Читать книгу Jet Black and the Ninja Wind - Leza Lowitz - Страница 9

CHAPTER 1

遊技 Yugi

The Game

The party had just started, and Jet stood in Amy Williams’ kitchen, wearing the two-dollar black dress she’d bought at the thrift store.

“That’s such a cool outfit,” Amy told her, pushing a drink into her hand. The girls gathered, staring as if trying to remember whether they’d seen the dress in a catalog or a store window. Still, Jet knew it would’ve been cooler to have a date or to buy clothing that hadn’t belonged to someone living in an old folks’ home.

“Yeah,” she said, “just put a hood on this thing, and I’d look like the grim reaper.”

The girls in their sleek new outfits laughed. Jet could hardly believe it. She knew she’d changed, that people looked at her differently. Even her mother, staring at her one morning, had said, “The tomboy’s gone. You’ve become a woman.” Now Jet wanted nothing more than to spend the evening with the girls who’d always ignored her. But she couldn’t. She had ten minutes before she had to leave. The game. Tonight was the night of the game. Saturday night had been ever since Jet could remember. She hated the game like she hated nothing else.

She took the drink anyway, not sure what it was—orange juice and something that smelled like rubbing alcohol. Amy Williams cranked the music. Boys were arriving. The girls began dancing in the living room just as the star quarterback threw open the door, a cooler on his shoulder. Jet tried to dance. How did they make it look so easy, swaying and turning gracefully? She’d have been more comfortable doing a spinning kick or a backflip. Now she had to make up her mind. Was it better to awkwardly explain she had to leave soon, or just slip out and invent a story later?

Her senses stilled. She took in the blaring music, the thudding baseline, the hollering boys, but behind all that, if she focused, there was the battering, off-rhythm engine of the truck turning onto Amy Williams’ street. Kids were crowded around the door, so she went upstairs and into the bathroom. She took off her sandals, lifted the window screen and slipped out onto the roof’s overhang, then jumped to the ground. She caught the top of the fence and swung herself over it. The truck was still moving, nearly to the house, when Jet reached the door and let herself in.

“Don’t stop,” she whispered to her mother, sliding down in her seat. A duffel with clothes for the game was on the floor, and as soon as they turned the corner, she began to change.

“Have fun?” her mother whispered, slumped at the wheel, more gaunt than ever.

“Best time of my life,” Jet replied, “all ten minutes of it.”

Satoko drove them out of the suburbs and into the mountains, over roads muddy and rutted from a week of heavy rains, though now the sky was clear, and the full moon hung in it as if Amy Williams herself had put it there.

The narrow road skirted the steep drop, hugging the edge of the mountain whose peaks glowed in the moonlight. As they went around a bend, the back wheels fishtailed. Jet gasped and clutched the seat. The truck almost turned sideways, skidding toward the cliff. Her mother jerked the wheel and hit the gas, and the truck slid back toward the mountain. She brought it under control and pulled it to a stop. She pressed her foot on the emergency brake, locking it in place. Her breathing sounded labored. She’d appeared unwell for months now.

“This is the last time,” she told Jet.

“Really? You mean that?” Jet said.

“Have I ever said this before?” her mother asked. “Have I ever told you it was the last time?”

“No…”

“Well, it is. You’ll never have to come up here again. The game will be over.”

“Okay, Mom. I’m thrilled,” Jet said, but the intensity of her mother’s concentration distracted her.

Jet tried to keep her focus, staring out over the hood of the truck at the muddy road. Her mother seemed to have calmed. Jet could sense her exhaustion, the slowness of her breathing, even the tired beating of her heart. Satoko had said she had bronchitis, but her cough only got worse and worse, and Jet wondered for the hundredth time whether her mother’s problem might be more serious. All week she would look exhausted and stay in bed, or meditate, and then, on the night of the game, she would pull herself together and become the woman Jet had always known her to be—strong, proud, still beautiful and fierce, like a raven. She would concentrate her energy, focusing herself, stilling her breath, her eyes becoming soft. Even now Jet could feel the slow expansion of calm around her, could see the precision in her movements. On the nights of the game, her mother would even cease to cough.

“You take the truck up to the parking spot,” her mother told her.

“What?”

“Take it up. I’ll get out here. You can find me.”

“You mean like–”

“The same rules as always,” her mother said.

She got out and stepped down into the mud. She slammed the door, and Jet slid over across the old vinyl seat whose split seams trailed bits of stuffing. When she looked out the window there was only the cliff alongside them, no sight of her mother. She released the parking brake and steered the truck up along the mountain. What if it really is the last time? she asked herself, trying not to be angry about the party. If the game is over, what’s next?

The parking spot was no more than a widening in the road where the limbless trunk of a dead tree stood at the foot of a jumble of immense boulders. Hundreds of times, Jet had climbed the mountain, crouched, pausing to watch for movement. Now, she wrapped her body in black cloth and hid her face, leaving only a slit for her eyes. She got out of the truck, stopped, and stared up at the moon.

Like a sign written across the sky, it seemed to mock her, saying, “Loser. You’re missing the coolest party ever, and you’re going to graduate from high school without ever having been kissed.”

She tried to think of a witty comeback. She stared at its face, at the craters like acne, and thought of the unpopular kids, the ones who didn’t get invited to parties either. She’d never even had acne. That was her curse: forced to be different, to keep secrets.

There was a faint buzzing sound, and something, like a bird or a bat, flew close to her face. It brushed alongside her cheek, the sound clearer, a thin hiss of displaced air. A long knife struck the dead wood of the tree and embedded itself, quivering.

Jet dropped to a crouch, looking up and around her, then scuttled alongside the truck. Her mother couldn’t have thrown it, could she? This wasn’t part of the game. They didn’t use real weapons, only sticks, rocks sometimes.

She was kneeling in the mud, her heart beating fast, moisture seeping through her pants, making them heavy. She shifted onto the balls of her feet.

Stay light, she told herself. Nothing moved on the mountainside. She didn’t sense anything, not a single living creature, nothing.

“Mom?” she tried to call but the word stuck in her throat. How stupid could she be? Whoever had thrown the knife wouldn’t miss again. Had her mother changed the game because it was the last time? She’d said “same rules as always,” but maybe someone else was out there.

Staying in one place is dangerous! Jet told herself.

She sprinted and jumped, catching the handle of the knife and pulling it from the wood. She landed among the boulders and moved quickly, with small, darting steps against the stone, until she was on a perch in the middle of the jumble, hidden from sight.

She turned the blade over. It was an army knife of some sort, long, its handle heavy. It would be easy for her to use, but then she almost dropped it, realizing that someone had meant to kill her. Why? What had she done?

No, it had to be her mother who was trying to scare her. But how could Jet play this game if they were using real weapons? Maybe her mother wanted to teach her to take her training more seriously. Jet had once heard a story about a crazy war vet living up in these mountains, a man who’d gone AWOL on a visit home, and who hunted anyone who came onto his land. Maybe that’s what was happening. Her mother might be in danger, too.

“Mom?” she shouted this time and moved quickly, changing her hiding spot. “Be careful!”

She placed her steps to leave the fewest traces. She ran along the side of a long flat boulder as big as a house, then crouched in a new hiding spot. There was no sound. Nothing. Who was out here with her?

“Mom,” she shouted again, “if it’s you, I don’t want to play. Stop trying to scare me.”

She changed places again and listened. Not a sound anywhere.

She knew every way up the mountain. The wind was picking up. Small clouds shuttled quickly across the sky, beneath the moon, their shadows gliding over the earth.

She concentrated her mind, listening, moving her senses out, watching the shape and hues of the landscape for traces of another person, the faintest pattern of footprints. But she sensed no one. Her mother had taught her to sit and feel everything for almost a mile around—birds, rabbits, people walking. The desert seemed empty, as if someone had cut Jet off from the world—or as if nothing was alive, or she wasn’t.

She had two choices, to be slow and cautious, or to find her mother before someone else did. As a cloud passed beneath the moon, she sprinted, running into its shadow. No one could beat her in a race, and she would be a hard target, weaving and leaping.

Her ankle twisted and her foot was pulled from beneath her before she could even feel the pain. She struck the mud face-first and rolled. It had been a sharp tripwire. She could feel the swelling in her ankle, the blood filling the soft leather of her moccasin boot. She wanted to cry, to scream her mother’s name, but stopping now could get her killed. She leapt behind another long rock and lay, trying to become invisible. The mountainside was irregular, an obstacle course of stone and fallen trees, of mud and sheer cliffs. Her mother had chosen it for this, to teach Jet all of the skills that her mother claimed she would someday need. Up until now, Jet never had.

Maybe that was why she didn’t cry now. The training. The lessons. The constant expectation that things would be more dangerous than they really were. She tried to sense what was around her, but her thoughts collapsed into fear. There was only her heart hammering in her chest, her body, her muddied arms and legs, her throbbing ankle, and her cold fingers still gripping the handle of the knife.

The wind was getting stronger. Jet took a few deep, slow breaths, as if pulling it into her body. It would help her. She had always been good in the wind. Her mother had taught her to move with it. She’d said it was Jet’s gift.

Ignoring the pain in her ankle, she ran again, this time moving with the wind, fitting her body to its contours so that she brushed past stones, through trees, not traveling directly toward the peak where she normally found her mother during the game, but letting the wind carry her along an indirect route no one could know unless they too were running in the wind.

Her feet danced from rock to rock. She avoided the moonlight, threading her body along shadows. The texture of the wind pleased her, and she almost forgot her pain. But she didn’t stop looking for the person who had thrown the knife and set the tripwire. She still couldn’t sense them or see any trace.

The low, flat peak of the mountain came into sight past trees and boulders, and moments later, something brushed against her thigh, catching in the cloth of her pants. Even as her fingers touched it, she knew what it was. A dart, its metal tip barbed, maybe poisonous. In her mother’s stories, they always were. She felt a sob building in her chest and tried to calm herself. Another one shot past and pinged off a rock. Where was her enemy? Above her, on the peak—that’s where he had to be.

Move with the wind. Feel the elements. As she ran, the deep hum of the earth reached up through the mud. The fluctuations of the wind propelled her stride. The heat in her chest, the air in her lungs, the solidity of her body—all this she could blend. But whoever was up there had incredible vision and aim. Another dart flickered past her face. Focus!

And then her mind calmed and opened outward, and she could sense the world again, the life out there, across the desert’s martian landscape that descended behind her. She knew each thing in its place. Lizards and snakes sleeping beneath rocks. Animals in burrows. A distant coyote sniffing the night air, sensing her. She had never felt this alive. Someone was on the peak, the presence faint, cloaked as if by an incredible act of focus, but still discernible. She directed her attention, searching into whoever it was.

Her enemy’s energy hummed with anger, with hostility. In the body standing on the peak, she sensed an intention to hunt and kill her. Just feeling it, she was terrified.

What choice do I have? she asked herself. I can’t just run away. Mom is out here somewhere. I have to do this. Stay calm!

Jet began to move again. Keeping close to shelter, she sprinted, twisting and leaping with the wind. She dimmed her presence, slowing her heart and breath even as she ran, to let her entire existence blur into the wind. It gusted hard, and she commanded her own life force to become faint, like a drop of water wiped along the surface of a dark window.

She didn’t head directly for the peak, but around the mountain, to a cleft she knew, just at the back, at the base of a stand of gnarled trees, their branches misshapen from the wind. It was the only way she could think of to invade the higher ground. She timed it perfectly with a strong gust, with the brief passing of a small cloud over the moon, with the distant cry of the coyote that she sensed ready to howl, and then she was twisting through the air, taking shape, her foot reaching for the earth as she swung the knife. The figure stood on the flat surface of the peak and spun toward her.

Sparks flashed as her enemy lifted a blade and deflected the knife. Her opponent was wrapped in black, just as Jet was. This was no crazy war veteran, but someone far more dangerous. Someone who wanted to stay hidden.

The moon appeared from behind the cloud, and her enemy kept its back to it, silhouetted, the bright pallor shining into Jet’s eyes as wind poured against the mountain with incredible force. Jet tried to use it, circling, feeling the pulse of the stone beneath her feet. But even as she twisted and leapt, the figure hardly seemed to move and yet avoided every strike, simply shifting slightly or again deflecting Jet’s knife.

Jet never stopped, attacking repeatedly as she swirled close to the silhouetted figure. She timed her kicks and circled, trying to get the moonlight out of her eyes. She focused her strength and energy, but her fists and feet and knife passed as if through the wind.

All the while Jet was trying to sense the fighter’s energy, at once masked and hostile, burning with a deep core of anger. But her enemy didn’t act on this rage, didn’t give in to impatience. It easily avoided every strike. All of the tricks Jet’s mother had taught her, to dodge and fall back and attack, to follow the wind, letting herself retreat or stumble even as she struck—nothing worked.

Another small cloud passed between the moon and the mountain, and even as Jet began to formulate a strategy, she realized her mistake. She should have planned already, for the split second when the moonlight would vanish. Her enemy had done this.

As Jet was leaping to the side, trying to stay with the wind, a foot struck her stomach, suspending her in the air as if she’d been pinned there. And then she was falling, trying to find the earth with her feet, even as she couldn’t breathe.

A hand caught the back of her head, gripping her hair through the black cloth. Her enemy jerked her head back and put the knife to her throat.

The wind suddenly died. The cloud passed from before the moon. The desolate landscape of the desert mountains stretched out like a vision of another world. Was this the last thing Jet would see?

“You’ve been lazy,” the enemy hissed. “You’ve never wanted to learn.”

Jet tried to pull away, but the blade stayed at her throat. The fist held her hair.

“What good are you to me? Tell me that!”

This time she heard the voice clearly: it was her mother’s.

“Mom?!” Jet cried out in shock. “What are you doing? Are you crazy?”

Then her mother’s lips were close to Jet’s ear. There was a long silence. “I’ve trained you since you were old enough to walk, and all you think about is parties and clothes. Millions of kids go to parties and wear nice clothes. Only one or two people in the world get to learn what I’ve taught you. You still don’t understand, do you?” She sheathed the knife and unwrapped her face.

Jet had begun to cry, shaking not just with fear and hurt, but with anger.

“You almost killed me! You could have–” she seethed.

“Jet,” her mother took a step closer, but her knees buckled. Jet caught her mother’s arm and held her up.

“This,” her mother whispered, “really was the last time. I had to make you see. I didn’t have the energy left, but I had to. I had to try to make you see.”

“See what? What’s wrong, Mom? Tell me. Tell me!”

“If you meet the dark leader, you must not be swayed. You mustn’t be weak, like I was,” Satoko said. “You must be strong.”

“What dark leader?” Fear rose in the pit of Jet’s stomach. “What do you mean, Mom?”

“Help me to the truck,” her mother’s voice came out, barely a whisper now.

Jet held her mother’s arm as they walked toward the edge of the slope. Her mother leaned against her, gasping now, heavier than anything Jet had ever felt.

“What happened to you …?” Jet began to ask, recalling the warrior she had just fought, the figure shifting almost imperceptibly in the wind.

Her mother couldn’t answer.

The walk down the mountain took an hour, Satoko leaning heavily against Jet with labored breath, her body exhausted in the night from which the wind had fled.

There were so many questions Jet longed to ask, so many her mother would never answer.