“Seriously?” She punched him in the arm. “You could lose your badge for that!”
“Ow!” He laughed at her and rubbed where she’d punched him. “You make it too easy. I got it from a manager of one of the shops. She was just giving them away. Said it was the least she could do.”
“You’re an asshole, you know that?”
“Guilty as charged.”
“And that manager deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. She’s a humanitarian if ever there was one.” Mariko took a swig. It was heaven. “When did you get out here?”
“I came as soon as I heard. Took me three hours. The whole city’s on lockdown.”
“You heard a death toll?”
Han closed his eyes and nodded. “By the time I got here they were saying eighty. Then ninety. Last I heard, maybe an hour ago, it was a hundred and twelve.”
The number hit her like a punch in the mouth. She couldn’t speak. Han’s eyes pinched tight and he pressed a fist to his lips. Mariko could see he was trying not to cry. Apropos of nothing, he said, “Your mom called me.”
“Huh?”
“I’ve still got her in my phone. From when we were partners, just in case—well, you know.”
“Yeah.” Mariko fished her phone out of her pocket. It was a mangled mess, probably crushed when she put her thigh into moving something heavy. She didn’t even remember it happening. “She okay?”
“I guess. Worried sick. Said she heard from you around midnight but not since. I told her you were all right.”
“How about you?”
“Me?” Han sniffled. “Yeah, sure, I’m fine.”
He was lying. Both of them knew it, and both of them knew why. No one was fine. The whole damn city was turned upside down and Mariko felt like she was hanging on by her fingernails. The only way to hold on was to not think about what she was feeling. Han was the same way.
So he changed the subject. “They’re saying two bombs.”
“I know. The second one went off in my face.”
“No shit?”
“Yeah.”
He looked at her probingly, as if he could diagnose wounds on sight. “I’m okay,” she said. “I mean, not okay okay. I’m beat to shit and my ears are still ringing, but that’s the worst of it. I don’t suppose you happened to overhear anything from the bomb squad.”
“Nope. But I know what you’re thinking. Hexamine.”
Mariko’s skin went cold. She and Han shared the same suspicion: if the Divine Wind was responsible for this attack, they’d likely have used the same explosives used by Joko Daishi’s lieutenant, Akahata. One of the key ingredients in Akahata’s bomb was a chemical known as hexamine. If analysts found traces of it in the blast residue here, it would go a long way to corroborating Mariko and Han’s theory. But what Mariko had never thought of before, and what now had her heart racing, was that if Akahata had managed to detonate his bomb—if Mariko hadn’t stopped him a split second before he hit the trigger—that subway platform would have looked a lot like this terminal. So would Mariko. There wouldn’t have been enough left of her even to identify her through dental records.
The thought that she’d come so close to death—and a death as violent as this—gave her goose bumps and made her stomach lurch. Now just sitting here made her feel guilty. It was a stupid reason to cry, but only now did she find herself crying. She’d made it. A hundred and twelve people hadn’t, and she had. She’d never been at serious risk here. She’d faced a far greater risk facing Akahata. That was when she should have cried. But she hadn’t, and now she was, and she felt like a little girl but she couldn’t help herself.
No. As soon as the thought struck her, she refused to accept it. She turned off the waterworks. “Goddamn it,” she said, accidentally reverting to English. “I’m just tired. Give me another—” She switched back to Japanese. “Give me another swig of that Chivas.”
It wasn’t healthy, medicating herself like this, but she needed to put a little fire in her belly to keep herself from total collapse. As long as she kept working, she’d been able to suppress her exhaustion, but now that she’d stopped, she wanted nothing more than to go to sleep. If her mother had been there, she’d have said it was perfectly natural; if fourteen hours of hard labor wasn’t a good excuse for a nap, nothing was. But Yamada-sensei, her late kenjutsu instructor, would have told her exhaustion