Mariko swallowed. “He hit the train. And then I did something I shouldn’t have done.”
Han studied her closely, trying to make sense of the tears welling in her eyes. Then he saw the thin trickle of blood oozing down the length of Glorious Victory Unsought. “Oh,” he said.
Mariko just nodded. She tried to speak but nothing came out.
Han nodded back. He tucked his left lapel into his right hand, which couldn’t do much other than grab onto whatever he put in it. Now that it had a good hold, his right arm could serve as its own sling. With his left hand he ripped off the tattered remains of his torn pants pocket, then reached up and cleaned the blood from Glorious Victory Unsought. He did it carefully and thoroughly. Then, rather than tossing the bloody rag aside for evidence techs to find, he stuffed it in his remaining pocket. “It’ll be all right,” he said.
“Han, I can’t ask you to—”
“You didn’t ask me for anything. You didn’t do anything you shouldn’t have done. And we don’t have to talk about this now. Let’s get you home.”
55
A week passed and life settled into what could only be called the new normal. The most mundane tasks were a part of Mariko’s life again. This included checking her e-mail, which for her ranked on par with shaving her legs: pointless, time-consuming, never the way she’d prefer to be spending her morning, but necessary because it was just what people expected you to do. This week the chore was much larger than usual. Her in-box had all the usual garbage—officer safety bulletins, policy reminders, a retirement announcement, the day’s menu from the commissary—plus seventy-five messages from individuals in the department, most of whom she’d never met, all offering congratulations.
From this she gathered that word had got out about the commendation she was to receive. The Medal of Honor was the highest award the department had to offer. The thought of it made her sick to her stomach.
Getting praise at work had never been easy for her, in either sense of easy: it was tough to come by, since most of her superiors thought of her not as a cop but as a lady cop, and it was tough to accept, because thanks to her weird self-esteem issues, she found compliments to be a form of embarrassment. She had always been her own worst critic. In this case it was especially hard to accept the accolades because she knew what she’d done to achieve them. She got into bed with the enemy. She broke the law. And now she was a rock star.
Just by virtue of taking place in public, the shootout in Kikuchi Park was automatically on YouTube. A couple of videos showed Mariko hauling ass on her commandeered motorcycle. Inevitably, her sister, Saori, found all of them and sent links to everyone she knew. But the clip that went viral was a ten-second snippet that some brainless little prick at Japan Railways pirated from their security feed. His title: COP OUTRUNS SPEEDING TRAIN AND CHOPS IMPOSSIBLY SMALL CHAIN IN HALF WITH GIANT SAMURAI SWORD.
Mariko objected on numerous counts. She didn’t outrun the train, she’d only caught up to it. And it wasn’t speeding either; at best it was speeding up. She had to concede the point about the five-centimeter chain and the odachi, but it would have been nice of the guy to call the TMPD and ask for her permission before royally fucking up any chance she’d ever have at working undercover again. That stupid video collected eighty thousand hits on its first day.
After that, Mariko could hardly blame Saori for pinning it to the top of her Facebook page. She begged Saori to change her status, and Saori complied, though not in the way Mariko had hoped. She deleted “My sister is a superhero!” as requested, only to replace it with “My sister is a Jedi Knight!”
Mariko wasn’t in the mood for high fives, though she had to admit she’d played a big part in a big win. Of 1,290 kidnapped children, 1,284 were returned safely to their homes. Six died in their sleep, the result of an overdose of whatever Joko Daishi concocted to put them under. It was a common risk with anesthesia of any kind, which was why people had to go to school for anesthesiology in the first place. The most callous news analysts said six out of thirteen hundred was statistically quite good; the number