Wearing the Cape 5: Ronin Games

by Marion G. Harmon

  What? It took me a moment, staring at the sealed crystal sphere, to realize that somehow Ozma had put a small measure of dust inside with the fish. A fish. She uses a tracking fish. I squeezed my eyes shut, opened them. I was really, really tired.

  “My little fish should now be pointing us in the direction of Miyamoto-san,” she explained simply. “He is not, which means we have made a mistake somehow.”

  I wasn’t the only one staring at the frantic little fish, and after a moment Ozma sighed and passed her hand over the orb. When she took her hand away the dust had vanished and the fish was happy again. She put it away.

  “I am certain we selected the correct stone. Is there anything you can tell us?”

  Guji Sohda sat back, hands folded and obviously rethinking just how good we might be. “May I ask why you seek this person?”

  And he won’t say his name. I held my breath.

  Ozma shrugged lightly. “To lift a curse.”

  Mr. Ushida coughed and started to choke. Guji Sohda frowned again, then began to chuckle, lips turning up until his unwilling smile crinkled his eyes.

  “Then you should have spoken to him before you exorcised him.”

  Episode Three

  Chapter Fifteen

  Are “counterfactuals” or “alternate histories” real? Yes, for a specific value of “real.” The same can be said for alternate futures—futures provably visited by the Teatime Anarchist(s). All of these realities have been proven to exist as extrarealities, viewable or visitable by breakthroughs with appropriate powers. The ultimate question, how real are they outside of the scope created for them by those same breakthrough powers, is unanswerable and ultimately beside the point. They are real enough for interaction, and therefore real enough for real concern.

  Department of Superhuman Affairs, Position Paper HS-1721c: Extrarealities and National Security.

  * * *

  “So, what do we do now? Jacky? Do you need a drink?” I was too tired to think. Guji Sohda and Mister Ushida had dispersed everyone with a promise of a village meeting tomorrow, and Jacky, Ozma, and I had been able to slip away and return to our room at the ryokan.

  “Yes,” she said flatly. “And you’re it.”

  “What? No.” Changing and finally getting a look at myself, I knew I looked as bad as Jacky but I bounced back fast.

  “Yes. What did it do to you?”

  I looked at Ozma for support, but she stayed out of it. “It showed me what I could have had. Without the earthquake. Or Seif-al-Din.” Before the Teatime Anarchist’s evil twin had cut off that bright potential future.

  “Shinigami are believed to show their victims their crimes.” Shell had snuck back and over the wall by herself and now she sat on the center futon, nervously kneading her claws in the blanket. “Or horrible memories. It makes them want to kill themselves. That’s not what happened to you, is it?”

  “I wanted to die.” Remembering the soul-freezing, crushing despair, I wanted to vomit. How could I have lived? “Its other victims died of heart-failure, well, my body almost did what I wanted it to.”

  Closing my eyes, I tried not to fall into that pit again. I wouldn’t. The shinigami had somehow amplified my moment of heartsick despair until it was the only thing in my universe, but it wasn’t anymore and I’d be me again soon. I would.

  Jacky snorted. “And that’s why you’re donating tonight. We’re at a dead end, and we don’t have time for you to cope.” Her voice made it a fact. She wasn’t pushing with her vampy power, just telling me how it was going to be.

  Fine. I nodded, giving up. I was so tired. “Okay. Where?”

  We had just the one room and the bathroom; Jacky pointed to the center futon and I nodded again. Pulling my hair out of the way I plopped down on it, ignoring Shell and Ozma. I’d changed back, so I was in my nightshirt and ready to go.

  I felt the air move as Jacky knelt down behind me. “Now what?” I tried to remember last time. It was a little fuzzy.

  “Listen to your heart. Breathe.”

  I could do that and I did, silently counting, too tired to shiver at the feel of her breath on my neck. One, two, three, four…

  Relax. It was more an echo than a word. Let go. I let my chin drop, my head fall forward. Whimsy made me smile; I couldn’t get more relaxed, when was she—

  I woke up between them. Jacky had taken the futon on my right, Ozma the one on my left. Shell sat on my chest, the paw she’d used to push on my face still raised. When I started to tell her she was getting way too into the whole cat thing she put the paw to my lips, little head shaking. What?

  Someone tapped quietly on one of the room’s outside panels, gently slid it open a crack. I could hear him breathing. Not fast, not high, not ready to attack or flee. Just waiting. He tapped again, and this time I raised to pull my blankets aside and quietly float over Jacky to the open panel.

  “Hikari-san?” It was Mr. Ushida.

  “Yes.” I slid the panel wider, slipped through the opening and closed it. He had opened the porch panel behind him as well, and now he slipped backward through it and outside. I started to follow, realized I was in my nightshirt, and twisted my ring to summon my uniform. Then I followed him.

  “I am sorry,” he said as soon as I was outside. I felt Shell move against my ankle, silent as a ghost.

  “Ushida-san? Is everything alright?”

  “Yes. I will be able to take all of you to the nearest train in the morning. We will wait to inform the authorities of what has happened until you have gone.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But, forgive me but I must ask. Have you met Miyamoto Yoshi before seeing his shinigami tonight?”

  Shell jumped. “How did you—” She stopped, hissed her frustration. “Well, crap.”

  Mister Ushida smiled, looking down at her in the light of the lamp he lifted. “What a tale this shall be to tell my grandchildren. Are you a nekokami?”

  “Normally she’s much taller. Yes, we have met a man before who introduced himself as Miyamoto Yoshi. A younger Yoshi, around twenty-five? When he wasn’t a younger girl, or someone else.” Or a fox.

  Unbelievably, upon hearing that Mr. Ushida relaxed.

  “Then you have met the kitsune. Good.”

  The heck?

  * * *

  Mr. Ushida led us into the woods behind the ryokan, Shell grumbling all the way. I didn’t care; the proper sounds of the night were back.

  “You know this can’t end well, right? Mysterious man, two idiot girls, dark woods…”

  “Hush.” Amazingly I was feeling pretty invulnerable, even cheerful. Jacky had made me forget the actual bite, but the euphoria remained. Had the shinigami-vision been a true one, the real might-have-been? Did it matter? The void was gone, the pain just a soft echo of regret, the way it had been before tonight. Whatever Jacky had done while I was in her power, my heart had said goodbye to John again, tucked his memory safely away where it belonged.

  And I really understood why Jacky mugged people for their blood and made them forget it instead of selling the fang-high.

  “Fine,” Shell huffed when I didn’t say anything more. “You realize Ja— Mamori’s going to want to kill you when we get back, right?”

  “Well if Ushida-san has bad intentions towards us, we won’t have to worry about Mamori, will we?” The woods were getting thick as the angle of the ground sharpened, and I picked Shell up so she wouldn’t have to struggle through the underbrush that tugged at my coat skirts and caught at Cutter’s tip. I heard him grumble and stepped more carefully. “So who’s being a silly nekokami?”

  “I can bite you, you know.”

  “You can break your teeth.”

  Ahead of us, Mr. Ushida laughed. “You two act very much like my Aya-chan and her friends.”

  I laughed back. “Ayaka-san? She must be a great trial to you.”

  “She is twelve, she is supposed to be. We are here.”

  Here proved to be a dark cave mouth in the side o
f the wooded hill. Mister Ushida’s lamp only made the shadow behind its mouth deeper.

  “And we’re going in there?” Shell wiggled in my arms. I was beginning to wonder if experiencing the world in a cat’s body was affecting her attitude.

  “You may stay outside,” Mr. Ushida said. “I have something to show your friend.”

  “As if. She goes, I go.”

  “Then we go.” He lifted the lamp above his head for maximum light and led us in.

  The cave narrowed quickly, and he had to bend and then turn sideways at one point. I was careful of Cutter, not wanting another voice to enter the conversation. After a sharp right turn, the cave widened out again although the ceiling stayed low. It wasn’t a perfect inverted bowl, more like a half-deflated weather balloon sagging in at one end, about the size of our bedroom at the ryokan. Dirt and stones gave it a decently flat floor.

  Mister Ushida hung the lamp from a chain suspended from a rusted iron spike driven into the ceiling.

  “The children spread long grass over the floor in the summer.” Old and tinder-dry piles of it lay scattered about. “At least, they did. They do not come here now, so close to the graveyard.”

  “Will they come back?”

  He smiled. “They must! So many youngsters to initiate now. There.”

  In the corner where the cave roof dropped low, someone had set a low, wide stone. And on it… Shell jumped out of my arms to creep up and sniff it. It was a fox. Crudely carved, but recognizable, a fox with lots of tails, twice Shell’s size and carved into old, old wood.

  “That is Tenkawa’s kitsune.”

  “Oh…” Oh oh oh. So much made sense now. I could almost see it, not all of it, but… “Who was he?”

  Mr. Ushida squatted to reverently dust off the piece of wood with his handkerchief.

  “The Miyamoto family and Ushida family are samurai families, two of the oldest families in Tenkawa although never very great. The story says that during the period of war when Tokugawa Ieyasu unified Japan, a son of the family returned to Tenkawa with a bride. She gave him many children but was always strange. One day only a few years after she came to Tenkawa, her mother-in-law caught her turning into a white kitsune in the woods to hunt. She disappeared then, but since that time someone in Tenkawa has always seen the kitsune when the village has been endangered by misfortune.”

  “And when the shinigami came…”

  “I do not know how Miyamoto Yoshi was able to come all the way from the care center where he lived. He was very old and very sick, and when he disappeared nobody admitted to helping him. But I found his body in the cemetery. He had…died after burning an offering at his family grave. And I met the kitsune.” Mr. Ushida frowned, remembering. “He looked as Miyamoto-san had looked when I was much younger, and he helped me to bury him.”

  “Did you ever see the kitsune again?”

  “No. He told me that he had a duty to fulfill, and then he hoped Miyamoto-san would sleep peacefully.”

  “It didn’t work.” Remembering the first face Kitsune had shown me, I swallowed, eyes prickling. Rei. Her name had been Rei and her mother had been Mari, Yoshi’s daughter and only surviving child. “He took vengeance for the Miyamoto family, but that was two years ago. Why didn’t Yoshi…”

  Mr. Ushida was shaking his head.

  “Shinigami are born of a hatred, but they are corrupted. Who they hated does not matter, then.”

  My head spun. It was obvious now that when Mister Miyamoto died he had generated a spectral breakthrough, the shinigami. But had he split, become both a spirit of vengeance and the family fox-spirit? No, if Kitsune was a part of him, a member of the Miyamoto family, then Ozma’s fish wouldn’t have been confused. But then who was Kitsune? Someone who had really loved the village, had been initiated into the child-cult that met in this cave?

  It really didn’t matter. “Ushida-san, may I…”

  “That is why I brought you.” He took a folding knife from his pocket and knelt by the statue. Whispering an apology, he carefully sliced a thin piece of wood from its base, wrapped it in a linen napkin, and presented it to me with a deep formal bow. “Thank you, Hikari-san. This is a small repayment. You, and your friends, have saved Tenkawa.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Defensenet Report, Tenkawa Incident: The Level 4 (local) spectral threat appears to have been removed. As Defensenet classed the threat as contained and too dangerous to risk further assets for removal, this action must have been undertaken by Active Non-Government Powers. This is confirmed by the testimony of Tenkawa’s mayor and shrine priest. The individuals involved could not be identified; however their descriptions match those of the three breakthroughs recently active with Heroes Without Borders, who identified themselves as the Three Remarkable Ronin.

  Defensenet Recommendation: Given the displayed power-levels of these three individuals, government assets should immediately be deployed to learn their identities and purposes. Further action would depend upon their cooperation once located.

  DR107-BV [Classified]

  * * *

  The sliver of wood worked, probably the only thing that kept Jacky from killing me and burying me in the forest. Looking at the happy clownfish, Ozma speculated that Kitsune might be an extrareality intrusion, as she was (or thought she was). If Kitsune had “come from” an extrareality created or made accessible by breakthrough beliefs after The Event, then that would explain a lot. (Of course it was also possible he was more like Fisher, created by a specific obsession.) What mattered was the wood idol was part of his story, so it worked for us.

  We got out of town ahead of the authorities, if they came looking for us at all. Mr. Ushida assured us that the notice he sent would be a bare report of the shinigami’s defeat by three visitors, and the government might simply assume that it had been done by a local yamabushi mystic. Apparently there were a lot of them in the mountains and a number of them were non-registering breakthroughs, “conscientious objectors.” As long as they stayed in the mountains the government left them alone.

  When he dropped us off at the train station Mr. Ushida also let us know that, when asked, he would have to faithfully tell the Defensenet agents of the three Magical Girls in Black he met. But he saw no need to tell them about recent guests at his family’s ryokan.

  I hoped he wouldn’t get in any trouble.

  The tracking fish (the cutest little bloodhound ever) pointed us in the general direction of Tokyo, which was a good thing; after making such a splash in Tenkawa, Jacky insisted that we needed to dive into a sea of people and run silent until we’d broken our trail. We caught the morning train, Ozma again playing with her mirror.

  “A couple of fun facts,” Shell said from her bag once we’d settled in our seats. “Including the twenty-three wards and twenty-six incorporated cities that make it up, Tokyo hosts a population of thirty-six million with a density of about seven thousand people per square mile. That’s more people than all the blossoms on all Tokyo’s cherry trees, of which there are a lot, cherry blossoms being the city’s special flower and all.”

  Shell looked up all that and more on her epad while we watched fields and towns pass by. The short-lived cherry blossoms were all about the transience of things and hope of renewal, and I wondered if that said something about the city. Tokyo had certainly been renewed a few times, coming back from earthquakes and fires, war, and now kaiju attacks. Coming in on the Shinkansen line we could see a couple of clusters of large scale tower construction. A kaiju hadn’t reached the city in two years; the last one that did got blown into dust bunnies by Tokyo’s own Verne-built mecha.