his eyes. Every moment was frozen like a film cell. He was like a little boy with a bug under his thumb, pushing slowly just to see what would happen.
If she kicked him, she’d compromise her balance, and then she’d go headfirst into the train. She couldn’t punch, couldn’t elbow, couldn’t bite him or gouge his eyes. She had no weapons left, except for Glorious Victory Unsought. The train was close enough that she could feel it hit her hair.
Yamada-sensei always taught her to keep her sword between herself and her opponent. He also told her the only response to failure was to try again. So she did. She couldn’t get her sword free, so instead she wormed her way behind it. In effect she treated it like a guardrail, putting it between herself and the train. Because of the way he’d trapped it, Joko Daishi was on the train’s side. He had her skull and her right hand totally locked down, but she was free to move everything else, so she put everything else behind Glorious Victory Unsought.
Now it wasn’t trapped. Now it was a lever.
She pushed.
The train hit his shoulder blade first. Everything after that happened much too fast for Mariko to see. He hit the train, the wall, the ceiling, bouncing like a rubber ball in a blender. Sparks flew whenever the mask struck something solid.
When the train was gone, its stroboscopic effect left with it, so Mariko was left in the dark. Soon after that, she was left in silence.
53
Mariko collapsed on the ledge and took the biggest, deepest breath of her life. She sat that way for a while, just breathing, her head lolled back against the concrete wall, legs dangling off the lip of the ledge. Let another train come, she figured. It can’t be worse than the last one.
In time she was ready to stand again, and she started walking back toward the platform where she’d left Han. She couldn’t see a damn thing, so she held Glorious Victory one-handed, letting it rest on her collarbone, while the other hand lightly brushed the wall. It dawned on her that her scalp hurt. When she prodded it her fingertips burned what they touched, then came away sticky. Joko Daishi had taken a big chunk of hair with him when he got hit.
“Ow,” she said.
“My child,” said Joko Daishi.
Mariko practically jumped out of her skin. Glorious Victory sprang to the ready, almost of its own accord. Tightening her bloody fingers around the grip, she realized he could see her and she was still blind. She probed the darkness with the tip of her sword, her back pressed flat against the wall.
“My child, please,” Joko Daishi murmured.
He sounded half dead. His words burbled in his throat. Wheezing breaths came slowly, as if passing through a slice in a piece of paper.
Mariko realized she had a light with her. After all her years with an old-school cheapo clamshell phone, it was easy to forget her new smartphone could double as a flashlight. She got it out, pointed Glorious Victory in the direction of Joko Daishi’s voice, and turned the light on.
The man in front of her was a mangled, broken, jagged, bleeding heap. He lay between the rails, crumpled like paper, his body knotted into impossible shapes. But his eyes were bright and white, blazing behind that evil mask. The mask had finally drunk its fill; every crease and furrow ran red with blood.
“Please,” he mumbled.
He should have been dead. Hell, he should have been dead ten or twelve times over. And since he wasn’t dead yet, he’d probably be a long time in dying. A long time suffering, too. It was clear from his face, from the twitches and shudders, from the sick sucking noises his body made when he breathed. Every moment was torture. If he were an animal, only a sadist would wonder whether or not to put him down.
Mariko realized she wasn’t the only one who could see that. Shoji could see it. Somehow she shared a profound connection with her son, something far stronger than blood. She knew his future. At this moment, did she see hours of agony or did she see an end? Mariko could decide that for her. She could decide right now.
I shall die by the sword. That was what Joko Daishi told her the first time they met. Shoji knew it. Furukawa knew it. If Furukawa could be believed, even Yamada-sensei knew it. He knew it well