* * *
I grabbed Yuki’s arm right when the bell rang. “Yuki-chan, I need a favor.” She looked at me, surprised.
“Everything okay?” she said.
I nodded. “I just... I was wondering if Niichan is still in town.”
She raised an eyebrow, puzzled. Behind her, Tanaka started fake laughing, flipping his chair on top of his desk before walking over to us. “Hu-hu-hu,” he said in an over-the-top voice that the drama club could probably hear from here. “Does Tomohiro have a rival?”
“Ew,” Yuki said, smacking Tanaka in the arm. “My brother? He’s, like, six years older than us.”
“Maybe she’s seen enough of Tomo-kun’s immature side,” Tanaka grinned slyly. “She wants an older man.”
I flushed with awkwardness. “Chigau yo”, I stammered. “Not even close.”
Yuki put a finger to her lips and blinked slowly, looking thoughtful. “He has a point, though. Boys our age are totally immature.”
Tanaka’s face drained of color. “O...oi! That’s not...” His shoulders slumped and he headed toward the blackboard, grabbing a cloth and starting to clean. Poor guy. He’d been asking for it, though.
“Niichan’s back in Miyajima,” Yuki said, “but I can give you his number. Everything all right?”
“I just wanted to ask him something about my history assignment,” I lied. “He knows a lot about kami myths.”
“Oh, yeah, he knows all that stuff. Here.” She took out her keitai and sent the number to me.
“Thanks.”
She grinned. “No problem.” I helped her push the desks out of the way while our classmates mopped the floor, and then I dashed to kendo practice. I’d call Niichan as soon as I had a chance, I thought. He’d be able to help me understand how the Imperial Treasures were caught up in this mess.
“Oi, Greene!” Ishikawa drawled from across the gym as I opened the change room door. He wore his gray hakama skirt, the dou chest plate already tied overtop. The colorful swirls of his tattoo slipped from sight as he slid on his kote glove. “Still taking kendo when Yuuto isn’t here?”
I reached for his other kote, still on the floor, and smacked his arm with it before passing it to him. “I don’t take kendo for Tomo, baka.” Maybe at first I had, to spy on him, but the sport of Japanese fencing had given me an outlet to deal with my grief over losing Mom. I loved the way I felt when I held the shinai, when the world was silent except for the shouts of opponents and the shuffling of feet. There wasn’t room to think about anything else.
“You’re tougher than I thought.” Ishikawa grinned. A lick of white hair pressed against his forehead, and he tucked it under the cloth tenugui wrapped around his head. Our club’s headbands were stamped with the black kanji that made up our motto: The Twofold Path of the Pen and the Sword. The last time I’d looked at the motto, it had been covered in Tomo’s blood as he’d pressed the tenugui against a bite from the dragon he’d sketched. My stomach twisted at the memory of the blood in the rain, the limbs dropping from the dragon as it tried to lift into the sky.
“Greene,” Ishikawa said, and I snapped out of it. “Man, you phase out a lot now. You okay?”
“Fine,” I said. “Thanks for staying with Tomo the other night.”
“You’re all right, for a kouhai,” Ishikawa said, ruffling my hair with a strong hand before getting into line for push-ups. “Juniors,” he mumbled.
“Hey!” I called out, but he didn’t look back. I grinned and dropped to the floor, ready to sweat and spar my troubles away, to escape just for an hour.
The dial tone sounded tinny and strange in my ear. I couldn’t call Niichan long-distance on my keitai, so I was using the house phone. Diane wasn’t home yet, but as long as I kept it short, she probably wouldn’t mind me calling. I was allowed to call Nan and Gramps anytime—that was different, but still.
I punched in Niichan’s number and waited, my thoughts drifting to his small place on Miyajima Island in Hiroshima. I remembered how Yuki and I had slept in his one-room apartment on the tatami floor, how we’d whispered and chatted in our soft futons while the ocean outside lapped against the beach. It had only been a few months ago, but it felt like ages.
The ringing sound cut out, and a woman’s voice recited ultra-politely that the customer was unavailable. I left a short, awkward message, and then hung up. Guess my questions would have to wait.
I opened the lid of my laptop, putting it on the low table by my bed, and sat down on my zabuton cushion beside it. Might as well find out what I could about the Imperial Treasures.
It turned out they were just about as mysterious to the rest of Japan as they were to me. They were called the Sanshu no Jingi, the Three Sacred Treasures. Only the emperor and his close aides had ever seen them, and even then only for special occasions. No one was even sure what they looked like, or if the treasures kept by the royal family were the originals.
They had really long, fancy names. The Yata no Kagami, for one, was Amaterasu’s mirror, the same one that had haunted Tomo’s nightmares and sketches. The one I had seen for the first time in my dreams a few nights ago.
Tomo had been wrong about their location, too. Only the Yasakani no Magatama jewel was kept in the palace in Tokyo. The sword, Kusanagi no Tsurugi, was in Nagoya, about two hours west of Shizuoka by bullet train. They were thought to be replicas, but Amaterasu’s mirror was supposedly the real one, and they kept it in a shrine in Ise, Mie Prefecture. I pulled up a map to see where Mie was. Southwest from here, past Nagoya and curved around a bay of water.
Outside the rain began to fall, tapping against the sliding door to our tiny balcony. I hoped Diane would be home soon, or at least that she wasn’t caught out in this. It was getting heavier by the second.
The breath caught in my throat as I looked at the search page. The real mirror of Amaterasu. Was it really the real one? I knew the Kami were real—I knew the ink lived in me and in Tomo—but it was still a scary thing to think about, that someone as powerful as Amaterasu had really existed. The paper copy of the goddess, the one whose name I had written with Ikeda in the sketchbook, had already been strong enough to send both Tomo and Jun reeling in the sky. After learning they were descended from Susanou and Tsukiyomi, Tomo and Jun had grown ink wings and fought high above the trees. It was only with Ikeda’s help that we’d summoned Amaterasu’s power to blast them apart and stop them from killing each other.
And that was only the Amaterasu that Tomo had drawn. What about the real one? For anyone to have that amount of power was terrifying. And like Ikeda and Niichan had told me, kami didn’t play by our modern rules of morality. They had their own code entirely of what was right and wrong.
I shut down the search tab and reached for the lid of my laptop, but the news column on my home page made me hesitate. The kanji for death,
Two more Yakuza found dead in Shizuoka. They showed old photos of them, smiling.
I knew that one. The Korean guy with the Mohawk who’d brought the bottle of green tea over when Hanchi was forcing Tomo to draw. His photo smiled back at me, completely unaware of what awaited him in his future.
I scrolled down the news article, much of it still illegible to me with my current kanji-reading