Girl Fights Back (Go No Sen) (Emily Kane Adventures) (2 page)

Kung
fu
seemed to her to have two hearts. One was very circular. It swirled away
from an attack and then back again. In a typical move, a block would lead into
a spin, and she would find herself surprisingly behind her opponent. Everything
flowed into every other thing. There were no stops. She fought as if she were a
river, or a summer breeze.

The second heart was called
wing chun
. This seemed, at least
initially, to be the antithesis of the first. It was almost completely contained
within the width of her opponent’s shoulders. It would be useful for fighting
in close spaces. But it was also very like the first, like a miniature version
of it. Spinning, flowing strikes, all released from within the tiny space
opened by the opponent’s initial attack. It was everything Shotokan aspired to,
but more contained, more controlled, and at the same time more free, less
jagged. Her strikes preempted those of her opponent. She punched to prevent his
punch. She kicked his foot before he could kick her with it. Or if she let him
kick, she would evade or block, and then kick his foot just as he was setting
it down, throwing him off balance and leaving him open to her attack. She
wasn’t just quicker. She moved and thought from within his attack, inhabited
his attack more fully than he did. It seemed almost effortless, almost like
breathing. It
was
breathing, for her.

By the time she was sixteen, she
had mastered three martial arts. She was five feet seven inches tall and
weighed a hundred and thirty pounds. She had no belts. She had worn a green
belt at one point. She couldn’t remember which art it was in. She couldn’t care
less. No one could remember ever seeing her wear a belt, or even a gi. She
trained in ordinary cargo pants and a white button down shirt. She figured she
was training for life, and so she should learn how to fight in the clothes she
usually wore. She had begun wearing a sports bra a couple of years earlier. She
didn’t own a regular bra. Sometimes she wore a denim jacket in class. The boys
wished they could complain about it. But Sensei seemed to let her do whatever
she wanted in the dojo. All she wanted to do was train. No one said a word.

Her name was
Emily, but when it was just the two of them, her dad called her Michi or
Chi-chan. No one else called her that. Perhaps no one else even knew that name.
At least, she had never heard anyone else use it, and she never mentioned it to
anyone.

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Chapter 2:
Camping

That day, her father picked her up
from the dojo in the family car. That was their little joke. It was a black
limousine, not huge or stretched out, but obviously solid. It belonged to the
family her father worked for. He was their driver, though it was not clear
exactly where his duties ended, or what he might be asked to do, or when.

He was not a physically imposing
man, perhaps only a couple of inches taller than her and maybe thirty pounds
heavier. He was wiry and strong, but deceptively so. He did not train
extensively, just a few push-ups, a few sit-ups, a few pull-ups, a few laps
around the estate where they lived. But like Sensei, she sensed, he was much
stronger than he had any right to be, than anyone might suspect. Of course, he
hardly ate at all, seemed not even to like food. A few vegetables, maybe some
beans, some fruit, a bowl of rice. That was his diet. They ate dinner together
most nights. She wasn’t sure he ate any other meals. He was in his early
forties, though most people on first meeting him would probably assume he was
ten years younger.

Emily figured he remained young
because he was essentially young at heart. She saw his playful side, she basked
in his love. But to everyone else he seemed to be made of stone. A cool
customer. He hardly spoke, never laughed. Just listened with an immovable
expression on his face. When his employer, Mr. Cardano, asked him to do
something, he did it, quickly, efficiently, without comment. Cardano had come
to rely on his impassivity. It was as secure as the Catholic confessional.
Sometimes, he was gone from the estate for a few days, never more than a week.
He never told her what he did on these trips. She didn’t ask anymore. For the
most part, however, he drove the family car.

When he had a day off, they would
go camping on the estate. It was very large, well over a thousand acres, much
of it densely forested hills. There were plenty of obscure places to set up a
lean-to and not be able to see or hear anything from the estate buildings. They
liked to pretend they were survivalists. They would bring no food with them,
and only minimal gear. Could they go two days eating only what they found in
the forest? It was all in fun, of course. Even if they found nothing, they
wouldn’t starve in two days.

But it was a kind of mental
exercise for Emily. There was a thrill in solving the problems each day would
bring. Find water. Catch some game. Start a fire. Eat a bug? Build a trap.
Choose a campsite, set up a perimeter, arrange branches and twigs in the
underbrush to alert them to the approach of a stranger in the night. And above
all, avoid the cameras!

Security cameras sprouted from odd
corners all over the estate. Mostly they watched the perimeter fences and
walls. But others aimed at the approaches to the buildings. A constant theme of
their survivalist games was to avoid letting the cameras see them. For as long
as Emily could remember, her father had insisted on including this game in
their outings. It was fun, like being a guerilla or a commando, stalking an
enemy compound. She got to be pretty good at spotting the cameras before they
saw her. But her father always seemed to know where one would be, even before
they came near it. She thought maybe he could hear some faint whirring sound,
or perhaps he just understood how the security team who installed them thought.

Emily eventually developed her own
sense for the cameras, too. It wasn’t based on a whirring sound, or any deep
insight into the locations where they were placed. She simply began to see the
terrain the way the cameras did. She understood them, or the people looking at
the monitors at the other end of them. When the land looked a certain way, she
knew there would have to be a camera nearby. She became an invisible partner of
the cameras, shared their view of the estate, but denied them any view of her.

Of course, the security guys knew
all about her. She was the chauffeur’s daughter. When she was little, if they
caught a glimpse of her on one of their monitors, she would run off with a
shriek and a giggle, maybe return a little while later wearing a funny hat, or
a new outfit. At least, that’s how it looked on the monitors. As she got older,
they saw less and less of her. Eventually she fell off their screens
altogether. Perhaps she was a bit of a mystery, some sort of recluse. They
didn’t think about her much anymore. She was harmless, and they had more
important things to worry about.

Michael Cardano seemed to be an
important man. He once held some minor posts in the federal government. He had
been a deputy to the Ambassador to the Philippines in the eighties, later held
an obscure office in the Pentagon, and then worked briefly for a well known
conservative think-tank. Most recently, he was a consultant to the State
Department on Southeast Asian economies. But he also seemed to have an influence
and importance that could hardly be accounted for by a mere perusal of the
various official titles he had held. His professional acquaintances assumed he
really worked for the CIA, or perhaps the NSA. That would at least account for
the resources employed to secure an estate in the backwoods of Virginia someone
of his professional attainments could hardly be expected to be able to afford.
But in the end, no one inquired too closely into Michael Cardano’s finances, or
into his work. Emily never gave it much thought, and her father certainly never
discussed it with her, or anyone else for that matter.

Emily slid into the front seat of
the family car. Her father grunted and she snorted. They both laughed. Thursday
was meditation day. Sensei had the whole dojo doing an “iron wire” breathing
technique for most of an hour. It involved breathing in and out very deeply and
slowly while doing a dynamic tension exercise. It was intended to encourage his
students to regulate their breathing so that they could hear it, coming in and
going out, and hear past it to the stillness of their
qi
. It was one of Emily’s favorite exercises in the dojo, since it
focused on what for her had become the central truth of her life, the central
insight of her passion for martial arts training. It drove the boys crazy. They
desperately wanted to succeed, to see what Sensei was trying to show them. They
flexed and tensed their muscles and they breathed as deeply as they could. Some
of them sweated through their uniforms. But they just could not figure out what
to listen for. And they heard nothing.

Her father knew, they had talked
about it before. There was something comical about the boys’ predicament. Emily
could feel for them, but the fact is their failure was itself a simple human
truth. One could wish them well, even lament their inability. But in the end,
there was nothing to do about it but laugh.

“I have to go out of town tonight.
I won’t be back until Saturday morning at the earliest,” her father said.

“Dad,” she groaned. “This was
supposed to be our weekend.”

“I’m sorry, Chi-chan. It’s really
out of my hands. Why don’t you go camping tomorrow without me? If I get back in
time, I’ll try to find you. Then we’ll see how good you really are at covering
your tracks.”

“You’ll never find me, old man!”
she retorted.

“I already know you’re gonna climb
out onto Promontory Rock and hide there. Don’t think I haven’t noticed you
casing that spot. You can’t fool me!”

“Fine,” she said. “But if you don’t
find me by Sunday morning, you’ll owe me big time!”

“Fine!”

“Fine!”

They rode home in silence the rest
of the way. She was a little miffed with him for this change of plans. But
there were plenty of pleasures for her out in the woods by herself. And he had
been right about Promontory Rock. Damn!

By the time they arrived home it
was already dark and Emily was hungry. Yuki, the cook, had something ready for
her: hot soup with chicken and some flavored rice. Her father, it seems, had
already eaten. He put the car away and retired to their apartment over the
garage. Emily ate in the kitchen of the main house with Yuki. They talked about
school, homework, boys, anything but the dojo. Yuki did not entirely approve of
how much time she spent there. She wanted Emily to focus on school, to go to
college, to find a profession. She had high hopes for this girl. She had
practically been a mother to her for the last sixteen years, so maybe she had a
right to stick her nose in to Emily’s life a little. But she also had no idea
just how profoundly her experiences in the dojo had shaped Emily’s growing
consciousness. To Yuki, martial arts was just a hobby, not something to take
too seriously, certainly not something to build a life on, certainly not for a
girl. No matter what that fool of a sensei thought.

Yuki had come to America years ago.
Emily didn’t know the whole story. But there had been some sort of scandal
involving Yuki’s father in Japan. He was a scientist, specializing in
bio-engineering, genetics research. It must have been very cutting edge. There
had been some sort of dispute about patent rights to a discovery he had been
involved in. It was all hushed up in the end, but he was shamed by the episode
and had taken his own life. Later, perhaps as an act of contrition, the company
that had claimed the patent turned it over to the Japanese government. Though
Yuki never spoke of it, Emily had the distinct impression from the little her
father had told her of the matter that Yuki’s father had been falsely accused
of industrial espionage.

Yuki was about the same age as
Emily’s father, though it was hard to tell exactly how old she really was. She
had enormous energy, much more even than could be expended in running the
kitchen of a large and socially active household. She must have vast, secret
hobbies, Emily sometimes mused. How else to account for all that energy, that
vitality? Sometimes she teased her about it, needling her to find out what she
really did with her spare time. But she could only push Yuki so far before she
would turn a withering glare her way. Then it would vanish, and those familiar
warm, dark eyes would reappear, smiling at her. Had there really been that much
menace in her eyes? Or was it just a trick of the light? Emily was not really
sure. Of course, she never doubted Yuki loved her, or that she was as close to
a mother as she would ever have.

Emily did not know her real mother.
She had never met her, never even seen a picture of her. According to her
father, she came from Taiwan, the youngest daughter of a merchant family living
in Taipei. She had been sent to school in Japan, where she met Emily’s father,
who was in the navy and stationed there at the time. They were married and she
returned with him to the states over the objections of her family. The marriage
was apparently turbulent, and she left shortly after Emily was born, her father
told her. He never heard from her or her family again. All she really knew
about her mother was her name, Mei Li. Her father said her own name was a sort
of anagram for her mother’s name.

For all anyone outside of the
family knew, however, she was just Emily Kane, daughter of George Kane,
chauffeur to an important family. Of course, anyone who saw her could not help
but take notice. Her long, straight black hair was unusual, though she mostly
kept it tied up in some sort of braid. Her eyes were black as coal, and very
hard to read. But what really caught one’s eye was her posture and her
confident gait. And she might smile at you. Was it just you, or does she smile
like that at everybody? This girl is the very picture of balance and control.
Everyone is her equal, no one her superior. But was there something else in
those smiling, dark eyes, something perhaps even darker? Perhaps it was
nothing, a trick of the light.