It was a sunny, late afternoon in May, and Rowen was in the back yard. He swung lazily back and forth in the hammock, a pair of earbuds jammed into his ear canals and issuing the relaxing, soothing melodies of Tool from an MP3 player that he'd assembled himself out of spare computer parts and a TI-82 calculator. His jaw was busy working the shell off a sunflower seed, which he spat across the lawn and reached into his pocket for another. He'd just spent a grueling day sleeping through the remaining 80 minutes of his final exams and pouring Red Bull down his hatch, and felt that he owed himself a good lazing.

Unlike most afternoons at Delta Rho Nin house, this one was quiet and serene, a picture of lower-middle-class Japanese suburbia, sword-gouged, arrow-studded stockade fence and everything. The other members of Team Ronin were out busy with after-school activities; Ryo, for example, was at soccer practice ("football" in European) and trying to kick his way through community college; Sage, who was going to school for no real reason at all other than it was simply something to do, was probably hanging out at that ritzy kendo dojo uptown and filling the new students with splinters; Kento could always be found at the gym this time of day—or next door with his new best friends, the Warlords; and Cye, depending on his mood, was either down at the docks working on his nautical knowledge of Marconi rig sailboats, or enjoying darts and a warm lager at the only English pub in Japan, The Crown & Anchor.

Yes, it was a lovely afternoon to be home alone.

Rowen sang along under his breath, "Over-thinking, over-analyzing separates the body from the mind . . ."

From over the tall fence that completely blocked the view next door, Cale's head popped into view. He had a black eye and a busted lip. (Rough night at the office.) "Hey, Strata."

Rowen had the music cranked loud enough to drown out the Crack of Doom, and his eyes were closed behind his sunglasses. He was as deaf as a post and blind as a bat. "Witherin' my intuition, leavin' opportunities behind—"

"STRATA."

"Feed my will to feel this moment, urgin' me to cross the line—"

Cale disappeared for a moment, came back up with an empty gas can, and chucked it at the oblivious Ronin. The can banged against Rowen's shoulder and he sat up with a start. The section of gutter that had slowly been working its way free for the past half hour finally groaned and gave up; Rowen thudded hard onto the grass between the side of the house and the scrawny, partially-dead maple tree. Half a second later the gutter, still attached to one end of the hammock, came crashing down. All 20-something feet of it. Onto the patio, the lawn, from one end of the house to the other. It was like a scene from Clark Griswold Does This Old House.

Rowen looked positively shocked and bewildered, sunglasses hanging from one ear. Then he saw the gas can, saw Cale, solved the equation to the nearest tenth, and calmly removed his earbuds. "Whadda ya want?"

Cale leaned against the fence. "I found a magic box. I need you to help me make it work."


Rowen stared down at the television in the driveway. It was so old it still had dials (remember those?) and woodprint plastic around the screen. He put his hands in his pockets and turned his head to spit more seeds. "That's a CRT television, Cale."

"What's that?"

Rowen, realizing that the question would be too difficult to answer for someone who was born before soap was invented, ignored him and said, "Where'd ya get it?"

"I found it in the alley behind the roadhouse. It was a bitch to carry home."

"I bet. It must weight about, what, 20 kilos?"

"I don't know. All I know is that I've seen these magic boxes before and they work. This one doesn't. You're smart, Strata. You can make it work, can't you?"

Rowen squatted down, chewing a shell thoughtfully. "Have ya tried pluggin' it in?"

"To what?"

"A wall socket."

Silence.

"Ya mean you've been livin' here for three months and ya haven't used a wall socket? Ya got electricity, don't ya?"

"Yes. No. What's electricity?"

Rowen's mouth fell open in horror, and the rest of the bird feed he was chewing spilled out onto the concrete.


Sundown was approaching as Cye turned into the driveway and dismounted his bicycle, whistling a merry sea shanty as he parked his eco-friendly ride beside the 1989 Geo Tracker that belched smoke like a Russian arms factory. He entered through the garage door, tripping over Ryo's cleats and Kento's gym bag, and tossed his knapsack onto the kitchen table. He went about heating up the kettle for tea and wondered what he was going to have for dinner when suddenly he realized that it was absolutely quiet.

This was a most disconcerting revelation.

"Hey mates?" he called. No reply. He peeked into the living room and glanced at the darkened stairwell. "Hallo? Anyone here?"

Something wasn't right. It was obvious that the rest of the Posse was home, the evidence was all over the floor, but there were no sounds of slamming doors, thumping footsteps, glass breaking, tigers roaring, or Sage shouting for a little peace and quiet. Either they were dead or outside somewhere. Cye turned back into the kitchen and was abruptly face-to-face with Sage.

It was the cheapest horror flick trick in the book, but like all cheap horror flick tricks, it still worked on people with nervous disorders at least once.

"AUUUUUUGH!" screeched Cye, throwing himself backward against the door frame.

Sage, whose approach had been about as conspicuous as thin air, didn't even bat his eye. He could have batted the other one, but it was covered by hair so no one would ever know if he did or didn't. He stood there expressionlessly and waited for Cye to calm himself.

"What the hell are you trying to do?" Cye demanded. "Give me a heart attack?" (Cye speaks proper British English, so he says "heart" like "hot", not "art" like some wretched plebeian Scouse or destitute Cockney scumbag.)

"They're all next door," Sage said flatly. "Some kind of techno-geek pizza party."

". . . And you're not invited?"

"I'm not going."

"Why not?"

"Isn't it obvious?"

Cye cocked his head.

Sage rolled his eye and crossed his arms. "I don't know why I don't just move back to Sendai and live with my parents," he muttered. "Nobody pays any attention to me in this house. Nobody cares about my happiness. Nobody—"

"Oh stop your whining, you sopping bint," Cye scolded, grabbing Sage firmly by the arm. "Honestly, for someone whose armor glows in the dark, you couldn't lighten up if you were a bloody Christmas tree."

"Cye, if you even think about dragging me over there, I will stab you in the heart with an icepick."

"Mate, you couldn't stab a pincushion without feeling guilty. Now shut your gob and put on your happy face."

"This is my happy face," Sage muttered, wearing an expression that made Dr Gregory House look like Jim Carrey on nitrous oxide.

"Oh dear," Cye said. "Well, no matter. I'm sure once we get there you'll be the life of the party."


Sage sat squashed between Dais and Sekhmet on the battered leather sofa with a greasy piece of pepperoni pizza slowly soaking its way through the paper plate in his hand. Rowen and Cale were hovering over the television set in the living room. Electronic guts were spewed out onto the floor. Broken vacuum tubes had been disassembled, recalibrated, and reassembled. Drills and pliers and screwdrivers were scattered hither and thither. There were a few new holes in the wall, and some of Rowen's spare coaxial cable (he always had a use for coaxial cable) had been implemented to run from the cable box down the street and directly into the living room of Masho Manor. And only Rowen knew how to jury-rig this mofo so that the cable company would never know that someone on Shinota Drive was getting free HBO. Rowen was smart. He could do that.

Ryo, Kento and Cye were enthusiastically devouring pizza and pop and offering their amateur advice to Rowen, who didn't bother telling them that he was an expert on this subject and they were all wrong as hell. Between bites of pizza and swigs of sugary death, he was well on his way to getting the Warlords addicted to game shows and reality TV.

"He's pretty smart," Dais commented to Sage.

"He's a show-off," Sage muttered moodily.

"Is he?"

"He graduated high school at fourteen and already had two Bachelors by the time we were all entering college. He just finished his Masters in engineering last year and now he's working on his Doctorate. His Doctorate! He's only twenty-one!"

Dais took a bite of crust. He didn't understand anything of what the Ronin was saying, but he understood the tone. "You seem jealous, Halo."

"Who wouldn't be?" Sage scoffed. "He's a disgusting genius. He's probably gonna go work for NASA or something when he graduates. You know he's fluent in Russian? French is his second language, too. My father's French and I don't speak French."

"You're still friends with him, aren't you?"

"Yeah. But it's hard to be friends with someone who's just so . . . so much smarter than you." His tone fell toward the end, sounding almost depressed. Dais picked up on it.

"Do you wish you could be as smart as Strata?"

"Me? No way. I'd go nuts if I had to live with all that stuff crowding my skull."

"Then why don't you let bygones be bygones and accept that you're all special in your own different way?"

"Because that's something only a delusional fucking madman would say . . . Pardon my French."

Dais looked at Sage.

Sage looked at Dais.

"Heh," chuckled Sage.

The lighthearted moment was interrupted by a tremendous belch on the other side of the couch. Sage and Dais stared in disgust as Sekhmet crushed his fourth beer can against his forehead and dropped it to the floor, along with his greasy plate. The front of his postal uniform was covered in pizza slops.

"So, Sekhmet," Dais said loudly, "how's work?"

"Damn awful," he grunted. "Damn bees. Damn mail. Damn mail boxes. Damn dogs. Damn cats. Damn old women." He reached into the cooler beside the couch and cracked open his fifth beer. "Damn kids. Damn pedestrians. Damn traffic. Damn bees." He took a slug. "You?"

"Oh, I got fired again."

"Damn."

"You got fired?" Sage asked, passing his untouched plate to Sekhmet, who asked no questions and set to work eating his pain away.

Dais sighed and slumped back into the cushions. "I've been through two jobs already. Apparently my skills as a telemarketer are under appreciated."

"That's not how it's supposed to be," Sage said with a shake of his head. "You're the Warlord of Illusions, not an office jockey. Surely there's something better you could do."

Dais loosened his tie. He looked bad in a suit. Like, monstrously bad. "I don't know. I guess I just have to wait and find my true calling."

"I'll drink to that," Sekhmet toasted, raising his beer.

"Got it!" Rowen exclaimed. He turned the dial and there it was, television in all its stolen Technicolor glory. He used the universal remote control he had built from scratch in fifteen minutes to change the channels, flash after flash of sex, violence, infomercials and the half a million sports channels that nobody ever watches.

"You made it work," Cale gawked, staring at the screen. "You must be a wizard!"

Rowen handed him the remote. "I'm not a wizard, it's simple shit. There any more pizza left?"

Ryo and Kento helped move the TV against the wall, and then everyone parked their glutes in front of it and passed beers and more pizza around, and Sage was eventually, grudgingly glad that he had allowed Cye to drag him to this insane gathering; Dais had actually engaged in meaningful conversation with him, something he rarely got at home, and he didn't feel as if he needed to swallow a bottle of sleeping pills before going to bed tonight. Why, he'd even been able to spend the entire evening without being accosted by that crude, vulgar, boorish and uncouth—

Cale plopped down into Sekhmet's empty place and draped his arm on the back of the couch, sending Sage a feral smile. "Hello, Sunshine. Having a nice evening, are we?"

Sage leaned away and looked in the opposite direction. "Nicknames are rude and hurtful," he muttered. "And I was having a nice evening with Dais here, thank you very much."

"Really, Dais?" Cale looked up at the older Warlord and sent him a glare with daggers and blood in the postscript. And suddenly Dais had to get up and go get more beer.

"That's better," Cale said, inching closer to our helpless hero. "It seems your friend is quite the magician. Do you know any magic tricks, Sunshine?"

Sage scooted further over and crossed his arms and legs protectively. "No. But if I did, my first act would be to make you disappear."

"Ouch," Cale grinned, sneaking his hand onto Sage's thigh. "Even without a sword you still cut me. I'd say that's magic."

"And I say you've got three seconds to get your hand off of my leg before I call up Halo and liberate your head from your neck." He slapped the offending limb away. "Now leave me alone."

"If that's the way you want it," Cale said airily, latching his hands behind his head and crossing his ankle over his knee. He was wearing snakeskin cowboy boots, Sage noticed. How abhorrently manly of him. "I just think it's a shame how you shut everybody out. The light is supposed to be warm and . . . gentle."

Sage turned to give Cale a cold, un-gentle glare. "I'm not that kind of light." He blinked. "What happened to your face?"

"Oh, this?" Cale gingerly touched the purple mouse under his eye. "Occupational hazard. Gotta make a living, right?"

Sage's face was half-sympathetic, half-disgusted. Mostly disgusted. "It looks gruesome."

"Ah." Cale waved and grinned. "It's fine. Besides, you gave me worse back in the day, remember?"

Despite himself, Sage started feeling guilty. Probably passed down through his Catholic father. "Does it hurt?"

"Confidentially?"

Nod.

"Like a motherfucker. I almost passed out after the first hit."

Sage felt a little bit glad that Cale could admit to such a shameful injury. A small part of him was even laughing with schadenfreude that the stupid barbarian had gotten his face handed to him. But a growing part of him (not that part), the part that possessed the compassionate virtues of grace and courtesy, was struggling to break the surface of his cold exterior.

"He must have been a big guy."

"Hm?"

"The guy that did all this to you."

Cale sighed again. "Confidentially?"

Nod.

"It was a woman."

Sage's mouth fell ajar, his lone eye owl-wide.

"She was a big lady," Cale said, drifting off into the Gaussian-blurred world of a flashback. "Two, maybe three thousand pounds. She had a mullet and tattoos and a cigar. Had a fist the size of a jack-o-lantern, and about as many teeth. Her name was Mickey. Her friends called her Mini. I think that's what you call a misnomer."

Sage uncrossed his legs and sat in awkward silence for a few moments. Then he said, very quietly so that no one else could hear his voice over the TV, "Close your eyes, Cale."

The ex-Warlord of Darkness froze in shock for two reasons. 1) Sage called him by name without the words "fuck you" or "die" preceding it, and 2) his tone sounded as if he were about to do something he would regret for a long, long time, and that filled Cale with hope. And blind, slobbering lust.

Stifling his baser instincts, Cale obediently closed his eyes without a word and sat very still. He felt the couch cushion dip as Sage moved closer to him, and then the soft warmth of a hand covering his injured eye, and another hand resting over his lips. "Don't move," Sage whispered. "Don't open your eyes. Just breathe and think of nothing."

The first two things were easy, but the last one was a bit harder. You'd have to be the fricking Buddha to sit there and think of nothing, especially if you were as desperately lonely and oversexed as a Dynasty Warlord and being caressed by your former enemy and the object of your insatiable animal lust. So while Cale failed and failed hard at the last request, he obeyed the first two, and after maybe a minute or so of teeth-gritting, heart-thumping agony, Sage removed his hands and Cale opened his eyes.

"Don't make a habit out of this," the Ronin warned, then stood up and walked into the kitchen to avoid any more homoerotic innuendo for which this author greatly apologizes.

Cale reached up and touched his eyelid, which was as perfect and healed as it had been before he met Miss Mini.


"I saw that."

Sage turned from the sink with a half-empty (or full) glass of water and sent optical lightning bolts toward Cye, who was smirking knowingly. "You saw nothing."

"Rubbish. You healed him. You're starting to like him, aren't you?"

"I'm starting to hate him a little less passionately if that's what you mean," Sage huffed, ducking his head in the manner he always used when he was curl-up-and-die embarrassed. "And stop smiling like that. It's creepy."

"Alright, I won't tease. But really, I'm glad you two are getting on well enough. We should all learn to get on with each other. We are neighbors, after all."

The delusional fucking madman strikes again. "Fine," Sage mumbled. "Just don't go telling all the guys what I did. I don't want them to get the wrong idea."

"How could that ever happen?" Cye winked. "Don't worry, I won't tell."

"I know," Sage said. (Thank Torrent for the virtue of trust, right?) Then, "Hey, I'm in the mood for tea and I was gonna boil some water. You want some, too?"

A blank look crossed Cye's face, followed by a funny one, followed by a hilarious one. "OH MY GOD!" he screamed, hands pressed to his cheeks and eyes the size of Boston cream pies. "I LEFT THE BLOODY KETTLE ON!"

And that was the last time the Ronins were able to use that particular excuse to leave the Warlords' house.