The unrest in the sewers had kept her away from Jim since she’d officially found out she carried his child. This was fine with her, as she couldn’t have borne to look him in the eye and lie about it. Though it was probably cowardly to not tell him, she thought it was better not to disturb him at such a crucial moment.
Now she didn’t see where she had a choice. She was going away for the next three months or so, which meant she wouldn’t have a chance to tell him again until the baby was born. Still she had lain in the hospital while she awaited the test results from Dr. Pavelski and wondered if she should tell him. She knew Jim well enough to know he’d volunteer to help in any way he could, which would mean her having to explain that like her and the rats, the best thing he could do was not get involved.
Aggie had said she should let him decide for himself what to do. That was what had brought her down into the sewers after she’d been released from the hospital. Unlike most times she came down here, she didn’t wear the Scarlet Knight’s armor, so she wouldn’t run into the assassin from the Plastic Hippo again. Instead she wore a loose blouse that adequately disguised her “baby bump.”
To find one of Jim’s friends didn’t prove difficult. She simply pried a manhole cover loose with a crowbar, descended the ladder, and called out in ratspeak. A rat not quite as big as Pepe but still more than a foot long without the tail approached her. The rat identified himself as a scout for a tribe still loyal to “the king.” In ratspeak she said, “Tell the king that his queen would like to see him.”
Once the rat had gone, she let herself throw up into the sewer. She supposed the remains of her toast and tea wouldn’t be as bad as a lot of things in the sewage. She eased herself onto a concrete bank of the sewer pipe to wait for Jim with a hand to her stomach. “This is where Daddy lives,” she whispered. Her daughter kicked as if in reply to her.
Pepe arrived first and pressed his snout into her chest like a friendly dog. She noticed a red scar along that snout. “You’ve been getting into trouble,” she said. The rat assured her it was just a scratch. “So I take it things still aren’t settled?” Pepe indicated positive gains had been made but that a few tribes still held out.
“They fall in line soon,” she heard Jim’s voice hiss. He appeared a moment later and she breathed a sigh of relief to see he didn’t bear any fresh scars—at least not on his face. A ratskin coat covered the rest of his body to conceal any possible wounds.
His face brightened with a smile as he approached her. “You look good,” he said. He touched her left cheek, which prompted her to blush as she wondered if he’d noticed it was chubbier than before. Maybe he already knew?
“Thank you,” she said. “So do you.”
“You no wear armor,” Jim said.
“No, I’m not.” She took her hand from her stomach to take hold of his wrist and move it from her cheek. “That’s part of the reason I’m here. Can we talk—alone?”
“Yes.” Jim told Pepe in ratspeak to give the royal couple some privacy—at least as much as they could hope for in a sewer. He waited until Pepe had gone away before he said, “You worried. What wrong?”
Emma couldn’t bear to look him in the eye. “I have to go away for a few months. Someone tried to kill me and it’s not safe for me here.”
“Where you go?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“You no trust me?”
“Of course I trust you. You’ve kept my secret all these years.” She looked up but focused her eyes over his shoulder. “I don’t want to risk this person getting a hold of you and trying to get that out of you.”
“I see. You protect me. You love me.”
“Yes. I do love you. That’s what makes this so hard.”
“You come back later?”
“I will. I promise.”
“Good.” He leaned forward to kiss her on the mouth. She resisted him and finally grabbed the sides of his face to push him back. “What wrong?”
“There’s something else I need to say. Something even harder.” Another round of sour bile rose up from her stomach, though this time she knew it wasn’t the sewer odors or the pregnancy. “You remember what happened six months ago? When I thought I was someone else and you brought me back?”
“Yes.”
“And you remember what we did then?”
“We kiss.”
“Yes, but more than that.” She hated to beat around the bush like this as she saw the way Jim’s brow furrowed and eyes narrowed as he tried to understand what she meant. “I guess you could say we mated and—I’m pregnant.”
He stared at her blankly, whether in shock or because he didn’t understand she couldn’t be certain. She took his hand to place it on her stomach. “Our baby is in there. Our daughter.”
“Our daughter?”
“Yes. You’re her father.”
He stared at her again for a moment and then shook his head. “No. I not father.”
“Jim, you are. You have to be. There’s no one else.”
“No!” His free hand took her chin so she had no choice but to look him in the eye. “I not father.”
“Don’t do this, Jim. We can figure something out.”
“No other way. You know that.”
“We could find a way,” she said, without any conviction. Clearly Jim had understood what she had from the start, that a life together wouldn’t work for them. His home was in the sewers and hers wasn’t. “She has to know.”
“She no want me for father.”
“Of course she will. She’ll love you like I do.”
“No. She want real father.”
Emma understood what he meant as it echoed her own concerns. If Jim couldn’t be there in the delivery room, he wouldn’t be any more at home at a school picnic or soccer game. He would never be the kind of father shown in ads on TV or magazines, the kind who wore an apron in front of a grill or played golf with other fathers or mowed the lawn with a beer in hand. Then again she supposed she’d never be that kind of mother either. She thought back to what Aggie had told her. “She’s only going to want someone who loves her,” she said.
“No. Other kids no like her then. Think her freak.”
“Jim—”
“No!” He turned and began to stomp away from her. She followed him.
She grabbed his bony shoulders to spin him around. “Jim, please. Let’s not decide anything right now. Let’s wait until she’s born. I’ll bring her down here and you can see for yourself that she loves you.”
“You bring her, I no see either of you. Ever.”
She let him go and nodded to him. “I’ll be back in a couple of months. Maybe then you’ll change your mind.” She turned around to head back for the surface. In her wake she could hear his footsteps retreat until only echoes remained.
***
There was one thing she wanted to do before she left for the archives. This was even more delicate than to go down to the sewers as it involved violating a crime scene. With a cutting torch on her back, Emma climbed up the side of the Fleischmann Building in the armor.
She had kept the armor off until she pulled up within a block of the building that had once housed TriTech. That company had been a front of a weapons dealer who wanted to create a catastrophe to drum up even more business. Part of his plan involved using a spell from the archives to create a portal to an alternate dimension.
From that dimension he took materials to construct a metal vault in his hidden office on the thirteenth floor. Since the metal in the vault was out of phase with this dimension, it created a dampening field around anything magical inside of it—which included the scarlet armor. That was what brought Emma up the side of the building after her disastrous meeting with Jim.
“The police already have everything worthwhile here,” Marlin said as she climbed.
“Not everything.”
“You hoping to find something to prove your friend’s innocence?” Tim Cooper had worked for TriTech, but had found
out too late what it planned to do with his designs. After the RAT Bombings, he pled guilty to aiding and abetting a crime, for which he received five years in prison. In Emma’s mind this was undeserved as Tim hadn’t been responsible for the bombings or the overload of an antimatter reactor that killed his girlfriend Sylvia.
“That’s not why I’m here.” She had started to breathe heavy by the time she made it to the fourteenth floor, where she slipped in through a shattered window. From there she wrapped the cape around her body and crept over to the stairs to make her way down.
The police had sealed off the Fleischmann Building after the attacks with no plans to reopen it anytime soon. They had left yellow crime tape over the door to Harry Ward’s office, but there was no officer to patrol the area anymore, just a single cop down in the lobby to keep out the homeless and the scavengers—like Emma.
“So what are you doing?” Marlin asked. “Or are you just feeling nostalgic?”
“You’ll find out,” Emma said. She made her way over to the vault and then took the cutting torch from her back. Ordinarily she could simply use the Sword of Justice, but the blade was magic and thus would do nothing against the vault, which forced her to rely on conventional techniques.
“Taking a souvenir?”
She didn’t say anything as she cut through the vault; she used her helmet as a welder’s mask. Other than its ability to dampen magic, there was nothing else special about the vault, so she didn’t have a hard time to cut out six sheets of various lengths. These she eased to the floor with her gloves and then let them cool for a few minutes. While she waited, Marlin continued to pester her with questions that she refused to answer.
To get the sheets of metal back to the Sanctuary proved more of a challenge. While she could hide herself with the armor’s cape, the metal from the vault would not disappear. As when she’d cut it, she had to rely on more conventional techniques. In this case she used the stairs to climb down to the lobby, where she found the guard asleep with a newspaper on his chest. This allowed her to sneak past him and out a side door, where she returned to the sewers.
As expected, Jim didn’t meet her, nor did any of his friends. She wondered if he would see her in three or four months even if she didn’t bring their baby. In time she hoped he would change his mind and they might be able to work something out, though she had no idea what.
She climbed up the ladder into the sub-subbasement of the Plaine Museum, to focus on the task at hand. It wasn’t something she had originally intended, but a worry gnawed at the back of her mind. There was only one way to make sure it didn’t happen.
Marlin waited for her in the Sanctuary with arms folded across his spectral chest. “What is it you’re planning to do?” he asked.
“I’m sorry about this,” Emma said. “It’s only going to be for a few months.”
“What are you talking about?”
She set the pieces of metal on the ground and then began to sort them out. She started with the bottom side and then the four around it to make a sort of box. With a welding torch she assembled the pieces with little difficulty; the metal was as easy to weld as it had been to cut.
The far more difficult part lay ahead. She began to take off the armor, and gently set it inside the case in the same order as she’d found it. As she did, Marlin said, “Are you doing what I think you’re doing? That baby must be making you daft—more so than usual.”
“I can’t take any chances,” Emma said. She took off the helmet and set it on top of the other pieces. Then she closed the lid. The case didn’t weigh much, at least until she dipped the bottom of it into her crude box. Then it became as heavy as a trunk full of bricks. With a grunt Emma dropped the case into the box.
“You’re serious, aren’t you?” Marlin said.
“Yes. I won’t let her take my place.”
“Who?”
Emma saw the face of Megan Putnam in her mind’s eye. “Megan. I won’t let that assassin kill her. She still has a future.”
“You don’t know that’s what will happen.”
“Becky’s right, Megan is a lot like me. Too much like me. Who else do you think it will get to fill in for me?”
“Maybe it won’t get anyone.”
“Like when Becky and I switched bodies and it had her fighting Koschei? She could have been killed. I won’t let that happen to Megan. Not against someone that dangerous.”
“So you’re going to hide it in this box? For how long?”
“Just a couple of months. After I’ve had the baby and I’m ready to come back.”
“What about me?”
“You’re four thousand years old; I don’t think four months will matter that much.”
“Yes, well, that’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one being locked up in that tiny little box, are you?”
“I’m sorry, but I have to make sure.”
“What about if you don’t come back? Have you considered that?”
“Aggie or Becky can let you out. Then you can find someone else.”
“And if it chooses your friend then what? Are you going to rise from the grave?”
“I might.” Emma wagged a finger at Marlin. “Don’t let Megan do it. I know what the rules are, but she doesn’t deserve this. She deserves a chance to be happy.”
“I seem to recall hearing this before from a certain old man about a certain young geologist. I’ll tell you the same thing: I don’t have any input in the matter.”
She remembered Percival Graves had pleaded with her not to become the next Scarlet Knight. She had done it anyway; she’d felt it was her duty. No doubt Megan would feel the same way. She would put on the armor to defeat the assassin who’d tried to kill Emma; she would naively think she could make a difference, just as Emma had. And then seven years later—if she lived that long—she would find herself alone, unable to have any kind of normal life, the one person she loved most gone from her life.
Emma began to cry, tears long overdue from her meeting with Jim. “I’m really sorry,” she said through her sobs to Marlin. “I’ll come back for you. I promise.”
Then she picked up the welding torch and set to work.
***
By the time Emma reached Aggie’s house, she wanted only to lie down in a tub of hot water and soak until the stink came off her. Though she doubted the stink of her failure with Jim, Marlin, and herself would come off so easily. That would stick around far longer.
Her ride back on the motorcycle wasn’t as frantic as the last time, except she had trouble to see through the tears in her eyes. No matter how she tried to stop, she found she couldn’t. It was more than hormones, she knew that much. She had locked Marlin inside a box so Megan wouldn’t make the same mistake she had so many years ago. On top of this, Emma had lost the man she loved and her child would likely grow up without a father.
It didn’t surprise her to see Aggie in the foyer. “It’s all right, dear,” Aggie said. “Let’s get you upstairs to rest.”
Another time Emma might have protested she wasn’t an invalid, but this time she let Aggie guide her up the stairs, into the bathroom. She did at least manage to take off her own clothes before she let Aggie help her into the tub already filled with hot water. The water felt as soothing as she’d imagined, though it couldn’t erase the memories.
“Do you want to talk about it, dear?” Aggie asked and Emma shook her head. “I understand. I’ll be just across the hall if you need anything.”
As she lay in the tub, Emma thought back to when she was a little girl. Then she’d always thought to be a mommy would be a wonderful thing. She would be just as caring and loving as her mother and married to an equally caring and loving person as her father. Instead, she couldn’t be certain about anything. Her child might not know her father. And what kind of mother would Emma be? She would try her best, as Aggie had said was important, but would that be enough?
Clad in only a towel, she stepped into the guest bedroom, where two suitcases w
aited. She rifled through one suitcase for some fresh clothes to wear. As she dressed, she realized she hadn’t called Dr. Maxwell to formerly take her leave of absence yet. They had already informally discussed it; she had wanted to finish out the semester while he assured her a place would be waiting for her whenever she decided to come back. There were only a few weeks left in the semester; what kind of teacher was she to abandon her students before finals? About as good of a teacher as she would be a mother.
She sagged onto the bed, unable to stop another wave of tears. “Emma, are you ready? Oh—” she heard Akako say from the doorway. “I’m sorry.”
Emma rolled to sit on the bed and forced a smile to her face. “It’s all right,” she said. “Hormones.”
To her surprise, Akako sat down next to her. “You don’t have to worry about going to the archives. Everything will be fine. It’s a perfectly nice place once you get used to it.”
“That’s not it.”
“Oh.” Akako’s face twitched as if she debated whether to press Emma on what the problem was. Curiosity got the better of her. “What is the problem then?”
“I told Jim. He doesn’t want to see the baby. Ever.”
“What? Why would he do that?”
“Because he’s worried she’ll think he’s a freak. And that other kids will give her a hard time if they find out.”
“That’s awful.”
“The worst part is he’s right.” Emma looked down at the floor and shook her head. “The kids made fun of me because I was tall and a couple years younger. What are they going to say if they find out her father is the Sewer Rat?”
“Kids always make fun of other kids. You know that.”
“It’s not just going to be the kids. It’ll be the grown-ups too.”
“Does that really bother you?”
“No, but it’s going to bother her. What if she hates him for it? And hates me too?”
Akako considered this for a moment and then said, “Look, Emma, I know I haven’t known you as long as Agnes or Becky, but I know what kind of person you are. I don’t think there’s any way a child coming from you could ever hate her own parents.”
Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis Page 68
