by Eliot Peper
But he was shaking his head again, resting it in his hands, elbows on knees.
“Javi?”
“I didn’t want this,” he repeated softly. “It’s not me. You were our leader. But then you were gone. Everyone was floundering. It was awful. And I’m still floundering, and it’s still awful.”
“But—”
“Why?” Suddenly his voice was harsh and his huge, dark eyes locked on hers. “I don’t give a shit about your precious honor. Why did you leave, Em? Why did you leave?”
She opened her mouth. Closed it.
“Because you couldn’t have picked a better time,” he said with bitter sarcasm. “The biggest crisis we’d ever had to recover from, everything, everyone on the line, and poof, just like that, you vanish into thin air. Calls, messages, goddamn private investigators dissolving into the ether. Nothing. Thirteen years. Thirteen years.” He squeezed his eyes and mouth shut, let out a suppressed growl. “What. The. Fuck.”
He leaned across the coffee table toward her, palms splayed, eyes wide. “And now suddenly you’re here and you’ve rescued Rosa from a kidnapping and it’s all part of this big conspiracy and don’t get me wrong, she’s my sister and I would do anything for her and I’m terrified for her and I’m so, so grateful but you nearly decapitated one of her assailants and it looks like someone throttled your neck and your arms are covered in scars and you’ve got a black eye and to be perfectly honest you look like you were run over by a bus but Rosa says they never touched you, the kidnappers, that you looked like that when she got home and you were just standing there in her living room and now that you’re finally here not only will you not tell me the slightest goddamn thing but the first words that come out of your mouth is that you’ll go.”
And then Javier was standing, towering over her, firelight illuminating half his face, his entire body trembling. “You are coming with me to tell Diana what you just told me. If we’re lucky, maybe that will be enough. Then you can crawl back into whatever hole you’ve dug for yourself. But I swear to God, you are not going anywhere until that happens. Don’t you dare. Don’t you fucking dare.”
CHAPTER 17
An owl hooted in the distance as Emily exited the house and paused to let her eyes adjust to the darkness. The night was cold, and the skies were clear. She pulled up her hood and headed off the path, crossing the wide lawn that led up toward the forest. She moved slowly, careful not to twist an ankle in a gopher hole.
When she reached the far edge of the lawn and the buildings were comfortably distant, she skirted the woods, tasting the forest’s loamy scent and reaching out to touch each tree as she passed.
The madrone must have shed its bark recently because the trunk was so smooth it could have been polished. Next were the gnarled knots of an oak tree. Then the hard resin blisters of a young Douglas fir and then, finally, the deep furrows of a mature redwood.
Emily stopped, leaning back to see the dark profile of the tree, a pillar blotting out the stars. Slowly, she removed her jacket, folded it, and laid it on the grass a few meters away. Then she summoned her feed, queued up N.W.A.’s “Appetite for Destruction,” and maxed out the volume.
Rizal had run her through this routine so many times that every move was etched into Emily’s muscle memory. She would get up in the morning and he’d drill her with punch and kick targets, observing and coaching every strike. In the afternoons, she would repeat the exercise on the heavy bag. The next day was more of the same. She’d make the same mistakes. He’d correct them. And again and again until days became weeks and weeks became months and months became years and slowly, ever so slowly, she learned to fight.
Now, with explosive rhymes raging over high-pitched synth, Emily unleashed every move in her repertoire on the unsuspecting redwood. Don’t you fucking dare. Javier’s twisted face swam before her. The crack of his glass shattering against the hearth had been so sharp, the wood popping and hissing where the wine splattered.
Strike, counterstrike, combo, repeat.
Victory was not a thing to savor, it was just another base camp. You reached the peak you were striving for, and the view from the summit was of the higher mountains to come. Those who bothered with self-congratulation neglected mission-critical preparation for the next ascent or, at best, stranded themselves at a local maximum.
The bark was thick and corky, springing back against her feet, shins, and knees. The bodies of her opponents were never so forgiving. In her first fight, she’d broken her hand when she landed an uppercut on her opponent’s jaw. Violence always hurt the offender as well as the victim, even if the vector was subtler.
As punch after punch split the skin on her knuckles, stringy fibers of bark came away stuck to the bloody wounds. The psychological warfare she’d overseen from this very island had warped her own reality, left scars deeper than the puckered flesh that turned her skin into a patchwork. They had exploited a backdoor into the feed, and doing so had opened a backdoor into exploiting each other.
The music howled its fury at the uncaring, broken world, bass thumping in time to the beat of ten thousand shattered hearts.
Her lungs burned, her throat constricted, her joints ached, her head pounded, but she pushed through it all, pushed harder, further, deeper, demanded herself to be up to it, forced herself to persevere, to embrace the pain, to exact and receive punishment.
Something touched her shoulder, and Emily spun, lashing out instinctively, terrified by whatever unknown threat could possibly lurk on this remote idyllic island. But it wasn’t an assassin dispatched by Lowell or a nightmare creature. It was Rosa, and Emily had to redirect her reactive sweep so as to not take Rosa’s legs out from under her.
Rosa stumbled back, yelping as liquid spilled from one of the two mugs she carried. Emily muted the music and realized that she was soaked with sweat, that her breath was coming in ragged gasps, and that every muscle was trembling uncontrollably.
“What the living fuck?” said Rosa, holding up her dripping arm.
“Holy shit, Rosa,” said Emily, heart pounding. “You scared the hell out of me.”
“I was standing right there yelling at you forever,” said Rosa.
Emily opened her mouth. Closed it. She tapped her ear. “Music,” she said. “Couldn’t hear you.”
“Jesus,” said Rosa, shaking her head. “You almost kicked me.”
“Sorry,” said Emily. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it was you.”
“You’re freaking me out, Em,” said Rosa.
“I, um, this is . . .”
Rosa stared at her for a long moment, and Emily was mortified that she had been discovered, that someone had been watching her routine, that Rosa had glimpsed Pixie. Emily shouldn’t have come back here. Shouldn’t have stayed. Shouldn’t be invading these people’s lives again.
“You’re bleeding,” said Rosa, squinting at Emily in the starlight.
Emily looked down at her stained hands and felt her pants sticking to her raw shins.
“Should I go get a first-aid kit?” asked Rosa. “Hang on, I’ll just run back and grab one.”
“No,” said Emily desperately. “No, this is nothing. Don’t worry about it.”
“Nothing? You break into my apartment and decapitate an abductor and then beat up trees in the middle of the night?”
“I—” Emily fumbled for words. Don’t worry about it, this is just a training routine. You should have seen what I’ve done to people in the ring. This is what penance looks like. But she couldn’t say any of those things, couldn’t say anything.
“So,” said Rosa with that special kind of fierceness that was little more than vulnerability’s veneer. “You’re a fucking ninja?”
“No,” said Emily. “It’s . . .”
The awkward silence stretched.
“You don’t want help,” said Rosa. “And you don’t want to talk about it.” She sighed, shut her eyes tight and opened them again. “Well, I guess this is the least I can offer.”
> Rosa approached, and Emily was horrified to see the hesitation in her movement, the evident fear, as if Emily might lash out at any moment.
Rosa reached out—she was trembling too—and offered Emily a steaming mug. “Chai,” she said. “Frances grinds the spices fresh daily. She’s obsessed. I spilled most of the other one, so we’ll have to share.”
At a loss, Emily accepted the mug and was grateful for the warmth of the ceramic in her hands. She smelled ginger and cardamom.
“How’d you know where I was?” asked Emily.
“Oooph.” Rosa sat down on the ground and patted the grass beside her. “Every time you had a new guest visit the Island, you woke ’em up in the middle of the damn night with cocoa and dragged ’em out here to look at the stars. When I was your victim, we talked about why I was moving out to get into the art scene. I distinctly remember that there weren’t enough marshmallows in the hot chocolate.”
Emily sat, heart still pounding in her ears, every centimeter of her body complaining.
“Shame on me,” she said.
“Quite.”
Emily took a sip, savored the creamy concoction. “It’s delicious, thank you.”
They passed the mug back and forth. Thoughts rolled around Emily’s head like marbles. Where to start? How to start? Whether to start at all? Who was Emily but a nexus of memory and anticipation, a passing shadow in the heave and flow of Rosa’s life? Emily shivered against the deep chill of cold air on drying sweat. There were so many things she couldn’t say. So many things she should have said but never did. Sometimes the only real answer was a deeper truth, no matter how painful it was to acknowledge.
“Rosa,” said Emily, “I want you to know how proud of you I am. No, really. I gave you a hard time when you opted out of our crew because I had a difficult time understanding why anyone who could wouldn’t devote everything to helping our cause. After you left, I was always so consumed with our mission that I didn’t make enough time for you. But now I realize how big a mistake that was. What you’ve built, who you’ve become, it’s just . . . It’s beautiful. You’re beautiful. I’m not good at this kind of thing because I assume you already know, but I love you.”
“You’re a jerk,” said Rosa, her voice catching.
“I know,” said Emily.
Rosa nudged Emily’s shoulder with her own, and there was a moment of contemplative silence.
“When I was little,” said Rosa, “our mom would go on binges, disappear for weeks at a time. You know that, obviously. Javi did his best to take care of me. An eight-year-old trying to be a grown man. I was a total brat, of course, whining about why we were having cornflakes for dinner again.” Her laugh was throaty. “Then Mom would come back, and there were tears and apologies and promises we knew would be broken but we believed anyway because how could we not? I handled it okay, probably because I had my older brother to rely on. But Javi had this tension in him all the time, like an overinflated balloon about to pop. The disappearing acts were bad, but the worst part was the uncertainty.”
Rosa sighed. “When we got home from school, would Mom be there? If not, would she be gone for an hour or a month? Were other kids’ parents like this? Was her absence better than her string of violent boyfriends? When they beat her, should we call the police? Which soup kitchens were close enough that we could get to them on the bus but far enough away that none of our friends from school would see us? And on and on and—Oh! Look at that.”
A shooting star flared.
“A few months after we moved in with you, that old tension began to ebb. Javi’s always wanted to be a good lieutenant, not a leader,” Rosa continued in a lower voice. “Now, though . . . Javi’s hard on himself. He’s the only one who doesn’t see all the great things he’s accomplished. He just sees the work left to do, the impossible magnitude of it, the maddening politics, the stupid half measures. It’s a burden, not a joy. I wish it weren’t like that. He’s my brother. God knows I love him more than anyone, but I can’t change who he is.”
The accusation was all the more heart wrenching for being left unsaid. It explained all the anger and resentment pent up inside Javier. How could an unwilling captain fail to resent the predecessor who had forsaken the ship, forcing him to take the helm? She had assuaged Javier’s fear of abandonment just in time to fulfill it herself.
“When did you get so goddamn wise?” Emily choked on the words.
“When did you turn into such a crybaby?”
“Screw you.”
“This is a romantic spot, but I prefer men.”
Rosa leaned her head on Emily’s shoulder.
Emily had never been more grateful for anything in her entire life.
CHAPTER 18
Rosa returned to the house, but Emily begged off, wrapping herself in her jacket and lying back on the grass. There was so much to process, far more than her head or her heart could contain.
Undiluted by city glow, the sky was thick with stars. Emily’s feed tagged distant nebulae, projected a spaghetti of satellite orbits, and indicated where to look when a shooting star was about to burn through the atmosphere. She was about to dismiss it, disintermediate the final frontier, when she saw a message from Rizal.
Hey, girl, I know you value your personal space, and I normally wouldn’t do this, but I haven’t heard from you since fight night (as your account testifies, it was a lucrative evening). I dropped by your apartment, but your neighbor, the depressed Aussie kid, said he hadn’t seen you in a couple days. Everything okay? If you come on down to the gym, I’ll help stretch you out. Please forgive my irritating protectiveness, but you’re an earner. Oh, and you must have been convincing because Mr. Harding’s people made an offer on the club. Kisses, Rizal.
Lowell didn’t need convincing. Accruing a global network of feedless fight clubs was the perfect investment for someone plotting against Commonwealth. Sure, the feed was officially inviolable, but how long would that last if things got nasty? After all, Lowell’s entire plan was to ensure that things got nasty. Emily had derailed the kidnapping, but surely he must already be executing contingencies aimed at sabotaging Javier’s initiative and setting the stage for a coup. She tried not to remember the way the man had twitched on the floor, cleaver still lodged in his neck.
Rizal didn’t know any of that. He didn’t see the larger game of which he was but a pawn, had no idea who Emily really was. She made every effort to be just another fighter, keeping him at arm’s length. Imagining him knocking on the door of her empty apartment inspired both indignation at his snooping and gratitude that anyone cared enough to check on her.
She ought to respond to Rizal, at least let him know that she was fine and that she wouldn’t be back for a few days. But just like it had felt impossible to bridge the gap from Camiguin to her old life, now that she was back here on the Island, she couldn’t channel Pixie, couldn’t find the words to assuage Rizal’s worry.
Dismissing her feed, Emily stared up at the naked stars.
She hadn’t meant to build a shadow empire. It was just one of those things that sort of happened, like repetitive-strain injury. She helped out a friend in a bind. Then another, and another, and another. What could be more important and innocuous than that? Before long, the favors grew from a trickle to a flood, and Emily sat at the center of a vibrant karmic web that spawned opportunity after opportunity. Ultimately, everything she had accomplished was built on doing and trading favors.
On Emily’s seventh birthday, her mom had given her a telescope. They’d set it up in the backyard, and Emily had been shocked at the new intimacy of the cosmos. The next day, Emily had lugged the telescope into the garage. Tools, workbenches, and projects in various degrees of completion filled the space, everything clean, organized, and worn with loving use. Together, they had taken the telescope apart, examining every piece as her mom explained optics and how diamond cutters had once been recruited to grind glass lenses by hand. Then they put it all back together. Emily remembered the fe
eling of satisfaction when she reattached the azimuth clamp, the burgeoning sense that if she paid attention, the world could make sense, that its secrets could be understood and mastered.
The next night, her parents drove her out to Joshua Tree National Park. There, amid the empty desert, they’d sipped hot chocolate and peered up at the universe. Emily had worried that understanding the inner machinations of her telescope might diminish the wonder it provided, but when she gazed through the eyepiece, she realized that the brief glimpse from the backyard had been nothing but a smog-shrouded preview, that the number and scale of whirling galaxies were far greater than she could ever hope to comprehend, that knowing how the telescope functioned enhanced its magic, that humans had made this thing that brought them closer to infinity.
By the time Emily entered high school, her telescope wasn’t getting quite as much use as it once had but still occupied a place of pride in her bedroom. Her parents had pushed to her test into a local charter school. Only a few months into her freshman year, Emily had already realized two things. First, the students were smarter than the teachers, and way smarter than the administrators. Second, her peers would go to extreme lengths to procure booze and pills.
Knowing it must be good if all her friends were so enamored, Emily wholeheartedly experimented with the narcotic cornucopia, doing her best to hide her misadventures from her parents. But the appeal soon wore thin. She just couldn’t get that excited about chemical-enhanced experiences. They weren’t bad, most of the time anyway. They just weren’t that interesting. It seemed to her like a crutch for boredom.
Boredom wasn’t a feeling Emily was accustomed to. The world was an endlessly fascinating place. Physicists probed the origins of the universe. Journalists chased stories to the end of the earth. Hackers pried open cracks in monolithic systems. You could follow any hobby down a rabbit hole of obsessive curiosity. Emily loved learning. Which was why she hated high school.
For Emily, high school sharply delineated the fault line between scholarship and institutional education. She would geek out with her classmates over some new, luxuriantly obscure topic, reveling at the wondrous complexity of the world. But that was after school. In class, they suffered through curriculum that was neither compelling nor comprehensive.
