PROLOGUE: DECAPRE I awoke. This was a monumental shock, because it had never happened before. Oh, I had -memories- from before my first awakening, but they were little more than gun-camera recordings made by a peculiarly sophisticated weapons platform. I had no emotional attachment to any of them, because I had had no emotions when I experienced them. I remembered stalking people, killing them, and feeling nothing. Reviewing those memories, I still felt nothing. Does a toaster regret the toast it has burned? At that point, having been a sapient being for all of 30 seconds, I probably wouldn't have understood regret even if I'd felt it; but that's neither here nor there. I didn't feel it. All I felt was surprise that I felt anything at all. I never had before. I'd never known the very concept of "I" before. It was all horribly confusing. I couldn't move; the stasis tube was still switched on, immobilizing me. I could only watch through unblinking eyes as a tall, slender man, dressed in gaudy, expensive clothing, stepped in front of my tube and stood looking at me with an expression that was half covetous, half disgusted. "Bison is such a fool," he said in a quiet, softly accented voice, as if speaking to himself. "To let such beauty as your template's slip away from him, to play God and create it anew, and then to -waste- it in the form of a mindless doll? To -destroy- it in the name of his perverse lust for immortality? Mind you, child," he added with a self-deprecating chuckle, "I am hardly one to judge a man on the perversity of his lusts... but still. What a fool. He strives for perfection without ever realizing that he's thrown it away in the attempt. Better you go from this place while you still have -half- your face... with one such as yours, even half is better than many." He leaned forward and kissed me once; I was powerless to resist, even if it had occurred to me to do so. Then he stepped back, raised his hands, and gently fitted a mask to my face. It was a more sophisticated one than I had memories of wearing in the past, and the fit was perfect. The optics built into it filtered the harsh glare of the laboratory lights and drew virtual annotations in the air, like the one that now identified the man before me. The second question ever to arise spontaneously in my brain, after "Who am I?", was an idle wondering as to how comprehensive its database was. "The stasis tube you are in will disengage in five minutes," Vega told me then. "I will be long gone by then, of course. Leave this place and never look back. If I ever see you again, I will have to kill you. The mere sight of you breaks my heart." Something in me, embryonic stirrings of the intuition a real woman would have possessed, suspected that he didn't have a heart, but I couldn't have disputed the point if I had wanted to. He bowed once, put on his own mask, and was gone. Five minutes later the stasis unit shut down and I was free. Whatever that meant. No one saw me leave the facility. If anyone had, there would have been no survivors. I emerged into cold, snowy darkness and heard the sound of diesel engines, pneumatic brakes, metal on metal. The optics in my mask switched automatically to infrared, revealing the world in dull shades of crimson. I crept to the top of the ridge above the ventilation stack I'd used as my escape route and looked down to see a freight train passing. Instinct honed by dozens of operations as an automaton carried me over the ridge and onto the roof of one of the freight cars. I rode unseen for hundreds of miles, all through the night, indifferent to the cold. Eventually the train came to a town - little more than a collection of ramshackle houses in the shadow of an industrial compound of some kind, the cranes and material piledowns of major construction floodlit against the Arctic night - and began slowing to a halt. DNEPROPOVINSK IRON WORKS, the Cyrillic sign on the side of the railway station said. I didn't need the mask to translate the Russian for me. Another train was just leaving from the platform on the opposite side. EXPRESS SERVICE TO ARKHANGELSK, my mask's computer informed me when I sighted the locomotive's number. I jumped from the slowing train to the accelerating one and settled in for an even longer ride. As the train rattled through the endless wastes of Siberia, I sank into a half-lit reverie, a trance that recalled what had been my normal state before Vega had crept into the laboratory and thrown some forbidden switch. I found myself running through more of my stored memories, searching for anything, anything at all, that stirred any kind of -feeling- in my barren, barely-used soul. Finally, almost at the end, there was something, or rather someone. A girl - little more than a child - she was the only human being who had ever stirred an emotion of any kind within me before my awakening, and her image burned bright in the otherwise colorless playback of my mechanical memories. She had -surprised- me, done something so unexpected, so unexpectable, that it had left my complicated action-reaction programming entirely at a loss. My machine- mind had so completely failed to account for her that I felt the failure as a genuine emotional response. The first I'd ever felt. Possibly, as I reflected on it through that night, the first crack in the barrier Vega had, for whatever twisted reason, torn down tonight. I decided I would have to see her again. I knew I would find her; that kind of thing is what I was built to do. Find her, and then learn whether she could make me feel again. Feel and -keep- feeling. And if not, whether she would be strong enough to put an end to my pointless existence. Eyrie Productions, Unlimited presents STREET FIGHTER: WARRIOR'S LEGACY BATTLE 07: LIBERTY Benjamin D. Hutchins with Philip J. Moyer and thanks to Pearson "Doc" Mui (c) 2011 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited G Monday, October 31. It was a chilly Halloween morning in Worcester, and I, for one, was absurdly pleased to be alive. For the past month, my life had been the kind of movie montage that's set to a peppy pop tune and serves to illustrate that Everything Is Going Just Fine. I had a half-share in a beautiful house in a nice neighborhood. I had a brilliant student who was coming along by (literally) leaps and bounds. I'd won my last two official bouts on the World Warrior circuit, one at home, one away, raising my average at that ranking to a respectable .667. I had, for the first time, a steady relationship and the love of a good woman. I'm not saying my life -before- last month was a vale of tears, but by any measure, on the last of October I was deeply, almost indecently happy, and not just because Halloween was one of my favorite holidays. We'd already had our big party the previous Friday, in deference to our friends who had proper day jobs, but the front hall was all done up in anticipation of the usual horde of trick- or-treaters. My Batman costume (vintage "The Dark Knight Returns", the only official rendering of the character that's ever been plausibly wide enough) was pressed and ready to go, as soon as Robin got home from school. I'd been practicing my gravelly rasp all day. It might have seemed paradoxical, to the casual observer, that one of the reasons I was in such a good mood was because I was about to have a fight with my lover, but that's how I roll. Cammy and I stood at opposite ends of the playhouse in the back yard, which was so new it still smelled of paint and floor polish. It wasn't really a playhouse in the traditional sense of a miniature dwelling for the amusement of children; it was really more of a barn, with timber construction and just one big room inside. My student Sakura, being Japanese, called it "the dojo", but it wasn't really a proper one of those either. The decor was all wrong, and we didn't follow strict dojo rules. For example, I was wearing shoes. My playhouse, my floor. I'd been meaning to build some kind of enclosed practice space back here for years, but had never gotten around to it. My old space in the basement was big enough for solo training, and in good weather I could just jump around the yard. The neighbors probably thought it was a little weird, but they'd had plenty of time to get used to my eccentricties, and most of them knew I was a martial artist anyway, since I had some small measure of fame around town as the local street fighter. (Say, that would make a good premise for a movie. I'll have to remember to pitch it to Ken next time I see him. "Support Your Local Street Fighter", a screwball comedy about a young fighter, new to the circuit, trying to get his neighborhood on side for his breakthrough bout against the wandering champ. Maybe we could finally get Fei Long to try comedy.) Anyway, when Sakura came along, we made do with the yard until the weather started to get chilly, and then it was finally time to saddle up Angus the Wonder Truck and head for Home Depot. My father, a mechanical engineer, kicked in a design; his father, an expert carpenter, headed up the build; and between the three of us, Zoner, Sakura, and Cammy, we had the place up in a long weekend, insulated in two, and finished off nicely by the weekend before Halloween, just in time to christen it with a party - and a fight. There is a terrific photo of me, Sakura, Charlie Nash, and a very sombreroed Jimmy Blanka on the wall behind the bar down at Tortilla Sam's now. So the place was already starting to build up fond memories as Cammy and I warmed up, out of the wind and secure in the knowledge that this time, the neighbors would not call the cops and report one of us for domestic assault. (Sgt. Janet Marshall got that call. She was... amused.) And even now, a month after she'd come to live with us, I still had to marvel. To remind myself that that girl over there, all five feet four and a half inches of her, long blonde hair, blue eyes, narrow scar on the left side of her otherwise perfect face, that girl was very much her own person and yet, in some hard-to-define, entirely voluntary way... mine. She saw me watching her warm up and smiled, knowing what was running through my head. I'd told her often enough, in quieter moments, how lucky I felt that she'd come along. "Ready?" she asked. "Always," I told her, cueing the sound system. /* The Crystal Method "Keep Hope Alive" _Vegas_ (1996) */ We circled each other slowly for about 40 seconds, smiling. Cammy bobbed gently on the balls of her feet, getting into the rhythm, and then, when the moment was right, she launched herself at me. We weren't going all-out, because, well, we didn't want to break the playhouse, and when either one of us gets going, things like wall panels and floorboards tend to suffer. I kept my electric bolts to myself and she didn't do any of her really heavy-duty leaping kicks. This was more of a technical exercise, all blocks and strikes and jockeying for position. She's vastly more agile than me, but I'm not as slow and plodding as I look, and I've got power and stamina where she has speed and precision. Zoner, who is not famed for his tact, has compared the two of us sparring to a bird annoying a warthog. The difference being that the warthog doesn't have any fun. We kept at it for maybe ten minutes, well into the next track on the playlist, before one of us made a serious slip-up and the other exacted payment for it. In this case, the slip-up was mine, almost literally; I overbalanced myself countering one of her more vicious kick combos, ended up well out of position, and was easy prey for an up-and- over throw. I wound up flat on my back in the center of the floor with Cammy kneeling astride my hips, and she took advantage of my compromised position quite shamelessly by pinning both my wrists to the floor and obstructing my airway with hers. "Flawless victory," I told her when I could talk again. "Shut up," she said, then made certain that I had to. She let go of my wrists, and I capitalized on that by reaching up and taking hold of her shoulders. I was toying with the idea of rolling her onto her back and seeing how -she- liked it when a voice remarked dryly from the doorway, "That's quite a finishing move, 005. I don't believe I've seen it used in hand-to-hand combat training before." Cammy stopped kissing me, gave me a microsecond look of surprise, and then rose and turned smoothly around to face the door. "Then I'm very sorry for you," she said coldly. I sat up, elbows on knees, and regarded our interloper with bemusement myself. I had never actually seen Lady Barbara Mawdsley, the Director of Secret Intelligence for Her Majesty's Government and thereby entitled to the time-honored codename "M.", in person before. I knew what she looked like because I'd skimmed her dossier in the SPECTRUM database, but her file photo hadn't prepared me for the presence she had in the flesh. She was perhaps in her mid-sixties, silver-haired and a bit fierce-looking; not so much matronly as matriarchal. Her dark, tailored suit looked less expensive than it probably was, which is usually a sign of formidability. Cammy had resigned from SIS a month before, after what she perceived as a betrayal by M. An amnesiac, she had turned up on the doorstep of a British special forces establishment as a teenager, some years before, with no knowledge of who she was or where she'd come from. She'd spent the intervening years putting her well-honed but mysterious military skills to use first in the Special Air Service and then as a member of the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce's Delta Red Squadron, but her official job had always been as a member of SIS, and in September, the new M. had pulled her out of Delta Red and sent her to infiltrate an installation belonging to Shadolu, the international criminal syndicate. The reason Cammy took this as a betrayal was because M., through her agency, had good reason to believe that she, Cammy, had been a senior Shadolu operative before her sudden appearance at UNIT's base in Scotland. No one had bothered mentioning that to Cammy, so M. had, in effect, sent her into a mission where her cover would be blown the moment she arrived, more or less just to see what would happen. What had happened, unsurprisingly, was that they'd captured her and prepared to send her back to Shadolu Headquarters in Southeast Asia, there to be subjected to God only knows what. The commander of UNIT and the Minister of Defence had pulled some strings to get Zoner and me hired, as independent contractors, to go and extract her, which we had done. She'd quit SIS by phone on the flight back to Worcester. Since then there had been phone calls, messages by courier, even a visit from the British consul-general stationed in Cambridge, ostensibly seeking to debrief Cammy on her mission, but all with a clearly telegraphed subtext of wanting her to stop all this silliness and come back to work. She wasn't having any of it. She'd submitted a formal report on the matter to M.'s office, and that, as far as she was concerned, was all they would ever have to say to each other again. When the consul came to the door, she hadn't even wanted us to let him into the house. And now here M. was, having come all the way to Worcester to... what? Make a final play personally? Maybe even oversee some sort of extraction? At the very least she'd managed to kill a very nice mood. I looked past her into the yard; two men in dark suits were standing on either side of the back door into the house, looking inscrutable in their shades. I got slowly to my feet, regarding her calmly, and said, "If you planned on not leaving empty-handed, you should have brought more guys." "A -lot- more," Cammy agreed. "I know it must be unusual for visitors to your home," M. said to me, "but I'm not looking for a fight. I came to ask 005 a question." "I've answered all the questions I'm ever going to from you," Cammy told her. M. gave her a patient look. "You're angry with me. It's understandable. I don't hold it against you, though I do hope one day you'll grow up enough to recognize why I had to do what I did." "Go to hell," Cammy shot back. "I probably will," said M. imperturbably. "In the meantime, I need to know one thing. You may despise me, and I don't grudge you the feeling if you do, but do you remain loyal to the United Kingdom?" Cammy blinked; clearly this was not a question she had expected. "I... of course I do. A person can be a loyal citizen and still not trust Her Majesty's Government," she added archly. "Technically, you weren't a citizen," M. told her. "You were a ward of the Crown. However, I took care of that when the U.S. Department of State reported that you'd requested an extended stay in this country." "You... you did? Why?" Cammy eyed her narrowly. "What's your angle?" M. smiled very slightly. "You're right, of course. I have one. I always do - one has to, in this business. I'll be frank with you, 005. I cannot accept your resignation. You're too valuable an asset to the Service - and too dangerous a weapon - to leave lying out in the open." Cammy opened her mouth to protest, but M. held up a hand and went on, "However. Despite what you may think of me, I am -not- in the habit of keeping Her Majesty's subjects in forced servitude. I'd be no better than your... former employer... if that were the case. So, in light of your past performance and the results of your most recent mission, I'm authorizing an indefinite leave. Do what you like. You won't hear from me - unless what you like compromises Britain's national security." She folded her hands and said with cold precision, "In that case you'll hear from me exactly once. Have I made my position clear?" I suppressed a snicker, which made M. glance sharply at me for an instant. She probably thought I wasn't taking her elegantly phrased death threat seriously, but really, I was just thinking it was a shame Cammy and I hadn't suited up for Halloween yet when she arrived. Not only would it have made her entrance that much more surreal, she would have looked devastatingly funny trying to keep up that frosty deadpan while issuing that threat to Supergirl. Cammy just stared at her for a few seconds; then she regained her self-possession and, only a little grudgingly, said, "I... I suppose I see your point. Fine, then. I'll stay on your books if it makes you happy - but keep your distance." M. nodded. "I'm glad we were able to reach an understanding. Hopefully someday you'll be able to see the bigger picture. Until then, I suppose this is goodbye, Cammy." "I'll show you out," I said, accompanying her to the door. At the threshold she paused, turned, and said, "One last thing. Don't be too hard on Lethbridge-Stewart. He protested my plan every step of the way. I had to go very far up the chain of command to overrule him. I'm sure he'd welcome you back to UNIT with open arms any time you like. As, for that matter, would SAS or the Highlanders." Then she left the playhouse, walking toward the gate that led back around to the front of the house. Her two guards left their positions by the back door and rejoined her, one of them opening the gate for her. I followed around to the front, where two more dark- suited agents were standing by the car. I recognized one of them as the woman who'd come with the Brigadier back in September. "Cammy's in no position to be gracious right now," I told M., "but I can at least acknowledge the basic human decency in what you just did. So thank you." "Don't misunderstand me, Mr. Hutchins," M. said coolly. "I haven't gone soft in my old age. But I'm a pragmatist, and it's obvious that you're having a beneficial influence on one of my most valuable operatives. That means supporting you is the best chance my organization has of not losing her forever." I didn't believe her for a moment; she liked playing the old battleaxe, but I'd seen a glimpse or two of the woman behind the act during her little speech to Cammy. I'd been watching hard enough. So I just smiled and said, "Whatever helps you sleep at night, ma'am." She gave me a penetrating look, letting me know that she knew I wasn't buying it, had suspected I wouldn't when she said it, but that since I was letting it slide, we had achieved detente. I could like this woman, as long as I never found myself directly answering to her. Sakura arrived home from school as M. was getting into her car; she pulled up on her bicycle and watched, curious, as the four agents climbed in after her and the Rolls pulled away. "Who was that?" she asked, leaning her bike against the garage. "She looked important." "Government," I said. "British." "Jeez, they just don't give up," Sakura said as she followed me through the gate and back out to the playhouse. "I think they will now. That lady was Cammy's old boss. I think we just came to an understanding." I stuck my head into the playhouse. "Hey. You all right? She's gone." "If that woman ever shows her face around here again," Cammy said hotly, "I'll show her my license to kill." "Well, for God's sake don't do it in the living room," I told her. "You -know- how hard that carpet is to clean." Cammy couldn't help but laugh at that; the living room carpet, which Zoner had selected in a fit of... something, was white shag about four inches deep, and would have required an act of Congress to get blood out of. The carpet was one of the reasons we rarely used the living room proper, instead tending to congregate in the front room. Regaining her good humor, she hugged me and said, "Thank you for backing me up. I liked your 'more guys' line." "I've always got your back," I told her, adding a kiss on the cheek for punctuation. "Hey, here comes trouble," she said brightly, turning me loose as she spotted Sakura lingering in the doorway behind me. "How was your day? Better than mine just was, I hope." "Well, nobody from the Japanese consulate came by," Sakura said. "I'm pretty sure I'm going to end up in a fight with that guy from the Burncoat cross-country team sometime soon, though. What an idiot." "Aye, well, go Highlanders," said Cammy, grinning. As a proud Scotswoman, she'd been tickled to learn of the mascot at Sakura's school, Doherty Memorial High. "We've talked about fighting at school," I reminded my student. "I'm not going to fight him at school," she replied. "We'll probably end up on the bridge in Elm Park, like usual." I shook my head, pinching the bridge of my nose theatrically. "You're going to take the whole foster-child thing out of everybody's hands by going to -prison,-" I told her. "If you're under 18, you won't be doing any time," she replied cheerfully. "Don't look at me, love," Cammy said when I glanced to her for support. "You're the one with the thing about punk music." She clouted Sakura on the shoulder. "C'mon, kiddo, show me what you've got." So I sat in the mission chair in the corner of the playhouse and watched my two best girls fight, one in woodland camo battle-dress pants, jungle boots and commando sweater, the other in civvies that looked as much like a Japanese school uniform as they could without being straight-up costume gear - warrior girls in their natural colors. And I thought: Life is so damn good. The next afternoon, I was lying on the sofa reading the latest Fighters' Times (the official magazine of the World Circuit Martial Arts Tournament Authority) when Sakura came in looking unusually pensive. "Sensei?" she asked. I shut the magazine on my finger and sat up. "What's up?" I asked. "You'll want this when I'm done, by the way," I added. "Big article on Ryu." She smiled - I might be her sensei, but Ryu was still her favorite street fighter - and then got the serious face again and said, "I need to ask you something. Please don't get mad." "When do I ever get mad?" I asked. "Well, there was the time Zoner used your soap without asking." "That wasn't so much that he used the soap as what he used it -for,-" I said. "But I'm not going to get mad. What's on your mind?" "Well, uh... " She hesitated, looking awkward, and I thought to myself, Oh boy. This is going to be about some guy at school. How did she get to the age of 14-3/4 without having had the Talk already? Are they that sheltered in Japan these days? I didn't have a useful basis for comparison, since the only other Japanese girl I had known at her age had been - or so I was told - fully trained in the art of deadly seduction by then. I was mentally queueing the "never let yourself feel rushed, and if he won't let you go at your own pace then kick him to the curb tout de suite, or let me know if you'd rather I did it" speech when she blurted, "Can you teach me about guns?" I blinked at her. -That- was her big, terrible request? The relief was so intense I actually laughed, which took her by surprise; she stood there and just sort of stared at me for a moment, unsure whether to be worried, take offense, or what. I pulled myself together - I had just been thinking that she was Japanese, after all. Things are different there. I learned to handle a firearm at the age of about eight, and that was hardly unusual in the place and time where I happened to -be- about eight, but Sakura's background was not mine. I could only imagine what her father would have said to such a request, for example. "Sorry," I said. "I was just expecting something a whole lot worse. Sure I can teach you about guns. I didn't think you'd be interested." "I wasn't, but... after what happened when we went to Canada," she said, then paused and admitted, "It scared me. And if I'm going to be part of your world, I can't be scared of things like that. I have to -understand- them." I smiled at the insight that remark showed, got up from the couch, and said, "Well, if you want to learn, I'll teach you. That's our whole deal, right? Besides, I find it's good for my concentration." "Zoner was cleaning his gun on the kitchen table this morning," she said, grinning - hard question asked, answer received, crisis over. "He said shooting's a martial art in itself." I nodded. "He's right. OK, let's go pick out some hardware to start with." We went down the hall to the study, where my grandfather and Zoner had built a spiffy armored gun safe behind a bookcase that swung open on hidden hinges. The whole thing was very Secret Agent Man, and Sakura was apparently as delighted by it as I had been. This is where Zoner and I keep the weapons we don't use all that often. We both have two or three pieces we kept aboard the Prince or closer to hand when at home, our favorites, the ones we're best and/or most comfortable with. The rest we keep in the safe, where we can be sure they're secure: my Winchester rifle and Mossberg shotgun, Zoner's AUG, a Mauser broomhandle, a nice replica of an 1864 Navy cap-and-ball revolver I built from a kit, and various other bits and pieces we'd accumulated on our travels. From its place near the bottom of the display, I took down my Ruger Mark II .22 automatic, opened and inspected it, and smiled. "Well, since we're here," I said, "that's your first lesson. If you can't see that a gun is unloaded when you find it, always open it and eyeball the chamber. Come to think of it, are you familiar with the way they work at all?" Sakura shook her head. "No. My parents didn't let me watch that kind of movie. I'd never even seen one, except for policemen's, before Transbelvia." "OK, then I'm going too fast... let's take a couple different kinds," I added, selecting a Police Positive revolver and reflexively popping the cylinder, "and sit down at the kitchen table so I can give you the tour." Half an hour later, I'd covered the anatomy of an automatic and a double-action revolver, and the field-strip procedures for my Browning Hi-Power and the Ruger. Sakura took it all in with keen-eyed interest. I'd been half afraid she would lose interest quickly when we got into the technical stuff, but on the contrary, she seemed to become more interested as we progressed. When Zoner returned from wherever he'd gone, he came into the kitchen with two bags of groceries and one of the big Dunkin' Donuts boxes to find her humming happily and reassembling the Ruger as I watched. "Yo," said Zoner, putting the bags down on the counter and turning to watch as Sakura nimbly fitted the .22 back together. He cocked an eyebrow at me. "Teaching a class?" he asked. "In a manner of speaking," I replied as she completed the assembly and handed the gun - locked open, butt-first - to me. I checked it out: not a quibble to be found with her performance. She was a fast study. I'd watched closely as she'd stripped and reassembled the weapon. Her hands were quick and sure - she never did anything tentatively, as if afraid she would break something, or worried that she'd accidentally hurt herself. They were also quite strong - like the rest of her, considerably stronger than she looked. "Nice work," I said, impressed. "Shall we head downstairs and give it a try?" The basement of our house is bigger than the house. There's a good reason for that: It was originally intended to -be- the house. In high school, Zoner developed a strange fondness for "earth shelter homes", which is a high-toned way of saying "bunkers". Later on, when he got money, he decided to build one, and the first draft of the design didn't actually involve a dwelling structure above ground at all. His idea was that, from the street, you would just see the garage, standing at the end of a driveway as if next to a house, but no house. That would have been amusing, but when the time came, I managed to convince him that we ought to build the bunker and then put a proper house on top - even more floor space that way, and we'd be able to use the yard without people driving by thinking we're insane. He pouted for a while, but eventually saw it my way. So we have the only basement in the neighborhood that's rated as a fallout shelter, unless they have one over at St. Spyridon's. It extends almost to the edges of the three-quarter-acre lot, buried six feet below ground level except for the part that's holding up the house. Inside, it's finished and quite heavily insulated - in fact armored, its concrete walls, floor and ceiling lined with a half-inch layer of steel plating, then a coat of rubberized sealant to prevent rust. There's also a layer of fiberglass insulation and an inch or so of a special sound-deadening foam developed by Q Branch between the steel and the inside layer of decorative wood paneling. The west wall, the one facing Elm Park, is further reinforced with -another- steel plate, this one an inch and a half thick and faced with three inches of packed earth sprayed with some kind of plasticky fixative. The reason for all this reinforcement is simple: that wall is the backstop of our basement pistol range. It's a bit small - only four lanes - but it has all the amenities, and at fifty yards, it's long enough for the sort of training that's most important for people in our line of work. For longer-range work we go to the police range (where we know the night shift rangemaster) or up to my grandfather's country place in Maine, but for day-to-day practical-range shooting, all we have to do is go downstairs. My reloading bench is here, too, and Zoner's tinkering bench. We get our major gunsmithing done at a small shop in Chicago, but cleaning, small repairs, and the occasional part replacement are all things we handle ourselves. The three of us trooped through the workshop and into the range; Zoner hunted up an extra set of ear protectors and I dusted off the spare shooting goggles, and then we all got to work. Cammy and Fury got home from their afternoon run when we'd been at it about half an hour and were just about to start live fire, which meant we got some actual ex-military perspective on the subject. I doubt any kid has ever had such comprehensive instruction, not only on the nuts and bolts of how to use weapons, but the whys and wherefores of -when- and -why- to use them... and not to. For my part, I grew up around guns and had known and respected them from an early age. My grandfather, a retired military officer, had been on the U.S. Army's rifle and pistol teams during his career and had served as an instructor, and he was an outdoorsman and hunter even before that; he taught me the central principles of responsibility, safety, and marksmanship when I was old enough to ask about them. My firearms training is as much a part of me now as Ler Drit. Zoner had been taught later in life by some of the top covert-ops experts in the world, and had a natural aptitude for the principles, and Cammy was, well, Cammy, a veteran of 22 SAS and UNIT Delta Red - two of the planet's finest special forces outfits. Sakura didn't have any of that, but she acquitted herself well in her first lesson, and she seemed to have made a definite connection with the discipline. She didn't even look too bored when I gave her the "bearing arms requires a profound moral commitment" speech - she was already on that page. She'd been thinking about it since she'd witnessed an acquaintance's rather-more-than-acceptably casual attitude toward gunplay in battle during our last big adventure, and it could be argued that her own hands were fast developing into lethal weapons too. Looking back on it, I can't think of many more pleasant ways to spend an afternoon. By the time we called it quits for supper, we'd all used up a hell of a lot of ammunition and punched a hell of a lot of holes in a hell of a lot of paper. Sakura's accuracy was not stunning, but her aptitude and safety-consciousness were impressive. As soon as we emerged, Sakura headed off to the master bathroom to shower before dinner. Spending a few hours in the basement, even with the heavy-duty ventilation gear we installed (hey, nobody wants lead poisoning), can be smelly work. It's hard to burn off a couple thousand rounds of ammunition and not wind up a bit whiffy, because smokeless powder isn't. "Well?" Zoner inquired as we three alleged grown-ups sat together around the kitchen table. "Well what?" I replied. "Are you impressed?" he asked. "I am." "Oh, definitely," I replied. "So am I," said Cammy. "I never would have expected her to be that comfortable so early." "We've got a prodigy on our hands," said Zoner with a grin. "I'll teach her to fly, and then when we retire we can just leave the whole operation to her." MZ I was kidding when I said that, but over the next couple of days I kept coming back to it in my mind. It particularly preoccupied me on Thursday morning, as I was driving home from Meg's new place in Maine. That train of thought started with me thinking I ought to get a smaller plane. Driving back and forth between Worcester and the Quest Foundation in Maine was liable to get old pretty quick, but even I couldn't justify taking the Hercules for such short flights. Maybe I could look around a little and find a decent deal on an old Lear. Or a T-38, that would be sweet. That got me thinking about all the places Gryph and I had visited over the last few years, first with our trusty R4D-8 and then with the Prince. All the wild adventures. I didn't think that was coming to an end - I sure hoped not - but I had to face the fact that it was all going to be different now. Meg and I were getting pretty serious - the mileage on my Suburban and her RX-7 would attest to that. Gryph was in a stable relationship for the first time... well, -ever,- and though I didn't grudge him that, it did mean things were different around the place. Admittedly, Cammy had originally moved in with us as much because she didn't have anywhere else to go as to be with Gryph, but I didn't think she was looking too hard for a place of her own, and that was fine. Honestly, it was. I'd like to think I'm not the kind of guy who gets huffy about other guys' relationships, and besides, I like Cammy. She'd be a cool housemate even if she wasn't hooked up with my best friend. And of course there's Sakura. I was iffy about her joining our little team at first. She won me over in London, when she kept her head and played a critical role in getting Ben out of SIS Headquarters without starting a firefight with the security team there, and she'd done nothing but add value, as the marketroids say, to the household ever since. In her own, completely different way, she's as good for him as Cammy is; he's been so much more centered since she came along. He didn't seem UNcentered before, which makes the change even more surprising. She's given him something to be responsible for besides himself, which I think he needed in order to take his own training to the next level. A lot of changes in a few months' time. I don't think I could have predicted any of it when I went behind Gryph's back and set him up with his World Warrior advancement bout in Scotland last summer. I sighed and turned off the Interstate, thinking it was time I faced up to what I hadn't wanted to admit: The buddy movie phase of our lives was ending. Had ended. That trip to Russia was the last hurrah. And yet, I couldn't say I didn't like the new format. I mean, yeah, the commute involved in my new relationship was a bit much, but I already had a plan for dealing with that, and the rest... well, Canada proved that we could still have adventures with the best of them. It was just... different, and it's never easy dealing with change, even positive change. There's always going to be a period where you look in the mirror and think, Is this who I am now? Am I cool with that? By the time I got to the house on Cedar Street and pulled into the driveway, I had decided: Yeah. I'm cool with that. My spirits restored, I all but bounded into the house, ready for the next challenge - - and found Gryph sitting on the shag pile in the middle of the living room, surrounded by Japanese schoolgirls. No, I mean it, surrounded. They were sitting around him like the points of a compass, four of them, bombarding him with questions while Sakura sat on the edge of the sunken area in front of the fireplace (which we had inevitably nicknamed the Love Pit long before she came along, though to the best of my knowledge neither of us had ever used it for any such thing) with her face in her hand, looking mortally embarrassed by the whole thing. OK, I couldn't -swear- they were schoolgirls at that point, they weren't wearing uniforms, but they were obviously all around Sakura's age: a perky, petite one in a yellow jumper dress, with a folded kerchief tied around her forehead; a tall, lanky one in red windbreaker and sweats who looked like a bit of a jock; a girl-next-door type in jeans and a pink sweater; and a cute but tough-looking one in a baggy T- shirt, biker pants and big chunky boots. The perky one seemed to be doing most of the talking, though they were all taking part in whatever the discussion was about. The biker girl seemed to be the quiet one; she just sat scratching Fury's head and not chipping in much. When I entered, Sakura glanced up and looked even more like she wished the ground would swallow her (or maybe them); the two girls who were sitting so they could see me reacted with surprise, one of them actually jumping to her feet; and the other two half-turned and looked startled as well. "Hey, Gryph, I, uh... huh?" I said. "Oh, hey, Zoner," said Gryph nonchalantly. "How's Meg doing?" "Fine," I replied automatically. "Um, what's... ?" "Oh. These are some of Sakura's friends from the old country." He pointed to them in turn, first the perky one, then the jock, then the girl next door, then the biker chick: "That's Hinata... and Natsu... and this is Kei... and Akira." "Um, hi," I said. "Dude, did you open a Japanese consulate or a branch of Girls Inc. while I was gone?" "Well, no," he said, looking at once amused and faintly embarrassed. "They actually came to rescue Sakura from our vile gaijin clutches. And then their return tickets got stolen on the T." "... Seriously," was all I could think to say to that. "It's all Kei's fault," Natsu said. "It was her bag that got stolen." "I -told- you Akira should have carried them," Kei shot back. "Nobody's going to mess with -her- bag. But nooooo." Her comrades seemed unmoved, so she protested, "I'm used to the trains back home! People have an idea of personal space!" "Um, are you riding the same trains I am?" Hinata asked, but Kei wasn't going to be deflected from her defense now. "I -also- told you we should have brought Ibuki," she went on. "She knows how to deal with international travel. And whoever took our tickets would be missing a hand now, and we'd still have our tickets." Natsu snorted. "And then we'd all have gotten arrested -except- her, because she'd have been all one with the night and stuff by the time the cops showed up." "Just be glad we didn't bring Makoto," said Akira quietly. "Then there would have been compound fractures." "-That- wouldn't have attracted attention," said Hinata. "Dojo girl at large in America. I'm convinced she only owns that one outfit." "Also," Kei added, "can I just point out that we wouldn't need return tickets if we'd brought Karin along?" "No, but she'd still have managed to get us arrested somehow," Hinata pointed out. "True." "Well," said Gryphon philosophically to Sakura, "you were just saying the other day how much you missed your friends." "I take it back," said Sakura from behind her hand. "Hey!" Kei burst out. "We only wanted to help." "I wrote you guys letters!" Sakura protested. "I told you everything was great!" "Well... yeah, but... we assumed he -made- you write that," Hinata said. "Oh, thank you," Gryph said. "I had to do a research paper last term about human trafficking," said Natsu. "I thought I recognized the signs." "You what?" I asked. "Yeah. Something not quite right about that teacher," she agreed, shrugging. "Anyway, that's one of the things -they- do. Make the girls write letters to the folks back home saying everything is OK and don't come looking for me." "I didn't say that!" Sakura cried. "I said everything was going GREAT and you should come visit me sometime!" "So we did," Akira put in softly. Everyone turned to look at her. "What?" she asked. "And when we went and asked your dad where you were," Hinata added, "he told us you were no concern of his and shut the door in our faces. So -I- thought maybe he sold you to white slavers." "But Tsukishi said he bet it was the Hong Kong Triad and they were programming you to kill the president," Natsu put in. Sakura palmed her face again. "You GUYS," she said. "I was NOT, SOLD, to ANYBODY." She ticked off the points on her fingers as she went on, "I'm not hooked on opium or dancing in an underground bar. I don't serve drinks or carry stuff through Customs, I'm not starring in ecchi movies, and whatever on Earth YOU were talking about," she added with an accusatory point at Natsu, "there's NONE OF THAT, OK!" "Why are you getting so mad, Sakura?" Kei asked. "We were worried about you. We're your friends." Sakura took a deep breath through her nose, folded her hands in the centering gesture she'd learned from Gryph, and let the air slowly out through her mouth. When she spoke again, she was much calmer. "I'm sorry, you guys. You're right, Kei, it's not your fault. And I'm really grateful that you cared enough to come check it out. But... well, you would not BELIEVE the stupid questions I've been asked by the child welfare people here. There's one in particular who comes right out and asks me if I'm doing things I never even HEARD of before she asked. And they always think you've been intimidated into covering up or you've been brainwashed or something when you try to tell them no, hey, it's all cool. I'm here 'cause I wanna be. I miss you guys and Mom and the buzz of Tokyo and even Tsukishi sometimes, but this is where I belong now. Sensei and I are a team. I love these guys. Not in that way." She shook her head. "Anyway, people assuming the worst... it's all really getting kind of old. And I guess I just took it out on you." The four of them sat, gazing thoughtfully at her and taking it all in. After a moment, they nodded, though Natsu still looked puzzled. "Well, OK," she asked, "but... so what's the deal with your dad, then?" Sakura shrugged. "He's an asshole. What's complicated about that?" The four girls stared at her, open-mouthed with shock; then they all burst out in gales of laughter, literally rolling on the floor, both at the fact that Sakura had just said that and the fact that she had the world's perfect oops-was-that-my-outside-voice face on. "Well," said Gryphon, rising to his feet, "hopefully we're all cool now, and you guys no longer intend to beat me into submission and take Sakura back to Japan for deprogramming." The girls looked at each other, conferring silently, and then Hinata, acting as spokeswoman, nodded. "In that case," he went on, "I'ma go get started on lunch. Hope everybody likes Chinese!" he added as he passed through the archway into the kitchen. We all played through to the rarely-used big table in the dining room, where there were seats for everyone and the kitchen was just a countertop island away. "So... " I asked when everyone was seated. "Isn't it the middle of the school term over there? How did you guys arrange this?" "Well, we figured if we did it right, we'd only have to cut class on Friday," Kei explained. "Which we could cover up easy enough with some sick notes. As for our parents... " She shrugged. "They all think we're sleeping over at each other's houses this weekend." "Ahh, the old reference dependency scam." I smiled approvingly. "Yeah, that's a good one." "You ought to know," Gryph put in, recalling the web of obfuscation I'd woven around the transfer of the Bionic Six equipment to Meg's new venture in Maine. "You want pointers?" I asked, and we spent a few minutes discussing ways they could refine their adult-scamming skills while Gryph chopped things, heated the giant wok, and dropped in dark comments about contributing to the delinquency of even more minors. "Is he seriously going to feed all of us?" Kei asked me confidentially while the others chattered among themselves (apart from Akira, who didn't appear to have the chatter gene). "Yeah," I said. "It's what he does. People stop by, he feeds them. And after lunch we'll most likely see about getting your ticket problem sorted out." I shrugged. "Unless Prince Hassan makes us a good offer." She blinked and edged away slightly, and I chided myself for excessive puckishness. "That was a joke," I told her. "Zoner," Gryph admonished me from behind the range. "Sorry," I said, genuinely contrite. "You know Hassan doesn't pay worth a damn for Japanese girls," Sakura threw in offhandedly. "That's why I'm still in stock." "-Sakura,-" said Gryph. "Sorry." He shook his head, most of his attention on what he was stir- frying. "Going to scar these poor girls for life," he muttered. "Don't sweat it," Natsu said. "We're used to Sakura's warped sense of humor. We just didn't realize she'd found a sugar daddy who could appreciate it." "Natsu!" Hinata burst out, setting everybody laughing. Cammy got in from somewhere just before lunch was served (a nice talent to have), was as baffled as I had been, was introduced, and a lovely time was had by all. Sakura had taught Gryph something of the depth of a Japanese schoolgirl's appetite, so there were mountains of food, sufficient to stuff everyone present to repletion. Afterward, we were all loafing around the front room, fighting off food coma (and in the girls' case, jet lag), while Gryph sat in his favorite chair in the corner and thumbed through the mail. "Bill... bill... may have already won... preapproved credit card for Fury... have you considered a home equity loan. Hmm!" He flipped a narrow envelope with distinctive red and blue airmail edging out of the stack and considered it. "This looks interesting. Who do we know in Mexico City?" "Nobody that I can think of," I said. "Here you go, Sakura," he said, tossing the envelope across to his slightly surprised student at the end of the couch. "You're taking Spanish this year - see what you make of that." "Oh, sure, give it to third-language girl," she muttered, slitting the envelope open with a thumbnail and removing a neatly folded piece of paper from inside. "A-h'-hm. 'Dear Gryphon.' - El Grifo, if you please! 'If we may introduce ourselves, we are... free wrestlers? In the city of Mexico. Your kind hospitality to those who visit your home is,' um... " She peered more closely. "... Ah, OK. 'Legendary among the... warriors of the street.' Aw, that's nice." "I can see how word gets around, if you feed everyone who comes here like you fed us," Natsu observed, patting her belly. "'We would like to... know you that... ' No. 'We would like you to know that, if you and your famous student - ' I'm famous? ' - come to our restaurant in... Milmáscaras? We will show you the same warm... ghost? Spirit. Spirit of welcome. We would consider it a great honor to show you our home and... test our might against yours. Yours very truly, El Fuerte y El Fuego.' And then there's a phone number." "Hm!" Gryph said. "Luchadores, eh? I've never fought a luchador before. What do you guys think? Who's up for a trip to Mexico City?" Kei blinked. "What, right now?" "Well, no, I figured I'd call them first," Gryph said. Before she could protest, he reached to the endtable, picked up the phone, waited while Sakura keyed in the number, and then, after enough time for a couple of rings, said, "¡Hola! ¿Cómo está usted? Gryphon llamada." There followed a short, cheerful conversation, at the end of which were many protestations of the looking-forward-to-it sort; then he hung up the phone and looked pleased. "Right. Like I said: Who's up for a trip to Mexico City?" G We all piled into the Suburban and headed up to the airport, where Zoner fired up the forklift and got started fitting the Mobile Modular Base into the Prince of Thebes's cargo hold. With the MMB in place, we'd have full facilities and living quarters, rather than just the spartan handful of bunks and tiny galley in the permanent quarters abaft the flight deck - not palatial accommodations for eight, but workable for a short trip. While I helped Zoner with the loading, Sakura and Cammy gave our slightly shocked visitors the lowdown on the hangar and what it was we did there. Thanks to long practice, it took us about an hour to get the MMB loaded and locked, with all the support systems connected. We made certain the bird was gassed up and ready to go - a redundant precaution, since we never left it in any other condition - and then reported to the "briefing room" to see what the consensus was. Natsu was intrigued, Hinata excited, and Kei a bit dubious; Akira, as before, was hard to read and seemed like she would be happy to go along with whatever the rest of the group decided. "So... this is what you -do- now?" Kei asked Sakura. "You guys just get invited places and rock up in your own personal cargo plane to do some street fighting?" "Pretty much," Sakura agreed. "Cool, huh? I can show you the logbook, they've been everywhere. I've only been with them for a couple of months, but I've been to London, Transbelvia, Vegas... " "Come on, there's no such place as Transbelvia," Hinata said. "Is so," Sakura insisted. I could tell she wanted to elaborate, tell them all about what we'd been doing there, but discretion won out and she just said, "It's in the Carpathians. Look, you guys were worried about your return tickets - well, now you don't need 'em. We'll go to Mexico City, do our thing, and then we can run you home." I glanced at Zoner, interested in his reaction to this blithe declaration - the trip from Mexico City to Tokyo and then back home wasn't exactly like swinging by Honey Farms on your way home to grab a pint of Americone Dream - but he just smiled and nodded. I should have figured he wouldn't mind. Piling up more hours; there wasn't much he liked better. Akira yawned hugely, then looked faintly embarrassed and said quietly that she would like to get some sleep before deciding anything. The others agreed - it was the wee hours of Friday morning for them, and they'd had a long flight from Japan - and so we all headed back to the house. One of the many off-label uses of the playhouse is as a sort of impromptu bunkhouse. A few bedrolls and a touch more thermostat, and our unexpected guests were all snugly accommodated. Sakura decided to stay out there with them in a show of solidarity - and, I suspected, to catch up on lost time. I made sure they were all settled, told them to buzz the house on the intercom if they needed anything and how to find the downstairs bathroom in the dark, then went inside and plopped myself on the couch to see if I could finish reading my much-interrupted Fighters' Times. A few moments later Cammy came in and curled up next to me, so the answer was no. "You," she opined, "are a strange attractor." "Well," I replied, "at least I'm attractive." "They seem like nice kids," she noted, refusing to take that bait. "Yeah," I said. "They were all really concerned about Sakura, and they came all this way to make sure she's OK." "Those are the kind of friends who'll help you hide a body," Zoner declared as he sloped in with a bag of chips. "I think they were expecting they might have to," I agreed. "And instead they get an all-expenses visit to Mexico City and a ride home," said Zoner. "All crazy high school schemes should work out so well." I wasn't hugely familiar with Mexico City; I'd been there a couple of times, but just as a stop on the way to somewhere else. We stopped there on the very first Trailing Edge flight, in fact, for gas en route to Peru. I'd never just gone out and explored Mexico's Federal District, and I wasn't sure what I was expecting. Something like a hotter, higher-altitude LA, maybe. What it actually reminded me more of, particularly once we got out of the shiny part and into the smaller-scale, more intimate, poorer neighborhoods, was India. There wasn't quite the same overcrowding, and there were no elephants, but the bustle and spirit of the area we were heading into had something of Thiruvananthapuram, the nearest big city to the village in Kerala where Dhalsim the Mystic lives, about it. There was that same air of cheerful cheek-by-jowl coexistence, that poor-but-making-it vibe. I'd heard of Milmáscaras before in my travels. The name translates into English as "Thousand Masks", which goes some way toward explaining the general bent of the neighborhood. The masked wrestlers of Mexico, los luchadores, are a national institution, and Milmáscaras is one of the places where they came from. In Japan I'd once visited a village, out in the sticks near Nagano, where everyone in town was a ninja. Milmáscaras was, I'd heard, a similar kind of thing, but with luchadores. As it turned out, that was a bit of an exaggeration. When I say everyone in the ninja village was a ninja, I mean -literally- -everyone-, but not everybody in Milmáscaras was walking around in spangly costumes and masks. There were posters and bits of graffiti announcing support for one or another luchador -everywhere-, though, the way some neighborhoods in the States are wallpapered in (often surprisingly artistic) gang tags. Most of the kids had T-shirts depicting one brightly colored mask or another. Our destination was easy to find. There were quite a few restaurants in the neighborhood, but only one, tellingly called Fuerte y Fuego, was decked out with a huge banner saying ¡EL GRIFO BIENVENIDA! and the sort of bunting normally associated with major holidays. It was a cheery-looking little place, the kind of storefront restaurant you could find in neighborhoods like this one all over the world - the kind, in fact, Zoner and I usually hunted around for, rather than hitting the famous places in the guidebooks, because it was the sort of place where the locals eat, and wherever you go in the world, the food is almost always better where the locals eat. We went in and found it bustling, with happy-looking people at most of the tables and some really excellent smells in the air. The walls were covered in still more luchador posters and the waiters were all dressed like cornermen, which was cutesy but forgivable, given the context. This was illustrated a moment later, when the proprietors appeared from the back and hurried over to greet us. They were quite a picturesque pair, two burly guys in bullfighter pants, silk sashes around their waists, and the traditional lucha libre masks - one white with gold trim and three blue stars on the forehead, the other red and white with an orange "fireball" icon. The one in white was wearing a cook's apron emblazoned, surprisingly, with the cartoonified visage of a Japanese unlimited-league wrestler called Rainbow Mika, whom I'd heard of - Sakura had met her a couple of times. the one in the Mika apron cried, beaming delightedly as he shook my hand with both of his. he went on, indicating the wrestler in red, I replied. El Fuego looked mildly surprised at the size of the group I had with me; then, with a broad grin, he said, I allowed, introducing the girls. "I don't know what's going on, but at least they seem pleased to see us," Kei observed to Hinata as El Fuerte and El Fuego bowed deeply to each of them in turn. I liked these guys already. Luchadores are roughly broken up into two groups: the rudos, who play the bad-guy role in the ongoing schtick of their curious profession, and the técnicos (literally "technicians"), who are the good guys. These two were clearly técnicos, and real gentlemen - and unfazed when their challengee turned up with just shy of a half-dozen Japanese schoolgirls in tow, which is always a good sign. "Hi, I'm MegaZone," said Zoner, putting out a hand. "Lead singer and driver of the Winnebago." El Fuego looked puzzled, switching to English: "You have a band too?" I laughed. "No, it's an inside joke," I explained. "Zoner's the pilot in our little traveling show. And this is Cammy," I added, and it was all still so fresh and new that I felt faintly presumptuous saying out loud, "the love of my life." She went a little pink, but shot me a look that said she certainly didn't mind me saying so, and El Fuerte beamed at her. "I am delighted!" he declared. "The stories of your own prowess and beauty have reached us even here in Mexico City." He swept down in his deepest bow yet and added solemnly, "El Grifo is truly blessed." Her blush deepening, Cammy actually stammered slightly, replying, "Why, why thank you." "Come!" said El Fuego. "You must be hungry after your long flight. We'll have some lunch, and then a tour of our humble neighborhood." Lunch was spectacular, and the tour afterward more or less confirmed my initial impressions of the neighborhood. Milmáscaras was not a rich neighborhood, but it was no slum. People took pride in their homes and streets, looked out for each other, and worked hard to make the best of what they had. Buildings were shabby, but clean; children played in the streets without fear; and the cheerful luchador graffiti was everywhere. Or, well, almost everywhere. Sakura asked, pointing to a whitewashed wall. She'd only spoken Spanish since we arrived, which seemed to please our hosts even though her pronunciation wasn't great. Now, though, El Fuego looked faintly annoyed, as much as it was possible to tell through his mask. The poster Sakura had noticed wasn't one of the ever-present, brightly colored ones declaring support for one wrestler or another. It was mainly red and black, showing a tall building rendered in a vaguely brutal Socialist Realism style, and bearing the bold slogan SU FUTURO ESTÁ AHORA CON FUTURCORP. "Hm," said Zoner. He looked up and down the street; I followed his eyeline and saw what he was seeing. That same poster was repeated at fairly precise intervals of 100 feet or so, all up and down this street. In places it had been defaced, partially torn down or painted over with graffitoed expressions of disdain or defiance, but others were untouched and looked relatively new. "'Your Future Is Now With Futurcorp'," he went on. "-That's- not at all ominous." "They are real estate developers," El Fuerte explained. "They want to build high-rise apartments here." "Doesn't look like they're too popular," I observed as we past one of the torn-down posters. "They aren't. We won't let them have our neighborhood," El Fuego replied, his fists clenching. That explained his annoyance - it wasn't with Sakura's question, it was with the object of it. "They tried money; then they tried threats. Neither one got them anywhere with the people of Milmáscaras." "Now there's always the worry that they'll go over our heads to the Legislative Assembly," said El Fuerte glumly. "There are those elsewhere in the Federal District who would like to see the district 'renewed', as they call it." "'Futurcorp' doesn't sound very Mexican," Sakura mused, having apparently decided that if they were going to speak English she might as well too. "The money behind it is foreign," El Fuego said. "It comes from somewhere on the Pacific Rim. We haven't been able to find out exactly where. There are local people who pretend to be in charge, but their orders really come from wherever the money comes from." "But we didn't invite you here to bore you with our problems," El Fuerte put in, giving his partner a warning look. "The processes of government are slow in this city." He smiled wryly. "For once that works in our favor. Come - now I'll show you where our match will be held in the morning." As we followed the two wrestlers back up the block, Zoner gave me a significant glance, then got out his Droid and started thumbing intently at the keyboard. It's one of the little oddities of my life that, despite the fact that my job (if you want to call it that) is called street fighting, I don't often find myself fighting in an actual street. Saturday morning, though, that was the plan. The Fuerte y Fuego crew had turned the stretch in front of the restaurant into a ring with the judicious application of some stanchions, ropes, and a canvas-covered layer of gymnasium mats, erected simple bleachers at either end and along what had been the sidewalks, and strung more banners and bunting from all the overhead power lines. People were crammed into upstairs windows all along the block. The air was electric as Sakura and I stood in the restaurant's doorway, watching the home team warm up the crowd. "Sure you want to do this?" I asked her. "I'm sure Cammy'd be happy to jump in if you'd rather sit out. I don't think the guys really understood the situation when they invited you." Sakura grinned. "Nah," she said. "I'm good. This should be fun!" Suddenly she hesitated, looking thoughtful, and then turned to her friends and said, "Hinata, can I borrow your kerchief for a minute?" With a puzzled look, Hinata untied her kerchief, removed it, and handed it over, shaking her head to clear her suddenly unrestrained bangs out of her eyes. "OK, but why?" she asked. Sakura smirked, unfolded it, refolded it into a triangle, and started tying it on as a sort of bandito mask. "What are you doing?" Kei asked. "I'm putting on a mask," Sakura replied. Kei gave her a look. "I can see that." "Then why'd you ask?" Sakura wondered innocently. Kei paused, with the look of someone who is mentally counting to some fairly high number, and then said patiently, "I'll rephrase the question. -Why- are you putting on a mask?" "Look around," Sakura said, gesturing to the crowd of people who had gathered to watch the match. "Phone cams -everywhere.- This is going to end up on the Internet. Suppose crazy Child Welfare lady googles Gryphon-sensei tomorrow? That's -all- we need." "Tying a bandana around your face isn't going to fool anybody," Hinata told her. "It doesn't have to," Sakura said. "It's called 'deniability'. We use it a lot in the freelance spy biz," she added with a knowing look. I smiled. "That's strategic thinking," I said. "Nice." "I'm learning," Sakura replied cheerfully. "I think we're up! Wish us luck, you guys." "Go get 'em, killer," Natsu said with a wink. "You're out of your mind," Kei told her. "Yeah, but you love me anyway," Sakura said. "Let's go, sensei!" We went out into the street and climbed through the ropes into our corner of the ring. Cammy, having fully embraced the role of cornerwoman, was standing just outside with a towel and a purely ceremonial bucket of water. In lieu of a CREW T-shirt, she'd found one that said WHO DARES WINS. Zoner and Sakura's crew filled up the nearest corner of the bleachers, making a small but vocal cheering section. A slim young man with a pomaded black pompadour and a cream- colored linen suit, apparently acting as referee, held up his hand for quiet and then announced in a voice that boomed out of all proportion to his size, He noticed Sakura's mask, sized her up with a quick, appraising glance, and smiled to himself as he went on without missing a beat, <... and La Cernícala!> They were a hometown crowd and we were the away team, but there was nothing wrong with the cheer we got as we advanced to the middle of the ring. Sakura leaned toward me and murmured, "I don't know that word." "It's good," I assured her. "It means 'sparrowhawk'. A small bird... " I smiled. "... but very fierce." She seemed to like that. "Cool," she said. said the referee as the four of us converged in the center. We all agreed. El Fuego declared. Sakura's eyes twinkled above her improvised mask. "Let me take him, sensei." "Go for it," I told her, and then to Rey, said Rey. El Fuerte and I retired to neutral ground, all our attention on the center of the ring as our two partners got ready to kick off the action. "This should be interesting," Cammy murmured. "I'm confident," I said. Rey commanded El Fuego and Sakura to shake hands, which they did readily. Then he held up a hand between the two fighters and asked, Both nodded firmly. The ref looked from one to the other, grinned, and stepped away, raising his hand from between them. /* Otis Redding "I Can't Turn You Loose" (single, 1965) */ It's usually my habit, at the start of a fight, to let the other guy come to me for the first clash. I'm not sure why, it's not usually part of any great psychological strategy; could just be laziness. Whichever, Sakura's not like that. The instant the ref was out of the way, she went in like the U.S. Marshals. She opened with her own twist on my slide kick, the levitation part of which she'd only just cracked a few days before. Where I just go straight in, leading with a knee, she throws in a half-spin at the end, turning it into a sweeping kick that's still covering ground. El Fuego was too canny to get caught flat-footed on the first pass, though; he backflipped away from the sweep, landed on the second rope, and used it to spring himself toward her while she was still coming out of the spin. I winced as he clipped her a good one on the side of the head, but she rolled with it, sprang to her feet, and switched up her stance. Back and forth they went; El Fuego kept trying to get into position for a hold or throw - he was a wrestler, after all - but Sakura was too elusive for him, always blocking his setups or slipping out of his grasp before he could get a proper hold. Every time he closed, she punished him for his presumption with a quick jab to the midsection or a couple of short, chopping kicks. On the other hand, she didn't have any easy answer for his longer reach, and he had speed enough to keep her very much on her toes if it turned into a straight-up boxing match. El Fuego declared as she caught him high in the chest with a sidelong kick, driving him back and breaking up another of his attempts to come to grips with her. Sakura replied, her eyes fierce but cheerful. said the red-masked wrestler happily. He dropped into a half-crouch, muscles bulging, and began to glow as though ablaze, then jumped up and back to the uppermost rope. he cried, and the crowd, apparently familiar with this windup, roared. Then, with a bellow of he propelled himself off the rope, his flame aura drawing a bright arc in the air behind him as he dove toward her. Sakura tensed, preparing to spring back out of his reach, but she misjudged how fast his dive was, and before she could finish the maneuver he had hold of her. His momentum carried her backward into the far ropes, bowing them outward, and then he lifted her halfway into the air, his arms locked around her waist, and fell backward, sending her crashing face-first to the mat. "Ouch," Cammy murmured. "Mm," I agreed. El Fuego got to his feet and backpedaled, his footwork dancelike, expecting to see Sakura down for the count. Instead - to his visible shock - he saw her swing her legs up and over, flipping herself onto her knees, and then rise with a jerk to her feet, scuffed, scorched, sooty, and a bit bruised, but still very much in the game. she asked, though the wobble in her stance made it plain that this was at least part bravado. El Fuego seemed to like it even more for that; his grin almost threatened to unseat his mask. he declared. Sakura shook her head, blinking, and glanced toward me, as if weighing the option of calling me in - but I knew she'd never do it, not while all four of her limbs worked, anyway. Too stubborn. El Fuego was a gentleman, but he was also a fighter, and he knew better than to leave an advantage uncapitalized. He moved in while she was still shaking off the shock, scoring a few minor hits that would have put him ahead on points if it'd been that kind of fight. Then he tried to get her in a simple armlock, possibly to set up another throw. For a second it looked like he had her, but then she got a hand under his chin and broke his grip. He adapted, turning the throw into a sweep and dumping her to the canvas, then backed up and launched himself in an attempted body slam. Sakura's response to that was to fade back and let him have a short, sharp punch to the center of the chest, a move she'd learned not from Ryu -or- me but from a Fei Long movie. She even threw in the classic Fei Long high-pitched "WATAAAH!" and crazy eyes, which got a laugh from the whole crowd. (Apparently they'd all seen "Legend of Fury" too.) The force behind the blow came from El Fuego's charge as much as her own efforts, and it staggered him briefly; she moved in with a double kick based on my own, connecting with the first but not the second. The miss put her off-balance; El Fuego made her pay for that, swinging in with an elbow that knocked her flat on her back. While she was down, he backflipped to the upper rope again, that fiery glow reappearing; crouched there for half a second, gathering energy; and then leaped, arms outstretched, crying, Sakura arched her back and swung her lower body, legs turning like rotor blades, and used the momentum to propel herself upright; her body still turning, she thrust herself into the air with her back foot and the directed force of her spirit, arcs of electric light crackling around her little red sneakers as she intercepted El Fuego's flaming dive in the form of a small cyclone. She'd been messing around with her own version of the classic Shotokan hurricane kick for some time, but not until she cracked Ler levitation did it take on a form she was really satisfied with - and only then after a couple of hair-raisingly close calls with the big beam running across the middle of the playhouse ceiling. Throwing in the electric flares was a new flourish, presumably inspired simply by the worthiness of her opponent. I wasn't convinced that "tatsumaki psychokyaku" was really the right name for it, but she'll probably grow out of the barbarous calque portmanteau phase eventually. Both combatants got a piece of that exchange, winding up against the ropes at either side of the ring and looking stunned. El Fuego recovered first, breaking into a headlong charge across the canvas, but Sakura wasn't far behind. Instead of rushing to meet him, she took a deep breath, cocked her open hands at her side, and gathered lightning between them, then hurled a ball of it at him with a sharp cry of, "TESLA HADOKEN!" That, on the other hand, was a move name I was down with. I hadn't realized she'd ever -heard- of Nikola Tesla. I made a mental note to ask her how she'd made his acquaintance later. El Fuego, caught mid-charge, took the ball lightning full in the chest; it blew him over backward, ass over teakettle, and he wound up sprawled halfway through the lower two ropes on the far side. Sakura stood at the other side, weaving slightly on her feet, and I could see that she was spent for the moment - but El Fuego had had enough. He stirred, blinking, and tapped the mat twice with his right hand to concede - at which point Sakura, touching my heart with pride, went over and helped him up. she said brightly. I barely heard her over the roar of her small cheering section, who were trying - with relatively limited success, but a lot of heart - to chant the luchadora name the ref had given her at the start of the match. El Fuego agreed. the ref said to El Fuerte and me. Cammy kissed me for luck and said, "Go make it two for our team," before propelling me into the ring. Sakura and I exchanged high and low fives in passing, and I felt loose and in the groove as I stepped to the center and faced my opponent past Rey's upraised hand. he told us, and we did so gladly. El Fuerte told me, grinning. he told the ref. Rey laughed. he said, but he didn't share what it was. Instead he asked, said El Fuerte. I agreed. Rey swept his hand up and out from between us. DECAPRE Seeking the girl was easier than finding her. I didn't have to think about what I was doing; I had a protocol and I followed it. It was comfortingly like the old order. Once I found her, though, I had to choose what to do next. Unseen, I crouched at the corner of a roof two blocks away and watched the fight. The sightline was excellent. If I'd had a telesighted rifle instead of just my mask's optics, I could easily have dispatched as many of the combatants or spectators as I wished. Fortunately for them, I wished to dispatch none of them. For reasons I wasn't equipped to explore, I chose merely to observe. The girl fought with something I dimly recognized as an inspired flair, improvising and blending together elements of at least four different fighting styles. Her raw talent was impressive, but what was truly startling in one so young was her ability to focus. Mainly through force of will, she shrugged off an onslaught from the wrestler that might have put me down before my most recent round of augmentations. That willpower gave her the ability to demand far more of her slight and immature body than it could reasonably be expected to give - and get it. Her teacher, though... he was a different story. He wasn't a very tall man - several inches shorter than Lord Bison - but heavily, solidly built, with a low center of gravity and a way of standing and moving that gave him an air of implacability. He did have certain qualities in common with his student, I saw. Like her, he had the knack of demanding the fullest measure of his body's powers - and his fully grown, sturdily made frame had more to give. Against the second Mexican wrestler, he showed this quality by absorbing far more punishment than he dodged or blocked. In our battle, of which I had clinically precise but emotionally dead pre-awakening memories, he had been hard pressed to stay away from my blades, but against an opponent without edged weapons, it often cost him less to simply -take- a blow than it would have to avoid it; and he seemed to know when that was and wasn't true, which was the greater trick. That description makes him sound like a slow, unskilled brawler with an uncommonly hard head, but there were more dimensions to his abilities than just an ability to take a punch. I recognized much of Lord Bison's style in his movements, and yet much that was different as well. This man's way of fighting was just as direct, just as straightforward, as my former master's, but he lacked the master's brutality. No - more than that. He seemed somehow to -eschew- the master's brutality, like a man who has a gun and chooses not to use it. He possessed a similar psychic gift, what Bison calls his "psycho power", but harnessed it only to defeat, not to destroy, his opponents. This required more effort, more -finesse-. I realized, with another in the long series of shocks my life had become, that in this respect his method, seen in person, made Lord Bison's seem... ... crude. I filed this realization away for later consideration. It was becoming obvious that this man, the street fighter called Gryphon, was going to be the key to understanding my primary - target? Objective would probably be a better word. His influence on her development as a martial artist was evident, and that meant he was also certain to be shaping her character. Both aspects were likely to be important in the future. As Gryphon's battle with the white-clad wrestler entered its final, climactic phase, I shifted my attention to the onlookers. His partner, the freelance operative codenamed MegaZone, sat in the bleachers surrounded by a small group of obviously Japanese teenagers, the five of them standing out like a neon sign among the local population all around them. Oddly, in the middle of all this noisy spectacle, he seemed to be having an intent conversation with someone by Bluetooth headset. It would have been interesting to tap his comms, but I lacked the proper equipment. None of the girls registered in my database. Friends of the primary objective's, perhaps. Some part of me wondered idly what it was like to have friends. /* ZZ Top "Can't Stop Rockin'" _Afterburner_ (1985) */ SAKURA Did you ever have the feeling you were being watched? I did during Sensei's fight with El Fuerte, and I still can't imagine why. I mean, yes, I had noticed a slightly odd vibe in the air when we first arrived in Milmáscaras, a kind of suppressed tension, and it hadn't gone away, but I didn't think it had anything to do with us anyway. Regardless, nobody on that entire block was looking at me right then, not even my buddies from Tokyo. Every eye within 200 yards was on the action in the ring, and you don't get bonus points for guessing why. I kid Sensei sometimes about his style not being all that visually interesting, and compared to a lot of the others on the World Warrior tour, it really isn't. It's all straight-up punches and efficient but not very artistic kicks. If you go by Sensei's style in the ring, a fully trained Ler Drit fighter fights like normal people drive their cars, whereas somebody like Fei Long or Cammy is like a stunt driver shooting a car chase. That might have more to do with him than the art, though. I mean, I've never seen Rose fight, but I bet she doesn't fight like that. She even -walks- with flair. So anyway, yeah, on the whole, I'd rather watch Ryu fight. He's got a certain zing (which he doesn't realize he has, which is so cute). But that's not to say that Sensei's just a bruiser, like what's-his-name the boxer. Once you get your eye in, you start to realize that the simple efficiency of his style, the way all the lines are clean and straight and no motion is wasted, is beautiful in its own way. I mean, it's not for me, I like to jump around and put a little English on things (as my baseball-crazy pal Shoma likes to say), but I've learned to appreciate it. It was especially obvious against El Fuerte, who, even more than El Fuego, sometimes seemed to be almost as much dancer as fighter. He had a bunch of fancy footwork and liked to do things with his hands that were probably supposed to be distracting. He was a lot of fun to watch. "Go on, Gryphon!" Natsu yelled from behind me. "Take him down!" I turned around and smirked at her; she'd sure come around from her original assessment of him, which she delivered when the four of them barged into the house and (so they thought) cornered him in the living room: "Hmph. That's kind of disappointing, he's just some guy." Now that I was over being annoyed at them for thinking I was some kind of international sex slave in Worcester, I thought the whole thing was kind of funny. I mean, here they all were in -Mexico City-, of all places, fresh off seeing me fight a masked wrestler. That's crazier than the time I challenged Karin Kanzuki to a hot dog contest. And I've got a much better chance of not puking in Kei's backpack. El Fuerte grabbed my attention back from that thought by scoring a solid right to the middle of Sensei's face. Then he took a half-step backward, wound up, and jumped up so that he was standing on Sensei's shoulders. Sensei seemed more startled by that than anything else. I had done something like it in our fight with all those Shadolu goons in Canada, but that was just because it was the quickest way of getting past him. It wasn't because I was about to drop with all my weight (not that that would really accomplish much if it was MY weight, but you know) on his head and then do some kind of spinning aerial suplex from hell. Sensei actually -bounced- when El Fuerte finally turned him loose at the end of all that, then danced away from him. "Oooh!" said Akira behind me in an I-bet-that-hurt tone. That was about the loudest outburst I'd ever heard from her. Here, again, was one of those direct, straightforward things about Sensei that made some people on the tour dismiss him as a no-style brawler. Somebody flashy, like Fei Long, or elegant, like Ryu, would have gotten up with some kind of stylish special move, a kippup or a sideways roll or some such. Sensei just... got up, climbing to his feet like he'd just finished letting the oil out of his car. He shook his head, making sure his neck was still attached the right way around, and then grinned at El Fuerte. I knew that grin. So did Cammy. It made the same one come onto both our faces, and we glanced at each other with that silent look that means honey, get the camera, 'cause this is gonna be friggin' great. His left fist was already starting to glow as he took two running steps, then dropped into a slide, sparks flicking up from where the Ler field around his feet caught specks of dust. El Fuerte's roundhouse kick passed within a millimeter of the top of his head, and then Sensei was coming up from the sliding crouch with a knee in El Fuerte's gut, doubling him over with a WHUMP we could hear over in the corner. Switching his feet and scraping to a stop, Sensei straightened El Fuerte back up again with an open right palm to the middle of the chest, rocked back slightly over his hips, and applied the Stark Fist of Removal. I had tried to do this move over and over again, but never gotten it to work. It was my new tatsumaki senpuukyaku, the move I ached to pull off but couldn't manage yet. It reminded me a little of the Rekkaken that's one of Fei Long's trademarks in his movies, that flurry of fast punches to the body - except the Stark Fist is done all with one hand, propelled by concentrated Ler faster than the eye can follow, and it finishes with an uppercut that doesn't twist like the Shotokan dragon punch, but is good for almost as much air. Sensei's personal best is a dozen hits in two and a half seconds, under controlled dojo conditions, and he couldn't lift his left hand above shoulder height for a day afterward. By comparison, this one was relatively lightweight, only six-by- two, but it did the job, particularly with the Electro Gauntlet (well, that's what -I- think he should call it) unloading at the end. El Fuerte went so completely over backward that he ended up flat on his face. For a couple of seconds, nobody moved; even the hometown crowd had gone silent. Then El Fuerte raised his head, blinked, and tapped out, and Sensei went over to help him up. "And the crowd goes wild!" I called to him over the noise of, well, the crowd going wild. El Fuerte, still holding onto his hand in the armwrestler grip he'd used to pull himself to his feet, beamed. he said. Rey stepped between Sensei and me, took hold of our hands, and raised them in the air. he boomed, his voice quieting the crowd for a second. I didn't understand why the change of nickname, but the crowd did; it got a huge laugh, and for a second I thought he was making fun of me, but not the way everybody was cheering. And Sensei laughed too, which he wouldn't have done if Rey was being mean - I hoped. "What's this one mean?" I asked. "In Spanish, they call firefighters 'bomberos'," he told me. "OK, and '-ita' is a feminine, what's it called, diminutive," I said, to prove I had been paying attention in Spanish class. Sensei nodded. "Yeah." I still didn't get it for a second, and then I felt my other hand being raised in the air, looked to see El Fuego holding it up, and it all suddenly became clear. I was still cracking up as my friends crowded around me, congratulating me (Natsu and Hinata) or telling me I was still out of my mind (Kei) or just beaming with quiet happiness (Akira), and then El Fuerte declared the kitchen open for the delight of victors and vanquished alike (don't look at me, that's what he said) and we all crowded into the restaurant. G I've been known to put on a feed or two after hosting a match, either at home or, if I'm feeling too lazy or beat-up to cook, at one of Worcester's finer establishments. I don't think I've ever rolled out a spread to compare with the one El Fuerte and El Fuego put on, though, particularly not after notching a loss. I'm not a sore loser, but I do tend to be rather sore after I lose, if you follow the distinction, and it blunts my culinary aspirations somewhat. It seemed to make the luchadores hungry, and they were spectacular cooks in an intensely flavorful, but not blow-your-head-off spicy, variant of the Southwestern style. Dish after wonderful dish flowed out of the kitchen, presenting a delicious challenge in balancing things tasted against cargo space remaining. The meal finally wrapped up, two hours after it began, with a flan that would just about break your heart. "I can hear my mother now," said Kei, pushing her chair back slightly from the long center table where we all, as "guests of honor", were seated. "'Where have you been all weekend? And how on Earth did you gain twenty pounds?'" "I'm never going to be able to look at the Tac-O-Rama in the Aohura Center food court again, now that I know how much better this kind of food can be," Hinata agreed. Sakura turned in her seat and translated her friends' remarks to El Fuego, who stood behind the bar. He grinned broadly and said they were too kind, far too kind. Somebody put something norteño on the jukebox and the afternoon shortly seemed set to become an extended sort of block party. There was fútbol on TV (when is there ever not?), there was a wide range of mildly alcoholic beverages available to those entitled to them, and before long I was reminded powerfully of a truly delightful evening I'd spent in Scotland not all that long ago. It was only midafternoon, and I was a lot soberer this time, but the vibe was the same, that great combination of warm hospitality, general fellowship, and sheer... -niceness-. Fuerte y Fuego was turning into a Latin-themed doppelganger of the Iron and Wheel, and there were a lot worse things for a place to be. At one point, I was sitting near the end of the bar with a bottle of Belhaven stout in one hand and Cammy's free hand in the other, watching El Fuego present Sakura with the bright red silk sash he'd been wearing around his waist as a trophy of her first victory in a ranked Street Fighter Tournament match. I don't know why it hadn't registered on me that it -was,- but until that moment it hadn't, and I made a mental note to mark the occasion in some way myself. As it was, she was delighted with El Fuego's gift, more than she ever would have been by some cheesy official trophy. Ah, that's my girl. I took a sip of my beer, not understanding what was going on with the fútbol and not really minding, when Zoner slipped onto the stool to my left and said quietly, "Gryph, I think we might have a problem." I eyed him. "You do?" "Yeah. I've been digging into the background of this outfit that's trying to buy up the neighborhood, and I think my contact at InterBank just nailed down where their money's coming from." He showed me the screen of his Droid. I read it, but before I had a chance to react, the front doors of the restaurant banged open and a rather battered teenage boy lurched through, crying breathlessly, El Fuerte broke away from explaining something to Sakura - I hoped it wasn't that Godawful multistage throw he'd laid on me, I did NOT want her busting that out on me in training someday - and rushed to the boy's side. he said. So saying, he eased the boy onto a seat at the nearest table. Javier told him. El Fuerte frowned. Javier replied. From outside came the sounds of breaking glass, people running, and shouting. El Fuerte's frown turned into a full-on scowl. He untied his Rainbow Mika apron and dropped both it and the matching chef's hat on the table. he said. Javier nodded. El Fuerte told him, clapping his shoulder. I turned to Cammy. "Why does this always happen when we're having a nice quiet drink somewhere?" I asked. "It must be you," she replied, knocking back the last of her Belhaven with a shrug. "Never happens to me when I'm on my own." Then she grinned and swung off her stool. "Shall we?" "Wouldn't miss it," I said. "Hey - where are you going?" I added as Zoner turned and started heading for the back. "Downtown," he said. "You guys take care of business here." "Uh, OK," I agreed. I was a little puzzled, but not really worried. If he was heading out the back, he had an errand of some kind planned that involved avoiding the fray we could hear developing outside, and that meant he was in full-on operative mode - not surprising if what I'd seen on the screen of his Droid was true. "What about us?" Hinata asked. "We want to help too." "This is liable to be pretty messy," I started to say, but before I could go on, Sakura told her, "Go with Javier to the church. El Fuerte says most of the children from the neighborhood will be there. The priest will probably need help protecting them. Take Fury with you. Got it?" Hinata nodded. "Got it. Kei's the only one of us who speaks any Spanish, and she can't fight worth a damn - " "Hey!" " - but," she added with a dark little smile, "I think we'll manage." Hinata and Sakura bumped their fists together, and then Sakura's four friends and the dog formed up into a little defensive phalanx around Javier, and the six of them went out into the street. I turned a thoughtful eye to my student. "Your friend sounds like she's done this before," I observed. "Yeah, there was this big conspiracy at her school last year, and - tell you what, ask me later," she said distractedly, unfolding El Fuego's sash from one of the front pockets of her cargo pants (the same ones she'd worn on the Alkali Lake job). Before I could ask her what she was planning to do with that, she knotted it around her face as a replacement for Hinata's kerchief, which she'd given back after the match. "What do you think?" she asked, brushing the long red tail of her impromptu scarf mask back over her shoulder. "Does the Strider look suit me?" "It actually kind of does," I admitted. "Scarily enough." Cammy returned from a quick recce by the front door. "It's definitely hotting up out there," she reported. "El Fuerte's talking with someone - I guess he's the leader, or as close as that lot gets - but I don't think he's getting anywhere. I reckon we're about two minutes away from a full-on Celtic-v.-Rangers donnybrook." I grinned at her. "I love it when you talk foreign." "Focus, boy," she replied, thumping me lightly on the chest with the back of her hand, but she was smiling. "C'mon." Catching sight of Sakura, she smiled more broadly and said, "Oh, nice -touch.-" "Thanks," Sakura said as we left the restaurant. /* Timo Maas "To Get Down (Fatboy Slim Mix)" (single, 2001) */ The street where our ring had been set up a few hours before had been cleared of all the equipment, but now it was full of people. On the one hand, what looked like pretty much the full adult population of Milmáscaras, including a good many masked figures of both genders, along with the crew from Fuerte y Fuego, civilians of every shape and size, a handful of guys in the green coveralls and flat caps of the local garbagemen, Rey and a group of other young guys who were dressed and pompadoured just like him, and even what appeared to be a mariachi band. On the other, a central-casting angry mob, complete with rough-looking bunches who looked like construction workers and a group who looked like shopping mall security guards. Sprinkled among this restive, muttering group were more than a few people wielding traditional angry-mob weapons - axe handles, pool cues, and the like. I missed the last of the heated words that passed between El Fuerte and the tall, heavily mustached man who seemed to be speaking for the mob. Cammy, Sakura, and I arrived at the front of the crowd just in time to see The 'Stache, as I mentally dubbed him at once, shove El Fuerte with both hands, a dismissive sneer on his face. El Fuerte might have let even that go without giving up on diplomacy, but the chinless wonder on The Stache's left punctuated his boss's dismissal by applying a similar shove to Connie, Fuerte y Fuego's head waitress. The blow knocked her down, and El Fuego, who was standing next to her, wasn't about to let -that- pass. His nickname didn't only derive from his flaming specials. He laid that guy down with one tremendous, outraged punch, and then we were all off to the races. KEI The church at the end of the block was a big old stone building, dark and cool inside, and beautifully decorated; if I'd had more time, I could have enjoyed just looking around in there for a while. As it was, though, I had work to do. As the only member of our little group who could even slightly speak the language - and it was VERY slightly - I had to explain to the startled priest what four foreign teenagers had barged into his place of refuge to do. Apart from Father Alvarez and the rest of the church staff (what do you want, I'm not Catholic, I don't know what they're called), there were about three dozen kids in the church, ranging in age from four or five up to around 12. They were scared, as you might expect, and the sight of us suddenly appearing didn't help, though a lot of the younger ones calmed down when they saw Fury. He wasn't a mean-looking dog, but he was big and solid, and he had a strange kind of confidence about him, like he'd been in situations like this before and everything was going to be OK. I was glad to have him with me when I saw how the smaller kids reacted to his presence. The good news, apart from that, was that there was only one entrance to the church that wasn't a sturdy metal fire door which locked from the inside. That was all the way at the front, facing onto the main street. The bad news was that it couldn't be locked, and even if it could've, it didn't look all that substantial. "OK, well... could be worse," Natsu said philosophically. While Hinata did a few preparatory stretches and Akira found a place to stash her duffel bag, Natsu took off her windbreaker and draped it on the end of one of the pews, then had a look around. As she did, she spied one of the smaller kids, the ones who were too young to really understand what was going on but not too young to be scared, staring at her like she was a creature from another planet. Which she probably looked like to him, in fairness. She's nearly six feet tall and, well, Japanese, which is a combination that gets her a fair number of startled looks -in Japan-, let alone Mexico City. "Hey kid," she said cheerfully, pointing to the red kickball he was clutching, "can I borrow that for a minute?" The boy gave her a baffled look. "Kei, ask him if I can borrow his ball," she told me. I relayed the request, puzzled out his rapid-fire reply, and reported, "He wants to know why. We can't play any good games in here." She smirked. "That's what -he- thinks." The boy took my fumbling translation of that remark aboard, considered it, and then handed over the ball. Natsu took it with a gracious nod, tossed it in the air and bounced it off her arm a couple of times to get a feel for it, then caught it, tucked it under her arm, and said, "Not quite what I'm used to, but it'll do." The doors opened a moment later to admit a dozen or so large, angry-looking men, and I felt that sinking feeling I get whenever a day out with Sakura turns into a festival of danger, which is pretty much every time. You would think I'd have learned by now that even halfway around the world, hanging with Sakura means automatic trouble. It just -follows- her. Which sometimes makes me wonder why I do. I like to think I'm -not- a thrillseeker, but all the evidence suggests otherwise. "You better get these kids back," Natsu told me quietly. "Try and keep them calm." I nodded. "Right." Trying to keep my voice as cheerful as possible, I said, At least, I think that's what I said. one of the men said. another asked. "Sorry, no habla," said Hinata in English. "Are you girls lost or something?" the guy repeated in that language. "We got no quarrel with you. Why don't you take off? If you go that way," he said, pointing to the side of the church away from the restaurant and the mob scene we'd seen on our way over here, "you won't run into our friends. Just keep going 'til you get to the the Metro." "What, walk away and just let you trash a church and scare all these kids?" Hinata replied scornfully. "Yeah, uh, that's not really gonna happen," Natsu agreed. said the first one who'd spoken. "And what do you think you're gonna do about it?" the spokesman asked. "Nothin', unless you make a move," Natsu said nonchalantly. "That's right," Hinata agreed. The man loomed over Hinata, who looked like a little china doll in comparison to his rough-hewn, brawny construction-worker style. "And if we do?" he asked mildly, his hands forming into big, knobby fists. "Better for everybody if you don't," she said. "As the ancient Tibetan masters teach us," Natsu said solemnly, "'Don't start none, won't be none.'" the first man said. Stepping forward, he reached to shove Hinata out of the way - - but she had already slipped aside, leaving his hand to paw empty air, and then, with an explosive KIAI!, she unloaded a sidelong kick into his midsection that folded him up like a deck chair and sent him skidding across the polished wood floor most of the way back to the entrance. I said, and they listened to me this time and started moving toward the altar, where Father Alvarez and the rest of the staff were staring in grim amazement at what was going down inside the entrance. "That was a mistake, girl," the spokesman said, pulling a set of brass knuckles out of his pants pocket. He advanced, but before he could close with Hinata, Natsu had wound up and served the boy's kickball into his face with such force of will behind it that it set the man momentarily on fire. The ball, trailing a fine wisp of smoke, bounced back into her hands as he went down, and she glanced at at it in surprise as she and Hinata went back-to-back and prepared to take on the rest of them. "Nice!" she said. "You get some real friction out of this surface. I wish I'd discovered these things -years- ago." "You probably did," Hinata told her. "Remember second grade?" "Only thing I remember from second grade is the time I got sent home for punching Billy Himura," Natsu replied. "Why'd you do that?" "Dunno. I probably liked him. I was a conflicted child." Then the rest of the men rushed them, and the altar boys (I think that's what they're called - the guys about our age, in the dresses) charged past me to join the fray on Natsu and Hinata's side, and the whole thing got very violent and exciting. MARIA It took me a few minutes to work up the courage to go up to the fourth girl, the quiet one, and tug on her white T-shirt. She was watching the fight so intently that her face was almost fierce, but the others were busy and the nice one with the funny accent was helping the rest of my friends, so she was my only option. She didn't speak any Spanish, and I only had a little English and none of whatever language she normally spoke, but I managed somehow to make her understand that I couldn't find my brother Diego. I thought he must have gone home to try and get El Vaquero. I couldn't get -that- part across at all, but she seemed to recognize "brother". She smiled, just a little, and told me her name was Akira (which pretty much used up all of my English). Then she must have said she'd help me, because the next thing I knew she was taking a leather jacket out of the bag she had with her, pulling it on, and then letting me pull her toward the back of the church and out the side door into the alley. She followed me across the block to the building where my family lives. We could hear the fighting up the street, and it was really scary, but I wasn't that worried. Out in the street, with the danger all around us, the quiet foreign girl moved with the kind of confidence I was used to seeing in Tío Fuerte or one of the other luchadores in the ring. She looked so nice and gentle, but I just knew that if there was a problem, she would handle it. You learn to see that kind of thing when you grow up in Milmáscaras. We went upstairs to my apartment, and there was Diego in his room. He -had- come back for El Vaquero, and then he heard the fighting getting closer to the house, chickened out, and decided to hide. I would have yelled at him, but he was only five, and I knew he couldn't really help it. Instead I told him Akira was here to help us get back to the church and got him to come down to the street door with us. "Who is El Vaquero?" Akira wondered in her funny English while we were coming down the stairs. I pointed to Diego's teddy bear, who wore the mask and cowboy pants of his favorite luchador. Mama made the outfit for him. Akira smiled and said something I didn't understand, ruffled Diego's hair, and then said, "Rettsu go," which must have meant she thought we should hurry, because she jumped the rest of the way down the stairs. That's when the three guys kicked open the door from the street and came into the hall. Akira went very still, facing them. Diego made a frightened noise and hid behind me, the big baby. For a second, the three men and Akira all stood looking at each other, the men obviously as surprised to see her as we were to see them. /* Rollins Band "Ghost Rider" _Hard Volume_ (remastered, 1999) */ Moving slowly and calmly, Akira zipped up her leather jacket, then picked up my older brother Rey's motorcycle helmet from where he'd left it hanging on the knob at the bottom of the stairs. Her voice was very soft as she said something I couldn't understand to the men. "What the hell language is that?" one of them said to the others. "Beats me," said the one he'd asked. "She looks like she might be Chinese." "Jesus, Balrog didn't say anything about beating up little kids," said the third one. "Yeah, but he didn't say not to, either," the first one said, smirking. He cracked his knuckles and stepped toward Akira. "Hey! You! Get outta the way or you're gonna get hurt! You understand me?" He switched to English. "How about now? ¿Hablas Inglés? Clear off or it's not gonna be pretty." "No," Akira agreed, "it's not," and then she put on Rey's motorcycle helmet and cinched it under her chin. Tío Fuerte says that the mask gives the fighter his power, and that when he puts it on, he becomes more than just a man. I thought he was just telling me a kiddie story - even though I'm almost eleven! - until the day I saw Akira put on Rey's helmet. She seemed to turn into a different person. She still didn't say much, but her voice was louder and sounded rougher, and the quiet confidence she'd had before turned into the kind of furious courage I was used to seeing from Tío Fuego in the ring. She was no bigger than before, but she seemed -twice- as big somehow, as she beat those three big men senseless. Wherever they tried to hit her, she wasn't. Wherever they tried to avoid her, she was. Even when they managed to connect, she didn't seem to feel it. She knocked out two of them quickly; the third was tougher, but eventually she overpowered him as well. She knocked him right out the door onto the stoop with a backflip that was also a kick, landed partway up the stairs, and then leaped at him, straight through the door, and pounded him with flying kicks all the way down to the sidewalk before finishing him off with a spinning elbow that would have done anyone in the Milmáscaras Open Fighting Club proud. Akira stood over him for a couple of seconds, breathing hard; then she climbed back up the steps, dragged the other two men out of the house, took off Rey's helmet, put it back where she'd found it, and said again to me and Diego, "Rettsu go." I wanted to ask her if she knew who Balrog was, but I don't think I could have made her understand me, and besides, I wanted to get off the street before anyone else came along, so we left. G I hate to say it, because it was obviously a very traumatic day for a lot of people and caused a lot of needless damage to Milmáscaras, but... well, I actually had a lot of fun during the riot. With all the luchadores at large, and Sakura rocking the Strider Hiryu style, and Cammy and I getting to uncork an extra bottle of teamwork whoopass on the deserving, the whole thing rather took on the character of a huge and strangely festive tag-team match. These guys, whoever they were, obviously wanted to cause a lot of mayhem, but they apparently had limits. Nobody seemed to have brought a gun, or even a knife, which was a little surprising. Heads got broken in a figurative sense, but there were no really serious injuries - not even when Sakura and El Fuego teamed up for something they christened "Blazing Justice Relay", but which I thought of as "Bowling for Bad Guys", since it basically involved El Fuego using his flaming dive technique to propel Sakura (and a whole bunch of FIRE!) straight into the midst of a particularly problematic group of roughnecks. Of the two, the fire was the smaller problem for them. Only once did anyone on the opposing side ever cross that unwritten line between street brawl and serious shit, when - with most of his closest associates down for the count all around him and the whole situation visibly unraveling for his side - The 'Stache did finally show his true colors and haul out a Beretta nine-millimeter. Unfortunately for him, he did it within six feet of Cammy, which meant that before he could even take decent aim at El Fuerte, let alone try to take the shot, he'd received a little gift called a "cannon spike" that sent him flying in one direction and his nine in the other. With a neat backflipping follow-through, she caught the gun and kicked him for extra distance before he could reach the ground, then landed on her feet facing his pals, flipped the weapon over, and field- stripped it one-handed, letting the pieces fall to earth. She gave the guys a look that said, "I could take -you- apart just that easily too," and they all decided they really ought to find someone -else- to fight. I love that girl's style. Have I mentioned that? Another wave of them came around the corner from uptown a moment later, and the rest of us regrouped. I was just starting to wonder where Zoner had gotten off to when he showed up with the Army. Well, the Federales, but they did have a tank - which he was riding on top of, the big showoff. Order, as they say in the newspapers, was restored in short order. MZ We went back to Fuerte y Fuego, which had somehow managed to go unransacked during the riot, as soon as the police were done interviewing everybody. We managed to keep Sakura and her friends more or less out of it. By mutual consent, the locals all chose not to mention their contributions to the defense of Milmáscaras - though they were very well-acknowledged once the cops had cleared off to write their reports. If anything, the post-riot party was an even more cheerful occasion than the post-match one. For this one, Gryph hit the kitchen with our hosts, helping them kick out even more fantastic food, and we all stuffed ourselves again. Fending off a manufactured block riot - or, in my case, rushing downtown to alert the Federal Police that one was in progress, and present the evidence that it -was- manufactured - was the kind of thing that built an appetite. Frozen drinks were consumed. Songs were sung. Heroes were named. One of the guys from Rey's gang, a wiry little guy who had seriously huge talent with a spray can, painted a mural of Strider Sakura in action on the side of the garage across the street, complete with an artful little spray of blood from the nose of the mook whose face her right shoe was caught in the very instant of flattening. It took him half an hour and was the most amazing act of graffiti I'll probably get to watch. The blowout finally wound down around midnight, by which time nobody felt like making the trek back to the airport to sleep aboard the Prince. Bruised, sore, only slightly drunk, and tired from two huge fights in one day, Gryph crashed on a mattress in the corner of the restaurant's upstairs storeroom, fully clothed, with Cammy by his side, Fury at his feet, Sakura curled up between him and the wall, and all her friends in a row over on the other side. He looked, even in his sleep, deliriously happy. The thought made me smile as I went downstairs, where El Fuerte and El Fuego were having a last beer before calling it a night themselves. The place looked like - well, like two huge parties had happened in a row, but compared to the street outside it was tidy. There'd be a lot of cleaning up to do, in here and outside, but everyone seemed content to let that slide until morning. I certainly couldn't argue. "Hola," said El Fuerte, moving over to make room for me at the table. "Yo," I replied, sitting down. he said. I told him. He nodded. I took out my Droid, brought up the document my contact at InterBank had sent me, and handed it over for his inspection. He read through it, then blinked and gave me back the phone. he asked, sounding confused. I explained. El Fuego frowned. I said. El Fuerte snapped his fingers. he said. I nodded. El Fuego asked. I said, El Fuerte said. I said. El Fuerte looked me in the eye for a moment, then smiled and patted my arm. he said. the other luchador declared. I said. I decided not to mention the sniper the police had found stabbed to death on the roof of the high-rise office block a half-mile from the flashpoint of the riot. It wasn't a given that he'd had anything to do with the violence, though it was an awfully big goddamn coincidence if he didn't... but someone had gotten to him before he could take a shot, regardless, and I wondered who it had been. Had somebody in Milmáscaras taken somewhat more, er, -pointed- exception to the whole proceeding? Or did we have a third player on the field today? That's all we needed was some psycho with a blade and a willingness to use it shadowing us. It troubled me, but there was no point burdening El Fuerte and El Fuego with it. I'd just have to keep my eyes open. We left Mexico City the next day, to the kind of sendoff usually reserved for Roman generals departing for their next great campaigns to extend the Empire. On the long flight to Tokyo, Gryph, Cammy, and the girls watched movies back in the MMB, and even did some sparring, not that there's a lot of room back there for that. After we stopped for fuel at Midway, Cammy spelled me at the controls (the Prince has an autopilot, but someone's got to be pilot in command all the time anyway - better safe than in the sea) so that I could go back and relax for a while. I found the six of them in the miniature living room, lights off, all of them watching the TV with expressions of what I can only describe as dull horror. I sat down at the end of the couch and took a look. At first it seemed like a pretty straightforward samurai movie, a bit cheesy, but nothing that would provoke the kind of train-wreck fascination they were all exhibiting - until it suddenly took a right turn and got -really, really freaky.- "Gryph?" I said after one particularly not-safe-for-teenage- girls scene. "What in the hell are we watching?" "I'm not sure," he admitted without looking away from the screen. "It was on the satellite thing." I got out my Droid and checked the program guide. "'Hanzo the Razor'," I said. "Wasn't there a mature viewers warning?" "It had already started when we found it," Gryph said. "Shh," Natsu chided me. "Is he going to - oh my God, he IS," Hinata blurted. "Just like Muay Thai guys do," Natsu agreed. "Except that's to toughen their HANDS," Hinata said. "Shh," Akira chided them. "Should we be letting them watch this?" I asked Gryph. "Bit late now," he replied fatalistically. "This wasn't really how I wanted to be prompted to have this conversation with you, Sakura, but when this is over I think there are going to be a few things I need to clarify." "Shh," Kei chided him. Once the movies were over, I helped Sakura's friends refine their cover stories for the weekend, and they left us at Haneda Airport apparently none the worse for their adventure - not even permanently scarred by the horrors of "Hanzo the Razor" and its two equally incomprehensible sequels. Ah, the resilience of the teenage woman- child. Gryph told them to come back anytime, but perhaps to consider calling ahead and keeping better track of their return tickets. We overnighted in Tokyo, seeing some sights, having dinner with an old friend, and paying a clandestine visit to Sakura's mother and younger brother while her father was at work; and then we turned around and headed home. It was a long way to spend a weekend, but a good one. We got home, slightly disoriented but in high spirits, to find a bunch of mail waiting for us, but nobody camped on the doorstep, which was good. It was the middle of the night and Sakura had school the next day, but we were hungry, so I nuked some of the frozen lasagna from the week before and we all sat around the kitchen table to eat it while Gryph flipped through the mail. "Anything good, sensei?" Sakura asked. "Well, this looks like it might be interesting," he replied, then turned up a fat, oddly square envelope of nice cream-colored paper, higher-class than the usual crap we got. "Looks like a wedding invitation," I said. "Do we know anyone who's getting married?" Gryph shrugged. "Maybe Joe's finally found that special guy," he said, making me snort lasagna. "AAAH," I remarked, then did what I could to mitigate the spill. I was under no illusion that Cammy and Sakura were laughing with me rather than at me. "Ah. Bastard." "Well, go on," Cammy said, giving his near shoulder a push. "Don't keep us in suspense." "OK, OK, you don't have to shove me," he said, slitting the envelope with his unused butter knife. Inside was a neatly folded sheet of the same creamy paper, embossed with a gold seal. He unfolded it and revealed that it was covered in neatly painted Chinese characters. "Hmm. That -is- interesting." "Well? What is it?" Cammy asked. "It's not a wedding invitation. It's an invitation to the Kokuryukai underground tournament in Hong Kong later this month." He considered the paper. "I wonder how I got on their mailing list." "Are you going?" Sakura asked excitedly, but I was already shaking my head, because Gryph and I had talked about what we'd do if this happened five years ago, the last time the Black Dragon Society's infamous Kumite was held. They hadn't invited him then, but we figured there was a decent chance they might the next time - and now that they had, I knew what he was going to say. "Hell no," he said. "Those guys are only about a half-step above the Triads. Their tournament's like a cage fight dressed up in an expensive suit. Forget about it." Sakura looked disappointed, but she knew better than to press the point when he'd nixed going so decisively. He put the invitation aside and kept flipping through the mail with his free hand, eating automatically with the other one. Toward the bottom of the stack was another red-and-blue-edged airmail envelope, this one addressed in a familiar hand. He raised an eyebrow, opened it, and took out another, cheaper piece of paper, also covered in Chinese writing, but this rendered much more simply in blue ballpoint. "Hmm," he said. "This complicates things." "What?" Cammy asked. "It's from a friend of ours in Hong Kong," said Gryph. He passed the note to me. "'You once said you would do anything in your power to help me with my most important investigation,'" I read. "'I hope you meant that. And that you haven't already thrown away your invitation to the Kumite, because it's vital that you attend. Plan to arrive HK two days prior. Will explain when I see you. Li.'" "If that were from anyone else, I'd pretend it got lost in the mail," Gryph said heavily. "Yeah, but it's not," I told him. "And that means you're stuck." He sighed. "Yup. I did promise." "What investigation?" Sakura asked. "And who's 'Li'?" Cammy wondered. "Well," Gryph said, "it's kind of a long story. The first time Zoner and I visited Hong Kong, not long after we started Trailing Edge, we met this cop... " END BATTLE 07