Girl Takes The Oath

by Jacques Antoine

  Emily took a deep breath and faced her enemy. “People have mistaken me for a demon before.”

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  Chapter Twenty Seven

  I am Death

  Events and images swirled through Kathy Gunderson’s mind so rapidly—could she ever have dreamt of what she saw unfolding in front of her at this moment? Her enemy, and her enemy’s friends risked everything to protect her, had probably been doing it all year, though she hardly wished to face such a harrowing thought.

  She remembered arguing with Carnot the other night and running afoul of men in an alley, then waking up in that van and seeing how they’d beaten Stacie. She must have followed and tried to save her in that alley… but why would she do that for her? How long had she been under that hood, hours… days? Then this foul, evil woman, beautiful in a way that made her even more terrifying, who would kill without hesitation, she brought them to this concrete hole in the ground, and Kathy knew it might as well be her grave.

  She watched as the two of them stood quietly, facing each other, the one seething with focused, malevolent energy, the other calm, seemingly unaware of the peril surrounding her, merely breathing. One in a fighting stance, the other holding herself somehow differently, a hand extended as if in greeting, the other ready to receive a gift.

  When the violence began, Kathy’s eyes could barely follow Diao Chan’s hands, they moved so quickly. At first, Tenno seemed able to keep up, to block and counter. Kathy was no judge of these things, but as invincible as Tenno had seemed that night in Cumberland Court, when she handled Casey, Caspar and Martens effortlessly, she seemed vulnerable now, even overmatched. Kathy knew all their lives now depended on her.

  The blow, when it came, fist striking face, was not nearly as loud as Kathy thought it would be. Tenno spun away from Diao Chan, lost her footing and fell to the floor. Diao Chan’s men cackled their approval.

  “Tenno-san, do you still think you can resist?” Diao Chan said.

  Kathy cringed as Tenno picked herself up, and stood opposite. Another sequence of strikes and blocks, kicks and grabs, Tenno managed to gain what looked like the upper hand until Diao Chan turned the tables in a sudden pivot and kick to Tenno’s chest, which sent her tumbling backwards. The expression on her face no longer seemed impervious in the way that had so infuriated Kathy and her friends. Now shaken, her eyes radiated doubt instead of that dark fire. Kathy gasped to see it.

  When Tenno picked herself up once more, Diao Chan attacked again, this time before she could set herself, a spinning kick that caught Tenno on the side of the face, another quiet contact that drove her to the floor again near one of the men. His foot dangled over her head, ready to come crashing down, and Kathy thought this was the end. Even when Tenno swept his other foot, upending him as she spun away and sprang up again, Kathy thought she could feel the desperation in Tenno’s heart.

  Stacie must feel it, too, she thought, glancing over to see her struggling to free her hands, newly revived from her stupor. If only she could be of some help, strong and tough as she’d always seemed in the past. But if Tenno couldn’t stand up to Diao Chan, what could Stacie hope to accomplish? Kathy shifted her position to conceal her efforts.

  Speaking to her men, Diao Chan said something in what Kathy assumed was Chinese, an order perhaps, or a joke at her victim’s expense. Then she turned to Tenno and laughed.

  “Now you see how much better my father’s experiment is than your grandfather’s could ever be.”

  “I am no genetic experiment,” Emily muttered. “Haven’t you learned yet… there is only training.”

  “Pathetic,” Diao Chan said. “Tang Tian used to say the same thing. But your Japanese mysticism will not save you, or them, just as it could not save him. We know all about the Crown Princess’s little schemes, and the fable she uses to seduce her agents, the samurai who believe you are a Genji, or that it could make any difference even if you were.” She turned to sneer at the body of the man lying by the van. “I imagine he’s just another one of those fools, and you see what became of him.”

  Bizarre as that exchange seemed to Kathy, she was at least heartened to see a spark of defiance in Tenno’s eyes. If only she could rally.

  Diao Chan’s next onslaught seemed even fiercer than before, as if now she meant to kill and not merely subdue. But Tenno’s response was different this time. Instead of blocking and striking, dueling her opponent, she merely leaned away from the attack, elusive as water or air. Then in a sudden return, just when Diao Chan’s frustration peeked out from her otherwise stony mien, Tenno slapped an errant punch away, tying her opponent’s arms up in the inertia of the miss, and leaned her full weight forward into a short, low punch to Diao Chan’s ribs, followed by a quick, loud slap to her face.

  As Diao Chan staggered back, stunned by the sudden reversal, Tenno smiled at her and tilted her head, almost like some sort of feral animal contemplating its prey. Enraged, Diao Chan roared something incoherent, and charged ahead, looking to strike at her enemy with hands or feet, even claws if she’d had any. But Tenno side-stepped the onslaught, pivoting as Diao Chan went by, and brought a high kick around to the back of her head, sending her face first into the concrete floor.

  “Being able to take a punch is as important as being able to deliver one,” Tenno said. “Perhaps your father never taught you that lesson.”

  With a broad scrape across her cheek and forehead, Diao Chan picked herself up and faced Tenno once again, taking a breath and spreading her arms horizontally to settle herself, then drawing them back together into a fighting stance. Tenno tilted her head once again as she eyed her opponent darkly, then shifted her weight onto her back foot and rotated her arms in widely overlapping circles. Kathy found the movement of her hands mesmerizing, as if the curves they traced prevented her from focusing.

  The movement of Diao Chan’s feet was so quick, Kathy couldn’t understand how she hadn’t managed to strike Tenno’s face. But once again, elusive as the air, Tenno evaded each strike without blocking. Fierce combinations, kicks and hand-strikes all somehow went awry, though Kathy could hardly see how. But she could sense Diao Chan’s frustration growing, as well as the deteriorating mood of her men as they watched from the side. Would they dare intervene?

  In what seemed a desperate effort, Diao Chan swung wildly for the face, and this time Tenno blocked, or at least swatted the fist aside, then stepped forward to deliver a series of strikes to Diao Chan’s chest and head. None of them were overpowering, all were controlled, balanced by the movement of Tenno’s hips and shoulders. Kathy couldn’t see all the blows, but she could see the toll they took on Diao Chan, who’d been hit so many times she began to seem intoxicated. When she stumbled back to get out of range, Tenno crossed one foot behind the other and kicked her hard in the center of her chest, sending Diao Chan crashing into the concrete wall.

  Kathy could hardly take her eyes off their enemy, leaning against the wall, searching her face to see if any fight remained in her, and it took a moment for those dark, hateful eyes to find a focus again. When they did, she shrieked something in Chinese, and Kathy turned to see one of the men pointing the gun at Tenno, his other hand still holding the sword Tenno’s friend had dropped.

  With the sound of the blast, magnified by the echo chamber of the parking garage, Kathy hardly noticed Stacie fling herself in front of Tenno, letting the bullet hit her square in the chest, then slump to the floor, inert as a sack of potatoes. She’d managed to free herself, thank goodness... but at what cost? The magnitude of her sacrifice would probably hit home later. For now, through the swirl of emotions, Kathy felt something like relief—her protector still lived.

  In the confusion of smoke and noise, her eyes dazzled by the muzzle flash, she could barely follow what happened next. Somehow, Tenno had pivoted around Stacie’s body before the man could fire again, and in the spin, she seized his wrist and smashed through the back of his elbow with her free hand. The gun clattered on the floor as he howled
in agony, and before she knew it, Tenno had wrenched the sword away, gripping it now like a dagger with the tip pointing at the floor. She swung it up along his thigh, slicing through his belt and tearing a huge gash in his belly and chest. The same motion seemed to carry her around, hacking through the side of a second man’s neck, a spray of blood blossoming behind her as she let the movement carry her past him, to slash across the throat of the last man, who’d been as transfixed as Kathy by the sudden burst of violence Tenno had just unleashed.

  Did she conceal that spirit inside herself all the time? It wasn’t difficult to see why someone capable of such things might go to great lengths, even adopt an attitude of extreme reserve, to keep it in check. Kathy’s reassessment of her entire relationship with Tenno, of the meaning of her own behavior, percolated behind her eyes as she watched her fighting for their lives.

  But in the meantime, Diao Chan had managed to get hold of the gun and raised her arm toward Kathy. She tried to yell some defiant threat—“Stop or I’ll shoot her!”—but Tenno leapt at her anyway, and when she panicked and tried to bring the gun around to shoot Tenno herself, she was too slow. The blade sliced down through Diao Chan’s forearm with the slick sound of wind whistling through a bamboo grove. What did it take to slice through bone? Kathy hardly knew. The gun, still in the grip of the hand, came to rest on the floor, the fingers flexing in one last spasm that no longer responded to the rest of the arm.

  They stared at each other for what seemed like forever to Kathy, though it probably lasted less than a second, the one girl’s eyes finally tamed by the loss of a limb, strangely not registering the pain it must entail, her face bruised and bloody, the other’s eyes almost too severe to behold.

  “Who are you?” Diao Chan hissed at her now triumphant enemy.

  Tenno replied in a tone so dark as practically not to come from her body: “I am death.”

  In a stroke as fast as thought, she pivoted away from Diao Chan and then back around towards her, letting the blade pass through her neck as if it were slicing water. Perhaps Diao Chan didn’t quite know what had happened, her expression showing only perplexity… until her head tipped slightly to one side, and then slid off her shoulder, making a dull thump as it hit the concrete floor and rolled away.

  The next moment, as she cut Kathy loose, her eyes softened with sympathy and she turned to cradle Stacie’s head in her arms, her shoulders shaking. Could this angel of death be weeping? Kathy tried to stand—her legs feeble from bondage—and put her hand on the back of Tenno’s neck.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “Stacie was so brave. I feel like it’s my fault. She wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for me.”

  Tenno turned to look at her, and in her eyes Kathy saw something she could hardly have expected, a serenity in the depths of those black eyes, as if she’d resigned herself to all the suffering the world had to offer, absorbed it and was ready to pass over to another one. The imperviousness that had so irritated her these past few years—Kathy now saw its true meaning.

  “It’s not your fault,” Tenno said. “You didn’t kill anyone.”

  Kathy was grateful for the acknowledgment, even if the tone of voice it came in seemed harder than steel. But what else could she hope for, given the circumstances, and the weight of her own conscience? The moment called for mourning more than reassurance.

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  Chapter Twenty Eight

  One Last Sacrifice

  Emily looked down again into Stacie’s face, bruised and swollen from her final ordeal, and yet somehow placid in death. She’d died a hero, and maybe it showed in the set of her jaw, and the shine on her lifeless eyes. But the sacrifice was too great, and Emily knew all too well that she wasn’t worth it. That she had survived to serve Princess Toshi mattered to her, but it could have made no part of the calculus that led Stacie to this moment. She brushed the dead girl’s hair aside, and closed her eyes, and wondered if the swelling would go down before her parents would have to see her.

  “Your friend, he’s still alive,” Gunderson called out in a shaky voice.

  Emily turned her attention to Kano. Blood had pooled around his body and seeped under one tire of the van. His breathing was labored and heavy, but his eyes still flashed with life.

  “Kano-san, you shouldn’t have come,” she said to him in Japanese, a private sentiment she didn’t feel like sharing with Gunderson.

  “I did my duty,” he replied.

  “But it cost too much. I am not worthy of your sacrifice. Your training, the perfection of your skills, they have come to nothing, and all to defend someone as worthless as me.”

  “You are mistaken. My skills have no meaning, unless they can be used in the service of something greater than myself. I am honored to have been able to give my life in your service. Your spirit, your chi, is beautiful, Ohime-sama. I see now what the Crown Princess knew all along, that I can entrust the safety of Princess Toshi to your capable hands.”

  “No, Kano. You don’t have to die. We can get help.” She turned to Gunderson and said, “Quick, look for a cell phone, maybe in one of their pockets, or in the van.”

  “It is no use,” Kano said, now speaking to both of them in English. “I don’t have much time, and there is one last service I must do for you. Place the sword in my hand, and when they ask, you must say I killed them all.”

  Gunderson stared blankly at him, and Emily shook her head.

  “But why, Kano-san. These people were not worthy of dying by your sword.”

  “The conspirators will use it as a weapon against you if they discover that you killed her. If they think I did it, they will merely be discouraged.”

  Emily nodded reluctantly and glanced at Gunderson, who nodded back at her.

  “I’ll say whatever you need me to say. You saved my life, both of you, and I owe you…”

  Kano smiled to hear this, until his face stiffened and took on the form of a mask, behind which no light shone any longer in his eyes. Emily bowed her head to the floor in front of him and held it there, until she heard the sound of whimpering and got up to investigate. Crouching behind the van, where she must have crept when Diao Chan’s men were focused on the fight with Emily, she found Ruochen Ma, face ashen and eyes red with tears. When she touched her shoulder, the girl shivered in fear.

  “It’s okay,” Emily said. “You’re safe now. Diao Chan is dead.”

  Tottering a little, and unable to believe the truth until she saw for herself the hated head lolling a few feet from its body, Ruochen shuddered to look at it, and then cried out, “But my family… they are still in danger. You don’t know these people.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ve done what I can for them. A friend is trying to arrange a safe passage.”

  “Who are you?” Gunderson asked, eyes wide and mouth agape, and perhaps not remembering what happened to the last person to ask that question.

  “You know who I am, a classmate, a midshipman…”

  “You know what I mean. How do you have the resources to do all these things, to help her family, who I assume is halfway around the world, to command the service of this man, whoever he is, to fight off these men with his assistance… I hardly know what to think. I owe you my life, I know that much, and you’ll have my gratitude ’til the end of my days, I suppose.”

  “I am nothing,” Emily murmured, unhappy to be reminded of the outsize impact her troubles seemed to have on those around her.

  “That’s not what he thought,” she said, gesturing to Kano’s lifeless body. “He spoke to you like you’re some sort of royalty.”

  Emily grew impatient with this subject and searched in the pockets of the dead for a phone. “It’s getting late,” she said. “We need to notify the authorities.”

  “Do you mean NCIS?” Kathy asked. Emily considered her suggestion while she continued to search. Everett and Horton would have to be notified eventually, because Naval personnel were involved, and especially because Caspar had been killed. B
ut she didn’t like the idea of dealing with them just yet, given their blunt misreading of the events that led to this scene.

  “There’s a phone in the van,” Ruochen said, and dug it out of the glove compartment. Emily looked at the time, just after oh-three-hundred, and groaned.

  “I guess it can’t be helped,” she muttered, and punched in a number. When a groggy voice picked up, she said, “Ed, I need you.”

  “Who is this?” he mumbled.

  “It’s me, Tenno Michiko.”

  “Do you have any idea what time it is?”

  “I’m sorry about that, Ed, but I wouldn’t have called if it wasn’t important.” She told him how to find them. “It’s a bloody scene here, ten dead, another Chinese hit-squad. Contact NCIS for me, but it’ll be worth your while to make sure your people get here first.”

  “Because you want me to put a sympathetic twist on the scene?”

  “No. Because you deserve a heads-up, and besides, you owe me.”

  In the time it took Braswell to round up his partner and get to the mall, Emily tried to help Kathy and Ruochen find their sea-legs.

  “If anyone asks you, Kano killed them all, except for the people Diao Chan shot.”

  Ruochen nodded. “I didn’t see most of it, because I was hiding behind the van,” she said.

  “I’m sorry to ask, but it’s important. Other lives may depend on it.”

  “You can count on me,” Kathy said. “I owe it to Stacie, and I owe it to you. I was such an ass to both of you, all year long. I hope you can forgive me.”

  “You don’t need my forgiveness,” Emily said. “Maybe you just need me to trust you.”

  “Thanks, Tenno.”

  “My friends call me Em.”

  “M for Michiko?”

  “Yeah. Or for Emily.” When the expression on Kathy’s face showed puzzlement, she added, “That’s what my family call me.”

  “Thanks, Em,” Kathy said, and Ruochen nodded behind her.