Reclaimed – Chapter 21

I wait inside the estate, sitting at the dining room table, in wet clothes, shivering, while the whole house moves around me. Cathy, my old hibernation tech and now my new personal doctor, crouches over me, a pair of scissors at the ready. She cuts my sleeve up in half, across my shoulders, slices into the collar and down the back, slowly peeling my shirt off and away from my blistering burn.

“It’s a good thing I got here quickly because you don’t want this to become infected.”

A sob in the hallway catches Cathy’s attention, but I lay my head down on my right arm on the table. My body shakes, too much of my skin exposed to open air.

“Jiro,” Cathy calls out the door. “Please bring a dry blanket for Miss Itami.”

“Is he out there?”

“Yes. He’s speaking with his mother.”

Another sob echoes in. I press my eyes shut against Mariko’s pain and grief. I am unable to endure another round of loathing from her. She was fast becoming friends with Miko’s parents and had known Oyama all his life. Now their deaths are on my head too.

“Ow! Shit that hurts.” Cathy ignores my hisses and groans as she irrigates the area around my burn, removing dirt and bits of gravel from it that I carelessly introduced in my fight with the hostage.

The door slides open and Jiro enters carrying a blanket. His eyes widen and he snaps the door shut when he realizes I’m naked from the waist up. “What happened to your shirt?” He lays the warm blanket on my back and tucks it around me.

“Cathy cut it off of me.”

I groan from the pain and rest my head on the table again, breathing deep, in and out, as she applies salve to the burn and covers it with a protective layer of false skin.

“Now sit up, please.”

Jiro grabs my shoulders and pulls me up, and letting my back rest against him, I clutch the blanket around my body like a toga. Cathy prepares a syringe and injects me in the same arm, then peers into both of my eyes with a flashlight before taking my temperature with a small sensor.

“You’re running a fever — thirty-nine degrees — but that should go down soon with the shot I gave you. It’s typical to run a fever after a burn. I’ll come by again in twelve hours. Rest. You should have been in bed hours ago.”

I shiver as I look out the window. The sun is rising and I never went to bed. I was too busy coordinating rescues with Himitsu and talking to every cat and dog in the neighborhood, spreading information wherever I could find it. I was working until I started to sway on my feet — thirsty, exhausted, and my arm in constant pain.

A soft knock at the door interrupts my thoughts of the sunrise and how beautiful it is amongst the smoke of my city still trying to put out fires now that the rain has moved on.

“Jiro, Sanaa, are you in there?”

“Come in, Lucy,” Jiro says, his voice cracked and hoarse.

“I need to go.” Cathy stands up and gathers things into her bag. “I’ll be back around dinner time.”

The door slides open and Cathy and Lucy pass each other. Sakai, showered and dressed, follows Lucy in and shuts the door.

“You should see this,” Lucy says, turning on her tablet and propping it up on the table.

The local news feed streams through Lucy’s tablet, a live camera pointed at the area to the west of the hospital. Along the fence, picked wildflowers, candles, and incense line the sidewalk, and Nobu and Yukio Yamamoto stand next to a blown-up portrait of Risa.

“Oh shit,” I mumble, as Nobu glances around at the reporters surrounding her, making eye contact with a few before taking a deep breath.

“Ladies and gentlemen, today, my husband and I returned to the city of Yamato, hoping to rest and recuperate after a long journey across the continent to rescue our daughter from the clutches of Fujiwara himself. Our daughter, Risa, had disappeared three weeks ago after meeting with our government and being enlisted in an espionage mission brought to her by Lucinda Coen, Sanaa Itami, and their staff. She was rumored to be in the capital city of Tengoku and working for Fujiwara, and we were doing our best to bring her back home from that ill-thought-out and blatantly misplaced mission.” Nobu glances up from her tablet, no doubt the statement she is reading tells her to pause at this moment for the best possible effect.

“When we returned to Yamato, not only was the city in chaos and our leaders nowhere to be found, but Risa was found dead right here in the town square. A note was in her hands from Fujiwara blaming her for spying on him.” She breaks out into tears, letting the tablet fall down to her side.

“I demand to hear from Lucinda Coen and Sanaa Itami about the death of my poor sweet Risa. She was a wonderful and capable young woman with a bright future ahead of her. How dare they recruit an innocent person with absolutely no qualifications to do such a dangerous job? How dare they…”

I jerk my hand out and turn off the tablet.

“I don’t need to see any more of that,” I say, pulling my shaky hand back into my blanket.

“Hmmm…” Sakai rubs his jaw and the graying stubble sprouting up on his chin. “This is not good for us.”

“She’s hitting us when we’re most vulnerable, a Taira Clan tactic if ever I saw one. Miura used to pull this crap all the time in Nishikyō. He would wait till the city was dealing with a crisis and then pull his support until we complied with a petty idea or request he had.” Lucy rubs her face. “He was always the best blackmailer on the planet.”

Lucy turns to Sakai. “What evidence do we have of Risa being the conniving little bitch she always was?”

Jiro huffs a laugh. “She was good, always a princess or sweet to your face or the cameras, and lying and duplicitous behind closed doors. Besides aiding and abetting Kazuo and Sachi in the attempted assassinations of Sanaa, we don’t have much. And shall I remind everyone that Kazuo is now on our staff too? If we were to release that evidence, it would do nothing for us.”

“Don’t bother,” I say, standing up and repositioning the blanket around me so I don’t flash anyone. “This is exactly what Risa wanted. She wanted to destroy me, grind me down into a tiny piece of dust, and she was willing to do it from the grave.”

“Sanaa…” Sakai tilts his head at me.

“Oh, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think she killed herself or offered herself up for this. She probably fought till the end, knowing her. This is the beginning of a masterful play to pull the throne out from under me. She wanted to see me suffer. No doubt she’s laughing her ass off now… wherever she is.”

“We can’t just let them say these things about us without denying the allegations,” Jiro says, following me out the door.

“We can deny until we’re out of breath. I mean…” I laugh, a tired, hysterical note to it frightening even me. Accept, Sanaa. Accept the consequences. “We all know what really happened, and maybe someday, the truth will come out. We should maintain our innocence but move on from the conversation whenever it comes up because we have no evidence they’re lying.” I sigh and close my eyes, convinced I could fall asleep standing up right now.

Taking a deep breath, I open my eyes, and down the hall, Usagi, Helena, and Mariko stand, their unhappy and pale faces turned towards me. The echo of Nobu’s voice floats down the hall to us, her high-pitched ranting for justice being watched by every other awake person in the house.

I hear her cry for my impeachment and that I should be in jail for what I did before reporters start shouting questions at her.

“I need to get dressed.” I sweep the blanket away from my feet and head towards my bedroom. “There’s work to be done.”