Chosen Path Ch. 03

Every time, without fail, as soon as he began to look down at her, his alarm clock went off.

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I woke up groggy to the faint smell of chloroform. That time I did have enough presence of mind to think before acting. With my eyes still closed, I surveyed my circumstances. I was still dressed, but my shoes had been removed. I was lying on my back on a thin futon with a very low cushion, perhaps a folded towel, behind my head. The ambient temperature felt comfortable, but the air held too much moisture to have been mechanically chilled.

I could hear crickets and not much else. None sounded close. I smelled trees, conifers, and at least two different men. Someone had brewed tea with recently dried leaves. A small, wood fire burned somewhere silently, a cooking fire. There was also rice, stagnant water and manure somewhere farther away. I slowly opened my eyes enough to see sliding doors, wooden walls and the inside of thatched roof. The coals of the cooking fire and a small lantern lit the room. The sun had set; I must have been unconscious for more than 10 hours.

A voice said, "Welcome, Princess. Please forgive me for my meager accommodations. Your presence greatly honors this humble home." The man speaking sounded very old. Since he knew I was awake, I opened my eyes fully and rose to a sitting position. He was indeed very old, and he wore the traditional clothing of a peasant farmer. His eyes hid behind the features of his face: wiry, white hair, bushy eyebrows, oversized nose and ears.

He had spoken politely, so I followed suit. "Thank you for your kind hospitality. I regret that I must tell you I am not a princess."

"Are you not the daughter-heir Itsumoto?"

"I am."

The man feigned his visible disappointment in my answer. "I was born before Reconstitution, Princess Itsumoto," he replied, "so by my oath of fealty, you are thirty-fifth in line to ascend the throne."

He had a point: a dull, rusty one. I have no patience for revisionist historians who cling foolishly to a past that never was. "Your oath was to the Emperor, who assented to Reconstitution. I am grateful for this opportunity to remind you of that fact, lest your error be mistaken for treason."

He scoffed and turned to a kettle hung low over the small fire. "May I pour you tea?"

"Regretfully, I can accept no more of your hospitality," I answered. "I must attend to duties elsewhere."

"Yes, yes, duties," he said waving one hand at me to suggest both the brevity of his remaining business with me and the futility any attempt to leave. "You must attend to your duties, but first you must attend to your opportunity." My cold blank stare demanded he get on with it. "I know of your dilemma, Princess, and I can help you to resolve it. Sometimes in this hectic and violent world, a single murder can simply be forgotten. You might consider such happenstance to be good fortune."

"You know nothing of my circumstances."

"I know more than you wish were true, Princess. I know of the poor woman in the subway and her tragic demise."

"I have retained council and expect to prevail on the merits of my case if I face charges."

"Yes, yes, the merits of your case," he waved off my rejection. "I know also of this ill-fated woman's betrothal and of your regret. I know of a man whose grief will turn to anger, a man whose love will turn to hate. Must we allow one tragedy to follow another? Must he also lose his only other love? Will you draw and quarter him between death and betrayal? Or will he too prevail on the merits of your case? No, Princess, I think it best that no more hurt should come of this."

I didn't understand how. How could he possibly know everything the day after it happened? The police must have known immediately, and his offer to suppress the investigation implied that he had agents within the department. They knew who she was and who I was. They found the engagement ring, the text message from Kosei. They questioned him. Had they told him, asked him if he knew me? If so he already knew. There could be no hiding from him.

Kosei! In all my panic and confusion, I hadn't thought of him again since that moment at the station. I was running. When I ran, I ran from him, not the police, not prison. I turned my mind away from him and fled as fast and far as I could. I could not bear to think of what I had done to him. I felt the weight of it crushing me inside. I had splattered a poor woman all over the tracks, but that oppressive, irresistible guilt driving me down into my own personal hell had nothing to do with her. I hurt my love, hurt him in a way that does not heal, and my mind piled together and compounded all the pain and sorrow it could conceive to punish me for what I had done to him.

That I felt nothing for the woman frightened me, made me wonder if I was a sociopath, but an avalanche of fear came down from my love of Kosei and swept that thought away. A chunk of falling terror hit me, and I tumbled with it, becoming part of that avalanche. My thoughts battered and crushed me as I fell. I needed to get out. I thought I was dying, like I could feel the fingers of his judgement sliding around my heart to tear it out. In that moment, I would have done anything—anything—to undo what I had done to him or even just to hide it from him. If I could have traded my own life for hers, I would have done it gladly.

But the old man was telling me that he could hide it, that it could be forgotten. How? They hadn't questioned Kosei, or they hadn't asked him about me. They didn't need to. My motive was obvious. Maybe someone saw me go into his building, and they put it all together from that. I didn't know. I hadn't gone there to commit a crime; I didn't care who saw me enter. What if I killed myself? There would be no trial. Maybe he would never know. Maybe.

But if there were a trial, the day would come that he would look at me across the courtroom, and he would see a murderer who had broken his heart in two and killed one of the halves. I could confess, plead no contest. He would know. They would tell him who killed his fiancee. Suicide was out for the same reason. They would tell him when they closed the case. He had a right to know who did it. I had run so hard from those thoughts because I knew deep down that I could not hide.

The old man could see it. He had me, and he knew it. That made me angry. I stood, slid open a door and walked outside. A picking basket on the teahouse's wide porch confirmed we were on a rice farm. Two other men, not the fake detectives but just as beefy, sat on wooden planks near where the porch ended. I only saw their faces by dim lantern light from inside when they turned to look at me. I could see nothing beyond them through a thick fog that blocked out all the stars, making the moonless night feel as black as the tunnels into which I had fled before.

I could run, but they knew the terrain. Even if I ran, what then? I reluctantly accepted the obvious solution. I needed time. I needed to leave there with the old man believing I would consider his proposition. He knew that too, and he walked up beside me to state his terms.

"Life pays for life, and blood for blood," he said. "You have murdered a woman who was innocent. Now you must execute a man who is guilty."

"I am no murderer," I answered.

"How many people must you kill before you would call yourself a murderer?"

That seemed a fair question, so I answered honestly, "One more than I have."

"You admit your guilt!" He turned to me smiling.

I kept staring ahead. If he had known as much about me as he thought, he would have interpreted what I said more carefully. "I do not," I reminded him.

"That is a pity, Princess Itsumoto," the old man said, turning to stare into the same darkness as me. "I admit mine. You view me as a criminal. I can see it in your eyes. I am no more a criminal than you. We both are simply part of the ecosystem. I am a scavenger, a shadow-dweller. I am a rat. I sift through the disgusting residue of human civilization, nibbling up the refuse of what you call society. Without me, moral pestilence and social decay would pile higher than the tallest buildings of the cities that produce them. We rats, we clean up after people like you, and so long as you fuel your avarice with the poverty of others, we rats will never disappear. Our work must be done."

"Rats like me are everywhere, crawling quietly through the tunnels and sewers of the world. Millions of people walk the streets above us every day while we work our labors in peace. No one cares about rats, Princess, until someone sees one. If any rat strays too far from the shadows, if one of the nice, clean people like the woman you killed sees a rat, that peace is lost."

"Normally we rats will kill and eat our own, but when one of us crawls into the light, what are we to do? If we chase him, if we fight him in the clean spaces where nice people live, we lose everything. One rat can be ignored. When one rat pokes his head out of the sewer to smell the clean air, well, then people see a single rat. They curse the rats in an abstract way and go on about their lives. But two rats, Princess, two rats make an infestation."

"Only one good end can come to these rats that would forsake the shadows. They must be hunted by another animal. When humans kill a rat, they leave poisons and traps everywhere. Our lives become difficult, and our work slows down. But the hawk strikes fast and cleanly, then there is peace. Our ecosystem must remain in balance. We need a predator."

"And you, Yumiko Itsumoto, are the apex predator of human civilization. You are more than a hawk. You are a dragon. When you killed, when you murdered, you came near enough to the shadows for us to see you. We risked ourselves to come and talk to you, we risked being seen, because the hawks have not done their job. I will take your refuse, Yumiko Itsumoto. I will hide it, and we will eat it, and it will be forgotten. All I ask in return is that you hunt."

I answered, "I am not your assassin," but it felt perfunctory. The old man was too clever to believe I would simply acquiesce to his demands. I knew he had more, and I waited for him to continue.

"The dragon hunts as she wills," he said. "I only wish to direct your gaze. There is a man who calls himself the Shogun of Saikaido. He has left the shadows and moved into an estate near Kagoshima. If I may judge by your response to my courtesy, Princess, I expect you will find him even more despicable than you find me."

"For me to kill every fool I meet would make a very empty world, though death would spare you and yours from the loneliness of it." Again my answer felt pointless, just going through the motions, struggling against bonds I knew I could not break. I waited.

"I would kill him for his foolishness, but you will kill him for his guilt, which you will find aboard a container ship scheduled to dock in California two days from now. My associates will provide you with details. Go there and judge for yourself. I will wait to hear of your decision. Now please, my Lady Dragon, drink your tea. It will make your journey home much more comfortable."

I walked back inside, and swallowed the tea he had poured for me in three quick gulps. Then I laid down on the futon and waited for its tranquilizer to set in.

I woke to the sound of my alarm clock the next morning, and I found a small envelope filled with documents beside the clock. I had gotten more sleep recently than I had for months, but I probably would have felt better had it not all been while tranquilized, hallucinating or otherwise blacked out.