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

  Girl Fights Back, by Jacques Antoine

  Copyright 2011 Jacques Antoine

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  To Roxie and Miki,

  for taking the initiative.

  Girl Fights Back

  a novel

  by Jacques Antoine

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1: Kung Fu

  Chapter 2: Camping

  Chapter 3: Software

  Chapter 4: Back in the Woods

  Chapter 5: Getting out the Door

  Chapter 6: If you can’t stand the heat…

  Chapter 7: Back to the Woods

  Chapter 8: School Days

  Chapter 9: Yet Another Garage

  Chapter 10: A Meeting on the Road

  Chapter 11: Out with the Guys

  Chapter 12: Students Everywhere

  Chapter 13: The Big Game

  Chapter 14: Back to the Woods Again

  Chapter 15: A Familiar Face

  Chapter 16: Torbay

  Chapter 17: Kyoto

  Chapter 18: Back Home At Last

  Chapter 19: Miss M Comes Out

  Chapter 20: The Tournament

  Chapter 21: A Foot in the Door

  Chapter 22: Home At Last

  Chapter 1: Kung Fu

  It’s like a kid swinging a bat in his first little league baseball game. He has no idea what to expect, when to begin his swing, when to commit to it completely, not to mention where to swing the bat. Sure, he’s probably already practiced swinging at balls with his dad out on the local ball field or at a batting cage. He knows how to hold the bat—dominant hand on top, knuckles of both hands lined up, bat off his shoulder—maybe even how to step slightly into his swing, shift his weight to his back foot, swivel his hips and then his shoulders.

  But facing the opposing pitcher in a real, live game; now that’s something completely different. That kid on the mound is not trying to teach him how to hit the ball. He’s throwing as hard as he can, trying to get him out. His throwing motion is different from his dad’s. It’s really hard to see the ball until it’s almost too late. His eyes don’t focus on the right things; they don’t look in the right directions. He doesn’t know what to look for. He closes his eyes and swings. Here’s what it sounds like in sequence: thud... swish. Thud (the ball hits the catcher’s mitt), then swish (the bat cuts the empty air). Later, after a lot more experience in game conditions, he learns how to train his eyes to look and his mind to attend to the right things.

  That’s how sparring always seemed to her: just a matter of seeing, of knowing where to look and what to look for. She saw the telltale signs of her opponent’s intentions almost as soon as he had formed them, certainly as soon as he committed to them. This was her third martial art. First was aikido, a beautiful, meditative discipline. All round, soft movements, deflecting the opponent, but also absorbing him, enfolding him in the subtle folds of her own movements, a caress, a rebuff... almost a kindness. Soothing the opponent, allowing him to expend his energy fruitlessly, turning him around, twisting him in an unexpected way. Perhaps he sees his effort is going awry even as it’s happening to him, but there’s nothing he can do about it. The surprise she saw written across his face gave a supreme satisfaction, better than victory and his admission of defeat. Tap.

  Then came Shotokan karate. This too was meditative in its own way. But also much more angular, lots of jagged edges for an opponent to stumble on. Here, it wasn’t so much a matter of absorbing, deflecting and twisting away as of slipping inside and attacking her opponent’s attack from within. It was a new way of looking at her opponent. Now, instead of looking for clues to the ultimate destination of the attack and then derailing it, she learned to examine the beginnings of his movements. What did they betray? How did he make himself vulnerable at the very moment of his attack?

  She would strike him just as he began to strike her, but more quickly. A reverse punch to the solar plexus, or perhaps a sharp knuckle to the inside of his bicep before he could even straighten out his arm, or even a quick jab to his armpit. Instead of retreating from him she stepped forward to meet his punch. She was so close he couldn’t even reach her with his long arms! She didn’t hit him as hard as he wanted to hit her, but it was hard to breathe after she hit him. It was infernally frustrating, and puzzling. How did she know? She always seemed to know!

  That’s the way it always was with boys. They tended to be bigger and stronger, usually faster, too. But they were fascinated by their strength and it distracted them from the truly important lessons. They absorbed all the techniques designed to make them strong and fast, they broke boards, they wore their knuckles raw punching the heavy bag. But it was much harder for them to understand the importance of learning to see, to look. Sensei would drone on interminably about becoming still inside, breathing in and out, feeling everything—not just the sweat on your opponents brow and the little jitter in his chest—feel that, too, of course, but so much else in addition. Feel the stillness every blow interrupts. Feel the return of the stillness afterwards. There was just no room in a boy’s soul for this lesson. Not yet. Maybe later. But she learned it all.

  The strength and speed techniques fascinated her at first, too. She wanted to be strong. She preferred kicking. She was so much more flexible than the boys; it gave her what seemed like an advantage. Learning to punch was cool, too. But she could never punch as hard as she could kick. So she practiced as much as she could, in between schoolwork and housework. But even though she was better and sharper than the boys at kicking, she wasn’t better enough. She got a lot of bruises when they got a punch or a kick in. They were embarrassed to hit her, but she got hit. She would block their punches, too, but it still hurt.

  One day she was looking one of the boys in the eye over her gloves. He tried to look her eyes away. He wanted her to see his left foot twitch so she would move to block it, leaving him an opening for a left jab. It had worked before against others, even her. It was a good move. It was supposed to just graze her chin. He would follow with a quick front kick to her left knee and then as she was falling to the mat he would finish her with a right hook to the left side of her face and a ridge-hand to the throat. He knew he had to be fast, because she was limber and could easily land one of those sneaky kicks to the side of his head as he leaned in with that first jab. That’s why he wanted her to commit to a downward block before committing himself to that first jab.

  But she saw something else this time as she watched him. She was all electricity, waiting for a sign in his muscles she could react to, anticipate. Her synapses were poised to fire, a state of high dynamic tension flowing out to her extremities and back again to her core. She could feel the pattern, in and out, resonant, surging like a tide of electricity. Her eyes examined him, looking in his eyes, at his shoulders, his throat, his mouth (the muscles of the jaw sometimes twitch just as someone makes a decision). His nerves resonated with energy like hers, though not perhaps in sync with her.

  Then it dawned on her: what she sought was not to be found in any of those places. There was something else, some place else to look. Her attention slipped past his eyes, behind them, to something vital flowing behind his eyes. His qi (or chi). She could feel it. She knew instantly what he meant to do. Not in so many words. But she knew, she felt with absolute confidence that she would recognize exactly when he had decided to make his move, and what direction it
would go to and come from.

  He flicked his eyes down, twitched his leg and waited for her to block. She did and he leaned in with his jab. Before he knew what had happened, she had stepped just inside his fist. He grazed her ear as she punched him hard to the center of his chest. He thought of kicking before she hit him again, but her left knee struck just above his knee as he fell backwards. She hit his chest, throat and chin three more times before he hit the floor. Jaws dropped around the room. Everyone in the dojo stood staring. They all recognized at once that she had just made a quantum leap in her sparring. They sensed it, even as it came to pass, even though they had no idea what it really meant.

  Sensei smiled, drew her aside and said quietly so only she could hear, “You hit him too hard. It left you overcommitted.”

  “I know,” she said, and she did. She understood perfectly. He didn’t mean she had made a tactical error. There was no flaw in her technique. But she had overcommitted emotionally. In the thrill of the moment of insight, she had allowed herself the satisfaction of hitting him as hard as he had meant to hit her. But it left her out of balance emotionally, no longer sensing the flow of qi in the room. She gave herself over to the boyish thrill of hitting hard and fast, of triumphing. It took an extra instant to pull herself back, to collect herself emotionally, to open herself again to the energy of the room. Soon, she would learn to control even that reaction.

  From that moment on, no one in the dojo ever managed to score a point on her again. Not even Sensei. The weekly sparring competitions took on a different flavor for the others. She cast a shadow over every match. They all knew the winner might eventually have to face her. And there was something unsettling about it, a peculiar mix of embarrassment and frustration. Her ability to read them was uncanny. None of them quite knew how she always came out the winner, how she beat them to their own punch. She never retreated, no matter how ferociously they charged. She never let their size or strength faze her. She never allowed them to make any use of their apparent advantages.

  She saw what they did not see, felt what they did not feel, because she looked where they did not look. It was, in fact, a new way of perceiving, of being in the world. It changed her whole life. When her dad picked her up in the family car, he knew. It was obvious on that first day. She walked like a tomboy, as usual. Her strong shoulders and quick legs looked the same as always. But she held her head at a slightly different angle. Her father noticed.

  Her hands were stronger and coarser than one might expect in a girl, but not as large as a boy’s. If a boy with a crush on her—she was quite pretty in her way, though she seemed to have little interest in exploring that side of herself—tried to hold her hand, he might not notice how different her hands were, what they could do in the dojo.

  But she could tell from his hands exactly what he was capable of, that and the look in his eyes. Physical strength, fighting strength, is more evident in a boy’s hands than in his arms or shoulders. That’s where she could see if he had been trained. But the eyes really said it all. Where did he look, what did he notice? Was he capable of pulling back from visual immediacy and attending to something beyond, behind, to qi? It seemed to anyone else like an almost unfocused gaze. She never saw it in any of the boys she met.

  In fact, the only people she knew who looked in that way were Sensei and her father. With Sensei, it felt almost like a secret they shared, even though he spent plenty of time trying to get his other students to look in that way, too. But none of them had been able to follow him. Sensei understood. That was the way it always was. He offered his wisdom to them openly, without reservation, but none of them knew how take advantage of his most important lesson. In fact, she was only the third student in forty years to understand. Three was a lot, as he figured it.

  With her father she never talked about it. He encouraged her interest in the martial arts. He celebrated her successes. But he remained curiously distant from the concrete reality of it. Yet she never doubted he looked in the same way she did, saw what she saw, held his head at an odd angle. They shared that, even if they never spoke of it.

  Finally, she took up kung fu. She had already mastered two other martial arts, so there weren’t any technical challenges for her here. She just wanted to learn how to think and sense in a new way. Kung fu turned out to be a bit of an amalgam of all sorts of other arts, kind of an encyclopedic discipline. It did not pretend to any deep unity, as if the ancient monks thought to themselves: “Any of these techniques can lead to inner peace. Study them all or only some of them. But the point is not the mastery of any of them. Rather, keep studying them until you find the way past them.”

  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.