The Foragers

by Katherine Nader

  The iron door squealed open.

  “Irashai masen.” A maid with an apron around her waist welcomed me from the door. She held a scanner in her hand.

  I pinched one contact out, and stared into the scanner. It beeped red.

  “Try again,” I insisted.

  The maid brought the scanner to my eye and it beeped red again. My fingers dug into the girl’s ear, drew out an earpiece and brought it close to my lips. “It’s me, Maya.”

  The maid remained still, smiling. I shoved the device back into her ear. She listened to the voice from her com and nodded. “Welcome, Maya Mori. A bath has been drawn and the change rooms are over there.”

  “Oh, so now they give me the Mori name. How sweet of them. Did they give you one too, I wonder?”

  “The bath is over there.” The maid continued to smile.

  “How do you do that?” I strode into the baths, removed my clothes and stepped into the warm water. After a while, I went inside one of the stalls behind and dressed in a pink and white kimono. “You can be so much more than just a servant,” I said from behind the curtain, tightening a red band around my waist. “I don’t understand how the Mori can just pass their name onto their recruits and then treat them like slaves.”

  The maid’s palm brushed through the curtain. I handed her my string of blades. She still waited. I groaned and handed her my last blade. Straightening my collar, I slipped into Geta. I hated those wooden clogs. The maid held a spray bottle in her hand.

  “Keep that away from me,” I said.

  She paused and then proceeded to spray me with perfume from head to toe. I headed past the stalls to the end of the corridor, sneezed, tilted my head to the camera in the corner, and a buzzing door opened. Music filled the air as I walked into a grand hall. A symphony played from above the central stairs. It rushed in and around the servants scrubbing and cleaning every inch of the place. I passed by men and women all alike with blank and empty stares. When I looked at them, they smiled at me without meaning. I steered away from the cleaning team and bumped into a tall figure. This one didn’t smile. A streak of burns snaked down the side of his face. It struck through a tattooed leg of a spider visible beneath his hair line.

  “You!” I gasped, remembering how I had fought him in the fire. “Y-you’re alive?”

  “As are you.” A voice came from the staircase.

  My eyes left the man in front of me and lingered to the top of the steps. Mr. Mori, with a long greying ponytail and dressed in a kimono, stood in the center. He clutched a katana in his hand. Its sheath touched the ground where his feet met. “Care to go for another round?”

  ***

  In an old board room with a vaulted ceiling, I clutched the black-leathered hilt of a katana with both hands. Mr. Mori, slashing the katana delicately at the air and the lights of the ceiling dancing on his cool steel, dashed toward me. I held my blade evenly, leveled with my nose, and stalled his strike. I whipped around to clash his steel. It shivered under his compelling strength. A wretched grin split his lips as he throatily crooned, pressing closer to my face. With one knee down, my foot pressed firmly against the tatami mats, I used all my weight to thwart him. Dodging his arcing blade, I watched him bring it over his head, humming a low, swift tune when he swung it down. It split the mats in half just as I whirled around him and pointed my sword at his back.

  “Very good.” He beamed. “The Kan have taught you well.”

  “As have you,” I replied.

  Mr. Mori sheathed his blade and called for one of the servants watching from the door. “Bring in the tea,” he said. Paper-thin doors slid to one side of the dōjō and maids ushered us inside. They set up the table and the tea set. A servant pressed a button on a wall and a metallic screen rolled up, revealing a tilted window with sunlight dashing in. I could see down the side of the Mountain with the forest and the maze below.

  “How is my son?” he asked, sitting cross-legged on the floor and sipping his tea.

  “He hasn’t checked in with us yet,” I replied, my gaze never leaving the view.

  Mr. Mori cleared his throat as he waited for me to have a seat.

  “Forgive me, but I must refuse. The Kan never allowed it, and I never had a taste for tea anyway.”

  “You see, that’s what I like about you,” he laughed. “Very direct and straight to the point. Very well, then.” He waved the tea away and the servants along with it.

  “We’re setting up a trap tonight,” I said, rolling out a scroll from my sleeve and placing it on the table.

  Mr. Mori examined it and nodded.

  “We’ll need to use the taihō if this is going to work.”

  “How many?” he asked, breathing heavily.

  “All of them.”

  ***

  A serious man with every muscle on his torso as defined as an Olympic gymnast stood next to me in the elevator. He pressed his thumb onto a scanner and pushed level zero—the basement. The doors closed and we went down from level twenty. He folded his hands below his waist and his biceps, the size of my head, had a spider tattoo. He caught me looking at it and I averted my eyes. The elevator doors opened and blue beams flicked on one by one, lining the edges of the tunnel we stepped out into. The man waited in front of the elevator as I continued down the tunnel. Cries for help and the rattling of chains echoed from one tunnel. Whips, blades, chains, and other tools for torture hung from its concrete walls. I breathed in sharply as I passed it. I headed down another tunnel and a steel vault with blast-resistant airlocks came into view. I had been here once before and it didn’t go so well…

  It all started seven years ago, when I was in a glass-walled hotel suite, looking over New York’s City lights. I was sitting on a sofa watching three teenagers play cards on the center table. They each had a matching red band around their wrists. One kept track of the score, tapping into his tablet. They called him Saisho. A man with long hair and a bear tooth chained to his necklace sat in an armchair with his eyes closed. Thundering blows shook the locked door of the bedroom. Whoever was in there, had been at it for hours. The front door clicked open and a guard walked in.

  “She wants to see you,” the armed guard ordered. The three teenagers scrambled to their feet. “Not you,” the guard grumbled. “You.” He waved me over.

  The long-haired man in the armchair opened his eyes and watched me in silence. I stepped out through the door and, as soon as it shut behind me, a number of guards shackled my wrists behind my back. I grunted as they threw a black bag over my head.

  “Where are we going?” My heart raced.

  “Don’t ask questions. The less you talk the longer you live,” the guard growled. They escorted me down a staircase and into a car. We drove in silence for almost twenty minutes, taking several turns and then coming to a stop. The car door opened and arms hauled me out again. “Let’s go.” The guard shoved me through a door that buzzed open, and he dragged me up another flight of stairs. “Hurry it up.”

  “You know, it’s hard to watch where I’m going, and this bag makes it almost impossible to breathe.”

  Arms hugged my legs and lifted me up.

  “Hey, put me down.” I bounced off a guard’s shoulder as we went up the next flight of steps. Just as I was about to break myself loose, the guard dropped me onto a soft mattress and ripped the bag off my head.

  “Now, now, that’s no way to treat a guest.” A woman with short brown hair grinned from her desk. She wore a red dress, and crossed her bare legs in her chair. “Un-cuff her.”

  The guard hesitated.

  “Do I look like I’m joking?”

  The guard searched for a key on him and the woman rolled her eyes. I sat up on the sofa, wriggled a pin in the lock and we all heard a click. I picked up the cuffs between my finger and thumb and held them in the air. “I don’t suppose you want these back?”

  “Leave us,” the woman ordered.

  “Yes, Kimura-san.” The guard nodded and left.

  I placed
the cuffs on a coffee table and scanned the office around me. It was three times the size of the suite I had been holed up in for days.

  “You must be … what do the American’s call it … oh yes, jetlagged.” The woman poured a glass of water and, with a tablet tucked under her arm, approached the sofa.

  “Th-thank you.” I extended a hand but she ignored me, crossing the room and taking a seat in a chair. She sipped from her glass.

  “I don’t think you understand how this is going to work,” she said, putting the glass down on the table. My stomach ached and my throat was parched. “You give me what I ask, and I’ll give you what you need. Simple.” She tapped a finger against her tablet. “Maya Hara, seventeen years-old, charged with breaking and entering, possessing a weapon of mass destruction and … murder. It’s a little too much, don’t you think?”

  I eyed the water on the table.

  “Maya,” she articulated. “That is your name, isn’t it?”

  The water bubbled in the glass and I closed my eyes. “Yes.”

  “I find it very odd that someone like you shows up at my door, equipped with everything for just the right situation and at just the right time. Interesting.” The woman tapped her foot impatiently. She set her tablet down, checked her watch as she undid it, and sighed. She lunged out of her chair and dug her nails into my neck, hauling me off the sofa and pinning me against the wall.

  “H-he …” Gasps of air escaped my mouth as my hands squeezed the woman’s arm. She brought her cold eyes close and tilted her head from side to side.

  “How many wish to be young again like you.” She smelled my hair, breathing down my neck. “You have such good skin. It would be unfortunate for it to go to waste.” She released her hold on me and I dropped to my knees, panting. “Now get up; we have work to do.”

  Mrs. Kimura’s voice rang in my head. I could still remember it, even after seven years had passed. I winced from the memory and turned my attention to the steel vault that creaked from the howling wind in the tunnel. Massive metal bolts held by a combination lock extended from the door into the surrounding frame. I rotated the discs, listening to them click into place. The vault opened and a cold, tightly pressured air emanated from within. I knew the room like the back of my hand. Parts and pieces of warheads, missiles, explosives and hazardous ammunition lined the counters and shelves. I flicked a kit open to reveal a vial of red blood encased in a glass box with an electronic combination lock on it. It was propped on a book that had a spider symbol etched in its center. Sliding it slowly under the kit, my elbow knocked into a bar behind and the book slipped out of my hands. It landed on its edge and the spider symbol fell out. A USB was attached to its back. The rest of the book’s pages were either burned, smudged or loose from the spine. I closed the book and propped the kit carefully back on it. A glass cabinet marked ‘sensitive’ caught my attention. I hid the USB in my sleeve pocket, and closed my hands around a metal case with USW written all over it. From the center of the room, a light shone on an empty pedestal, the same one that used to hold the venom seven years ago.

  I remembered Jinan, Saisho’s friend, surveying the tray of three glass vials on the pedestal. The hazard symbol was plastered around each one. “Is this it?” He asked. “We came all the way out here for this?”

  “Don’t touch it,” I told him not looking away from Saisho’s tablet. “Are you in yet?”

  “They don’t call me the first for nothing,” he said, furiously tapping away on his keypad. An alarm sounded from the tunnel.

  I breathed heavily and gave Saisho a piercing look.

  “It wasn’t me I swear,” he said. “Someone must have manually set it off.”

  “The guards just exited the tunnel.” Sannan popped in through the vault door. “They’re leaving.”

  The walls budged and the vault door shook.

  “Whoa, what was that?” Saisho held onto his tablet.

  “Do you hear that?” I stepped out of the vault and pressed my ear against the tunnel floor. Water swooshed underneath. “Seal the vault.”

  “What?” Jinan’s eyes widened.

  “Are you crazy?” Sannan yelled. “We’ll be locked in. We need to find a way out.”

  I sprinted to the vault door just as the wall of the tunnel collapsed and waves of water crashed through. I threw Sannan into the vault and sealed the door after us. The vault shook again and knocked out the shelves.

  “What the hell?” Sannan jostled me.

  “I just saved your life. The whole tunnel is flooded. Your friend here didn’t trigger just any alarm. This tunnel is designed to flood in emergencies.” I dragged a metal cased box and stood on it to feel the stone ceiling. “We’re going to have to blow ourselves out of here.” I rummaged through canisters on a shelf and drew out soft and moldable clay. “Help me get it around in a circle.”

  Jinan climbed on Sannan’s shoulders as he plastered the clay onto the corner of the ceiling.

  “How much longer till the tunnel is drained?” I asked Saisho.

  “Two minutes,” he said, tapping on his keypad.

  “A little help here.” Sannan wobbled as more shelves tumbled. Saisho let go of his keypad and squeezed Sannan’s shoulders.

  I stuck two cap fuses into the clay, pulling the wire back. Jinan jumped off Sannan and they took shelter. “You might want to cover your ears.” I plugged the wire into the detonator. It sent a shockwave into the clay and it exploded, caving in the wall and sending rocks tumbling down around us. “Is everyone okay?” I coughed. A cloud of dust and debris filled the air. I kicked a shelf off me and searched the ground for the boys.

  “Over here.” A hand protruded from a tilted shelf. I clasped my fingers around it and dragged Saisho out. He secured two yellow vials against his chest. The third broken, leaving a yellow stain on his clothes.

  “I tried my best,” he said, coughing. “Do you think the Kan will be impressed?”

  “Saisho.” I slapped his face. “Stay with me.” I pulled his arm over my shoulder, his forehead burning up.

  “Where’s Jinan and Sannan?” he mumbled. We spun around and searched the ground. Rocks piled on top of shelves.

  “Sagasu …” Voices rang in the tunnel.

  “There’s no time.” I pushed Saisho up to the floor above us, and climbed up after him.

  “No, we have to come back for them.” Saisho fought my grasps.

  I sent a blow to his face and he slumped onto my shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

  Even after seven years, the vault was still the same size. I looked at the corner of the ceiling where Saisho and I had escaped. It was now replaced with metal. I headed back out into the tunnel, sealing the vault behind me, and hoping it would be the last time I’d have to come here.

  Chapter Ten

  Makoto

  “Where is Minoru?!” the bald man yelled as he trudged in his wheel chair. The bald man’s glass of water fell on the pink carpet.

  “You have to take your medicine.” Nurse Yu picked up the bottle of pills off the table.

  “I’m not taking anything until I know how my grandson is doing.” The bald man shook in his wheel chair.

  “This won’t do, Nurse Yu,” I finally spoke from my chair at the other end of the dining table. I gestured for her to come.

  “Yes, Mori-san?”

  I pulled myself up from the arms of the chair, felt for Nurse Yu’s bowed head with my hand and slapped her.

  “I’m very sorry, Mori-san,” Nurse Yu said.

  “Hachiro!” I yelled. The guard at the door burst into the dining room. “See to it that Nurse Yu stays in her room until she is called for.”

  The door slammed shut and the nurse’s struggles echoed in the hall. I reached into my robe pocket for the whip.

  “You will not force me!” the bald man roared as he turned the wheels back.

  I clasped the end of the table, held on firmly and walked over to him.

  SNAP!

  The whip smacked against t
he steel wheel. The bald man rolled forward.

  SNAP!

  I clasped the end of the whip with my other hand and wrapped it around the bald man’s head. “Listen to me, Oji-san.” I tightened my grip on the whip behind the bald man’s neck, slapped my hand on the bottle of pills at the table, emptied it in his mouth, squeezed his lips shut, released the whip and waited for him to swallow. His breath came out in interrupted gasps. Drool spilled onto my hand.

  “Good.” I smirked, wiping my hand on his chest. “Don’t sleep for long. In the next few hours, you’re going to wake up and see that it’s all over.” I patted his bald head. “Everything is going to be mine. Minoru is my son.” I slipped the whip back into my pocket and took hold of the wheelchair, pushing it through the room. The doors opened and the guards stepped back.

  A grandfather clock ticked in the distance. It came from Oji-san’s room. Minoru’s grandfather obsessed over time. He didn’t spend a minute without making sure he knew where everyone was. He didn’t want to die alone. He didn’t want to include me in his will. He didn’t want me to attend Minoru’s birthday. He only spoke nicely to Minoru and I didn’t know he was obsessed until I heard him and his lawyer exchange details of his will.

  Minoru is going to take everything. I know it.

  Oji-san snored in his chair as I brought him to the door. I searched for the keys in his breast pocket and fiddled with the chain until I found the right key. I unlocked the door and wheeled him inside.