Devil's Advocate (The X-Files: Origins #2)(59)

She lingered there in the dark, watching his figure vanish into the night.

Why did I hide from him?

Why am I afraid of him?

The questions burned in her mind, but she did not try to answer them. Not out here, alone in the dark, confused and still off balance from whatever had happened in Sunlight’s Chrysalis Room. Not after everything Corinda had told her.

She put another dime in the slot and dialed a number. It rang five times before Ethan answered.

“I need to see you,” she said, her voice urgent and breathless.

“Whoa, wait, are you okay? Is something wrong?”

“Everything’s wrong,” said Dana, but then she took a breath. “Look, can I come over? I need to talk about some things with someone who understands.”

“Understands what?”

It was a good question, and it took Dana a few seconds to figure out how to answer it. “The case,” she said at last. “I have more information, but I don’t know if it’s real or not. Actually, I don’t know if anything’s real anymore. My head is so messed up right now.”

“Messed up how?” asked Ethan.

“I’ll tell you when I see you. I’ll tell you everything. Can I come over?”

“When?”

“Now.”

Ethan paused and hushed his voice. “I think Uncle Frank brought the file home for Todd Harris. I saw him putting the big case folder in his desk, and it looked thicker. But the thing is, my uncle’s still here. He was supposed to work another double today but he said he wasn’t feeling too good and called in sick. But after he took a nap, he said he was doing better and was going to go in after all. He said it was probably just too much spicy food at the diner last night. But he won’t be leaving for an hour. I’m cooking dinner first. He wanted oatmeal to calm his stomach. Can you come over after? Like around eight?”

Dana thought about it. She felt like going home and hiding under the covers in her room, but she was afraid of what her parents would say, especially if her pupils were still dilated from whatever it was that had happened with Sunlight. Last thing she needed was to have her folks think she’d been getting high. As if. But with everyone in Craiger talking about dumb kids getting stoned and then getting killed, she’d never be able to convince her parents that it was the aftereffect of meditation and astral projection. Yeah, that wasn’t something she could sell. She didn’t even know if she believed it herself.

However, if she didn’t go home, that left a lot of time. She glanced along Main Street in the direction of the dojo.

“Okay,” she said. “I’ll be over after my class, but I have a curfew, so I won’t be able to stay long.”

“Good,” said Ethan, sounding relieved. “And Dana…?”

“Yes?”

“Be careful, okay?” He paused, then added, “I just found you. Don’t want to lose you already.”

Dana took too long trying to decide how to answer. Ethan hung up.

She stood in the darkened booth and stared at the phone.

And smiled.





CHAPTER 52

Kakusareta Taiyou Dojo

7:35 P.M.

Dana was late for class but jumped right into the calisthenics. The orderliness of push-ups, sit-ups, and jumping jacks helped calm her jangled brain. And it gave her something else to blame for rapid heartbeat and sweats. Then they began the drills. The students stood in lines, everyone wearing crisp white gis and colored belts; Sensei Miyu Sato and her assistant, Saturo, wearing starched black hakama, the traditional culottes of the samurai. As Saturo counted in Japanese, the students moved together, practicing footwork and postures, evasions and angles of attack, while Sensei Miyu paced up and down and studied them with a critical eye.

Then everyone was paired off for uchikomi, a drill for practicing attacking skills against a passive opponent. There was an uneven number of students in the dojo that night, so Dana found—to her dismay—that she was paired with Saturo. The exercise always began very slowly to allow students to see that every technical detail was correct. They started with tsukuri, the preparation for a throw, and repeated this twenty times. Then on the last run, the throw was executed with more speed and as much precision as possible.

There were a lot of components to a good throw, including interception of the opponent’s attack; achieving the correct and best angle; disrupting balance; establishing a fulcrum with a foot, leg, hip, or shoulder; generating power through speed and torsion; and then the actual throw, followed by a pin, pressure point, or finishing strike. The goal, according to the sensei, was to do every single technique at least ten thousand times to truly master them. As there were hundreds of techniques in jujutsu, Dana did not expect to become a master anytime soon.

However, the orderly, mechanical, and practical approach to these exercises steadied her. Nothing was mystical in jujutsu. It was all physics and physiology, cause and effect, logic and technique. She was far from the best student in the class, but she learned very quickly, and she loved deconstructing each move to understand how they worked. Leverage points, angles of mass displacement, velocity, and balance. It was machinelike in the best of ways, and as the class wore on, it pulled her back from the strange and formless places her mind had gone.

When they had completed these drills, Sensei Miyu ordered everyone to sit cross-legged around the edges of the large mat-covered area in the center of the room.