This is the philosophy that allowed the Mu to recover from near extermination. This is what has enabled them to serve the murderers so faithfully over the millennia, to ensure that the other peoples of Earth would serve them too. Whatever happens is meant to happen—alone, it is the motto of a defeated people. But the Mu are not defeated, only disciplined. And so there is a second part to their philosophy, just as essential as the first.
Do whatever must be done to prevent it from happening again.
Whatever must be done. That has been the core of Chiyoko’s training, and she knows it to be the core of her uncle’s being.
Whatever must be done, no matter who it may hurt, no matter what might be sacrificed.
Her uncle isn’t the only one who knows how to read silence. Over the years, she has gotten very good at reading the lines of his face, the worry in his eyes, and she knows what he is thinking now.
He’s thinking that Satoshi might be right. That Akina might win. That he has just agreed to sacrifice his beloved niece to a larger cause, and that it is hard, but it is right.
He’s sending her into an ambush, but that’s not what hurts.
What hurts is that he’s worried she won’t come back.
Know your enemy.
This is the first rule of battle, a necessity of victory.
And so, in the few days she has left, Chiyoko sets out to know Akina Nori. She will not make contact with the girl, not until absolutely necessary. She will lurk in the shadows, watching, waiting for Akina to reveal her secret self, the indulgences and weaknesses that will seal her fate.
Her uncle’s basement houses a workshop filled with gears and circuitry, GPS chips and microscopic lenses and microphones. Chiyoko has logged many hours down there, designing surveillance equipment to suit her needs. Recording devices disguised as pens, hair clips, lucky rabbit’s feet; infrared cameras the size of a pinhead; nearly invisible trackers that can be shot into a target’s neck, with a small sting easily mistaken for a mosquito bite. In the lush gardens of her father’s estate, Akina slaps at her skin and suspects nothing, feels nothing, certainly not the tiny ridge of a GPS signal emitter.
It’s easy enough that it feels almost like cheating, but Chiyoko has been trained for a game that has no rules except one: win at any cost. This is what she intends to do.
Akina isn’t careful. She lives her life on the surface, almost as if she wants Chiyoko to see.
Chiyoko sees Akina train in a lavish gym on her father’s grounds, sees her practice aikido, muay thai, sanshou, capoeira, and jujitsu, sees her skills with the wooden dagger, the battle-ax, the curved kujang, the shuriken, and several semiautomatic machine guns. Akina is good—Chiyoko is better. Where Akina fights expensive instructors in well-equipped facilities, Chiyoko has battled real enemies on urban battlefields across Japan. Akina, Chiyoko can tell, has never truly had to fight for her life. Paid instructors will always hold back, always pull a punch if it threatens to wound. Chiyoko has stabbed thugs on an empty subway platform in the bowels of Tokyo; she has speared gangsters in a deserted alley of Nagasaki. She has danced away from bullets and kicked knives out of grimy hands. She has fought knowing that no one, not even her uncle, would step in to save her—fought for her life and emerged understanding what is needed to survive. She sees this is a lesson that Akina, spoiled by the luxury and illusion of safety, has never had to learn.
Chiyoko sees that Akina is stronger with her right arm than her left, and has a hamstring strain that acts up when she pushes herself too hard. She sees that Akina is handier with a revolver than with a rifle, and nearly hopeless with a crossbow, her arrows always flying a few centimeters to the right of her mark.
She sees Akina laboring over ancient texts and struggling to translate the words of their ancestors, and sees that she is smart, but not brilliant, and that Satoshi Nori sees this as well, but pretends not to.
She sees Akina put away her training gear and her books so that she can go to school or watch a movie or hold someone’s hand in the dark.
In some ways, they are not so different. They have the same pale skin, the same shoulder-length black hair with bangs cutting a razor-straight line above their eyebrows. When Akina is training, she wears the black robes of a samurai, just like Chiyoko. Watching her from a distance, Chiyoko can almost imagine she is watching herself. But when Akina steps out into the world, she is a girl transformed.
Chiyoko’s closet is filled with identical black skirts and white shirts. This is her costume for daily life, how she hides her superhero self away. She is a black-and-white movie, drab and easily missed, trained to fade into the background.
Akina is Technicolor. She paints her lips cherry red and her eyelids gold and silver. Akina streaks her hair with neon blues and greens, tugs rainbow socks up past her knees. One day she will drape herself in pure pink pastel princess gear from head to toe, with sparkling tiara to match; the next she will go goth girl, black and bloodred nails and lips, a walking darkness that somehow still shines bright. Every day, Akina remakes herself anew. As if she is always choosing, and choosing again, who she would like to be.
Chiyoko’s life has been a tunnel, funneling her toward a single goal. Every choice is measured against Endgame, and so no choice at all. Now she sees what it might be like to live another way.
Sometimes, especially in the quiet before the dawn, Chiyoko thinks that if she only wanted it enough, she could will herself to speak.
But what would she say? What would she choose?
Chiyoko has always wondered if there are some things that cannot be known unless put into words. If this is why she has never quite known her own heart.
Her tongue is intact, her lungs hale, her throat unmarked. Okinawa’s best doctors have been unable to find a single flaw. She is designed for speech—but somehow, still, destined for silence. As if the gods themselves stole her words, unspooled them from her in the womb. She remembers being very young, clapping chubby hands, banging stubby legs, anything to be heard. To be known. She remembers the faces of her elders: Anxious. Hopeful. And, finally, disappointed. They did their best to hide it from her, but Chiyoko has always been good at watching. Understanding.
She tried for them, harder than she tried for herself. She remembers that too. Opening her mouth. Willing herself to scream.
There was only ever silence. So it has always been; so it will always be.
Chiyoko cannot have what she wants. So she has trained herself to want what she has.
She is that strong.
She was designed for strength too. And that is her destiny.
But sometimes, even now, if only for a moment, she is weak.
Chiyoko presses herself into the shadows of a school and watches Akina Nori, and even though she knows this butterfly of a girl is nothing to be envied—shallow and preening and fated to die—she cannot help herself. She wishes; she wants; she imagines, just for a moment, a life that cannot be.
Akina flips her hair and laughs. The melodic trill comes so easily to her that she does it again. Akina talks with her voice but also her hands, fingers dancing through the air as she tells her friends story after story. They turn toward her as if warming themselves in the sun.
Chiyoko has no friends. No school, no stories. She has a family that cares for her and a room full of beloved books. She has a destiny, and all this is meant to be enough.
Akina has a life.
Akina has a boy named Ryo, who she calls Ri-Ri, even though he claims to hate it. She tickles his neck and he laces his arms around her waist and lifts her off the ground. She whispers in his ear, and even Chiyoko, hiding so close, listening so closely, cannot hear what she has to say.
Chiyoko follows Akina for three days, traipsing back and forth across the city, from the school with its eager audience to the Naha Main Place with its endless corridors of stores, from the mangrove woods where Akina slides her body against Ryo’s to the family estate where she talks herself out of trouble for breaking curfew.
Soon Chiyoko understands everything she needs to know about the enemy. Akina is used to getting what she wants—life is easy that way, for those who are able to ask. Akina never searches the shadows, never catches a glimpse of movement, of Chiyoko’s eyes blinking in the dark.
Chiyoko is good at hiding, at turning invisible. It has saved her life more than once, and very soon it will save her again.
Akina, it is clear, has never turned invisible. Wouldn’t know how. Akina is soft, Akina is spoiled, Akina expects to win, and because of that, Akina will die.
So there is no reason to envy her, Chiyoko reminds herself.
No reason at all.
They come for her in the hour before dawn. Ten masked figures, all in black, all with swords and guns. Chiyoko likes that there are so many of them. It is a sign of respect from her uncle. He knows any fewer than that and they would have no hope against her.
Foolish, though, that they expected to catch her asleep.
She wakes as the first soft footstep crosses the threshold of the house, two floors below. By the time they burst through her door and window, she has hidden her shuriken and her favorite knife beneath her thermal gear, along with a compass and several packets of water purification tablets.
“Come along quietly and you won’t get hurt,” one of them says, and it’s times like this that Chiyoko wishes she could laugh out loud.
She comes along quietly, as she does everything. But she’s not the one who gets hurt.
She is a silent whirlwind of violence, kicking and punching, slicing flesh. Cartilage crunches beneath her fist and bones crack against hard floor. She jabs a stomach, ducks a roundhouse swing, aims the flat of her hand at an exposed throat, dances past flashing knives, her body like water, flowing through the enemy unharmed. By the time they succeed in binding her hands behind her back and lashing her legs together, there are four bodies on the floor, and two moaning in opposite corners.
There is no shame in losing this fight; she is expected to lose. She suspects she was not expected to take so many of them down with her.
“Maybe they’re wrong about her,” a woman’s voice says as something sharp pierces Chiyoko’s spine. “She’s a tough one.”
She glimpses a needle, feels something poisonous creeping through her veins.
“You want to tell us how tough you are, sweetheart?” a man says, giving her a rough shake.
In the silence, he laughs. “Didn’t think so.”
“Show a little respect,” the woman says. “She’s still the Player.”
He laughs again. “Not for long.” He lifts Chiyoko off the floor and swings her body over his shoulder. She is no threat to him now, hog-tied and poisoned, weak and fading.
Fading.
The laughter is softer now, as if coming from a great distance.
Or else she is the one at a distance, untethered from the world, from her body, floating farther and farther away.
Her lids are so heavy. Darkness closes in.
Hold on, she wills herself, but there is nothing to hold.
There is nothing but empty dark, and silence.
And she is so tired.
“Sweet dreams, chatty,” the man’s voice says.
She dreams of killing him, slowly.
She dreams that he begs her for mercy, and that instead she makes it hurt.
She opens her eyes to a pounding headache and the thunder of an engine. Ropes bite into her wrists and ankles, but she slips a finger free of the bindings and that’s all it takes to extricate the rest of her. She rises on sore legs to find herself in a small cargo plane.
A small, empty cargo plane. Flying thousands of feet over a sea that stretches to the horizon.
With no pilot at the controls.
And a fuel gauge tipping toward empty.
Sometimes, Chiyoko thinks, it would be nice to be able to swear.
She scrambles into the pilot’s seat and scans the console. She’s never flown this kind of plane, but she’s logged many hours of solo flight time on military transport craft and a Boeing freighter with similar controls. The radio has been disabled, as has the navigational system, but the steering is intact, and it’s not hard to get a feel for the stick and ease the plane onto a level flight path.
Flight path to where is the question. She estimates she has about twenty minutes of flying time left, and even if she could land the plane on the open water, she wouldn’t last long. She’d be dead of exposure or dehydration or sharks long before Akina got around to ambushing her.
This is a survival exercise, and Chiyoko knows her uncle isn’t going to make it easy on her, but he also wouldn’t make it impossible. Somewhere in that endless stretch of ocean, there must be land.
She guides the plane in an ever-widening spiral, scanning the waters until she sees it. First just a speck of brown on the horizon, then, as she closes in, a spit of land dense with green. An island.
It will do for survival—just not for landing the plane.
Chiyoko levers the control stick into place with her shoe, a makeshift autopilot that will guide the plane in a loose, lazy circle around the island. Then she begins to scour the cabin for a parachute.
There is no panic. She’s been trained out of that. As she sorts through crates and unscrews panels, checking every inch of the plane for the chute she knows must be secreted somewhere, she breathes at regular intervals. Calm, collected, in and out. Heart rate low and steady. No mental sirens blare. Chiyoko knows how to suppress the dumb-animal part of her brain, the part that in most people would be shrieking incoherently.
Out of fuel!
Lost at sea!
No way out!
This is part of the test: staying calm, staying rational. Children panic—Players Play.
She uncovers a parachute beneath a loose panel in the flooring and straps it to her back. Then it’s merely a matter of dropping elevation, plotting a flight path over the island, heaving open the freight door, swiftly gauging the physics of momentum and gravity, calculating the relevant distance and velocity vectors—320 km per hour horizontal motion and a 9.8 m/s2 vertical acceleration that without the parachute could have her smashing to the ground at a terminal velocity of 195 km per hour—perfectly timing her bailout.
Waiting for her moment.
Waiting.
Waiting.
Jump.
She could stay here forever.
Floating.
Blue above, blue below.
A thunder of wind in her ears, the sound of silence.
The chute rippling overhead, the ground inching closer, the seconds stretching, her isolation absolute.
There is no threat here, in the air. No attack to anticipate, no enemy to avoid. No game to Play. There is only a child’s dream of flight, a lazy drift through the clouds, like floating in a lake on a summer day.
It is like flying again over the streets of Naha, soaring through the night from roof to roof, that same weightless freedom, and she feels at home. Drifting through the air, one with the sky.
This is where she belongs.
This is where she would happily stay.
But she cannot fly, only fall, and inevitably the ground rises up to meet her. The game begins again.
Impact.
As Chiyoko assembles her lean-to, rigging a makeshift home from bamboo stalks and the waterproof chute, she wonders when and how Akina will appear on the island. She snorts, thinking of the girl diving out of a plane. It seems more likely she’ll arrive by yacht.
Chiyoko gathers wood for a fire and then uses the lens from her compass to focus the sunlight into a spark. She strips a small sapling and fashions it into a fishing rod. Between that and the nuts and berries she’s able to forage near her campground, she should have no problems with food. She builds camp on the coast but ventures into the dense trees in search of fresh water. She finds a spring a half mile away, and there are enough small animals feeding from it that she feels confident to drink.
She waits for
Akina, waits for the ambush she knows is to come.
Waits for the girl she is meant to kill.
Two days pass, and this becomes her routine: Tend the fire. Forage for food; trek to the stream. Swim. Work out under the blistering afternoon sun; throw her shuriken at increasingly distant targets. Wait.
Wait.
Wait.
She plays out the attack in her head, imagines her hands around Akina’s throat, her knife in Akina’s belly. She kills the girl again and again in her mind.
Kill the girl; kill the doubt.
That is the promise of this mission.
All those who have questioned her will be silent. They will be forced to accept her, and to believe in her.
In the silence that follows, she will finally, fully believe in herself.
That is the promise, and so she waits for it to deliver.
She is distracted by her reflection in the water. Just for a second—no, less than that. For a heartbeat. She catches a glimpse of herself, rippling across the blue, and smiles, so that the quiet girl in the water will smile back at her. Nothing about the girl announces her ferocity. Even here, besting the wilderness, she looks like a shy schoolgirl, nothing more. Chiyoko is easily underestimated, and that has always worked to her advantage. But there are times she wishes her exterior could match what lies within. That her reflection revealed a warrior.
A warrior should never be caught off guard. Even one beat of distraction is too many, and by the time she hears the noise behind her, it is too late.
A jaguar stands before her, ready to pounce.
Two more eye her from the brush, their coats sleek, their legs strong, their teeth sharp.
She reaches for her knife, and deliberates. She could, with a flick of the hand, bury it in the nearest jaguar’s neck. But that would leave the other two alive—and her knife out of reach.
She could keep her knife close, wrestle the beasts to the ground one by one—and risk being overpowered.
If she can distract or disable one of them, maybe she can outrun the other two.
Maybe.