. “You really put the screws to her.”

  “Don’t sweat it, big guy,” Braswell said. “She kinda has that effect on people.”

  “What’s your read on her?” Everett asked.

  “About what?” Braswell asked. “You mean, will she cave? I doubt it. The girl’s made of some pretty stern stuff.”

  “Because she didn’t wilt under fire on that bridge, is that what you mean?”

  “Yeah, it’s that, but not just that. She’s tough, but it’s also how she managed the whole situation. Padgett and I were down, and she took charge without hesitation. That’s more than just courage. You don’t get that kind of focus from live-fire exercises.”

  “The girl knows more than she’s letting on,” Padgett said. Everett looked him over as closely as she could without seeming rude. She saw a gleam in his eye, like he had a secret and he wanted to let it out.

  “You guys are real suckers, like this doofus here,” she said with a snort, tilting her head at her partner. “A pretty girl bats her eyes at you, and you’re all lovesick. Next thing, you’ll be telling me she’s got super powers.”

  “You weren’t on that bridge,” Braswell said.

  “I get it, she’s got serious hand-to-hand skills. So what?”

  “Besides, that doesn’t explain the Chinese extradition request,” Padgett finally blurted out. “Why would they do that if there wasn’t more to her story?”

  Braswell glared at his partner, who didn’t seem to realize yet that he’d goofed. Everett smirked at her partner, who was only now beginning to shake the cobwebs out of his addled brain.

  “What extradition request?” he roared. “And why are we just hearing about this now?”

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  Chapter Nineteen

  The Night in which All Cows Are Black

  “I’m not doing it,” Stacie huffed, and plumped down on the edge of the bed in the posture of passive defiance, arms folded, eyes narrowed and lower lip jutting out.

  “You heard what she said. We need to move.”

  “And we’re just supposed to pack up and leave her behind, and not sit with her at meals, or walk to class with her? What happened to unit cohesion?

  “I know,” CJ said, trying to appease her roommate. “We’ll look like we’ve abandoned her. But it’s what she wants, and I don’t feel like arguing with her about it. Do you?”

  Stacie stared at the tiles under her shoes. “We’re supposed to bunk outside the company? I don’t like any of it.”

  “You know as well as I do, whatever’s bugging her, it’ll probably blow over in a week, and then she’ll feel all bad about making us pack and move. At least we’ll have the satisfaction of watching her move all our gear back.”

  “Trouble in paradise, I see,” Kathy Gunderson said from the doorway. “Or maybe you two have finally wised up about that bitch.”

  “Shut your mouth before I shut it for you,” Stacie cried, and jumped off the bed, fists already clenched.

  “I hear NCIS took her away in leg irons. It’s about time, if you ask me.”

  CJ had to step in to keep Stacie from charging into the hall to get at Gunderson. “Don’t let her get to you, Stace.”

  Trowbridge stuck his head in the door—“Need help lugging anything?”

  “You’re doing the right thing, ladies,” Gunderson said. “Put some distance between yourself and that traitor.”

  At these words, CJ turned and slapped her across the face. She wanted to shout some defiance at her, but Gunderson hadn’t been as stunned as CJ hoped, and before she knew it had swung back at her.

  “Hey,” Trowbridge cried out. “Take it easy, girls.”

  But before he could step in to break it up, CJ had reacted more swiftly than even she was used to. A quick, rising block, and driven by instinct or training, or maybe the time spent all those mornings with Emily on Sherman Field, she trapped Gunderson’s hand, twisted it down and then up again, forcing her face into the floor. A little thumb pressure on the back of Gunderson’s hand elicited a muffled shriek and she stopped struggling. “Don’t press your luck, Kathy,” CJ hissed into her ear.

  Once Stacie got over her own surprise at her friend’s decisive action, she rushed over. “CJ, let her go. We don’t need this kind of trouble.”

  “Back off,” CJ snarled, and glowered at Trowbridge, who had tried to intervene on the other side. Then she released Gunderson’s hand, stood up and walked back into the room.

  “You haven’t heard the last of this! I’m putting both of you on report. I’ve got a witness.”

  “I didn’t see anything,” Trowbridge said, and flashed a sneaky smile at Stacie.

  “Are you on their side now, Scott?” Gund
erson wailed.

  “No, Kath. But if you insist on seeing sides here, don’t choose the wrong one.”

  “What’s got into you, CJ?” Stacie asked, once the door closed and the noise of the hallway faded into obscurity.

  “I don’t know. It’s like I was completely in the moment, you know, just doing what seemed natural… like my hands were thinking for me. I wonder if that’s how Em feels all the time.”

  ~~~~~~~

  The room hadn’t felt this quiet for a very long time. Even as her roommates slept, the noise of their dreams could keep her awake. A few thousand other mids slept within a few hundred yards, but their sleep meant nothing to her. Now the silence in her own heart, which had oppressed her so profoundly over the last few months, and especially since the moment she took Jiao Long’s life… by a remarkable sympathy that silence found a pain as deep as itself to echo and resound with.

  Emily sat against the wall, the floor tiles cool against her bare, folded legs, cool air drifting down from the window just above her head. As her breath moved in and out, through her nostrils, into her lungs and back out again, her thoughts followed it out, through the window and across the rooftops of Bancroft Hall, then out along the Severn River, and across the Chesapeake Bay where it could skate along the waves and reflect the dark stars of a moonless night.

  Now her breath came back to her, and her thoughts followed it in to her lungs and heart, and deeper, until she found herself again in the familiar forest and the meadow that had sustained her through the darkest times. The same waterfall at the end of the stream reached out for her, and her feet found the soil, cool and alluvial, placing heel in front of toe as she walked the path. At the end, mist enveloped the pool where the falls came crashing down—how often had she allowed herself to luxuriate in that pool, to find her father’s spirit, commune with his memory? How long had it been since she’d felt truly at home there?

  Behind the falls, she found the cave, welcoming in its darkness, where she never felt any fear, even as she fell deeper and deeper, through the sedimentary history of the Earth until, at the very center, the beating heart of existence where all life-force concentrated itself, she found the wide expanse of the heavens. Breathtaking beauty, more than beautiful, a sublime immensity greeted her, a blackness terrible to behold, and inspiring at the same time. To breathe was to look, to imbibe it all, and Emily took it all inside of herself.

  But all she saw was not for her, or for anyone. So many voices sang to her, at first cacophonous, senseless, squabbling, paying no attention to what she couldn’t help but see. It saw her, too, beckoned to her, offered to take her into itself, dissolved into its eternity, allowing her to be everywhere at once and, finally, nowhere at all. Here was the allure of death, to be no more, and in nothingness perhaps to be reunited with her father.

  In the clamor and clatter of voices, she thought at moments to hear an underlying harmony and rhythm, a promise of musicality that she could not quite bring into focus. Now one voice, now another disturbed the stillness, one malevolent, one distracted by cruel intent, creeping over the walls, hoping to catch her unawares, to trick her into selfish finitude. As she turned more of her attention to it, the quilt of stars receded into an ever greater distance, until she could barely see it, little more than a fuzzy nebula at the limit of her visual acuity, and found herself falling once more through the familiar darkness.

  When she finally hit bottom, with a thud rather softer than she might have expected, she snorted awake and kicked off the sheets that clung to her in a cold sweat. Had she been dreaming, or meditating? She hardly knew. The sun would not rise for another hour, and in the dim, pre-dawn light, Emily felt a new urgency to respond to what the coming days and weeks would bring.

  She dug running clothes out of a drawer, pulled on socks and training shoes, and headed out the door.

  Back to top

  Chapter Twenty

  A Croquet Match

  Rumors spread quickly around the Yard—vague and unfounded at first, but accruing detail in inverse ratio to the availability of facts—and people began to keep their distance from Emily, discreetly at first, and then more decisively as days passed into weeks. Within the Fightin’ 28, the process of divesting took longer. The plebes melted away first, though without really understanding why they should, then the youngsters, and finally the upperclassmen. Seating in the galley at mealtimes posed all sorts of problems, since she had to sit somewhere, but she didn’t want to encourage her friends to think she was safe. So she sat with the plebes and hardly spoke to anyone, and mainly kept her nose in one book or another… though she listened.

  “Gregorovitch,” Funderburk hissed from behind a pillar near the entrance to King Hall.

  “Yes, sir,” the plebe replied, standing as rigidly vertical as he could make himself.

  “Has she spoken to you?”

  “Tenno, sir?”

  “Who else would I be asking you about?”

  “No, sir, I mean, yes, sir.”

  “What’d she tell you?”

  “Nothing, sir.”

  “What the…,” Funderburk said, one hand across his forehead. “So she doesn’t talk to you at meals?”

  “Oh, that, sir. No, she doesn’t really talk to any of us. She just sits and eats. Says pass the salt. She’s very polite, sir.”

  “But I saw you talking to her just now.”

  “Yes, sir. We asked her about this business in the East China Sea, you know, the stuff that was on the news this morning, when a Chinese frigate had a missile lock on one of the JDF destroyers, ’cause, you know, she’s Asian, or something.”

  “And what’d she say?”

  “Nothing, really, sir. I mean, she explained a little bit of the history of those islands, that sort of thing. But it’s not like she was confiding in us.”

  “Really? What’s her interest in it, I wonder.”

  “She just said how the fishing boats like to work those waters, ’cause of the drop off, you know. And like how the Chinese and Japanese fisherman help each other out, and stuff, like they don’t care who owns ’em. But when the governments get involved, suddenly everything’s all tense.”

  “That’s enough, Gregorovitch.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Funderburk flicked his head to the side to indicate to Gregorovitch that his company was no longer needed, and the plebe skittered away just as McDonough and Talib approached.

  “Not here,” Funderburk said, as the stream of people leaving the galley intensified. He indicated a spot in the direction of Gate One, where they might have a little more privacy.

  “What’d he say, sir?” Zaki asked.

  “Nothing. She’s as stoic as ever, like nothing’s changed.”

  “Maybe nothing has,” McDonough offered.

  “Then why’d she kick her roommates out? Is she pissed at them for something? NCIS hasn’t moved on her, and there’s been no word from the Deputy Commandant. The whole thing’s a mystery.”

  “Maybe it’s because of all the bilge coming out of the Seventeenth about her.”

  Funderburk reflected on this suggestion for a moment, hand on chin. “You think she’s blaming Tanahill or Carnot for that? And what about you two? I notice she doesn’t talk to you either.”

  “No, sir,” Zaki said. “It’s nothing like that. CJ says she asked them to leave so they wouldn’t get caught up in whatever NCIS is hatching.”

  “Is that why you two are keeping your distance?”

  “She hasn’t said anything directly to us about NCIS,” McDonough said. “But it’s like that stoic curtain just closed us out. It’s subtle, you know, always polite. But in all the little ways, she makes it clear that she wants to be alone.”

  “And she’s stopped the early morning hand-to-hand lessons,” Zaki said, wistfully.

  “What lessons?” Funderburk and McDonough asked simultaneously.

  “Oh, yeah. That was supposed to be a secret.”

  “No secrets in company, Tal
ib,” Funderburk said.

  Zaki cleared his throat and took a small backwards step. “It was just a favor for Tanahill, sir. You know, pointers on technique. Carnot and I got wind of it, and she included us. We met most mornings at oh-five-hundred on Sherman Field.” McDonough glowered at his friend.

  “Training in the dark,” Funderburk said, half to himself. “If I’d known, I’d have had the entire company out there with her.”

  “Sir, she said if anyone else found out, she’d make us run across the bridge to Jonas Green every morning.”

  “You shoulda told me,” McDonough muled.

  “Sorry about that.”

  “You can really see the impact it’s had on Tanahill,” Funderburk said. “She practically exudes confidence these days.” He rubbed his head for a moment, grumbling under his breath. “Are you guys playing today?”

  “No, sir,” McDonough said. “It’s gonna be all youngsters against the Johnnies.”

  “Ah, yes. That explains the request about not wearing the uniform.”

  “Yes, sir. I think they’ll be wearing straw hats and boaters.”

  “Is Tenno going?”

  “I assume the entire company will be there, sir.”

  “Well, you two make sure she goes, too. While we’re there, let’s make a point of keeping an eye on her.”

  “Sir?” Zaki asked, an anxious expression on his face.

  “So we can report that she didn’t meet with any suspicious types over there.”

  “Suspicious types?”

  “I don’t know, Talib. But I’d like to be able to support her somehow, and this may be the best way to do it. This whole thing is just like NCIS. They intrude on us, but it’s always mysterious, leaving us doubting ourselves, and then they do nothing for weeks, like they’re testing us.”

  McDonough grunted, and Zaki said, “You mean, it’s a loyalty test, sir?”

  “I have no idea,” Funderburk said, “but it’s all very frustrating. They want our loyalty to be to flag and fleet first, then the brigade and our company. But loyalty grows naturally in the other direction, you know, outwards. I can’t tell if they’re watching her or the rest of us.”