ran. Some shrieked and froze stiff. Some threw themselves over Makoto’s body to shield him.
The traitorous woman took aim at Makoto’s father.
“Your weapon cannot harm me,” he said.
“I believe you,” she said, and she pulled the trigger.
Makoto’s world went dark. He could not hear his father’s voice anymore.
3
Mariko didn’t know how Tokyo International Airport came to be known simply as Haneda. She’d never actually been there, despite the fact that she’d flown in and out of the city dozens of times. She’d spent much of her childhood in Illinois, and had flown back home to see her grandparents twice a year like clockwork. But all the flights to Chicago originated out of Narita, some sixty kilometers to the northeast, so while Mariko knew Narita like the back of her hand, her first impression of Haneda was as an oily, gritty, bombed-out shell.
The centerpiece of Haneda’s Terminal 2 was a rotunda of shining blue-green glass, an iconic background dressing in any number of movies and TV shows. Now every pane was blown out, leaving only a lattice of steel window frames twisted like chicken wire. It was a gaping wound four stories tall, leaking greasy black smoke into the bright blue sky. The sight of it froze the breath in her lungs. Seeing it made it real. Tears welled in her eyes, and the only reason she forced them back was that she didn’t want Captain Kusama or Lieutenant Sakakibara to know she could be vulnerable.
She’d come in the same patrol car as Kusama and Sakakibara, plus four other officers crammed in cheek by jowl. By the time they arrived, it seemed every squad car in Tokyo was already there. Ambulances too, and fire engines, and private airport security vehicles, all forming a stroboscopic chaos of flickering lights. No one was directing traffic—everyone present had something more important to do—so between the emergency vehicles and the TV news vans, the road labeled DEPARTURES was so congested that Kusama’s squad was frozen like an insect in amber. Mariko couldn’t stand it anymore; she got out of the car and just ran the rest of the way.
As she passed by a news correspondent she overheard the woman confirming the death toll at forty. Perhaps that should have stopped Mariko in her tracks, but it didn’t. There was nothing she could do to help the dead. Somewhere there were people she could help. She was going to find them and help them, and that was all there was to it.
When she finally reached the bomb site, she was surprised by what impressed itself most deeply on her mind. Streaks of blood didn’t register for her—or rather, they did, but they didn’t strike her as out of place. Neither did the miasma of blue diesel smoke that choked her, or the rasping background chatter of walkie-talkies. Those things were normal in her line of work.
No, what drew Mariko’s attention was the abnormal. The thin layer of grit that made every footstep crunch as if on ice-encrusted snow. The bitter film clinging to the roof of her mouth—probably halon from all the exploded fire extinguishers. Here and there she saw something totally incongruous: a shoe, a can of coffee, an itinerary printed from someone’s inkjet printer. These things were completely pristine, though everything around them was in ruins. How had they come to be there? Clearly they weren’t thrown by the blast, or they’d be dusty, burned, blood-spattered, just like everything else. They didn’t fit, yet there they were.
Her senses captured all of these details, but her mind still hadn’t caught up. Her city was under attack. Someone had bombed her city. Her city, and now it wasn’t hers anymore. It was like someone had slashed her face with a knife and now she didn’t recognize herself in the mirror. Everything was familiar, yet everything was different.
She accidentally met the gaze of a wizened old man sitting silently on a suitcase, holding a wadded T-shirt to the side of his head. Blood matted his hair. On any other day, a silver-haired grandfather with a bleeding head wound would have been the sole focus of everyone in sight. Today he was just waiting where someone told him to wait.
Something about him struck Mariko as odd. She stopped where she stood, unwilling to go farther until she sorted it out, because maybe the whatever-it-was would require her attention. As Mariko stood watching him, she saw a grown woman being carried like a child, both of her legs striped