Chapter 8 - Invitation

Gion
Higashiyama Ward, Kyōto
6:21 p.m.

There’s a rule about bringing civilians into the Locker Room.

I’d already broken it once today. Breaking it twice felt like a rounding error.

“We can’t leave her here,” Shizuki said, as if I’d argued.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“You were thinking about it.”

“I was thinking about the paperwork.”

“You took your girlfriend there,” she said, demurely.

And there was a punch to the heart.

Mio stood beside the battered sport bike that Mandu had swiped off the street, her helmet tucked under one arm and her chin lifted, trying very hard to look like a girl who watched people get cut in half every day. The tremor in her fingers gave her away. Down the street, smoke curled over the rooftops of Gion, and somewhere beyond it a siren wound down into silence and didn’t start again.

She’d spent the last twenty minutes with a monster-hunting dumpling and a cowboy. Leaving her on Hanamikoji Street would have been a death sentence with a bow on it.

“Mio,” I said in Japanese, “what I’m about to show you is going to sound insane.”

“I watched Mandu throw a jelly drink through a man’s head.”

“Fair.”

“It was an awesome throw,” Mandu said.

“Stay out of it,” I replied.

“Sadly, I still want it.”

I traced the rectangle in the air. Golden light trailed behind my finger, and Mio’s breath caught as I pressed my palm to its center and the outline of a door opened where there had been nothing before.

“Okay,” she whispered. “Okay. That’s new.”

Shizuki took her hand. “It’s all right. I did the same thing an hour ago.”

“Did you scream?”

“A little.”

“Good. I might.”

“Don’t,” I said. “The fluorescent lights are loud enough.”

Jotun carried Tzo’s niuweidao wrapped in his coat and held away from his body like a bomb. He went through first. Mio followed with Shizuki. Mandu looked at his bike, then at me.

“Where did you even get that thing?” I asked.

“Victim of a yamikoko-ra.”

“Were you planning to give it back?”

“He’s dead, hyung.”

“Then, park it with respect.”

He leaned it against a wall with the tenderness of a man tucking in a child and stepped through. I came last, checked the street once more, and closed the door behind us.

The Locker Room hadn’t changed much. The weapon’s vault was standing open like it had given up on security entirely. The lights buzzed.

Mio turned in a slow circle.

“It’s a locker room,” she said.

“Yes.”

“A school locker room.”

“The universe has a sense of humor.”

“It’s not a good sense of humor.”

“That’s what I keep telling people.”

She set her helmet on a bench and folded her arms to hide her hands. “Your friend said he hunts monsters. Is this where you keep the monster-hunting things?”

“Pretty much.”

Her eyes drifted to the racks. “Is there a sword in there?”

We all looked at her.

“Sorry,” she said. “It was the first thing I thought of. I do kendō. Eight years. I’m not good at much else, but I’m good at that. Well, maybe computers.”

“A shinai isn’t a sword,” Mandu said gently.

“I know. But if one of those things comes at me, I would like to have the real version.”

Mandu glanced at me. I glanced at Shizuki.

Shizuki shrugged. “She has a point.” She lifted the Calico slightly. “You gave me this.”

Of course she had a point.

I walked Mio to the vault and passed over the pistols, rifles, shotguns, machine guns, and the crates of ammunition that wouldn’t scratch a Yamikoko-ra. At the back wall hung the blades. Hundreds of them, each tagged with a date, a place, and a number.

I pulled down a katana in a plain black saya and held it out, hilt first.

“Death-marked,” I said. “Taken off a Yamikoko-ra in Nagoya. It’s balanced for someone about your height. If it feels wrong, say so and we’ll find another.”

Mio took it in both hands.

Her posture changed.

Shoulders dropped. Feet set. The tremor in her fingers vanished, and she slid the blade out a hand’s width, studied the edge, then sheathed it with a soft click.

“It’s heavier than I expected,” she said. “But it’s good.”

“You’ve done this before.”

“Never with a real one.” She tied the saya at her hip with the sash Mandu fished out of a locker. “You’re going to tell me to stay behind you, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m going to say yes and then not do it.”

“Noted.”

“She’ll fit in,” Mandu said, with the voice of a man trying not to sound like he was already in love.

A terminal sat on a desk near the vault, the screen dark. Mio’s attention snagged on it.

“Is that connected to anything?”

“The PDC network. It shows alerts and agent locations. We mostly use it to see who’s dead.”

“Can I look?”

“It’s encrypted.”

“Okay.”

She sat down. I watched her type. For about twenty seconds, nothing happened, and then the screen flickered and a map of Kyōto bloomed across it, studded with red.

“Mio,” I said.

“The login screen was a joke. You people use a six-digit PIN?”

“It’s seven.”

“It’s a PIN.”

She dragged the window wider. City cameras. Traffic feeds. PDC deployment tags. Across the center of Kyōto, a dozen blinking icons clustered near a spot marked HQ – FUSHIMI, and a smaller cluster of gray dots moved toward Nijō.

Mandu leaned over her shoulder. “She’s a hacker.”

“I dabble. Actually, it’s only this easy because I’m using a terminal on your system to access the data. Getting in from outside would take much longer. Intersystem networks are easy.”

“She’s a hacker.”

“We’re keeping her,” I said.

Shizuki’s mouth twitched. Mio kept scrolling, and I turned to the lockers before anyone saw me smile.

When my hand touched the vest pocket, the one with my little surprise, I stopped.

Not yet.

I closed the locker.

***

Kyōto
Fushimi Ward Streets Near PDC Headquarters
6:34 p.m.

Kali cut down the last Yamikoko-ra in a rain of her own blood.

Not much of it. A graze across the ribs, a slash along one forearm, a thin line across her cheek that stung when she breathed. Her kurta hung in ribbons. She was barefoot on the wet pavement, and thirty-one bodies lay around her in a ring so neat it looked ceremonial.

The thirty-second still twitched.

She drove a talwar through its throat and held it there until it stopped.

A harness crossed her chest, a mini Uzi hanging beneath each arm. Magazines for them rode her belt alongside half a dozen khanjar daggers, their blades curved like the tails of scorpions. The talwars were in her hands. The tegha lay across her back, unused. She hadn’t needed it. She had been saving it.

Around her, the street burned.

A gate shimmered at the far end of the block, edges wavering, the world beyond drained of color. Two more Yamikoko-ra stepped out.

Kali didn’t wait for them to reach her.

She went through them like a monsoon.

The first lost his sword arm. The second turned to run and found her blade across his spine before he had taken a step. She spun, caught the next attacker’s kukri between both talwars, and kicked him through a shop window. The shutters buckled. Glass rained across the sidewalk.

She emptied one Uzi into the gate’s mouth until the last silhouette in the shadows fell. She ejected the magazine, slammed in another, and kept going.

They stopped coming.

After a long time, the street grew quiet.

Kali stood in the center of the carnage, breathing slowly. Blood ran down her fingers and dripped from the talwars’ tips.

Garuda.

She had seen the status board in the lobby. Thalia had made sure of it. A name. A red icon. A line that said no confirmed passage.

Dara had been the first to teach her a Thai curse word and the last to laugh at it.

She wiped the talwars on a corpse and slid them into their sheaths.

“Thalia,” she said into the comm at her collar, voice rough. “The street is clear. I am coming back.”

“Understood,” came the answer. A pause. “Kali. The others are on their way.”

“Good,” Kali said.

She turned toward the headquarters at the end of the block and walked through the dead without looking at them.

***

PDC Headquarters
Fushimi Ward, Kyōto
6:46 p.m.

The Locker Room dropped us a hundred meters from the front gate.

It did not drop us gently.

I stepped out first, and my boot hit something soft.

I looked down.

“Don’t,” I said, “look down.”

Everyone looked down.

Mio made a very small noise. Shizuki didn’t, but her fingers found my sleeve and held on.

The street was gone. Where the pavement should have been, Yamikoko-ra lay piled four and five deep, heaped against storefronts and curbs and each other. Some had been cut in half. Some had been opened from throat to belt. A few were just pieces. The black blood had gone sticky in the evening air, and the smell rolled over us in waves.

Jotun crouched and examined the nearest wound. “Talwar,” he said. “Two blades. A curved one, then a straight cut.”

Mandu let out a long, low whistle.

“Kali’s been here.”

“She’s still here,” said a voice from the dark.

We all turned.

She stood at the mouth of the gate, a silhouette against the lit windows of the PDC building, one hand resting on a talwar’s hilt. Blood striped her arms. She was small, barely over five feet, but every man in the street felt a little smaller when she looked at him.

“Kali,” I said.

“Ranger.”

She walked toward us. Mandu pretended to find something fascinating on his boots. Jotun straightened. Mio edged slightly behind Shizuki.

Kali stopped in front of me. Close up, I could see the cuts, the tight line of her mouth, the faint tremor in her left hand that she kept clenched against her thigh.

“You’re late,” she said in Hindi.

“We were busy,” I answered in the same language.

“Aren’t we all.”

She looked at Shizuki. At Mio. At the sword on Mio’s hip.

“Civilians.”

“Long story.”

“The Locker Room is not a hotel.”

“Tell me about it,” I said. “I’ve been explaining that all day.”

She didn’t smile. But the line of her shoulders eased the width of a hair.

“Inside. Thalia is waiting.”

She turned and walked back toward the building without waiting to see if we followed.

We followed.

***

PDC Headquarters

Operations Room

6:58 p.m.

The room was a bunker disguised as a corporate lounge. Glass and brushed steel, a long conference table, three walls of monitors scrolling too fast to read. A dozen PDC staff worked at stations along the edges, speaking in low voices. Nobody looked up when we entered.

Thalia stood at the head of the table.

She looked about ten. She stood like someone who had spent a lifetime giving orders and several more watching them go wrong.

“Drake,” she said. “Thank you for coming.”

“Madam.”

Her gaze moved to Shizuki, then Mio. “We’ll discuss the civilians after. Sit. All of you.”

We sat.

Thalia didn’t. She pressed a button on the table, and the largest screen resolved into a map of the city: red marks, blue marks, a handful of black ones.

“Here is what we know,” she said. “At 5:03 this evening, eleven gates opened across Kyōto within ninety seconds of one another. Our analysts believe these are what we are now calling crossrips: gates forced open and held there. Reports confirm simultaneous breaches in England, Germany, Italy, and the United States. We are holding in most of them.”

“Most,” Mandu said.

“Most.” She touched the screen. A black marker blinked at Kinkaku-ji. “Gate Agent Dara Chantarat, codename Garuda, was killed at 5:31 p.m. by a Yamikoko-ra known as Yashiro Kagenobu, the Iron Fang.”

No one spoke.

Kali’s hand closed on the edge of the table.

“She did not return to the loop,” Thalia continued. “The tracking magic that follows an agent’s essence dissipated. We have confirmed it twice.”

“We saw it,” I said. “General Tzo. He had a sword.”

Jotun unwrapped his coat and laid the niuweidao on the table. The runes along its blade swam with a darkness that made the fluorescent light flinch.

A staffer by the wall actually stepped back.

Thalia stared at it for a long moment.

“Where did you get this?”

“General Tzo. We were dueling and then he told me what it does,” I said. “So, I shot him.”

“And?”

“It closes the loop. Forever.”

She didn’t flinch. But something behind her eyes shifted, the way a house settles after a heavy step.

“Mandu?”

“Chuluun had one too,” he said. “A big mache. Same runes. I didn’t stick around to check the details.”

“Lei Zhao is missing,” Thalia said quietly. “He was battling yamikoko-ra at Fukakusa at 6:09. Observers report that Tsukikage Ayame took him alive.”

Mandu swore in Korean.

“Alive,” I repeated. “They’re not killing the rest of us.”

“Not yet.”

“Why?”

Thalia was silent for a moment.

“Because the man behind this wants something,” she said at last. “Every agent they have taken alive has been separated from the others and moved toward Nijō-jō Castle. That’s where our observers last tracked Ayame. And the Yamikoko-ra we have interrogated before today have been consistent on one point. They answer to a figure known as the Regent of the Hollow Moon.”

Jotun’s voice was soft. “A Regent. A Yamikoko-ra who rules other Yamikoko-ra.”

“Not exactly,” Thalia said.

She didn’t elaborate.

I watched her face. Four thousand years on that face. Her eyes were on the sword.

She knows something, I thought. She’s not telling.

“Thalia,” I said.

“Yes, Drake.”

“Six months ago you moved me across the planet because agents were going missing. You didn’t say who was taking them.”

“I didn’t know.”

“Do you know now?”

She looked at me.

“I have a suspicion,” she said. “And I hope I am wrong.”

The wall of screens flickered.

Every light in the room dipped.

A staffer stiffened over her console.

“Madam. Shadow State gate at the front entrance.”

“Size?”

“Small. One entity. The perimeter wards are holding.”

Kali stood, a talwar already halfway out of its sheath.

Thalia looked at the security feed.

On the screen, a huge figure waited beyond the entrance, a double-headed greataxe resting against one shoulder.

“Yashiro,” she said.

Kali’s blade came the rest of the way out.

“Keep the wards sealed,” Thalia told the staffer. “Open the external communication channel.”

A voice rolled through the room’s speakers.

“Madam Thalia. Must we speak through a wall?”

“You’re fortunate we’re speaking at all.”

“I carry a message from His Excellency.”

“Deliver it.”

“In person.”

Thalia considered the image.

Then she looked at Kali.

“We need to hear him.”

Kali’s fingers tightened around the hilt.

“He killed Dara.”

“I know.”

Two words. Quiet enough that I almost missed them.

Thalia turned back to the console.

“Admit him through the warded corridor. Seal it behind him. No one else enters.”

The staffer hesitated.

“Yes, madam.”

We waited.

Nobody sat comfortably.

When the doors finally opened, Yashiro Kagenobu stepped into the operations room wearing black armor trimmed in silver. His gaze traveled over the monitors, the staff, the weapons gathering around the table.

He looked like a man deciding whether a restaurant deserved his business.

“Madam Thalia.”

The Iron Fang bowed.

Almost courteously.

“It has been a long time. You haven’t changed a bit.”

“State your message.”

His eyes moved to me.

“Ah. The Ranger. I had hoped we would meet.”

“Nice entrance,” I said. “Seven out of ten.”

His scar shifted with his smile.

“Only seven?”

“Security had to let you in. Takes away some of the mystery.”

Behind me, Jotun’s chair scraped across the floor.

Mandu rested a hand near one of his K5s. Shizuki held the Calico across her lap, her finger clear of the trigger.

I could hear her breathing.

Yashiro lifted his free hand.

“I am not here to fight.”

“You killed Dara,” Kali said.

His attention settled on her.

“Yes.”

No apology. Not even the courtesy of hesitation.

“She fought well.”

Kali took a step.

Thalia raised one hand.

“Kali.”

For a moment, I wasn’t sure that would be enough.

Then Kali stopped.

Yashiro watched her with interest.

“Your message,” Thalia said.

“His Excellency, the Regent of the Hollow Moon, invites the Gate Agents of Kyōto to Nijō-jō Castle. All of them.”

“Invites,” I repeated.

“He wishes to discuss the nature of the loop, the significance of seventeen, and the future of your kind.”

I glanced at Thalia.

She hadn’t moved.

“He believes,” Yashiro continued, “that you will find the conversation educational.”

“And if we decline?”

“Lei Zhao is presently enjoying His Excellency’s hospitality.”

Mandu’s hand closed around his pistol grip.

“Enjoying?” he asked.

“He is alive. Whether he remains comfortable depends on you.”

Shizuki’s hand found mine beneath the table.

“Who else?” Thalia asked.

Yashiro smiled.

“Mayor Takahara is already a guest. There may be others you would recognize.”

“Names.”

“Come and ask them yourselves.”

I leaned forward.

“Why tear apart a city just to get us into a room?”

“You’ll have to ask the Regent.”

“And he couldn’t send a letter?”

“He sent me.”

Kali’s expression suggested several ways we could return him.

Yashiro lowered his hand.

“You have until midnight. After that, the invitation expires.”

“Midnight,” I said.

His eyes found mine.

The smile changed.

He knew.

Of course he knew.

“Happy birthday, Ranger.”

Then the gate closed around him, and the colors of the room came back.

Nobody spoke.

Kali sheathed her talwar one inch at a time.

Mandu let out a breath. “Well,” he said. “That went about as well as a fart at a funeral.”

“Mandu,” Thalia said.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Not now.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Thalia looked at each of us in turn. Kali. Jotun. Mandu. Me. Shizuki. Mio.

When her eyes reached the niuweidao on the table, she lowered her voice.

“Gear up,” she said. “All of you. The vault is open. Take whatever you can carry.”

Kali turned for the door.

Jotun wrapped the cursed sword in his coat again.

Mandu caught Mio’s eye and gave her a crooked grin. “Ready to see the rest of the Locker Room?”

“No,” Mio said. “But I’m coming.”

I pushed back my chair and stood.

Somewhere out there, a man in a castle wanted to talk about my life and why it ended.

I touched the little surprise in my vest pocket.

Okay, Regent, I thought. Let’s talk.