a morning person. She never had been. Her choice to be a makeup minimalist had nothing to do with fashion, nor was it a personal political statement about the double standard for men’s and women’s dress codes. It simply allowed her an extra five minutes of sleep in the morning. So it was a rare thing indeed for her to be happy to have somewhere to be at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning.
But this would be a good morning, because she got to spend it with the two men she trusted most in the world. Han met her at a high-top table for two at the window of a Mister Donut that overlooked the Blind Spot. Inevitably, he’d gotten there first—she’d slapped the snooze button once too often—and thanks to his near telepathic familiarity with Mariko’s habits of mind, he’d ordered a steaming cup of coffee just as she liked it, timed so that the waitress delivered it to their table even as Mariko was walking up to the front door.
She saw Han already had a stack of yellowed notebooks on the table. Mariko had brought a few herself, tucked into the largest purse she owned. These slender booklets represented a tiny fraction of the reams of notes inscribed by Mariko’s mentor and sword master, Yamada Yasuo. Yamada-sensei had been the one to open her mind to the possibility of the paranormal. Usually Mariko didn’t go in for the X-Filesy stuff, but by now she’d accumulated too much evidence to ignore. She didn’t go in for conspiracy theories either, but it was Yamada’s notes on the Divine Wind that first put her onto Joko Daishi, even before the attempted subway bombing. She couldn’t help thinking that if only she’d read a little deeper, she could have prevented the Haneda attack.
She needed another pair of eyes roving over the notebooks, and that was why she’d drawn Han into this. She couldn’t imagine letting any other cop see this deeply into her personal life. It was all too easy to dismiss these notebooks as the ravings of a demented old man. In fact, Yamada himself had predicted just that. He’d published volumes upon volumes as a history professor, yet he’d never submitted a single article on the cryptohistory that so fascinated him. Japan’s top universities weren’t ready for cursed swords and magical masks. Neither were Japan’s police officers. Mariko was a detective; she believed only what the evidence allowed her to believe. If she ever let it slip that she’d witnessed swords that were something more than inanimate matter—swords capable of imposing their will, for lack of a better word—then funny looks at work would be the least of her worries. The boys already made stupid jokes about whether or not she should carry a gun while she was on her period. Sincere doubts about her sanity would spell the end of her career.
Han was different. He and Mariko were partners—not ex-partners but partners in spirit, and neither one of them gave a good goddamn where some camera-mugging captain decided to assign them. That was why Mariko felt she could reveal the notebooks. It was also why Han felt he could speak plainly with her, with none of the polite deflections that were the hallmark of the Japanese language. His jaw dropped the instant he saw her face, and the instant Mariko saw his reaction, she knew why he was gawking. She couldn’t believe she’d forgotten: she and Han hadn’t actually seen each other in the flesh since she got jumped. In Mariko’s case, the flesh was bruised in umpteen different colors.
“Holy shit, Mariko, what the hell happened?”
Mariko cringed at the volume of his voice. “Keep it down, will you? I told you the other day. I got hit in a fight.”
“Yeah, I saw your text, but . . . I mean, there’s getting hit and then there’s getting hit.”
“I guess this would be the latter.”
Han, still gaping at her, shook his head in disbelief. “I thought you said she hit you with her purse.”
“Yeah, well, she had something really fucking heavy in her purse.”
Mariko pulled out her phone, a newer model to replace the old flip phone she’d destroyed doing relief work at Haneda. It wasn’t top of the line, but the camera function worked well enough. The photo she showed Han wasn’t very clear, but it didn’t need to be; Han knew the demon mask by sight. “This,” Mariko said softly. “This is what she hit me with.”