“Send them in.”
I removed my hat as I entered, which fear of recognition forced me to keep on even in the corridor.
「We expect promptness when we call.」Before the door had closed behind me, Chief Director Hotaka Andō Mitsubishi lashed me with harsh Japanese which made my greeting bow into a cringe.
「Apologies, Chief Director. I should have fought harder to break away.」I answered him in Japanese, and bowed anew with my apology, but dared raise my eyes enough to count the pairs of legs around me. There were five in the room, but four wore the familiar deep green of Mitsubishi guards, so, for an audience with the Chief Director, we were practically alone.
「Black Sakura. You know what’s happened?」
「Partly yes, Chief Director. I’ve been assigned to the case.」
I straightened now, and verified my fears. Directorate Guards wear whatever cuts of Mitsubishi suit jacket match their nation-strats: Chinese closed at the front with braided frogs, Korean tied across the chest like cheogori, Indian long and buttoned like sherwani, sometimes Western blazers, or the Japanese style, crossing at the front like kimono. Today there was no such variety: all Japanese suits with Japanese faces, several familiar, children of executives who held high office in the Hive through Andō’s patronage. This was an inner circle, then, gathered for that special kind of meeting where, if there are bruises afterward, no one will dare ask why. The Chief Director himself stood in the center, Hotaka Andō Mitsubishi, to use the customary English ordering of his names. Today’s suit was blue-black with a pattern of plain reeds appearing for spring, fine cloth but no finer than his guards’, while his simple shoes and plain short haircut proclaimed the supreme confidence of a ruler so secure he can afford to dress no better than his subjects. He was not always so. In our kind age no face (beside the Major’s) is truly battle-hardened, but Chief Director Andō’s is at least conflict-hardened, with a handsome severity earned over decades battling to break the Chinese factions’ hold on the Chief Director’s chair. Even our anti-aging drugs, which keep the strength of thirty alive in him as he approaches sixty, have not kept stress from silvering his temples.
He addressed me in Japanese, but for you, good master, I shall render what I can in common English.「The thief used the Canner Device.」
My tracker bleeped alarm as my pulse spiked.「I don’t have it!」I cried.「I don’t have any idea where it is! I don’t know anything! It was thirteen years ago! I don’t have the remotest connection to anyone who might have ended up with it!」Only this far into my reflexive protest did I realize I was cowering, my arms over my head to stave off blows, though no guard moved.「Please believe me! I don’t know anything!」
As Director Andō stared me down, I could read in his face the evidence against me massing, ready to draw into a phalanx: my presence at the house, my fingerprints on the paper.「Where did you hide it?」he asked.
「It … I don’t … 」
「Where did you hide the device?」
「Maybe there were two?」Even I could hear the foolish desperation in my voice.
「There were not two. There was one. Who did you give it to?」
「No one, Chief Director! No one! It … it couldn’t have been the Canner Device!」The words were as much for myself as the Director.「The device could swap tracker signals and make someone else’s tracker register as if they were Ockham Saneer, but it couldn’t get through the rest of the security. I don’t know what security Black Sakura has, but there are systems at the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’ that nothing I know of could get through, certainly not the Canner Device. It was only for the tracker system, for swapping two signals, nothing else! It can’t have been—」
「Martin sent this to you, too.」The Chief Director brought an image before my lenses, Martin’s scan of the paper I had found in the trash that morning, which I had hardly glanced at among the many messages that had chased me through my ride. The reconstruction was meticulous, rendering the paper fiber by fiber, showing how it had indeed, as Martin said, been crumpled around something. In the next instant the Director filled in that something: the unmistakable, sleek, fishlike tapered body of the infamous device which the hysterical public never should have named for me.
「You had it last,」Andō accused.「You know who has it now.」
「I don’t know! It was years ago. It’ll have been sold on to someone else by now.」
「Sold? Did you sell it to someone?」
「No. Yes! I mean, sort of. I left it … 」Plausible-seeming lies multiplied in my imagination, but as I started to voice one I could see Chief Director Andō’s face tighten. It wasn’t plausible. None of this was plausible, least of all my innocence, though innocent I was.「I really don’t know what happened to it. Please believe me. I was arrested. I don’t know what happened after that. The police say the case for the device was empty when they found it, but anyone could have it: crooked cops, organized crime, kids who stumbled on my hideout, anyone!」
「You can’t have been that reckless with it.」
「I was a child!」
Andō did not need to do more than glare.
Genuine faintness made it easy to fall to my knees before him.「Please believe me, Chief Director. I don’t know anything about what’s happened. You know I have no way to prove my innocence, but you’ve trusted me a long time and I’ve never betrayed that, I never would. Even this morning, I could have told Martin the truth about the Seven-Ten list, but I didn’t.」
His glare changed.「What truth?」
「That Tsuneo Sugiyama didn’t write that list.」I saw the Chief Director flinch, and I clung to the new topic like a lifeline.「Sugiyama always writes Black Sakura’s Seven-Ten list, but they think the pen should be wielded like a sword, especially the most publicized article of the year. Sugiyama would never have produced anything so uncontroversial, and, when they listed the top seven, they would never have referred to you as Hotaka Mitsubishi, they would have included your birth bash’ name.」
Hotaka Andō Mitsubishi hissed under his breath, and my tracker finally stopped worrying about my heart rate.
「Masami Mitsubishi wrote this list, didn’t they, Director?」I tested. I waited.「Masami is still interning with Sugiyama, yes?」
The Chief Director scowled down at me, then turned toward the rear of the room, where a partition, patterned with a calligraphic scene of frogs and goldfish holding congress in a waterfall, separated this outer chamber from an inner one.
A new kind of shiver touched me as the partition opened. I cannot date the beginning of the tradition wherein queens and warlords surround themselves with fawning predators: hounds, lions, serpents on silken cushions, ready to loose their savagery at the master’s whim. Chief Director Andō has chosen a more dangerous predator: adopted children, ten in all, fox-cunning and ambitious, just finished with school and ready to carve their names into the world. Six were present in the inner room then, sprawling on the floor like cats, and, as the door yawned wider, they watched me, as cats watch a twitching toy they have not yet made up their minds to chase. They all come from one bash’, a batch of ba’siblings who lost the older generation and had been scattered to distant foster bash’es before the childless Andō-Mitsubishi bash’ welcomed them all. They were just starting to cross from teens to twenties now, and the three eldest had recently passed the Adulthood Competency Exam, one donning Humanist boots, another a Mitsubishi suit, the third a Hiveless sash, but the rest had not yet chosen, so wore only minors’ sashes over soft pajamas, and the sloppy sweaters their adopted mother knitted herself.