by Sable Jordan
“Part of it.” Kizzie inhaled a breath. She didn’t want to do this, relive it, but it was out in the open now. “What else did your contact tell you?”
He frowned. “Not a contact. You. What you were saying, what you weren’t. But judging by the question and the relief on your face, there’s more to the story.”
More? Xander didn’t know the half of it.
The rape shook her, changed her, opened her eyes. It fought to consume her; Kizzie fought harder. Channeled her anger into her schoolwork, used the shame to be outstanding in the truest sense of the word. Covered feelings of vulnerability with a blanket of “don’t fuck with me” as she focused single-mindedly on becoming the best second lieutenant The Point had ever seen.
Sophomore year, the year it happened, she increased her workload, took adjunct courses online, studied multiple languages. She would have graduated top of her class, earned something no one could ever take from her.
But then, Junior year.
As horrible as the rape was, the events that followed were what weighed on her. That “little kerfuffle.”
The pack pressed harder an infinitesimal amount. The muscles in Xander’s jaw bunched and flexed, and emotions she couldn’t read shifted over his face. His brown eyes bored through her, searching, and if he asked she’d break down and tell him the truth.
Kizzie the fraud. The coward.
The murderer.
But Xander wouldn’t push, not now. So it’d be up to her to stop running, to submit to this kind of pain.
Deal with the fallout of things she couldn’t plan for. Communicate when she didn’t want to. Trust when she didn’t want to…
“I owe you an apology. Several, actually. Uh…” The familiar fight against being vulnerable reared its head, but Kizzie forced it down. “Like I said, I don’t do close to me, for a couple of reasons… But you got close, and I’m such a coward it was easier to think you were playing me than to believe you really care about me. So I latched on to the first thing I could to push you away, jumped to the lame-ass assumption you were trading your help for a quick screw, ‘cause I was scared shitless you’d find out there’s nothing in me to get close to. Still am…”
God, she felt naked. She wanted her hands back so she could huddle in her jacket. Xander’s gaze was on her. No judgment, no pity, no sadness. Just enough calm for the both of them. She cleared her throat and pressed on.
“I’m more than sorry. That was a horrible thing to even hint at, and if I know nothing else about you, I know you’re not that guy.
A gentle squeeze to her hand. “And I know what it took for you to open up, which makes you incredibly brave, Princess, not a coward.”
A flash of green ribbon…a sea of red. She swallowed hard. “You don’t know me, Xander.”
“Well,” he glanced at his empty wrist, “world’s slated to end in ten hours. Got someplace to be before then?” She grinned and he said, “Baby steps.”
Kizzie turned her gaze out the window, ready to take a leap. “And Jo…wasn’t cheating on me. Jo’s a woman.”
She wanted to say more. To admit she was the reason her best friend was dead.
But the guilt clogged her throat. She blew out a breath. “Whew, this elephant is kinda tough…little salty too.”
Xander chuckled, dropped a kiss to her cold knuckles. “Thank you for trusting me with that.” Her hand still in his, he stood and rounded the table, tugged her up with him. “Come on. Come lay with me.”
He guided her past another set of captain’s chairs where Sumi lay unmoving, cocooned in the hotel’s blanket. Kizzie had been in such a haze she’d missed the body altogether.
Xander toed off his shoes and sat on the couch. Hunched over, he unlaced her sneakers so she could step out of them. Then he stretched out on his side. Kizzie stretched out, too, her back snuggled against his chest. His palm splayed over her belly, her palm slid down the back of his and their fingers locked together.
Warm, safe, protected.
If only for a little while.
“I owe you three questions,” Xander whispered, just as Kizzie started dozing. “Absolutely honest. Any three you want, no restrictions.”
Her brow lifted but her eyes stayed closed. She’d forgotten all about that. And what she should ask—What’s your problem with Connolly?; Who’s your buyer for Harvey?; Anything else on 3-19?—didn’t align with what she wanted to know.
“Do… Do you really play the spoons?”
Xander laughed, low and gravelly in her ear. “Going for the jugular, huh? Thought you’d ease me into this, start with something a little less personal…. Quit stalling, beautiful.”
She frowned, mulling it over in her head. “Honestly, I don’t have any.”
“Not one? Why’s that?”
Kizzie let out a deep sigh, snuggled against him a bit further. “‘Cause where you met, why you got married, and if you love her…hearing the answers’ll only make it hurt more.”
“Hm.” Xander hummed, pressed a kissed to her hair. “Long flight. Get some rest.”
August 5th
Washington, DC
Serial number: B-29-45-MO44-86292. Victor 12, or 82, depending on which side of August 5th you were on. But not just 1 of 15. The one.
The Mother.
With a 141-foot wingspan it resembled just that, a mama bird with her arms spread wide in proud adulation of her Little Boy’s accomplishment.
Practically alone in this section of the museum, Julie stared out at her distorted reflection in the shiny aluminum fuselage, a mix of pain and anticipation curling in her blood.
The soft squeak of shoes on concrete drew her attention to the left where the Enola Gay’s placard resided. A small, hunched Japanese man clutched the hand of a child of maybe six or seven years old. He unfolded enough to look out at the plane, through the glass nose and into the cockpit. Julie watched him curiously, wondering what he thought and felt. What memories did seeing this ghost stir in him? The girl beside him fidgeted, twirled around oblivious to the meaning of the words her elder mumbled from the placard.
Julie had read the short inscription on the plaque just minutes before, and it took all her control not to show her rage at it’s inadequacy. It described the B-29 as a “sophisticated propeller-driven bomber.” A handful of insipid specs were listed—length, width, combat radius, max speed—but not the number. Not one single line devoted to the many counts of horror this vehicle of death had delivered.
But Julie knew. Just as she knew the number of lives lost in the internment camps. Just as she knew the number of names in the register that filled the stone chest sheltered by the cenotaph in the inappropriately named Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park. Peace? Peace was about balance, about all things being in equilibrium, in a contented state of rest.
70,000 deaths on impact was not peace.
A little girl, standing across from the ghostly ruins of the A-Bomb Dome was not peace.
And that same little girl haunted by the phantoms of her mother’s raw pain was not…
She pulled back and stared into her matushka’s face, past the ruined, wet skin and into resilient black eyes that looked so much like her own. A hand on each of Hiro’s cheeks—one terribly scarred, one less so—she asked, “Why are you sad?”
“You were very good for mommy.” Hiro smiled, creasing her waxy skin. She turned her head and kissed her daughter’s palm. “Would you like to have tea and sweets now?”
Her brow knit. Hiro kept ignoring her questions and she didn’t like it. “No, Matushka,” she said defiantly.
Hiro tilted her head and raised her brow. Then she touched a finger to her daughter’s nose. “I promise you’ll love them.”
She pointed to the building without turning her gaze. “Why’d that place make you cry?”
“Just a…a phantom that scared mommy. That’s all, baby.”
She didn’t like phantoms, especially not ones that scared her mother. Nothing scared her mother. She studied the ca
rcass again and something she’d never felt before gripped her young heart. Her eyes narrowed. “I hate it.”
“No!” Hiro clasped her small shoulders. “You will not hate. Ever. Am I clear? Not even a little.”
“But it hurts you! It makes you cry!” She stubbed the toe of her shiny shoe into the concrete. Water pressed behind her eyes and then spilled down her cheeks. All the strength in her body wasn’t enough to help the woman who kissed her boo-boos, and she let out a low sob.
“Shh, shh.” Her own nose and chin trembling, Hiro brushed her daughter’s tears away. “How many elements are there, baby?”
“One—” she hiccupped wetly, “one hun’red fifteen.” Pride filled her voice, happy for the chance to impress her mother and stop the sadness. “There’s hydrogems and he-weums and little-umms and the berries and—”
Hiro chuckled and tapped her fingers over her daughter’s heart. “I mean here. The most important ones. How many are those?”
“Oh, five, Matushka! Five el’mets of peace.”
“And is hate one of them?”
She went through the list and shook her head. “No. But I don’t want that place to make you sad or hurt you. I want to help.”
Hiro dabbed at a fresh stream of tears, passed her hand over her daughter’s silky black hair. “But you have, baby, you have. I hated for a long time. Too long.”
“You did?”
Hiro nodded. “And it stole the peace from my heart. Then you came along and gave it back; filled it up and made me whole again. My miracle. My little peace warrior. My strong flower.” She touched the golden locket at her daughter’s neck, the heart too big for a her body. But that was the point of it. For her daughter to remember the bigger the heart, the more love to share with the world. She cleared her throat. “Hate is a most powerful enemy. It is resourceful, it is cunning. It will try to break you, baby. Try so very, very hard. But you must be…shinari. Say it.”
“Shi-nah-ree,” she said, sounding it out.
“Good. It means you must not bend to it, not even a little. Promise me...”
And in that moment, with memories so sharp and vivid they could have been her own playing on an endless loop in her head, all reservations Julie might have had about what she would soon do faded away. She clutched the locket, eyes closing against tears for the mother and daughter tucked away inside.
Hiro was an innocent 4-year-old when Little Boy landed on Hiroshima. She and her parents lived nearly two miles from the epicenter, but the heat from the blast was so intense it scorched Hiro’s exposed skin, causing the dermis to boil and blister the way direct contact with a hot iron would.
Hiro, a brilliant engineer with a keen mind and determined heart, was forced to quietly bear the scars of America’s hate until the day she died. She left a little girl of her own motherless far too soon.
Where, Julie wondered, was the peace in that?
She brought the aluminum beast into focus once more, then her eyes shifted to other parts of the room. All around the huge space various and sundry winged machines told the history of “sophistication” of World War II, and a large mural provided the backdrop for this monument to barbarism.
The Japanese man shuffled away, holding the little girl’s hand. For support? Or in gratitude that, for now, she didn’t understand the magnitude of hate man could cause his fellow man?
Julie sighed and made her way back to the placard. Her hand in her pocket, she fingered the final offering and bowed her head. “As the rains—”
The room erupted in a cacophony of sounds, snapping her head up and her focus to the door. A group of excited school children surged in, a handful of adults in tow trying to wrangle them all. The children darted to different parts of the railing, laughed and pointed, marveled at the size of all the planes. Bright eyes took in the “cooooool” aircrafts, obviously aware of purpose as they made shooting sounds and diving sounds and other sounds of battle snatched from the safety of Transformer movies.
All save one.
A little boy sidled up beside her, fervent gaze on the placard. A deep frown creased his brow, and he glanced out at the silver plane dominating the Smithsonian’s hall. He shook his head and mumbled, “There should be a bell…”
“Jason!” another child called, “Come see this one!”
A brief glance at Julie, Jason shoved his hands in his pockets and trudged away.
Julie bowed her head again, whispered the words she’d repeated at each of the five internment camps she visited on her cross-country trip, and then settled a tiny flask of water on the railing. After centering the knot in the red rope around the neck, she set the last paper oleander beside it. Eyes fixed on the Enola Gay, she worked the crab claw clasp of the necklace, pulled it from around her throat. Then she folded it into the palm of the woman now standing beside her, returning the locket to its rightful owner.
Full circle.
“Mistress Shinari,” Julie said, bowing slightly. Then she looked into her owner’s dark eyes.
Vanda smiled. “I’m so very proud of you, pet.”
August 6th
Washington, DC
At 2:28AM the morning of August 6th, a black SUV sped across the tarmac leaving Ronald Reagan National Airport in Virginia.
How had Xander managed clearance?
Just one of many questions reeling through Kizzie’s head. Too much had happened in the last 16 hours, one raw scab of her past had been peeled off and she hadn’t taken the time to process how she really felt about it. Didn’t have the time. She slipped on the skin she was most comfortable in—Agent Kizzie Baldwin—and focused on the important issues.
Harvey.
Set to go off sometime today.
When was one huge issue.
When was secondary to where.
All Kizzie had deduced was Washington D.C.: 68.3 square miles hiding a nuclear weapon the size of a picnic basket.
Haystack, meet needle.
Phil forced the vehicle onto the George Washington Parkway. The streets were mostly clear at this early hour, yet the lack of traffic was the only positive. If Harvey went off in a densely populated city like DC, wooden or stucco walls wouldn’t save anyone.
Her phone vibrated and she pulled it from her pocket; shoved Fay’s now-useless device into the driver seat’s back pocket in front of her. “Go.”
Fletcher paused half a second. “Triangulation on the phone shows it’s still in Tokyo, but it’s registered to a Vanda Ohayashi. Professor with the University of Tokyo’s Mechanical Engineering department, an emphasis in robotics. In DC for a STEM competition for gifted kids held later today, sponsored by the Smithsonian.”
“Smithsonian,” Kizzie said to Phil, and then almost immediately to Fletcher, “Wait, there’s a million different museums. Which one?”
“Not at the Smithsonian. By—”
“Fle—” Remembering who she was in the car with, she chopped off his name and swallowed the groan. “Where, specifically?”
“Convention Center.”
Some of the tension in her neck and shoulders eased. “Pick her up.”
“That’s the problem. We can’t find her.”
“Shit.”
Xander spun in the passenger seat, concern in his gaze. Kizzie cracked the knuckles of her free hand. Harvey was here someplace, set to explode in who-knew how long, and—
“She left her hotel room around 7pm yesterday evening,” Fletcher cut in. “A kid from the program said he saw her with a woman while they toured the Air and Space museum. He was pretty upset because his submersible robot for the competition is missing, too.”
“Specs on the other woman?”
“Young, long black hair, Japanese descent…”
Vanda was Mistress Shinari. There were 5 sacred warriors, three dead, one sitting beside Kizzie in the back seat of the SUV. This new woman might be the warrior unaccounted for. But which?
Sumi’s smug words to Fay replayed in Kizzie’s head, drowning Fletcher out: “Yo
u have to choke a fire.”
The tattoo on Fay’s shoulder. An oleander. Relatively fresh, and right over where the other girls had an In-Yo, shinari in the dragon position, their element in the tiger slot. Was Fay’s element fire?
Submersible robot.
Xander had mentioned the best-case scenario for using Harvey was a surface detonation. On land or…
“Water,” Kizzie mumbled. The puzzle clicked into place and she said it louder. “Water. She’ll detonate in water.”
“It’s DC,” Fletcher reminded her. “Water everywhere.”
“Not too late to bail,” Xander said half-heartedly, focus on the phone in his hand.
Kizzie shook her head without hesitation. She’d stop this bomb.
Or die trying.
A light rain had started to fall, and Phil flicked on the windshield wipers.
“It’s water. Gotta be someplace closed in,” she said.
Xander nodded, thumb working like mad over the display of his cell phone. “Reservoir or lake. The Potomac is too random, especially if you want to make a point…”
She relayed the thought to Fletcher as the SUV started over the bridge to bring them into DC proper. Cruising over the rushing Potomac, Kizzie shoved down a breath to keep her thoughts clear, but in the back of her mind she knew time was running out.
“It’s pretty at night, with all the lights…” Sumi said so low Kizzie almost missed it. Sumi sat on the passenger side behind Xander, and had leaned forward to look out of the window across from her. “Didn’t think it’d be so pretty.”
“Anything else you can think of, Kizzie?” Fletcher asked through the phone.
She was mildly aware of Xander’s questioning gaze, but Kizzie had her face turned to the view out her window.
In the distance, the Washington Monument pointed skyward like a beacon in the predawn black; in the foreground a large domed building glowed yellow, reflecting off a dark, mirrored surface.
A body of water surrounded by cherry trees—a sign of friendship from the Japanese…