Free Girl Rides the Wind by Jacques Antoine

Cmdr Leone behind her.

Chapter 7

Chutes and Ladders
    E mily lay quietly in her rack – the clock they shared showed 0439, and its red eyes blinked back at her. Lettering on the back of an old photo she’d tucked up against the panel above her head shook in the general agitation of the bulkhead. She reached it down and held it out before her face in the dim illumination of CJ’s nightlight. “It’s not over yet,” it read. “Sorry, kiddo.” A finger slipped along one edge and she mouthed the final words: “You can count on me. C.”
    Three pictures mattered to her, two of which she’d salvaged from the charred remains of the home she’d grown up in. Those images of her not-yet-recognized mother sustained her childhood, and she kept those back at Michael’s house in Virginia. But this one, a gift from Connie, had become the shoulder she rested on in the darkest moments, too precious to lose, and too important not to keep near. A sealed plastic bag kept it dry – her one concession to the hazards of shipboard life – but it had been in enough uniform pockets to round off two of the corners.
    She flipped it over and let her eyes roam across the fading colors on the other side. The jungle-camo green of the men’s fatigues had gone mostly grey, but Connie’s hair was still blond, tied back in a severe pony-tail. There she stood, on a wooden dock in Okinawa or maybe Manila, next to a single-engine seaplane, with three men. Two of them looked directly at the camera, perhaps surprised, but with faces too stony to show it, and a third man stood further back, shaded by the wing, glowering at something behind Connie. How had someone even be able to take such a picture – this thought had always perplexed her. Was it a friend? But these people weren’t the sort to make friends, not even with each other. Or just an accident? However it had happened, she was sure Connie had demanded the camera, no doubt hissing a not-so-veiled threat on the photographer’s life.
    The man in the middle always commanded Emily’s attention, her father, as secretive a figure as she’d ever met. He’d raised her under a foggy incognito, kept her hidden even from herself, kept her safe, and been killed before he could complete the task. Gazing at the only photographic image of him she’d ever seen comforted her. The image of the tall blonde standing next to him brought a different sort of reassurance. She knew well enough what lengths Connie would go to on her behalf, as well as what she’d do to keep Li Li and Stone safe – the children Emily had rescued from Kamchatka years ago – and what Connie had already risked to keep her alive, too. The man in the shadow also caught her eye, though she sometimes shuddered even to think of him, her uncle David, inhumanly cruel and determined to destroy her, until in one final confrontation she’d hacked a broad gash across his chest with a katana and stripped his life away. If only his face didn’t haunt her so, resembling her father’s as closely as it did.
    The third man was a mystery to her. She’d never asked Connie about him, and would never show the photo to anyone else. Tall, with wavy red hair, or maybe dirty blond. Other than the fatigues, and the duffle bag over his shoulder, you wouldn’t think he was military, or any of them for that matter, except perhaps Connie. The hand he’d draped over her father’s shoulder suggested some sort of intimacy, and she would give anything to know what it might signify. Emily slipped the photo back into its temporary hiding place, swung her legs onto the floor, taking care not to wake Kiku, and slipped into some shorts and running shoes.
    Sleep had never been a problem for Emily before, and in the ordinary sense of the word, it wasn’t really a problem now. The intermittent roar coming from the flight deck could not be covered by the white noise of whatever fan assembly pushed cool air into their berth, and the vibrations caused by the screws