Year of the Demon

he would have said. And now Mariko was so entangled in her conscious thought that she’d spoiled any chance for her subconscious to do what needed to be done.

There was no way she could make the shot now, not against such a small target, a moving target, not with all the self-doubt. Yamada was right. There was no room for thinking, only for doing. And she couldn’t—not while she was stuck so deep in her own head. Better to drop her sword and pick it up again. It was the only solution.

She had no choice. She lowered her weapon.

Akahata’s eyes went wider still, glowing with triumph. He roared out his mantra and reached for the detonator.

Mariko’s pistol snapped up and she put a bullet in the center of his forehead.

61

Mass panic erupted all around her. People were running for the stairs even as her gunshot’s echo reverberated in the tunnels. Passengers on the opposite platform stood slack-jawed, frozen. Mariko watched as the high school boy fell, seemingly in slow motion, resisting the pull of Akahata’s deadweight as best he could until finally he lost his balance. At first Mariko wondered whether she’d shot him, whether she’d somehow double- tapped Akahata without knowing it, whether her second shot had pulled left and hit the kid. She didn’t remember firing two shots, but it was only when the kid rolled away from Akahata’s body, shrieking and crying, that Mariko was certain she hadn’t hit him.

She ignored the fleeing crowd for the moment, trusting that the transit authorities upstairs would know what to do with them. Her focus remained on Akahata, his weapon, and his erstwhile hostage. Akahata wasn’t moving. The bullet hole was a neat, perfectly circular thing, just like in the movies.

That surprised her somehow. It was morbid of them, wasn’t it, getting a detail like that just right? Of all the things a person could obsess over, some special effects artist had chosen to perfect the fatal gunshot wound to the head. Maybe there had been a pay raise in it for him, or a patent, or at least a pat on the back for a job well done. Maybe his mother boasted to her friends about how far he’d come.

The instant that struck her, Mariko wondered what her own mother would say about what she’d done. A man was dead and it was Mariko’s fault. Mariko had just killed a human being.

She knew she’d have to make a moral assessment of what she’d done, and she knew it had to come soon, but for now she had civilians to tend to. That high school boy was hunched on all fours, stupefied and shuddering. His face was red; his mouth hung open; tears flowed openly and a string of drool lolled from his lower lip. For all of that he seemed stable enough for the moment, not a threat to himself or others, so Mariko took a few cautious steps toward the massive IED.

She wasn’t on the Bomb Squad and they hadn’t taught her a thing about explosives in academy, but the big steel canister barely hidden inside Akahata’s trash can didn’t look like garbage. Neither did the gutted flashlight sitting on top. It was no more than a simple on/off switch now, with wires trailing from it into a little hole in the canister. To Mariko it looked a whole hell of a lot like a homemade detonator.

Part of her was thankful not to see a countdown timer. Another part of her said it was stupid to think Hollywood got that detail right too, and that prompted a sudden need to inspect the device all over, looking for a hidden timer clicking down toward zero. But that little voice was silenced by her common sense, which screamed at her not to get any closer to the really dangerous object that hadn’t gone boom yet but very well could if she decided to poke at it. She decided to return her attention to the traumatized teenager who had been a hostage a few moments before.

“Hey, kid,” Mariko said, holstering her weapon. She put herself directly in his line of sight, between the boy and Akahata’s corpse. “Look at me, okay? You’re going to be all right. Just look at me. Please?”

He was scarcely able to speak. His voice was harsh and squeaking, like a missed note on a violin, but at last he managed to say, “You shot at me.”

“Not at you. Never at you.”

“You could have shot me. You could have killed me.” He still hadn’t managed to meet Mariko’s gaze; his eyes were locked on Akahata’s ruined face.

And he wasn’t wrong. Mariko heard herself say the words anyway: “I shot at your assailant. Not at you. At him. I promise you that. I never would have pulled the trigger if I thought I might hit you.” She hoped the words were true.

“You shot at me,” was all he could say.

“I want you to sit down, okay?” She did what she could to herd him away from the body, but though he consented to sit against one of the tile-faced pillars, she couldn’t get him to pull his gaze away from Akahata’s face, much less look her in the eye.

“I want you to know I’ll be speaking to your commanding officer,” said a voice from behind her.

It took her by surprise; she’d honestly forgotten anyone else existed apart from her, the kid, and Akahata. She turned to see a tall, blond gaijin with a little mustache and wispy beard. Only upon seeing him did it occur to her that he’d spoken in English. Now she heard the Japanese voices too: hurried whispers from the opposite platform, distant panicked chattering echoing all the way down from street level, just as her pistol’s report must have echoed all the way up.

Mariko stood from her crouch beside the high school boy and assessed the gaijin. He seemed the graduate student type to her: he had a computer bag slung over his shoulder, and despite his Midwestern accent his shoes were European, vaguely hippieish. His face was grave, the sort of expression she’d seen before in people who had narrowly escaped what should have been a fatal car crash, or a house fire. She had a good guess of what he intended to tell her CO, and she wasn’t in the mood at the moment. “There’s no need to thank me, sir—”

She could tell she’d taken him aback, as happened all too often when she responded to gaijin in fluid, unaccented English. She assumed this was another case like that, but then she saw his expression shift from solemnity to outrage. “Thank you? Are you joking? You just shot an unarmed man!”

“Excuse me?”

“You just shot a civilian in cold blood. I’m going to stand right here until your commanding officer arrives, and I’m going to tell him exactly what I saw. You endangered that boy’s life to shoot an unarmed janitor. In my country we call that reckless endangerment and excessive force.”

We’re not in your country, Mariko wanted to say. She could also have gone with Are you fucking kidding me? I just saved your life. She was still wired from her standoff with Akahata and now this skinny, self-righteous prick had her adrenaline spiking yet again. Politeness was beyond her, but she managed to resist face-planting him on the floor to slap handcuffs on him. She stood chest to chest with him and said, “Sir, I don’t think you have the slightest goddamn clue what just went down here.”

“I know exactly what ‘went down’ here, Officer. I study law at the University of —”

“Mariko!”

It was Han’s voice, and hearing it made Mariko’s mind do back flips. She was relieved and elated and discombobulated at once. How had he gotten here? Was all of this some sort of post-traumatic hallucination? But no, there he was, racing down the stairs. “You all right?” he said, his words tumbling out in one unbroken torrent. “Did you find him? Is he—?”

The gaijin law student was still talking, but Mariko ignored him. “I’m fine,” she said, reverting to Japanese. “Akahata’s down. We’ve got a kid who’s pretty roughed up, but he’ll pull through sooner or later. Akahata used him as a shield.”

Han looked past her shoulder, and looking at no more than his face Mariko could tell the instant he saw Akahata’s body. “You—?”

“Yeah.”

His eyes flicked back to hers. “You okay?” He wasn’t asking whether she was hurt.