All the way in to Tokyo I kept watching for the Eight Excellent Protectors or some other Defensenet team to drop out of the sky on us. I couldn’t even enjoy the beautiful view, which was stupid—yes we’d made a big splash last night, but the delay (hopefully) in the story’s reaching anybody who could respond meant that we’d likely gotten away. And if their engagement doctrine was anything like ours, if they really did come after us they would wait to do it in a place where we could be quickly separated from the bystanders and collateral damage minimized.
Hard to do on a train.
We had decided to get off on the west side of Tokyo, but as the Shinkansen turned north and glided into Shinjuku Station our magic compass-fish surprised Ozma by smoothly but swiftly twisting to point northeast. Her shout had me looking for enemies until she explained, and then we all scrambled for our bags.
Disembarking into the biggest train station I had ever seen in my life, we promptly got lost in the tide of commuters filling the underground labyrinth, and exited through a huge shopping center labeled Lumen Est in two-story letters. After talking to a friendly policeman, Ozma led us back through the station to the west side where we caught a taxi to the Keio Plaza Hotel, smack in the middle of a business and shopping district that dwarfed the Chicago Loop.
We didn’t even try and pay in yen here; the place smelled like money and was so high class it probably didn’t know how to handle the paper stuff—using cash to pay for our rooms would have made us stand out like we were wearing shirts saying Move along, nothing to see here.
Ozma got us to our suite, which was good because I was sort of in shock; Tokyo made Chicago look like Littleton; it really was a people-sea, and even with a pointing fish how were we ever going to find Kitsune in a place this big? Last night’s euphoria was definitely gone.
I did manage to remember not to try and tip the bellhop—a terrible insult that would have suggested we thought he expected extra for doing his job. It would have totally labeled us gaijin, foreigners whatever we looked and sounded like. He made sure to point out the desk number if we needed anything at all, before closing the doors behind him.
Looking out the windows at the distressingly big cityscape, I dropped onto the furthest bed.
It had been four nights. Doctor Cornelius had suggested I had at least two weeks. Okay, plenty of time to use a magic fish to find someone who we probably wouldn’t recognize; after all, if we walked right past him the fish would flip around, right?
The mental image of us walking around Tokyo following a fish in a crystal globe, like Girl Scouts following a wayward compass, made me snicker in spite of everything. I was still laughing when Ozma came back from checking out the bathroom. Sitting beside me, she patted my knee.
“The speed with which the Compass Fish turned as we approached the station indicates that Kitsune is not far to the east of us, perhaps within five or ten miles. Of course he won’t be standing still, and certainly will not be standing on a street corner awaiting our arrival, but unless he too is on a journey then we will find him.”
She nodded decisively. “Shell, would you please tell us what we can expect in this quarter of the city?”
Shell looked up from the bed she’d promptly spread herself out on upon climbing out of her bag. “I can tell you it’s going to suck.”
Probably not the reassuring answer Ozma had been looking for.
* * *
Anyone managing to spy on us (nobody was—Ozma looked in her mirrors and guaranteed it) would have laughed till they peed themselves.
We sat around the suite’s coffee table, Shell sitting beside the Compass Fish. (It kept darting about inside its globe and catching her instinctive attention.) Ozma produced the tiny silver service from her box and prepared tea; the copper pot was self-heating, of course, and just the fragrance of the tea unwound the knot inside me.
She gracefully poured and passed to Jacky and me, set out a tiny saucer of cream for Shell and gave her ears a light scratch-tug. “I wish you could have some, my dear, but Six-Leaf Clover is a restorative. It will restore natural vitality, but it will also restore imbibers to their natural state and I do not think you want to be a scouting drone again. The cream is the finest refined cream from the Land of Mo.”
Shell dropped her head and lapped the cream, purring like a mini-motor, then started and straightened up looking terribly self-conscious. When she licked a drop off her whiskers I had to cover my smile.
Raising my own cup to my lips, I stopped. Weren’t we transformed too? Ozma smiled and shook her head.
“Unlike Shell, we have merely changed outward form.”
I sighed with relief; the tea smelled so good. Sipping it sent a liquid warmth through me, leaving me feeling like I’d been the recipient of a long spa-weekend. The shadow of the shinigami faded a little more.
“Right,” Shell said as we sipped our tea. “About what we’re looking at. Guys, we’re just down the street from City Hall. That’s the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, and there’s just got to be lots of government capes and plainclothes powers hanging around protecting the government of the biggest megalopolis in the world. Then there’s Defensenet. Defensenet Shinjuku is the national headquarters—home base for the Eight Excellent Protectors and the Nine Accomplished Heroes.”
Jacky snorted. “So we’ve got to be quiet. That’s not news.”
“No, what’s news is if we start something here or across the tracks and they’re already looking for us, then we’ll probably be counting our disengagement window in seconds. After that Defensenet capes are going to be crawling up our—backsides.”
I nodded. “Okay, what else?”
“Then there’s all the ronin.”
“All?” Jacky’s voice sharpened.
“Not all. But you know about the government training and management system; all the Japanese capes work for the Japanese government.”
“Okay…”
“But there are some like you who just aren’t joiners. They don’t register. Then there are breakthroughs who work in private security, or as consultants, or who are members of international non-government organizations like Heroes Without Borders. We’re not even talking about the muscle recruited by the yakuza.”
I was getting a bad feeling even the Six-Leaf Tea couldn’t banish.
“And then of course there’s the breakthroughs who were criminals to start with, or whose powers really don’t have legitimate uses. The yakuza love those.”
Yakuza. The Japanese Mafia. “Shell,” I said carefully. “When you say ‘all,’ are you implying that a lot of them are here? In Shinjuku?”
“East Shinjuku, actually, right where the Compass Fish is pointing. Akihabara is the center of media-driven cape-fandom—they call capes powers here, and cape fans are power-otaku—but East Shinjuku has become the center of the ronin-otaku subculture. And it looks like the fish might be pointing at Kabukicho, which is even worse.”
Ozma lowered her cup. “And how precisely is it worse?”
“Kabukicho?” I hadn’t actually known that many Japanese words until Ozma’s magic drops, but kabuki was one of them. How could theater be worse?
“Kabuki-cho.” Shell enunciated. “East Shinjuku is one of the big nightlife and entertainment centers of Tokyo—all that money from the business and government district next door—but Kabukicho is the adult entertainment center of Tokyo. For the same reason, really; all the suits with money to burn. The district was named after a planned kabuki theater that never got built.”
I blinked. “Adult…oh. You think he’s there?”
“It’s got a huge yakuza presence. They run all the gambling and drugs and own most of the host and hostess clubs, couples hotels, and soaplands in Kabukicho. So yeah, I’d bet lunch on it. Not my life, but lunch.”
“So,” Jacky summed up, “to find and get to Kitsune, we might need to go through ronin who may or may not be yakuza members or clients, and with a good chance of Defensenet capes coming down on u
s if it gets at all public?”
“Uhuh.”
She shrugged. “Doesn’t sound too hard, unless he sleeps in some yakuza boss’s house. We find out where he closes his eyes at night, go in and get him. My only problem is if we have to go into…Kabukicho? Then I’m the only one who looks old enough to be there and wouldn’t be bait. You two…”
I almost gagged on my tea. Under normal circumstances it might be fun to walk a dangerous neighborhood for a while and cull the free-roaming predator population (Jacky did it all the time in Chicago and New Orleans), but attracting attention here…
This was so going to suck.
* * *
My first suggestion was that Ozma use her magic belt to “age us up” a bit, only to learn that the famed Magic Belt was a magic capacitor. She only used it when she didn’t have something in her magic box that would do the job and didn’t have time to whip up something in her lab. And between changing us the first time, transforming herself into a green crystal jar, catting Shell, and her stunt the previous night in the graveyard, she’d pretty much tapped it out and it needed to recharge.
Not good news.
So we came up with a plan and armed ourselves—which in this situation meant shopping. The clothes we’d worn “under” our costumes, and the extra clothes we’d picked up in Anhui, were not nearly upscale enough for where we needed to go in fashion-conscious Tokyo. We needed serious upgrades, and could “age up” a little in our style choices.
Ozma called the lobby and they sent us to Isetan Shinjuku, Isetan’s flagship store and multiple floors of clothing, accessory, and even hair and makeup fashion. Armed with Shell’s no-limit credit cards, we hit the place for a complete Girl’s Day; that meant hitting one of the fanciest hair spas I’d ever been to for deep cleansing oil massages, shampoos, and blowouts along with manicures and face-care, and then the personal attention of a team of style-guides as we shopped till we dropped.
Sending the purchases we weren’t wearing to the hotel, we snacked and window-shopped our way up East Shinjuku (avoiding City Hall). That gave Ozma a chance to implement one of my ideas; buying a quality foldable city-map, she used it like a Girl Scout’s map and compass with her magic fish, stopping every half hour to check and draw a new red line orienting to Kitsune.
It looked like he was moving around (not all lines intersected at the same point), but the angles suggested he was staying in East Shinjuku. We’d check again from the hotel during the night hours; if he left Shinjuku we’d follow, if not then tomorrow we’d scout the east side.
Returning to Keio Plaza for a four-star dining experience, we went back up to our suite to confer with Shell over a walking-map of East Shinjuku that would let us make more Kitsune-checks without standing out too much.
When night fell Kitsune stayed in Shinjuku.
Dammit.
We set an alarm so one of us would get up every hour to recheck Kitsune’s direction, just in case. Jacky expressed a need to hunt (she promised she’d be careful), so Ozma and I took one of the two big beds and left the other for her. The bath was big enough for us to share, but I wasn’t going that Japanese even if I knew the proper way from Shell’s explanation at the ryokan (wash off completely first, then soak in the bath).
I left the bathroom to Ozma while Jacky changed to go out, and found myself looking out at the city while waiting my turn.
The suite’s lights were low enough that I could see the glowing towers of Shinjuku and my own ghostly reflection in the window. It had been a few days now, and seeing myself still made me feel…unreal. Beautiful (especially after today’s pampering care) but not me. A shadow behind me turned into Jacky as she stepped up, looking over my shoulder at the Tokyo nightscape.
“What are you thinking about?” She watched my reflection in the window, and I suppressed the urge to bite my new manicure.
“Kitsune.”
“Why? Beyond the usual.”
“I— ” Why? What had changed? “If Kitsune— If he’s really a criminal… I don’t know.” Oddly, I’d been happy to hear Veritas’ theory that he’d been working for the Japanese government in the whole Littleton affair. A spy working for his government—that could be right, even honorable. If he was just a criminal who sometimes did government jobs… But thinking that didn’t feel right, somehow. And it wasn’t just wishful thinking. Why…
“What do you know about him?” Jacky asked quietly, watching my face in reflection.
“Everything you know.”
“Not his file. What do you know about him?”
For some reason I flashed back to the second time I’d met him—if he was the right pronoun. The first time he’d worn the dead banker’s face, then Mom’s, and then Yoshi’s granddaughter’s: a slide-show. But the second time…then he’d worn Yoshi’s younger face. He’d been nice, even sweet, but the important thing was that when Nemesis had shot up The Fortress gunning for him, when I still hadn’t known who he was, he’d stayed and helped the victims. And in the whole Littleton thing, he’d risked his game (her game—she’d been Allison then) to deal us into it. Because Shelly had been there.
And… Oh. I knew why putting Kitsune with the yakuza in my head didn’t work.
“The tree,” I whispered. My eyes were wide in the mirroring glass.
“What about it?”
My eyes met Jacky’s in the window. I didn’t know why I knew this but… “It’s good. The tree, I mean. The whole place. Doctor Cornelius called it the High Plane of Heaven and—I know it’s not Heaven, but—but I don’t think anything evil can be there.” Folding my arms, I hugged my chest. “It’s so…when I’m there I feel so—I really wouldn’t mind staying. But…”
But everyone I loved was here. My responsibilities were here.
Her reflected mouth twisted. “‘Not evil’ doesn’t mean good, but if there’s a moral requirement I understand why you can be there. You’re all ‘Please let me save everyone I see, ever.’ They don’t even have to be good—killing Heavenly Dragon hurt you, didn’t it?”
When I shrugged her smile thinned. “Yeah. But that fox is a trickster. He’s at least as morally flexible as I am. Criminals can be a mix, too.”
She sounded impatient, like she shouldn’t have to be stating the obvious, and I sighed.
“I know.” I looked down at the cross-hatched grid of lighted streets, relatively quiet now. “It still doesn’t feel right. I can’t put him and the tree and him and the yakuza in the same picture.” When she didn’t say anything I looked up. She’d stepped back from the window and into shadow.
“Maybe. But don’t get stupid now. Trust is something we can’t afford until you’re safe. Go to bed—I’m going out.”
I nodded but stayed by the window until I heard the door of the suite close behind her.
Chapter Seventeen
The Second Deed of Hikari is celebrated in Tenkawa, a small town in the mountains. Each year, during the week when the three days of the deeds are honored, the town fills with celebrants from across Japan and the families of Tenkawa hold a joyful festival. They publicly celebrate the day that Hikari, sent by Tenkawa’s own guardian kitsune, survived the death-dealing touch of a powerful shinigami and freed the town of its evil.
A History of the Brief Career of Hikari and the Three Remarkable Ronin.
* * *
A light breeze stirred the flowering tree, plucking white cherry blossoms away to fall like snow. No. The air was still, the waving branches the only sound, a soft rub and rattle of branch against branch as petals drifted to settle on me.
Why?
Wearing the Cape 5: Ronin Games Page 15