Ninja Girl
Chapter Twenty

Nick reached for the bandages, wanting to fiddle with them still more, but Anya once again pushed his hands away.

“Cut it out,” she said, though she sounded more tired than annoyed. “I’m fine. I promise.”

“You’re not fine,” Nick argued, so frantic his voice came out as a whine. “You took a falling metal beam to the head. You’re lucky you’re even alive. At the very least it’s entirely possible you have a concussion.”

“I don’t have a concussion,” Anya replied softly, soothingly. She shifted in her seat and adjusted her arm sling. Nick had not known it until she had woken up, but her arm had been injured during the building collapse as well. While it did not appear to be broken, the sling seemed to help the pain.

“No one knows if they have a concussion or not,” Nick shot back. “You were unconscious for thirty minutes after a blow to the head. That says concussion to me.”

“I told you, I’m fine,” she said with a sigh.

Nick had expected her to be angry when she woke up, or completely out of it depending on how badly she had hurt her head. Instead, to his surprise, she just seem tired. That might have scared him more than anything else, though, as from the point that he had met her she had not given any indication that she had any weakness. She had barely eaten or drunk anything, he had not seen her sleep, and she never even seemed to need to rest.

After waking up, though, she had seemed down almost to the point of depression. She had woken up on the journey back to their hideout, which was fortunate because Nick had no idea how he would have been able to get them both back inside by himself. Beyond that fleeting moment of cooperation she had mostly been withdrawn and idle.

“Nick, please, will you stop? I don’t like being fussed over.”

“Fine!” Nick threw up his hands in defeat. “But just remember: when you die from internal hemorrhaging, it’ll be nobody’s fault but your own.”

“I’m not going to die, Nick. I told you, I’m fine. Now please, you promised you would go replace a shirt.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Nick replied dismissively, but went off to the office to do as he had promised. His shirt was still the bandage wrapped around Anya’s head, which had made for an awkward moment when she had woken up to replace him half naked and standing over her. He supposed he was probably lucky she had chosen not to just kill him outright in that moment.

Nick had seen a few shirts in a little closet in the office area. None of them seemed particularly great, but none of them seemed too dirty or nasty for wearing, either. He picked a plain gray shirt and threw it on over his head.

When he returned, he found Anya in mostly the same position as he had left her, but now she was holding something in her hands. He stepped over to where he could get a good look. It seemed to be a small patch that had a symbol of a six-point star with a dragon’s head superimposed over it.

“What’s that?” Nick asked, not sure if he was intruding on something private or not.

Anya did not seem alerted or bothered by his presence. Instead, in a distant voice she answered, “It is the ryuhosi. The ‘dragon star.’ It is the symbol of my clan.” She looked off into the distance at nothing in particular. “I miss my home,” she added after a time.

Nick frowned and sat down next to her. “I know,” he said, sympathetically. “We’ll get you back there, I promise.”

Anya did not respond. After a moment she put away the patch and leaned back against some nearby boxes. She put her feet up and motioned to Nick. “Do you want to bring me the laptop?”

Nick blinked, confused. “The… laptop?” he echoed.

“So I can do some research.”

“I thought that was my job here?”

Anya motioned with her injured arm. “Normally, yes, but I’m not exactly in a position to keep up my exercises. So you can bring me the laptop and then do your exercises.”

Nick’s eyes went wide. “I haven’t done enough exercises for one day?”

“No. You still owe me ten jump kicks at the target.”

“Ten!?”

“With each foot.”

“But I already did that!”

“You mean, you attempted to do it. Poorly. You need to keep practicing until you can do it with ease.”

Nick gaped at her in disbelief for a long time, but she met his glare with only a placid look of her own. Finally, Nick sighed and went to do as she asked.

“You’re a slave driver, you know that?” he called over his shoulder as he walked away.

After attempting the jump kicks a second time, Nick was so exhausted he simply collapsed on the safety mattress and before long fell into a deep sleep.

The next two days followed much the same pattern. When he wasn’t eating or too exhausted to move, Anya was putting him through one exercise or another. Occasionally she got up to, as she said, “stretch her legs.” This generally involved aerial acrobatics the like of which Nick could hardly even fathom. How she pulled off most of it with only one good hand was absolutely beyond him.

From time to time, Nick would attempt to discuss with her the events at the warehouse, but whenever he brought it up she would quickly change the subject. When she had first woken up he had given her a breakdown of all the things he had seen after she passed out, but from that point on her typically stoic attitude was even more withdrawn than normal. It was clear to Nick that the revelations they had discovered that day were bothering her, but it was equally clear that she had no desire to discuss it.

By the end of the second day Anya was feeling confident enough in her convalescence to remove her bandages. Her head still had a scar but it was healing surprisingly rapidly. She also was able to pull her arm out of the sling and stretch it without wincing.

“Nanomachines,” Nick said as he watched her doing this.

Anya raised an eyebrow and gave Nick a confused look. “What?”

“I’m just calling it right now,” Nick explained, slicing his hand through the air like he was declaring a runner safe on base. “Whatever Ryerson injected you with, I’m betting it was nanomachines.”

“Nano… what?”

“Nanomachines. You don’t know?” Anya shook her head in response. “Aw, man, they’re all over sci-fi stuff. Like the plague. Nanobots. They’re like these microscopic robots. They usually have a hive mind like bees, or ants. They work inside of something like germs or even a virus. Usually they’re inside of robots and keep up maintenance on the robot so it never runs down. As an alternative to the way the human body automatically works, I suppose.”

“So…” Anya said slowly, as though she were having trouble wrapping her brain around it, “you’re saying I have a bunch of tiny robot ant viruses living inside of me?”

Nick frowned. “Well, when you put it that way it sounds way less cool.”

“And why do you think this, again?”

“Because,” Nick shrugged. He could feel his face growing red with embarrassment now. “I dunno. Nanomachines in fiction are basically magic. They can do anything. So I would assume that includes stuff like teleportation and speaking languages and quickly healing someone in only two days after some pretty serious injuries.”

Anya’s expression turned thoughtful. “Do you recall when we were outside the Teller building, and you were explaining hacking to me?”

“Uh…” Nick said, not sure why she was bringing this up now. “Yes?”

“Do you remember that you were complaining that fiction tends to portray hacking in a ridiculous manner?”

“Yes?” He said again.

“Do you not feel you are just doing that now with this Nano… technology?”

Nick opened his mouth to speak, but it just ended up hanging there. His shoulders slumped in defeat. “You make a really good point,” he conceded. He thought about it for a moment. “So how do you explain all of it, then?”

“All of what?”

“All of it. Like, being able to talk in English?” Anya shrugged and shook her head. “Or the teleportation?”

“No clue.”

“Or what about healing so quickly from such serious injuries?”

“They really were not that serious.”

“Or, oh! What about how you have barely eaten or slept since I met you? Where are you getting all of your energy from, huh? Nanomachines.” Nick tapped his finger in time to each syllable in “Nanomachines,” pretty convinced he finally had Anya beat, but she was shaking her head long before he finished.

“That’s just part of being a ninja,” she explained. “I’ve always been like that.”

“Oh,” Nick replied, once again defeated. “Lousy badass super ninjas.” He sighed. “You really enjoy crushing my soul, don’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, here I am all excited about how cool it would be to have someone with nanotechnology inside of them, and you go shooting all my theories down.”

Anya got a curious look on her face. “So… are you saying that I’m not… ‘cool’ because I don’t have these ‘nano’ ant viruses inside of me?”

Nick’s expression grew shocked, and he quickly attempted to backpedal without much success. “Not, I mean, I wouldn’t say, I… uh… it’s not that you… you know…”

“So you’re saying that being a – what was it? A badass super ninja isn’t cool enough for you?”

Nick’s eyes went wide. “You know, I hadn’t thought of that. Now that you mention it, I guess being able to do all the stuff you do without any help from crazy futuristic technology actually would be more cool. So, I guess you are pretty cool after all.”

“Just to check, that’s a good thing, right?”

“Yes,” Nick said, “that’s a good thing.”

“Then, thank you, Nick Lombardi.”

“You’re welcome, Anya Karuba.” Nick grinned like an idiot at being able to finally use her last name.

“Kuroba,” she corrected.

Nick’s smile immediately vanished and he grumbled, “Whatever.”

“You should probably get back to work now.”

As if on cue, Nick’s stomach grumbled noisily. “Sorry,” he said, wrapping his arms around his belly, “I’m too hungry to keep going.”

“You already ate twice today.”

Nick shook his head. “Actually, I haven’t had anything to eat today. I finished the last of the food last night. You didn’t get that much to begin with, so it went pretty quickly.”

Anya sighed with annoyance. “Fine. I wouldn’t mind an excuse to get out of here for a while. Give me some money and I’ll go get more food.”

“I’m out of cash,” Nick said with a shrug. “All I’ve got is my card. I’d be okay with you drawing the rest of the money out of my account so we can have cash. After that rope and grapple I probably don’t have much left anyway.”

Anya contemplated that. “Very well. I can justify doing that, but I will want to go to an ATM across town to remain on the safe side. I will likely be gone a while.”

“That’s fine,” Nick said, handing her the card and a piece of paper with his PIN number on it. “Just keep your head down and don’t get caught by Ryerson.”

“Hey,” she said, in a tone that almost sounded hurt, “I’m a badass super ninja, remember?” With that she turned, jumped through the window, and was gone.