Chapter 2-7: Arson and Grand Theft
- Pronouns
- She/Her
The Monochrome Girl frets as she walks through the streets of Tokyo. She's not sure of these clothes, and the package on her back is heavy. They're stylish, sure, but how does the woman she's pretending to be ever do missions in them without messing them up? She doesn't know. With a wig as well it's a double nightmare.
It doesn't help her senses are dulled right now, pulled down with only a thin layer of plastic between them and the full fury of the world outside. Kasumigaseki, the centre of Japan's civil service rising around her in boxy concrete, architectural styles of a better era, before the lost decade became thirty years.
The back door of the target building is locked of course. She pulls out the pick gun and screwdriver from her kit, inserts them and pumps the trigger. The door opens smoothly first try.
Someone less experienced than her, a veteran for all that it'll still be a year before she can legally drink, might look both ways or make other furtive motion that'd give away she shouldn't be here, but she doesn't. She walks in and locks the door, stepping into the busy office space at the back of an office block. Some workers look at her as she passes but she pays them no heed, walking straight to the elevator and hitting the up button. Two suited men come in on the second floor, having a loud conversation about emerging markets, then grow quieter and more curious as they see the girl.
"Hey." One says, turning towards her. "Who are you exactly?"
The Monochrome Girl pulls the gun out of her bag and shows it to them. It's a boxy black automatic pistol, the same polymer framed Belgium designed, US made gun that won the US army's pistol replacement program before war aborted the desire to spend resources on something as marginal as a replacement automatic pistol. She sees the two men's eyes widen, and readies herself for the dim possibility space in which one of them makes a move. "Next time the doors open, you should get out."
"Y-yes." The older of the two says. "Alright."
The door opens again and a gaggle of office ladies, laughing about something, make to step in. Their laughter dies at the expression on the men's faces, then they see the girl, and the gun and back up fast.
The doors close and the girl rides up to the top floor.
She's done enough play acting, and there won't be any more people stepping into the left for a while. It's been made clear to her that she doesn't need to worry too much about what she's doing standing up to close scrutiny. Investigators will want to believe in the fiction that she is spinning.
She pulls the googles out of her bag, closes her eyes and removes her glasses, then slots the familiar high-technology over her head. It only takes a moment to boot up and then she opens her eyes and lets her power fully flower.
Security will be waiting for her on the executive floor. She can trace the line of it. She know she's armed but will meet her anyway, with mancatchers and bravery, for the honour of the company. Their boss is an ex-cop, ex-riot police unit, frustrated, willing to spend his men's lives. The girl tucks the gun back into her bag and pulls out another weapon, a long, weighted cord.
The door pings and the security men waiting beyond tense. They're standing in a group behind two mancatchers in the open plan executive office at the top of the building, where the company chairman and his many secretaries and minions stay. Outriders stand at either side of the door. They think they have the advantage here. They'll grab this terrorist girl as soon as the door opens. There's nothing for her to dodge behind when they rush. They're not prepared for a long metallic weight on the end of the rope to whip out of the lift before the door is even open and break the mouth of their commander as he starts to yell an order. He's knocked down as if he ran into a door. For a fatal instant, his troops hesitate, mancatchers raised but uncertain, waiting for the signal that won't come, glancing back. What? Is that? Did she?
She steps out of the elevator and her rope weapon whips around, impossibly gracefully. The kind of grace that comes from considered knowledge of where each movement will put it. She controls it from the middle, both weighted ends slamming into the softer parts of security men. She spins, pushes forward, and the left side of the rope snaps around the legs of two dazed security troops, pulling them together. They trip, trussed. The other end plays out, slamming into one face after another after another, until they're all on the floor in a shocked, bloody tangle.
The leader staggers to his feet, clutching his mouth. The Monochrome Girl drops the rope and pulls out her FN, levels it at his face. A few seconds ago, before his defeat, he might have charged her, trying for the gun, or to let one of his fellows get it. Now the pain and shock have made the weapon real, and he freezes, eyes wide.
She keeps it on him for a long moment then snaps it up to the ceiling and fires once. The security men and the watching executives and secretaries wince from the detonation. "Everyone out." She says. "Use both elevators."
They run, scramble into the lifts, the security men dragging their downed colleges. The girl ignores them and unwraps the package on her back. She wanted to carry the weapon in fully assembled but at one point four meters, the big american made sniper rifle is too conspicuous. She's practiced the rapid motions needed to put the gun in firing order a lot since he got this mission. First the barrel, then the bipod, and finally the high tech binocular sight fits on the top.
A USB cable links the sight with her goggles. A good picture. She unplugs the cord again, aims her pistol and blows out one of the big plate glass windows on the side of the office overlooking the Central Common Government Office. There's a wash of pressure and papers jerk and twitch in the high altitude wind. She plugs back in, braces the gun on its bipod and takes careful aim.
The longest range sniper kill in history was made by a Canadian special forces soldier during the first Iraqi civil war using just this kind of rifle. That was around three thousand meters. It's a record that will probably be broken soon, given the chaos and war that now engulfs so much of the world, but for now it's a good guide.
She doesn't want to attempt something so ridiculous. The shot she's making is ridiculous enough. She lies down on her stomach with the rifle braced on her shoulder and takes aim at the building, then accesses the camera feeds inside.
The target has just got in, already through security and up to an office in the building's middle floors. She keeps the gun safed and waits patiently as the target moves into the office. Everything is unfolding as she has foreseen.
Her target steps into an office marked as belonging to the head of public safety's special section. He walks over to the desk, checks the in tray, then jerks in surprise as another man steps out of the shadows. The Monochrome Girl wishes she could find out what they were saying. Ah well. It probably doesn't matter.
The Monochrome Girl calculates briefly with the help of the sights and her goggles, local weather information scrolling down one side as the ballistic computer works, then centres the target and fires.
The 12.7mm round penetrates through the window of the government office cleanly. It continues easily through several internal walls, through a cubical, through the coffee cup of an office worker raising it to his lips, and then strikes the public safety director in the neck. The round decapitates him cleanly, blowing out his neck parasite as well and splatters him over the wall.
The other man snaps around in a combat stance, something hissing around him, then fades out of view. Another mage. She isn't quite sure why they chose to remove their own piece from the board rather than his kidnapper but it's not a big deal to her. She knows exactly what they had on the public safety special section head, and is glad enough to be able to push hot metal through him.
Below there is the sound of sirens. Dozen of police vehicles are drawing up, hundreds of police rushing into the building. Time to go. She stows the gun on her back, then walks to the window, aims her grapple and fires, then ziplines down towards the next building. Professional that she is, she already has her exfiltration route set out.
I hear Junya's abort code, the anger in his voice and my stomach drops out. We've got all three compliance agents, ziptied, blindfolded and bagged in the back of the van. We're out, way to far out to do anything. To even know what happened yet. All there is Junya's tightly controlled anger on the tactical net.
"Magenta. Magenta. Magenta." That means he's aborted both the primary and secondary extraction points. He's headed for a rally area streets away. What happened.
"Nozomi," Manako has a laptop open, "look at this."
Breaking news. Shots fired in Kasumigaseki. Public Safety Official killed.
It's that last line that makes me realize we were set up. There's no way the press would have that unless the police wanted them to have it. Someone killed the target and is going to blame us for it.
Sorry Aratani. I guess you were wrong.
I need to think of a new plan. I need to think. I need to get there and actually be able to affect the situation.
I open my mouth to say "Take us to Kasumigaseki." Then I feel something. A feeling across my eyes as if I really need to blink. For an instant I try to deny it, try to tough it out, and then my body begins to jerk around. I feel something incredibly awful happening in the deepest parts of myself. Manako is holding me and calling my name. I'm falling back into darkness.
And then in the darkness I see Reijou, glowing with light as her hand touches my forehead.
I blink, then sit upright, ready to grab something coming at me and wrestle it. No monsters present. A familiar ceiling.
I'm at home, in bed. Wearing a silk nightgown. Manako is sitting in an armchair, still in tactical gear over her sweeter, a rifle sitting at her side. I'm not connected to any monitors which must be good. However my teacher is sitting on the balcony, which is bad.
I get up, cautious not to meet Manako, pull on a robe and go to sit next to Kondo-san.
"If you're here I must be in trouble."
"Perhaps not as bad as you think. According to your doctor, that young exorcist girl managed to prevent most of the soul drain you experience." He pours me out a cup of tea, then offers me the pot and I return the favour. "But you're being framed for the murder of a public safety official."
"What did you do with those three compliance guys who tried to jump me?"
"They're alive, but no longer a concern." He takes a swallow of tea. "I've already told Compliance and my Japanese state contacts that you were with me at the time of the murder, and provided proof. False of course, but nothing that they can disprove. They'll still be a hearing however."
"Thanks." I look down at the central garden below. It's peaceful. I wonder if their's a hunter now. Probably. "What do I owe for these services?"
He thinks for a long time. "For now, nothing, save your continued retrieval of dangerous knowledge."
I look over at him, a little surprised. This is a major favour he's done me, something that would usually require reciprocity. Then I understand. "You're not saving me. You're saving her."
He looks back at Manako, her head cocked against the chair, mouth open in the innocence of sleep, and smiles a little sadly. "I need a student Nozomi. Someone to assist me in my work not just today but over decades to come. I'm truly sorry that it might not be you."
I shake my head, a kind of pleasant sadness settling over me. That particular melancholy savor, the kind of defeat that makes you smile. "It's alright. She's a rare talent. I didn't really expect it either. She deserves a long life and a good tutor."
"You might not give her the first, but it seems that you are the second." He gives me a look. "You'd better keep her safe."
"I'll guard her with my life." I rub my eyes. "I might take her out of the country. This has gone completely wrong. I don't think I can pull it back."
"That I leave to you." He raises, then looks at me seriously. "Just be careful Nozomi. The Aratani boy has dropped you into a particularly dangerous situation."
"I know."
There's a pop of air and he's gone. Manako's eyes open and she makes a jerky grab for the rifle, then relaxes. "Nozomi, you're awake."
"Come out and sit with--" I get that much out before she's in my arms, the magazines on the outside of the tactical vest cold against me through the silk robe and the nightdress beneath. She kisses me hard, tilting my chin as she pushes forward, her lips pressing against mine like she was afraid I'll vanish away. After a few precious moments I tilt my head back, pressing my forehead against hers and into her eyes. They're brown, and very big, joyful and afraid. At my back, her arms are warm through sweater and gloves, hooked around me. She smells of cordite and sweat, and I don't mind at all.
"I dreamed you were awake." She says. I know that feeling. The awfulness of dreams of hope. "I needed to know this was real."
"What's got into you? You've seen me have a seizure before." I keep my gaze level, resting my hands on her shoulders
"You've never fainted before! That second year reached into you and did something. Maybe struck down the Hunter. I thought she'd hurt you." Her arms press tighter into my back, hooked just beneath my ribs, hearth's embers on a cold morning. She ducks her head closer into me, almost muffling her next words as my arms rest limp where they are. I don't know what to do. "She hurt herself to. The doctor says she's still fragile from what she did a few nights ago."
"Is she okay?"
"She's awake. The Doctor and that hot tailor told her not to do anything risky."
"So you do like guys as well. I did wonder."
Manako pouts a little. "I like you more."
I'm the one that leans in this time, a swift brush against her pout, before pressing forward, deeper until she suddenly pulls back until the back of her neck presses against my interlocked palms. She swallows, opens her mouth, before shutting it and swallowing again. When she speaks, it's a whisper. "Are we-- Have we -- Have we lost?"
I don't answer right away and she continues to speak, urgent. "Everyone thinks we have. The prosecutor phoned someone and shouted at them. The Cop is just silent. The tailor and that gangster with him have been together trying to figure out what to do. Is it that bad?"
"A high ranking public safety official was assassinated and they're blaming us for it. They can't prove it but they'll be gunning for us now. Maybe not Reijou, the exorcists will protect her. Junya, I suppose has his own protection, but you and me…" I move forward, shifting so she's sitting further on my lap, and make to kiss her again, but she looks at me and I stop, searching for anything else to speak about. "Have you ever wanted to just travel, just the two of us?"
"But what about my Uncle? What about the girls getting kidnapped?"
I'm silent for a long while, gently embracing Manako.
"I don't know. I don't know how to do anything." My voice shudders as I speak, and my tongue tastes saline. Am I crying? How weak. I take a long breath, try to get myself under control.
Manako's arms squeeze tight again as she shuffles closer, pressing my head into the crook of her neck. "Shhh." she says.
I enjoy the faint smell of her hair for a moment, but the words bubble up, pulling me away from her. "Aratani set me up for this. He knew things like this would happen and he staked me out to save his reputation. Just set me out to do his dirty work. Now I've put you in--"
I don't realise she's kissing me until I try to speak more and can't. Her lips are wet, and taste salty. Is she crying too? "Just stop." She's trembling as my hands move down her sides, slow tremors like ripples in a pool. She kisses me again, softer, pulling away after a second. . "Stop talking."
She leans in again, but this time we only hug, each of us desperate, her hands tight around my shoulders as I grip onto her waist fiercely. I couldn't say how long we hold each other, but eventually I shift, one of my legs going numb from her weight. The motion drives the top of one of the magazines into my ribs, and I yelp at the cold and sharpness. Manako flinches backwards, almost standing up. Her face is tear-stained and her hair a tangled mess, but. I've never seen anyone so beautiful. We speak at almost the same moment.. "Are you--"
"Can I --"
I lick my lips, compose myself a bit "Can I take your vest off?"
She blushes, suddenly shy, then I see her eyes widen and she laughs, a tremulous thing. "I thought you were, I thought you were asking for something else."
I stand up and begin to undo the vest. She begins to help and I kiss her again. We fumble blindly with the vest, spinning in place as we breathlessly kiss, a furious urge that burns away my melancholy. It finally comes free, and I toss it blindly away, ignoring the muted thump as it lands.
I reach up, my hand slipping into the curve of her throat, and step into her, my thigh slipping between hers. Manako's breathing deepens as she pulls me back down into the armchair. I press forward, feeling the fabric of her jeans up against my bar leg. My mouth slips from her own and I start tracing her jawline with my mouth, nibbling lightly at the flesh at the junction of her neck, the action producing a breathy sound that liquifies something inside me. I nip at her earlobe, pressing harder into her as my hands trace meaningless patterns in the small of her back, then move back to her lips and--
The armchair overbalances, tipping the two of us out of it, sprawling in a heap of limbs across it's back and the floor. I try to stabilize with my hand and feel my hand slide on Manako's vest, which goes forward, under the balcony rail. There's a metallic sound as plate carrier, plate, tools, most of a battle load of ammunition and hundred thousand yen encrypted personal radio drop three stories.
We both stop, stunned, as the echoes die away.
"House." I mutter belatedly. "Catch that." Manako starts to laugh. A moment later I join her. Laughing so hard I almost start to cry again. I roll to the side so we're side by side on the back of the armchair.
There's a lot of things I should say to Manako. About us, about mage society. The expectations that mages have about the world and how those aren't the same as the ones of normal people. It feels somehow more desperate than half the fights I get into. "That's the second time we've had an almost."
"Mm."
"I keep thinking I should try to talk to you about things." I look up at the ceiling. "Like, Mages don't date the way humans do. What's normal just isn't the same."
"Like how?" She looks over at me, rolling so we're side by side on the soft upholstery of the armchair.
"Like, it's pretty weird for a mage to only have one romantic partner. You have a husband or a wife, but you have, well, others."
"Do you have someone else?"
"No!" I look over at her quickly. "I'd never have done that without asking you first."
She rolls over so we're face to face. "Then, why don't we just leave that question until you find someone else you like?"
There's a kind of commitment that, a commitment that, if I find someone else, I have to let Manako be able to hurt me in the aftermath. But then, haven't I made that commitment already, in a thousand different ways?
"Do you want to take a shower?" I mutter into her hair.
"Yes."
It's at that point I think that it hits me.
What happens to middle class girls who look like they might not make their highschool exam?
They get tutored.
I get dressed before I go down, thinking out the angles of it. I don't know that what I figured out is true yet. I make most of my outfit black today, black top, fancy black skirt, white shirt poking out of the top. White thigh highs with mystic symbols stitched into them in black and red thread.
Yoshitaka is sitting at the kitchen counter table and drinking my booze. There's a mostly empty bottle of Arran Robert Burns Single Malt Scotch next to her. Something I brought back from a trip to England. Her cheeks are flush and she's kind of leaning over the table. "You got no right to complain!" She says when she sees me. "A girl your age shouldn't even have booze." She knocks back another shot.
I'm not really worried. I actually have another three bottles in the cellar. I'm more annoyed.
"How drunk are you?" I sit on the hight chair opposite her, and reclaim the bottle. She watches it go with a sigh.
"Not drunk enough." She rubs her eyes. "Tanigawa is talking about taking her niece and fleeing the country. I don't know where we could possibly go they won't find us. I never thought, I never thought they'd just kill one of their own like that."
"Did you ever get the information about the kidnapped girls we were talking about?"
"No." She rubs her eyes. "Or not enough to be useful. I was looking through the transcripts when my memory cuts out. I remember that a bunch of them were like you said, low achievers in middle school, but got into a good highschool."
"I've got an idea maybe, about how they're selected. I'm just not sure how to check it out."
She looks at me then at the bottle."Okay I'm definitely too drunk for this. Can you do something about that?"
I go to the fridge, pull out a set of injectors and tap my wrist. "How your arm out." She does and I apply the injector. There's a hiss of gas and she shivers, eyes clearing.
"That's awful."
"Just make sure to drink some water as well. The alcohol will still dehydrate you. You can still get a hangover."
"Great." She goes to the tap, pours herself a tumbler and then returns. "So what have you got?"
"Tutoring company." I say. "It's got to be. Making some kind of assessment of them in the process of tutoring. Either they were trying to create a reserve for their supply of foreign girls, or they were field testing assessment."
"So we just ask your friend who tutored her, and we're back in business." Yoshitaka shakes her head.
"We don't even need to phone my friend. I remember who they were. They had a weird name. It was Porphyrion." I had thought it was funny in middle school. It having an Greek name. An obscure mythological reference.
"I suppose it'd be too much to expect them to have a facility on their records where they could care for dozens of kidnap victims."
"We're probably going to have to wait for them to kidnap someone else than then follow them." I rub my eyes. "The first thing we're going to need to do though is figure out who met the criteria for their assessment."
Porphyrion's offices are kind of out of the way, a nondescript pair of office block in Nerima overlooked by a bunch of high apartment buildings. There are actually two of them, the assessment centre and the administrative offices.
The big problem is going to come if they've purged their own records to an offsite location. Which, if they're as slick as they've been so far, they will have.
However, while I'm not actually a hacker, I'm relatively confident that I can at least figure out where they sent the data, assuming they didn't get really clever, pack it onto a hard drive and send it off via courier. Even if they did do that though, that requires somebody at the building they're leaving to know where the stuff went. That assumes of course there's no paper records, which will be even harder to move.
Junya and Reijou are out. Both insist they'll be back if we have a clear target, but for now Reijou's organization wants her as far away from me as possible. Junya in the meantime has a rush job in Ginza. "It's probably a diversion to get me away from you, but it's not something I can ignore."
"Do you need any help?"
"Nah." He waved. "Just get your own problems sorted."
"You too."
So it's just Manako, Tanigawa, Yoshitaka, and me, with a few hired Yakuza for seasoning. We spent the rest of the day assessing the complex. Both Manako and I called in sick from school, which is going to raise questions with her parents if they find out, but seems like the only safe option. Besides but we needed all four of us working flat out to to do the proper assessment. things get any worse. I put Manako on drone observation of the complex, while Yoshitaka, Tanigawa and I set about compromising an employee and gathering other human intelligence.
Most of the day is spent with us furtively hitting up our contacts to see about getting more than the city hall floor plans. We get a good hit about six, when one of Yoshitaka's street level informers comes through with a janitor with a serious hostess club habit who ended up borrowing a bunch of money from the Yakuza.
A few calls and a suitcase of money later and we've got a good read on precisely where the paper record room and the server room are.
We're in luck in that they're all stored in the administrative block. Apparently there's some level of tight security about bringing them over from the less secure test centre every night, which the janitor has to do. We briefly discuss a plan to have him abscond with the packet on the way across but scotch it as we don't know if he has the records we want. In turn, the janitor leads us to a security man recently transferred to a post he didn't want for drunkenness. He proves easy to crack and we get an idea of the night security. There's a code pad check in system, but the guard tells us that it's mostly kept in the security room, due to daily changes.
"Do you think this is a trap?" Tanigawa asks as we sit around with the annotated plans spread out over my dining table, its edges weighed down with coffee cups and plates of mostly eaten cakes. Manako is sitting with her but Yoshitaka is still out, checking with her contacts in the police in the state of play within public safety. "Security is nominally tight, but this isn't something that would stop you on your own is it?
"No. I could get into a building like this without anyone noticing at all." I slump back in my chair. It's a bleak thing to think after a day of planning and investigation but the security just feels too light. Too normal. That means there's a surprise in there, almost certainly.
"And if they realize we took the records, they'll shift their focus and target in a different way. People from down whatever list they're using." Manako says. "This feels hopeless."
I tap my fingers on the map and think. "Wait a moment. I have an idea."
Detective Yoshitaka doesn't like the guy she's driving with. She doesn't like the suit I gave her either. "I look like a hostess" she complained when I gave it to her.
"The point is that you don't look like a cop."
Her driver is a Yakuza, though not a particularly obvious one, Eiji-san, Ryuta's trusted lieutenant. Is to old and fat to really look the part when he puts on a normal suit that hides his tattoos. The approach to Ryuta was honestly the most agonizing thing today. I was sure he was going to be compromised and get us into a fight, but he wasn't and it was embarrassing. Hopefully this means they don't have that many more frog throats, so can't compromise people other than through a normal chain of command.
I doubt it though. I suspect they'll have a few more in reserve. However they probably suspect, accurately, that I've laid some traps in case they try to come after any of my other friends. Ryuta though, they could have got. He likes his privacy too much, and knows my capacities to well to have let me know his life well enough to lay anything good.
I watch the car passing along below from a number of screens. I've got a pair of drones up, and a compromised traffic camera, plus a few web cams laid during earlier ground reconnaissance. One of those is watching Manako specifically, sat on the ground sheet at the window of an empty apartment, covering the car with a huge .50 cal rifle. The rifle is the same one used by Canadian special forces, and Manako proudly told me that it holds the record for one of the longest ranged sniper kills in history. The advanced scope on the top is made by an American civilian company and automatically adjusts for target movement and even wind.
I won't find out for a while how much of an irony the choice of weapon is.
The longest part of operational prep was spending an hour making sure of all the various runes we'd sprayed onto it before either Manako or Tanigawa were willing to fire it in the busy streets of a Nerima evening.
"We're coming up on the initial point now. Can you see us?"
"I see you." I report.
"Eyes on." Manako says. She's switched over to a pair of binoculars, then drifts to look at the building. "There's not much going on at the target. A guy just took the trash out."
"Alright. Eji-san, start your run now."
The car, a silver toyota pulls along the street slowly. On the drone feed I see the man putting the trash turn to watch it, then his eyes widen as the window lowers and Yoshitaka raises the grenade launcher she's been keeping between her legs. The first round is smoke, to let her measure her aim, the second is an incendiary round the smacks through a ground floor window.
"Got it!"
Eiji punches the car forward, accelerating away in a scream of tires. The man outside is speaking into a radio. Indeed, the whole building has lit up with radio and phone transmissions.
I hit the second part of the plan and there's a distant boom. Part of the street jumps as the fiberoptic serving the office's internet connection.
The singular insight I had for this is that we don't actually need to take the records. If we render them unusable then the entity breaks out anyway. It's not optimal, because it ends up with a bunch of prominent people hatching cosmic horrors, but that's something for Aratani and my enemies to care about more than I do.
Or at least. I can make my enemies think that I don't care. Think that I'm willing to take the win that is hurting them, rather than the win that comes from actually doing something about the horror's they've summoned to remake the world. They probably have backups, but logically this should cause them to displace their records, and hopefully make it easier for me to get at them without walking into whatever trap they've laid.
Eiji and Yoshitaka's car zooms away, visible on the drone, making its pre-planned escape route. There are Tokyo police area cars looking for them, and several police drones up, but so far the route looks like it's been successful, especially with our own drone overflight.. I hand that job over to Tanigawa as Manako speaks up.
"Fire trucks are arriving now. There's a pair of armoured van as well. I see two fat guys, they might be frog throats."
There's a lot of milling around going on on the street, but they seem to have a procedure. A ladder is already up against the building and as water is sprayed into the lower floor, men in fire fighting suits who jumped from the van are already swarming up it. A few moments later they throw the first strong box down the ladder to the men waiting below. The boxes go into the armoured vans one after another, then the fire suited men go with them.
The two vans pulls away into the traffic as the fire fighters start to address the blaze in earnest. At the end of the street they split, and a pair of police vehicles fall in with them for escort.
"They're not stupid." Tanigawa sighs. "How do we know which one is carrying the real records?"
I don't have a good idea. "Let's just keep watching for now."
They're not, I think, quite used to the idea of drone observation being a thing. At least, there's no precautions taken to do in the quad copters. Still, for now they're just in transit, "M, stay in position to make sure they don't start pulling more boxes out and taking them elsewhere. Y, what's your status?"
"We've proceed as planned and we're outbound, no sign of pursuit." The launcher dumped down a storm drain, clothes changed, fresh car. They'll be police checkpoints soon after that kind of grenade attack. We'll wait them out.
"Looks like the escort dumped one of the trucks."
I look over at the image of the second truck. The police vehicle is diverging away. "Huh."
"I guess it's the other one."
"No." I consider. "No, I think it's that one." After all, if you're running a kidnapping ring, what would you want less than the police knowing where your records are? Corruption only goes so far.
I hope I'm right, because the first van stops at a place much harder to raid. A busy night office in Shinjuku, with a lot of visible security, including police. Meantime the other van doesn't go so far, another quiet Nerima office complex. It looks dead quiet as the men start to unload the truck. Dead quiet except for a fat man in a cheap suit watching as they unload. A woman who looks like a college girl waiting with him.
"That can't be--" Manako blurts. She's been watching the feed. "He died! He turned into a monster and I shot him!"
"I guess death isn't the end for creatures like him." Explains why they're willing to attach eldritch throat cancers to themselves. "I'm heading that way."
I get up from the booth in a station cafe I've been sitting at and head for Nerima.
There are tons of police around. Police and onlookers. The firebombing has made a splash, both on social media and in the normal news. Groups of police are everywhere, looking for people and checking IDs. The news is already worrying we're turning into America. A commentator is talking about the esper program.
In a way it makes it easier.There's a lot less going on in the back streets around the office.
I'm wearing a black hoodie, a rain cloak, shorts and black leggings under it's actually still quite cold. Runes are woven into the hoodie in white that make the eyes slide off it, and I have a dark blue scarf to cover my face. It's not quite truth invisibility, but it's a lot less visible to mages. If it was just fashion I'd use red, but don't want to look too much like one of the American rebellion's super soldiers.
I check it from across the street, then begin to climb up to building top level, staying low and careful not to skyline myself. "I'm at the target. Going radio silent. I'll double click when I'm about to make entry."
They're being fairly quiet about it, the blinds drawn but the lights are on. Some covert scrying shows me the capture team from earlier are set up in a lounge in the second floor, chatting with several dozen Yakuza, whose office this may actually be. The voice shit they're doing is an absolutely terrifying power. A room over, several tech types are setting up laptops, communications and so on. Looks like I hit the jackpot. Or just a secondary command centre that's a trap. I won't know until I make entry.
I circle the building slowly. The drone is pulled back now. I don't want to tip anyone inside. There's are two look outs on the roof. They're probably supposed to be covering both angles but they keep congregating together and smoking. Gangsters can be pretty lazy. I use my thermal monocular to check that there's not someone without a cigarette trying to fake me out by covering the far side. Nope.
Initial check done, I find place to wait, roof of a building a little way along the street. sitting back in the shadows and wrapping them around me with a simple enchantment. Invisibility is hard but using shadows is easy. I put my headphones on and put on the podcast I cued up.
With any luck it'll rain.
By three AM the building seems to be mostly still. There's still two lookouts on the roof. New guys after a shift change a few hours ago. Most of the other Yakuza, techs and guards are asleep or have left in a gaggle. The fat man left a while later, while the female mage took the Yakuza boss, who's actually quite handsome, up to the third floor. She seems likely to be distracted for a while.
Rain is coming down steadily now and the two cigarettes on the roof are standing together under an umbrella. They seem to prefer the front of the building, maybe it's a more interesting view.
I work my way down from my perch and then turn off the podcast and hang my headphones around my neck, and insert the earpiece for my radio in one ear. Then I move in along the alley at the back of the building, mount the fence silently and begin to climb up the back.
The rain is coming down hard, but a small amount of Crawley effect applies to my hands makes getting up easily. I get to the second floor and hang their for a moment, listening at the window. Snoring inside, the sound of active computers.
I hang their for a moment more in the rain, thinking how much I love this. As fun as it's been working with others there's something uniquely satisfying about this lonely sneak. I sketch a rune on the window lock and it pops open silently, then slide it over.
The tech is of course, sleeping on a sofa right under the window. Water and cold air hits him and he starts to wake up, then I whisper a word of sleep in his ear and he turns over and begins to snore again.
The water is a problem. I fetch a towel from my kit and dry my boots off, then shrug off my rain coat and ball it up with the towel, letting both drop away into the dark. I'll get wet on the way out but it's better than revealing my presence. Only then do I tug the window shut, double click my radio and climb over the sleeping tech to check the room.
It seems like the plan to occupy the building with a pile of guys all night has been mostly undone by lack of sofas. The office itself is a pretty typical open plan with half height cubical desks affair, that wouldn't look out of place for anything from a law office to an anime studio, but there's only one sofa in here. A second man is sleeping under one of the desks in a sleeping bag. I go over and whisper a word of sleep to him as well, keeping him out, then go check the door. There's a couple of Yakuza outside sat in office chairs and talking about some girl at a local club. No problem.
I walk over to one of the laptops, which is plugged into a rack of hard drives and jack into it. There's some basic anti-esper countermeasures, but while I'm not exactly the world's best hacker, I know enough to rapidly cut through with magic.
Access files. Bingo. Dozens of educational files. Myers-Briggs type profile. Probably not that. IQ tests, a few other normal educational tests. Huh. What's this? Perihelion? I insert a thumb drive and take everything. No point in second guessing.
My radio buzzes. "N, the fat guy is on his way back. Sorry, we didn't spot him till he was almost at the building."
Damn. No point in crying over spilt milk If I didn't have them I'd have no observation at all I double click in response, and pull the drive out, sticking it into a pocket. The outer door opens and the two Yakuza on the stairs stir, and I hear them get up.
I could teleport out but that would make a noise. Instead I duck in under one of the desks.
"That you friend?" One asks.
"Yes." The voice hits hard. "Where's Ichika?"
"Still with the boss."
"Lucky bitch." He laughs. "I should have found some action earlier. I was hoping for someone in particular."
"This girl you think will break in here?"
"Yes." The door opens. The fat man steps inside the office, the lighter footsteps of the yakuza behind him. "She did something horrible to me and a friend of mine earlier, and I'm longing to do something even worse to her."
I reach into my hoodie and grip the pistol inside. If I have to silence the place it's my most reliable option.
"Sorry you didn't find her then."
The fat man walks in, he's checking around the room. I ease back further into the shadows. The main light comes on, and both techs mutter and come awake. "You lazy fucks. You're not supposed to be sleeping. You're supposed to be on watch in here."
"Sorry sir."
"Maybe you will be." He laughs. "Then again, if she's come and gone that'll mean I might get to meet both her and that short haired girl who shot me again. I'd like that."
I almost step out and shoot him right then an there, then I realize that's exactly what he's trying to induce. Even in casual conversation, the magic bleeds through. How did they build his power? The door opens again, female voice, sounding annoyed. "You're making a noise Van."
"I'm sorry Ichika-chan." He laughs. "I was wondering if we'd had visitors while I was out."
"Well, wonder quietly."
Once again I wait, listening to the two techs messing around. The fat man, Van, goes out, once again talking to the Yakuza who he seems to be more interested in than the techs. I wait, not moving and hoping my body doesn't go stiff as they putter around.
"You want some coffee?" One of them asks. "There's a machine down the hall."
A flicker of music as headphones are removed. Some tinkly video game sound. One of the tales games? "What?"
"Coffee? Do you want some."
"Sure. Get a couple of cans." The headphones go back on and the door bangs. I'm never going to get a better chance than this. I crawl out from under the desk, staying low and walk around the back of the guy on the laptop. Yeah, Tales of Symphonia. I prefer the sequel. I walk to the window, pull it open with a smooth motion and whisper a word that'll warm and dry the air coming in, then push myself out through it, sticking to the wall with a hand as I pull it closed.
Just in time, the other tech comes back with the coffee. I slump back against the wall, then embarrassingly almost lose concentration and fall, saving myself at the last moment. Time to get out of here.
The rain has mostly subsided to a fine mist and I retrieve my coat and towel from the bottom, stuff them into my kit and then make my way out of the compound. "I'm out. Pick me up at--" I take a moment to check my map and give an address.
"Did you get it?"
"Yeah." I take out the thumb drive and look at it. "Yeah, I got it."
It doesn't help her senses are dulled right now, pulled down with only a thin layer of plastic between them and the full fury of the world outside. Kasumigaseki, the centre of Japan's civil service rising around her in boxy concrete, architectural styles of a better era, before the lost decade became thirty years.
The back door of the target building is locked of course. She pulls out the pick gun and screwdriver from her kit, inserts them and pumps the trigger. The door opens smoothly first try.
Someone less experienced than her, a veteran for all that it'll still be a year before she can legally drink, might look both ways or make other furtive motion that'd give away she shouldn't be here, but she doesn't. She walks in and locks the door, stepping into the busy office space at the back of an office block. Some workers look at her as she passes but she pays them no heed, walking straight to the elevator and hitting the up button. Two suited men come in on the second floor, having a loud conversation about emerging markets, then grow quieter and more curious as they see the girl.
"Hey." One says, turning towards her. "Who are you exactly?"
The Monochrome Girl pulls the gun out of her bag and shows it to them. It's a boxy black automatic pistol, the same polymer framed Belgium designed, US made gun that won the US army's pistol replacement program before war aborted the desire to spend resources on something as marginal as a replacement automatic pistol. She sees the two men's eyes widen, and readies herself for the dim possibility space in which one of them makes a move. "Next time the doors open, you should get out."
"Y-yes." The older of the two says. "Alright."
The door opens again and a gaggle of office ladies, laughing about something, make to step in. Their laughter dies at the expression on the men's faces, then they see the girl, and the gun and back up fast.
The doors close and the girl rides up to the top floor.
She's done enough play acting, and there won't be any more people stepping into the left for a while. It's been made clear to her that she doesn't need to worry too much about what she's doing standing up to close scrutiny. Investigators will want to believe in the fiction that she is spinning.
She pulls the googles out of her bag, closes her eyes and removes her glasses, then slots the familiar high-technology over her head. It only takes a moment to boot up and then she opens her eyes and lets her power fully flower.
Security will be waiting for her on the executive floor. She can trace the line of it. She know she's armed but will meet her anyway, with mancatchers and bravery, for the honour of the company. Their boss is an ex-cop, ex-riot police unit, frustrated, willing to spend his men's lives. The girl tucks the gun back into her bag and pulls out another weapon, a long, weighted cord.
The door pings and the security men waiting beyond tense. They're standing in a group behind two mancatchers in the open plan executive office at the top of the building, where the company chairman and his many secretaries and minions stay. Outriders stand at either side of the door. They think they have the advantage here. They'll grab this terrorist girl as soon as the door opens. There's nothing for her to dodge behind when they rush. They're not prepared for a long metallic weight on the end of the rope to whip out of the lift before the door is even open and break the mouth of their commander as he starts to yell an order. He's knocked down as if he ran into a door. For a fatal instant, his troops hesitate, mancatchers raised but uncertain, waiting for the signal that won't come, glancing back. What? Is that? Did she?
She steps out of the elevator and her rope weapon whips around, impossibly gracefully. The kind of grace that comes from considered knowledge of where each movement will put it. She controls it from the middle, both weighted ends slamming into the softer parts of security men. She spins, pushes forward, and the left side of the rope snaps around the legs of two dazed security troops, pulling them together. They trip, trussed. The other end plays out, slamming into one face after another after another, until they're all on the floor in a shocked, bloody tangle.
The leader staggers to his feet, clutching his mouth. The Monochrome Girl drops the rope and pulls out her FN, levels it at his face. A few seconds ago, before his defeat, he might have charged her, trying for the gun, or to let one of his fellows get it. Now the pain and shock have made the weapon real, and he freezes, eyes wide.
She keeps it on him for a long moment then snaps it up to the ceiling and fires once. The security men and the watching executives and secretaries wince from the detonation. "Everyone out." She says. "Use both elevators."
They run, scramble into the lifts, the security men dragging their downed colleges. The girl ignores them and unwraps the package on her back. She wanted to carry the weapon in fully assembled but at one point four meters, the big american made sniper rifle is too conspicuous. She's practiced the rapid motions needed to put the gun in firing order a lot since he got this mission. First the barrel, then the bipod, and finally the high tech binocular sight fits on the top.
A USB cable links the sight with her goggles. A good picture. She unplugs the cord again, aims her pistol and blows out one of the big plate glass windows on the side of the office overlooking the Central Common Government Office. There's a wash of pressure and papers jerk and twitch in the high altitude wind. She plugs back in, braces the gun on its bipod and takes careful aim.
The longest range sniper kill in history was made by a Canadian special forces soldier during the first Iraqi civil war using just this kind of rifle. That was around three thousand meters. It's a record that will probably be broken soon, given the chaos and war that now engulfs so much of the world, but for now it's a good guide.
She doesn't want to attempt something so ridiculous. The shot she's making is ridiculous enough. She lies down on her stomach with the rifle braced on her shoulder and takes aim at the building, then accesses the camera feeds inside.
The target has just got in, already through security and up to an office in the building's middle floors. She keeps the gun safed and waits patiently as the target moves into the office. Everything is unfolding as she has foreseen.
Her target steps into an office marked as belonging to the head of public safety's special section. He walks over to the desk, checks the in tray, then jerks in surprise as another man steps out of the shadows. The Monochrome Girl wishes she could find out what they were saying. Ah well. It probably doesn't matter.
The Monochrome Girl calculates briefly with the help of the sights and her goggles, local weather information scrolling down one side as the ballistic computer works, then centres the target and fires.
The 12.7mm round penetrates through the window of the government office cleanly. It continues easily through several internal walls, through a cubical, through the coffee cup of an office worker raising it to his lips, and then strikes the public safety director in the neck. The round decapitates him cleanly, blowing out his neck parasite as well and splatters him over the wall.
The other man snaps around in a combat stance, something hissing around him, then fades out of view. Another mage. She isn't quite sure why they chose to remove their own piece from the board rather than his kidnapper but it's not a big deal to her. She knows exactly what they had on the public safety special section head, and is glad enough to be able to push hot metal through him.
Below there is the sound of sirens. Dozen of police vehicles are drawing up, hundreds of police rushing into the building. Time to go. She stows the gun on her back, then walks to the window, aims her grapple and fires, then ziplines down towards the next building. Professional that she is, she already has her exfiltration route set out.
*****
I hear Junya's abort code, the anger in his voice and my stomach drops out. We've got all three compliance agents, ziptied, blindfolded and bagged in the back of the van. We're out, way to far out to do anything. To even know what happened yet. All there is Junya's tightly controlled anger on the tactical net.
"Magenta. Magenta. Magenta." That means he's aborted both the primary and secondary extraction points. He's headed for a rally area streets away. What happened.
"Nozomi," Manako has a laptop open, "look at this."
Breaking news. Shots fired in Kasumigaseki. Public Safety Official killed.
It's that last line that makes me realize we were set up. There's no way the press would have that unless the police wanted them to have it. Someone killed the target and is going to blame us for it.
Sorry Aratani. I guess you were wrong.
I need to think of a new plan. I need to think. I need to get there and actually be able to affect the situation.
I open my mouth to say "Take us to Kasumigaseki." Then I feel something. A feeling across my eyes as if I really need to blink. For an instant I try to deny it, try to tough it out, and then my body begins to jerk around. I feel something incredibly awful happening in the deepest parts of myself. Manako is holding me and calling my name. I'm falling back into darkness.
And then in the darkness I see Reijou, glowing with light as her hand touches my forehead.
*****
I blink, then sit upright, ready to grab something coming at me and wrestle it. No monsters present. A familiar ceiling.
I'm at home, in bed. Wearing a silk nightgown. Manako is sitting in an armchair, still in tactical gear over her sweeter, a rifle sitting at her side. I'm not connected to any monitors which must be good. However my teacher is sitting on the balcony, which is bad.
I get up, cautious not to meet Manako, pull on a robe and go to sit next to Kondo-san.
"If you're here I must be in trouble."
"Perhaps not as bad as you think. According to your doctor, that young exorcist girl managed to prevent most of the soul drain you experience." He pours me out a cup of tea, then offers me the pot and I return the favour. "But you're being framed for the murder of a public safety official."
"What did you do with those three compliance guys who tried to jump me?"
"They're alive, but no longer a concern." He takes a swallow of tea. "I've already told Compliance and my Japanese state contacts that you were with me at the time of the murder, and provided proof. False of course, but nothing that they can disprove. They'll still be a hearing however."
"Thanks." I look down at the central garden below. It's peaceful. I wonder if their's a hunter now. Probably. "What do I owe for these services?"
He thinks for a long time. "For now, nothing, save your continued retrieval of dangerous knowledge."
I look over at him, a little surprised. This is a major favour he's done me, something that would usually require reciprocity. Then I understand. "You're not saving me. You're saving her."
He looks back at Manako, her head cocked against the chair, mouth open in the innocence of sleep, and smiles a little sadly. "I need a student Nozomi. Someone to assist me in my work not just today but over decades to come. I'm truly sorry that it might not be you."
I shake my head, a kind of pleasant sadness settling over me. That particular melancholy savor, the kind of defeat that makes you smile. "It's alright. She's a rare talent. I didn't really expect it either. She deserves a long life and a good tutor."
"You might not give her the first, but it seems that you are the second." He gives me a look. "You'd better keep her safe."
"I'll guard her with my life." I rub my eyes. "I might take her out of the country. This has gone completely wrong. I don't think I can pull it back."
"That I leave to you." He raises, then looks at me seriously. "Just be careful Nozomi. The Aratani boy has dropped you into a particularly dangerous situation."
"I know."
There's a pop of air and he's gone. Manako's eyes open and she makes a jerky grab for the rifle, then relaxes. "Nozomi, you're awake."
"Come out and sit with--" I get that much out before she's in my arms, the magazines on the outside of the tactical vest cold against me through the silk robe and the nightdress beneath. She kisses me hard, tilting my chin as she pushes forward, her lips pressing against mine like she was afraid I'll vanish away. After a few precious moments I tilt my head back, pressing my forehead against hers and into her eyes. They're brown, and very big, joyful and afraid. At my back, her arms are warm through sweater and gloves, hooked around me. She smells of cordite and sweat, and I don't mind at all.
"I dreamed you were awake." She says. I know that feeling. The awfulness of dreams of hope. "I needed to know this was real."
"What's got into you? You've seen me have a seizure before." I keep my gaze level, resting my hands on her shoulders
"You've never fainted before! That second year reached into you and did something. Maybe struck down the Hunter. I thought she'd hurt you." Her arms press tighter into my back, hooked just beneath my ribs, hearth's embers on a cold morning. She ducks her head closer into me, almost muffling her next words as my arms rest limp where they are. I don't know what to do. "She hurt herself to. The doctor says she's still fragile from what she did a few nights ago."
"Is she okay?"
"She's awake. The Doctor and that hot tailor told her not to do anything risky."
"So you do like guys as well. I did wonder."
Manako pouts a little. "I like you more."
I'm the one that leans in this time, a swift brush against her pout, before pressing forward, deeper until she suddenly pulls back until the back of her neck presses against my interlocked palms. She swallows, opens her mouth, before shutting it and swallowing again. When she speaks, it's a whisper. "Are we-- Have we -- Have we lost?"
I don't answer right away and she continues to speak, urgent. "Everyone thinks we have. The prosecutor phoned someone and shouted at them. The Cop is just silent. The tailor and that gangster with him have been together trying to figure out what to do. Is it that bad?"
"A high ranking public safety official was assassinated and they're blaming us for it. They can't prove it but they'll be gunning for us now. Maybe not Reijou, the exorcists will protect her. Junya, I suppose has his own protection, but you and me…" I move forward, shifting so she's sitting further on my lap, and make to kiss her again, but she looks at me and I stop, searching for anything else to speak about. "Have you ever wanted to just travel, just the two of us?"
"But what about my Uncle? What about the girls getting kidnapped?"
I'm silent for a long while, gently embracing Manako.
"I don't know. I don't know how to do anything." My voice shudders as I speak, and my tongue tastes saline. Am I crying? How weak. I take a long breath, try to get myself under control.
Manako's arms squeeze tight again as she shuffles closer, pressing my head into the crook of her neck. "Shhh." she says.
I enjoy the faint smell of her hair for a moment, but the words bubble up, pulling me away from her. "Aratani set me up for this. He knew things like this would happen and he staked me out to save his reputation. Just set me out to do his dirty work. Now I've put you in--"
I don't realise she's kissing me until I try to speak more and can't. Her lips are wet, and taste salty. Is she crying too? "Just stop." She's trembling as my hands move down her sides, slow tremors like ripples in a pool. She kisses me again, softer, pulling away after a second. . "Stop talking."
She leans in again, but this time we only hug, each of us desperate, her hands tight around my shoulders as I grip onto her waist fiercely. I couldn't say how long we hold each other, but eventually I shift, one of my legs going numb from her weight. The motion drives the top of one of the magazines into my ribs, and I yelp at the cold and sharpness. Manako flinches backwards, almost standing up. Her face is tear-stained and her hair a tangled mess, but. I've never seen anyone so beautiful. We speak at almost the same moment.. "Are you--"
"Can I --"
I lick my lips, compose myself a bit "Can I take your vest off?"
She blushes, suddenly shy, then I see her eyes widen and she laughs, a tremulous thing. "I thought you were, I thought you were asking for something else."
I stand up and begin to undo the vest. She begins to help and I kiss her again. We fumble blindly with the vest, spinning in place as we breathlessly kiss, a furious urge that burns away my melancholy. It finally comes free, and I toss it blindly away, ignoring the muted thump as it lands.
I reach up, my hand slipping into the curve of her throat, and step into her, my thigh slipping between hers. Manako's breathing deepens as she pulls me back down into the armchair. I press forward, feeling the fabric of her jeans up against my bar leg. My mouth slips from her own and I start tracing her jawline with my mouth, nibbling lightly at the flesh at the junction of her neck, the action producing a breathy sound that liquifies something inside me. I nip at her earlobe, pressing harder into her as my hands trace meaningless patterns in the small of her back, then move back to her lips and--
The armchair overbalances, tipping the two of us out of it, sprawling in a heap of limbs across it's back and the floor. I try to stabilize with my hand and feel my hand slide on Manako's vest, which goes forward, under the balcony rail. There's a metallic sound as plate carrier, plate, tools, most of a battle load of ammunition and hundred thousand yen encrypted personal radio drop three stories.
We both stop, stunned, as the echoes die away.
"House." I mutter belatedly. "Catch that." Manako starts to laugh. A moment later I join her. Laughing so hard I almost start to cry again. I roll to the side so we're side by side on the back of the armchair.
There's a lot of things I should say to Manako. About us, about mage society. The expectations that mages have about the world and how those aren't the same as the ones of normal people. It feels somehow more desperate than half the fights I get into. "That's the second time we've had an almost."
"Mm."
"I keep thinking I should try to talk to you about things." I look up at the ceiling. "Like, Mages don't date the way humans do. What's normal just isn't the same."
"Like how?" She looks over at me, rolling so we're side by side on the soft upholstery of the armchair.
"Like, it's pretty weird for a mage to only have one romantic partner. You have a husband or a wife, but you have, well, others."
"Do you have someone else?"
"No!" I look over at her quickly. "I'd never have done that without asking you first."
She rolls over so we're face to face. "Then, why don't we just leave that question until you find someone else you like?"
There's a kind of commitment that, a commitment that, if I find someone else, I have to let Manako be able to hurt me in the aftermath. But then, haven't I made that commitment already, in a thousand different ways?
"Do you want to take a shower?" I mutter into her hair.
"Yes."
It's at that point I think that it hits me.
What happens to middle class girls who look like they might not make their highschool exam?
They get tutored.
*****
I get dressed before I go down, thinking out the angles of it. I don't know that what I figured out is true yet. I make most of my outfit black today, black top, fancy black skirt, white shirt poking out of the top. White thigh highs with mystic symbols stitched into them in black and red thread.
Yoshitaka is sitting at the kitchen counter table and drinking my booze. There's a mostly empty bottle of Arran Robert Burns Single Malt Scotch next to her. Something I brought back from a trip to England. Her cheeks are flush and she's kind of leaning over the table. "You got no right to complain!" She says when she sees me. "A girl your age shouldn't even have booze." She knocks back another shot.
I'm not really worried. I actually have another three bottles in the cellar. I'm more annoyed.
"How drunk are you?" I sit on the hight chair opposite her, and reclaim the bottle. She watches it go with a sigh.
"Not drunk enough." She rubs her eyes. "Tanigawa is talking about taking her niece and fleeing the country. I don't know where we could possibly go they won't find us. I never thought, I never thought they'd just kill one of their own like that."
"Did you ever get the information about the kidnapped girls we were talking about?"
"No." She rubs her eyes. "Or not enough to be useful. I was looking through the transcripts when my memory cuts out. I remember that a bunch of them were like you said, low achievers in middle school, but got into a good highschool."
"I've got an idea maybe, about how they're selected. I'm just not sure how to check it out."
She looks at me then at the bottle."Okay I'm definitely too drunk for this. Can you do something about that?"
I go to the fridge, pull out a set of injectors and tap my wrist. "How your arm out." She does and I apply the injector. There's a hiss of gas and she shivers, eyes clearing.
"That's awful."
"Just make sure to drink some water as well. The alcohol will still dehydrate you. You can still get a hangover."
"Great." She goes to the tap, pours herself a tumbler and then returns. "So what have you got?"
"Tutoring company." I say. "It's got to be. Making some kind of assessment of them in the process of tutoring. Either they were trying to create a reserve for their supply of foreign girls, or they were field testing assessment."
"So we just ask your friend who tutored her, and we're back in business." Yoshitaka shakes her head.
"We don't even need to phone my friend. I remember who they were. They had a weird name. It was Porphyrion." I had thought it was funny in middle school. It having an Greek name. An obscure mythological reference.
"I suppose it'd be too much to expect them to have a facility on their records where they could care for dozens of kidnap victims."
"We're probably going to have to wait for them to kidnap someone else than then follow them." I rub my eyes. "The first thing we're going to need to do though is figure out who met the criteria for their assessment."
*****
Porphyrion's offices are kind of out of the way, a nondescript pair of office block in Nerima overlooked by a bunch of high apartment buildings. There are actually two of them, the assessment centre and the administrative offices.
The big problem is going to come if they've purged their own records to an offsite location. Which, if they're as slick as they've been so far, they will have.
However, while I'm not actually a hacker, I'm relatively confident that I can at least figure out where they sent the data, assuming they didn't get really clever, pack it onto a hard drive and send it off via courier. Even if they did do that though, that requires somebody at the building they're leaving to know where the stuff went. That assumes of course there's no paper records, which will be even harder to move.
Junya and Reijou are out. Both insist they'll be back if we have a clear target, but for now Reijou's organization wants her as far away from me as possible. Junya in the meantime has a rush job in Ginza. "It's probably a diversion to get me away from you, but it's not something I can ignore."
"Do you need any help?"
"Nah." He waved. "Just get your own problems sorted."
"You too."
So it's just Manako, Tanigawa, Yoshitaka, and me, with a few hired Yakuza for seasoning. We spent the rest of the day assessing the complex. Both Manako and I called in sick from school, which is going to raise questions with her parents if they find out, but seems like the only safe option. Besides but we needed all four of us working flat out to to do the proper assessment. things get any worse. I put Manako on drone observation of the complex, while Yoshitaka, Tanigawa and I set about compromising an employee and gathering other human intelligence.
Most of the day is spent with us furtively hitting up our contacts to see about getting more than the city hall floor plans. We get a good hit about six, when one of Yoshitaka's street level informers comes through with a janitor with a serious hostess club habit who ended up borrowing a bunch of money from the Yakuza.
A few calls and a suitcase of money later and we've got a good read on precisely where the paper record room and the server room are.
We're in luck in that they're all stored in the administrative block. Apparently there's some level of tight security about bringing them over from the less secure test centre every night, which the janitor has to do. We briefly discuss a plan to have him abscond with the packet on the way across but scotch it as we don't know if he has the records we want. In turn, the janitor leads us to a security man recently transferred to a post he didn't want for drunkenness. He proves easy to crack and we get an idea of the night security. There's a code pad check in system, but the guard tells us that it's mostly kept in the security room, due to daily changes.
"Do you think this is a trap?" Tanigawa asks as we sit around with the annotated plans spread out over my dining table, its edges weighed down with coffee cups and plates of mostly eaten cakes. Manako is sitting with her but Yoshitaka is still out, checking with her contacts in the police in the state of play within public safety. "Security is nominally tight, but this isn't something that would stop you on your own is it?
"No. I could get into a building like this without anyone noticing at all." I slump back in my chair. It's a bleak thing to think after a day of planning and investigation but the security just feels too light. Too normal. That means there's a surprise in there, almost certainly.
"And if they realize we took the records, they'll shift their focus and target in a different way. People from down whatever list they're using." Manako says. "This feels hopeless."
I tap my fingers on the map and think. "Wait a moment. I have an idea."
*****
Detective Yoshitaka doesn't like the guy she's driving with. She doesn't like the suit I gave her either. "I look like a hostess" she complained when I gave it to her.
"The point is that you don't look like a cop."
Her driver is a Yakuza, though not a particularly obvious one, Eiji-san, Ryuta's trusted lieutenant. Is to old and fat to really look the part when he puts on a normal suit that hides his tattoos. The approach to Ryuta was honestly the most agonizing thing today. I was sure he was going to be compromised and get us into a fight, but he wasn't and it was embarrassing. Hopefully this means they don't have that many more frog throats, so can't compromise people other than through a normal chain of command.
I doubt it though. I suspect they'll have a few more in reserve. However they probably suspect, accurately, that I've laid some traps in case they try to come after any of my other friends. Ryuta though, they could have got. He likes his privacy too much, and knows my capacities to well to have let me know his life well enough to lay anything good.
I watch the car passing along below from a number of screens. I've got a pair of drones up, and a compromised traffic camera, plus a few web cams laid during earlier ground reconnaissance. One of those is watching Manako specifically, sat on the ground sheet at the window of an empty apartment, covering the car with a huge .50 cal rifle. The rifle is the same one used by Canadian special forces, and Manako proudly told me that it holds the record for one of the longest ranged sniper kills in history. The advanced scope on the top is made by an American civilian company and automatically adjusts for target movement and even wind.
I won't find out for a while how much of an irony the choice of weapon is.
The longest part of operational prep was spending an hour making sure of all the various runes we'd sprayed onto it before either Manako or Tanigawa were willing to fire it in the busy streets of a Nerima evening.
"We're coming up on the initial point now. Can you see us?"
"I see you." I report.
"Eyes on." Manako says. She's switched over to a pair of binoculars, then drifts to look at the building. "There's not much going on at the target. A guy just took the trash out."
"Alright. Eji-san, start your run now."
The car, a silver toyota pulls along the street slowly. On the drone feed I see the man putting the trash turn to watch it, then his eyes widen as the window lowers and Yoshitaka raises the grenade launcher she's been keeping between her legs. The first round is smoke, to let her measure her aim, the second is an incendiary round the smacks through a ground floor window.
"Got it!"
Eiji punches the car forward, accelerating away in a scream of tires. The man outside is speaking into a radio. Indeed, the whole building has lit up with radio and phone transmissions.
I hit the second part of the plan and there's a distant boom. Part of the street jumps as the fiberoptic serving the office's internet connection.
The singular insight I had for this is that we don't actually need to take the records. If we render them unusable then the entity breaks out anyway. It's not optimal, because it ends up with a bunch of prominent people hatching cosmic horrors, but that's something for Aratani and my enemies to care about more than I do.
Or at least. I can make my enemies think that I don't care. Think that I'm willing to take the win that is hurting them, rather than the win that comes from actually doing something about the horror's they've summoned to remake the world. They probably have backups, but logically this should cause them to displace their records, and hopefully make it easier for me to get at them without walking into whatever trap they've laid.
Eiji and Yoshitaka's car zooms away, visible on the drone, making its pre-planned escape route. There are Tokyo police area cars looking for them, and several police drones up, but so far the route looks like it's been successful, especially with our own drone overflight.. I hand that job over to Tanigawa as Manako speaks up.
"Fire trucks are arriving now. There's a pair of armoured van as well. I see two fat guys, they might be frog throats."
There's a lot of milling around going on on the street, but they seem to have a procedure. A ladder is already up against the building and as water is sprayed into the lower floor, men in fire fighting suits who jumped from the van are already swarming up it. A few moments later they throw the first strong box down the ladder to the men waiting below. The boxes go into the armoured vans one after another, then the fire suited men go with them.
The two vans pulls away into the traffic as the fire fighters start to address the blaze in earnest. At the end of the street they split, and a pair of police vehicles fall in with them for escort.
"They're not stupid." Tanigawa sighs. "How do we know which one is carrying the real records?"
I don't have a good idea. "Let's just keep watching for now."
They're not, I think, quite used to the idea of drone observation being a thing. At least, there's no precautions taken to do in the quad copters. Still, for now they're just in transit, "M, stay in position to make sure they don't start pulling more boxes out and taking them elsewhere. Y, what's your status?"
"We've proceed as planned and we're outbound, no sign of pursuit." The launcher dumped down a storm drain, clothes changed, fresh car. They'll be police checkpoints soon after that kind of grenade attack. We'll wait them out.
"Looks like the escort dumped one of the trucks."
I look over at the image of the second truck. The police vehicle is diverging away. "Huh."
"I guess it's the other one."
"No." I consider. "No, I think it's that one." After all, if you're running a kidnapping ring, what would you want less than the police knowing where your records are? Corruption only goes so far.
I hope I'm right, because the first van stops at a place much harder to raid. A busy night office in Shinjuku, with a lot of visible security, including police. Meantime the other van doesn't go so far, another quiet Nerima office complex. It looks dead quiet as the men start to unload the truck. Dead quiet except for a fat man in a cheap suit watching as they unload. A woman who looks like a college girl waiting with him.
"That can't be--" Manako blurts. She's been watching the feed. "He died! He turned into a monster and I shot him!"
"I guess death isn't the end for creatures like him." Explains why they're willing to attach eldritch throat cancers to themselves. "I'm heading that way."
I get up from the booth in a station cafe I've been sitting at and head for Nerima.
*****
There are tons of police around. Police and onlookers. The firebombing has made a splash, both on social media and in the normal news. Groups of police are everywhere, looking for people and checking IDs. The news is already worrying we're turning into America. A commentator is talking about the esper program.
In a way it makes it easier.There's a lot less going on in the back streets around the office.
I'm wearing a black hoodie, a rain cloak, shorts and black leggings under it's actually still quite cold. Runes are woven into the hoodie in white that make the eyes slide off it, and I have a dark blue scarf to cover my face. It's not quite truth invisibility, but it's a lot less visible to mages. If it was just fashion I'd use red, but don't want to look too much like one of the American rebellion's super soldiers.
I check it from across the street, then begin to climb up to building top level, staying low and careful not to skyline myself. "I'm at the target. Going radio silent. I'll double click when I'm about to make entry."
They're being fairly quiet about it, the blinds drawn but the lights are on. Some covert scrying shows me the capture team from earlier are set up in a lounge in the second floor, chatting with several dozen Yakuza, whose office this may actually be. The voice shit they're doing is an absolutely terrifying power. A room over, several tech types are setting up laptops, communications and so on. Looks like I hit the jackpot. Or just a secondary command centre that's a trap. I won't know until I make entry.
I circle the building slowly. The drone is pulled back now. I don't want to tip anyone inside. There's are two look outs on the roof. They're probably supposed to be covering both angles but they keep congregating together and smoking. Gangsters can be pretty lazy. I use my thermal monocular to check that there's not someone without a cigarette trying to fake me out by covering the far side. Nope.
Initial check done, I find place to wait, roof of a building a little way along the street. sitting back in the shadows and wrapping them around me with a simple enchantment. Invisibility is hard but using shadows is easy. I put my headphones on and put on the podcast I cued up.
With any luck it'll rain.
By three AM the building seems to be mostly still. There's still two lookouts on the roof. New guys after a shift change a few hours ago. Most of the other Yakuza, techs and guards are asleep or have left in a gaggle. The fat man left a while later, while the female mage took the Yakuza boss, who's actually quite handsome, up to the third floor. She seems likely to be distracted for a while.
Rain is coming down steadily now and the two cigarettes on the roof are standing together under an umbrella. They seem to prefer the front of the building, maybe it's a more interesting view.
I work my way down from my perch and then turn off the podcast and hang my headphones around my neck, and insert the earpiece for my radio in one ear. Then I move in along the alley at the back of the building, mount the fence silently and begin to climb up the back.
The rain is coming down hard, but a small amount of Crawley effect applies to my hands makes getting up easily. I get to the second floor and hang their for a moment, listening at the window. Snoring inside, the sound of active computers.
I hang their for a moment more in the rain, thinking how much I love this. As fun as it's been working with others there's something uniquely satisfying about this lonely sneak. I sketch a rune on the window lock and it pops open silently, then slide it over.
The tech is of course, sleeping on a sofa right under the window. Water and cold air hits him and he starts to wake up, then I whisper a word of sleep in his ear and he turns over and begins to snore again.
The water is a problem. I fetch a towel from my kit and dry my boots off, then shrug off my rain coat and ball it up with the towel, letting both drop away into the dark. I'll get wet on the way out but it's better than revealing my presence. Only then do I tug the window shut, double click my radio and climb over the sleeping tech to check the room.
It seems like the plan to occupy the building with a pile of guys all night has been mostly undone by lack of sofas. The office itself is a pretty typical open plan with half height cubical desks affair, that wouldn't look out of place for anything from a law office to an anime studio, but there's only one sofa in here. A second man is sleeping under one of the desks in a sleeping bag. I go over and whisper a word of sleep to him as well, keeping him out, then go check the door. There's a couple of Yakuza outside sat in office chairs and talking about some girl at a local club. No problem.
I walk over to one of the laptops, which is plugged into a rack of hard drives and jack into it. There's some basic anti-esper countermeasures, but while I'm not exactly the world's best hacker, I know enough to rapidly cut through with magic.
Access files. Bingo. Dozens of educational files. Myers-Briggs type profile. Probably not that. IQ tests, a few other normal educational tests. Huh. What's this? Perihelion? I insert a thumb drive and take everything. No point in second guessing.
My radio buzzes. "N, the fat guy is on his way back. Sorry, we didn't spot him till he was almost at the building."
Damn. No point in crying over spilt milk If I didn't have them I'd have no observation at all I double click in response, and pull the drive out, sticking it into a pocket. The outer door opens and the two Yakuza on the stairs stir, and I hear them get up.
I could teleport out but that would make a noise. Instead I duck in under one of the desks.
"That you friend?" One asks.
"Yes." The voice hits hard. "Where's Ichika?"
"Still with the boss."
"Lucky bitch." He laughs. "I should have found some action earlier. I was hoping for someone in particular."
"This girl you think will break in here?"
"Yes." The door opens. The fat man steps inside the office, the lighter footsteps of the yakuza behind him. "She did something horrible to me and a friend of mine earlier, and I'm longing to do something even worse to her."
I reach into my hoodie and grip the pistol inside. If I have to silence the place it's my most reliable option.
"Sorry you didn't find her then."
The fat man walks in, he's checking around the room. I ease back further into the shadows. The main light comes on, and both techs mutter and come awake. "You lazy fucks. You're not supposed to be sleeping. You're supposed to be on watch in here."
"Sorry sir."
"Maybe you will be." He laughs. "Then again, if she's come and gone that'll mean I might get to meet both her and that short haired girl who shot me again. I'd like that."
I almost step out and shoot him right then an there, then I realize that's exactly what he's trying to induce. Even in casual conversation, the magic bleeds through. How did they build his power? The door opens again, female voice, sounding annoyed. "You're making a noise Van."
"I'm sorry Ichika-chan." He laughs. "I was wondering if we'd had visitors while I was out."
"Well, wonder quietly."
Once again I wait, listening to the two techs messing around. The fat man, Van, goes out, once again talking to the Yakuza who he seems to be more interested in than the techs. I wait, not moving and hoping my body doesn't go stiff as they putter around.
"You want some coffee?" One of them asks. "There's a machine down the hall."
A flicker of music as headphones are removed. Some tinkly video game sound. One of the tales games? "What?"
"Coffee? Do you want some."
"Sure. Get a couple of cans." The headphones go back on and the door bangs. I'm never going to get a better chance than this. I crawl out from under the desk, staying low and walk around the back of the guy on the laptop. Yeah, Tales of Symphonia. I prefer the sequel. I walk to the window, pull it open with a smooth motion and whisper a word that'll warm and dry the air coming in, then push myself out through it, sticking to the wall with a hand as I pull it closed.
Just in time, the other tech comes back with the coffee. I slump back against the wall, then embarrassingly almost lose concentration and fall, saving myself at the last moment. Time to get out of here.
The rain has mostly subsided to a fine mist and I retrieve my coat and towel from the bottom, stuff them into my kit and then make my way out of the compound. "I'm out. Pick me up at--" I take a moment to check my map and give an address.
"Did you get it?"
"Yeah." I take out the thumb drive and look at it. "Yeah, I got it."
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