Wearing the Cape 5: Ronin Games (32 page)

It grew. The street-mecha stumbled back as the happy little guy ballooned outward, snakelike body wrapping around the sphere. Ozma calmly stepped up and across his expanding back to join me as she told it what to do.

“Mamori.” she called to Jacky. “Hold me here?” Jacky misted over to wrap an arm around Ozma and another around me. “When you’re ready,” Ozma let me know.

I lifted again, sucking air between my teeth. My shoulder was on fire, but we rose. “Shell! Point me! Tell the Eight to stand off!”

A red marker gave me my direction as we lifted out of the construction pit, picking up speed. Little Dragon tightened his scaly grip to take the strain, horned and whiskered head pointed towards the bay.

Shell reoriented. “We need to get out of the Uraga Channel and head southwest, away from Oshima Island!”

“Got it.” Every breath made my vision swim, but I could follow Shell’s virtual target and Little Dragon was happy to be guided.

“Agent Inoue says that he’s alerting the coast. He says ‘Good luck.’”

“Good to know.” I tried to blink away visions of blast-generated tsunamis—what could happen if we were
lucky
. I couldn’t see down past the engine, but from the sides I could see as we passed over Tokyo Bay and the Aqua Line.

“Jacky, when we hit deep water take Ozma and go—I’m going to get this as far under as I can.” I could
push
the thing easily enough if I was going the way gravity wanted me to.

“No! You’ve danced with a bomb once already! That should be
your
career limit!”

“We’re past the sea wall…” Shell sang out and I angled to follow the new direction and accelerate while trying not to black out.

“Everyone will be safe!” I didn’t have
time
for this.

“Almost there…we’re past the shelf—drop!”

I stopped trying to hold the engine up and dove for the rain-swept sea: Jacky would take Ozma to safety.

Instead she
bit
me. With no warm-up I felt the bite like stinging ice before the warmth flared down my neck and over me, washing away the agony of my shoulder. I didn’t have time to draw breath or even think before she grabbed my head and put her mouth next to my ear.

“
SLEEP!
”

The last of the Three Deeds of Hikari and the Three Remarkable Ronin was saving all of Tokyo during the Yi Guo Attack. The Shrine of The Deeds built near the Kannonzaki Lighthouse and within sight of Hikari Island commemorates all of the deeds of Japan’s greatest ronin, and their festival day culminates the week when The Sword makes its four-stop return from the Chinese sister shrine in Anhui.

A History of the Brief Career of Hikari and the Three Remarkable Ronin.

I didn’t hurt anywhere, but the brush of warm blossoms on my forehead made me open my eyes. There were no blossoms; the lady whose lap I lay in gently traced her fingers across my brow.

“Good.” She smiled. “I do not think your friend meant for you to sleep forever.”

I blinked. Even looking at her from upside-down, she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She wore brilliant court robes, but although the fashion was ancient Chinese her rich dark hair hung loose and flowing, shifting in the breeze. The rising sun lay behind clouds, but she glowed brighter and warmer than even my by-now familiar dream country.

Except there was no cherry tree above us.

And I knew her; even if she wasn’t holding a baby and there was no parrot. Little Dragon lay draped contentedly across her shoulder, and I had prayed in front of her statue in the Dome’s chapel more times than I could count.

“Quan Yin!” I jerked into a sitting position, only her hand on my arm keeping me for springing to my feet. And still nothing hurt.

“Kannon, dear, in Japan. God let me borrow you for a while. Do you mind?”

The world is full of weeping. How can I go?
I should have realized: Kannon, the Goddess of Mercy, “who hears the cries of the world.”

“Yes.” She rose with infinite grace and helped me up, her smile turning merry. “I met young Kitsune here one fine morning, and tricked him into my occasional service before he realized I was more than simply a lively tree. And
you
. You were praying to your Mary of The Pagans but I heard you anyway, once Kitsune introduced us.”

She let go of my hand and, as good as I felt, I suddenly remembered my friends. I didn’t see them anywhere on the hill.

“You have slept the hours away,” Kannon said before I could ask. “And you were safe with me so they wandered. Shall we find them?”

“Is everyone…”

“You saved them. All of you saved them.” She led me down the hill.

At the base of the hill I had to stop and dip a hand in the bubbling spring. Everything was crystal clear and vibrant as it had been in my dreams, without the dreamy lassitude—my thoughts ran as clear as the water. We followed the stream down through the lower tree-covered hills to the island’s shore.

“There they are.” There was laughter in her voice as she pointed to the small building near the beach. The building looked a lot like a traditional raised wooden shrine, except that instead of walls hiding the chamber where the
shintai
, the sacred object that housed the kami, was kept, the platform sat open to the air with four posts supporting the peaked roof. It made the whole thing a kind of Japanese gazebo beside the stream where it flowed into the sea.

And it was crowded. Jacky, Ozma, Shell, and a man I didn’t recognize sat talking. Well, Jacky and Ozma were talking—Shell was teasing the gray-haired man holding the fishing pole. All of them wore breezy summer yukatas, but the older man also wore a flat-brimmed cowboy hat and smoked a stubby rolled cigarette…

“
Cutter?
”

Shell looked up. “Hope!” Using Jacky’s shoulder as leverage, she bounced to her feet and jumped off the platform. Sand flew under her feet, and I barely had time to reach up before she threw herself onto me. “You’re awake!” She squealed. “Isn’t this amazing?”

“Yes, I—” Turning my head I realized we were alone; Kannon was gone.

“Come
on
! We’ve got to tell you what’s been happening!” She grabbed the hand Kannon had held, tugging me towards everyone.

“Girl.” Cutter nodded when I joined everyone else. For a man in what looked like a fancy bathrobe he still managed to look totally cowboy.

Jacky looked almost as improbable in her yukata as Cutter did, but Ozma wore hers perfectly and looked like of course they had been invented just for her. Looking down, I finally realized that I was wearing a blue yukata of my own. With a white star-pattern, naturally.

Shell pushed me down to sit where she had been, folded her legs to squeeze between me and Cutter. “You slept for
ever
. You know it’s been days back home?” She waved a hand to vaguely indicate the Real World.

I poked her. She was
real
.

“Yeah, since I was in your head at the time I got sucked in here too. Heck, when Jacky sent you to sleep she expected just
you
to vanish. Or not, in which case she expected Ozma to turn you and herself into fashion accessories so she could get you all out of there. Instead we
all
came. Well—” She stopped smiling. “Except for Cutter. You left him stuck in the engine. And Little Dragon. He stayed with Cutter.”

“But—” I looked past Shell’s red head to make sure Cutter was still there. He took his cigar out of his mouth and chuckled.

“I’m dead, girl. Searchers found my hilt and part of my blade—Vulcan made me tough—but that’s it.”

“Searchers? What’s happened?” So Shell explained, Jacky adding details to her enthusiasm and Ozma gently correcting now and again.

It had been
three days
since our wild flight.

The zero-point engine had sunk into the Pacific and nearly buried itself in the deeps beyond the shelf before exploding and turning billions of cubic meters of seawater into superheated steam. Fortunately the wind had been blowing
east
; the instant and lethal cloud simply drifted out into the Pacific to cool, just missing Oshima Island. That was the good news.

The blast had kicked off a seven-point-eight earthquake along the east coast of Japan, caused a miniature tsunami to flood much of Sagami Bay with the seawater that had rushed to fill the void, and cracked the actual seabed. Smaller quakes continued to unsettle the Japanese islands, and it looked like there was going to be a new volcanic island appearing soon in the middle of the Sagami Sea.

The amazing thing was that, because of the kaiju alert, everyone had been sheltered or evacuating; between that and all of Defensenet’s capes, the death toll was miraculously low. But there were still deaths. There always were.

“So, does anyone know we’re alive—
mostly
alive?” I’d think about what Cutter and Little Dragon meant later. Much, much later…

“Nope. And yeah.” Shell shrugged. Her being here
and real
was just as strange. “Since the zero-point engine’s gone the interdiction field is back, but I’m still linked with quantum-me from here. Ozma’s transformation ended and cat-me has reverted back into a drone, and I used the drone’s link to Defensenet to let Agent Inoue know we’d made it. But I don’t think he’s told anyone else. Weird but true, it looks like he’s using your ‘heroic deaths’ to quietly erase all evidence he can find that might tell anyone who you really are.”

“
Why?
”

Ozma giggled, looking a lot younger than her triple-digits. “For the
story
. An epic to conjure by—Hikari, Mamori, and Kimiko, the Three Remarkable Ronin. Shell tells us there is already public talk of building a shrine for us on the Muira Peninsula, next to the Kannonzaki Lighthouse. You’ll be able to see the new volcano from there. They’ll probably name it after you.”

The look on my face had her bursting into more un-Ozmalike giggles. “Kannon told all of us the story of Tenkawa’s kitsune. Interesting people become kami all the time in Japan.”

“
Historically
, but—”

She laughed harder and I gave up.

We decided that since I was awake it was time to go
home
—and as divinely beautiful as the High Plane of Heaven was, the thought of waking up for breakfast with the parentals was positively blissful. Shell decided to stay with Cutter and explore, since her virtual-self would be waiting for me back home, too. But before we left (which according to Ozma was now as easy as leaving the godfish’s weird pocket of extrareality), I went back up the hill to see the tree. Or the goddess.

Kannon waited for me there, and I wondered if the cherry tree would be here if I returned. If I
could
return. Now that she’d shown herself, would I ever see her again?

“You’ll still be able to dream your way here,” she answered the biggest of my unasked questions. “I promise.”

“Thank you.” We sat. The sun had risen high over the string of green islands. I could see a larger mainland behind them, and wondered if my island sat in a spirit-realm analogue of the Inland Sea. I didn’t wonder very hard; watching Little Dragon chase startled seabirds was much more fun.

And I just had to know.

“How— How did Cutter and Little Dragon…”

Kannon laughed, and it was a sound I could listen to forever. “Even simple objects have their own kami. And the kami of objects animating by magic are certainly aware. Dying, Cutter followed you here. He was
your
sword, after all. Little Dragon followed the rest of you. I believe I will keep them.”

She gave me the smile that had brightened her face when I opened my eyes. “And your real question, Hope?”

I blinked, realized my face was wet and didn’t know why. “You hear the cries of the world. How can you be
happy
?”

“Oh, my dear.” Her gentle smile didn’t waver, but her eyes grew solemn and she reached up to stroke my chin. “I am happy because I also know how it ends.”

“How what ends?”

“Everything. ‘And they all lived happily ever after.’”

The warmth of her kiss on my forehead didn’t fade until I’d been home for days.