Girl Fights Back (Go No Sen) (Emily Kane Adventures) (11 page)

This was definitely not the moment
to explain everything to Sensei. But she would not be able to put off that
moment for long. She needed time to think through what she could tell people,
whom to trust, and how far to trust them.

“Sensei, I need time to think. It’s
all very confusing to me right now. I’ll tell you all about everything in a few
days. Okay?”

He nodded and
gave her a half smile. Danny came out of the dojo and together they went to see
his mom about an apartment.

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Chapter 9:
Yet Another Garage

Emily and Danny’s mother, Laura
Rincon, spoke for about half an hour, once they had shooed Danny out of the
apartment. It was just a big room with a bathroom and walk-in closet on one
end, and a tiny kitchen and dining table on the other. Two large windows faced
out over the driveway toward the street, and a smaller window on the opposite
wall looked out over the neighbor’s backyard. The kitchenette was in the corner
next to the back window, just inside the door. A twin bed stood out from one
side wall, next to the bathroom door. A long, old couch and lamp stretched
under the front windows. The staircase led up the right side of the garage and
was visible from the house through the kitchen windows. The landing at the top
was large enough for a couple of lawn chairs. The studio was small, but clean.
It suited her.

“Where exactly are your parents?”
Mrs. Rincon asked.

“My dad’s traveling in Asia on
business,” she replied.

“I thought your dad was just a
chauffeur,” she asked, a little skeptically.

“He is, but he is also sort of a
bodyguard. His boss likes to have him along on trips like this one.” That was
true enough. Emily was wary of saying too much, of getting caught in a lie.
Especially in front of people she was hoping to live with.

“What about your mom?" Mrs.
Rincon pressed on.

“I don’t know where my mom is. I’ve
never met her,” she said defensively, hoping to play on her sympathies to get
her to back off. Also, it wasn’t exactly a lie. She had never met the woman
whom she had supposed was her mother until the last few days. But she also had
to worry about being consistent in what she told everyone around town. She
needed to fit in among these people, not just for a few days or weeks, but for
as long as a year. She needed to be able to have come from this town in order
to be able to go anywhere else as anything but a fugitive. In Danny’s case, the
problem was perhaps more acute. He was her friend, and becoming more important
to her every day. When the truth about her father’s death came out, she did not
want to be thought to have lied about it. But the lie about her mother was
safe. No one in this town need ever find out Yuki was her mom. If everything
went as Emily hoped, no one in the world would ever connect Michiko Tenno to
Yukiko Kagami.

“Oh! I’m sorry honey. I didn’t
realize,” Mrs. Rincon said, clearly embarrassed for having intruded into this
girl’s private pain.

“It’s okay, Mrs. Rincon. I’m used
to it.” Mrs. Rincon sighed. She would not be able to press her any further now.

“And you’re eighteen?”

“Yes,” she lied, innocently, but with
the documents to back her up.

“And you want the place through
May?”

“Yes, though I might want to stay
through the end of the summer, if that’s okay with you.” Mrs. Rincon hesitated
for a moment, but then relented.

“We don’t really need a lease, I
guess, for a month to month arrangement. Are you sure you can really afford the
rent?” Mrs. Rincon’s jaw dropped when Emily counted out twenty three hundred
dollar bills and said: “That should cover everything through the end of May.”

“I guess I owe you fifty bucks
then. I’ll get it to you tomorrow, if that’s okay.” Laura handed her the key,
looked at her for a moment, and then turned to go. She stopped at the door and
turned again to say: “Why don’t you come over for breakfast in the morning
before school.”

The next day after school Emily
went to the DMV and took a driver’s license test as Michiko Tenno. She passed
the written test and had an appointment for the road test Friday afternoon.
After she passed the road test, she sold the truck registered to George Kane to
Emily Hsiao. She was creating a past for her new identity in Bath County,
Virginia. Later she would convert the paperwork on the dirt bike to a similar
name. It wasn’t safe yet, she judged, to attach her real name to any of these
vehicles. Eventually, she would have to transfer the title to all of her school
records to Michiko Tenno. This was a subject her mind returned to frequently.
She didn’t know quite how she was going to do it, but she was pretty sure she
needed to wait until just before or just after graduation. She didn’t want
anyone at Bath County High School to remember her as the girl who changed names
in her senior year.

On Saturday, she went to the dojo
early to talk to Sensei. She didn’t know exactly what she would say to him. She
hoped it would come to her when she looked him in the eye. He was the only
person there when she got there. Students wouldn’t begin to arrive for another
twenty minutes or so. She went into the office.

“Emily, it’s good to see you, as
always.”

“Hi, Sensei,” she said tentatively,
almost sheepishly. She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, looked him in the
eye and went on. “There’s so much I have to tell you. Everything is different
now. I don’t know where to begin.” Her voice was trembling.

“Emily, what’s wrong? What is it?”

“My dad is dead.” There, she said
it. Someone else who knew him had heard it. It was now a fact in the world. She
started weeping, slowly, sobbing deeply. It was now an inescapable fact for her
as well. Up to this moment, she had been able to avoid confronting the reality
of it. It had been obscured in her consciousness by the blinding awareness that
Yuki was her real mom, that she had not been abandoned by her mother. But now
the full weight of the event came crashing down on her. She began to feel ill,
as if she would throw up. She staggered over to the wall, put her back against
it and let herself slide to the floor.

Sensei was speechless for a long
moment. George was a friend. Emily felt almost like a daughter to him. He knelt
beside her and tried to offer some comfort.

“Oh, Emily! How? When?” He stopped
talking and just sat next to her. He had no comforting words. Just mute
sympathy. They remained in that posture for several minutes. It could have been
days, or weeks. Students started arriving for class. Sensei peered around the
office door. “I’m gonna have to go out there in a moment. Are you gonna be
alright in here?”

“No. I’ve gotta go do something.
Meet me here late, say one o’clock, I’ll show you what happened.”

He was intrigued. There was no way
he wouldn’t meet her. Though he hardly knew what to expect. He went out into
the dojo. Emily slipped out the front. No one noticed her except Wayne.

Emily got in the truck and drove
about thirty minutes east to the town of Goshen, to the Goshen Public Library.
Her father had given her a thumb drive with a program on it that would allow
her to make encrypted web phone calls from a public terminal. He warned her to
be careful about using any terminal that might be traceable to her, and not to use
any location more than once. He was not absolutely confident about the
encryption program, and worried it might be possible to trace an origin from
it. She was pretty sure Mr. Cardano and her mom would be in New Mexico by now,
if they had made it there at all. She had fought every impulse to call her
before now, not wanting to make them break cover before they had gotten dug in,
so to speak. But the conversation with Sensei showed her exactly how much she
needed to hear her mom’s voice.

The library’s
terminals were in a room at the far end of the first floor. As luck would have
it, the room was empty. With a little fiddling, she managed to launch the
program and selected the first number it offered her. It connected her, through
a very circuitous series of digital diversions, to a disposable phone in
Michael Cardano’s pocket. After three rings, she heard his voice.

“George?”

“No, it’s me, Emily. I need to talk
to Yuki,” she replied nervously.

Michael was caught by surprise. He
hadn’t expected that George would let her use the thumb drive. His mind raced
through possible explanations. None of them was not connected to some sort of
catastrophe. Wordlessly, he handed the phone to Yuki.

“George?” she asked uncertainly.

“No, Mom, it’s me. Dad is dead.”
She blurted it out as if it were a hot coal in her mouth. Tears ran down her
face.

On the other end of the line Yuki
felt a cold hand grab her heart, squeezing the life out of it. She saw the room
begin to go dark as if she were traveling backward through a long tunnel,
watching the light at the other end grow smaller. But then the first words
Emily had said registered. Her daughter needed her to be strong. She could be
in danger. She had called her “Mom” for the first time in her life.

“Chi-chan, are you safe?! Where are
you?”

On her end, Emily felt a warm
feeling rush over her. Her mother had used the pet name her father used for
her. No one else ever called her that. But, of course her real mother would
know it too. She wondered how much self restraint it required to keep from
using it for all those years.

“Mom, I’m safe. Dad was wounded as
we were leaving the estate. He died outside of Pittsburgh. Is it okay to say
where I am on this connection?”

Yuki turned to Michael and asked.
“As long as she’s calling from a public terminal, yes,” Emily heard him say in
the background.

“I’m in Virginia. I’ve gone back to
school.”

Yuki was flabbergasted. What could
she be thinking? “No, No, No! You have to come out here right away. You’re not
safe there. They’ll find you! It’s too risky.” With that she started sobbing
openly. Emily heard it.

“I’m sorry, Mom. But this is the
only way. I can’t run from those men for the rest of my life, always hiding,
always pretending. I have to make a life for myself that isn’t built on a lie.
I can only do that here.” She knew she was right, but she also knew her mother
would never accept it. She heard Michael tell her mother she had to end the
call in one minute. The pain was like nothing either of them had ever known
before, to hear each other’s voices, to have so much to tell each other, and to
have so little time together.

No, Honey. Please no. I can’t
afford to lose both of you. It’s too much,” Yuki sobbed out loud.

“Don’t worry, Mom. I’m taking
precautions, being real careful, the way Dad taught me,” she said, trying to be
reassuring. Yuki sighed audibly on the other end. “And Dad gave me all the
papers, the passports, the money. I’ve got a new place to stay, in town. And,
Mom, I’ve got friends!” She almost giggled as she said that last bit.

Yuki was dumbstruck. She knew how
much that meant. She remembered how many times she and George had lacerated
themselves over the thought that they were cheating her out of a normal
childhood. And now, here was her daughter, encircled by unseen enemies, gushing
over her new friends.

Yuki might have been surprised to
learn how quickly Emily found friends. But she knew how hungry for
companionship her daughter was. It was gratifying to hear that other kids could
open up to her after all these years. Perhaps they had been fascinated by her
all this time.

“I’ve got one question, Mom. I need
to know if I can trust Sensei.”

Again, Yuki was dumbstruck. She had
always disapproved of Sensei as an influence on a young girl. It was good to
discover that Emily could even ask a question like this. She hated to admit it,
but she had no reason to doubt him. He had been George’s friend for as long as
she had known the two of them. She turned to Michael and asked him what he
thought. He didn’t think he could have betrayed them. Yuki took a breath and
said “Yes, you can trust him. But don’t tell him more than you have to.” Emily
breathed a sigh of relief.

“I’ll call you again in a week. I
love you, Mom!” She cut the connection and waited as the program cycled through
all the registries on the ISP’s servers erasing its tracks. She leaned back in
her chair and smiled through her tears, musing on how wonderful it was to talk
to her mother. It was Yuki’s voice she heard, but it was her mother who wept
with her.

On the other end, her mother was
experiencing very similar feelings. This was the moment she realized she had to
explain everything about her daughter to Michael. He listened in amazement to
the whole story, parts of it were terrifying, especially the bits about the possibility
Meacham’s men (or the Chinese) could think Emily carried the gene mutation
inside of her. Now he understood why George would not let her go to Naxos, what
the real danger might be. But what most amazed him was Emily’s decision to
return to Virginia, to the estate, to go back to school right under Meacham’s
nose. She was probably right. They wouldn’t look for her there, even though
they would search the entire earth if they knew of her relationship to Yuki.
But what most amazed him was how self-possessed this young woman was. Yes, she
was the same girl who looked him in the eyes at that birthday party all those
years ago.

Emily put the thumb drive in her
pocket and went back to the truck. She had something to eat at a little diner
in Goshen and then headed back to her apartment. She was emotionally exhausted
by these conversations and needed to rest up before meeting Sensei.

 
Sleep came over her almost as soon as she lay down on the
couch. When she awoke it was just past midnight. She changed into dark clothes
and a jacket, put the rifle scope in her pocket and went downstairs to roll the
dirt bike out of the garage. She coasted the bike down the driveway and a short
way down the block before popping the clutch to kick start the engine, in order
to keep the noise of her departure to a minimum.