Wearing the Cape 5: Ronin Games (16 page)

Defensenet Report, Tenkawa Incident: The Level 4 (local) spectral threat appears to have been removed. As Defensenet classed the threat as contained and too dangerous to risk further assets for removal, this action must have been undertaken by Active Non-Government Powers. This is confirmed by the testimony of Tenkawa’s mayor and shrine priest. The individuals involved could not be identified; however their descriptions match those of the three breakthroughs recently active with Heroes Without Borders, who identified themselves as the Three Remarkable Ronin.

Defensenet Recommendation: Given the displayed power-levels of these three individuals, government assets should immediately be deployed to learn their identities and purposes. Further action would depend upon their cooperation once located.

DR107-BV [Classified]

The sliver of wood worked, probably the only thing that kept Jacky from killing me and burying me in the forest. Looking at the happy clownfish, Ozma speculated that Kitsune might be an
extrareality intrusion
, as she was (or thought she was). If Kitsune had “come from” an extrareality created or made accessible by breakthrough beliefs after The Event, then that would explain a lot. (Of course it was also possible he was more like Fisher, created by a specific obsession.) What mattered was the wood idol was part of his story, so it worked for us.

We got out of town ahead of the authorities, if they came looking for us at all. Mr. Ushida assured us that the notice he sent would be a bare report of the shinigami’s defeat by three visitors, and the government might simply assume that it had been done by a local yamabushi mystic. Apparently there were a lot of them in the mountains and a number of them were non-registering breakthroughs, “conscientious objectors.” As long as they stayed in the mountains the government left them alone.

When he dropped us off at the train station Mr. Ushida also let us know that, when asked, he would have to faithfully tell the Defensenet agents of the three Magical Girls in Black he met. But he saw no need to tell them about recent guests at his family’s ryokan.

I hoped he wouldn’t get in any trouble.

The tracking fish (the cutest little bloodhound ever) pointed us in the general direction of Tokyo, which was a good thing; after making such a splash in Tenkawa, Jacky insisted that we needed to dive into a sea of people and run silent until we’d broken our trail. We caught the morning train, Ozma again playing with her mirror.

“A couple of fun facts,” Shell said from her bag once we’d settled in our seats. “Including the twenty-three wards and twenty-six incorporated cities that make it up, Tokyo hosts a population of thirty-six
million
with a density of about seven thousand people per square mile. That’s more people than all the blossoms on all Tokyo’s cherry trees, of which there are a
lot
, cherry blossoms being the city’s special flower and all.”

Shell looked up all that and more on her epad while we watched fields and towns pass by. The short-lived cherry blossoms were all about the transience of things and hope of renewal, and I wondered if that said something about the city. Tokyo had certainly been renewed a few times, coming back from earthquakes and fires, war, and now kaiju attacks. Coming in on the Shinkansen line we could see a couple of clusters of large scale tower construction. A kaiju hadn’t reached the city in two years; the last one that did got blown into dust bunnies by Tokyo’s own Verne-built mecha.

All the way in to Tokyo I kept watching for the Eight Excellent Protectors or some other Defensenet team to drop out of the sky on us. I couldn’t even enjoy the beautiful view, which was stupid—yes we’d made a big splash last night, but the delay (hopefully) in the story’s reaching anybody who could respond meant that we’d likely gotten away. And if their engagement doctrine was anything like ours, if they really
did
come after us they would wait to do it in a place where we could be quickly separated from the bystanders and collateral damage minimized.

Hard to do on a train.

We had decided to get off on the west side of Tokyo, but as the Shinkansen turned north and glided into Shinjuku Station our magic compass-fish surprised Ozma by smoothly but swiftly twisting to point northeast. Her shout had me looking for enemies until she explained, and then we all scrambled for our bags.

Disembarking into the biggest train station I had ever seen in my life, we promptly got lost in the tide of commuters filling the underground labyrinth, and exited through a huge shopping center labeled
Lumen Est
in two-story letters. After talking to a friendly policeman, Ozma led us back through the station to the west side where we caught a taxi to the Keio Plaza Hotel, smack in the middle of a business and shopping district that dwarfed the Chicago Loop.

We didn’t even try and pay in yen here; the place smelled like money and was so high class it probably didn’t know how to handle the paper stuff—using cash to pay for our rooms would have made us stand out like we were wearing shirts saying
Move along, nothing to see here
.

Ozma got us to our suite, which was good because I was sort of in shock; Tokyo made Chicago look like
Littleton
; it really was a people-sea, and even with a pointing fish
how
were we ever going to find Kitsune in a place this big? Last night’s euphoria was definitely gone.

I did manage to remember
not
to try and tip the bellhop—a terrible insult that would have suggested we thought he expected extra for doing his job. It would have totally labeled us
gaijin
, foreigners whatever we looked and sounded like. He made sure to point out the desk number if we needed anything at all, before closing the doors behind him.

Looking out the windows at the distressingly big cityscape, I dropped onto the furthest bed.

It had been four nights. Doctor Cornelius had suggested I had at least two weeks. Okay,
plenty
of time to use a magic fish to find someone who we probably wouldn’t recognize; after all, if we walked right past him the fish would flip around, right?

The mental image of us walking around Tokyo following a fish in a crystal globe, like Girl Scouts following a wayward compass, made me snicker in spite of everything. I was still laughing when Ozma came back from checking out the bathroom. Sitting beside me, she patted my knee.

“The speed with which the Compass Fish turned as we approached the station indicates that Kitsune is not far to the east of us, perhaps within five or ten miles. Of course he won’t be standing still, and certainly will not be standing on a street corner awaiting our arrival, but unless he too is on a journey then we will find him.”

She nodded decisively. “Shell, would you please tell us what we can expect in this quarter of the city?”

Shell looked up from the bed she’d promptly spread herself out on upon climbing out of her bag. “I can tell you it’s going to suck.”

Probably not the reassuring answer Ozma had been looking for.

Anyone managing to spy on us (nobody was—Ozma looked in her mirrors and guaranteed it) would have laughed till they peed themselves.

We sat around the suite’s coffee table, Shell sitting beside the Compass Fish. (It kept darting about inside its globe and catching her instinctive attention.) Ozma produced the tiny silver service from her box and prepared tea; the copper pot was self-heating, of course, and just the fragrance of the tea unwound the knot inside me.

She gracefully poured and passed to Jacky and me, set out a tiny saucer of cream for Shell and gave her ears a light scratch-tug. “I wish you could have some, my dear, but Six-Leaf Clover is a restorative. It will restore natural vitality, but it will also restore imbibers to their natural state and I do not think you want to be a scouting drone again. The cream is the finest refined cream from the Land of Mo.”

Shell dropped her head and lapped the cream, purring like a mini-motor, then started and straightened up looking terribly self-conscious. When she licked a drop off her whiskers I had to cover my smile.
Raising my own cup to my lips, I stopped. Weren’t we transformed too? Ozma smiled and shook her head.

“Unlike Shell, we have merely changed outward form.”

I sighed with relief; the tea smelled so
good
. Sipping it sent a liquid warmth through me, leaving me feeling like I’d been the recipient of a long spa-weekend. The shadow of the shinigami faded a little more.

“Right,” Shell said as we sipped our tea. “About what we’re looking at. Guys, we’re just down the street from City Hall. That’s the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building, and there’s just
got
to be lots of government capes and plainclothes powers hanging around protecting the government of the biggest megalopolis in the world. Then there’s Defensenet. Defensenet Shinjuku is the national headquarters—home base for the Eight Excellent Protectors and the Nine Accomplished Heroes.”

Jacky snorted. “So we’ve got to be quiet. That’s not news.”

“No, what’s news is if we start something here or across the tracks and they’re already looking for us, then we’ll probably be counting our disengagement window in
seconds
. After that Defensenet capes are going to be crawling up our—backsides.”

I nodded. “Okay, what else?”

“Then there’s all the ronin.”

“
All
?” Jacky’s voice sharpened.

“Not
all
. But you know about the government training and management system; all the Japanese capes work for the Japanese government.”

“Okay…”

“But there are some like you who just aren’t joiners. They don’t register. Then there are breakthroughs who work in private security, or as consultants, or who are members of international non-government organizations like Heroes Without Borders. We’re not even talking about the muscle recruited by the yakuza.”

I was getting a bad feeling even the Six-Leaf Tea couldn’t banish.

“And then of course there’s the breakthroughs who were criminals to start with, or whose powers
really
don’t have legitimate uses. The yakuza
love
those.”

Yakuza. The Japanese Mafia. “Shell,” I said carefully. “When you say ‘all,’ are you implying that a lot of them are
here
? In Shinjuku?”

“East Shinjuku, actually, right where the Compass Fish is pointing. Akihabara is the center of media-driven cape-fandom—they call capes
powers
here, and cape fans are power-otaku—but East Shinjuku has become the center of the
ronin
-otaku subculture. And it looks like the fish might be pointing at Kabukicho, which is even worse.”

Ozma lowered her cup. “And how precisely is it worse?”

“Kabukicho?” I hadn’t actually known that many Japanese words until Ozma’s magic drops, but
kabuki
was one of them. How could
theater
be worse?

“Kabuki-cho.” Shell enunciated. “East Shinjuku is one of the big nightlife and entertainment centers of Tokyo—all that money from the business and government district next door—but Kabukicho is the
adult
entertainment center of Tokyo. For the same reason, really; all the suits with money to burn. The district was named after a planned kabuki theater that never got built.”

I blinked. “Adult…
oh
. You think he’s
there
?”

“It’s got a huge yakuza presence. They run all the gambling and drugs and own most of the host and hostess clubs, couples hotels, and soaplands in Kabukicho. So yeah, I’d bet lunch on it. Not my life, but lunch.”

“So,” Jacky summed up, “to find and get to Kitsune, we might need to go through ronin who may or may not be yakuza members or clients, and with a good chance of Defensenet capes coming down on us if it gets at all public?”

“Uhuh.”

She shrugged. “Doesn’t sound too hard, unless he sleeps in some yakuza boss’s house. We find out where he closes his eyes at night, go in and get him. My only problem is if we have to go into…Kabukicho? Then I’m the only one who looks old enough to be there and wouldn’t be
bait
. You two…”

I almost gagged on my tea. Under normal circumstances it might be fun to walk a dangerous neighborhood for a while and cull the free-roaming predator population (Jacky did it all the time in Chicago and New Orleans), but attracting attention
here
…