Chapter Sixteen

That first week after my grandfather's visit was hellish. I could barely enjoy my birthday party with Mr. Sugar standing noticeably off in a corner and two bulky Elites flanking the door. Peering through windows and walking through chokepoints felt like matters of life and death. Practice with my squad turned into a production with bodyguards in matching cars and Mr. Sugar supervising all of our sessions. I went everywhere with my new blades on my hips and slept with them at my side. At night, I locked my door and put a chair in front of it. Even then, I rested poorly, and my dreams were full of black-clad murderers.

Takeru started carrying sai. He didn't go out much, skipping school and training alike. I could hear him playing video games in his room day and night with the volume way, way up. The bass and sound of gunfire rattled me. Finally, I banged on his door.

"Put your headphones on!" I shouted. "I couldn't hear an elephant coming with your music up that loud!"

It occurred to me later, much later, that perhaps he had the volume up for that very purpose.

One morning, when I got up to train, I opened my bedroom door only to see him standing outside of it. I had to double-check my clock to make sure I hadn't misread the time. It was 5 AM. I rarely saw him before the early afternoon.

There was empty fear in his face when he looked at me.

"Saya," he said. "If Grandfather comes after us, what are you going to do?"

I heard the unspoken question. If you have the choice, are you going to let me die?

"I'm going to fight with you," I said. "So you'd better practice."

I held out my hand, staring him in the eye.

Color flushed his cheeks. He reached out. We shook.

From that time on, we practiced every morning in the exercise room together. He wasn't that great, but he wasn't as shitty as I remembered. In fact, he reminded me a lot of Mike—like he was reclaiming an old skill he had long ago mastered. I wondered if he was actually shitty on purpose, if at some point in his life he'd tried and tried and tried and then burned out.

"Do you have a squad?" I asked one morning while we were stretching.

"No," he said. "I failed out."

"You what?"

"I failed out." He wouldn't look me in the face.

"Why?" I asked.

He shrugged.

"You're not bad," I said. "I mean, it's like, there are some people who just can't understand a skill even if they work at it. But you're not that way. I feel like you know more about ninjitsu than you let on."

"I used to work hard at it." He paused mid-stretch. "I stopped trying. It was useless."

"What was?"

"Getting Mom to love me." He sagged over his knees. A big tear dripped down his nose and he wiped it away furtively. "She doesn't like guys. So she can't like me." He whipped his gaze up to mine. "Don't you fucking dare tell anyone."

"Of course I won't," I said.

"She likes you," he said bitterly. "Because you're a girl. Because you're like Akemi. I think she thinks you're Akemi reincarnated."

"You're kidding."

"No. She said some stuff when I was a kid, stuff about prayers being answered, or dreams she had, or something. I don't remember it all. But even when you were gone, she loved you more than me."

I slumped down on the floor, looking him in the face.

"I'm sorry," I said in a low voice.

He blinked furiously, beating the tears back, but he said nothing.

"Is that why you hate me?" I asked.

He shrugged and dropped to the mat across from me.

We sat knee to knee for a little while, saying nothing and looking at our laps. He sniffled a little and staunched his tears with his sleeves.

"Takeru," I said at last, "we should start over and be friends. I don't want to be enemies. We already have so many."

His eyes brightened and he wiped his nose on his sleeve.

"Deal," he said.

"How much do you know about the Foot? I mean, about the organization, and all the people working in it?"

"Tons!" He grinned. There was a light of pride in his eye. "I'll tell you everything I know."

"Do you know anything about Nakamura Natsuki?" I asked. "If anyone knifes me in the back, I'd bet on her."

"Her?" he said. "I doubt it. The Nakamura family has been on Mom's side for ages. Like, I mean, they've actually sacrificed standing with the Japanese faction to work with her. Maybe you don't realize it, but Mom made sure you'd get into a group with safe squad mates."

"Wait, really?"

"Yeah. She knows you're too trusting and you don't have a lot of experience with other people."

"I... I... wait!"

He started laughing at me. I turned red all the way down to my collar.

"I'm not too trusting at all!" I said.

"I heard her telling Fujita-san, and I quote: 'She's been alone too long and she's got his damnable openness on top of that.'"

My cheeks blazed. "Openness! The last thing my dad has ever been is open."

He laughed. "I'm just telling you what she said. Anyway, she chose from families that she knew were already established on our side time and time again, and she chose foreigners who would side with the American faction first. You can probably trust Nakamura-san."

"Probably."

"Look, it's not the people who hate you openly you should be afraid of," he said. "If Nakamura-san really wanted to hurt you, she'd probably act like a friend first."

"You mean I should distrust, like... the Yamaguchis?"

"Nah. The Yamaguchi family has sacrificed more than the Nakamuras have," said Takeru. "They're known for cracking jokes and being pleasant, like, all the time. Even while they're cutting someone in half."

A family of Mikes, I thought. And suddenly I had a realization. It hit me hard. When Dad was getting so angry about Mike flipping me onto the ground during practice... Mike wasn't just playing. That was literally Mike's strength. Mike dropping my guard with a barrage of jokes, shielding himself with his own weakness, and throwing me down because I had assumed too little of him. I hadn't respected him enough.

I shivered.

"What about Dickens and Perez?" I asked.

"Dickens found out that some of his classmates were snitches and turned them in to us. Kind of a big deal because he'd grown up with them and they were the ones to introduce him to the Foot. Perez's parents didn't want her involved with us, so she dumped them and came to live at the Clubhouse."

"You mean her parents are looking for her?"

"Yeah. She's not going by her original name and she moves from Clubhouse to Clubhouse pretty often."

"How do you know all of this?"

"Everybody's got a dossier around here."

"Even me?" I asked.

"Especially you," he said.

"Can I see it?" I asked.

"Mom might let you, if you ask. Or you can just do what I do and pay a hacker or an office drone. There are a couple I trust here in the organization."

I leaned back and considered the ceiling. I felt like my stomach had fallen out.

"I can't imagine abandoning my family," I said softly.

"Big sacrifices mean big trust," said Takeru. "And trust is worth more than gold around here."

My squad's first mission was at the end of May. We started preparing two weeks in advance. Hair longer than our ears was chopped off. My hair had stopped growing; cutting it short was nerve-wracking. Then we were sized and had our measurements taken. We were issued a black hakama with all its underthings, padded cloth armor, breastplates with the Foot emblem over the heart, and black masks. I was grateful that it wasn't form-fitting like the dougi of the lower ranks, but I felt weird and fat, especially standing next to Nakamura. And Nakamura always stood next to me. Flynn made sure of it. We were a pair made in comedy heaven—willowy, long-legged Nakamura, whose every strike seemed imbued with grace, and me, squat and round and short, with a punch more like an exclamation point than poetry.

We were briefed in our practice room. Flynn brought a tablet and laid it on the floor, showing us the floor plan. The mission was simple: patrol a warehouse on a dock where Watanabe Shipping held sway and look for trouble. We visited it once in the daytime in plainclothes, looking like nothing more than a gaggle of schoolchildren. The location was exceedingly safe. The cargo was innocuous, the territory secure. There would be no trouble. So it was that in the middle of the night, armed with our weapons of choice and sandwiched by my bodyguards' black vehicles, Flynn drove us from the gym down toward the river.

"Ninjas in a van," hissed Eiji, turning around to look at those of us in the back seats. He had tied a red bandanna around his forehead.

"Yeah, so?" Dickens asked, stifling a yawn.

"So ninjas in a van!" Eiji said. "It's my new band name."

"Japanese only," Flynn said, although her voice was not as cold as it could have been. She wore the full outfit of an Elite and set her hat on the dash. Her hair had been freshly buzzed and there were new thunderbolts jagging over her ears.

We all broke into laughter intermittently on the drive over, not always because someone was cracking jokes. The situation was ridiculous. We laughed about how politely we stopped at red lights… as a van full of ninjas. We laughed about how we could go through a drive-through and order ice cream… as a van full of ninjas. We laughed about driving beside a police car… as a van full of ninjas. Dickens began chewing at his mask from the inside to make himself look like a weird wet-mouthed sock puppet monster and expanded his jaw as far as it would go. Perez turned her mask completely around and pulled tufts of her hair through the eyeholes. Eiji borrowed a red bandanna from Daichi and added it to his own, then turned both of his bandannas around so that the knots stood out over his eyes. Monster noises and raspberries were made in abundance. Nakamura alone did not partake; sitting primly in one of the front seats with Eiji and Daichi, she rested her chin on her hand and watched the lights pass by.

Once we'd parked outside of the warehouse, Flynn turned the car off and looked over her shoulder at us. The giggling immediately stopped and we all sat at attention, masks half-cocked and bandannas askew.

"Truly," Flynn said in dry English, "the Elite ranks of the Foot have never seen recruits the like of these."

Once we had straightened ourselves out, Dickens still with a wrinkled wet spot over his mouth, we stepped out onto the blacktop. The warehouse sat on a canal snaking away from the river. We could just see the Hudson, black as oil, the lights from the city thrown across its face like paint. The fishy, briny stink was overpowering, and the night was hot and humid. The only true relief was the cool breeze sweeping over the water.

Flynn and Sugawara took a moment to strap on their hats. When they looked back up at us, a chill ran through me. With their high collars pulled up, you couldn't see the expressions on their faces. With the short capes lifted up by their pauldrons, a visual line cut across their chests that cast an illusion of breadth. With the spread of their hats' brims and their breastplates, they appeared twice as big. There was something deliciously terrifying about them.

"This way," Flynn said. Even her voice sounded more foreboding.

Behind us, my bodyguards' vehicles opened up. Fully-uniformed Elites poured out, utterly noiseless. We were followed at a respectful distance. Then they scattered around the building and melted into the shadows.

"Flynn-san," Nakamura said, "if there is trouble, we won't even get to find it because Watanabe-san's men will first."

Flynn turned her head only slightly. I could barely see the bridge of her nose and the pale arc of her eye.

"Then look for her men," said Flynn.

The hair stood up on the back of my neck. I didn't even know who these people were and apparently I owned them.

The warehouse was closed up tight. We headed toward a single door lit by a single light. Flynn picked the lock, opened it quietly, used a piece of dark, polished plastic to look above and from side to side, and then she beckoned us in. We slid in single file, followed by Sugawara, who quietly shut the door behind us and locked it again. Although we could have turned on the lights, part of the challenge was working in the dark. The roof was lined with windows, but the moon was new, so they offered only the city's dim light; the ceilings were lost in long shadows. It occurred to me that if someone wanted to get us, the girders up near the roof would be the place to go.

In the daytime, the warehouse had been a rather pleasant place. Big receiving doors had stood open, casting clean rivers of summer light across the floor. All the lights had been on and the sun smiled through the windows. Workers had been driving forklifts and moving products into totes and packing boxes, conversing loudly in English and Spanish. Music screamed from random corners of the building—rap here, hard rock there, Spanish pop over near the offices.

But in the nighttime, the warehouse was a haunting, claustrophobic place. The silence was so thick that even the smallest sounds echoed, and most of the lights had been dimmed or turned off completely. Shadows stood in pools and loomed in corners. Most unsettling was the layout. At no point could you see everything. In the front of the building were taped off squares where product was unloaded from ships and sorted; there were narrow passages between each stack wide enough for a single person to stand. Past that, towers of product stretched all the way to the ceiling, from hanging t-shirts to shrink-wrapped pallets. A space large enough for forklifts passed between each tower. I thought it would be easy for someone to lie top of products, or squeeze between them, or army-crawl beneath the towers. The ceiling and towers were so high that your view was limited the minute you passed between them. You were cut off by both sight and sound. And because there was so much variation in the products themselves, it was also easy for your senses to become overwhelmed: too many colors, textures, patterns. Easy for somebody to disappear into that visual riot, especially if you didn't expect to see anyone there at all.

I pinched myself. This was Dad's paranoia, I told myself, not mine. It was a warehouse, and a normal warehouse at that, full of textiles. Nobody gave a flying fuck about textiles.

Sugawara stepped up beside Flynn and the two split. We followed our respective leaders, as had been planned. Eiji, Perez, and Dickens went with Flynn. Sugawara was followed by Nakamura, Daichi, and me. Flynn and her team scaled the second row of towers, quick as squirrels; Sugawara headed straight down between towers A and B. Even though I was a good climber, I was difficult to lift, so I was relegated to floor duty.

I didn't like it. I felt doubly exposed. Perhaps up high I would have been an easy target for a man with a gun, but I could have started calculating lines of sight and had a broader view of the warehouse's floor plan. On a lower level, an attacker's vision would have been limited by the sheer size of the towers. Much better to be up high, where I could have been the one in wait.

Every now and then I heard a soft rustling as one of my compatriots on the top of the tower scuffed plastic. Nakamura and I were to keep our eyes on the right side while Sugawara and Daichi kept their eyes peeled on the left. I felt stupidly jumpy. I clenched the hilt of my katana the entire time.

We crossed over to row three. Above, Flynn's team jumped to tower D. Kind of silly, I thought. If someone saw us here they'd think we were LARPing or something. Who cares about t-shirts? What if one of the workers came in early? Was this a common occurrence? Did new employees have to be briefed on what happened if ninjas trained in the warehouse? Would they know who we were? What if they called the police? What could you possibly say to the police if they showed up? "Yeah, we're just training to be ninjas, that's all. Gotta protect those novelty beach towels with my life, officer."

My eye passed over one row of boxes after another. Here and there I saw a stamp or sticker signifying that a product had passed inspection. Ninja-approved, I thought, and cracked a smile. I carefully put the phrase aside to give to Eiji later.

By row nine, my shoulders hurt from the constant tension and my fist was sweaty from clenching the hilt so long. Every t-shirt suggested a human shape and every pallet shielded a crouched villain, so after a measly fifteen minutes I could barely process what I was seeing anymore. My eye had started sliding over features in the towers without recognition. I forced myself to go back over them. Surely one of Mom's Elites lay in wait somewhere nearby. Maybe it was even going to be a test for us. Maybe…

I heard a chirp. It was such a small sound, like a cricket. What was not small was the loud crack against the lip of my shell.

The impact echoed sharply. Without thinking, I dropped flat on the floor. My teammates fell with me. I heard Flynn's group rustling above us. And across from me, beneath the tower, I saw feet. Nakamura's breath hitched. She saw them too. They were soundlessly padding toward us, stepping heel to toe. The shoes were traditional geta, toes split by tabi socks.

A strange sense of relief rushed over me. Grandfather's assassins, at last.

The entire episode must have taken only a few seconds, but it felt like a hundred years. I knew what to do. My whole body tensed like a spring. I launched up from the floor, bounded over the top of a pallet, and threw myself bodily into the ninja on the other side.

I caught a flash of a man dressed all in black, the pouches of a utility belt, and in one hand, a tantou. I'm not sure what he saw of me. He was nearly twice my size, but I knew from long experience that he would expect me to be much weaker and lighter. He flung his arms out to deflect me and spun out of the way, but he wasn't fast enough, and he didn't use enough force to thrust me off-balance. I had drawn my wakizashi on the way over the pallet. As he deflected me, his tantou bouncing uselessly off of my shell, I slashed. My wakizashi bit through his arm, slicing cleanly through the padded armor below his delts. I rolled away, followed by a spattering trail of blood.

He grunted, swore softly. As I tumbled to my feet, I became aware of a second person rising to her feet beside me. It was Nakamura. She had followed me over the pallet, flying right as I had flown left. Her wakizashi was drawn and dripping. We turned together like two cogs in the same machine, and there was the assassin, whirling to face us, his breathing harsh with rage or pain or both. One of his hands was clapped beneath his arm, glistening black with blood. I realized that when he had spun to deflect me, Nakamura had flanked him and plunged her wakizashi underneath his raised arm.

There was a major artery there.

Flynn perched on the second level of the tower behind him, flanked by her team. Sugawara crouched between two pallets, her hand pressed up against the plastic. Daichi peeked around her, nunchaku clenched in hand. None of them moved. Or perhaps it was that time had slowed down so dramatically that they hadn't moved yet. I wasn't sure. I was only keenly aware that the assassin might be mortally wounded, but he still had time, and he still had teeth.

Did it matter how good he was? Did it matter how small we were? There were still eight of us and one of him. Nakamura flashed toward him on his left. I darted for his right side. As we raced for him, Flynn drew her katana—and jumped over us. Haltingly, her team followed her. They landed on the other tower and then melted away. This distracted the assassin, who swept his tantou up to guard from an attack that never came.

The assassin could not face us all, and that moment that he had turned to face Flynn gave us all the time we needed. Nakamura reached him first, a flurry of slices aimed for his arm, his side, any part she could reach. He spun to face her only to receive my wakizashi in his ribs. High on adrenaline, he must not have realized I hit him at once, because he kept spinning to follow Nakamura's trajectory. I jerked my blade out as he pivoted away and hot blood splashed across my face. He shoved Nakamura with a brutal twist and smashed her into a stack of pallets. I slashed him up and down, aiming for the joints in his padded armor, for his face, for his hands. Daichi jumped him at the same time, cracking him in the elbow, bludgeoning him in the temple. Daichi's final blow was what felled him.

Eyes blanking, the assassin went down without a sound. I followed him. Dropping knees-first on his shoulders using all of my weight, I jerked his head back and slit his throat. Pale skin parted in a mockery of a smile. Lurching back to life, he grabbed at me with his uninjured hand, but Sugawara slammed her foot down on his elbow, and Daichi stamped on his other arm. As his hips swung up, prepared to pin his knees around my head, Nakamura tackled his legs and pinned them together. He jerked helplessly back and forth, gurgling, coughing.

He choked to death on his own blood beneath us. We watched him die.

We didn't go back to the van immediately. We turned on all the lights in the building and met in the employee break room. The counter was a riot of microwaveable lunch cartons and coffee mugs. Faded posters and policy printouts were the only decorations. The politely bland faces of uniformed workers smiled down upon us without knowledge.

"Don't sit down," Flynn warned us. She made us stretch out our hakama and shake them out. When I shook my hakama, she reached down between the thick pleats and plucked out three thin black darts.

"Fortunate, Watanabe-san," she said. "Turn around."

Embedded in my scutes and armor were three more darts, and there was one stuck in the lip of my shell, just over my collarbone. She jerked each one out and laid them on one of the cheap plastic tables, gingerly handling each one by their middles. Then she smoothed out the back of my kimono. I could feel the give of the fabric. The assassin's tantou had sliced straight through the fabric and revealed the whorling scutes, glassy jade green and mottled brown. I felt naked.

No one else had been darted. It was just me. I didn't remember being struck a second time, much less seven times in a row, but it occurred to me that I was so distracted by the approaching assassin that I hadn't thought to look for someone aiming at me from far away. That had probably been the aim all along. One man to distract us while another took as many potshots as possible.

"This is why we wear armor," said Flynn with a bitter smile.

I couldn't smile back at her. I was shaking. Not only because I had been spared death, but because it had been so long since I'd killed someone. And in the same way, too. Except this time I had been sitting on his chest, looking down into his face as he choked and foamed. The adrenaline that had slowed my perception of time had also made his death last an eternity. I hadn't been able to see his face through the mask, but I had felt the stubborn throb of his heart, and that had been individual enough.

Did he have children? I wondered. A family? Certainly a mother and a father. Will they miss him?

Flynn made some calls on her phone. I heard something about "cleanup" and "assassination attempt." The Elites who had guarded the outside of the building swept through after us. We could see them through the break room windows making a thorough search of the building. They dragged two body bags out into the night.

We sat in stony silence for a while, catching our breaths, sucking at our water bottles, cleaning our weapons with paper towels from the automatic dispenser by the sink. No one looked at or talked to anyone else; there was only a shared sense of deflation. Nakamura slumped nearby, Sugawara giving her a thorough look-over. Nakamura was bruised from head to foot and winced every time Sugawara prodded her, but otherwise made no sound.

After the warehouse had been searched and the vans thoroughly checked for malicious tampering, we commandeered one of my bodyguards' vehicles and drove back to the gym. The silence was heavy and the cab stank of blood. We sagged when we reached our classroom and sat in a sad, sloppy line against the wall. Dickens was crying and tried to hide his tears in the corners of his eyes.

Flynn, hat in hand, stood before us. Her eyes were pale and terrible. Sugawara reclined against the wall behind her, head lowered.

"Before this day," Flynn said, "how many of you saw someone die?"

Perez raised her hand slowly. I raised my hand, too.

"How many of you have killed before?" she asked.

Perez's hand dropped. My hand trembled in the air by itself.

"I thought so," she said. "Does it feel good, Watanabe-san?"

"No," I said.

"How many times have you killed, Watanabe-san?"

I shrugged. I could remember each person I had killed and each animal, too. And there had been some I hadn't been sure about, some that could have gone either way, but I hadn't stuck around to see how it went.

"More than one." Flynn smiled at me. It was genuine for once, and had a kind of warmth. "But it grows easier."

"Yes, sensei."

"It had to be done," Flynn said.

"Yes," I said.

"It isn't a small matter." Flynn shrugged. "It's all right to be disturbed. To some degree, it's even healthy. But this is a hill you must learn to climb. Remember that there will be more like this. If it is something you cannot stomach… you may always leave."

No one said anything. Her eye roved over us slowly, thoughtfully.

"Very well," she said. "This is early for deaths, but it happens. We were fortunate tonight. Some of us could have been among the dead. But we weren't. This is testimony to your training and your skill."

We sat up a little straighter.

"You will have the next two weeks off to heal," said Flynn. "Relax. You have earned it."

We meandered out into the hallway, subdued. The morning was gray with the newly risen sun. None of us quite wanted to look at each other, but we also didn't feel like being alone. We slowly put on our shoes at the genkan. Nobody got their phones out at once. Nobody spoke. I saw Nakamura wincing against the wall, leaning over with a stiffened back and awkward shoulders. She was trying to tie her shoes. I limped over to her and knelt at her feet.

"Here," I said. "Let me tie them."

"Uh," she said, looking horrified.

I didn't ask for her permission. I began to tighten her laces.

"Thanks," I said without looking up. "For having my back."

"It's nothing," she said, sounding embarrassed. "We're supposed to work together."

I looked up at her. Her face was flushed, her eyes averted. There were nasty bruises and scrapes running up and down her cheek and neck down into her shirt.

"You didn't have to, though," I said. "You fought really well."

She laughed and winced when she did, then held her finger up against her eye to dab away a tear.

"This is my fault," I said softly.

Nakamura shook her head. She extended her hand as I finished tying the laces, and helped me to my feet. Her hands were rough with calluses, her knuckles yellow with old bruising.

"I guess so, but who cares?" Nakamura said. "It's good practice. Like Flynn-san said, there will be more like this. It had to happen sometime. Might as well be now."

I smiled at her. She smiled at me. That was when I realized I was still holding her hand. We both started laughing a little nervously, and I let go.