Free Facing Fear by Gennita Low Page B

me?”
    “Because life isn’t like the movies, little Jade Tree. We all see something we want and go after it, but the center is an illusive place. It has many meanings. Our motherland is chuung-quo, the Middle Kingdom, but is it truly in the middle?”
    “So Grandmother, the center is where I believe it is?”
    “My child, you are old beyond your years.”
    Nikki missed her grandmother. Their conversations ran the gamut from old wives’ tales, to historical epics from ancient China, to prophecies using the ancient Chinese calendar-almanac, the Tuung-sing , literally, the Book ofKnowledge. Her grandmother had her memorize many of the old poems from this book by the age of five. Even now Nikki could still recite most of them. They were what kept her sane in those dark days when they had put her in isolation. She had found out that one valued the oddest things when the soul was lonely.
    She recalled how her grandmother’s stories became a kind of strength builder. She spent those hours in the dark remembering the Tuung-sing , that wondrous book that told the past and the future, that gave the lunar dates to farm and to make babies. It taught all the Chinese traditional beliefs of palmistry, physiology, and astronomy. It held the secrets to the universe because her grandmother told her everything she knew came from that ancient text, with its updated almanac every year.
    Tomorrow she would go down to Chinatown and buy herself this year’s text. She wanted to leaf through its pages and see whether it still held any secrets for her.
    “Yun Tzi Tcho, Sing Poon Si.” Nikki whispered in Cantonese those first two lines of the poem all Chinese-educated kids knew by heart. A new life is innocent, like an empty page, ready for the hard lessons ahead.
    Easing the car into an empty parking spot, she turned off the engine, then leaned forward to check her face in the rearview mirror. She had put on a little more makeup today. Again, she hadn’t wanted to dwell on the reason. The building loomed behind her reflection, already busy with visitors. She remembered how suffocated she had felt when she was in there. What was wrong with the building?
    She opened the car door and stepped out, stopping for a moment to smooth away the wrinkles in her skirt. Notepad. Purse. ID. She was ready.
    The building looked back at her, as if it were waiting for something. She shook the thoughts away and started to walk toward it, studying the front side with all its reflective windows. There was a lesson waiting for her in there. She felt it intuitively, the way she always did about certain things.
    Her grandmother had talked of illusions. Nikki smiled with gentle acceptance. Her whole life now was an illusion. Her hardest lesson was to accept that and live it, and in the process she had learned to use it as a talent for her agency. Which, in turn, had guided her back here, to the beginning, where she was once an innocent, like an empty page.
    She climbed the steps, making her way with the throng of visitors toward the entrance. Her thoughts turned to Rick Harden. A master illusionist. One who had cloaked himself so well, she didn’t even think he knew where his center was. He held the key to her quest for the truth, but in order to find it she must break him apart, piece-by-piece.
    However, last night he had been the one pulling her apart. She understood how she seemed to him, with her long hair and similar bearing to his old love; she had even been ready for it. But she had been totally unprepared for her response to his touch. Her stomach fluttered from the memory of the heat in his eyes and the sure touch of his hands holding her, caressing her hair. There was a moment when she had believed that she felt tenderness from him, but that instant fragmented quickly enough as his desire turned into anger. She had wanted to call him back when he let her go and walked away.
    Illusions, she told herself. All illusions. She reached the security desk and gave