Girl Takes The Oath (An Emily Kane Adventure Book 5) Page 3

  When Bauer looked up, he saw her standing over them, and caught a glimpse into her eyes, dark as coals, yet with a glare as if they were on fire. Was this what his friend had tried to warn him about, what he’d seen that day at the Sea Trials? She reached down to help them up and he shuddered at the sight.

  “We can go on, if you like,” she said. “But I suspect you two have had enough.”

  Later, sitting in the locker room, a towel draped over his head, he marveled over the strangeness of it all. She’d beaten him soundly, and yet managed not to inflict any serious injury, which should have seemed more miraculous to him than anything else that had transpired, if he could have brought his mind to focus on it.

  “Don’t drag me into anything like that again,” Trowbridge snarled at him.

  “There’s something not right about her,” Bauer muttered. “I just don’t…”

  “She let us off easy. If you can’t see that…”

  “I don’t care if you and everyone else thinks she’s the next best thing. I don’t like her.”

  “Whatever you’re planning, leave me out of it,” Trowbridge said as he left the room.

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  Chapter Three

  The Chrysanthemum Emissary

  “They’re definitely targeting her, sir,” Midshipman 2/C Zaki Talib said. “I’ve seen ’em shadowing her, Bauer and Gunderson, like they’re waiting for something to ring her up for.”

  “Anyone else notice this?” asked 1/C Jeremy Funderburk, Midshipman Commander for the first semester, and Operations Officer for the entire Brigade of the Academy.

  McDonough and Carnot raised their hands and a scattered grumbling bounced around the circle of midshipmen standing in running clothes on the edge of Farragut Field. Emily stood on one side, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, uncomfortable with all the attention directed at her.

  “This isn’t worth our notice, sir,” she said. “It’s my problem.”

  “No, Tenno,” Funderburk replied. “This is about unit cohesion. It’s not just about you. Besides, you were an important part of our winning the Color Company competition last year.”

  “And it’s also about the honor code,” Talib piped up. “A midshipman doesn’t just tell the truth, but also ensures that the truth is known.”

  “Yeah, that too,” Funderburk said.

  “Well, we should just be prepared then,” Emily said. “If we close ranks, they may start targeting our plebes, you know, like ratcheting up the ‘harassment package’ on them.”

  “I think it may already have started,” McDonough said. “Didn’t we have two separate ‘mutinies’ declared last week by interlopers from the Seventeenth?”

  Murmurs of assent and commiseration confirmed the shared suspicion among the upperclassmen in the circle about the meaning of these incidents.

  “Any idea why they’re pissed at you, Tenno?” Funderburk asked.

  “None, sir.”

  “Aw, c’mon, sir,” McDonough groaned. “Everyone knows Bauer’s just jealous ’cause we outclassed the Seventeenth two years in a row.”

  “Stow that, sailor,” Funderburk barked. “We solve our own problems. We don’t waste time blaming others.”

  “I just think it might be better for the company if you let me handle this on my own,” Emily offered.

  “And just how do you propose to do that?”

  “I don’t know, sir. Mainly keep my head down. But it might be easier to do if you guys keep your distance for awhile.”

  “I don’t like the sound of anyone in the Fightin’ 28th just keeping their head down,” Funderburk roared. “But you may have a point,” he added in quieter tones, “at least when it comes to our plebes. In the meantime, I’ll sound out the Brigade Chief about it.”

  Emily winced to hear this last remark.

  “Can’t we just keep it in-company, you know, solve our own problem?”

  Funderburk tilted his head as he considered her suggestion. The wind whipped through everyone’s clothing, and he glanced at his watch.

  “It’s almost oh-six-hundred. We need to get a move on to finish our run before reveille.” The group broke up as each person ran off at their own pace, and Emily lingered behind, still troubled by the potential consequences of Talib’s having drawn the Company Commander’s attention to what might otherwise have remained her own private irritation.

  ~~~~~~~

  “Trowbridge isn’t so bad,” Carnot said, as the three of them walked behind the statue of Chief Justice Roger Taney on the brickwork in front of the State House, a waxing moon illuminating the evening more effectively than the street lights. From that spot, they could see down Francis Street and Cornhill Street, two spokes radiating from State Circle. The angle wasn’t quite right to see very far down East Street, and the docks were not visible from that vantage either.

  “I kinda figured that out the other day, Stacie,” Emily said.

  “You mean in the hand to hand class?”

  “Yeah. I probably shouldn’t have thrown him around quite so hard.”

  “You threw him?” Midshipman 2/C C. J. Tanahill said. “He’s huge.”

  “I know,” Stacie said, sharing CJ’s astonishment, even though she’d been there to see it. “I have no idea where you get the strength for that stuff. I mean, look at you. You’re just a twig.”

  “Well, I may not have a pair of guns like this,” Emily said, giving Stacie’s biceps a pinch. “But I don’t supply most of the force. It’s all in how you hold their hand. A squeeze and a well-timed twist and they sorta throw themselves.”

  “I wish you’d teach me how to do that,” CJ said.

  “CJ, you already know how. It’s not really different from the stuff we learned in our first hand to hand class.”

  “Yeah, right,” Stacie snorted. “Why do I think you bring your own special magic to those encounters.”

  “Well, whatever it is, you know I’m no good at that stuff, Em,” CJ said.

  “If you get up early enough, we can do a little practice on the field tomorrow.”

  “You mean like oh-five-hundred?” she moaned.

  “I’ll be there,” Stacie chirped, a broad smile spreading across her face. “Any time you want to teach me stuff.”

  Emily remembered a time when making that admission would have been too painful for Stacie. Thrown together for the first time two years earlier, at the end of their plebe summer, she couldn’t conceal a low opinion of her future roommates, two skinny, unprepossessing girls, and fancying herself a tough guy in a man’s navy. For all the iron she pumped, little did Stacie know then what genuine toughness looked like. And Emily remembered hoping she wouldn’t have to be the one to show her.

  “There’s that guy again,” CJ said.

  “You think it’s the same one as before?” Stacie asked.

  “He’s just standing there.”

  “You really think he’s following us?” Emily asked.

  “It looks like the same jacket, and that haircut is hard to miss,” CJ said.

  “Try not to look at him,” Emily said. “Listen, you two head over to Maryland Avenue, and I’ll try to lure him down the alley to Main Street. I can circle around to the other alley and come up behind him. Then we can find out who he is.”

  “What are we supposed to do?” CJ asked.

  “If all goes well, nothing. Let me take care of it.”

  “No way we’re leaving you alone,” Stacie said.

  “Fine,” Emily said, with one arched eyebrow. “But don’t get involved unless I’m in trouble. Circle back along the east side of the circle, but keep your distance, okay?” After some reluctant throat clearing, they nodded and Emily shooed them along. “Now get going, you two.”

  With one eye on her friends, and the other sighting the mysterious figure standing in the shadows along Francis Street, Emily watched for her opportunity from behind the statue. As soon as CJ and Stacie cleared the bottom of the stairs leading to the avenue, the man w
alked quickly up toward the circle, moving so as to keep them in sight. Emily waited until he had cleared the intersection, from which point he’d have an unobstructed view of her by the upper portico of the State House. With a quick glance to make sure he’d seen her, Emily walked over to an alley between two colonial-style town houses and broke into a run the moment she was out of his sight. Once on Main Street, she turned left and stepped as quickly as she could without drawing attention to herself, weaving in and out of the evening restaurant crowds thronging the sidewalks.

  Fifty yards down, she stopped abruptly before the second alley connecting Main Street to State Circle, pressed her back against the side of a building and studied the passenger side window of a parked car, looking for any indication that the mysterious stranger had passed the other end of the alley. The glare from a nearby streetlight washed out the reflection, and probably made her own reflection even more visible than her shadow’s would be. A deep breath cleared her mind of all the distractions of the street. Who did she expect this stranger to be? One of Bauer’s buddies from the Seventeenth hoping to catch her in some petty infraction? Or perhaps someone aiming a deeper embarrassment at her?

  For the tiniest moment, the thought of darker enemies from her past flashed across her consciousness. The face of Colonel Park, with her bleached blonde hair, sneered at her. “But you’re already dead,” Emily thought. “I killed you in Kamchatka.” And her uncle, David Walker, had made it his mission to hunt down and kill every possible loose thread from Colonel Park’s team. It couldn’t be any of them. And what of David himself—cruel, baleful man, his face never far from her thoughts, tied as it was to the memory of her father? She remembered the expression on his face that terrible night, after she’d brought the blade of her katana crashing down through his collarbone, tearing a vast, bloody canyon into his chest. Finally at peace, reconciled to the fact of her survival, he’d never resembled her father more than at that moment. And then he was gone.

  The headlights of a car turning out of Conduit Street flashed in her face, drawing her back from the dream of dead souls, and for a brief moment the whole scene was lit up, allowing her to glimpse the startled reflection of the stalker lurking just a few feet inside the mouth of the alley. Had he seen her too? No, the lights would have washed out any image of her he might have noticed. “Better move now, before his eyes adjust.”

  With a sudden turn, she charged into the alley, brooking no resistance from the dark figure who met her there, more surprised than she was. A quick shove, and as he stumbled back she seized his wrist and twisted hard, spinning him into the brick wall.

  “Who are you, and what do you want?” she growled, with her face pressed up to his ear. He said nothing for a moment. A bit more thumb pressure applied to the back of the hand she held at an awkwardly contorted angle brought no results, even though it must have caused him intense pain. Finally, after a long moment in which they exhaled in a sort of harmony, he muttered in heavily accented English, “Please, release me, Ohime-sama.” The strange words, the voice, and maybe even the shape of the side of his face shadowed in the dim light of the alley, it all began to seem familiar. And he wasn’t the first person to call her “princess.”

  “Kano, is that you?” she blurted out, startled, and let go of his hand. When he turned to face her, the sorrow in his eyes seemed almost to push her back. After a brief second, he fell to his knees and stared resolutely at her shoes.

  “Please, forgive me, Ohime-sama,” he said, now speaking very formal Japanese. “I did not mean to cause you any distress.”

  “But… what are you doing… I mean, how….” Emily stared down at him, almost unable to complete a sentence. “Get up, Kano-san,” she said, finally, in equally formal Japanese. “And please do not call me that. It is inappropriate.” When he remained on his knees, she became concerned. “If you will not stand, I must kneel with you, and I’d rather not get this uniform dirty.”

  Kano mulled over her words, and with a grunt and a smooth, rocking motion, leaned forward and pushed himself up onto his feet.

  “Now, tell me what you’re doing here, and why you’re following me.”

  “Her Imperial Highness, the Crown Princess sent me.”

  “She what…,” Emily gasped out, flabbergasted.

  “You are in danger, and so is Princess Toshi. Her Highness sent me to keep you safe.”

  “Princess Toshi is…”

  “Yes, she is in danger, and so are you. There is a conspiracy.”

  “I don’t need protecting,” she said, though a closer consultation with her heart would probably reveal what she really meant: she didn’t want protecting.

  Having put the turbulent events of her high school years behind her at the Academy, she was unaccustomed to feel the morbid fatalism that had served her so well in those dark times. But there it was again, curling over the edge of her mood as ever. She didn’t want protecting because she preferred to face the danger, whatever it might prove to be, to smile at death and let it claim her, if it would. Princess Toshi’s safety was another matter, another tie to this world, since she could not trifle with the destiny of a grand-daughter of Amaterasu-omikami, the great goddess of the sun—if one believed the ancient stories.

  “There is no time,” Kano said, as the two of them glanced together up the alley and saw CJ and Stacie enter at the other end. “We must not be seen together. Take your friends out that way, and I’ll leave from this end. And watch out for the cameras.”

  Emily smiled at Kano’s warning, so reminiscent of her father, who played games with her as a child designed to teach her this same caution. She seemed always to know where to find the cameras, and how to avoid them. Perhaps she’d let that discipline slip at the Academy, with so many other disciplines to attend to. “Wait there,” she called out to her friends. “I’ll come to you.” When she turned back to check, Kano had already slipped away.

  “Who was that guy?” Stacie asked.

  “Just an old acquaintance, it turns out. Harmless.”

  “But what did he want?” CJ persisted. “And why was he kneeling in front of you?”

  “That was weird,” Stacie added.

  “Oh… you saw that?” Emily muttered. “It was nothing. He had some news for me.”

  “It must have been important, if he was going to follow us all evening just to deliver it,” CJ said, voice dripping with insinuation.

  “Well, I’m sorry, Miss Nosey, but you’re just gonna have to take my word for it that there’s nothing delicious in his news for you to pick over.”

  The two girls harrumphed at Emily, until Stacie said, “C’mon, it’s getting late.”

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  Chapter Four

  Spirit and Spiritedness

  Days slipped into weeks in the rigorous routines of the brigade. Bauer, or his buddies, shadowed Emily most days, skulking around corners, listening at doors left ajar, looking for some sort of actionable infraction. She proved an elusive target, even if her friends didn’t, especially McDonough, whose quick temper was easy to trip up. And the plebes of the Fightin’ 28 registered a slight uptick in the frequency of trivial incidents, the so-called harassment package, noteworthy for the rate at which they were disciplined by upperclassmen from outside their company, a development which should have caught the attention of battalion or brigade-level command, if anyone inquired.

  Poetry had never been her favorite subject before now, and the loud grumbling among the midshipmen who could not see its relevance to their eventual command responsibilities didn’t do much to recommend it. But somehow, Lt. Commander Marquez, a Marine aviator taking a tour teaching literature at the Academy, made the Romantics resonate for her, as if they articulated the very essence of human spirituality in the voice of nature itself.

  “What difference do you see between the English and the German Romantics, Miss Tenno?” Marquez asked in the middle of class. He’d taken to calling on her most days, no doubt because she showed some enthusiasm fo
r the topic.

  “The spirit Wordsworth finds in nature seems to be Christian, sir, but Hölderlin appeals to something older, something pagan. It’s not the poetry of grace and salvation.”

  “Interesting,” Marquez replied. “If it’s not about salvation, in what sense is it romantic?”

  “Doesn’t Hölderlin speak of sacrifice?” Kathy Gunderson offered. “Why isn’t that Christian?”

  “But in ‘Bread and Wine’ he says we’ve come too late, that the gods have already departed,” Marquez observed. “Does that sound Christian to you?”

  “It sounds like despair, sir,” said Zaki Talib.

  “He also sounds a positive note,” Emily said. “He says the gods left poets behind as a token of their eventual return.”

  “Yeah, but it’s still all about pagan gods, Tenno,” Gunderson said, now taking the opposite view, and perhaps not really caring about any side. “What’s that got to do with Christianity? Jesus doesn’t need poets.”

  “That’s my point,” Emily replied. “He’s appealing to an older form of spirituality, and maybe he thinks Christianity is a variation on that, just as the bread and wine of communion is derived from Bacchus and Ceres, you know, Dionysus and Demeter.”

  “But you don’t believe those gods are coming back, do you?” Gunderson sneered.

  “Aren’t we talking about what Hölderlin believes?” Emily said, as if she shared nothing of the poet’s sensibility. But on some level, she did share his sense that an ancient spirituality could cut through the noise of the present moment and speak to us, as it had already spoken to her.

  “Whatever,” Gunderson said, rolling her eyes.