CHAPTER 21
Naomi
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The second sound was closer than the first.
I'd told myself the first one was nothing: wind moving a branch, or one of the deer that came down from the ridge some mornings to strip the edges off Riko's vegetable beds.
But this one landed wrong: a snap, short and hard, more boot than branch, and past the pale gold wash of morning through the shoji, a shadow crossed the screen and didn't keep moving the measured way a deer moved.
It stopped. It waited. Then it was gone.
I was out of the futon before I'd decided to be, one hand flat in the hollow Kenji had left less than a minute before, already losing its warmth.
If I let myself, I could hear the door easing shut behind him, hear the small formal words we'd traded at the threshold, the ones that were supposed to mean I'll come back to you in a language that didn't waste breath saying so directly.
There wasn't time to hold onto any of that now.
I crossed to the window on bare feet, avoiding the floorboard by the closet that always announced me, and eased the screen back a finger's width.
The garden looked as it had moments earlier when Kenji crossed it in his dark suit, one hand lifting before the pines took him.
Stone lantern. Koi pond. The low fence where Riko rested her broom while she talked to vegetables as though they could hear.
Nothing moved. That was wrong. Birds should have been working through the garden.
Instead it held the unnatural quiet of a room waiting for someone to lie.
I eased the screen shut and didn't wait around to find out whether I'd imagined it.
I pulled on yesterday's jeans, the soft gray cardigan off the back of the chair, my boots, my hands moving faster than my head could keep up with. I didn't let myself think past the next single thing. Boots. Laces. Door.
Hiro was already in the corridor when I opened it, and one look at his face told me I hadn't imagined a single part of any of it.
He was dressed, alert, a black case I'd never seen him carry slung low across his back, his eyes fixed on the far end of the hall where the garden door stood open to the cold.
“The eastern camera is dark,” he said, low, in the careful English he saved for sentences that mattered too much to risk. “Stay in the tea room. Riko is there. I will check.”
“Hiro—”
“Go.” Not unkind. Just certain, the same flat certainty Kenji used when there wasn't time left for a longer sentence. He was already moving past me toward the garden door, and I did the only useful thing left to me, which was exactly what he'd told me to do.
Riko was awake in the tea room already, wrapped in her own thick cardigan, a kettle steaming gently on the low table like this was any ordinary dawn in the mountains.
She looked once at my face, and hers went still in the particular way of a woman who'd lived beside danger long enough to recognize its weather before it arrived.
“Sit,” she said, patting the cushion beside her, and I did, because sitting was the only useful thing my body knew how to do yet. She didn't ask what was wrong. She already knew. Her hand found mine on the low table and held it, small and dry and stronger than it looked.
We heard it before we understood it. A short, flat crack from the direction of the garden, then another close behind it, nothing like the movies had ever taught me gunfire sounded, smaller, meaner, more like something snapping shut than something exploding open.
Riko's grip on my hand tightened hard enough to hurt.
A third crack, further off. Then quiet, the kind that felt worse than the noise had.
The quiet that followed was worse than the cracks had been. I sat inside it, breath held, bracing for it to break. It didn't last long. The service door off the kitchen banged open behind us before I'd let the breath back out.
He was younger than I expected and more nervous than I expected, which somehow made the gun in his hand worse instead of better. He swung it between Riko and me twice, breathing hard, before he seemed to decide I was the one who mattered, and took a step toward me.
Riko moved before I did. She came up off her knees with the hot kettle already swinging, water and steam arcing bright across the tatami, and it caught him full across the forearm with a shout from him that was more shock than pain.
He staggered back into the doorframe. His arm jerked.
The gun went off once, wild, and Riko folded sideways with a small, terrible sound, one hand clamping hard over her upper arm, blood already dark and spreading between her fingers.
“Riko—” I moved before thought caught up, my old hospital discipline cataloguing what I could see: upper arm, not chest; blood flowing but not pulsing. It could still be serious. The gun swung back toward me, steadier now, his face gone white and furious at once.
I stopped. I made myself stop, one palm raised, the way you'd calm anything cornered and scared, because that was exactly what he was, whatever else he happened to be holding. Every part of me wanted to cross the room to her instead. I made myself stay exactly where I was.
“Watashi o tsurete ikeba, anata no oyabun wa hoshii mono o te ni ireru,” I said, keeping my voice flat and even, the register I once used in hospital corridors for news no parent wanted.
If you take me, your boss gets what he wants.
“Watashi o uteba, nani mo te ni hairanai.” If you shoot me, he gets nothing.
He hesitated. Just a fraction of a second — the gun dipped half an inch, his eyes flicking toward the door he'd come through, toward whatever clock was running in his head that I couldn't see and didn't need to. It was the only opening he was ever going to give me, and the only one I got.
He crossed the room and took my arm hard enough to bruise, and a strip of cloth was over my mouth before I'd decided whether to scream, knotted fast behind my head.
I twisted once, hard, toward Riko, and caught her braced up on one elbow, her good hand pressed white-knuckled to the wound, her eyes finding mine across the room and holding on the way you'd hold a rope somebody had thrown you.
He dragged me through the service door into cold morning air, past the kitchen garden, toward a dark sedan idling with its trunk already standing open, another man behind the wheel with the engine running.
I twisted again at the threshold and caught one last look: Hiro, bursting into the tea room from the garden side, one leg of his trousers soaked dark to the knee, already dropping down at Riko's side instead of mine.
That was the choice, and it was the right one, and some clear, cold part of my mind understood that even then. He couldn't save us both at once. Riko was bleeding in front of him. I was only being taken somewhere.
Then the trunk lid came down, and the light went with it.
I didn't scream into the gag. I didn't waste the air on it.
I did the thing my mother had taught me instead, the thing that had carried me through worse mornings than I'd ever expected to survive — I pressed my palm flat against my own sternum and counted.
Ichi. Ni. San. Shi. Go. One, two, three, four, five.
It didn't make me calm, not exactly. It gave me a floor to stand on, and this particular morning, a floor was better than calm would have been.
I ran my fingers over my own arms, my ribs, the way I'd have checked a patient too frightened to check themselves.
No blood. No break I could find, just the ache of his grip already blooming into a bruise at my upper arm.
I took the small mercy of that and held it the way I was holding everything else.
The trunk smelled like carpet and gasoline and something metallic underneath both, and the dark pressed close enough that I couldn't have told you, eyes open or shut, which version of black I was looking at.
I thought, absurdly, of a line from the poem my mother used to read me, the one about being here, only here, nowhere else, and how that had always sounded like comfort until this exact moment, curled into a space built for luggage.
The strange courage of that poem had always been about staying fully inside the hard thing instead of escaping somewhere safer in your own head.
So I made myself be inside it. I made myself stay.
My phone was in my cardigan pocket, and my hands were free enough to find it.
Beneath the cover of the gag and the engine, I triggered the distress locator by touch.
One short vibration confirmed the signal.
Then I worked the phone beneath a loose edge of trunk carpet, leaving it hidden in the car where it could keep reporting the route even after they searched me.
If Hiro received it, he would have a line through the dark.
I held that possibility as tightly as the turns of the road allowed.
The road under me changed twice. Gravel first, jarring and slow, then something smoother and faster, tires singing over asphalt seams in a rhythm I half remembered from the drive up here weeks before, going the other direction, when none of this had seemed possible yet.
A highway. I counted the minutes the way I'd once counted a pulse in a hospital corridor, waiting on a result that mattered to somebody else's entire life.
Counting didn't fix anything. It just gave the fear somewhere useful to go instead of everywhere at once.
An hour passed that way. Then close to two.
The road changed again, slower now, starting and stopping, horns somewhere close and constant in a way no mountain road had ever sounded.
Tokyo, I thought. It was the only city this drive made any sense for.