Ninja Girl: The Nine Wiles

by Steven W. White

  Then again, seeing a teenaged girl dressed in black on the top floor of a prison, he might freak out anyway.

  No alarms went off. No pressure sensors in the floor. That was just the movies, she supposed. The hall had a weird chemical smell. It smelled very, very clean, and it made her a little sick. She glanced around and noticed a T-intersection at each end of the hall. Where to?

  She didn't have much time before somebody noticed the dead camera. She imagined some poor guard sitting at a desk with a bank of screens. One of the screens just went black. Would he come running? Call for backup? Was he in administration two buildings over? Or just down the hall? How much time did Ash have?

  She started down the hall, trying to listen with her mind. Elsbeth, I'm here.

  Nothing. She reached the T at the end of the hall, where a narrow window showed the darkness of Seattle's night outside. The window had bars. At last, bars, she thought. Like a decent prison.

  Ash pressed her back to one wall and slinked up to the corner. She peeked fast and pulled her head back.

  Another camera at the far end. She drew the star from its pocket... and hesitated.

  She couldn't keep dismantling cameras. She was going to get caught, at this rate.

  But she needed to reach Elsbeth. She would use the time she had. No giving up, no doubting. Just some good aim, please. She breathed in the rhythm her aunt had shown her, and felt calm return. Her heart settled and her senses sharpened.

  She had to be gentle. Too hard and the star would go through the building and land in the traffic on I-5. Ash visualized how much force she would need, then she turned and flicked the star at the camera.

  It drove itself into the lens with the sharp sound of glass cracking. The red light flickered, but stayed on, sending a blurry mess to a screen at that guy's desk.

  Nice shot! Ash held up her fists and did a victory hop. She walked a slow, zigzag path down the hall toward the camera, pausing at each cell door and probing for Elsbeth with her mind.

  Nothing. Ash looked up at her handiwork, the star wedged into the camera like a knife halfway through a block of cheese. She leaped up and grabbed the camera with her left hand, hanging there while she worked the star free with her right.

  A harsh mechanical buzz came from somewhere else on the floor.

  An alarm? Ash heard a loud clank-clank on top of it, and the buzz stopped. She recognized it – somebody being buzzed in through a security door. Her guard had finally arrived.

  She dropped and pressed herself to the wall at the corner. She was dressed in black, against a white wall in a brightly lit corridor. Bad news.

  Option one: Bolt. Back to the vent and gone. Without Elsbeth.

  Option two: Whack the guard. Keep looking until more guards come. Get caught, reveal the existence of ninjas and spoil the Cloak forever. Go to jail for murder, and deserve it.

  Under her mask, Ash's lips pulled back from her teeth. These options sucked. Think!

  Slow footsteps sounded elsewhere on the floor. Coming closer. Ash had no choice. Option one, then. She slinked to the next corner, back the way she had come, and paused at the corner to listen.

  The footsteps echoed quietly, seeming to float everywhere, difficult for Ash to locate. She peeked around the corner to the hallway with the cut-out vent in the ceiling.

  At the moment she looked, the guard stepped into the hallway from the other side. Ash pulled back before he saw her, but she got a look at him. Young guy, hair cut close, tan uniform. Wide awake and looking for trouble. Ash was cut off from her escape route.

  His footsteps came closer... and closer. Maybe Ash could circle around to the vent from the other side. She got ready to sprint–

  The footsteps stopped. He had to be standing under the hole. Ash heard a burst of static from a radio. "Twenty-one, twenty," the guard said. "Prisoner escape. There's a vent carved up here."

  Ash's heart sank. She closed her eyes. ELSBETH!

  The radio crackled back. "Twenty, twenty-one. If you're joking, you're fired. You know that."

  "Just hit Code Four already," the guard said.

  Ash!

  A bolt shot through Ash's body, like being struck by lightning. That was Elsbeth!

  Where are you? Ash hollered mentally.

  The voice in Ash's head sounded weak, barely a suggestion. Maybe Ash was imagining it. In the van...

  The van? Ash wouldn't imagine something that made no sense. What kind of van could be in a prison cell? Did Elsbeth mean–

  Outside! Hurry!

  Ash raced down the hall to a window and pressed her face against the glass. Far below, a white van emerged from a parking garage and wheeled through the lot.

  What the heck was Elsbeth doing there? The transfer to Supermax in Colorado – Spencer had said seven AM, but it looked like it was happening now, in the middle of the night. Just like the library renovation – did these people do everything early? Didn't they know how to keep a schedule?

  Ash had to catch that van. But she was a hundred feet too high for that.

  The security door buzzed and clanked open again. More footsteps, more voices. The guard's friends were here.

  Ash had climbed the diamond facades on the administration building because the prison's walls were smooth, with no ledges. No choice now, though. Down she would go, and fast.

  Hopefully not too fast.

  I'm coming, Elsbeth!

  Ash stepped back from the window and drew the sword. She gripped the handle in both hands, swallowed, and drew in a breath. She was already sorry about the mess.

  She swung hard at the window, eye-level, right to left. The blade's tip caught the wall and raced through, cutting drywall, wood, and concrete – then glass and steel bars – then drywall, wood, and concrete. The gash was four feet long and clean, and Ash hadn't even had to push very hard.

  She swung again at knee level, then two vertical slashes to complete a square. The bars tumbled away first, followed by a section of glass, then the wall on each side of the window tumbled a hundred feet down.

  Icy wind blew into the hallway and the steel bars rang when they hit the parking lot below.

  "What was that?" said one of the guards. Ash had a few seconds left before she'd be in the middle of a serious cell block rumble.

  She had a clear view of the van now, without the glass reflecting the hallway lights. A police van, with "King County Corrections" on the side. It left the parking lot and turned into the street.

  Ash hesitated, unsure how not to plummet to her death. And unsure how not to be seen, and shot at, by the guards when they reached the spot where she was now standing.

  She needed a hang glider.

  She sheathed the sword and dug the throwing star from her pocket. Her fingers brushed the smooth edge of severed concrete and she stepped one foot over the cut glass at the bottom of the window. Outside, her toes found the window’s base, a flat concrete ledge less than two inches wide – enough for her feet, but her hands had nothing to grip. She reached around to the outside of the building, drove the star into the wall, and pulled down, testing some of her weight on it.

  It cut through the wall like butter, carving a vertical groove in the surface. It wouldn't support the weight of a kitten.

  Crap, Ash thought. She pulled the star's sharkfin blade out of the wall... and jabbed it in again, horizontally. She pulled down and swung her body entirely out the window and into the night air. Now all her weight hung against the flat of the star's blade. And it held. So she could climb with it after all.

  And, remembering her escape from Mrs. Wilson's math class, she climbed up.

  Ten feet higher, she reached the roof and sprinted to the east side of the building. At the edge, she spotted the van closing on the southbound I-5 onramp. It had to be heading for Boeing Field or Seatac Airport, next stop: Colorado.

  Ash would be on that van before it reached the highway.

  38

  She hopped onto the barrier at the roof's edge and dug th
e star into it. She eased herself over the side and lowered herself down. When she was hanging from the star as low as she could, stretched to full length (which wasn't very long), her foot found the lip of a window.

  She twisted the star loose and jammed it in a couple of feet lower, and lowered her body again, stretching for a foothold.

  It would work. It would take forever and wear out every muscle in her body, but she would reach the ground.

  As she hung ninety feet over the hum of traffic on the interstate, she realized she needed a new strategy. She gripped the star as tightly as she could, jammed it in vertically, and put some of her weight on it.

  It gouged a furrow in the concrete. As before, it wouldn't support her weight. But she didn't need it to.

  She took a breath, then another, and pulled her foot off the window’s edge. She raced down, speed-walking backward along the wall and letting the star keep her from freefall as it tore a valley in the building's side. The sound was like a miniature jackhammer.

  She could barely keep her legs moving fast enough as she back-skipped down. The star tried to turn, tried to roll free of the wall, tried to shake her loose.

  Above her, a broken stripe ran up the wall.

  Halfway down, she twisted her body, turned to the highway and spotted the van racing up the onramp, merging into the sparse traffic. Getting away.

  She grabbed her wrist with her free hand and let the star grind away as her feet found a rhythm in their high-speed shuffle. Twenty feet above the ground, she jumped.

  And landed in a tree. Between the branches, she searched for police – anyone who might be looking for whoever had gone out the hole in that window.

  Nobody. They hadn't traced her to this side of the building.

  And she'd be gone before they did. She sprinted to the overpass, going for speed rather than stealth. She'd be a black blur to anyone who noticed her. At the overpass, she hopped the rail, dangling over the traffic of I-5, clinging to deep cracks in the ancient, freezing concrete as cars whipped past her knees. The van was still in sight, its red tail-lights receding.

  Ash needed to hitchhike, like she had with the truck. An adopted ninjamobile – something speedy this time. She set her feet and waited... knowing that every second, Elsbeth was slipping away from her.

  Ash heard the engine before she saw the car – a rolling, high-pitched roar of RPM's – and had a split second to charge up her body for the jump, compressing herself like a spring. A black sedan blasted by underneath her, and Ash could already see the red halos of its tail-lights as she pushed off the concrete wall. She shot out over the highway, arms pressed to her sides, legs straight, her body rocketlike.

  She seemed to hang over the sedan's shining black roof for a timeless moment. As gravity brought her gently down, she bent her knees, reached out and landed, froglike, with barely a thump. She crouched low behind the moonroof and kept her toes in front of the back window. Not a lot of space, and nothing to hang on to.

  She hoped the driver hadn't noticed her. Would the car slow down? Swerve? She noticed her reflection in the shine of the car's roof – the ghostly black oval of her head, the crescent that exposed her eyes.

  She glanced around. No other cars, except for an SUV in the far left lane, now falling behind. It rolled along steadily. If she stayed low, she was probably hard to spot. Good color choice, this car.

  And she was gaining on the van!

  In fact, she was more than gaining. As traffic raced under the overpasses and dark buildings of downtown, her little hot rod pulled even with the van, which plodded along. The way her driver was racing, she would pass the van and leave it in the dust.

  Time for a new ride. Ash swallowed and judged the distance. Could she jump to the van across three lanes? At this speed?

  Maybe. If she slipped, she'd slide to a stop, and see whether this suit would protect her from road rash. Even if she landed well, a thump on the van would alert the people inside. Then what?

  The little black hot rod pulled a car-length ahead of the van, then two. Too far now. Ash had missed her chance. Stupid third Wile. She should have jumped.

  Her ride was gaining on a red pickup truck. Time for a transfer.

  She leaned to one side and tried to set her feet for a jump. The car's roof was slippery with a fresh wax job – this could be tricky. And she'd have to aim...

  She placed her feet squarely under her and pushed off, floating over an empty lane of traffic at sixty miles per hour, the wind caressing her as she extended her arms and sank through an arc into the pickup truck's bed.

  She landed on a tool box and rolled off. It tipped and its lid fell open, showering her with wrenches and screwdrivers. She winced in pain and balled up. The truck hit the brakes hard – the driver obviously heard the crash – and she was flung forward to the front of the truck bed.

  She pressed herself against the cold red metal directly under the cab's rear window, trying to be a shadow. The driver turned and scowled, taking in the mess, his face lumpy and foreshortened from her perspective, under the sweatstained bill of his baseball cap.

  Don't look down, Ash thought.

  The driver faced forward and the truck swerved, correcting its drift and returning to the center of the lane.

  Ash crept to the side and peered over the rim of the truck bed. The van holding Elsbeth was slowly pulling ahead. It had changed lanes right, maybe to take the next turn-off... that meant Boeing Field.

  Boeing Field was a small airport, unlike SEATAC, which handled most air traffic in and out of Seattle. Maybe a small airport was better for putting a prisoner on a plane. It would be private and easier to manage security. That would be important if the prisoner was a ninja. Ash wondered if this was the work of Mr. Alexander again, behind the scenes.

  Ash hunkered behind the driver and peered past his headrest. Yep, the van was taking the next offramp. Boeing Field, all right.

  But the pickup stayed in the lane where it was. Ash would need a new ride again. Her heart sank, and she slumped behind the truck's back window.

  Not another jump, please. She'd almost been beaten to death with tools on the last one. Hitchhiking was not her thing. But she didn't see another way.

  And then she did. If Mr. Pickup Driver wasn't going to take the offramp, well, maybe Ash could persuade him to. She rolled onto her stomach, lying flat behind the driver, and drew the sword.

  It gleamed, golden reflections of city lights rolling along the blade as buildings passed by.

  She settled behind the driver, back-to-back with him, and put her black-slippered feet on one of the wheel-wells – rounded rectangles that bulged into the truck bed on each side. Her feet gripped the cold red steel. She pressed, stabilizing herself, and set the tip of the blade against the wheel-well, right between her feet, sharp side down.

  Slashing tires was such a cliche. For a juvenile delinquent, she wasn't very imaginative. But, she supposed, slashing tires at highway speed was a neat twist. She pushed, and the blade melted through the steel.

  Gently, she thought. Don't jam the wheel. Don't send the truck spinning out of control. Just persuade Mr. Baseball Cap to take the next offramp.

  There would come a time, if this went well, when Mr. Baseball Cap would notice a surgical one-inch cut in the wheel-well, and wonder what caused it. Ash supposed the staff at King County Corrections had to be wondering how the enormous rectangular hole in the side of their building had gotten there.

  Ash wasn't so good at this. She kept leaving evidence. But who would look at it and think that they had a ninja problem?

  Gremlins. That was more likely.

  Ash smirked, and the mask caressed her cheeks. She was a gremlin.

  She drove the sword deeper.

  The sound was not a "pop" – that's what Ash had been expecting. Instead, it was a loud thump, and then a sort of roar as the tire deflated. Ash yanked out the sword and rolled to the front of the truck bed so the driver wouldn't see her.

  The collapsi
ng tire dragged the car to the left, and the driver swerved back. Ash heard him swear.

  The truck swayed uncertainly. The driver turned and checked the truck bed a few more times, then he faced forward and changed lanes to the right. Ash rolled over on her stomach and slipped the sword into its scabbard, guiding the blade with both hands while her chin pressed against the truck bed.

  The van holding Elsbeth had already taken the offramp and was a quarter-mile ahead. The pickup followed. Ash sighed happily. Her trick had worked!

  The highway and the turn-off were twenty feet above ground level. Ash peeked over the bed's rim as the pickup left the highway. She saw treetops passing by. Beyond them lay wide open space: one-story flat-roofed white buildings separated by broad strips of tarmac. This was the place.

  39

  Ash lay flat in the truck bed, gazing up, as streetlights flashed by like orange suns. The truck was already slowing and easing its way to the shoulder of the offramp. Ash knew she had to get out before he stopped. This whole invisibility thing was tough. How did Elsbeth and the ones who came before her do so well maintaining the Cloak?

  The driver was already going to have a sob story to share with his buddies over a beer about how his toolbox exploded on the highway, and two minutes later, his tire blew out, and what could have made this hole in his wheel-well? And the fine people at the King County Jail – would they write up the damage as some sort of escape attempt? Would they interview all the inmates and try to find out who had planned it?

  If Ash succeeded in busting Elsbeth loose, could the police figure out that the damage to the building and Elsbeth's escape were related?

  Sure they could.

  What in the world was she doing?

  Just before the truck came to a stop, Ash slipped over the side and ran for the guard rail. She hopped the railing, caught it, and dangled in the streetlight-shadow, saving herself from a twenty-foot drop into some lovely greenery. Her feet scrabbled against the concrete side and she peeked under the rail. The driver got out and lumbered to the blown tire. He took off his baseball cap, scratched the back of his neck, and jammed the cap back on his head. Ash could hear him grumbling.