Chapter Seventeen

Mr. Sugar was not the only person to pick me up that morning. Two bodyguards flanked me in the back seat and a third sat shotgun. It was an awkward ride. The Elites seemed to look anywhere but at me, and I kept my eyes down on my lap, where my blood-soaked uniform lay wrapped in plastic bags.

When I got to the apartment, Fujita-san brought me a full breakfast of everything I liked. Hot English Breakfast tea with too much sugar; boiled eggs, the yolks crumbly and dry; orange juice; pancakes slathered with butter and hot syrup. I ate methodically, slowly, savoring what the dead could not.

"Where's Mom?" I asked at last. "Does she know?"

"She knows," said Fujita-san. "She's in Japan right now."

I had a bad feeling.

I bathed for a long time. My bath brush hooked on the rough chop across my shell. It was something I'd have to pay attention to later. I felt no bruising in the muscle below it; a small victory.

When I finally crawled into bed, I only napped for a little while before a combination of tension and the sun woke me up. It was noon. I recalled one of those weird waking dreams that I only had when I was hyperalert. The sunlight fell in bright chinks across my blanket; I could see a loose hair looped on my sleeve; I could look into the hall through my open door; I could appraise the texture of the carpet. Accompanying this photorealistic scene was a sense of distance, a detachment. When Dad had asked me questions in these states, it would take me what felt like an eternity to open my mouth, and what came out did not really make sense.

A dusky rat in a maroon yukata stood at my door, staring down at me with cocked ears and wriggling nose. His eyes glowed like the full moon and were far too large for his face. I couldn't stare at him straight on, but only look somewhere to the left of him. He said something in a garbled voice that I couldn't understand, a voice I could only feel, like a TV anchor's muffled speech in another room, or the way sounds travel to you underwater. At first I felt like he was telling me a story. I could feel rather than know the plot points; they were accompanied by the rise and fall of his voice. Following the plot was like trying to watch a cartoon through a sheet of wax paper.

At the end, as I began to wake up, my eyes slid away from him; I could not even look at his shadow. His voice grew more and more understandable. I heard a particle, a noun, a string of verbs. And then his voice, breath whistling through his teeth. I understood it, but it was muttered, ghastly, inhuman.

A pang of horror jabbed through my guts.

Wake up! I thought. Wake up! WAKE UP!

Sucking air, I fought my way back to the living world. My chest constricted. I felt like I was staggering up out of a sea of cotton. When I finally raised my head, it was to see an empty room and an empty hallway. I half-crawled, half-stumbled across the room and began to search the apartment. Of course there was no giant rat anywhere. Why would there be?

Heart thudding, I sank into the couch in the living room, striped in light from the half-shuttered windows. It took me half an hour to shake the fuzzy feeling. As for the sensation of impending doom, it lingered long after.

I was very sure that I had been visited by the ghost of my grandfather, and that he had told me that my father was going to die.

I had just selected a Disney film to salve my soul when Mom called my phone. She had never called me before. I picked up the phone with numb hands.

"Mom?"

"Saya. How are you?"

That voice. There was such tightly reined anger in it that it bulged out at the seams.

"I'm fine."

"You killed?"

"With my team, yes."

"They have IDed the bodies. They were my father's men."

"I thought so," I said softly.

She laughed in a low voice. God, what awful laughter it was. More like an open-mouthed snarl.

"He will pay for it," she said. "Do not leave the apartment until I tell you to."

"I won't," I said.

"Good," she said, and hung up.

Takeru poked his head out of the door. "Was that Mom?"

"Yeah. She tell you stay put, too?"

"Yeah."

"I don't like this," I said.

"Me neither," he said. "She's always hated Grandfather, and he's always hated her, but..." He opened his mouth and closed it.

"Not like this?" I asked.

"Not like this," he said.

Minutes dripped by. Fujita-san did not leave that night. She spent her time cleaning with a religious zeal I had never seen before. As for Takeru and me, we sat together in the living room and watched movie after movie, too nervous to sleep and too tired to train. Every now and then I woke from a microsleep with a start. Once I caught Takeru looking down at me, concern etched on his face. He looked away as soon as I caught him.

Fujita-san prepared us a simple meal and made us go to bed at ten. I rolled myself up on a futon on Takeru's floor, and he locked the door. We slept with our weapons by our sides. Fujita-san slept on the sofa.

On the morning of the second day, Takeru and I were sitting on the sofa, watching cartoons. He fiddled with his phone. I sketched idly in a notebook. I kept drawing pictures of rats, rats in yukata, rats with long whiskers and oversized eyes. Some of them I tried to shade in the ways my art book had suggested, but they ended up too dark and featureless, like shadow people. At the end, I started drawing over the same lines until I tore holes in the paper, and flipped the page to see what kinds of half-born images I had made on the other side.

Suddenly, the front door slammed open. A weird breeze rushed ahead of it. For some reason I thought of the puff of air on my forehead before the honden. Takeru and I jerked to attention so roughly that he threw his phone and I ripped a page in half.

"Fujita-san," Mom called. "Children."

I hadn't liked her angry voice, but I didn't much like her joyous one, either. It was almost a drunken thing. Takeru and I crept into the kitchen, shoulder to shoulder; Fujita-san stood in the doorway to the tatami room. Mother stood before us, her hand relaxed on a chair, her eyes shining. She towered before us in a jet black pantsuit. We gazed upon her like serfs upon a queen.

"What happened?" I asked.

She laughed. "The Foot is mine now," she said. "I will be resting in my room."

She swaggered between us. We had to step aside to give her space. She traced her hands over our shoulders, looked down at us with a smug expression, and then swayed up the hallway and was gone.

"What do you think?" I asked Takeru.

"I don't know," he whispered.

We both turned to Fujita-san. She shook her head and helplessly opened her hands. The open wings of the gilded cabinet in the tatami room reflected a bar of afternoon light across her body and turned her outline to gold.

The day seemed too long. We ate dinner alone and watched movies until Fujita-san shooed us to bed. Fujita-san was close-lipped, but her fear was all over her face. She carried a little tantou in a pretty blue sheath and constantly glanced at the front door.

"Should we put a chair in front of it?" I asked her.

She shook her head no. I put one of the nice dining room chairs in front of it when she wasn't looking.

The next morning dawned after an interminable length of microsleeps and nightmares. I cannot begin to describe the isolation to you. We never opened the door and we couldn't hear anything but the whir of the air conditioner. We were too well insulated from the city to hear anything outside. From certain angles in the apartment, I could see the creeping movement of vehicles and foot traffic down below, but this seemed more like a distant memory or a movie scene, not like the real world. Only the daily news was a sign that the globe kept spinning. At one point, Takeru flipped to a 24-hour news station from Japan and we watched for stories about the Foot. There was nothing.

I felt like we were the last people on Earth.

The group chat had been uncharacteristically silent since our mission. I hadn't missed it at first; my dread had left me closed up and wordless. But by degrees, a gaping hunger for human interaction consumed me, a hunger like fear. I finally grabbed my phone and opened my messages, staring at my inbox until the screen dimmed. I tapped a greeting out, grimaced, and erased it. I reworded it and added an emoji. It seemed too trite. I deleted it again.

"What's going on?" I asked at last. I had meant it to be a good-natured opening. The minute I hit "Send," I knew it wouldn't look that way.

Nakamura answered in a private text. "Don't you know?"

I hesitated, my mouth dry, before tapping out an answer.

"I think my mom did something bad," I said.

"She gutted your grandparents," Nakamura said. "She and her Elites killed half of the council. It's civil war for sure."

I swallowed. "What does that mean?"

There was a long pause. I decided that either she wasn't going to answer at all, or it was going to be a monster of a text. Instead, I received a belated sentence.

"I don't know," she said.

Mom gathered us together that afternoon. Takeru and I sat down beside one another in the dining room, Fujita-san standing at the foot of the table with a fretful expression. Mom took the head of the table, like always. She was dressed in black and gold, long legs crossed in front of her, head thrown back. For the first time, I noticed that there was a mottled bruise on her wrist traveling up into her sleeve, and crescent-shaped scabs on the back of her right hand.

"It is time I told you what happened," she said.

Takeru and I glanced at each other.

"I have taken the Foot from my father and the council," she said evenly. "The center of our operations will move here. There are several important tasks that will require my full attention for the next few months. I may not be here very often, if at all. I will not lie. It will be dangerous for you both."

"Why?" I asked.

"There is still a portion of the Foot that believes my position is illegitimate. You see, I did not wait for Father to die." Her smile was tight-lipped. "They will try to kill you. They will fail. I will hunt them down. But it will take time."

"But what if they hurt you?" I asked softly.

"Then they hurt me," she said. Her face softened. "I have done this once before, Saya. I will do it again. I know Japan much better than I knew New York."

Dad's voice came to me suddenly. "A lot can change in ten years," it said.

"What about training?" I asked.

"What about school?" Takeru asked.

"You will both have bodyguards," she said. "But there will be no missions for Saya until this matter is taken care of."

Nothing changed at once. For two weeks, Takeru and I never left the apartment. I didn't see Mr. Sugar or my tutors, and the group chat was still dead. Fujita-san left after the first week to get groceries, but she didn't go the usual route through the family elevator; she used the staff elevator in the back of the kitchen, and she went with dark glasses and her head covered in a floral-print scarf.

In mid-June, we began creeping out again. I started seeing my tutors again. My guards had doubled in number, and a few of them had guns. I thought the gym seemed oddly silent. Even Tomoe-san jumped when I came through the door. At training, my squad sat together on the tatami in heavy silence. No one smiled; few spoke. Our camaraderie felt disjointed and threadbare. The presence of Mr. Sugar and his black-clad posse against the wall did not help the mood any.

Neither Flynn nor Sugawara seemed to care. Without looking at my bodyguards, Flynn knelt before us, laid down a map of the warehouse on printer paper, and immediately brought up our last mission. She explained how and where we went wrong, tapping on entrances with her index finger.

"The assassins must have come in before we arrived and waited for us," she said. "We didn't keep the mission a secret, and that was our downfall. We also did not examine beneath the shelves. A small detail, but an important one."

I had been suspicious of Dad's paranoia. But Dad would have also been correct. In fact, hadn't Dad been proved right again and again? Maybe paranoia didn't make sense for most people, but most people didn't have contract killers out for their blood, either.

It was Nakamura who posted the first article about the Foot to the group text. Rumors of the elder Watanabe's deaths, but no evidence. Their mansion cleared out and put up for sale, their staff dismissed. Several key members of the council, also gone. Whole families vanished. A whisper of daggers and poison; no bodies, only sudden disappearances. The article featured a brand new picture of Mom, eyes glittering as she leered down at her photographer. I'd never seen her gleeful before, and if there was a god, I'd never see her gleeful again.

In early July, I was in the tatami room doing my homework when I heard Takeru come home from school. When he slammed the door, the pressure shook the shoji doors. I sat straight up. The door had stood open longer than it should have for the entry of a single person. There was a clatter somewhere in the kitchen, and a sound like cabinets slamming shut. I couldn't tell what was going on. I stood and listened. The hair rising on the back of my neck. Minutes passed. I heard footbeats, and then nothing.

My hand instinctively fell to my hip and clasped on air. My heart stuttered. When I had gone to pick up my notebooks from my desk, I had accidentally left my weapons in my bedroom.

"Where is the little cunt, anyway?" a boy asked. From the way his voice echoed, they must have been near the living room.

"I don't know," Takeru said. His voice slurred.

I carefully, quietly tucked my book under my arm and slipped into the greenhouse. I hadn't been there for weeks. The windows were too open and I had thirsted for the safety of walls. Stepping into it was unexpectedly refreshing. The sunlight embraced me. I had the sensation that the greenery was leaning down, as though it had been waiting for my return. The gardener had left a tray full of tools on the ground; I silently set the book down, then picked up the shears and a screwdriver.

"I want to see her face," said the boy. "Does she really look like a turtle?"

"Not really," Takeru said. He was talking too loudly now. "Saya?"

"Don't," said the boy.

I heard footsteps rapidly approaching the greenhouse, and I ducked into the foliage. Two boys stepped in, one of them with his arm around Takeru's throat. The one on the right was white with golden hair and blue eyes—the kind of person you'd see passing the turkey in a Rockwell painting. The boy holding Takeru was Japanese and wore a wristband stamped with the symbol of the Foot. Both of them were wiry, slender, hard with muscle. Just by the way they moved I realized that they were ninja.

"Come on!" Takeru said, struggling with his captor's arm. "What do you care? She's just a little kid."

"That's not what I've heard," said the Japanese boy.

"I want to see her," said the blonde boy. "I want to see if she's got a shell, like they say."

"I said she's not here," snapped Takeru.

"And I said I wanted to see your ugly sister," said the blonde boy. He looked down at my book, touched the cover, then glanced through the foliage. I had already flattened myself against the floor. I didn't look straight at him, but off to the side. People can feel when you're looking at them.

"I see her," said the Japanese boy softly. He fingered something in his pocket.

I froze. He was definitely looking in my direction, but I wasn't sure if he actually saw me or was trying to flush me out. My t-shirt was eggshell-blue, not exactly camouflage.

"Where?" The blonde boy leaned and stared.

The Japanese boy pointed and we met eyes.

I slowly backed up, creeping on fingers and toes.

The blonde boy started laughing and tromped toward me. "Oh my god."

"Jacob! Leave her alone!" snapped Takeru. "She's just a stupid kid." Horror had crept into his voice.

I didn't run. It just triggers the chase. So I pushed myself to my feet and backed away just fast enough to stay ahead of him.

"Leave me alone," I said.

"I will as soon as you show me your back," said Jacob. His grin stretched ear to ear. "I just want to see if you've got a shell."

I saw the way they thrust their hands into their pockets. I recognized the shapes pressed between their fingers. Takeru's face was white, and he was staring at me, willing me to read his mind. I understood.

"I will kill you," I said.

Jacob only laughed. The Japanese boy's arms tightened across Takeru's chest and throat. He reached down slowly toward Takeru's waistband, flipped up the edge of his t-shirt, and withdrew his sai.

Takeru blanched and his hands shook; with a puppet-like jerk he thrust against his captor's folded arm. I recognized the move he was trying to use—something that would have broken a chokehold. But the Japanese boy had been trained in the same art and merely shifted his grip, like a mother jostling a struggling toddler into a more stable position. He whipped the sai up against Takeru's solar plexus, the points pressing into his abdomen.

Loathing boiled up in my belly.

"Don't you touch him," I hissed, putting all of my heart into it.

"What are you doing?" Takeru asked in a high-pitched voice.

"What do you think?" the Japanese boy asked.

Jacob dropped into a sprint and flashed toward me. At the same time, Takeru kicked off, and he and his captor staggered up the steps and tumbled back into the tatami room. Hard bodies hit the floor; doors slammed; feet pounded against carpet; Takeru screamed for the Elites. I had a feeling they wouldn't come.

I ducked and spun around Jacob. His arm whooshed over my head so closely that his nails grazed my scalp. It was like sparring Don: fast, fast, fast, each stance and blow beautifully precise, and the entire time he was grinning like I was the biggest joke he'd ever seen. The building stress of the past few months was no friend to me. He bashed me in the shoulder on the third swing, and I barely blocked the fourth—a strike that cracked against my forearms. I wasn't fast enough to dodge the fifth blow, either, but I had an ounce of luck; that strike grazed my cheek and cracked into the lip of my shell. He jerked his fist away with a hiss—I think he broke something.

Just enough time for me to throw a one-two punch of my own: the first right into his dick, the second an uppercut to the jaw when he instinctively buckled down. Blood spurted out between his lips as he bit through his tongue, and he must have blacked out for a second because he staggered back and fell to one knee. I launched into him and we crashed to the floor together. I jerked the screwdriver out of the hem of my pants. Jacob came to just as I jammed it through his temple. He didn't even scream. He swung and clocked me. Blinking away stars, I rolled away and ripped the shears out of my pocket.

He lurched to his feet. Only then did he seem to realize that something was off. His trembling hand rose to the handle jutting out of his skull.

"Bitch!" he gasped.

I spat blood, hiding the shears behind my hip. Some of my teeth were loose. But no time for that. Takeru would surely get knifed sooner rather than later, and that would mean two on one, and there was no way I could handle that. So I charged him.

He was way off this time. I think he was having trouble seeing. I concentrated on his every strike, moving closer and closer. Dodge. Block. Block. Dodge. He winced and his guard drew up a second too late. That was when I drove into him, stabbing the shears right up between his ribs. He smashed his fist down on my skull over and over; from afar, I felt the pressure, but I didn't feel the pain. When he went down, I was on top of him again, leaning on his windpipe. I jerked the shears out and thrust for the artery in his throat. The cords of muscle tensed as I buried the blades between them. When I jerked them out, a spurt of blood followed. He flailed madly at me, digging his nails into my arms.

No, I realized dimly. Not just his nails. A knife. He'd been knifing me the entire time. Suddenly I realized that I was drenched in blood and it was all mine. I rolled away from his spastically twitching body. For a few minutes, I watched the life jet out of him. It was clouding the goldfish water a pale pink; the stupid creatures congregated in our shadows and begged for food.

I waited until Jacob's writhing slowed to a brainless twitch. He was lying comatose on the ground in a pool of his blood. He was still breathing, but it was faint, his heartbeat rapid, his skin cold. I jerked out the screwdriver and patted him down, then withdrew a nice knife. I set the shears down and pattered across the tatami room, leaving a trail of bloody footprints behind me. I was in that strange empty place where I was the only actor on a stage full of automatons.

I crept to the tatami room and peered in. No one was there, but there were glistening freckles seeping into the mats. I ducked into the living room, wiping my gory hands on the pristine carpet. Fujita-san had left a few cream-colored fabric napkins for us on the end table; I tied one around my forehead like a bandanna to keep the blood and loose flaps of skin from dripping into my eyes.

Upstairs, I heard someone whispering.

I crept up the stairs. When I was at the top, I peeked up slowly. The Japanese boy leaned on Takeru's door, facing away from me. His free hand twirled Takeru's sai; he must have wiped it on his pants because there was a red streak there. Takeru was sobbing in his room, and there was a big wet splotch smeared across the wall all the way to his door.

"No one is coming to help you," the boy said softly. "Right now your disgusting sister is bleeding out. The Elites are either dead or our allies. Your mother is facing six Elites with only a fountain pen. Open the door, Watanabe. It's all over."

I crept toward him. The carpet swallowed my footsteps.

"I promise that I won't let you suffer," he said.

I crouched behind him.

"I promise that I will make it fast," he said.

I jumped.

When I had stretched him out against the wall, I heard the door click. Takeru peered out, eyes red. He was hugging a bath towel and a sai to his chest, t-shirt dark and glistening with blood.

"Saya?" he said.

"Are you coming?" I asked.

"I wa-was… I was…" He squeezed his eyes shut. "I was stabbed."

"Me too." I stood up. "Let's go before we realize how bad it is. Do you have any money?"

His eyes widened. "But we can't escape. We need to go to a doctor."

"Not without money," I said. "You're the one who has all the freedom. Come on. There may be Elites in the foyer and they may not be our friends."

He groaned. "Where is Fujita-san?"

My face burned. "I don't know. Come on."

Shaking, he pulled out a wallet and threw it to me. Inside was a Black Card, a wad of bills, and the keycard for running the elevator. I stuck it in my pocket, stepped into my room, grabbed my katana, wakizashi, and tantou off of the nightstand, and belted them over my hips. Then I jerked my chin toward Mom's room. Takeru's brow wrinkled, but he followed me in anyway.

"Close the door quietly," I said.

"Why are we in here?" Takeru asked. "We can't hide here. They'll find us."

"We're not hiding." I knelt by her bed and pulled out the drawer, then entered in the code.

"Then what are you doing?" he asked.

"Saving your life," I said, opening the clamshell box. "It's what Mom uses to heal herself. Sit here."

As Takeru slowly lowered himself onto the bed, I loaded a glowing yellow vial into a syringe. It popped in with a click. A few thick yellow bubbles drifted toward the plunger. He shrank away when he saw the needle.

"Are... are you sure?" he said.

"Yeah, I'm sure," I said. "Don't make any loud sounds."

"Can't I just go to an ambulance?" he asked in a tiny voice.

"No. Bite the comforter or something. I'm gonna give you at least one of these or bust."

Somehow he managed to only make a strangled groaning sound when I injected the first one into his arm, but it was low enough. I was able to stick him three more times before he waved me away.

"Okay! Okay!" he said. "What is that supposed to do anyway?"

"Help you heal." I closed up the box, throwing the syringe inside. "You carry the box. If I get badly hurt, you've got to use the rest on me."

"Why not now?"

"Do I look badly hurt to you?"

He paused. "Yes."

"Well, I feel okay."

"You just don't want to get a shot."

"Shut up."

"You look horrible, though. I'm not joking."

"Fine," I said.

I loaded the vial up and plunged the needle into my thigh. It hurt like hell. Watching the plunger drop made me dizzy; I had to look away. Naturally, I met Takeru's eyes. Mortally wounded, and he still had a shit-eating grin on his face. I glared at him without blinking the entire time.

"There," I said, closing up the box.

"Just one?" Takeru said.

"It's supposed to work better on m... on mutants. I'll be fine."

"Sure," he said.

We crept down the stairs together, he looking right, me looking left. We headed through the living room toward the elevator lobby on silent feet. Part of me was dreadfully curious to see what the yellow liquid would do, if our skin and muscle would seal up before our eyes or if the blood would stop flowing. But I didn't feel any different. As for Takeru, he still shook and his breaths were rapid ones, and I couldn't tell the shape of his stab wound just by looking at him.

Just before we reached the genkan, I grabbed Takeru's arm. In the glossy marble floor, I could just see the reflection of an Elite's head. He was looking in our direction.

Waiting. Watching.

Takeru's face was strained and colorless. He glanced down at me. I shook my head and pointed toward the kitchen. We crept there side by side. That was where we found Fujita-san. She lay crumpled against the refrigerator. There was a knife in her hand and it was streaked with blood. Tears burned in my eyes. I blinked them away and headed toward the staff entrance. The emergency stairs and the staff elevator were back in that part of the apartment. When I peeked out, I saw the Elite watching the elevator. Or at least, he was turned toward it. His head drooped upon his chest; his hand clutched at his side. His knees had buckled and he knelt in his blood.

Fujita-san, I thought.

We crept up to the elevator and hesitated before it. Takeru looked over his shoulder, then at me, and nodded. Then he pressed the button.

The button dinged.

In that silent apartment, we might as well have set off an alarm. Feet stamped toward the kitchen from the foyer. Then Takeru and I were inside of the elevator, and he had punched the button for the first floor. The footsteps grew closer and closer; beating over the stone, then beating over the carpet. We flattened against the walls. Sweat beaded on my forehead.

The kitchen door slammed open. A dark shape with flashing eyes stood in the doorway, katana raised. And then the elevator doors began to shut—the shape sprinted toward us—I drew Jacob's knife and threw it. Up went the arm to shield his face; the knife buried in his throat, and the doors slammed shut.

The elevator hummed as it descended. We were safe for the moment.

Takeru started to cry again.

"Is it true?" he said. "Is Mother dead?"

"I don't know," I said. "It doesn't matter. We need to get out of here and get you to a hospital."

"What about you?" he asked.

"I'm a monster," I said. "They wouldn't know how to help me."

"We'll pay them so much they won't talk," he said.

I side-eyed him. "Okay, that's great. In the meantime, there will probably be Elites on the floor level."

He squeezed his eyes shut.

"What happened out there, anyway?" I asked. "How much do you know?"

"Those were members of my old squad. We go... we went to school together." He looked down at his feet. "I was kidnapped out of gym class. They got me into a car and used a stolen keycard down in the parking garage. I saw two Elites dead and two guarding in the foyer." He raised his head, eyes panicky. "I don't know anything else. How many of them are traitors? What are we going to do?"

"Calm down," I said. "We got this far. Okay, so... let's think. You only saw two, so hopefully it's just a small group, right?"

"But what if it isn't?"

"There were only two Elites here," I said. "Best case scenario is that they're the only ones. Worst case scenario: if there are more, that means they're busy somewhere else. Which would mean there are some Elites and genin who are still devoted to Mom out there and they're fighting. So let's get out on Floor 2 and go out the windows. I'll bet they don't have enough to watch all the floors, so they're gonna be watching the stairs and the elevator on the first level, with a spotter to watch the street."

He nodded. "Then what?"

"Ambulance, then hospital, I guess. What's on floors one through three, anyway?"

"The gym's floor three, restaurant on floor two, offices and the pool on floor one," he said.

"Does the public use the restaurant?"

"Yeah, of course."

"Then that's where we're going. Got your phone? Call 911. Tell them there's been a murder and that you need an ambulance."

For the first time since the attack, color flushed his cheeks. He set down the clamshell case and withdrew his cell phone. As he made the call, I pressed the button for Floor 2. Then I reached into my pocket and withdrew my cell phone. I hesitated over the group chat. I thought of Mr. Sugar's advice, Takeru's speech in the exercise room, my mother. Then I typed.

"I'm in trouble," I typed. "I need help."

"What kind of trouble?" Dickens asked.

"Assassins," I wrote. "Japanese faction here. We've been stabbed."

The chat filled with horrified expressions.

"How many? What rank?" asked Eiji.

"At least five Elites. No genin yet."

"Where are you?" Eiji asked.

"Tower."

"Coming," Perez typed.

"I'm close," Eiji typed. "Everyone's here but Nakamura. We're armed."

"Coming," Nakamura said. "I'm nearby."

I waited for a second with my fingers hovering over Mom's name in my contacts. If she were really dead, then our enemies would have her phone.

I closed my contacts and slipped the phone into my pocket.