by Andrea Speed
Kaede was almost afraid to ask, but he kind of had to. “Were you… involved in that whole fight?”
Without blinking, Ash said, “Of course I was.”
“Did you fight any soldiers?”
“Several. Guns are cowardly weapons. They require no skill or thought. They’re blunt, idiotic tools.” Ash said this without emotion, neither bragging nor ashamed. He was simply stating a fact, and this convinced Kaede he was telling the truth.
Kaede also felt suddenly cold. This man sitting across from him—and some quick math in his head had him at twenty, Kaede’s age, or maybe twenty-one at the oldest—who looked so dainty, was possibly one of the most dangerous men in existence. The fact that he’d fought soldiers and had not captured meant one of two things: he’d had a few fights and escaped in the general chaos of battle, or he’d fought his way completely through a whole group of soldiers and there had been no one left to stop him from leaving the scene. But it was safe to assume he’d at least killed one, most likely more. At thirteen.
“This troubles you?” Ash asked.
“No, I’m just trying to take it all in.” His noodles were cold, so he put them on the glass coffee table. He wasn’t sure how to ask the next question politely and figured there was no way to ask such a thing in a way that didn’t seem rude. So he forged ahead. “Were you… altered? By my father.”
“I am genetically altered,” Ash said, as casually as if he were discussing the weather. “I’m stronger than the average human. I have greater muscle density, and from what I understand, my lungs and bloodstream process oxygen more efficiently. There may be other alterations, but those are the main ones.”
“Does that explain your hair color?”
Ash shrugged. “Perhaps. It’s always been this color.”
Like all of this was nothing! As if admitting he was a gengineered supersoldier trained by a death cult wasn’t a remarkable thing. “Umm….” Kaede was kind of flabbergasted. He wasn’t sure what to say. “And, uh, why did my father send you along now? It was really convenient timing.”
Ash dipped his head again. “He told me there were credible rumors that the Brotherhood and Dr. Blood were planning something. Along with my arrival, he thinks it might be time for you to relocate.”
Kaede snorted, the spell of strangeness broken by the fact that sounded exactly like his insensitive, easily distracted dad. Of course his father did have something of an excuse. He injected himself with a serum that was supposed to triple his intelligence, and while it did, it also had what he dubbed an “unfortunate” side effect: madness. The serum that made him so smart also made him nuts, and maybe that was why he seemed to forget Kaede existed for big chunks of time. Either that, or he honestly didn’t care about his son in any respect, which Kaede figured was closer to the truth.
“And where does he expect me to go?” Kaede asked.
Ash reached into his coat pocket, and for the first time Kaede realized how tailored his clothes were. They were tight to his body, making him more aerodynamic, and black, making him both seem slighter and harder to see in the dark. He was built for lethality. Ash pulled out an envelope, which Kaede took, his fingers briefly brushing Ash’s. His hand was cold, almost unexpectedly so.
“He thinks you should return to the States,” Ash answered. “A private plane will take us out of here tomorrow.”
“Us?” Kaede replied with a small smile. The envelope contained what he expected: a new passport and driver’s license in the name of Jason Tanaka. Kaede wondered how long this would fool anyone. Two days? Three?
“I am your bodyguard,” Ash said. “Where you go, I go.”
“I see. And what’s your identity, Ash?”
“Ash Han. No one knows me from anyone.”
Kaede could believe that. “You might want to change your last name, or at least the spelling.”
“Why?”
“You don’t look Korean. People might ask more questions than you’d like.”
“Do people always appear to be the race of their surname?”
Ash had him there. Kaede dropped the envelope on the coffee table, his new identity cooling beside the cold noodles. “No, but people are nosy assholes. I learned that the time I was Adam Jordan. Do you have a passport under that name?”
Ash nodded. He didn’t verbally respond.
“Okay. I’ll fix you up a new one, under the name Ash Han… son. Ash Hanson. That good with you?”
He shrugged. “It makes no difference to me. You can make false identification papers?”
It was Kaede’s turn to nod. “Dad may be the mad scientist, but I’ve picked up a few useful skills. Mostly making fake IDs and repurposing some of Dad’s works to suit me.” He held out his hand over the table, and Ash looked at it for a moment as if unsure what he should do. So Kaede said, “The passport? Yours?”
“Oh.” Ash reached inside his trim coat, pulled it out, and placed it on Kaede’s palm with the utmost delicacy. Kaede was starting to notice how economical Ash’s movements were, how still he could sit, and his mind once again went to martial arts training. They had a smorgasbord in Karna, didn’t they? Many brutal martial arts taught, as well as a few other hand-to-hand combat disciplines. Kaede was beginning to find him fascinating, if only because he seemed so alien. Of course, there were also rumors that his father worked with alien DNA, but he’d never found any proof of that. Didn’t mean it wasn’t possible—just unlikely.
Taking Ash’s passport, Kaede went off to the hidden room—every single one of his father’s safe houses (or apartments, bungalows, suites, or condos) had a secret room—and made quick work of the change. It wasn’t anything to add “son” to Han, and when he called Ash in, Kaede got his driver’s license and did the same thing.
The room looked very much like a small lab—they all did—and Ash looked around like he was searching for something or looking for something familiar. Kaede had no idea if he found it. In spite of looking around, Ash was standing very still, waiting patiently for Kaede to finish. Now he was getting the sense that while Ash was kind of fascinating, he was also kind of creepy. He hadn’t learned to blend in with normal people yet, had he? You’d have thought his adopted family would have taken care of that first thing. Maybe it just didn’t take.
As soon as Kaede was done forging the documents, Ash asked, “Can I see your bedroom?”
That was an unexpected, and sort of weird, question. “Uh, sure,” Kaede replied, wondering what Ash had in mind. Kaede had picked up not one bit of interest from this guy about anything. If this was a sexual overture of some kind, it was out of the blue. Was Ash even interested in him? Or anybody, for that matter? He seemed to show no emotion whatsoever. He had a poker face that could break Las Vegas.
Kaede led him back to his bedroom, which exhibited the same clean, austere sterility as the rest of the place. He went straight to the window. He traced the window grating, and Kaede told him, “It’s retractable, but it only opens from the inside.”
Ash attempted to shake the grate and nodded, as if satisfied by its strength. “It’ll do.” He then spun sharply on his heels. “I’ll sleep in the living room.”
“Sure,” Kaede agreed. He went to the closet and pulled out one of the folded blankets on the top shelf. All the safe houses were stocked with pretty much the same things in the same places, although Kaede had generally memorized all the differences by now. He’d lost count of how many times he’d traveled the globe or stayed in any one of these places. He gave the blanket to Ash, who took it without comment. If Ash was revealed to be some kind of android, he wouldn’t be surprised. “I don’t think I have any pajamas or anything—”
“I don’t need them,” Ash said and left the bedroom. Just like that.
Now Kaede was intrigued. What did he mean he didn’t need them? Was he going to sleep naked on the couch? Or sleep in his clothes? He kind of wanted to sneak out later and find out.
Count on his dad to finally send him a bodyguard, but one so
strange he was equally attractive and repellent. Kaede would say he knew how to find his own bodyguards, but he didn’t. Sadly, Goro Hayashi knew how to make them. Kaede wondered, not for the first time, if that included him as well.
2
AT FIRST Kaede wasn’t sure what had woken him from such a nice sleep, and then he heard a heavy thud in the front room.
He sat up, alarmed, and remembered Ash was sleeping on his couch. Had something happened? He almost called out to Ash but then thought maybe it would be best not to, not until he knew what was going on.
Kaede snuck up to the doorway and peered out as carefully as possible. The first thing he saw was a man splayed facedown on the carpet in a slowly growing puddle of blood. Another seemed to be convulsing, draped awkwardly over an armchair, while Ash punched a third attacker in the throat and kicked a fourth one in the stomach so hard he flew backward into the couch, making it rock and slide back half a meter. These men were wearing dark clothes but no face masks, although that almost didn’t matter. They all seemed to look vaguely similar, with brown hair and angular jawlines, and Kaede wondered who they could possibly be until he remembered the henchmen of Dr. Blood usually looked vaguely related. Kaede had heard either plastic surgery was involved, or Blood simply sought out men who closely resembled a specific type. The why of it was not known, and Blood was not gay, as far as anyone knew, so it was unclear why his henchmen would have to be a specific kind of guy. He probably had a reason, but there was no doubt it was crazy.
Even though Kaede had only opened the door a tiny crack, Ash saw him and said, “We need to get out of here tonight. Pack a bag. I’ll call and make sure there’s a plane standing by when we hit the airstrip.”
Kaede opened the door. It turned out there were five corpses in all, as there was a man dead in the foyer. None of them had guns in evidence, but they were carrying the distinctive kukri machetes of Blood’s henchmen. He grabbed one from the nearest body, the blade still concealed in its holster. He didn’t like guns, but he had an appreciation for knives.
“Why did they break in?”
Ash could only shrug. He was still wearing all his clothes (damn), and he didn’t appear to have a speck of blood on him, nor had he worked up a sweat. He was the serene eye of a hurricane that had just torn five men to pieces. Kaede was right: there was no quantifying the danger of this delicate, unassuming man. Maybe his white hair was an attempt by nature to alert others to his inherent lethality. “From what I understand, both Blood and the Brotherhood thought they could use you as leverage against your father, but that’s all I know. I wasn’t given further details.”
“No, of course not,” Kaede said with a sigh. That would have been too helpful.
Kaede returned to his room, and since he was only wearing boxer shorts, he quickly got dressed. He also had what was colloquially known as a “bug-out bag” already packed and ready to go. Most people who made them were preparing for the zombie apocalypse that was never going to happen, so Kaede thought of them as sad weirdoes, but his bug-out bag contained clothing, cash, a burner phone, an open-source laptop, and some weapons, along with enough credit cards and IDs under fake names to get him around the world a few times over. Now that was an apocalypse bag. A hatchet and MREs helped no one—unless you were a starving lumberjack. He opened the pack long enough to slip the kukri inside. He might need it further down the road.
When he returned to the living room, Ash had just snapped his phone in half and tossed it aside. “Called the cleaners,” he reported. “They should be here shortly. The plane will be waiting for us.”
“Great.” Of course Kamani had a secret “cleaning division” that made all the corpses disappear. How else could they have stayed in business all this time? Although it probably varied country to country, killing people was generally frowned upon. If you wanted to stay in business, it was best to hide the bodies so well they would never be found. Kaede sometimes wondered if Kamani buildings across the globe were powered by human-fueled furnaces. It was not as far-fetched an idea as you might think.
Ash moved ahead of him, leading the way out, and Kaede thought it was a weird bit of paranoia until two dark-clad men jumped out of the shadows and attacked them. Well, attempted to attack. Ash grabbed the arm of one and not only snapped it with the sound of a two-by-four being broken, but shoved the assailant’s knife right into his own chest. The man had barely started to fall when Ash kicked the other attacker so hard he flew back and hit the wall solidly enough to leave a person-sized dent. He hit the floor wheezing, clearly hurt but still alive, and scrambled for his kukri, which he had dropped. Ash could have finished him off, but Kaede was tired of Ash having all the fun and very carefully flicked one of the round throwing stars he carried. From what he could tell, it entered the man’s back, and as he sat up, he didn’t seem to notice it. But then blood started pouring out of his mouth, and he slumped facedown onto the carpet.
“Nice,” Ash said, not even pausing in his stride as he stepped over the body.
“I’m not completely helpless,” Kaede replied.
“I never thought you were.”
Kaede gave him a sidelong glance in the elevator, and while Ash’s expression didn’t change one iota, Kaede thought maybe he was impressed. Sort of.
The ride down in the elevator was quiet, and no one attacked them as they got in the car—bulletproof, of course; nothing but the best for a Hayashi—and they also weren’t assaulted on the way to Kamani’s private airstrip, although Kaede was braced for it. Ash drove. They never even discussed it; he simply got behind the wheel.
“So did your death cult teach you defensive driving?” Kaede asked. Belatedly he wondered if he should have called it a death cult. Maybe Ash thought of them fondly.
But Ash had no reaction to it. “No, Kamani did. Tabaah Karna believed no conventional combustion engines would be viable when oil and/or oil production ceased.”
“Oh.” Yes, that made sense. The Road Warrior was a fun movie, but gasoline was likely to stop pumping once society went to hell. “I can see that.”
Ash actually smiled. It was faint, but Kaede saw it when he glanced at him. “They were all crazy,” Ash said. “Good self-defense teachers, but nutty as a jar full of peanuts.”
“Ha. So I take it you won’t take part in the family reunion.”
“Even if there were more than a handful of us alive, I’m gonna say no.”
That brought up an interesting question. “Do you keep in touch with any other members of Karna?”
“No. There wasn’t a lot of sentimentality among us.”
“Do you ever wonder about your birth parents?”
“No. I think I’m genetically distinct from when I was born, so I’m not sure I’m related to them anymore.”
Wow. What did you say to that? Sorry? “Umm….”
Ash looked at him, and appeared puzzled for a moment. “There’s no reason for you to feel responsible. You didn’t do this to me.”
“But my father did.”
“So? It was never you. You’re not responsible for what he did and does, and you shouldn’t take the guilt. That isn’t your burden to bear.” He then turned his gaze back on the road. “Besides, I like being superior to all humans. Makes it much easier to beat the hell out of them.”
That made Kaede smile. “You’re an awesome bodyguard.”
“I am the best,” Ash said. He said it with no pride or smugness; he was simply stating a fact.
And Kaede believed it.
KAMANI, LIKE all big corporations, followed its own rules. Once an entity amassed a certain amount of wealth, rules that pertained to everyone else didn’t apply. Most businesses that owned their own planes had to file flight plans in advance and undergo certain security protocols, but Kamani never did. So that was why, despite the last-minute request, the corporation had a private jet on the runway waiting for them, fueled up and ready to go. The pilot was a company man, a faceless employee Kaede would only see if he went up to t
he cockpit and introduced himself. Even then, the pilot might not talk to him. Kaede was pretty sure his father made not talking to him a corporate bylaw. He was referred to only by a single code name: Pilgrim. Why his father had given him such a silly code name he had no idea, but he suspected that it amused him to hear “Pilgrim needs a pickup” or “Extract the Pilgrim.”
As soon as they were on the plane, fastening their seat belts, Kaede looked across the aisle at Ash, whose white hair seemed to glow in the overhead lights, and asked him, “What’s your code name?”
Ash glanced at him. In this light, his eyes took on an almost crimson cast. It was unearthly, eerie. “Phantom.”
“Of course.” Made perfect sense. Pilgrim and the Phantom. Everybody loved alliteration.
Even after all this time, all these flights, takeoffs always got to him. Kaede white-knuckled it, holding on to the arms of his plush chair (much plusher than anything on a commercial plane, including first class), until they were in the air and everything smoothed out. When the plane finally hit that smooth state, he glanced over and saw Ash staring at him with the tiniest hint of a smirk.
Kaede scowled at him. “Aren’t you afraid of anything?”
Ash shrugged, his expression returning to baseline (poker face). “Of course I am. But fear can never control you. The moment it does, you’ve lost.”
“I think I read that in a fortune cookie once.” Ash just kept looking at him with those honeyed eyes, and Kaede realized he might have gone too far. “It was a joke.”
“Yes, that makes sense. Too many words for a fortune cookie.”
Was that a joke? He honestly couldn’t tell. Kaede yawned, popping his ears and also reminding himself he’d only had about two hours’ sleep before Blood’s men broke in. It would be a long flight to the States from France, and he really needed to get some sleep. But first, there were a couple of details he was fuzzy about. “So what are we doing in the States? What’s our cover?”
Just like he figured, Ash knew. “You are an associate for Nagoya Holdings Limited, supposedly working on and monitoring a secret project with Kamani, code-named Bright Thunder.”