Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis Read online

  Emma grimaced at this; clearly she wasn’t the only one Becky had turned away. “I’m sure things will work out for you,” she said. “Your poems—”

  “Don’t fucking patronize me like I’m a little kid. It’s too late for the big sister shit.” Brandi spun the car into the parking lot of Rampart State University and stomped on the brake. The Chevette skidded to a stop in the middle of the lot. Emma thought for a moment Brandi might try to slap her or do something worse. “Get the fuck out.”

  “All right.” Emma reached into the back for the meteor crate. “I’m sorry—”

  The car had already screeched out of the lot before she could finish the apology.

  ***

  The next problem came as Emma lugged the case up to the front doors of the college’s science department. It was already nine o’clock at night, long after most everyone had gone home. There was the possibility of a night class, in which case one of the doors might be open.

  She had to try both front doors and one around the side of the building before she found one at the rear that was unlocked. By that time she needed to stop for another break and rested the case against a stand of student newspapers. With her sleeve she wiped the sweat from her forehead. Now if she could just find an open lab with the equipment she needed.

  “Becky?” a man’s voice said.

  “Yes?” she said. She squinted into the dim light of the hallway. From the shadows came a middle-aged man with the thick glasses and gray temples of a professor; he lacked only the tweed jacket and maybe a pipe to complete the look. Instead, he wore a white lab coat similar to the one Emma had worn at the Plaine Museum.

  “I thought that was you. I was so sorry to hear about Steven. He was our best student.”

  “Oh, you were one of Steve’s professors?”

  “Yes. I’m Dr. Maxwell.”

  “OK,” Emma said. She should have known she might run into someone at the college’s science department who might recognize her. It would make it far more difficult for her to lie her way into a lab.

  “What’s that you have there?” Dr. Maxwell asked on cue.

  “It’s just a project of Steve’s. I found it in his things and I thought I’d finish it for him. You know, as a kind of tribute.”

  “What type of project?”

  “I’d rather not say. It’s kind of personal.”

  Her bluff worked. Dr. Maxwell nodded to her. “I understand.” He patted her shoulder in a fatherly fashion. “If you need any help, you just ask.”

  “Well, I was hoping to borrow one of your labs for a couple of hours.”

  “Yes, of course you can. I think they’re still using 107, but you can use 103.” Dr. Maxwell led her down the hallway, past a well-lit laboratory where students poured chemicals into beakers. From the look of it, they were pouring water into baking soda. She had done a similar experiment when she was four years old with a chemistry set Mom bought her for Christmas. She wanted to go into the lab to watch and maybe try it herself, but then she reminded herself it would be out of character for Becky to wander into a lab; Becky didn’t share her nostalgia for science experiments.

  She followed Dr. Maxwell past the lab, into a similar one that was unoccupied. Emma couldn’t help but smile when she saw the equipment at one end of the room. Maybe it wasn’t as good as the Plaine Museum, but it would be able to tell her more about the meteor than her puny microscope. “This will be perfect. Thank you.”

  Dr. Maxwell hefted the case onto a table for her. “It certainly is heavy,” he said.

  “I’m sorry. It didn’t hurt you did it?”

  “No, I’m fine.” Dr. Maxwell smiled at her again. “Anything else you need, you let me know. I’ll be down in my office for a couple of hours. Got some tests to grade.”

  “Sure thing.”

  Emma waited until Dr. Maxwell was gone before she shut the door. The lab door didn’t have a lock on it; she would have to hope no one tried to burst in to spy on her while she studied the meteor. If they did, she would try the same lie she had used on Dr. Maxwell. It wasn’t completely implausible that Steve Scherr—whose love of science rivaled Emma’s—would have kept a meteor.

  It felt like she had come home after a long vacation when she began to turn on the lab equipment. Even in those last months at the Plaine Museum she hadn’t done a lot of research work; she’d gotten bogged down in the administrative end of things. While she didn’t mind administrative work, she never found it as much of a challenge as research. There were no mysteries with bureaucratic work, only boxes to fill in with basic information.

  The mystery of the meteor deepened when she ran a spectral analysis on it. From what she could tell, there was something dense inside the meteor, denser than the rock she had studied with her feeble microscope. It wasn’t implausible that this could happen naturally; she had read about cases like it in her journals. Still, it warranted a further investigation.

  With the equipment at her disposal, the best way to go about this would be to take a core sample. That would allow her to see what made up the denser material at the meteor’s core. It might even explain the source of the glow she had witnessed at Bykov’s house. After she slipped on her gloves and a pair of goggles, she picked up the drill.

  She stood at arm’s length from the meteor even though she still couldn’t sense the presence she’d felt earlier. She eased the drill forward and tightened her grip as it came into contact with the meteor. The drill churned through an inch of solid rock without incident.

  Then the meteor lit up in a flash of light. Emma didn’t have time enough to pull away before a surge of energy sent her backwards. Even in Becky’s heavier body she managed to fly a good twenty feet across the room to smack the back of her head against a blackboard. As her vision dimmed, she thought she saw the meteor hover in midair.

  Chapter 20

  The walls around her vibrate as if from an earthquake. Emma pays little attention to this or the screams that accompany the thumping bass of the stereo. She has become used to these Friday night parties at the dorms. In theory such parties are not allowed, especially at one in the morning, but in reality a well-placed bribe takes care of any problems with the floor supervisor and the campus police.

  If she wants, Emma can appeal to higher powers at the university to force them into action. She has considered this once or twice, but decided it wasn’t worth the effort. In another three months she’ll leave Northwestern with her bachelor’s degree in geology to move on to Berkeley to pursue her doctorate. She can tolerate a little noise until then.

  She looks down at the sheet of equations before her. She can’t remember who assigned these, but she knows they’re due Monday. Ordinarily it wouldn’t take her more than an hour for such homework, but she’s been stuck on this sheet for the last five hours. The equations don’t make any sense; they use symbols she’s never seen in any textbook or journal. She’s started to suspect this might be some kind of joke by one of her professors, an attempt to trick the sixteen-year-old genius. A professor in her advanced calculus class had tried that when he left out a variable in a formula. The professor had then challenged Emma in front of the class to expose her as a fraud.

  “You missed something,” she said. She wrote in the variable in the equation. Then she proceeded to solve the problem in less than a minute. By the time she finished, she could feel everyone stare at her, so that when she turned around, her face burned from embarrassment. She slunk back to her seat and hunkered down in the hope people would forget about her.

  The door to her room bangs open. A couple locked in a kiss stumble into the room. Emma recognizes the female half of the couple as her roommate. Emma looks down at her equations to give them privacy. Her face starts to turn red as it did that day in advanced calculus class. She can already hear Becky call her a prude.

  The slurping and sucking noises pause. Her roommate says, “Oh shit, the kid is still up. Isn’t it past your bedtime?”

  “I can’t sleep.�
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  “Whoa, is that the little genius?” her roommate’s boyfriend asks.

  “Yeah, that’s the freak. Maybe I should read her a bedtime story.”

  “Maybe we should go somewhere else. This kid is giving me the creeps.”

  Emma’s roommate sighs dramatically. “Fine. Let’s go to your room.” On her way out, Emma’s roommate grumbles, “Why’d they have to put the baby with me?”

  Emma stares at the sheet of equations, but her mind isn’t focused on the problems at the moment. She takes off her glasses to wipe at the hot tears that run down her cheeks. She’s dealt with insults like that ever since she came to Northwestern, but the pain has never stopped. She understands why her parents didn’t let her skip too many grades, despite that she was often bored in her classes; they wanted to protect her from the kind of discrimination she faced here and in high school.

  Just a couple more months, she reminds herself. With a final sniffle she reseats her glasses on her face. There has to be some way to solve these problems. She thinks back to one of her history classes that talked about the discovery of the Rosetta stone. Because it contained both Greek words and Egyptian hieroglyphics, scientists were able to translate the ancient Egyptian language. She needs to apply a similar principle here. If she can just find something familiar in one of these equations, then it might allow her to translate all of them.

  She studies the page of equations again. Near the bottom she sees something that looks sort of like the Pythagorean Theorem. That might be what she needs to unlock the rest of the problems on the sheet. Let’s see, if this squiggly line is an equals sign, then—

  The door bangs open again. Emma assumes it must be her roommate, or maybe another drunk couple who want a place to make out. She doesn’t bother to look up from the paper until a hand grabs the back of her shirt. “What do you think you’re doing?” a woman’s voice snarls.

  The hand jerks Emma’s head back so she can see the woman is Becky’s mother. She snatches the paper off the desk. “What’s all these funny lines and stuff?”

  “It’s homework,” Emma says, but her voice sounds wrong. The room around her has changed; the walls have turned to scarred wood paneling with posters of Brad Pitt tacked up instead of the Periodic Table.

  “Homework?” Becky’s mother laughs at this. “What do you need to do homework for? You think you’re going to be some big shot? You think you’re better than me?”

  Becky’s mother shakes Emma as she says this last sentence. The alcohol on the woman’s breath is nearly enough to make Emma choke. “No,” Emma whimpers.

  “You been hanging around that hoity-toity Earl family too long. You ain’t never going to amount to nothing, you fat pig.”

  Though she can still only see the wall and ceiling, Emma can feel her rear spill over the sides of her chair and her stomach rest against her thighs. “No,” she says again.

  She’s helpless to do anything as Becky’s mother tears up the sheet of equations she was so close to solving. “You don’t need that book learning. I’ll teach you a real lesson.”

  Though Emma knows she weighs nearly twice as much as Becky’s mother, she still finds herself unable to fight back as Becky’s mother drags her out of the room. She passes another bedroom, where little Brandi and Bambi look up from their dolls for a moment before they turn away. There’s nothing either of them can do to help.

  Emma knows where Becky’s mother will take her even before they stop in front of the furnace closet. “No, please,” Emma says. “I’ll be good. I won’t do anything.”

  “Get in there, Piggy,” Becky’s mother says. “And if you try to get out of there I’ll tan your fat ass.”

  The furnace closet is a tight squeeze for Emma. Her stomach presses against the hot surface of the furnace, but there’s nothing she can do about it no matter how she tries to arrange her body. She can only cry silently to herself.

  She feels another presence in the closet. This presence doesn’t feel human or animal. It feels like something more dark and sinister than even Becky’s mother. Emma presses her back against the wall, but there’s nowhere for her to go. The monster will get her this time—

  ***

  Emma woke up to someone shaking her. She looked up into the unfamiliar face of a young man with dark skin and brown eyes who looked fit enough to be quarterback for the football team. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  Emma put a hand to her head and felt Becky’s long hair. She couldn’t feel any blood. “I’m fine,” she said.

  The young man didn’t so much as grunt as he helped her sit up. “What happened? I was next door when I heard a crash and then I saw you on the floor.”

  Emma thought about this and remembered her last moments of consciousness. She had tried to extract a core sample from the meteor when it shocked her, just like the first time. She looked around the lab and saw the meteor still on the counter, apparently undamaged. “I was working and then I fell off a stool.”

  “You fell off a stool?” the young man gave her a quizzical look. “Weren’t you studying that meteor over there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then how’d you get all the way over here? That must be at least twenty feet.”

  “Oh, well, I—”

  “That’s enough, Tim. Mrs. Scherr’s obviously taken a nasty fall. Why don’t you go find some ice for her head?”

  “Yes, Dr. Maxwell,” Tim said. He gave Emma another quizzical look before he finally left the room.

  “I’m sorry about that. He’s my most gifted student, but sometimes he’s too inquisitive.”

  “I understand.” With Dr. Maxwell’s help, Emma got to her feet. She limped around in a circle to get her bearings. “I think I should be going. Thank you for letting me borrow your equipment.”

  “It’s no trouble at all. You’re welcome to use our facilities anytime.”

  “Thank you.” Emma waddled over to the meteor. She hesitated before she reached out to touch it with her gloved hands. The meteor didn’t give her a shock this time; it allowed her to place it gently back into its case. By the time she had sealed the case, Tim had returned with a can of Coke.

  “I couldn’t find any ice, but I thought this might help,” he said. He held out the can to her.

  “Oh, thanks.” Emma took the can of Coke and pressed it to the back of her head like an ice pack. She had to admit that the cold of the soda did help dim the ache in her head. “That’s very nice.”

  She tried to pick up the case, groaned, and then set it back down.

  “Do you need help with that?” Tim asked.

  “I can get it.” Emma tried again; this time she managed to heft the case from the table to set it down on the floor. “But thank you.”

  She started to drag it towards the door to the lab. Only when she reached the doorway did she stop to consider where she was going. She didn’t have a car or enough money for a cab. “I don’t suppose one of you could give me a ride home? I don’t want to carry this on the bus.”

  “I can take you,” Tim volunteered. “I was just finishing up with my experiment.”

  “If it’s not too much of a bother.”

  “No trouble at all, as long as Dr. Maxwell will lock up.”

  “Of course. You two go on.”

  Emma decided to let Tim carry the meteor case, his muscles more than capable of the task. He led her to the parking lot and a rusty turquoise Ford Escort. The case fit into the little car’s trunk without any difficulty. It was a tighter squeeze for Emma in the passenger’s seat of the car. She had to suck in a breath before she could get the seatbelt across her stomach.

  She started to give Tim the address, but he held up a hand. “I know where you live. I worked with Dr. Scherr in Advanced Physics.”

  Emma remembered she wasn’t welcome at Becky and Steve’s house. The last thing she wanted was to provoke Becky to do something to Emma’s body. “Actually I’m house sitting for a friend while she’s away.” She gave him the address to
Ms. Chiostro’s. “So were you a friend of Dr. Scherr—my husband?”

  “Maybe not a friend per se. Colleague might be the better way to put it. He was helping me with some of my experiments.”

  “What are you majoring in?”

  “Mechanical engineering. I’m hoping to work for NASA. Maybe I could make the first robot to walk on Pluto.” Tim laughed to himself. “It’s kind of silly, I know.”

  “It’s not silly. Everyone needs a dream.”

  “I guess so. Dr. Scherr always said you were his dream.” Emma blushed at this and turned away to the window. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to reopen old wounds.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “I felt terrible when I heard about him being shot. I don’t know why anyone would have wanted to shoot him.”

  “I don’t know either,” Emma said, although she did know why Steve had died. The evil goddess Isis had ordered Steve killed in order to drive Becky to become the Black Dragoon. Becky didn’t remember any of that; she had sleepwalked through her time as the Dragoon, but the rift remained between them. In a way she supposed Becky was right: it was Emma’s fault. “It’s a tragedy.”

  “I’m sorry,” Tim said again. They didn’t say anything else until they reached Ms. Chiostro’s house. He hefted the meteor from the trunk and carried it up to the front steps for her. “If you need any more help with this, I’d be happy to help you.”

  “Thanks, but I can handle it.”

  “I didn’t mean that you couldn’t. I just—”

  “I know and it’s very kind of you.”

  “Though really you should let Dr. Earl take a look at it. She’s an expert on meteors, probably the best in the world.”

  Emma felt her cheeks turn warm again. “She’s a little busy at the moment. I can take care of it on my own. Thanks.”

  “If you’re sure—”

  “I am. Good night.”

  She left the meteor case in the foyer and then trudged up the stairs to the guest room. She fell asleep moments after she splashed down on the bed. She hoped tomorrow she would wake up and all of this would be a nightmare.