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Description
      Miyuki Shimada sat cross-legged on the eaves of a roof, looking into the face of a demon. It was her face, or the one she would shortly assume, a traditional black lacquered noh mask carved to look like one of the many sinister creatures of Japanese mythology, with bulging eyes, short, sharp horns, and, rather unusually, a hysterical grin. A grin full of fangs, certainly, but she had always felt it looked like it was enjoying itself far too much. She leaned forward and glanced over the edge of her roof at the point where a narrow alley met the street three stories down. From this angle she could just see the white Mercedes, still parked in a loading zone, and the bull-necked bald man, still standing guard over it.
      Miyuki leaned back into the shadows. The roof she had chosen swept down and outward, and then up again slightly in the traditional Chinese curve, and sitting at the lowest point she was hidden from view from the street below. The only light up here was from the moon, a bright silver gibbous moon. Off to the east the giant spear point silhouette of the Transamerica Pyramid stabbed up into the night sky. A cluster of more conventionally shaped high rises crowded toward it from the south. Miyuki leaned forward again.
      Grant Avenue was a riot of neon and bobbing red paper lanterns, decorative streetlights supported by twisting gold dragons and brightly lit storefronts promising a mix of virtually everything for sale; collectively they created a long thin valley of daylight running north from the Chinatown gate until it ended at Broadway. The lights danced across the deep automotive gloss of the Mercedes, the white SLK with the AMG rims, still parked in the loading zone down below.
      Miyuki sat back again. The bells of Old Saint Mary's struck one o'clock. She re-crossed her legs with her feet on top of her thighs and her knees down, laid her hands in her lap with her palms up, and closed her eyes. The sound of distant traffic blended with the rustling of dry leaves into a steady rushing noise, like a river flowing all around her. The low dull thunder of a jetliner rumbled in, and then out again. One of her ballistic plastic kneepads clicked against the roof tiles, and a dog barked somewhere off in the distance.
      Down on the street a phone rang once, and then stopped. Miyuki opened her eyes.
      The bald man glanced both ways down the street, showing some rather impressive scars. He had a bulldog face to go with his bulldog body, and held his arms at a somewhat awkward angle so as to keep near the front of his suit jacket, close to the automatic pistol undoubtedly concealed just under his armpit. The man was every inch a boo how doy, a Tong enforcer, and probably a pretty good one, or he wouldn't be responsible for watching the white Mercedes, which remained obstinately parked in the loading zone, three stories below. But not for much longer.
      A young man in an immaculate white linen suit had just left the building on the other side of the alley, a small group of his lieutenants forming a black chevron immediately behind him. The bull-necked man opened the driver's door of the SLK and the man in white took his seat behind the wheel. It was a special kind of influence, Miyuki thought, possessing either the fear or admiration of his compatriots, that allowed a man to walk at a closed door without pausing in the knowledge that someone would always open it in time. The men in black all briefly saluted their chief as the driver's door was shut again. As they walked back out of Miyuki's line of sight she got a good look at the man in white. He had a handsome, aristocratic, face, perhaps as much Manchu as Cantonese, a face possessed of the very particular keenness that could make men powerful outside society's laws.
      The glowing red end of a cigarette arced out of the car's open window, and Miyuki thought she could make out a slight smirk as the big German V8 roared to life. The white Mercedes pulled away from the curb, followed shortly by a black Range Rover. Almost immediately afterward, a steel door clanged open in the alley below.
      The alley was dark except for a pair of lit windows in a cramped looking apartment building, but more than enough light bled in from the main streets at either end to see what was happening. There had been a security light over the steel door, but Miyuki had disabled it hours ago in violation of the agreement, made by those unknown parties who made those sorts of agreements, that she wasn't to act until the white car had left. Raised voices drifted up to her vantage point, followed by a sharp cry of pain and the hollow plastic sound of a garbage bin falling over.
      Miyuki loosened the silk cords that would hold the demon mask in place, and brushed her hair back away from her face. A decorative ceramic dragon stared blankly from the ridge of the roof and she leaned over and whispered to it confidentially.
      "Time to get my game face on."

      Elliot "the Eel" Chow backhanded the girl again, and this time she stumbled backward over the fallen bin and fell to the asphalt.
      "Nobody double crosses me, you worthless baht po!" he kicked her hard in the ribs as she tried to get up again. "Where's my damn money?!"
      The girl stammered something in Korean. Chow whipped open his suit jacket and dragged a handgun free from his waistband. He racked the slide with excessive vehemence.
      "Aw geez boss, not here?" one of his bodyguards called from the mouth of the alleyway.
      "Yes, here!" Chow turned and stabbed a finger at the two big men who had kept a respectful distance, and until now, a respectful silence. "Everyone's gotta know who not to fuck with, now shut up and watch the street." He turned back to the girl and raised his pistol to her forehead, her eyes crossed slightly as they fixed on the muzzle.
      A sudden, rapidly expanding cloud of smoke stopped him short. It smelled of incense mixed with gunpowder, and shrouded the alley so thickly that even the lights from Grant Avenue vanished briefly from sight. Several thumps and a crash echoed through the darkness, followed by a short staccato burst of automatic gunfire. The cloud dissipated almost as suddenly as it had arrived, revealing one of his bodyguards laid out motionless on the ground. Nearby, his Steyr machine pistol lay amidst a scattering of its own brass. His companion hung limply from the point where his head was pinned to the wall by a small hand at the end of a slender arm, terminating in a small woman.
      She was dressed in an eclectic combination of traditional Japanese costume and modern tactical gear, with her arms as well as her abdomen bare, the latter from just below her breasts to a sash around her waist that boasted a pair of short straight wicked stabbing swords. As she slowly lifted her head, her shoulder length hair fell back from the frozen lacquered cypress-wood face of the grinning demon.
      "Elliot Chow!" her voice echoed off the brick and concrete walls of the alley. "Meet your end like a man. The right hand of the Blue Tara has come for you!" Chow took a step back as Miyuki took a step forward, letting the bodyguard drop.
      The metal door clanged open again abruptly, and another heavy charged out, pistol raised, drawn by he sound of shots from the alley. Without breaking her stride Miyuki yanked his arm forward and then forced it back at an unnatural angle. She pressed his finger down on the trigger and his gun discharged clean through the fleshy part of his thigh before twisting out of his hand. As the thug stumbled back toward the street, Miyuki fixed Chow with the grinning Oni's gaze once more.
      "What do you want?" he hissed at her. "What are you doing here?"
      "Dude, pay attention, I'm here to kill you." The flat Northern Californian accent behind the grinning mask was infuriatingly casual.
      "What?! We have an agreement!" Chow took another step backward and accidentally kicked the fallen bin, which let out another hollow plastic boom. "You touch me and it's war!"
      "I think I can live with that."
      "I am shé tóu! I'm protected!" Chow was not so much yelling at Miyuki as he was at the building walls around them, grasping for assistance from any source. In response one of the burning apartment lights switched off. Some things it was better not to see.
      "You got a gun. Protect your own sorry ass." Miyuki gauged the distance between them, and tensed the muscles throughout her body. Her hands hovered near the hilts of her two wakizashi. "C'mon, Elliot. Let's throw down!"
      Chow's mouth turned down into a snarl, and his arm jerked upward. At the same instant, Miyuki launched herself off her left foot, like a cobra uncoiling. Her two blades flashed out in broad horizontal arcs, slowing briefly as they met with their objective, then passed on, spattering both sides of the alley with their deadly calligraphy.
      Miyuki had judged her distance decently well; Chow's gun had gone off right next to her, and as a result the sound of his body collapsing to the pavement was dulled in her left ear by a loud ringing. She shook her head a little to clear it, until the ringing went and was replaced by a distant siren. How far? Coming or going? The average response time was about six minutes; Miyuki was almost done here, but not quite.
      She quickly wiped both swords with a paper towel that would later disintegrate in a nearby storm drain and resheathed them, then pushed the grinning demon back on to the top of her head. Her face underneath was largely covered by a balaclava of sorts, a degree of anonymity had to be preserved, but there was no reason to frighten the helpless. The girl that Chow had brought out to the alley was curled against the wall, whimpering softly. Her cheap sequined cocktail dress had slid down exposing one of her breasts, but she was using both hands to cover her face. Miyuki crouched down in front of her.
      "Hey. D'you speak English? Neih sikm`hsik góng gwóngdùngwá a? Nagsasalita ba kayo ng Tagalog? Ban có nói tieng Viet không? ¿Habla usted español? Nothin', huh?"
      The girl said something in Korean that Miyuki didn't quite catch. Korean wasn't her best language. Was the siren getting louder, or was that a different one?
      "Speak Korean not well. Won't hurt. Police coming. Will help." Miyuki stood up again and walked back to the body, flipping open a small utility knife. She glanced back at the girl.
      "Don't look."

      For Officer Lili Wu, Chinatown always brought back memories of her childhood, especially long walks with her grandfather, admiring windows full of jade and pearls, bright green produce vying for space with red and gold packaged novelties. Stockton Street at four in the morning was a far cry from the crowded business district she was used to. All the lights were out, all the colorful stores were shuttered, and all the people, grandfathers and granddaughters included, were asleep in their beds.
      Her partner, Officer Fred Avila, slowed their cruiser slightly at a red light, and then continued through. Their duty shift should have ended already, and he was ready to go home. The red and blue light bar on the roof of their Crown Vic was flashing its warning even though the emergency had finished, and the streets were empty.
      "One time, in the sandbox" Avila began, breaking a ten minute silence, "at Al-Taji, I think it was, this huge sand storm blew in outta nowhere. Like a huge wall, all the way up to the sky, and once it hit you couldn't see nothin'. Convoy had to stop, couldn't even see the vehicle ahead. Can't help but think we're drivin' into another one now."
      "Whaddya mean?" Wu rolled her head sideways to get rid of a kink in her neck.
      "I mean you cross a geographical line here somewhere and suddenly no one's seen nothin'."
      "Lot of places like that."
      "Yeah, but in other places it isn't always the same nothing they all didn't see. Here it is." Two black and white SFPD cruisers were parked at the mouth of an alley, along with a white Ford van with the words "Medical Examiner" ostentatiously emblazoned across the rear quarter in big black capitals. Avila pulled in behind the hindmost cruiser and radioed in their arrival to dispatch. Wu got out, stretched as best as the snug fit of her Kevlar vest would allow, and walked over to the officer standing guard.
      "Hey, Fong! They dragged me all the way down here 'cause they needed someone to speak Guongzhou huà, so if you're here, I'm leaving."
      "Detectives wanted a second opinion." Fong nodded back toward the alley. "They probably want a bunch of interviews done, you know, harassing the neighborhood. 'Sup Avila."
      "Fong, thought you'd be driving a desk by now,"
      Wu rolled her eyes while the guys engaged in a gesture somewhere between a handshake and a high five. At absolute worst she could hand over interviews to someone else when the sun came up two hours from now; the force had any number of officers and detectives who spoke Chinese, but it didn't necessarily have them at four in the morning. Fong lifted the crime scene tape gallantly for her.
      Little yellow plastic cards with numbers on them sat in a clump at the other end of the alley, each one marking where a shell casing fell. One more lay a lot nearer, next to a lump under a white plastic sheet. A crime scene investigator was coaxing a small submachine gun into a clear plastic evidence bag, while the supervising detective looked on passively. He turned and nodded to Wu and Avila as they approached.
      "Noonan, Homicide. Thanks for coming. I need you to translate for me."
      "Sure." Wu hadn't seen anyone other than police so far "Where's the wit?"
      "Not a wit." Noonan reached down and pulled the plastic sheet black, like a magician revealing the absence of a rabbit. "The victim."
      Avila let out a low whistle.
      "Wow, Elliot the Eel. Someone's aiming high. What, don't you ever read the briefs from the NCIC?"
      Wu gave him a dirty look, and then refocused on the body. Elliot Chow had had his throat cut rather spectacularly, but he also had what appeared to be superficial stab wounds to his chest. Wu drew the maglite from her belt and switched it on; under the powerful beam the cuts resolved themselves into a series of ideograms.
      "Well?" Noonan drew a torn flap of shirt back with his pen, to give her a better view.
      "It says something like 'slave trade entrepreneur' but the grammar is odd, and this character here doesn't fit."
      "How not"
      "It doesn't mean anything. It's not Chinese, maybe Japanese from the look of it."
      "Christ." Noonan rubbed his temples with his free hand. "A well known bad guy is killed in his own backyard bodyguards neutralized in a quick in and out like the fuckin' Navy Seals, killer doesn't use a gun, tags the body in Japanese. This shit again, I swear…"
      "Inspector?" Fong called from his end of the alley. He had lifted the tape for a pair of men in dark suits. The smaller of the two, a fastidious young Latino man shook Noonan's hand.
      "Inspector Noonan, good to see you again."
      "Agent Gomez. Didn't know the FBI got up this early."
      "I got a call from SF General that one of my informers caught a bullet in the leg, and shortly after that, the man he's informing on shows up dead. That'll open your eyes faster'n a gallon of espresso. It's looking more and more like the CI was blown, and they shot it out here."
      "Except Mr. Chow got himself killed with a sword, not a gun. Probably a pair of swords. No, I've seen this kind of thing before; it was Ninjas"
      "Aw c'mon." the other FBI agent cut in "You don't seriously… ninjas are an urban legend. We had a case once in Milwaukee, it was just college kids dressing in black pajamas and jumping out of bushes to scare folks."
      Wu stepped away from the knot of men and the corpse and looked the other way down the alley. A young Asian woman was sitting on the back step of an ambulance, her bare legs poking out from the blanket the paramedics had wrapped her in. One of them handed her a bottle of water and gestured reassuringly for her to drink it. It was otherwise a very effective assassination, why leave a witness?
      Avila took a step back from the group, and shined his maglite up above their heads.
      "Inspector, gentlemen. Up there."
      Embedded in a wooden utility pole, just high enough not to be knocked down by passersby, was a six-pointed metal star, apparently used to tack up a folded piece of paper.
      "What the hell…" the taller FBI agent let his words trail off.
      "That's a shuriken, Agent Willis. A ninja star." Inspector Noonan gave him a slap on the back. "Welcome to San Francisco."

By the time the persistent buzzing of Miyuki's phone had dragged her to consciousness her bedroom was already flooded with the sunlight of a brilliantly clear autumn day. She had already hit the snooze on her alarm twice before shutting it off for good so she could luxuriate under the blankets for another hour, but like virtually everyone living in the modern world she had been conditioned to answer her phone, even when she really didn't want to.
"Mmmmmggrrrwhaddya want"
"Hey Snowball," Her cousin Jeff was irritatingly chipper, and his insistence on using her childhood nickname wasn't winning him any points this morning either. "Are you awake?"
"I am now."
"Late night, huh?"
"The, uh, party got the best of me. Whassup?"
"Check out the news, channel 2."
      Miyuki swapped her phone for the remote on her bedside table, rolled back onto her back as the plasma screen at the foot of her bed popped to life. Contrary to Agent Willis' beliefs concerning the wardrobe of the ninja, Miyuki didn't favor black pajamas, or any pajamas for that matter, and in consequence she found herself viewing the demise of Elliot Chow's human trafficking empire through the pink valley between her bare breasts.
      A confusion of arrows crisscrossed a map of the Pacific Rim, followed by stock footage of a freighter and a container port, and then exterior shots of the nondescript house down the peninsula where Elliot had kept the bulk of his operation carefully hidden from any number of federal agencies. Now a pretty, nebulously ethnic reporter was talking to Sgt. Jeff Shimada of the San Francisco Police Department. No wonder he wanted me to see this, Miyuki thought.
      Possibly Hispanic Reporter Girl had moved on to ninja involvement, and Jeff was leading her on with intentionally vague and evasive answers. Was there any truth to the rumor that the killer (and possible ninja) had left a note with the locations of the other sites the FBI had raided this morning? The Department couldn't reveal the sources of an investigation in progress, and generally had no comment in regards to possible ninjas at this time.
      Miyuki turned the TV off, let her head drop back against her pillow again, and tried to put the coming day in order. She had cleared all her business appointments just in case things had turned ugly last night, but she was still meeting a friend for lunch in about two hours. Miyuki toyed with the idea of a quick jog, but planning around the likelihood of traffic she didn't really have time; she could hop directly into the shower and make it without rushing. She pulled herself out of bed, stood, and stretched, glancing sideways at herself in the mirror. She was naked except, curiously, for the headband she had been wearing last night and now duly tossed in the general direction of a wicker laundry hamper. A cursory look showed no suspicious cuts or bruises to explain away.
      "One side, Nudie McNuderson. Government business." Miyuki stepped back into the doorway of her bedroom as her roommate swept past, a duffel bag balanced on her shoulder.
      "Lyta, it's like almost eleven. Why aren't you out wiping out Al-Quaeda, or convincing people that aliens don't exist?" Miyuki followed her friend into the living room of their apartment. They had been living together for most of their adult lives, and knew each other as well as two people generally could. It was a clear sign of their longstanding familiarity that Miyuki didn't bother trying to cover her nudity, and that Lyta didn't find anything amiss.
      "Oh, I'm still at work. I'm headed downrange as soon as I can get over to Travis, I just came back here to grab a few necessities." Lyta Rodriguez tended to resemble her Aztec ancestors somewhat more than their Iberian conquerors, but Miyuki always felt she had gotten the best of both somehow. Her face, tanned to a light mocha, was framed by an immaculate military bob; her baggy, digitized camouflage Airman's Battle Uniform covered a curvy body that would probably tend to weight if not so rigorously disciplined. She set down her duffle next to the door.
      "You're going overseas? For how long?"
      "Dunno, a few days, a week maybe. There's something, uh, time sensitive going on, so however it works out it won't be long."
      "Oh. Cause the weekend's coming, and, well…" Miyuki traced a circle in the carpet with the big toe of her bare right foot. The disappointment had crept into her voice far more than she had intended.
      "I know, there's never enough time to hang out. C'mon, I'll be back soon, and there's other weekends. Now give your girl a hug." Lyta nodded toward the kitchen. "Oh yeah, I brought you some naranjas, too."
      "Aww, you're the best." Miyuki wrapped her arms around her friend and held her close for a few moments. They were the same height, and the metal pilot's wings on Lyta's uniform were shockingly cold when they touched Miyuki's bare chest. Sitting on the kitchen table she could see a plastic net full of bright, plump oranges.
      "Anyway, I gotta go." Lyta perched her duffel on her shoulder again and pulled the door open. "Can you feed Oscar and the babies while I'm gone?"
      "Okay, but bring me something cool back from wherever you're going. Like a really awesome sword, if they have swords. Where are you going, anyway?"
      "They haven't told me yet, and you know I couldn't tell you anyway. But yeah, I'll bring you a mystery item from Undisclosedlocationistan. Remember, don't give Oscar more than two of the prawns at once, even if he makes puppy eyes at you."
      "It's kind of hard to tell what he's thinking, since I'm not sure where his face is. Now if he was a cat there wouldn't…"
      A gentle breeze blowing down through the open court caressed Miyuki in places it normally didn't, and the realization that she had walked a good fifty feet from her apartment door completely naked stopped her abruptly mid-sentence. One arm flew to her breasts while the other shot down between her legs in a belated attempt at modesty.
      "Well, crap. I gotta get back inside before any of the neighbors see me."
      "Chica, they been living here more than a week, there's nothing they haven't seen." Lyta had something of a point, Miyuki had to concede. Her embarrassment was almost entirely because this time she hadn't done it on purpose.
      "Oh haha. Look, stay safe over there."
      "I only grill the carnitas, other dudes gonna have to fight the pig. They'll be waiting on me. Stay out of trouble, huh?"

      Reach-Seven-One-Four-Niner, was not, despite Lyta's prediction, waiting for her on the runway with it's engines running. One of Air Mobility Command's C-17 Globemasters, it was squatting between two of its brethren on Travis Air Force Base's tarmac like a massive grey cormorant hanging out its wings. The rear cargo ramp was down when she arrived, and a group of airmen were standing by as a helicopter, its rotors folded, was winched aboard. The loadmaster nodded to her in a brief greeting, never letting his glance wander from helicopter, ready to signal the airmen to give it a nudge should it stray out of line with the C-17s cargo bay. The helo had, oddly, been shrink wrapped in bright blue plastic, but Lyta could make out the familiar shape of one of the army's UH-60 Blackhawks underneath. Or it would have been, had it been a little smaller and less angular.
      "It's a Low-Observability MH-60 Infiltrator. It's for you, happy birthday." Daniel Murphy had appeared next to her, silently and suddenly, like he almost always did. It was no mean feat, given how much his Brooks Brothers suit and civilian haircut made him stand out from the military personnel. Sneaking up on people was a bad habit, Lyta reflected, that must be occupational. Miyuki did it all the time.
      "It's not my birthday, but I'll take it. Where am I taking it to, Pakistan again?"
      "Not this time." Danny paused as a colossal C-5 Galaxy rumbled down the runway, but then pointedly failed to elaborate. "Oh hey, here's Miranda."
      Miranda was Danny's assistant and constant shadow, and like him had developed the bad habit of sneaking up on people. She had appeared suddenly and silently at Lyta's other shoulder, despite standing out even more than her boss; her black suit that ended in a fashionably short skirt that she had chosen to accessorize with very high heels.
      "Good morning, Lieutenant Rodriguez." She handed a plain manila folder to Danny. "NSA grab for you, Agent Murphy."
      "Sweet, long flights suck without something to read." The first few pages showed changes in military deployments over the last 12 hours on a map with the names blacked out; it didn't matter he knew that particular coastline far too well. By the time they reached their destination this report would be outdated, and a new one would be waiting for him. Underneath was a packet sifted from the National Crime Information Center that morning. Flagged for his attention, it contained a pair of reports, one each from the FBI and San Francisco Police Department, concerning the death of Elliot "the Eel" Chow that morning in a Chinatown alleyway.

      Mindful of her morning's misadventure, Miyuki, now showered, dried, brushed and made up, didn't approach her front door again until she was fully dressed, this time in a black tank top and low-rise jeans. As she jingled through her keys for the one that would lock the deadbolt, here eye fell on a UPS delivery slip lying on her doormat. Sorry we missed you, package requires a signature, will try again tomorrow; the deliveryman must have rung while she was in the shower. She wasn't expecting anything, and they didn't give her the option of picking it up, so it would just show up when it was going to, whatever it was.
      Miyuki's car was getting some work done in anticipation of a possible underground street race this weekend, so she would be driving a loaner today. It was a silver Acura TSX, the same one that had been parked on a quiet side street near Chinatown early in the morning. It had had license plates taken from a wreck then, those plates were, by now, at the bottom of the Bay. It was probably excess caution, but the instant the car was implicated in a ninja incident it would vanish, and only reappear with a new set of license and VIN plates, and a subtly altered appearance. As far as Miyuki knew, it had already done so. She stuck the UPS slip in the center console and promptly forgot about it.

      Freeway traffic in the middle of a weekday was rarely severe, and Miyuki found herself facing the elegant red brick façade of the University of California's Archeological Research Facility at a quarter to noon. She didn't know the inside of the building at all, but college guys, even highly focused doctoral candidates, were always willing to help out a pretty girl and she found the room she was looking for without any trouble.
      The sign on the door read "Archaeological Research Reserve Library" but she felt like she had wandered into a Victorian adventurer's garage sale. An Egyptian sarcophagus stood upright next to a statue of a winged and bearded Assyrian divinity under the benevolent gaze of a bronze Buddha, green with centuries of verdigris. A Falcon headed Horus competed for space with a bare-breasted marble Aphrodite and a table covered with astrolabes, armillary spheres, and other arcane scientific objects inscribed in Arabic, Greek, and any number of mysterious scripts Miyuki didn't recognize, each with it's own small paper tag indicating its place in the University's inventory. Packed into every available space not occupied by artifacts were the books; great original tomes in Moroccan leather, university reprints in sober grey, modern discoveries and analysis in a rainbow of glossy colors. A laptop sat open on solid looking cherry wood desk, but of its owner there was no sign.
      "Clarissa?" Miyuki called out into the labyrinth of bookcases.
      "Miyuki?" a disembodied voice called back.
      After a moment's pause, Clarissa stepped into view from between two of the stacks. The room, Miyuki felt, called for a bespectacled old man in a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, and Clarissa was perhaps the last person one would expect to see. She was almost as pale as the marble Aphrodite, whether by nature or design, Miyuki could never quite tell, but her complexion formed a sharp contrast to her dark eyes, and the near-black shade she had chosen for lipstick and nail polish. Her short, spiky black hair came down in two long bangs on either side of her face, almost hiding ears with multiple piercings. A black velvet choker around her neck suspended a little silver ankh above the copious cleavage revealed by the scoop neck of her black t-shirt; her ultra-short black denim cutoffs exposed a good four inches of bare leg before the start of her dark thigh-high nylons, which in turn vanished into a pair of shiny leather combat boots. More than anything else Clarissa looked as if she'd just come in the back door from a rock concert, cleverly hidden in the adjacent Law Library.
      "Whaddya think of my office? Pretty cool, huh?
      "Yeah, it's really… is that a stuffed alligator?"
      "It's mummified actually. A mummified crocodile. The Hearst Papyrus was found inside one just like it."
      "Inside?" Miyuki didn't really understand the reasoning behind mummifying a crocodile in the first place, cutting it open 3500 years later made just as little sense.
      "Yeah, they'd stuff them with scraps they didn't want anymore, like we wrap things with newspaper. Useless now, but priceless in a thousand years." Clarissa waited while her laptop powered down and folded it closed. "Do you want to go for a big lunch or small?"
      "Big." Miyuki hadn't eaten anything since last night's dinner, except for one of Lyta's oranges. "Howsabout Indian? Place on University and Shattuck has a $9 buffet."
      "Yeah, totally." Clarissa swept a stack of books from her desk into her bag. "Hey, listen, I got a question for you, it's sort of a Buddhism question but it's really more of a sword question."
      "I know something about each but everything about neither." Miyuki momentarily flashed back to early that morning, when, kneeling on the stone temple floor with her two sheathed wakizashi sitting next to her, she had lit a stick of incense before the statue of Jizo Bosatsu, and prayed that Elliot Chow would be reborn as a better man. "Go for it."
      Clarissa fixed Miyuki with her gaze, like she was sizing up an opponent in a poker game.
      "In any of your martial arts studies, have you ever heard of the Oracle Sword?"

Description
      Miyuki Shimada sat cross-legged on the eaves of a roof, looking into the face of a demon. It was her face, or the one she would shortly assume, a traditional black lacquered noh mask carved to look like one of the many sinister creatures of Japanese mythology, with bulging eyes, short, sharp horns, and, rather unusually, a hysterical grin. A grin full of fangs, certainly, but she had always felt it looked like it was enjoying itself far too much. She leaned forward and glanced over the edge of her roof at the point where a narrow alley met the street three stories down. From this angle she could just see the white Mercedes, still parked in a loading zone, and the bull-necked bald man, still standing guard over it.
      Miyuki leaned back into the shadows. The roof she had chosen swept down and outward, and then up again slightly in the traditional Chinese curve, and sitting at the lowest point she was hidden from view from the street below. The only light up here was from the moon, a bright silver gibbous moon. Off to the east the giant spear point silhouette of the Transamerica Pyramid stabbed up into the night sky. A cluster of more conventionally shaped high rises crowded toward it from the south. Miyuki leaned forward again.
      Grant Avenue was a riot of neon and bobbing red paper lanterns, decorative streetlights supported by twisting gold dragons and brightly lit storefronts promising a mix of virtually everything for sale; collectively they created a long thin valley of daylight running north from the Chinatown gate until it ended at Broadway. The lights danced across the deep automotive gloss of the Mercedes, the white SLK with the AMG rims, still parked in the loading zone down below.
      Miyuki sat back again. The bells of Old Saint Mary's struck one o'clock. She re-crossed her legs with her feet on top of her thighs and her knees down, laid her hands in her lap with her palms up, and closed her eyes. The sound of distant traffic blended with the rustling of dry leaves into a steady rushing noise, like a river flowing all around her. The low dull thunder of a jetliner rumbled in, and then out again. One of her ballistic plastic kneepads clicked against the roof tiles, and a dog barked somewhere off in the distance.
      Down on the street a phone rang once, and then stopped. Miyuki opened her eyes.
      The bald man glanced both ways down the street, showing some rather impressive scars. He had a bulldog face to go with his bulldog body, and held his arms at a somewhat awkward angle so as to keep near the front of his suit jacket, close to the automatic pistol undoubtedly concealed just under his armpit. The man was every inch a boo how doy, a Tong enforcer, and probably a pretty good one, or he wouldn't be responsible for watching the white Mercedes, which remained obstinately parked in the loading zone, three stories below. But not for much longer.
      A young man in an immaculate white linen suit had just left the building on the other side of the alley, a small group of his lieutenants forming a black chevron immediately behind him. The bull-necked man opened the driver's door of the SLK and the man in white took his seat behind the wheel. It was a special kind of influence, Miyuki thought, possessing either the fear or admiration of his compatriots, that allowed a man to walk at a closed door without pausing in the knowledge that someone would always open it in time. The men in black all briefly saluted their chief as the driver's door was shut again. As they walked back out of Miyuki's line of sight she got a good look at the man in white. He had a handsome, aristocratic, face, perhaps as much Manchu as Cantonese, a face possessed of the very particular keenness that could make men powerful outside society's laws.
      The glowing red end of a cigarette arced out of the car's open window, and Miyuki thought she could make out a slight smirk as the big German V8 roared to life. The white Mercedes pulled away from the curb, followed shortly by a black Range Rover. Almost immediately afterward, a steel door clanged open in the alley below.
      The alley was dark except for a pair of lit windows in a cramped looking apartment building, but more than enough light bled in from the main streets at either end to see what was happening. There had been a security light over the steel door, but Miyuki had disabled it hours ago in violation of the agreement, made by those unknown parties who made those sorts of agreements, that she wasn't to act until the white car had left. Raised voices drifted up to her vantage point, followed by a sharp cry of pain and the hollow plastic sound of a garbage bin falling over.
      Miyuki loosened the silk cords that would hold the demon mask in place, and brushed her hair back away from her face. A decorative ceramic dragon stared blankly from the ridge of the roof and she leaned over and whispered to it confidentially.
      "Time to get my game face on."

      Elliot "the Eel" Chow backhanded the girl again, and this time she stumbled backward over the fallen bin and fell to the asphalt.
      "Nobody double crosses me, you worthless baht po!" he kicked her hard in the ribs as she tried to get up again. "Where's my damn money?!"
      The girl stammered something in Korean. Chow whipped open his suit jacket and dragged a handgun free from his waistband. He racked the slide with excessive vehemence.
      "Aw geez boss, not here?" one of his bodyguards called from the mouth of the alleyway.
      "Yes, here!" Chow turned and stabbed a finger at the two big men who had kept a respectful distance, and until now, a respectful silence. "Everyone's gotta know who not to fuck with, now shut up and watch the street." He turned back to the girl and raised his pistol to her forehead, her eyes crossed slightly as they fixed on the muzzle.
      A sudden, rapidly expanding cloud of smoke stopped him short. It smelled of incense mixed with gunpowder, and shrouded the alley so thickly that even the lights from Grant Avenue vanished briefly from sight. Several thumps and a crash echoed through the darkness, followed by a short staccato burst of automatic gunfire. The cloud dissipated almost as suddenly as it had arrived, revealing one of his bodyguards laid out motionless on the ground. Nearby, his Steyr machine pistol lay amidst a scattering of its own brass. His companion hung limply from the point where his head was pinned to the wall by a small hand at the end of a slender arm, terminating in a small woman.
      She was dressed in an eclectic combination of traditional Japanese costume and modern tactical gear, with her arms as well as her abdomen bare, the latter from just below her breasts to a sash around her waist that boasted a pair of short straight wicked stabbing swords. As she slowly lifted her head, her shoulder length hair fell back from the frozen lacquered cypress-wood face of the grinning demon.
      "Elliot Chow!" her voice echoed off the brick and concrete walls of the alley. "Meet your end like a man. The right hand of the Blue Tara has come for you!" Chow took a step back as Miyuki took a step forward, letting the bodyguard drop.
      The metal door clanged open again abruptly, and another heavy charged out, pistol raised, drawn by he sound of shots from the alley. Without breaking her stride Miyuki yanked his arm forward and then forced it back at an unnatural angle. She pressed his finger down on the trigger and his gun discharged clean through the fleshy part of his thigh before twisting out of his hand. As the thug stumbled back toward the street, Miyuki fixed Chow with the grinning Oni's gaze once more.
      "What do you want?" he hissed at her. "What are you doing here?"
      "Dude, pay attention, I'm here to kill you." The flat Northern Californian accent behind the grinning mask was infuriatingly casual.
      "What?! We have an agreement!" Chow took another step backward and accidentally kicked the fallen bin, which let out another hollow plastic boom. "You touch me and it's war!"
      "I think I can live with that."
      "I am shé tóu! I'm protected!" Chow was not so much yelling at Miyuki as he was at the building walls around them, grasping for assistance from any source. In response one of the burning apartment lights switched off. Some things it was better not to see.
      "You got a gun. Protect your own sorry ass." Miyuki gauged the distance between them, and tensed the muscles throughout her body. Her hands hovered near the hilts of her two wakizashi. "C'mon, Elliot. Let's throw down!"
      Chow's mouth turned down into a snarl, and his arm jerked upward. At the same instant, Miyuki launched herself off her left foot, like a cobra uncoiling. Her two blades flashed out in broad horizontal arcs, slowing briefly as they met with their objective, then passed on, spattering both sides of the alley with their deadly calligraphy.
      Miyuki had judged her distance decently well; Chow's gun had gone off right next to her, and as a result the sound of his body collapsing to the pavement was dulled in her left ear by a loud ringing. She shook her head a little to clear it, until the ringing went and was replaced by a distant siren. How far? Coming or going? The average response time was about six minutes; Miyuki was almost done here, but not quite.
      She quickly wiped both swords with a paper towel that would later disintegrate in a nearby storm drain and resheathed them, then pushed the grinning demon back on to the top of her head. Her face underneath was largely covered by a balaclava of sorts, a degree of anonymity had to be preserved, but there was no reason to frighten the helpless. The girl that Chow had brought out to the alley was curled against the wall, whimpering softly. Her cheap sequined cocktail dress had slid down exposing one of her breasts, but she was using both hands to cover her face. Miyuki crouched down in front of her.
      "Hey. D'you speak English? Neih sikm`hsik góng gwóngdùngwá a? Nagsasalita ba kayo ng Tagalog? Ban có nói tieng Viet không? ¿Habla usted español? Nothin', huh?"
      The girl said something in Korean that Miyuki didn't quite catch. Korean wasn't her best language. Was the siren getting louder, or was that a different one?
      "Speak Korean not well. Won't hurt. Police coming. Will help." Miyuki stood up again and walked back to the body, flipping open a small utility knife. She glanced back at the girl.
      "Don't look."

      For Officer Lili Wu, Chinatown always brought back memories of her childhood, especially long walks with her grandfather, admiring windows full of jade and pearls, bright green produce vying for space with red and gold packaged novelties. Stockton Street at four in the morning was a far cry from the crowded business district she was used to. All the lights were out, all the colorful stores were shuttered, and all the people, grandfathers and granddaughters included, were asleep in their beds.
      Her partner, Officer Fred Avila, slowed their cruiser slightly at a red light, and then continued through. Their duty shift should have ended already, and he was ready to go home. The red and blue light bar on the roof of their Crown Vic was flashing its warning even though the emergency had finished, and the streets were empty.
      "One time, in the sandbox" Avila began, breaking a ten minute silence, "at Al-Taji, I think it was, this huge sand storm blew in outta nowhere. Like a huge wall, all the way up to the sky, and once it hit you couldn't see nothin'. Convoy had to stop, couldn't even see the vehicle ahead. Can't help but think we're drivin' into another one now."
      "Whaddya mean?" Wu rolled her head sideways to get rid of a kink in her neck.
      "I mean you cross a geographical line here somewhere and suddenly no one's seen nothin'."
      "Lot of places like that."
      "Yeah, but in other places it isn't always the same nothing they all didn't see. Here it is." Two black and white SFPD cruisers were parked at the mouth of an alley, along with a white Ford van with the words "Medical Examiner" ostentatiously emblazoned across the rear quarter in big black capitals. Avila pulled in behind the hindmost cruiser and radioed in their arrival to dispatch. Wu got out, stretched as best as the snug fit of her Kevlar vest would allow, and walked over to the officer standing guard.
      "Hey, Fong! They dragged me all the way down here 'cause they needed someone to speak Guongzhou huà, so if you're here, I'm leaving."
      "Detectives wanted a second opinion." Fong nodded back toward the alley. "They probably want a bunch of interviews done, you know, harassing the neighborhood. 'Sup Avila."
      "Fong, thought you'd be driving a desk by now,"
      Wu rolled her eyes while the guys engaged in a gesture somewhere between a handshake and a high five. At absolute worst she could hand over interviews to someone else when the sun came up two hours from now; the force had any number of officers and detectives who spoke Chinese, but it didn't necessarily have them at four in the morning. Fong lifted the crime scene tape gallantly for her.
      Little yellow plastic cards with numbers on them sat in a clump at the other end of the alley, each one marking where a shell casing fell. One more lay a lot nearer, next to a lump under a white plastic sheet. A crime scene investigator was coaxing a small submachine gun into a clear plastic evidence bag, while the supervising detective looked on passively. He turned and nodded to Wu and Avila as they approached.
      "Noonan, Homicide. Thanks for coming. I need you to translate for me."
      "Sure." Wu hadn't seen anyone other than police so far "Where's the wit?"
      "Not a wit." Noonan reached down and pulled the plastic sheet black, like a magician revealing the absence of a rabbit. "The victim."
      Avila let out a low whistle.
      "Wow, Elliot the Eel. Someone's aiming high. What, don't you ever read the briefs from the NCIC?"
      Wu gave him a dirty look, and then refocused on the body. Elliot Chow had had his throat cut rather spectacularly, but he also had what appeared to be superficial stab wounds to his chest. Wu drew the maglite from her belt and switched it on; under the powerful beam the cuts resolved themselves into a series of ideograms.
      "Well?" Noonan drew a torn flap of shirt back with his pen, to give her a better view.
      "It says something like 'slave trade entrepreneur' but the grammar is odd, and this character here doesn't fit."
      "How not"
      "It doesn't mean anything. It's not Chinese, maybe Japanese from the look of it."
      "Christ." Noonan rubbed his temples with his free hand. "A well known bad guy is killed in his own backyard bodyguards neutralized in a quick in and out like the fuckin' Navy Seals, killer doesn't use a gun, tags the body in Japanese. This shit again, I swear…"
      "Inspector?" Fong called from his end of the alley. He had lifted the tape for a pair of men in dark suits. The smaller of the two, a fastidious young Latino man shook Noonan's hand.
      "Inspector Noonan, good to see you again."
      "Agent Gomez. Didn't know the FBI got up this early."
      "I got a call from SF General that one of my informers caught a bullet in the leg, and shortly after that, the man he's informing on shows up dead. That'll open your eyes faster'n a gallon of espresso. It's looking more and more like the CI was blown, and they shot it out here."
      "Except Mr. Chow got himself killed with a sword, not a gun. Probably a pair of swords. No, I've seen this kind of thing before; it was Ninjas"
      "Aw c'mon." the other FBI agent cut in "You don't seriously… ninjas are an urban legend. We had a case once in Milwaukee, it was just college kids dressing in black pajamas and jumping out of bushes to scare folks."
      Wu stepped away from the knot of men and the corpse and looked the other way down the alley. A young Asian woman was sitting on the back step of an ambulance, her bare legs poking out from the blanket the paramedics had wrapped her in. One of them handed her a bottle of water and gestured reassuringly for her to drink it. It was otherwise a very effective assassination, why leave a witness?
      Avila took a step back from the group, and shined his maglite up above their heads.
      "Inspector, gentlemen. Up there."
      Embedded in a wooden utility pole, just high enough not to be knocked down by passersby, was a six-pointed metal star, apparently used to tack up a folded piece of paper.
      "What the hell…" the taller FBI agent let his words trail off.
      "That's a shuriken, Agent Willis. A ninja star." Inspector Noonan gave him a slap on the back. "Welcome to San Francisco."

By the time the persistent buzzing of Miyuki's phone had dragged her to consciousness her bedroom was already flooded with the sunlight of a brilliantly clear autumn day. She had already hit the snooze on her alarm twice before shutting it off for good so she could luxuriate under the blankets for another hour, but like virtually everyone living in the modern world she had been conditioned to answer her phone, even when she really didn't want to.
"Mmmmmggrrrwhaddya want"
"Hey Snowball," Her cousin Jeff was irritatingly chipper, and his insistence on using her childhood nickname wasn't winning him any points this morning either. "Are you awake?"
"I am now."
"Late night, huh?"
"The, uh, party got the best of me. Whassup?"
"Check out the news, channel 2."
      Miyuki swapped her phone for the remote on her bedside table, rolled back onto her back as the plasma screen at the foot of her bed popped to life. Contrary to Agent Willis' beliefs concerning the wardrobe of the ninja, Miyuki didn't favor black pajamas, or any pajamas for that matter, and in consequence she found herself viewing the demise of Elliot Chow's human trafficking empire through the pink valley between her bare breasts.
      A confusion of arrows crisscrossed a map of the Pacific Rim, followed by stock footage of a freighter and a container port, and then exterior shots of the nondescript house down the peninsula where Elliot had kept the bulk of his operation carefully hidden from any number of federal agencies. Now a pretty, nebulously ethnic reporter was talking to Sgt. Jeff Shimada of the San Francisco Police Department. No wonder he wanted me to see this, Miyuki thought.
      Possibly Hispanic Reporter Girl had moved on to ninja involvement, and Jeff was leading her on with intentionally vague and evasive answers. Was there any truth to the rumor that the killer (and possible ninja) had left a note with the locations of the other sites the FBI had raided this morning? The Department couldn't reveal the sources of an investigation in progress, and generally had no comment in regards to possible ninjas at this time.
      Miyuki turned the TV off, let her head drop back against her pillow again, and tried to put the coming day in order. She had cleared all her business appointments just in case things had turned ugly last night, but she was still meeting a friend for lunch in about two hours. Miyuki toyed with the idea of a quick jog, but planning around the likelihood of traffic she didn't really have time; she could hop directly into the shower and make it without rushing. She pulled herself out of bed, stood, and stretched, glancing sideways at herself in the mirror. She was naked except, curiously, for the headband she had been wearing last night and now duly tossed in the general direction of a wicker laundry hamper. A cursory look showed no suspicious cuts or bruises to explain away.
      "One side, Nudie McNuderson. Government business." Miyuki stepped back into the doorway of her bedroom as her roommate swept past, a duffel bag balanced on her shoulder.
      "Lyta, it's like almost eleven. Why aren't you out wiping out Al-Quaeda, or convincing people that aliens don't exist?" Miyuki followed her friend into the living room of their apartment. They had been living together for most of their adult lives, and knew each other as well as two people generally could. It was a clear sign of their longstanding familiarity that Miyuki didn't bother trying to cover her nudity, and that Lyta didn't find anything amiss.
      "Oh, I'm still at work. I'm headed downrange as soon as I can get over to Travis, I just came back here to grab a few necessities." Lyta Rodriguez tended to resemble her Aztec ancestors somewhat more than their Iberian conquerors, but Miyuki always felt she had gotten the best of both somehow. Her face, tanned to a light mocha, was framed by an immaculate military bob; her baggy, digitized camouflage Airman's Battle Uniform covered a curvy body that would probably tend to weight if not so rigorously disciplined. She set down her duffle next to the door.
      "You're going overseas? For how long?"
      "Dunno, a few days, a week maybe. There's something, uh, time sensitive going on, so however it works out it won't be long."
      "Oh. Cause the weekend's coming, and, well…" Miyuki traced a circle in the carpet with the big toe of her bare right foot. The disappointment had crept into her voice far more than she had intended.
      "I know, there's never enough time to hang out. C'mon, I'll be back soon, and there's other weekends. Now give your girl a hug." Lyta nodded toward the kitchen. "Oh yeah, I brought you some naranjas, too."
      "Aww, you're the best." Miyuki wrapped her arms around her friend and held her close for a few moments. They were the same height, and the metal pilot's wings on Lyta's uniform were shockingly cold when they touched Miyuki's bare chest. Sitting on the kitchen table she could see a plastic net full of bright, plump oranges.
      "Anyway, I gotta go." Lyta perched her duffel on her shoulder again and pulled the door open. "Can you feed Oscar and the babies while I'm gone?"
      "Okay, but bring me something cool back from wherever you're going. Like a really awesome sword, if they have swords. Where are you going, anyway?"
      "They haven't told me yet, and you know I couldn't tell you anyway. But yeah, I'll bring you a mystery item from Undisclosedlocationistan. Remember, don't give Oscar more than two of the prawns at once, even if he makes puppy eyes at you."
      "It's kind of hard to tell what he's thinking, since I'm not sure where his face is. Now if he was a cat there wouldn't…"
      A gentle breeze blowing down through the open court caressed Miyuki in places it normally didn't, and the realization that she had walked a good fifty feet from her apartment door completely naked stopped her abruptly mid-sentence. One arm flew to her breasts while the other shot down between her legs in a belated attempt at modesty.
      "Well, crap. I gotta get back inside before any of the neighbors see me."
      "Chica, they been living here more than a week, there's nothing they haven't seen." Lyta had something of a point, Miyuki had to concede. Her embarrassment was almost entirely because this time she hadn't done it on purpose.
      "Oh haha. Look, stay safe over there."
      "I only grill the carnitas, other dudes gonna have to fight the pig. They'll be waiting on me. Stay out of trouble, huh?"

      Reach-Seven-One-Four-Niner, was not, despite Lyta's prediction, waiting for her on the runway with it's engines running. One of Air Mobility Command's C-17 Globemasters, it was squatting between two of its brethren on Travis Air Force Base's tarmac like a massive grey cormorant hanging out its wings. The rear cargo ramp was down when she arrived, and a group of airmen were standing by as a helicopter, its rotors folded, was winched aboard. The loadmaster nodded to her in a brief greeting, never letting his glance wander from helicopter, ready to signal the airmen to give it a nudge should it stray out of line with the C-17s cargo bay. The helo had, oddly, been shrink wrapped in bright blue plastic, but Lyta could make out the familiar shape of one of the army's UH-60 Blackhawks underneath. Or it would have been, had it been a little smaller and less angular.
      "It's a Low-Observability MH-60 Infiltrator. It's for you, happy birthday." Daniel Murphy had appeared next to her, silently and suddenly, like he almost always did. It was no mean feat, given how much his Brooks Brothers suit and civilian haircut made him stand out from the military personnel. Sneaking up on people was a bad habit, Lyta reflected, that must be occupational. Miyuki did it all the time.
      "It's not my birthday, but I'll take it. Where am I taking it to, Pakistan again?"
      "Not this time." Danny paused as a colossal C-5 Galaxy rumbled down the runway, but then pointedly failed to elaborate. "Oh hey, here's Miranda."
      Miranda was Danny's assistant and constant shadow, and like him had developed the bad habit of sneaking up on people. She had appeared suddenly and silently at Lyta's other shoulder, despite standing out even more than her boss; her black suit that ended in a fashionably short skirt that she had chosen to accessorize with very high heels.
      "Good morning, Lieutenant Rodriguez." She handed a plain manila folder to Danny. "NSA grab for you, Agent Murphy."
      "Sweet, long flights suck without something to read." The first few pages showed changes in military deployments over the last 12 hours on a map with the names blacked out; it didn't matter he knew that particular coastline far too well. By the time they reached their destination this report would be outdated, and a new one would be waiting for him. Underneath was a packet sifted from the National Crime Information Center that morning. Flagged for his attention, it contained a pair of reports, one each from the FBI and San Francisco Police Department, concerning the death of Elliot "the Eel" Chow that morning in a Chinatown alleyway.

      Mindful of her morning's misadventure, Miyuki, now showered, dried, brushed and made up, didn't approach her front door again until she was fully dressed, this time in a black tank top and low-rise jeans. As she jingled through her keys for the one that would lock the deadbolt, here eye fell on a UPS delivery slip lying on her doormat. Sorry we missed you, package requires a signature, will try again tomorrow; the deliveryman must have rung while she was in the shower. She wasn't expecting anything, and they didn't give her the option of picking it up, so it would just show up when it was going to, whatever it was.
      Miyuki's car was getting some work done in anticipation of a possible underground street race this weekend, so she would be driving a loaner today. It was a silver Acura TSX, the same one that had been parked on a quiet side street near Chinatown early in the morning. It had had license plates taken from a wreck then, those plates were, by now, at the bottom of the Bay. It was probably excess caution, but the instant the car was implicated in a ninja incident it would vanish, and only reappear with a new set of license and VIN plates, and a subtly altered appearance. As far as Miyuki knew, it had already done so. She stuck the UPS slip in the center console and promptly forgot about it.

      Freeway traffic in the middle of a weekday was rarely severe, and Miyuki found herself facing the elegant red brick façade of the University of California's Archeological Research Facility at a quarter to noon. She didn't know the inside of the building at all, but college guys, even highly focused doctoral candidates, were always willing to help out a pretty girl and she found the room she was looking for without any trouble.
      The sign on the door read "Archaeological Research Reserve Library" but she felt like she had wandered into a Victorian adventurer's garage sale. An Egyptian sarcophagus stood upright next to a statue of a winged and bearded Assyrian divinity under the benevolent gaze of a bronze Buddha, green with centuries of verdigris. A Falcon headed Horus competed for space with a bare-breasted marble Aphrodite and a table covered with astrolabes, armillary spheres, and other arcane scientific objects inscribed in Arabic, Greek, and any number of mysterious scripts Miyuki didn't recognize, each with it's own small paper tag indicating its place in the University's inventory. Packed into every available space not occupied by artifacts were the books; great original tomes in Moroccan leather, university reprints in sober grey, modern discoveries and analysis in a rainbow of glossy colors. A laptop sat open on solid looking cherry wood desk, but of its owner there was no sign.
      "Clarissa?" Miyuki called out into the labyrinth of bookcases.
      "Miyuki?" a disembodied voice called back.
      After a moment's pause, Clarissa stepped into view from between two of the stacks. The room, Miyuki felt, called for a bespectacled old man in a tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, and Clarissa was perhaps the last person one would expect to see. She was almost as pale as the marble Aphrodite, whether by nature or design, Miyuki could never quite tell, but her complexion formed a sharp contrast to her dark eyes, and the near-black shade she had chosen for lipstick and nail polish. Her short, spiky black hair came down in two long bangs on either side of her face, almost hiding ears with multiple piercings. A black velvet choker around her neck suspended a little silver ankh above the copious cleavage revealed by the scoop neck of her black t-shirt; her ultra-short black denim cutoffs exposed a good four inches of bare leg before the start of her dark thigh-high nylons, which in turn vanished into a pair of shiny leather combat boots. More than anything else Clarissa looked as if she'd just come in the back door from a rock concert, cleverly hidden in the adjacent Law Library.
      "Whaddya think of my office? Pretty cool, huh?
      "Yeah, it's really… is that a stuffed alligator?"
      "It's mummified actually. A mummified crocodile. The Hearst Papyrus was found inside one just like it."
      "Inside?" Miyuki didn't really understand the reasoning behind mummifying a crocodile in the first place, cutting it open 3500 years later made just as little sense.
      "Yeah, they'd stuff them with scraps they didn't want anymore, like we wrap things with newspaper. Useless now, but priceless in a thousand years." Clarissa waited while her laptop powered down and folded it closed. "Do you want to go for a big lunch or small?"
      "Big." Miyuki hadn't eaten anything since last night's dinner, except for one of Lyta's oranges. "Howsabout Indian? Place on University and Shattuck has a $9 buffet."
      "Yeah, totally." Clarissa swept a stack of books from her desk into her bag. "Hey, listen, I got a question for you, it's sort of a Buddhism question but it's really more of a sword question."
      "I know something about each but everything about neither." Miyuki momentarily flashed back to early that morning, when, kneeling on the stone temple floor with her two sheathed wakizashi sitting next to her, she had lit a stick of incense before the statue of Jizo Bosatsu, and prayed that Elliot Chow would be reborn as a better man. "Go for it."
      Clarissa fixed Miyuki with her gaze, like she was sizing up an opponent in a poker game.
      "In any of your martial arts studies, have you ever heard of the Oracle Sword?"