Ninth Step Station
Season 1, Episode 10

The Foreign Mischief
Malka Older

Despite the late hour, almost every seat in the Diet Chamber was filled. Sakagawa Ichirou, an MP with the Komeito Party, had been drumming up publicity for his bill for the past week.

“It’s only an official condemnation,” muttered Yoshiro Fujioka, a young MP from Niigata, as Sakagawa orated on and on about the need for his motion to pass. “Just words. I don’t know what everyone is so worked up about.”

“Words condemning the United States for inaction in very strong terms could end up being more than just words,” replied his neighbor in the curved row of representatives, Sasaki Yamato.

Yoshiro grunted. Sakagawa had finally sat down, and the next speaker, from the LDP, was railing against the motion, talking about the importance of maintaining positive relationships with the US, their ally. Yoshiro grunted again, this time derisively. “Let me ask you something,” he said to Sasaki. “How can it be that the US doesn’t act, even after their own soldier was assassinated by the Chinese? That deserves more than condemnation! They should be ashamed.”

Despite the thirty-five feet between them, the expression of the MP from Niigata was not lost on the young woman sitting in the gallery above. Without moving her eyes from the chamber, Akiyama Kazuko made a careful note on the sleeve curled around her forearm. She would compose her full report later, but such small observations about the nuances of the political discussion were sent to her boss, Charles Yardley of the US Embassy, in real time.

Just then there was a loud crack, and then a staccato burst of pops. The door of the chamber was thrown open, and men dressed in business suits and wielding handguns and semiautomatic rifles poured in, shouting and shooting at the storied ceiling of the chamber. Kazuko stood and slipped out of the upper gallery door, fingers tapping at her sleeve even as she walked, quickly but without unseemly hurry, up the hall. Before she had reached the stairs, the lights went out.

Act I

Nishimura exhaled. “That is a lovely speech, Higashi-san. But as we learned during the war, words do not stop bullets.”

“Words can stop someone from pulling the trigger.”

Miyako waved a hand. “Everyone! Listen to this.”

With a gesture, she tossed her newsfeed to the main wall. The room’s audio system erupted with sounds of gunfire and shouting.

“At last count, more than a dozen armed militants wearing unmarked tactical uniforms have stormed the Diet,” the newscaster continued. “Council members are trapped in the council chamber. This unknown militia has taken the Diet. Repeat: A militia entered the Diet and is declaring martial law across Tokyo—”

The sounds of gunfire and shouting crumbled into static just before the broadcast cut out.

“An attack on the Diet?” Emma asked slowly, meeting Miyako’s eyes.

“Maybe this is what they were priming for,” Miyako answered. “Maybe this is it.”

Emma didn’t ask who they were in this scenario, or what it was. She heard the answer in the tone of Miyako’s voice. Since she got here, she realized now, everyone had been preparing for war.

“Let’s go,” Emma said, and saw Miyako’s eyes widen, as though it hadn’t even occurred to her, and the next minute, they were plunging down Ninth Step Station’s stairwell, bumping each other on the turns.

“Wait!” one of the bodyguards she’d been assigned by Captain Orbach yelled from above them.

“Stay with the prisoner!” Emma called back at Corporal Brockton. “That’s an order!” She didn’t really expect that to work, but when they got to the bottom of the stairwell, no one’s footsteps clattered after them, and she almost giggled with the sense of escape.

At the exit, Emma wheeled toward the nearest entrance to Kudanshita Station, but Miyako shook her head. “Faster to run,” she gasped, and took off down the street.

It seemed like a ridiculous idea at first, but once Emma settled into her stride and thought about it, it was only a couple of kilometers. She had run the whole circuit of the Imperial Palace park with—her heart ached like a bruise—Santiago and the rest of the team. Several circuits in one go, in fact. Once she got her bearings and realized how close they were to the Diet, she sped up. Maybe they could get there before it was all over. Maybe she could do her real job and keep the peace.

It was not until she thudded up to the front of the Diet building that Emma realized Miyako wasn’t with her. She hesitated a moment, looking back the way she had come, but evening was falling and she couldn’t make anyone out in the dimness. A siren blared somewhere, and Emma made her decision. She flashed her badge to the startled-looking man standing outside the guard post and jogged up the long entranceway.

It was dark inside the building—they must have cut the lights. Emma unholstered her gun, sidling between the columns at the entrance to peer inside with her eye’s infrared capabilities. The lobby was empty. Either the attackers were gone, Emma thought as she tugged open the heavy door and slipped inside, or they were amateurs. Just then, a volley of gunfire broke out somewhere above her, and Emma charged up the stairs, heading for the council chamber.

The door was closed, but she could hear yelling and shots from inside. Emma took two deep, steadying breaths. She had to assume that the attackers had night vision, like she did, and hope that they weren’t organized enough to have someone covering the door. She didn’t feel quite confident enough about that to rush in, especially with no backup, so she stayed off to the side while she fluttered the heavy door slightly open. No sudden hail of bullets. Two more deep breaths and Emma swung around and pushed in through the door, staying on the slightly diagonal trajectory she got from sliding through the half-open door and staying as low as she could.

She was exhaling with relief when she felt more than heard the thud-thud of two bullets whooshing behind her and burying themselves in the door. There was yelling, but it took Emma’s brain a second to catch up with what it meant. By the time she could think again, she was huddled between two chairs, not sure how she got there.

They’d missed. It wasn’t the first time Emma had been shot at. She shouldn’t be so thrown. She saw Santiago’s face under the oxygen mask, realized what was happening, and yanked her brain back into the present.

“—somewhere in the back row!”

“Stay calm!”

The yelling had an edge of hysteria. Emma slowly raised her head above the level of the seats in front of her. Most of the people in the room were cowering on the floor, hunched over or curled up in their suits. Their eyes were squeezed shut or blinking, unseeing, as bright spots in her green-black vision of the room. The room was a sniper’s paradise: concentric half-circles of seats descending to an open area around a central podium, where three men were stalking around, shouting at each other.

Fortunately, Emma was a sniper, so she felt right at home.

She sighted her firearm along the back of the chair in front of her and squeezed on an exhale, then ducked and crawled farther along the row as more shouting erupted. When she peered up again, the man she had shot was clutching his arm on the ground, and the other three were staring around the room anxiously. Emma had her sights on the next one when the chair she was resting her arm on splintered violently and a bullet zipped through it into the floor at her feet. Fuck! Again, Emma was several chairs over without knowing how she got there. Of course they had someone in the gallery—or had it just come from the top of the chamber? There was no way to sneak under the chairs and—another chair shattered behind her—the last thing she wanted was to get trapped. She came to an internal aisle and slithered two rows down it before diving back into the safety between rows. She breathed deeply once, twice, then tipped an eye over the top of the seat in front of her. Only one man still stood on the dais, and he was bent over his injured comrade.

Emma shot him.

Which was not the strategic move, she realized, ducking down and crawling back the way she had come, since he was not an immediate threat to her and there were at least two people wandering around the chamber who were. Deep breaths. She fired five shots into different parts of the ceiling and risked a quick look around. She found them pretty quickly: one edging around the outer aisle of the semicircle, and the other across the aisle and one row down from her, looking around in the wrong direction. Emma shot him before he could turn the right way, making herself aim for the shoulder, and crawled toward him as he fell.

His eyes were rolled back and he didn’t offer any resistance when she pulled the weapon out of his oddly ungloved hands. She didn’t want him taking any potshots when he came to, and besides, she might run out of rounds pretty soon. Emma hefted the new gun experimentally, aimed it at the guy on the outer aisle, and pulled the trigger.

Nothing happened.

She shot again.

Nothing.

Oh.

Handprint recognition.

Emma shook the implications of that out of her head for the moment. One bad guy left, and she was going to have to make do with the rounds she had.

• • •

Miyako was in shape. Maybe not in Olympic shape, but she still worked out regularly. Well, maybe not so regularly recently, she admitted to herself as Emma disappeared around a curve of the path in front of her. The war was all-encompassing, and after that everything seemed so temporary, so in flux. She had lost her routine. But she still got into the gym every week or so. Or . . . when was the last time?

Miyako gave up and slowed to a fast walk. The weather had changed over the past few days to an early summer. It was hot and muggy and she couldn’t get her breath. She was passing the National Theatre—not far now. She focused and started to run again.

She pulled to a stop in front of the guardhouse at the entrance to the Diet grounds. Emma was nowhere to be seen; unless she’d gotten lost on the way (a thought appealing to some unsavory part of Miyako’s character), she had already gone in. As she should have. This was an emergency. A guard stood by the gate, looking pale and nervous. Miyako flashed him her badge. “What do you know?”

“I heard shots and immediately called the authorities.” He was almost stuttering with nervousness. “Then the power was cut.” Miyako noticed that his tiny cubicle of a guardhouse was dark.

“So you didn’t see them enter?”

The guard shook his head emphatically. “No one unauthorized has gone in through this gate tonight. Only members and a few journalists.” He paused. “Oh, and one of yours who rushed in there a few minutes ago.”

So the American didn’t get lost. Miyako shook her head, angry that the ugliness surrounding the assassination was straining her friendship with Emma. “Thank you,” she said to the guard, and hurried toward the main building. Now that she was thinking more clearly, it occurred to her that Emma might be needing backup. Miyako pulled out her penlight and dodged inside.

She hadn’t been to the Diet since . . . since the Nakagawa case. But the layout was familiar to her from school trips and the occasional formal police visit, and Miyako didn’t hesitate until she got to the council chamber doors. They were forbiddingly closed, but Miyako could hear yelling and scuffles from inside. With no windows, the chamber would be completely dark. Miyako dithered a moment more, but with only her penlight it would be too easy to do more harm than good. She backtracked and took the stairs up to the public gallery, pointing the light beam low along the side of the marble steps and hoping there were no shooters watching for her through night vision mods.

She edged through the gallery’s swinging door. The air was less close inside but smelled strongly of smoke and blood. The noises immediately became louder: someone yelling, someone sobbing. A shot snapped through the air, answered almost immediately, and Miyako dropped to the floor, heart pounding, but she didn’t feel the thud of a bullet hitting anything near her, and after a moment she crept farther into the gallery, staying low.

She had only crawled a dozen feet or so when her hand landed on a body.

It was a limb, rounded and completely unresponsive, which was not a good sign, but Miyako felt her way along the—arm, it was definitely an arm—until she found the chest. It felt damp. Shuddering uncontrollably with the horror, Miyako was patting in search of a bullet hole to put pressure on when the lights suddenly ignited.

She was staring into the dead face of Minister Kobayashi. Below it, a long wound across his throat gaped darkly even in the sudden brightness.

• • •

The last of the bad guys was proving tricky to flush out: a ringer, maybe? Emma had been trading shots with him from the opposite side of the chamber, which wouldn’t be a big deal if she weren’t down to her last two bullets. How had she let herself get lulled into not carrying extra ammo? Just as Emma was considering whether she could force one of the injured assailants to fire their guns for her, the lights came on.

Most commercial night vision, modded or external, wouldn’t adjust as quickly as Emma’s military-grade eyeball. She leapt up and vaulted to the nearest aisle, racing toward the spot the last shot had come from. It was going to be a close thing, and she wished she had body armor or at least more ammunition so she could fire a steady stream of cover. Whites of their eyes, she thought, and held off, held off, tore across the podium space and up the other side. She was three rows away when the guy finally popped up, goggles ripped from his head and eyes still blinking desperately in the brightness. Emma had no shot available but the head. She took it.

She was still sitting in the aisle, breathing hard, when the Diet security team poured in through the doors in full SWAT gear, weapons up. Emma had a moment that felt almost like embarrassment—the I’ve done something you’re going to think was amazing and therefore resent feeling—and then she remembered she had to warn them. She stood up, almost-empty gun held loosely above her head. “Emma Higashi, with the Tokyo Metropolitan Police!” she yelled. “Two of the wounded assailants are still armed.”

“Thank you,” said a security officer, coming up to her. “We’ll take it from here.” He coughed slightly. “Would it be too much trouble to ask for your identification?”

Emma showed him her badge, smiling to herself as she imagined how a US cop might have phrased that. Then she walked—a little stiffly, she noted, but that had been a lot of rolling and crawling, and fear—over to the nearest group of MPs to check for injuries.

“Yasuda-san!”

Hearing the exclamation from one of the security guards, Emma glanced up from the first aid she was doing on a councilwoman who had been shot in the arm. The guard was staring at the pair of incapacitated attackers on the dais. “You know those guys?” Emma asked her patient, quietly.

The woman nodded, fighting back tears. “Of course. They are members of this body.” With her free hand she gestured at the council chamber. “Kobayashi’s party,” she added, through tight lips, and Emma changed her assessment: She wasn’t fighting tears; she was furious. Or maybe both.

Emma finished tying off the bandage and stood. Paramedics had arrived; the worst of the wounded were being transported to hospitals. Her glance strayed to the last of the attackers awaiting transport, and the gun at his feet. She was still frowning at it when Miyako walked up to her. “You made it,” Emma said, and then winced; she had meant it as a statement of fact, not an insult, but she was still distracted thinking about the guns that wouldn’t fire for anyone but their registered owner. Just like the gun that the so-called defector had used. Just like the guns that—

Miyako didn’t seem to notice. “Emma—”

Emma raised a hand: Her sleeve was buzzing with a high-alert notification. “Just a sec,” she told Miyako, and took a step back. It was Charles. “Higashi,” she said smartly. “I’m in the middle of a situation here . . .”

Charles sounded hoarse, as if he had been running, or maybe his lungs were acting up again. “China is attacking.”

Emma shifted her weight, glancing back at the bloody wreckage of the council chamber. It was always awkward to correct your boss, even when that boss was as smarmy as Charles. “Actually, it seems pretty clear that it was the Nippon Saisei party,” she said as matter-of-factly as she could manage. “People here recognized the shooters—”

“Not the Diet!” Charles was almost yelling, or would have been if his throat could have taken it. “China is attacking! They’ve pushed the drone border; there are ground troops in the ASEAN zone . . .”

For the second time that night Emma’s heart dropped into her stomach. “What . . . ?”

“We need every peacekeeper we’ve got on this! Brockton and Silverstein have already been reassigned. Orbach is taking the lead with a rendezvous on the southeast corner of Yasukuni. Get over there!” Charles closed the connection before she could react.

“What happened?” Miyako was at Emma’s elbow, staring at her face with concern.

“China,” Emma said, when she could speak. “They’re attacking. We have to go.” She turned, but Miyako grabbed her arm.

“Wait! We can’t.”

Emma looked back at her, uncomprehending.

“Minister Kobayashi is dead,” Miyako said. “I found his body in the gallery.”

“There are at least four dead,” Emma answered, gesturing at where a sheet covered members of parliament who had been killed in the initial attack. She swallowed, remembering the man she had killed. “At least five. I understand that a minister has some importance but . . .”

“No,” Miyako said. “He wasn’t shot. His throat was cut.”

It had been a long day and Emma was starting to feel the effects of the adrenaline and that sprint along the park and then a freaking solo shoot-out with five men on the floor of the Diet Chamber. “So?” was all she could come up with as a response.

“He was murdered,” Miyako said.

“So were they!” Emma yelled, but even as she did, she understood what Miyako meant.

“Yes,” Miyako agreed gravely. “But we know who killed them. Minister Kobayashi’s case is our responsibility.”

Emma took a deep breath and failed to calm down. “But China is attacking!”

“All the more reason,” Miyako answered, her voice finally rising too, “for us to examine the crime scene now while we still can!”

Emma stared at her, shocked that Miyako was contemplating the loss of the Diet building. But she was right. If the ASEAN buffer zone was under pressure, this would be the next step for China.

“Our job . . .” Miyako went on, speaking slowly to emphasize each word, “our job is to solve murders.”

Emma opened her mouth to answer, but then her sleeve beeped again. “Higashi,” she answered, not taking her eyes from Miyako, letting it go to speakers.

“Emma! We’re deploying to the Yasukuni Shrine!” It was Orbach, voice strident with urgency. “We need you out here!”

Emma hesitated, watching Miyako’s face cycle through dismissal, skepticism, brief pleading, and finally resignation.

“Without Commander Vargas we need all hands on deck,” Orbach added.

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes,” Emma answered finally. An explosion echoed, tinny and dulled, through her speakers. “Orbach?”

“Still here,” Orbach said, coughing. “But maybe you could make it ten?”

“Go.” Miyako said. “I’ll take care of this.”

Emma ran.

Act II

By the time Emma got to Yasukuni Shrine, it was already on fire. Fire trucks lined the road on the Imperial Palace park side, but beyond them, in the alternating hues of the emergency lights, she could make out tanks, and nobody seemed to be spraying water yet. A crowd that seemed three parts angry to one part tearful pushed at the cordon, and Emma backed off a few dozen feet and checked the peacekeeper locator. Silverstein was hovering by the Indian embassy; Emma almost didn’t recognize her without Brockton by her side.

“What are we doing?” Emma asked without preamble. “Where is everyone?” And then, what was bothering her the most: “Why are we here, and not protecting the Diet and the rest of the government buildings?” During the breathless run, Emma had been unable to stop imagining Miyako heroically taking fingerprints in a Diet under heavy shelling.

“Because as far as we can tell, this is where they’re attacking,” Silverstein said. “Orbach is on a call to the Pentagon, asking for reinforcements.” From the US? Emma thought. What about Charles? “Argill has the rest of the squad doing recon. But what we need is some way to stop them without triggering outright war.”

“Is this not war?” Emma asked. Her eyes were burning from the smoke.

“So far there’s been some destruction of property, but no open fighting.” Silverstein blinked hard in the smoke-filled air. “They’re being very careful not to harm civilians.” She coughed. “If you ask me, they’re waiting for the Japanese to attack them so they can blow shit up while claiming they were attacked first. They moved the drones in and took some local government officials prisoner in the ASEAN zone, which I hope ASEAN has something to say about. Realistically, of course, they’re not going to do much besides complain.”

“And are we, realistically, going to do any more than that?” Emma retorted, remembering the resolution that had been under discussion earlier that evening. “The Diet was attacked,” she added, in case the news hadn’t penetrated this far.

Silverstein’s face was uncomprehending. “By the Chinese? Our surveillance drones didn’t show any troop movements south of—”

“No! By hard-liners. At least, that’s what it looked like.” Emma remembered the guns. The specialized guns that Charles knew too much about. Were the hard-liners, maybe, the recipients of that second shipment of guns? Had the first stolen shipment been intended for them in the first place? She took a deep breath. “Who’s running our drones?”

“The birdman. But he could definitely use some assistance.”

• • •

Miyako spent half the night working the scene: interviewing all the coherent witnesses, examining the gallery minutely. Periodically she came up out of her crime-scene zen to notice the parade of Cabinet members stopping by to show consternation or to remember that she expected Chinese tanks to roll up at any moment, but they didn’t. At two in the morning, Sato arrived with one other tech.

“Sorry I’m late,” he said. “The situation is . . .” He let the sentence trail off, his body language telling her the rest.

Miyako opened her mouth to ask for an update and then closed it again. She could check on the news. It was only then that she realized, with a start, that she didn’t have the news playing in her ear.

“But the two of us,” Sato went on, indicating himself and the other tech, “live on the eastern side of the city, so we can be here without being distracted.”

“Thank you for your efforts,” Miyako said formally. She understood what he was saying: The other techs were protecting their homes.

Sato looked down at Kobayashi’s body without comment, then started directing the other tech in documenting the scene.

“Anything you can find on the weapon,” Miyako said, knowing that he already knew. “And the timing. Any traces on the scene.”

Sato nodded without looking up.

Miyako rubbed her eyes. “If you can see to the body and the scene, I’ll get back to the station. I want to interview the attackers.”

Sato did look up at that. “Attackers?”

Miyako pointed at Kobayashi. “His party attacked the sitting council. With guns. Four dead, at least.”

Sato grunted, pulling out an evidence envelope. “And some of them were captured alive?”

“Higashi-san got them,” Miyako said, hearing the pride in her voice. “Now she’s—” But the words choked in her throat, and she wasn’t sure if it was anger or some more complex emotion about the fact that Emma was, sort of, defending her country.

“Go back to the station,” Sato said, his attention politely on the corpse. “We’re taking care of this.”

Miyako bowed with a modicum of extra depth.

She stepped out of the Diet building as if emerging from a crypt. In the light breeze of cooler night air, she realized that she was covered in sweat. Walking back to the station was unappealing, but she couldn’t think of any alternative at this time of night.

Once upon a time, it would have been easy. Once, she could have gotten a taxi, or hailed an Uber, or even still taken the subway. Before the war, she wouldn’t have had to think about what time it was. She wouldn’t have thought about the gas shortage or the bisected subway lines.

With a sigh, she started down the entranceway toward the road. Her whole body ached, but maybe the walk would do her good. She turned north and then stopped. The sky along the horizon glowed red. Slowly her brain clunked through a causal chain and made the connection: Hadn’t someone said the Chinese were attacking Yasukuni? Miyako looked down at her forearm and pulled up a map on her sleeve, then sighed. She was going to have to circle the park widdershins.

At least the longer walk gave her time to calm herself and to think over what she had learned through the stifling night in what she could only think of now as the chamber of horrors. All of the witnesses had agreed on the general outlines of the attack, although there had been the usual variation in number and description of attackers: The top echelon of the Nippon Saisei party had entered the chamber firing, mostly at the ceiling, and then the lights had been cut. After that, few people could say much about what had happened, except that the shooting had continued. One of the council members, however, had vision augmentation, and had seen the attackers walking around the chamber confidently in the dark, so presumably they did too.

When she couldn’t distract herself anymore, she turned on the news in her ear. She cringed when the sound came on: It was not the calm, controlled commentators of normal times, but the tight-voiced, monotonic recitation of information she remembered from the days of the war.

• • •

Emma and Bert spent a couple of hours reprogramming and retrofitting the available drones so they could dump water with at least a rudimentary attempt at targeting and prioritizing. In an ideal world, they would be assisted by human operators. But this was not an ideal world. Emma kept an eye on the drones’ work through her interface when she could, but for the most part she was trying to communicate with the Chinese military, trying to calm the Japanese onlookers and protesters, and—for about fifteen minutes around three a.m.—putting herself physically between the two.

Emma missed Santiago at every turn, constantly expecting to be able to look to him for advice or at least a calm presence and remembering over and over that he was gone. In a five-minute break when she was supposed to be rehydrating, she wrote a quick little search program and set it to run on border crossings over the past four days.

There was a lull in the hours before dawn. The fires were almost out. After the last impromptu conclave, the Chinese military had, without actually agreeing to do so, stood down for the night. The officers who had joined the parlay in the middle of the ash-strewn street were mid-level at best; Emma was sure they had no decision-making power. She thought she had caught a glimpse of Colonel Ting in the background, but if it was him, he had either ignored or not seen her.

Of more concern to Emma were the angry crowds that had been fluctuating through the streets all night. One stone thrown, she thought, and then almost laughed at herself out of exhaustion. One illegal gun, one weaponized drone, one katana unsheathed—another grim internal laugh at the horror of those optics—and the Chinese would surely claim a moral high ground. And if they said it loud enough and long enough, would anyone have the persistence to keep disputing it? When she reached that point in her reasoning, Emma set the drones that had been firefighting to surveillance, sending them swooping along the city blocks that were now effectively the front line. Hopefully that would give her a hint if something was about to escalate, but she was thinking more about documentation.

Most of the peacekeepers had regrouped at the Lawson convenience store on the corner. The shelves were unusually empty, but they were able to snag some rice balls, a bag of dried squid, and a small bottle of plum alcohol.

“Oh-ho,” Brockton said, seeing the bottle. “This is going to get sticky.”

“We’re almost off duty,” Emma said wearily. A fresh peacekeeper team was going to tap in at eight a.m.

“They’re going to stand down,” Argill predicted. “They don’t want to go to war. Can’t afford to. This is just about pushing boundaries.”

“Literally,” Emma said, remembering the drone wall. “And if we let them push those boundaries, what are they going to do next?”

Nobody had an answer, and they drank in glum silence.

• • •

When she got to the turnoff for Ochanomizu, Miyako considered just going home. She was footsore and exhausted, and it was the middle of the night. But the blaze was still reddening the western sky and the litany of affected places in her ears kept unrolling, and she knew she wasn’t going to be able to sleep anyway, so she kept going to the station.

Despite the late hour, the office was crowded, and as soon as Miyako walked in, Fukuda hurried up to her. “You’re working the Diet attack, right?”

It was meant as a conversation entry, not as a question, but Miyako clarified anyway. “The murder case related to it.” Although she supposed someone would have to be in charge of the evidence around the attack itself, even if the attackers confessed. “Yes. What about it?”

“The attackers are being held in the cells here,” Fukuda went on, still breathless with the enormity of it all as he followed her to the tea station. “And I know it was the most convenient place to bring them from the Diet but . . .”

When he had hesitated long enough, Miyako looked up from the teapot. “Well?”

“The Chinese are only a few blocks away!” Fukuda said in a rush. “What if they try to break them out?” While Miyako was still processing that idea, he plowed on. “They were conspiring with the Chinese, right?”

“I don’t know,” Miyako said. “Let’s see if we can find out.”

Interviewing fanatics was always interesting. They didn’t have the same calculus of self-protection and shiftiness as regular criminals, which wasn’t to say they didn’t have any. One of the suspects refused to say anything at all. One would only spout official party-line platitudes, occasionally mixed with some more virulent anti-foreigner sentiments that, while not approved for public speech, probably still represented their internal party policy. One, in tears, alternated babbling calls for his mother and sobbing threats to sue them for lack of treatment to his very adequately bandaged forearm wound. Miyako planned to come back to him later, when he would be hopefully calm enough to be coherent but still vulnerable.

The last one, though, was sullen and resentful with a slight edge of fear—perfect.

“Kobayashi was the leader of our party,” he announced in response to Miyako’s careful badgering. “He told us this was the way forward—the only way to achieve our objectives and save Japan! What was I supposed to do?”

Miyako was so used to aggressive male victiming that she could easily ignore it when necessary. “So why did you kill Kobayashi?”

The man’s face seemed to shrink into itself. “Kobayashi’s dead? No. No! Lying cop!”

“It’s true.” Miyako flipped open a picture of his face, carefully angled to hide the throat wound, on her sleeve. “Not just dead, but murdered.”

He blanched. “It must have been accidental—friendly fire!” He buried his face in his hands, then looked up. “Or maybe that crazy cop shot him!”

“We’re trying to figure that out,” Miyako said quietly. “What’s confusing us is that he was found not on the floor of the chamber but in the public gallery.”

“Oh, that’s easy,” the man said eagerly. “He went up there to watch.”

“To watch?” Miyako was careful to sound skeptical but not disdainful.

“To see how the fight was going, guide it if necessary.” Gloat, Miyako thought. Limit his legal culpability. “Like a general overseeing the battle!”

“But you cut the lights,” Miyako said, as if puzzled.

The man’s face became crafty. “Kobayashi-san didn’t tell many people about this, because it might have been misunderstood, but he had a minor sight augmentation that allowed him to see in the dark.”

The hypocrisy was starting to choke Miyako. The Nippon Saisei party had been particularly vocal about the supposed evils of bodymods. “We’ll check on that in the autopsy,” she said as evenly as she could, sending a message to Sato from her sleeve. “Was anyone else up there with him?”

The man looked puzzled. “In the gallery?”

“Sure,” Miyako said. “You know, like an aide-de-camp?”

“No, no. All his most trusted followers were carrying out the attack.”

So it was someone else, not directly involved in the attack, who had killed the minister. But if Kobayashi had night vision, why had he let them get close enough to cut his throat? Had he been distracted by the battle below him? Or was it someone he knew?

Before she left the cells, Miyako had another visit to make. She went back to the reception desk and asked for the holding cell numbers for the people who had been arrested on suspicion of tagging the US peacekeeper for the sniper who had killed him.

The officer at the reception desk, whose nameplate said MIURA, shook her head. “They were all released last night.”

“Last night?” Miyako gaped at her.

“Yes. Too many suspects, not enough evidence to hold them.”

“But . . .” Miyako’s exhausted brain couldn’t play out all of the implications. “The Chinese . . .”

“It was before the attack started,” Miura offered helpfully.

Miyako thanked her and walked away, thinking hard. Had Kaori made it back to the Chinese zone before the fighting started? Had she—her throat constricted painfully—been caught up in it? Or had she even tried to get home? If the Chinese hadn’t ordered the assassination, anyone suspected in participating in the frame-up was going to be in danger in their territory, even if they hadn’t truly been involved.

Surely Kaori wouldn’t have gotten involved in something like that?

Act III

Around dawn, Emma’s sleeve pinged with a message from Kensuke: Breakfast?

She stared at it for a while, trying to make sense of it. The last time she had seen him—it had only been twelve hours ago, but it felt like a week at least—he had been advocating for the false arrest of a scapegoat to placate the city. Now the city was in flames.

Maybe he had something useful to tell her.

Maybe he was sorry.

Or maybe he was just trying to stay in the loop with the US. Maybe that was all it had ever been.

Or maybe this was work. He had some information, or needed some. Just work.

Okay, she wrote back.

His reply was almost instantaneous. Where are you?

The Lawson by Yasukuni . . . Or what’s left of it, she added, and then wished she could take it back. Too much, too soon.

But maybe he thought she was talking about the Lawson (which had been further depleted by hungry crowds of onlookers and at least one clutch of polite, paying soldiers from the Chinese army), because he answered: Royal Host in Ninth Step Lower Station?

Emma was so tired, it took her a moment to stop translating the kanji individually and realize he meant Kudanshita Station. Sure, she wrote back, and turned her steps that way.

Royal Host was a “family restaurant” chain that mimicked slightly upscale US fast food in its aesthetic but with a definite Japanese twist to its menus. Banners outside advertised Melon & Granita and ROYAL omelet rice with deep fried prawn and crab cream croquette. Inside, the gleaming plastic restaurant was quiet. Emma gratefully accepted the hostess’s offer to show her to a booth: After a night of being forced to make decisions, none of which could be correct, it was a relief to relinquish agency, taste, and concern in this oasis of calm.

She sipped at the squat glass of ice water she was provided and was about to order coffee when Kensuke slid into the seat across from her. “Ohayo,” he said shortly. He looked unusually messy. His hair had lost some of its sheen, and he was wearing jeans that didn’t perfectly fit under an untucked polo.

“Hey,” Emma answered, and ran out of things she wanted to say. This was going to be awkward.

The waitress bobbed to their table, demure in an aproned uniform.

“Morning Java Curry,” Kensuke said, handing her the big plastic menu.

Emma tried not to gag. “Just coffee.”

“You need to eat.” Kensuke’s face was intense. “You don’t know what’s going to happen, when you’ll have another chance.”

He was right, but most of the shiny pictures in the menu made her nauseous. “Um . . . pancakes, please?

“Kashikomarimashita,” murmured the waitress. She asked some clarifying question too quickly and quietly for Emma to catch, but Kensuke answered and waved her away.

“Listen,” he said, leaning forward. “I appreciate what you’re doing for my country.”

Emma swallowed. That was not where she had expected this to go. “It’s not like that,” she said. “This is my job.”

“My job is to solve crimes,” Kensuke said very softly. “People still appreciate it when I do.”

Emma had to look away from the intensity of his eyes. “I’m not booking that random guy you found for the murder of my friend.” She meant it to be brutal, to be clear that his weird moment of sentiment wasn’t going to distract her, but once she said it out loud it sounded harsher than she had expected.

“I’m sorry about that.” Kensuke leaned back in his chair, finally looking away. He ran a hand through his hair, catching a moment of iridescent sheen. “I—I felt like everything was falling apart, and it seemed little enough . . . but I’m sorry.”

The waitress interrupted the silence with the arrival of their food.

Neither of them moved to eat.

“What’s it like out there?” Kensuke asked at last. His hands were jittery on the tabletop. “I wish I could be out there with you, doing something . . .”

“No, you don’t!” Again, it sounded too sharp, and Emma hoped he wouldn’t think she was trying to protect him. “They’re hoping to provoke a reaction,” she explained more quietly. “They want to be able to go to war and say you started it.”

“And what is this if not war?” Kensuke asked, then he shook his head. “No. You’re right. You know, I was thinking that perhaps the assassination was not by the Chinese, but by someone hoping to provoke you into confrontation with them. The Nippon Saisei, maybe, although—”

“Kobayashi’s dead.”

“He’s dead?” Kensuke had started eating, but that information made him pause for a moment in his rapid scooping of curry and egg into his mouth.

“That’s what Miyako said.” Emma tapped the sleeve on her forearm, bringing up open cases. “Yes, it’s logged as an unsolved murder.”

Kensuke frowned. “A lot of assassinations going on.”

“Maybe if we try to find the actual perps, it will stop instead of getting worse,” Emma snapped, and immediately felt bad. She picked up her fork and slid the perfect half-sphere of butter sitting atop her pancakes around. Without wanting to, she asked, “Any new leads on who killed Santiago?”

Kensuke scowled. “It’s only been twelve hours! Not to mention the Chinese invading my city, and you’re still thinking about one person . . .”

“And don’t you think that assassination was tied to the invasion today? If Santiago were still here . . .” Emma trailed off, her throat tight. Because if she was honest, Santiago wouldn’t have been able to change anything if he were there. They would still be stuck. “I don’t know what to do,” she admitted. “I don’t know how we can stop them without starting a war.”

“Maybe we need a war,” Kensuke said grimly. Now that he had finished eating, Emma could see that his hands were trembling.

She tried to claw her way back to optimism. “I don’t think they’re going to take over the city. They’re just posturing, trying to . . .”

Kensuke was shaking his head. “I think they are going to take it over. Maybe not in the traditional way, but . . .” He leaned forward again, voice dropping to a whisper, hands gripping the sides of the table. “I’m afraid the Nakajima-kai are aligning themselves with them.”

“What?” Emma said it too loudly, and then had to wait while the waitress refilled her coffee before he answered. It gave her time to take it in. “You really think the Nakajima-kai might work with the Chinese?”

“Well, they have been in the Chinese zone, haven’t they?” Kensuke gestured brusquely. He was angry, Emma realized; he felt betrayed by the criminals he had spent years of his career pursuing. “They know this city like no one else; they are connected to half the businesses. If they work as a conduit for the Chinese throughout the city, they’ll have their claws in everything!”

“I’ll . . . I’ll talk to Charles,” Emma promised. “Maybe we can figure out some creative kind of sanctions, or . . . or . . .”

“Maybe I should talk directly to the Nakajima-kai myself,” Kensuke muttered.

Emma was about to ask whether that was really a good idea when her sleeve beeped. “The Chinese have announced a twelve-hour unilateral cease-fire,” she reported. “But they are refusing to move the drone wall back to the agreed-upon boundaries. ASEAN is screaming about it in the UN . . . Now Russia has an opinion . . .”

Kensuke put his hand on hers. “Let them scream,” he said. “Twelve-hour cease-fire means that for us it’s time to sleep.”

• • •

Miyako went back through the list of the council members who had been present—it was nice working on a case with an attendance list, for a change—and cross-referenced for anyone with vision modification. But only two of the council members had enhancement for night vision, and neither of them looked likely: One was in his eighties, and the other, who also showed no history of violence or even exercise, was ideologically close to Kobayashi. Still, Miyako flagged him for follow-up once the situation allowed.

Because the situation at the moment was not one in which to be running around the city trying to find council members recovering from an armed attack on their workplace. Things did look better in the light of day; or, at least in the light of the Chinese cease-fire. But the drone border had moved, and nobody knew how the map of the city had changed. There were still reports coming in of Chinese troops on this side of the border, and of looting on that side of the border. Most of the department was out following up on one report or another, although Nishimura had told them to go easy on locals panicking and go cautiously with Chinese soldiers. “We may want an international incident,” he had growled in a brief video sent to everyone’s feed, “but we don’t want it to be started by the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department.”

True, someone with a flashlight—which, these days, meant anyone with a sleeve—could have attacked Kobayashi, but they would have been at a disadvantage—spotlight versus sight—and they would have had to have known he was there. Maybe one of the security guards? Miyako pulled the files of everyone on duty at the Diet building that night and then, when nothing jumped out at her, of everyone working Diet security.

From the low hum of conversation that rose and fell as people returned to and left the squad room, Miyako thought most people agreed with Nishimura’s sentiments. It was too painful for China to attack again with no retaliation, no reciprocity. Miyako had been agnostic about that silly measure condemning the US when she first heard about it, twelve hours ago. Now she was ready to sign on.

It was possible, of course, that someone unknown had been in the Diet building. Deliberations were public. There must have been journalists there! Miyako flipped open a news site on her sleeve, then another. The attack on the Diet would have been the top story on almost any other day, but as it was, she had to scroll through a lot of coverage of China’s aggression to find the names she needed. Miyako read through them carefully and sent messages to the reporters who seemed to have been writing eyewitness accounts. Most of them were probably either asleep now or reporting on China.

It was hard not to think that this might be a good time for her to sleep too. Suddenly unable to keep her eyes open, Miyako stood, swayed, and stumbled down to the data miners’ den.

She was surprised to find almost the usual complement on duty, but then she remembered it was already regular working hours and there was a cease-fire.

“Ohayo gozaimasu,” she said to the elderly woman at the counter. “I’m looking into the Diet attack—”

“They attacked the Diet, too?” The woman shook her head. “Terrible! The international community will have to do something now!”

“It wasn’t the Chinese,” Miyako said. “It was some members of the Nippon Saisei party.”

Now the woman was really shocked, her mouth dropping open and further hollowing her cheeks. “A Japanese party attacked the Diet? At a time like this when we are under attack by the Chinese? Unbelievable!”

“Well, it was before the Chinese attacked . . .” Miyako wondered if that were true. Surely the Chinese troop movements, even just across a few city blocks, must have started before she heard about it. Had Kobayashi known? Had the attacks been coordinated? It was hard to imagine the Nippon Saisei party collaborating with the Chinese, but Miyako didn’t have much faith in what politicians said in public, so she wasn’t sure. “The thing is, there was a murder during the attack . . .”

The woman was shaking her head again, muttering, “Awful, awful,” over and over.

“So I need someone to go through the surveillance cameras at the entrances and exits of the Diet building to know who was there besides the council members.”

That got the data miner’s attention. “The Diet building? Oooh, you know, they have all kinds of high-tech surveillance there.” Her whole face had brightened. “I’m sure we can do better than just images of the entrances. Let me look into it and I’ll get back to you.”

“Domo,” Miyako said with a bow, and went home to sleep.

Act IV

Miyako wrestled her way out of an uncomfortable dream to catch the last ring from her docked sleeve. The answering service kicked in: “Hi, this is Shimizu Manabu from the Yomiuri Shimbun following up on your message . . .”

One of the reporters from the Diet! Miyako dove out of bed and tapped her sleeve. “Hi, Shimizu-san, it’s Koreda,” she said, trying to sound as awake as possible. She tapped her sleeve again to turn on the recording function.

“You had some questions about the attack on the Diet?” He sounded cautious.

“We’re looking into the matter,” she said. “Mainly I wanted to find out who was present at the time of the attack besides the council members.”

There was a pause. “I don’t suppose you can share anything about why you need this information?”

“I’m going to refer you to the PR department on that,” Miyako said, attempting to sound regretful. She didn’t think any of the articles she’d read had mentioned Kobayashi’s murder, but she was several hours behind. It might be public knowledge now or it might not.

“Well,” Shimizu said, giving in. “I don’t know how much I can help you. I’m kicking myself because I had stepped out just before the attack—you know, it was right after deadline for the print edition, so I was filing from the hallway. When I heard the shots, I rushed back”— Miyako rolled her eyes; press foolhardiness was always a problem in high-profile situations—“but the doors of the council chamber were closed and I could hear shooting inside and . . .”

So he had some sense, at least. “And you didn’t go up to the public gallery?” Miyako asked, keeping her voice calm.

“I thought of that, actually,” Shimizu said, sounding pleased at his cleverness. “But then they shut off the lights, so it wouldn’t have done any good anyway.”

“Who else was there?” Miyako was using the tip of her finger to doodle on her sleeve as she listened.

“Well, the resolution was important but not important, if you know what I mean. And it was late, not that that means much anymore. But I think most of us were present. It seemed like good odds someone would say something ridiculous and quotable. Let’s see. Asahi, Mainichi, Nankai, Japan Times.”

Miyako had already messaged all of them except Nankai. She made a note. “Anyone else? Not a reporter, maybe?”

“No, I don’t think so . . . Oh wait, yeah! That creepy lady from the embassy was there.”

“Creepy lady?”

“What’s her name . . . Something yama . . . Akiyama! That’s it.”

“What embassy?”

“The US embassy, of course. She’s that translator for the liaison.”

Charles, Miyako scribbled. “And she was there?”

“I saw her leaving. She was walking away from the gallery just before the lights went out. Must have realized it wasn’t a safe place to be right then.”

“Why was she there in the first place?” Miyako asked automatically, her mind whirling. What if Kobayashi had been killed earlier than they thought?

“Well, they were debating a resolution condemning the United States. I imagine she was there to follow along and report back.”

“Probably,” Miyako agreed. Why would the US kill—assassinate?—Kobayashi? Or maybe it was personal? “Anyone else you can think of?”

“No . . . other than reporters and council members. There usually aren’t many observers at that time of night.”

“Thank you so much,” Miyako said, and hung up, then immediately called Sato.

He answered after one ring. “Did I wake you?” Miyako asked.

“No, I’m at the station. We finished up the scene around five and I got a good nap in after that.”

“Can you give me any precision on the time Kobayashi died?”

Sato exhaled through his nose. “Not too much. The Diet building is of course climate controlled, but we still have a window of ninety minutes or even two hours, really. Why?”

“I have a witness who places someone leaving the scene, but it was before the lights went out. I’m trying to figure out if they’re a viable suspect.”

“Oh? Wait a moment, let me check something.” Sato didn’t bother to put her on hold, and through the speakers on his sleeve she could hear the background clinking and chatter of the lab. “As it turns out, I can help you,” Sato said, coming back. “His vision enhancement was activated when he died.”

Miyako pondered that. “Is there any way it could have been activated if the lights were on? If he—put his hands over his eyes, say, or . . .”

“Doubtful,” Sato said. “His eyes would have had to be open, in the dark, and there’s usually a duration requirement—say, ten seconds. Sorry if that ruins your theory!”

“No, that’s good to know,” Miyako said, and closed the connection. She looked around her quiet apartment. The bed was tempting, but she turned resolutely away from it. She started rereading her interviews with the Nippon Saisei attackers, but then threw them aside in annoyance. They blamed everyone but themselves for their actions!

That thought reminded her, uncomfortably, of the man Kensuke had brought in to take the blame for the Vargas assassination. She wondered if he was still in the jail cell, forgotten in the confusion. And that case was still unsolved. Someone had to have seen something! Miyako spent some time watching all the videos she could find of the banquet to see if she could figure out who had tagged Major Vargas. Not Kaori, she was almost positive, but she couldn’t see any suspicious interactions with anyone else, either.

• • •

Emma glided into the squad room and got all the way to Miyako’s desk before realizing her partner wasn’t there.

“Higashi-san!” It was Fukuda, coming over from the other side of the room. “What’s happening? Are you pushing them back?”

Not personally, Emma thought. “We’re in discussion about getting the border back to where it was.” She tried to hit the right note between professionally competent and not raising expectations.

“Discussions?” Fukuda asked. Surprised to hear the skepticism in his tone, Emma looked up and met his eyes. She tended to think of Fukuda as a bit of a puppy, and definitely susceptible to the US’s particular brand of soft power, but at that moment he looked almost angry. Emma wondered if the whole city was balanced on the point of hating the peacekeepers.

“We’re experimenting with jamming the drones in the border wall so they can’t alert when they’re at low battery,” she said. “Then they crash, and hopefully get damaged.”

The anger was still there. “So you could have done that before? Ruined the drone border before?”

“And then what?” Emma asked. “They build a physical wall? Have checkpoints at every intersection? The drones are not the problem.”

She expected him to retort that she was the problem, but instead he nodded reluctantly and backed off.

Emma sighed and checked the time. Kensuke had set up a meeting with the Nakajima-kai for five o’clock—in the station, which he said was very unusual. It would probably have been a good idea to take a nap in the interim (there had not been a lot of sleep while she was with Kensuke), but Emma was too wired. Instead, she unrolled her sleeve on Miyako’s desk and opened the file for the Kobayashi case.

She was reading through the interview transcript when she heard a noise at her elbow and looked up, startled. It was an older woman she had seen somewhere—oh yes, one of the data miners.

“You’re Koreda-san’s partner, right?” the woman asked. “I have something for you on the Diet case.” She offered her forearm for a sleeve bump, and Emma tapped her gently, afraid to bruise the woman’s diminutive flesh. “Koreda-san asked me to check the entrance and exit cameras. These are the headshots from that, although the cameras don’t have infrared capability—silly, I know, but they must have thought they’d never run out of electricity—so the pictures from after the lights went out aren’t really usable.” The data miner rolled her eyes. “I also found some data from the atmospheric monitoring system—temperature changes, particles, chemicals.”

“Wow,” Emma said, flipping through the data, and then stopped, a wave of cold shivering over her skin. “This—” She showed the woman the paragraph she was looking at. She pointed at a chemical notation. “Isn’t that vanillin?”

“Oh . . . yes, I believe so,” the data miner answered, opening the internet to check.

“And this one?” Emma asked.

The older woman scanned it and searched. “Cardamom,” she answered. “Perhaps a perfume, or someone was drinking a special foreign tea . . .”

“Thank you,” Emma said, and headed for the door. In the stairwell she paused for a moment, then hurried to the Organized Crime Bureau.

“Kensuke,” she called, relieved to see him at his desk.

He looked up with his usual smile, or maybe a little more than usual. Emma almost groaned—how many complications could she get herself into with this guy?—but right now she was in too much of a hurry to get into it. “I have to go out for a while—”

“I hope you’ll be back for the meeting with the Nakajima-kai,” Kensuke interrupted. “I think it would be good if you could—”

“Embassy business.” Emma took a certain relish in cutting him off after his interruption. “Sorry. Miyako’s out now—can you please give her this file as soon as she gets back?” He raised his unrolled sleeve from his desk for the tap, eyes meeting hers curiously. “I ran a program flagging everyone crossing the border in the last few days with a heat signature that suggested secreted thermite and a physical profile that could have included components for a ballistic sniper weapon . . .” She shrugged uncomfortably at his expression. “This is what I used to do, you know. Anyway, there’s a list here. Tell Miyako to have Nishimura check it. He’ll know what to look for.”

Kensuke’s eyes were steady on hers, and Emma wondered if he was going to ask her whether she was giving it to him because she wanted someone else to know about it, or to keep it off the internet so no one else knew about it. Instead, he said softly, “Thank you. Better than my solution.”

Emma shook her head and rolled her eyes and left.

Act V

Kensuke intercepted Miyako in the stairwell before she got to the squad room. She sighed, feeling the weight of the past two days heavy as a winter coat on her shoulders.

“Kensuke, I don’t want to talk about that suspect or . . .” Or whatever.

He laughed, but it sounded unusually forced for him. “Your partner has already fixed that problem.” He stepped close to her and bumped his sleeve against hers. “A list of people crossing the border in the last few days, with some pretty specific parameters she came up with.” He watched her face. “She said to ask Nishimura to narrow it down more.”

“Oh, ah . . .” The resistance. Emma must think Nishimura could help them figure out who had shot Santiago by identifying who was in the resistance. Although based on their experience with the false defector, not many of them knew each other. Still, Miyako figured it was worth a try. And she had wanted to somehow express to the superintendent that she knew about his awkward position with his son and give him her support. “Okay, thanks,” she said, looking away, and continued up the stairs.

Miyako had barely stepped into the squad room before Nishimura sent her a boilerplate come-to-my-office request.

“What are you working on?” he asked abruptly when she stepped in.

“Minister Kobayashi’s murder.” Miyako realized that while she’d been logging all her case notes, she had forgotten to expressly notify him the way she normally would have for such a high-profile case.

Nishimura was frowning, but when he caught her eye, he gestured impatiently: not important. “Have you found anything further on the US assassination case?”

“There is some evidence that it was the resistance, not the Chinese,” Miyako said, and blushed, wondering if she was still under suspicion. If anything, it was more likely that Kaori worked with the resistance than with the invaders, but still . . .

“Ah,” said Nishimura thoughtfully. “The Americans must be upset about that.”

Miyako manufactured a cough to prepare him for something difficult. “Lieutenant Higashi has narrowed down a list of people who crossed the border over the past few days. She thought you might be able to narrow it further.”

The superintendent stared at her proffered forearm for a long moment.

“Of course,” Miyako said, feeling uncertain, “if this is not the right moment, I could concentrate on the Kobayashi case for a while and return to this when . . .” She had been going to say when things calm down but suddenly she wasn’t sure they would, and the words stuck in her throat.

There was a silence.

“There’s something I need to know,” Nishimura said, with a heaviness that made Miyako feel that it wouldn’t be a pleasant experience. “Koreda-san . . .”

The screen in his room erupted with a siren. “Chikusho,” Nishimura swore, the first time Miyako had ever heard him say such a thing. “They’ve attacked.” He punched the control and a vid played of a mortar falling in a tightly built-up street somewhere. “Has it been twelve hours already?”

“Where is it?” Miyako asked, her whole body tight as a fist.

“Shiodome.” They watched the chyron in silence. “A lone mortar,” Nishimura said, making an effort to sound optimistic. “They are saying it was fired by accident.”

“They are lying,” Miyako answered. She has no energy left for optimism. “They’re pushing and pushing in all these little ways, just to see what they can get away with, and they’re going to keep doing it until there’s nothing left.”

Nishimura was looking at her with something like relief. “You have no sympathies with the Chinese.”

Miyako was shocked. “Of course not! I am Japanese!”

Nishimura nodded once. “But which are you more loyal to?” he asked. “Japan or the order that we are sworn to uphold?”

Miyako didn’t understand, and then suddenly she flashed to the moment when Emma had run off to defend a country not her own while Miyako had stayed behind to solve a single murder of a despicable man. “Japan,” she said.

Nishimura nodded again, and relaxed, removing his right hand from his pocket. Miyako stared at the bulge against his hip. Had he been ready to shoot her?

“I’m glad,” he said. “You’ll work with us?”

The screen on the wall was replaying the mortar explosion over and over, and Miyako thought she could countenance almost anything to save her city.

Miyako wanted to say something qualified, like Insofar as I can or I’ll try, but in that moment she couldn’t. “What do you need?” At least that way she didn’t actually promise anything.

“We need the US to respond. We have to get the Chinese out of our territory, and to our shame, that is the only way to do it!”

“The assassination?” Miyako asked, stunned. “You killed Major Vargas?”

Nishimura looked down for the first time. “I’m not the only one making decisions,” he said. “One of our members was killed in this station. His comrades were furious. They wanted to use Higashi as the spark but . . .” Miyako blinked, unaccustomed to seeing Nishimura show any evasion. “Something had to happen.”

Miyako stared at her sleeve, the file still queued up to be transferred on a bump. “He was nice,” she said meaninglessly.

“The Chinese are blowing up our city!” Nishimura’s jaw was tight on the controlled yell. “We need to fight back!”

• • •

Emma had to wait almost two hours in the anteroom before Charles arrived back at his office, but in recompense he was in a swingingly good mood. “Come on in, come on in,” Charles said, motioning her through the door to his office.

Emma, who had seen the video of the mortar in Shiodome right before he arrived, was headachey and pissed off. “Surely there must be something you can do about all this?”

Maybe the sarcasm wasn’t clear enough, or maybe Charles was simply too hyped to hear it, because he kept talking as if she hadn’t spoken. “I’ve just come from a call with the president. It looks like we might actually get some traction here after all!”

“I thought you quit vaping,” Emma said.

Charles looked up, puzzled. “I’ve designed a special adaptation—well, I covered the mouthpiece with some fine cloth—to mitigate somewhat the harshness on my throat and lungs. And I’ve cut back quite a bit. But why do you care, anyway? Worried about my health now?” His pleased smile made Emma feel sick.

“I thought you were close with Kobayashi,” she went on, and at that Charles did freeze, just for a second. “Those guns that disappeared—they were for him, weren’t they?” Charles didn’t answer, looking away as though he wouldn’t have to answer if he didn’t look at her. “You knew about this appalling, this undemocratic attack they were planning on the Diet. What was the point? Did you get a kickback?”

Finally, Charles looked at her, fury contorting his face. “They were being too cautious! We needed someone in power here who would take a hard line!”

“We?” Emma asked. “Did you have Sa—Major Vargas killed too?”

“No, of course not!” Charles exploded with the indignation of a liar telling the truth, but he must have seen that Emma was still skeptical. “Can you imagine,” he asked, “the condemnation I’d face if it was found that I had anything to do with the death of an American service member? No matter how well I might be able to hide it”—he sneered, no doubt thinking that he would be able to hide it very well indeed—“it wouldn’t be worth the risk.”

“Then why’d you kill Kobayashi?” Emma asked. “He was doing what you wanted.”

“He did this to me!” Charles screamed it, or tried to, his voice shredding by the third word. He had to suck saliva before he went on. “He tried to kill me, just because his shipment was a little late. Due to unforeseen circumstances,” he added hoarsely. “And so cowardly, too. Hiring a gangster assassin to poison me.”

“While you personally slit his throat.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Charles whispered. “But whoever did such a thing certainly does sound like a man of decision. Exactly the right man to lead Japan in this uncertain time.”

• • •

When Miyako and Nishimura came out of his office, the squad room was empty. Everyone was out dealing with the fallout from the Chinese attack, the looting and counter-looting going on as the drone border swayed back and forth according to negotiations.

“I hope you understand,” Nishimura said softly. “I did not want to do it, but . . .”

Miyako remembered the letters Charles had shown her, the ones threatening Nishimura’s son. “Can I make you some tea, Superintendent?”

Nishimura nodded. “That would be very nice.” He turned back toward his office, but before he could go in, the door from the stairwell opened and Kensuke poked his head in, followed by a skinny man in a very good suit.

“Oh, Koreda,” Kensuke said. “I was looking—”

The man behind him stepped forward. “I was looking for you,” he said, and Miyako, who had thought herself numbed by revelations and conundrums, felt an icy trickle down her spine, because that man was Nakajima Yuma, head of the Nakajima-kai. Her eyes were drawn inevitably to the smallest finger on his right hand, which had been replaced with a pinky-sized tentacle.

But he wasn’t talking to her. He was looking at Nishimura. “Maybe it’s the end days, what do you think? In any case, it’s time for the criminals and the cops to work together.”

“What are you talking about?” Nishimura asked, stiff with anger.

“He’s talking about fighting back,” Kensuke said, his face ablaze.

“We’ve been playing with our enemy long enough,” Nakajima said. “We know many of their secrets, and they think we work only for money.” He laughed harshly. “But now we’re ready to fight. I’ll be giving the order tonight: The Nakajima-kai resists the occupiers!”

Miyako’s mind raced. Did he mean the US as well as the Chinese? How were they going to resist? The Nakajima-kai had followers all through Chinese-held territory! If they thought it through properly, maybe they could—

Nakajima was holding his hand out to Nishimura, and his gaze raked Miyako as Nishimura glared at him. “Fight with us?