Black Warrior Read online

  DEDICATION

  To my loving parents,

  Jeanette and Martin Hall,

  and my beloved grandparents,

  Margaret and Ken Livingstone

  EPIGRAPH

  AS A NINJA,

  MY BODY IS A WEAPON,

  MY MOVEMENTS ARE MAGICAL,

  MY FOCUS IS LETHAL.

  I AM THE INVISIBLE WARRIOR.

  From the ancient ninja’s Tiger Scrolls

  CONTENTS

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  EPILOGUE

  GLOSSARY

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BOOKS BY TIFFINY HALL

  COPYRIGHT

  ONE

  Thunderous flapping. My ears bleed. Turquoise stars burn. The world closes like a clam.

  I follow a ribbon of hair out of the darkness. The clouds part, a new sun rises, not a circle but a long sword. Pointed at me.

  Erupting awake, I half-roll onto my side in bed, gasping. One word, like a billiard ball, shoots around my brain: ‘Father.’

  I can’t escape. It feels like I haven’t slept for days. The same dream repeats over and over, a bad movie I can’t turn off. It makes no sense, but I know it has something to do with my father.

  I reach over and turn on my bedside lamp. The windows switch black, the fake light killing off the dawn. I slide out of bed, curl into my dressing gown, collect my school uniform I laid out neatly the night before and walk groggily down the corridor and into the bathroom. I close the door behind me, fiddling for a moment with the lock, but giving up when it jars as it always does. I stare into the mirror and look at my bed hair. Just days ago, I felt fear drip from every strand, but now it’s bathed in light, the kind of light that only lives in creases and cracks, that shimmies through slats, flowers through holes, then touches you in a pat. I rake my hair behind my ears and examine my face in the soft light.

  I’ve been the White Warrior for almost a month now; powers to control the elements and flash invisible and all that. I’ve stood up to bullies, fought at the Cemetery of Warriors and reclaimed my powers. When Elecktra turned samurai — not just any samurai but the Red Samurai, possessed by the Serpent Sword — we battled almost to the death in the cave at Samurai Falls and still I’ve escaped without a scratch, while she sleeps next door wounded. Guilt moves in, a grand piano in a tiny room, the music jarring, drowning out thoughts so that all I can taste are those notes of pain — I hurt my sister. Crash, crash. I could have killed her!

  I turn away from the mirror. I can’t bear to look at myself. Shouldn’t I feel powerful? I don’t recognise how I feel any more — a spikey feeling like anger, but also the lumpy feeling of guilt mixed with that sinking feeling of regret. I turn on the shower, undress slowly and walk into the steam. I stand under the water for a long time, but it feels like nothing washes away. Elecktra is still a samurai, I’m still a ninja and the biggest secret in my life is still buried deep somewhere in my mother’s heart. My mother’s heart, always shaded, covered like a singing budgie being blanketed for the night. Why does she always have to hide things?

  I turn off the water in desolation. I put on my school uniform, then drape the dressing gown over it. Sometimes I’ll wear the dressing gown over my clothes until the last second before I step out the front door. Something about it makes me feel so safe, just like the doona that I’ll drag downstairs to watch TV on the couch.

  Dense steam fills the bathroom, riding the currents of air in white swirls. I open the vanity above the sink. My side has hardly anything in it — face cleanser, cotton tips, soap, toothpaste, floss, deodorant — but Elecktra’s side looks like a make-up counter in a department store. The colour throbs on the shelves like something breathing. I run a finger across the spectrum of nail polishes. Despite Elecktra being extremely disorganised — I can’t believe she hangs more than one item of clothing on a single clothes hanger, doesn’t alphabetise her books and leaves Christmas decorations up in her room until Easter — her nail polishes are always army-ordered in rainbow colour. I swap a violet bottle with a yellow one and shift the red next to turquoise. The bathroom door swings open.

  ‘Me time,’ Elecktra announces. She is wearing her pink satin robe with a feature floral pocket, a towel tucked under one arm. Her entrance blows in fresh air, evaporating some of the steam.

  ‘I haven’t finished,’ I say.

  ‘You’re not the only one who needs to scrub off her sleeping face.’

  ‘Sleeping face?’

  Elecktra laughs and points at my cheek, where a deep crease from my pillow has engraved a line in the skin. Damn. Takes ages to get rid of sleep scars. I rub my face violently.

  ‘I’m the one who needs to get to school,’ I say. ‘Shouldn’t you be in bed?’

  ‘Why are you so eager to get to school anyways?’

  I have a boyfriend who is there, I sing in my mind. Then blush.

  Elecktra turns on the tap. ‘The water is warm,’ she says.

  I look at her.

  ‘Should be hot! You used it up!’

  I twist my mouth to the side and look around at the disappearing steam. ‘I had a lukewarm shower. Swear,’ I say.

  Mum calls something from downstairs. I just make out the whistle in the word ‘washing’, so walk over to the laundry basket and bundle up as much of the dirty clothing as I can manage. Wish House Elves existed. ‘Lecky, can you pass me those towels please?’

  Elecktra stops studying her eyebrows beneath her thick springy hair and cowers over her wounded chest. ‘I can’t,’ she says weakly.

  I dump the air out of my nose and walk to the towel rack, drop the pile of washing on the floor and pull off the towels. I flick Lecky gently with the orange one.

  ‘Watch it, I’m injured,’ she says.

  I flick her again on the leg. A perfumed deodorant bottle flies into Elecktra’s hand and she sprays me.

  ‘Stop it,’ she says. ‘Or you’ll smell of Love Puzzle foreves.’

  Love Puzzle smells of citrus. Elecktra only wears it when she exercises and ends up smelling like mouldy oranges as it doesn’t mix well with sweat.

  I drop the towel onto the washing and collect the pile into my arms again. I hesitate, then ask, ‘Are you feeling okay?’

  ‘Been better. I didn’t realise how good you were with the ninja stars.’

  ‘Only when being attacked by a samurai,’ I blurt.

  An awkward silence moves in, full of opportunities to say the wrong thing. I’ll have to come to terms with my sister being the enemy, but what will this mean? What if we try to kill each other again? What if we can’t live together any more? I hate to admit it, but I couldn’t live without my messy, bag-of-old-fruit-smelling sister with her weird outfits and powers. I couldn’t bear it.

  Elecktra turns to the mirror and I watch her splash water onto her flushed face without using her hands. The liquid fountains gently onto her nose and folds down her cheeks. Despite still being gripped by fever, she looks like she could be in a slow-motion TV commercial for bottled water, swimming pools, holidays, beauty products — anything t
hat involves water peeling off perfect skin. Her deep brown eyes flash beneath the spray, watching me.

  ‘We’ll work it out,’ she gargles.

  I nod and she smiles.

  ‘I’ll take this down.’ I shrug the washing as the guilt needles through me again. ‘Would you like a cup of tea in bed?’ I ask.

  Elecktra turns off the tap, her hands remaining by her sides. ‘S’okay, you don’t have to,’ she says quietly, then changes her mind. ‘Bag in.’

  ‘I know. I’ve been making you tea since we were little. I know you like bag in and three seconds of milk and a blue mug to keep yourself calm.’ Ever since Art told us that blue is a calming colour, Elecktra eats and drinks from blue plates and cups whenever she can — to keep herself in a serene ‘food mood’.

  She nods. I leave her plucking her eyebrows with floating tweezers while brushing her teeth, her hands folded behind her back.

  I drop off the laundry downstairs and find Art in the kitchen struggling to open a fresh jar of jam. His hands are wrapped so tightly around the lid that you can see the white outlines of his bones pressing against the skin. I take the jar from him gently and pop the lid with a single twist. He yanks my ponytail.

  ‘Thanks, kid,’ he says.

  I put the kettle on. Mum appears in her black satin pyjamas, her toenails painted watermelon pink. Her blonde hair is still fighting the static of sleep.

  ‘Mum, what are we going to do?’ I ask, for what feels like the thousandth time since Elecktra and I returned from Samurai Falls three days ago.

  With a loud, heavy sigh, Mum turns and looks out the window. The sky blinks awake. The day has a Sunday morning feel to it, no urgency, and Mum and Art still in their pyjamas. I have to keep reminding myself it’s Friday, but I refuse to take off my dressing gown.

  ‘Don’t know,’ Mum says. She takes a slice of spelt bread and leans towards the toaster, but doesn’t put the bread in. Rather she begins to shred it like a piece of paper. Art and I look at each other.

  ‘Mum?’

  Akita turns to me. ‘Sorry, I forgot I was holding this,’ she says nonchalantly, waving the bread. ‘I was somewhere else.’

  Art takes the bread from her and leads her to a stool.

  ‘Mum, what should we do? About Elecktra being samurai and me and you being ninjas?’

  I stare at her as dust filters in the morning light like plankton. She looks tired as she chews the side of her thumbnail and has that waiting-in-traffic kind of frustrated energy about her. Art is acting strange too. A half-eaten piece of jam toast juts out of his mouth and he is practising his golf swing, squaring up at an imaginary tee and whipping his stroke over and over.

  ‘One day at a time,’ Mum says.

  ‘What about the samurai clans? The Chiba samurai clan is bound to hate a samurai living with ninjas. And the Emishi ninja clan will retaliate,’ I say.

  ‘Maybe they’ll have bigger problems to deal with.’ Her face flashes with something that causes Art to stop practising his swing.

  As I make Elecktra’s tea, the doorbell rings. Mum kisses me on the head as she walks past to answer it. She returns with an armful of packages.

  ‘Sick enough for breakfast in bed, but not sick enough for online shopping,’ she mutters. ‘I wondered where my credit card had disappeared to.’

  I smile. Elecktra’s telekinesis could be really helpful in the future. Carrying the tea in one hand, I open the wing of my other arm to take the packages. Mum presses them into my armpit. Her hand lingers on my shoulder.

  ‘Don’t feel guilty, Roxy,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t your fault. You did what you were trained to do. It was instinct. Elecktra will be okay and for the time being we’ll lay low.’

  ‘But what if everyone finds out? Would Elecktra have to leave? Would the ninja clans attack her? Would she die?’ A thousand painful thoughts swamp me, then I gulp them down. ‘Things always work out,’ I reassure myself.

  Mum squeezes my arm and together we are grateful for the comfort of my lie.

  TWO

  Cinnamon and I sit on the Gate Two lawn, eating matching tuna sandwiches. Her bread no longer resembles cardboard but is fluffy and brown like mine. Rescue, her cat, sits between us, sunbaking. His black coat glistens into Cinnamon’s clear blue eyes. I stare into them. I know she’s dying to ask me something.

  Cinnamon leans in, her red hair tickling my ear. ‘Heard from Jackson?’ she asks.

  I look over at the Gate One kids and my heart sinks. I last saw him at Samurai Falls when he was fighting Hero. I couldn’t think past helping Lecky and left him in the cave to find Mum.

  ‘Nope,’ I say, casting my eyes down. I swallow a lump the size of an egg. Rescue nuzzles against my legs and I scratch his ear. I’m dying to tell Cinnamon about our kiss, the way Jackson pulled down my ninja hood to find my lips … but it doesn’t seem like the right time for girl talk. Not with Lecky hurt and everything so uncertain.

  ‘Hey, what’s going on over there?’ Cinnamon points across the lawn. I turn back around to look at Gate One’s area. Cinnamon stands and begins to walk towards some boys who are fighting. I follow her. As we arrive closer with a few other curious Gate Twos, I see it’s Hero surrounded by four other samurai, all taller and bigger than him.

  ‘Got beat up again by your mum?’ one of them asks, a furious colossus with malevolent eyes. I recognise him. Jayden something-or-other. A real bully assassin — goes in for the kill and leaves you feeling socially murdered.

  Hero swipes his cheek with his sleeve and when he moves his arm I see three fresh scratches on his face. He has two black eyes, probably gifts from Jackson in the cave.

  Hero glares at the kid-mountain. ‘Get lost.’

  ‘Never at training, skipping out on the boys. No wonder you’re a loser at championships. Spending too much time being a mamma’s boy,’ Jayden snipes.

  I can’t imagine Hero being a mamma’s boy; I’ve never even seen him with his mum. She doesn’t come to parent–teacher interviews or school events or special assemblies.

  Jayden punches Hero in the face. It looks like such an easy swing, but Hero’s head snaps back and he falls to the ground. The boy kicks him in the leg. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Hero look defeated.

  ‘Back off!’ I yell, running over to Hero’s side. ‘You okay? Can you stand up?’ I ask him.

  Hero is frozen.

  The samurai turn to me like a wall of muscle, then erupt with laughter, the sound of seagulls screeching over the last chip.

  ‘Feisty,’ Jayden hisses. ‘Disappear or I’ll start on you. No bull.’

  I help Hero up and walk him out of their way. Hero lurches away from me, shaking out his arm as if it were contaminated.

  ‘I can look after myself,’ he says, his voice soaked in humiliation. He limps off.

  Cinnamon falls into step with me, Rescue squished under her armpit like a cushion. I notice she has hair clips clamped to the straps of her school backpack.

  ‘So bullies get bullied too? Seems fair,’ she says.

  ‘Guess so,’ I whisper.

  After school, I pad into Elecktra’s room. She is sitting up in bed and greets me with a nose-scrunching smile. Seeing her wounded, enveloped by Mum’s pillow menu of hard and soft cushions, is still hard to take in. I reach my hand up to her forehead. The fever burns into my palm. I absorb the heat, then slide the fever off her skin with a brush of my hand.

  ‘Thanks,’ Elecktra says. ‘And I’m sorry about the whole trying-to-kill-you thingy. I think that qualifies as the biggest fight we’ve ever had,’ she adds with a wink.

  ‘Yeah, trying to slice my head off with a flaming sword qualifies, I guess.’ I pick up the glass of water from the bedside table. I hold it for a moment to chill it, then hand the frosted glass over. Elecktra sips demurely, heaving streams of breath into the water and making it ripple against the peacock shadows of her bed linen. Her sheets remind me of the ferocious waterfall at the cave. The suffocating water, lethal currents, E
lecktra’s blazing garnet eyes hunting me down. I shake the vision of the fight out of my head.

  Lecky lifts her mouth from the glass and sets it back down on the bedside table. ‘What’s wrong?’ she asks.

  ‘Oh, I was just thinking about the cave. You really freaked me out: creepy eyes, the veins, your strength,’ I say, reaching out to touch a clump of her golden hair.

  ‘I know. I’ll leave the red hair to Cinnamon. I couldn’t pull it off.’

  Usually she would brush my hand away, but since she’s come out as a samurai and been home from the cave, she’s been more mellow, nicer even. Perhaps living with the enemy will be easier than I thought. My forehead puckers.

  ‘What’s the matter now?’ she asks.

  ‘How’s this going to work?’ I say, pointing to her as she levitates the glass off the bedside table and over to her lips. She takes a sip without using her hands to support the glass.

  ‘What?’ Her eyes are all moonshine-innocent.

  ‘You sam, me nin,’ I say. ‘We’re bound to get into fights over stuff and what if we hurt each other again? We haven’t learned how to control our powers.’

  ‘You’ll have to behave yourselves,’ Mum says, walking into the room in foam-green harem pants and a slouchy singlet. Art follows behind and they take a seat on Elecktra’s bed.

  ‘You have your hands full,’ I say to Art.

  He shrugs. ‘Dealing with teenage girls is harder than dealing with two ninjas and a samurai.’

  ‘I still don’t understand how this happened,’ Elecktra says. ‘So my dad …?’

  ‘I was in love with him a very long time ago,’ Mum looks at Art, ‘but he’s a samurai. And despite clan law, I couldn’t imagine living without you, Elecktra.’ Mum’s cheeks are scarlet. Art squeezes her hand. He is wearing around his head the sweatband that he uses for jogging.

  ‘And my dad?’ I ask. I feel the butterflies smash through the cocoons in my stomach at the mere mention of my father. Maybe this time Mum will talk, spill, tell me everything I so desperately want to know.

  ‘He is someone I wish to forget,’ she says. ‘And that’s all I’ll say about him.’