Don’t you get that? I helped.”
She scowled at the brown cardboard box that contained her new class A’s. “This is why I don’t want that damn medal, Han. You were there when I broke into that strip club. That was criminal trespassing at best. Felony burglary as soon as I walked out the door with that printout. And that was before I fell in with the Wind. Since then . . .” She pinched her eyes shut and took a long drink. “Han, I lie awake at night listing all the crimes I committed for these people. It’s dozens. Maybe fifty, maybe a hundred. I’m too scared to write them all down.”
“Mariko—”
“We took an oath. That’s the difference between a cop and a civilian, you know? You swear an oath, and then all of a sudden you’re different. But I’m not. Not anymore. And now I don’t have the guts to open that stupid box.”
“Mariko, you are different—”
“Han, I killed a man. Not in self-defense. He was just lying there, and I killed him, and then you and I covered it up.”
He tried to put an arm around her. She shoved him away. Instantly she regretted it; jostling him shot pain through his ruined right arm. “Dammit, sorry,” she said. “You see my point, neh? We got away with it. ‘Cause of death: massive blunt force trauma.’ And now I’m supposed to accept a medal for heroism in the line of duty.”
Mariko finished her drink; Han didn’t give her a new one. “You know what the worst part is, Han? The worst part is I’ve been here before. But Fuchida was different. Akahata was different. Those guys . . . I mean, they train us to take down guys like that. But this . . . this was cold, Han.”
“Good.”
It was the last thing she expected him to say. She couldn’t even think of anything to say in response. He’d short-circuited her brain.
Han met her gaze head-on. “Why did you do it? Because he deserved it?”
“No.”
“Because you were pissed off?”
“No.”
“Okay, so you weren’t playing vigilante and you weren’t a hormone-raging PMS monster. That’s what Captain Kusama thought of you, neh? Turns out he’s full of shit.”
Mariko nodded reluctantly. “I guess.”
“No, you don’t. You know. Now tell me, what’s the real story? Why did you kill Joko Daishi?”
Mariko didn’t want to tell him about Shoji, or about psychic links and foreseeing the future. She felt too weak. Instead she said, “This is kind of hard to believe, but I know his mom. Joko Daishi’s, I mean. She’s a friend of my old sensei, Yamada.”
“Whoa. Weird.”
“You could put it that way. Anyway, I figured I owed it to her. He was her son. I mean, you saw the ME’s report. You saw the photos. How could I just leave him like that? I couldn’t do that to her.”
“So you . . .” He looked at Glorious Victory Unsought, which hung in its wall-mounted rack above her bed.
Mariko nodded somberly. She couldn’t speak. As soon as her thoughts ventured toward what happened in that tunnel she flinched away, as viscerally as if she’d touched a hot stove.
Han was dumbstruck too, at least for a while. Finally he said, “You’re amazing.”
“Huh?”
“You’re face-to-face with a guy who killed over a hundred people—a guy who tried to kill you—but you, your first response is compassion.”
Mariko hadn’t thought of it like that.
Leave it to Han to show her what was going on in her own brain. She supposed he was right. He had to be; all the evidence supported his conclusion, and Mariko believed what the evidence told her to believe. She was a detective, after all.
She was a detective. She’d never stopped being one, not even in her darkest hours—not when she was wiping her prints off a pistol and a padlock, not even when she let her friend wipe a dead man’s blood off her sword. The unnerving truth was that being a detective made her better at being a criminal. Everything she’d done for the Wind she was just as capable of doing on her own. But compassion had to count for something, didn’t it?
It did. She saw that now. Furukawa tried three times to recruit her. What tipped the balance wasn’t some new argument on his part: it was hundreds of kidnapped children.
Would she do it all over again? She didn’t want to think about that. She wasn’t afraid of a yes; she was afraid of what it might mean if the answer