Year of the Demon

before she was certain he hadn’t been close enough to do that. Now he towered over her.

“I am not one you should accuse of lying,” Genzai said, and Kaida found it strange to hear so much emotion in his voice. Up until now she’d only heard implacable calm. Now his words came out thick, tumescent, as if his throat wouldn’t let the words pass. “You know this already. I am a man of my word.”

“But I saw it,” Kaida said, trying to look past him, to get just a peek at whatever his companions were taking from the rowboat.

“You see too little and assume too much.” He reached down, grabbed a fistful of her hair, and twisted her head around so she could see full well what she’d been trying to catch a glimpse of a moment before.

His companions were carrying Masa’s dead body.

Masa hung loosely, held up by his wrists and ankles, his mouth leaking salt water. His long black hair hung from his head like clumps of seaweed, dribbling shining ribbons of water. When they dumped him on the sand, he landed bonelessly, limp as a rolled-up fishnet.

“There,” Genzai said. “Have you seen enough now?”

Kaida’s eyes were locked on Masa, whose eyes stared blankly back at her from behind the demon mask— the same one his friends were finishing the night before. Thin ribbons of blood striped his face, matted his eyebrows, trickled in nigh-invisible rivulets down his cheeks. The mask had killed him. Kaida was sure of it.

It was stupid, Kaida thought, diving with a heavy iron mask on; it was as good a way as any to drown yourself. Masa would have known that. Like Kaida, he was a survivor—and unlike Kaida, he was vibrant, full of life. There was no reason for him to kill himself. So had Genzai executed his friend by drowning him? Kaida didn’t think so. Genzai was distraught. No, it was the mask that killed Masa, and Genzai knew it too, but Kaida couldn’t imagine how a mask by itself could do that to someone. It was as if wearing the mask had caused him to lose his mind.

Now that was a terrifying thought. Kaida wasn’t afraid of hungry ghosts haunting the wrecked carrack, but the mask was something she could see, something Genzai’s friends had made with their hammers and tongs. She remembered the one-eyed hunchback, the man with the wispy white beard chanting his spells, their faces sinister in the red-hot glow of the mask. What had they done? Channeled some demon into it? Was that why it was demon shaped?

It wasn’t so long ago that Kaida had looked down on her fellow villagers for fearing Genzai and Masa as evil magi. Now she found herself fearing the outlanders and their witchcraft. What else could have killed Masa? And what was in that shipwreck that was worth dying for, worth risking a friend’s life for, worth provoking the wrath of evil spirits?

“Throw it away,” Kaida whispered, only half aware that she’d spoken aloud. “That mask. Melt it down. Let the sea turn it to rust.”

“It frightens you?” Genzai said.

“Yes.” She was not ashamed to admit it.

“It should. And you are a wise child if you can see how afraid you ought to be. So do not let foolishness escape your lips. That mask is too important to be destroyed. Someone will dive with it again, and may die because of it. And since I have so few of my own men to risk, perhaps the next one to dive will be you.”

BOOK FIVE

HEISEI ERA, THE YEAR 22

(2010 CE)

28

Mariko ate her ramen and reflected absently on the nature of her missing finger. She was sitting on her bed, a polystyrene container of Cup Noodles in her right hand and chopsticks in her left, because her right hand couldn’t manage the chopsticks anymore. Losing her right forefinger wouldn’t have mattered so much if she weren’t living in a chopstick culture. Forks and knives worked perfectly well in a four-fingered hand.

No matter where she lived, she would have had to retrain herself to shoot left-handed—assuming she still wanted to be a cop, of course. There were plenty of professions in which a missing finger wouldn’t have caused the slightest inconvenience, but Mariko had chosen the one job in which the loss of that particular finger could actually cost her her life. Learning to shoot as a lefty hadn’t been any easier than learning to eat as a lefty. She figured she should have logged enough practice by now—a few thousand rounds on the pistol range, three meals a day for a couple of months—but her marksmanship still wasn’t where she wanted it to be, and eating still made her feel like a clumsy gaijin tourist using chopsticks for the first time.

She supposed that losing a forefinger might have been a particular hassle in the twenty-first century, but Mariko didn’t participate much in the trends that would have been a pain in the ass given the state of her hand. She’d been a ham-handed typist even before her fight with Fuchida. She had no interest in Facebook and Twitter, seeing them as two more items on a to-do list already full to bursting. She didn’t text more than once or twice a day, and then only to her sister, who was living proof that Mariko wouldn’t have needed her forefinger for that: Saori texted at lightning speed using only her thumbs. Mariko had a harder time with old technology: keys, coins, and most importantly, her sword.

She’d skipped her kenjutsu class tonight. It was hard enough to come home and see the empty sword rack where Glorious Victory should have been; its absence would loom all the larger in the dojo, proving more and more distracting with each new drill. And her new sensei, a wizened war veteran named Hosokawa, did not admit distraction in his dojo, least of all from his sole female student. He was of the old guard, the generation that thought it unbecoming to teach swordsmanship to women. His view was hardly unique; for hundreds of years, everyone thought that way. But Hosokawa-sensei had earned his belt ranks under Yamada, and as Mariko had the honor of being Yamada’s last student, Hosokawa had accepted her as a matter of fealty to his late sword master.

But it didn’t follow that he had to be patient with her.

Following along with others wasn’t Mariko’s forte, and taking a formal class didn’t suit her nearly as well as the private lessons she’d started with, alone with Yamada-sensei in his backyard. As that was no longer an option, Mariko trained under Hosokawa for four nights a week, and four nights a week Hosokawa-sensei berated her for her sloppy technique, her wavering focus, and above all for her improper grip.

The right forefinger was of utmost importance in swordsmanship. Highest on the hilt, it was the strongest source of control. Closest to the tsuba, it provided the first point of contact, facilitating a fast and fluid draw. Mariko was handicapped on both counts. Of course it was impossible to know whether Hosokawa-sensei was really so obsessed with form or whether he was merely using it as a convenient ruse to mask his overt sexism. Either way, Mariko felt the same kind of pressure at kenjutsu that she felt on the firing range, an incessant drive to outperform her male counterparts just to be recognized for having done anything right at all.

So, sitting on her bed and eating her ramen, Mariko concluded that of all the people who could ever have lost their right forefinger, the one with the most to lose was a Japanese swordswoman in the TMPD.

Because her left hand was clumsy, she spattered tiny flecks of chicken broth on the notebook she was skimming. It was Yamada’s, one of the hundreds she kept in her stacked columns of banker’s boxes. If there was a system there, Mariko didn’t understand it yet. Some boxes were labeled, others not. Sometimes a box would contain exhaustive notes on a single subject, sometimes a chaotic cornucopia with no unifying theme. It had taken her weeks of filtering to set aside all the books that had details on the obvious starting point for her nightly