Even if the opponent is deeply entrenched in a defensive position, he will be unable to avoid fighting if you attack where he will surely go to the rescue.

—MASTER SUN TZU

Nonomi Sato left the facility as early as the unspoken demands of company loyalty would permit. She paused beside her car just long enough to sniff for suspicion, and when she felt no menace, no interest, she slid into the driver’s seat, turned the ignition, and headed out of the city, to where the traffic was thinner and she could more easily spot if someone followed.

She drove for an hour, watching mirrors and counting cars while ice inside her head turned her thoughts cold, chilling the fever that had taken hold these last days as her carefully constructed encampment had come under attack again, and then again.

Battle terrain was changing.

The landscape was fogging over and turning marshy.

Sato turned off the two-lane highway, pulled to the side, waited ten minutes, and then started the car again. Drove again, waited again, and when she was certain she’d left work alone, she continued to the nearest station, went inside to the phones, and found them just beyond the ticket machines.

Battle on the marsh should be avoided at all costs.

If the ground had indeed turned bad, if entrenchment was no longer possible, then the only way to avoid loss was to hurry away.

But to know the terrain, she first had to clear the fog.

Sato used coins, dialed, and caressed the cold calm of detachment.

It had been six months since she’d last spoken with the parents, longer still since she’d returned for a visit, but the e-mail from this morning, with its one simple sentence, had the potential to change everything: Daughter, we have missed you.

At last the line connected and a soft voice said, “Hai, moshi moshi.”

Sato became air and innocence and said, “Mother, how is your health, and how have you been?”

“We have been well, my child,” the woman said, “very well, although it has been lonely without you. A friend of yours called asking for you. I told him you were away. When will you return to visit? The garden is beautiful now.”

Sato bit down hard on her tongue and drew blood.

“Work has been difficult, but I will visit for Obon,” she said. “Thank you for news of my friend, did he leave his name or a message?”

“Let me see,” the soft voice said, and then, as if reading from a paper, “Kiyoshi is his name. He said that you were close at university.”

Sato shut her eyes, squeezing past the doubts of lives past.

Kiyoshi had indeed been a friend at school. The call could have been genuine, possibly, possibly, possibly. Sato said, “He gave you his number?”

“He said you already knew how to reach him and to please call.”

“Thank you,” Sato said, because that was appropriate, and because staying on the phone brought her nothing, she added, “Please be well,” and replaced the receiver with a gentle drop. And then, with shoulders straight, with a demure emptiness pulled over her face shielding the turmoil beneath, she walked back to the car.

She didn’t have Kiyoshi’s number, had no way to discover if the call had been genuine or if, instead, this had been an enemy using lies and family as a way to reach her. Sato put the key in the ignition and turned out of the parking lot, reconfiguring the positions of her imaginary army.

Throughout three years at the facility, through monthly security checks, random security sweeps, and regular background checks, she’d remained above suspicion, above reproach, yet every day brought with the sun a renewed possibility of being discovered.

That was the problem with long-term commitment, it was why she preferred the quick jobs, in and out, over and done, vanish and start again.

Six months had turned into a year, and that had turned into three, always following more research, further trials, the end of the road ever one more turn around the bend, the promise of ultimate reward taunting from just beyond reach.

The danger was in staying and she’d stayed too long.

Sato put on the blinkers, changed lanes, and rerouted.

At another station and another phone bank, in thinning invisibility amid the waning evening crowd, Sato dialed, using the information from a prepaid card. She turned her back to the station cameras and after the first ring dipped her finger into the receiver well and hung up.

The only safe way forward was to assume the call from Kiyoshi had been a pretext; the only safe conclusion, that this had come from the newcomer.

In return, the only strategy for the newcomer was deception and ambush.

Doing so wouldn’t clear the fog or allow a better view of the terrain, wouldn’t solve the issue of the marshy ground or fortify her encampments, but by ridding herself of the need to battle on more than one front, she could turn her forces to the other.

Sato dialed again, hung up again, and then repeated the process a third time. On this last she stayed on the phone a minute longer, holding a pretend conversation with dead air, for the sake of appearance. Then, having in this deception summoned he who would be the foot soldier used for ambush, she left for Suita, for a three-bedroom house, not far from Osaka University.

In the evening dark, off a well-trafficked road, Sato climbed the stairs at the edge of a wall up to a barren front door and the tiny patches of pebbles where some form of greenery should have gone, had she been the growing kind.

This was what home was for now, three stories sandwiched between an apartment building and a grocery store with two residences above, and parking just a divot off the road between a retaining wall and the neighbor’s tiered garden of river stones and bent manicured pines.

Hardly visible within corners and shadows of her doorway, concealed to blend, were the security cameras.

Sato unlocked the door and stepped into an empty genkan and hall, to the fragrance of mold spores, humidity, and decaying wood. She left shoes and purse on the genkan tiles and walked the wood floors barefoot for the kitchen, pulling the pins out of her bun as she went, running fingers through her hair, massaging her scalp to soothe the itch.

She poured a glass of cold barley tea, distinctly Japanese and an acquired taste that she’d acquired because, no matter where the family had been stationed, Mother had brought the tea. Sato drank it down, staring out over the room, devoid of furniture but for one lone desk and a small folding table on the floor.

The house was a wasted, expensive luxury, so much space for one in a city where every square meter mattered and three bedrooms should house three generations. But she required a residence on its own foundation, within reasonable driving distance from the facility, in a neighborhood where people came and went often enough that her presence as a single woman living alone wouldn’t draw the gossip of the neighborhood obachan brigade. That hadn’t left her with many options.

As her people were so fond of saying, gaman.

Polite and fatalistic. Suck it up: a national motto.

Sato rinsed out the glass and set it to dry: it was one of the two glasses she owned, in a kitchen as sparsely furnished as the house.

She’d never bought more; she’d never intended to stay.

For her, Japan had always been stifling. Still was. Tight and constricted, spatially and socially: hundreds of unspoken rules that dictated what she could say, to whom, and how; where she could work, in what field, for how long; how she could live, and love, and exist. Made it difficult to understand Mother’s melancholy homesickness and the obsessive way she’d taught Sato to read and write, as if Sato would one day become like her.

She’d only returned to Japan because of the job.

Sato picked up the glass again, pulled a handful of ice from the freezer drawer and dumped it in. Poured a shot of whisky.

Gaman.

When the money was good, anything could be endured.