Wearing the Cape 5: Ronin Games (13 page)

Defensenet Report, Shibushi Alert Development: Asset-in-place at HWB Shibushi Base reports arrival and departure of Active Non-Government Powers, heard to identify themselves as the Three Remarkable Ronin. See subsequent report of HWB Anhui mission. According to the asset, the ANGPs did not return to HWB Shibushi Base; current whereabouts, inside Japan or mainland China, are unknown.

Defensenet Recommendation: Stand down Shibushi alert, issue restricted countrywide watch notice to all observer assets.

DR106-BV [Classified]

The next morning we bought an epad and a carry bag big enough for Shell at a local corner store.

Despite being a flesh-and-blood cat, Shell was totally handy with our earbugs and the satellite uplink, and she synced herself with the epad to download our travel directions. Watching a cat work an epad is an interesting experience.

I couldn’t imagine how I could have gotten around without Ozma and her Comprehension Drops. I’d been an anxious child, bothered or scared by a lot of things: doctors (with good reason), frogs, loud noises, trees (bad movie experience), and even existential things like unfamiliar places (I’d
hated
sleeping in hotel rooms, and not being able to read directions had given me the willies). I was a long way from that scared little girl and I’d eventually seen a lot of Europe, but at least the signs there had been written in an alphabet I knew—here I wouldn’t have even been able to
sound out
what signs said unless they were also in English (and while a lot of them were, you couldn’t count on it).

We used a teller-machine at the hotel to stock up on yen, then found a place to eat breakfast that served recognizably American entries (the ramen had been nice, but I think we all wanted a little of the familiar). Cat-Shell insisted on trying the breakfast sausages. Remembering how much Graymalkin liked them—and the inevitable aftermath—I saved some napkins.

Trains run everywhere in Japan, or almost everywhere; the Shinkansen lines, Japan’s system of high-speed trains, would get us from Kagoshima to Osaka by way of Fukuoka. From there a train ride and then a taxi would get us to Tenkawa, the little village in the shadow of Mount Omine where we would find the Miyamoto family grave. I paid for our tickets with yen while Ozma used a casually carried mirror to “do something” about the station’s security cameras. As usual her explanation didn’t make sense, but it boiled down to “Visual review and facial recognition systems won’t recognize us.”

So
she
was concerned about Mister Konishi’s reliability, too—or assumed that our fight over China had been reported by somebody.

And we’d left a group picture on the wall of the HWB base—even with the black shades, enough for facial-recognition software to scan for matches…
and why don’t I think of these things?
 
I needed to kick my own ass.

We took a pair of facing seats at one end of our train car, and Jacky used her vampire mojo to
push
the other passengers until they were uncomfortable enough that our end emptied and we could let Shell out of her bag.

Nobody
said “The cat’s out of the bag.” I was very grateful.

“First the good news,” Shell said. “I’ve piggy-backed on the epad and I’ve got great news access. The Eight Excellent Protectors are back in Tokyo and none of the other Defensenet teams are making any big moves.”

I bit my lip. “Who did you hack for that?”

“I signed up to a dozen fan sites under a dozen dummies. Over here nobody watches capes—
powers
—like their fans do.”

“Worse than home? How—” I shook my head; I really needed to stop getting sidetracked. “So it looks like nobody’s looking for us?”

“Not in the cape-crowd, anyway, and if anyone was connecting an explosion offshore of Kyushu with the Three Remarkable Ronin that’s what you’d expect.”

“That’s good. So what’s the bad news?”

Shell hunkered down, nervously kneading her claws in the seat. “There’s an obstacle I didn’t know about. I should have.”

Jacky folded her arms and I took a moment to smile; with Ozma and me easily able to pass for sweet-sixteen, she looked like the long-suffering college grad babysitting her teenage cousins and pet. “Talk. I can hurt you when you’re like this.”

“
Tenkawa’s haunted. Well, the graveyard is and that’s where we’re going.”

A haunted graveyard. Really. Well, it wasn’t like I didn’t know about ghosts; Jacky had one living in her residence, twenty-four hour coffee shop, and private investigator practice. Acacia treated it (
him
, he was a dead gang kid) like a pet and knew how to keep him happy. Whether ghosts had always been around and were just “stronger” in the Post-Event World, or they were simply breakthroughs who thought they were ghosts and behaved accordingly, they were real enough. And the ghosts in Japan were scarier.

A
lot
scarier. The Japanese love their ghost stories, and their stories give them real teeth. Sometimes literally.

Shelly spelled it out—a bit over four years ago, the little graveyard in Tenkawa became deadly ground and reports were pretty clear about what was there: a
shinigami
, a death-spirit. Stories about shinigami vary—in some they’re demons, in others they’re
yurei
, evil spirits of the dead fueled by a serious hatred that twists them and won’t let them “move on.” In life their hatred might be focused on one person, but in death it becomes a hatred for all that lived.

Shinigami can
kill
. This one could apparently kill with a touch: seven victims had been found in the graveyard in the last four years, hearts stopped, faces frozen with horror, guilt, or grief. The last victim had been a supposedly powerful onmiyoji—an imperial sorcerer, servant of the Chrysanthemum Throne. Since then nobody had entered the graveyard even in daylight. Nobody knew why it was there (there hadn’t been any deaths and burials corresponding to its appearance), and so nobody knew how to get rid of it. The only reason anyone still lived in Tenkawa was it couldn’t leave the graveyard.

Great. Just, great
.

“So now we’ve got to be ghost-busters?” Jacky asked. “Does it attack everybody who enters, or just the randomly unlucky?”

“It used to be just the unlucky, but the onmiyoji ticked it off. Now everyone who enters sees it—and runs
real
fast.” Shell was almost hissing, and I wondered if she realized how instinctively her cat-body was reacting.

“Is it stronger at night?” Jacky dug.

“Nobody knows, best guess is no.”

“Good. Ozma could level me up so I can mist in the sunlight again, but I’m really still best at night.”

Ozma nodded, shook her head. “My magic really does not deal with spirits—I’m afraid there is not much that I can do directly.”

Good to know. “Shell? What was the physical cause of death for its victims?”

“Heart failure from extreme pulmonary stress. Why?”

“Um.” I thought hard. “Then I might be immune. At least partially. I can take a
lot
of stress and I do heal fast. Even if it takes a shot at me, I should be fine long enough for me to get what we need and get out. Right?”

I didn’t know which one looked more horrified, Ozma or Jacky. Shell was even spitting.

That argument carried us through a lot of stops and a few hundred miles. Eventually Shell went back in the bag and Jacky stopped doing her vamp-thing so others could sit near us, and we ate lunch on the train—little bento boxes full of rice and bite-sized things. I won the debate before we got the taxi.

“Well,” Jacky observed, “this doesn’t look like the start of every horror movie I’ve ever seen.”

I opened my mouth to say something upbeat, and closed it, defeated.

It was absolutely certain that Tenkawa’s shinigami only roamed the graveyard, but it was easy to see that its shadow lay across the whole town. Tenkawa had never been big—less than fifteen hundred souls—but it had depended on tourism: pilgrims coming to hike and view Mount Omine. It had a
ryokan
, a small, pseudo-period hostel converted from the largest house in town, and lots of little shops. At least half of them were closed now, and the equally period main street was almost empty. The village shrine looked neglected, paint flaking from its red gate.

I couldn’t see another obvious tourist, but nobody looked at us directly or even seemed curious. We collected our bags, and offered our driver good yen to stay until we were ready to leave; he regretfully but firmly refused and bowed apologies before reversing to get around and back down the road as fast as possible. I got the feeling that, if he’d been an American cabby, he’d have been calling us every kind of idiot.

Looking at each other, we pulled our bags behind us down the street. There was absolutely no sense in trying to blend in or look inconspicuous.

The graveyard lay beyond the shrine, a compact stretch of ground carved out of the woods and full of the Shinto-style gravestones—tiered stone blocks sitting on small plots, with a recessed bowl in the stone in front of each for offerings. The plots looked too small to me, especially for family plots, but that was because Japanese practiced cremation; the ashes of the entire family would be in a box-sized chamber under the stone.

“Yeah, not at all like the movies.” Shell agreed from her bag on top of my luggage. “The pet always dies. Let’s go eat.”

The ryokan was still beautiful and kept up, but we were the only guests. Checking us in, Mister Ushida gently inquired as to why we were here. Ozma explained that we were here to look after a family matter, and though he obviously wasn’t certain what to make of that, he didn’t push. We paid with yen and under names not on our IDs, and took the largest single room (we’d sleep on futons laid out on the tatami-mat floor). The Ushidas treated us like royalty; soon we were wrapped in yukatas after washing and soaking in the ryokan’s hot spring, being served with a multi-course meal (even Shell, who the Ushida girls just loved).

Dinner came with sake—rice wine—and I tried a little out of curiosity. Sake tastes very sweet.

No city lights to cut the darkness when night fell, and that worked just fine for us. The Ushida girls had laid out our three futons and wished us goodnight, and we prepared for bed and then bibbity-bobbety-boo’d into our uniforms before slipping quietly out. The sliding walls of our room made it easy and we went over the wall behind the hot spring like stealthy ninja. Not that we couldn’t have left by the front, but I had the distinct impression that if we’d tried the family would have done everything in their power to try and keep us safe inside.