Wearing the Cape 5: Ronin Games (18 page)

The crowd circling the cosplayers beneath the billboard talked costume details while arguing about our
stats
and excitedly sharing the news of the Three Remarkable Ronin with curious passersby not yet in the know. Ozma politely inquired and was happily directed to an internet ronin board that tracked sightings, and with Shell’s prompting I managed to find it on our epad.

The sight linked to news sources in China and confirmed our “kills” while crediting us with the successful medical mission, gave our “names,” Hikari, Mamori, and Kimiko, and speculated about our powers. The site’s writers correctly pegged me as some kind of Atlas-type, but guessed that Jacky was a physically enhanced teleporting martial artist (a master of gunjitsu). They had no idea what Ozma did, pegging her as a “supporting power.”

Beyond that it was all pages of comments and vlog and blog-posts, all speculation,
none
of them even hinting we weren’t from around here. I could breathe again, and ask Jacky what she had meant about last night.

For
that
conversation we found a coffee and karaoke shop and paid for a small party room. Our server’s cheerful greeting and the three cream puppies in latte foam-art that smiled up at me from my heavy mug didn’t do a thing for my black thoughts. I bit their cute little heads off and drank my coffee.

Then my brain caught up with me. I set my mug down as Ozma finished thanking our server at the door.

“Ozma? Would you mind taking Shell out for some fish? We’ve got our cellphones.”

She nodded and put her compact surveillance-thwarting mirror on the table. Taking the bag from me and ignoring Shell’s “Hey!” she pinched the top of the bag against her attempt to scramble out. I closed the door behind them, listened to her walk down the hall promising tuna and cream.

Jacky watched me from her comfortable chair, leaving her mug with its cream-puppy topping on the table to cool.

“You went into Kabukicho last night,” I said, leaning against the door. She would have walked right by the billboard corner.

“It has my kind of prey.”

Players. Wannabe Romeos. Inebriated mobile meals that could be cut from the herd, left a few ounces lighter with a false and fuzzy memory of getting lucky. “I know. Is there a reason you didn’t tell us this morning?”

“Like…”

I made myself sit down, didn’t know what to do with my hands and settled them on my knees (debutante manners—they never leave you). “Did you—did you have to do anything that nobody should know about?”

“And why would you think that?” My friend had gone still, like only vamps could and she still could even if she was a breather now.

“Because you’re all about the intel. You’d tell us what you’d learned unless— Did you not want us to know you’d been there?” I swallowed. “It’s okay, you know. I know that sometimes you have to do things I can’t— It’s okay—”

“Stop.” Jacky held up a hand in the universal
stop
sign, but she was smiling. It wasn’t a nice smile but it was better than her expressionless watching. “You sent Ozma and Shell away because you didn’t want them to hear if I admitted to a
crime
? Beyond my usual?”

“…yes?”

“Why?”

“I don’t
know
!” And I really didn’t; it wasn’t as if Shell didn’t know all about the things that Jacky sometimes had to do, and Ozma…I’d long since filed her majesty under the category of
Good, Not Always Nice
—she’d be likely to understand.

The sardonic twist to Jacky’s grin said
she
understood, which was totally unfair; it was like I’d regressed to high school and the BF’s code of silence. “So, why didn’t you share this morning? Since it’s obviously not a dark and bloody secret.”

She actually laughed at me, reaching for her coffee.

“When I came back this morning and until we’d walked across East Shinjuku, I didn’t know if we’d really be going into Kabukicho.” Her smile turned whimsical. “And being okay with what I do doesn’t mean you’re comfortable with it.”

I blanched. “Jacky—”

“Hope, it really is okay.” She held my gaze until she could see I believed her.

I sighed, shoulders slumping. “…okay.” It didn’t feel right to let it go, like I was letting Jacky down, but what were we fighting
about
? “So, tell me about it?”

“Not much to tell, really. I sipped from an office lady and an American tourist, and then found me a nice yakuza boy.” She tapped the base of her neck with two fingers. “They’re easy to spot by the tats, at least when they’ve got their shirts open three buttons down to show off their ink and shiny bling. Him I kept for a long talk.”

“What did you learn?”

“A lot and not much.” She sipped her coffee and grimaced. It was pretty good stuff, but even I could tell it wasn’t quite up to her own coffee-snob standards. “You know the yakuza isn’t like the Chicago Mob, right? They’re not just wise guys with tattoos. They have
business cards
. A local office listed in the phonebook. A public complaints department.”

“You’re kidding.”

She fished in her pocket and tossed me a card. “Shinjuku-kai’s
oyabun—
the local family’s boss—is Imada Masu. He’s a big believer in civic responsibility.”

The card had a black symbol on the shiny orange side that I decided must indicate the organization, and an orange phone number on the matte-black side. “They’re
philanthropists
?”

“They think they’re civic boosters. They extort money from the local businesses that they don’t own and from the semi-legal prostitution the place is known for, and pay the community back with honest-to-God protection from any crime that isn’t theirs. To be fair, it sounds like that means keeping their own minions in check, too.”

I turned the card back over. A crime family with a
hotline
?

She shrugged. “My
date
liked to brag—they even publicly support local charities and shrines, march in community festivals. He was in the last one, helped pull the family float.”

“And their ronin?”

“He boasted that their oyabun is a ronin, but nobody knows his power. For the rest they’ve got a stable of C and D Class street ronin, mostly Ajax-Types, but it sounds like people who get to see their high-power ronin in action don’t talk about it much—if they’re seen again at all.”

I sighed. Just once I would have liked something to come easy. “Well, we still—” My cellphone chimed a text, and I fished it out.

It read
“Ozma taken.”

“What?” Jacky asked when all the blood left my face.

“Somebody took Ozma.” I barely remembered to unlock the door before going through it.

Know well what leads you forward and what holds you back, and choose the path that leads to wisdom.

Buddha
Everything happens for a reason. Sometimes the reason is you’re stupid and make bad decisions.

Astra.

Shell’s next text,
Andre’s
, was in English instead of kanji and when I showed it to the greeter at the coffeehouse door she directed me to a café just down the street. My heart in my throat, I scanned the packed sidewalk and traffic but didn’t see Ozma or anybody moving in a way that screamed
I’m a kidnapper!

Jacky a silent shadow behind me, I proceeded at a walk that might have looked casual but would have knocked anybody who bumped me down on his ass until I found Andre’s—a seafood café with a narrow front and a long serving and eating counter inside. Shell’s bag sat right by the door, Shell crouched low inside it.

“Move!” Jacky whispered as she passed me and kept going without looking at me. Barely keeping myself from following her I picked up the bag, nodded to passing pedestrians, and headed in the other direction. Hailing the first free taxi I saw, I texted Jacky my intentions while Shell kept quiet.

Abandoning the taxi two intersections away, I walked through a street-mall and a department store before heading back to West Shinjuku through the insanely crowded station. Hoping the tides of people would keep anyone from following close, I still doubled back on my path twice and exited south of where we’d exited before.

At Keio Plaza I found a two-story French restaurant with private rooms and flashed my credit card for a small dining room overlooking the street in sight of the hotel.

The waiter left me with coffee. Maybe I’d finish this one. “You can come out, Shell.” I lifted her out of the bag and into my lap.

She flattened herself out across my legs. “Ozma’d just asked the greeter if she could get a small box of unseasoned tuna. They got out of a van.”

I nodded and stroked her back, eyes on the street. “And?”

“They wore headbands with strips of kanji-covered paper hanging from them. They didn’t look at anyone but us, and everyone else looked somewhere else. Not like they meant to—just, like they didn’t see that the kidnappers were any big deal.”

Magic
. I groaned but didn’t stop stroking Shell.

“When Ozma saw them she slipped her phone and box into the bag with me and left it. She went to meet them.”

I closed my eyes, imagining the scene. A packed sidewalk, a bubble of space where people stopped looking. Ozma couldn’t reach her wand or the Magic Belt without transforming first, blatantly and publicly. With no room to run, she left the bag and moved forward into their move, pulling their focus away from her priceless box and away from Shell.

Moving Shell to the chair beside me and fumbling in the bag, I found it: Glegg’s Box of Mixed Magic. Ozma had folded it up, its gold and gem-studded wire and filigree sides lying flat against each other as compact as a closed epad. Carefully unfolding the box into its six sides and latching the lid’s catch, I opened the box by its detachable
hinged
side (a final “trick” to foil thieves who shouldn’t be opening it that Ozma had showed me).

Anybody unfolding and opening it the “normal” way would just find it as empty as it looked when you peeked through the wire-mesh patterns of its sides. Opening it the right way showed me its velvet-lined interior and carefully packed contents. Putting fingers to each corner of the opening, I stretched the box like I’d open a rope-closed sack, and by the time Jacky showed up behind the waiter five minutes later I had everything spread out on the table.

“Smart,” she said. She didn’t say anything else until our waiter bowed himself out and she had poured her own coffee from the pot. “What did she leave us?”

“The Six-Leaf Tea, the Comprehension Drops, the Compass Fish, a pair of Anonymity Specs, a pair of—I think they’re her Seeing Specs—and a bunch of little coded boxes and bottles. And I think these are apothecary’s tools?”

Jacky looked over the black-lacquered box of golden instruments and ordered paper sleeves. “Could be. Nothing for us to play with.”

I spread some chicken paste on a biscuit for Shell, sighing at how this all looked—a bizarre and sad echo of yesterday’s tea. At least my hands weren’t shaking. “No, not going to open anything I don’t recognize—I’d be as stupid as Alice in Wonderland.” Putting together our little lunch plates held me together, let me sit on the little girl inside who’d wanted to wail since seeing the street with no Ozma.

“So do we go get her after lunch?” Jacky tried the coffee, found it acceptable, and reached for the little biscuits. “Because I have no plans.”

“We don’t know—”

“We do.” The cup in her hand stayed as steady as if held by a statue carved of white marble, a statue that spit out words like darts. “The yakuza. Somebody identified me from last night. They followed me today, grabbed Ozma when we split up.”

“We don’t know that.”

“If it was Defensenet then they would have been waiting for all of us, cleared the street while we were in the coffeehouse, and picked us up as we came out after her. We’d have been facing the Eight Excellent Cheerleaders or the Nine Fine Boys. You carved your way through a Chinese
dragon
for God’s sake, they know we’re a hard target.” She set down her coffee to select and munch a paste-covered biscuit like she was biting someone’s neck, chewed and swallowed. “The local yakuza boys have got her, so we go get her back.”

Blackstone once told me that when you’re up to your neck in the brown stuff, wallowing in
“It’s all my fault!”
is counterproductive—you don’t have that many inches left before you freaking drown. (As an ex-Marine, he said it a bit differently.) Which didn’t mean I wasn’t going to give myself a huge ass-kicking later; with the blinding clarity of hindsight, considering what Kitsune seemed to do for a living our chances of finding him alone and an easy target somewhere had always been horrible to laughably non-existent. We’d smuggled ourselves into Japan, breaking who knew how many laws, pretty much only to get caught. By the yakuza or Defensenet, it didn’t matter.

But it
did
matter for what happened next, and unless I had no other choice I couldn’t take Jacky’s guess as to who had taken Ozma as the basis for our next moves. Especially since, if the yakuza did have Ozma, our next move would be Find Jacky’s Date and work our way up the chain. As quietly of possible, violently if necessary. It would probably be necessary.

I’d hoped somebody might have followed us, but nobody visibly suspicious showed up in Kio Plaza in the hours we watched. Which didn’t change anything; we weren’t returning to the hotel. Jacky had a few quiet words with our servers and the restaurant’s manager (influence-reinforced, I was sure). I didn’t ask, but it was a pretty good bet they thought we were Defensenet agents now—great excuse for a stakeout and we were paying them well anyway. While she did that I thought useless thoughts until something sparked, the only decent idea I’d had since everything began.

The Compass Fish.

Back in the village shrine, Ozma had “fed” the family ashes to the fish without any kind of magic words or ritual. How had she done it? Could I do it?

Carefully sorting through the box of paper sleeves turned up a sleeve with a twist of long golden hair, braided into a short string and tied into a ring-sized circle. The sleeve had a fancy “O” scribbled on it; Ozma’s hair? It
looked
the right shade.

I held the sleeve in my fingers, tried to tell myself I wasn’t being stupid.

Shell watched from where she sat working her epad. “Remember what you said about Alice?”

“You’re not helping
.” It’s not like I’m going to eat it…

Squeezing my eyes closed and holding my breath (like
that
would help anything), I tipped the hair ring into my palm.

And opened an eye. I was still me, remembered being me, and was still here.
Okay
. I’d only seen it out of the corner of my eye at the shrine, but it seemed that Ozma had…

“Now that’s interesting,” Shell said.

When I tapped the hair ring to the crystal sphere that was Mister Fishy’s home, it had darted up, seemed to
sniff
the ring, and then grabbed it in its mouth to pull it right through the crystal and into its watery home like sucking food off the surface of a pond. Then it pushed the piece of Kitsune-wood lying on the bottom of the sphere out to drop into my hand.
Of course, must keep things neat
. I put Mister Fishy down and slipped the wood sliver into an empty paper sleeve, wrote Kitsune Wood on it in pen, and filed it in the box before I started giggling.

And now the fish was circling, darting between the hair ring and the side of the sphere where it tap-tap-tapped, pointing us at Kabukicho.

Jacky was right. But we weren’t going to need to work the chain.

“It’s going to go to shit. You know that, right?”

I didn’t take my eyes off the block of little buildings we stood above. They had the numbers, they knew the ground, and we had no backup. We
might
have surprise. “I know.”

“And?”

I kept my eyes on the buildings. “We’ve got a good shot at getting Ozma back ourselves, and if we don’t we’ve got a better chance of bringing enough Defensenet attention down on us that they won’t be able to spirit Ozma away to somewhere else. So we all get caught and taken into custody by the Japanese government. I can live with that.”

I didn’t say that even if the local cavalry arrived Jacky had a good chance of breaking contact and getting herself away. She knew that too.

We weren’t waiting for nightfall. Jacky still had Ozma’s sunscreen potion and bottled wind so she was good to go, and they probably
expected
us to arrive after dark, when the visitors filled up the place looking for variety and entertainment. But we were still capes; we wanted the opposite.

Jacky had put on Ozma’s Anonymity Specs and taken the Compass Fish for a taxi ride around Shinjuku (something we should have done
first
). Doing the Girl Scout survey with the map, she’d pinpointed Ozma in northeast Kabukicho. Narrowing it down told us they’d taken her to a weird little neighborhood called Golden Gai.

Golden Gai. It sounded like a fancy resort but it was the exact opposite. The place was a warren of narrow alleys and tiny two-story eateries and bars barely wider than their front doors. There were more than two hundred of them, all crammed into a small quarter of Kabukicho that had once been a post-WWII black market. Then it had been a red light district until the Japanese government had made prostitution illegal. It had survived the development around it mostly because the bar owners had banded together to keep arsonists working for developers out of the neighborhood—a neighborhood watch with
teeth
.

According to what I’d read about the place, Golden Gai was a time capsule, a window into what a lot of Tokyo had looked like before the massive firebombings of the war’s final year had resulted in almost total urban renewal. Now we stood on the roof of a neighboring business building, transformed and ready, looking down into the maze—a historic site if you wanted to call a modern-day hive of crime and villainy “historic.”

“Sound check,”
Shell whispered in my ear. Shell and I had shopped while Jacky scouted and now we wore earbugs better than the ones the Sentinels used, with matching sets of reality-plus shades (able to project the tactical imagery overlay that Virtual-Shell usually did for me through our link) styled to match our ronin costumes. Japan was the country on the cutting edge of new electronics. Shell was far too breakable to directly participate in what was about to go down, so she had chosen an amazingly clean alley three streets over to use as a “base” from which she could act as our Dispatch wingman.

“I hear you fine,” I confirmed.

“R-plus check.”
A red triangle appeared in my vision, the shades painting a marker on Ozma’s triangulated location in one of the establishments. A tag,
Aloha!
, floated over it and I wondered if the place’s name said anything about the menu.

Jacky—
Mamori
—checked her guns. “Ready to tell us what we might be facing?”

“Not until I’ve seen them. I’ve got a catalogue of probables, but I’m not going to prep you for stuff that may not be there.”