Chapter Eleven

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“You stole this.” I sounded incredulous, probably because I was.

Saori grinned at me lazily. “I prefer the term ‘liberated,’ actually,” she told me. She sounded smug, probably because she was.

“Sure,” I said. “But out of all the cars you could have picked, you liberated this?”

Saori looked at the car. It remained the same. The overall structure was ordinary enough, a sedan with pretensions of being a sports car. But I wasn’t sure how she’d even found a car painted quite this eye-searingly neon green.

“Yes? Are you surprised?” the kitsune asked me.

“Not really,” I sighed, getting in. Raincloud managed to fit herself into my lap, an impressive feat of acrobatics. “But I remain hopeful that someday, just maybe, you might do something sane enough to shock me. You aren’t afraid the original owner will recognize it?”

Saori sniffed. “Bitch, please. Getting caught is for amateurs.” She peeled out of the parking lot at an impressive speed. It had not taken her long to start driving this thing with the same devil-may-care attitude she’d had with the previous car. Apparently, in addition to her other talents, she was able to learn how a new car handled rather quickly, though at least this one didn’t yet have the aftermarket adjustments that had made that vehicle’s acceleration so intimidating.

I wasn’t sure how she was planning to keep a car this obvious from being noticed. But then again, I also wasn’t sure how she’d kept anyone from noticing as we just walked right through a police cordon. However strange her methods, there clearly were methods in Saori’s madness, and I decided to just trust her on it. “Alright. Well. I think the Blackbird is my next port of call.”

“Makes sense,” Saori said. The kitsune sounded slightly reluctant. I wasn’t entirely sure what the relationship was between her and Capinera, but I got the impression of almost a friendly rivalry when it came to their respective shady histories. Which was almost certainly one-sided, with how much Capinera wanted to leave hers behind. But when she killed for her father it hadn’t exactly been on the field of battle, and she was by far the more experienced of the two when it came to assassination. I thought Saori might be a little jealous of that.

I wondered, as she drove, what it said about me when my friends had a rivalry over who was better at which types of criminal activity. The question wasn’t asked in a wholly negative way—I did like these people, and their skills were undeniably useful ones. But it definitely felt like my life had ended up in a very strange place.

Saori blasted what sounded like circus music crossed with death metal at an obscene volume. Raincloud had her head out the window the whole way across town, and I could feel her exuberant laughter in the back of my mind.

---

Saori parked two blocks away from the Blackbird Cabaret, and we watched the crowd filtering in from the parking lot. There was a show tonight, then, which was good. It was a pretty decent bet that there would be something going on here, but Capinera did take nights off, and I couldn’t remember the schedule offhand. I couldn’t readily check, either. Capinera had a phone, but it was anyone’s guess whether she would remember to answer it. Growing up among the Sidhe hadn’t gotten her accustomed to mortal technology, and it was pretty clear sometimes. But I supposed that I was just as obviously naïve when it came to the Otherside, so I probably wasn’t in a position to throw stones.

The three of us sat there for a few moments, just watching. Eventually, I asked, “You coming with?”

Saori hesitated, several emotions flickering across her face too quickly for me to parse them before she settled on something like regret. “I shouldn’t,” she said, sounding reluctant. “Leg hurts like a bitch, think I might have pushed it a little too hard on that sprint. I mean, not complaining, but still, probably ought to rest it tonight.” She paused, then added, “I suppose I should also get some more grenades.”

I nodded. “Where the hell do you get those, anyway?” I asked, idly curious. I’d been wondering for a while, even before she used another today. They obviously weren’t commonly available. And granted, she and I both had our fair share of things that we weren’t legally allowed to possess, but these grenades didn’t even look like military hardware. I’d browsed a bit online, and I hadn’t found anything that looked quite like them.

Apparently, I’d just said something very funny. I didn’t know what it was, but Saori looked at me for a moment and then just broke down laughing. Her laughter, as usual, felt golden and flickery and pleasant on my skin. It was good that I enjoyed the feeling, because I had plenty of time in which to appreciate it. Saori was laughing so hard she couldn’t catch her breath, and it took a solid minute for the kitsune to get the laughter under control.

“You don’t want to know,” Saori said, wiping tears from the corner of one eye and still a little breathless. “You really don’t want to know.”

I was not sure I believed that. Oh, I had no difficulty believing that I wouldn’t enjoy knowing. If Saori thought that, I had total faith that she was correct. But that wasn’t the same thing as not wanting to know. This reaction was…a bit unsettling, and between that and the extremes of behavior I knew she was capable of, my interest was more serious now, concern rather than just idle curiosity.

I didn’t say any of that, though. For one thing, pressing her on it would be rude. But more to the point, it just wouldn’t work. I’d figured that out about Saori at this point. She could be coy or cagey, and she was happy to keep giving someone answers that only left them with more and increasingly concerning questions the further they followed her down the rabbit hole. But when she actually declined to talk about something at all, that boundary was not negotiable. Pushing would just make her close down and withdraw further.

So I just grinned, a little too wide, and rolled my eyes at her. “Yeah, well. Try not to get blown up, then.”

“I’ll see what I can do, but no promises. Try to keep your blood inside you, that’s where I want most of it to stay.” Saori’s grin was also too wide, and it didn’t quite cover a flicker of something else beneath. I wasn’t sure what emotion it was, but it was there.

“Alright, but only because you asked nicely.” I hugged her, and got out, and watched the lime-green abomination drive away. I wondered whether she really had stolen it. I wondered what it suggested that I couldn’t make a confident guess one way or the other.

Then I shook my head and took a deep breath of the cold December air to clear my thoughts, and turned away.

---

I sat in my normal corner, in the closest thing this theatre had to permanent furniture, and watched the show. Well, for a certain value of “watched,” at least. I was there, and I saw the show, but I was barely aware of it. The fatigue was really starting to wear on me now, and it showed. I wasn’t unaware of my world; on the contrary, I felt alert, twitchy and hypervigilant. But that awareness didn’t encompass meaning. I was attentive to my environment, but I couldn’t bring my focus to the performance itself enough to even say what it was. Some sort of acrobatic dance thing, but I didn’t register more detail than that.

Instead, the time drifted past me in a sort of dissociated fugue, alertness without clear thought. What thoughts I did have were quiet and distant, disconnected from my immediate surroundings. It felt almost like I was watching my body from the outside, my cognitive and language functions at a distance from things like movement and sensation.

I’d had this feeling before. It wasn’t something that boded well. In the past, this kind of distant, dissociated feeling had been associated with some of the worse mistakes I’d made in my youth. I was concerned about that comparison, though the worry also felt slightly detached.

It really wasn’t until the applause started that I snapped out of it. I blinked a few times, clearing my head, and then joined in with that applause. I was moderately enthusiastic about it; I might not know whether the show was any good myself, but I could tell that Raincloud had enjoyed it. Given she couldn’t really clap herself, it seemed appropriate for me to do so by proxy.

And then, just like it had not so long ago right before this all started, the crowd started filtering out. Just like I had then, I stayed where I was.

But apparently I looked a little worse for wear, because as soon as the room was otherwise empty, Capinera was walking over and leaning against the wall next to me. “Kyoko,” she said. “Are you okay? You look stressed.”

I sighed. “No, not really. I’m…in a bit of trouble, at the moment. I was actually hoping to ask you for a favor. I need somewhere to stay tonight, maybe for a few nights. And I have some questions that you might be able to help with, though I doubt you’ll enjoy the conversation.”

“Of course,” Capinera said. Just like that. There was no hedging, no reluctance or hesitation. I’d been expecting at least a little bit of pushback, and apparently my surprise at not receiving any showed, because Capinera smiled. “I know this may surprise you,” she said. “But you’re my friend and I would prefer that bad things not happen to you. Let me lock up, and then you can tell me what’s going on.”

She walked off without waiting for an answer. I stared after her. You know, I commented to Raincloud, I think that might be the first time she’s gotten snarky with me. I felt almost proud of Capinera for it, really. Even that slight sarcasm was sharper than she normally got.

It took a while for her to lock up. It was a bit more complicated than that phrase suggested; the locks only took her a moment, but rearming the wards was more involved. I didn’t watch too closely. It would have felt rude to display too much interest in someone else’s security system. And I wouldn’t have understood, anyway; I had no idea what was involved in the task, no background knowledge. Clearly, that was going to have to be a high priority on my list.

But I could feel it, when she finished. The structures of the spell snapped back into position, and suddenly the wards at my back felt a whole lot sharper. The magic woven into the Blackbird Cabaret always felt both strong and dangerous, and my understanding was that those wards weren’t fully disarmed even during shows. She had measures still active to dissuade troublemakers. But now the more powerful spells were active as well, and I could feel it, a higher tone to the vibration in the wall, the scent taking on more blood to go with the blackberries.

It was soothing. Sure, those wards were a dangerous weapon I didn’t understand. But having them between me and the outside world felt pretty damn nice right about now, and I relaxed as Capinera walked back over to me. She looked relaxed, too, despite having her rapier in hand. It didn’t mean that she was tense. Capinera just kept that sword so close that it might as well have been magically attached to her, the way Thorn was to me.

“Okay,” she said. “Now, what’s going on?” She opened the door to her living quarters, gesturing for me to follow. I did.

Capinera sat on the chair, which left me sitting on the bed. There just…wasn’t enough room for any other arrangement. Capinera’s personal space was tiny, not much bigger than a closet. She had one chair, one small table, a minifridge, a bed, and not a lot else. She cooked over a camp stove, because there was no room for anything larger.

I couldn’t understand why she chose to live this way. And it was a choice, too. Even discounting all the other factors, Capinera was a virtuosa, easily the best singer I’d ever heard. If she wanted to, she could be living a hell of a lot better than this just because of that. There were a lot of things about Capinera that I didn’t really understand.

But I trusted her. And I couldn’t think of a reason to hold anything back from her, not really. There was nothing actually secret about what had been happening in my life lately, and I had no idea which details might be important. So I told her the whole story, in fair detail, starting the night I had left here and gotten ambushed on the way back.

It took a while. She listened quietly throughout. Occasionally she would ask a question, clarify something, but otherwise she seemed content to just listen. Raincloud managed to work herself onto the bed in a way that left her head close enough to Capinera to solicit ear scritches, which she received.

When I finished, the room was quiet for a few moments. “Well,” Capinera said eventually. “You’re quite good at understatement. This is much more trouble than most people would refer to as ‘a bit,’ I think.”

“My scale might be broken,” I said, and my grin felt rueful. There was a reason Saito had agreed that I caused twice as much trouble as the current batch of recruits. I’d always had a gift for attracting…complications. “But yeah, I’m in over my head here. I’ve been finding that my life…has not exactly left me prepared for targeted assassination attempts as a topic.”

“And mine has. Yes.” Capinera was quiet for a moment. “Unfortunately, I don’t have all that much advice. It’s…part of the reason that you don’t see good responses is inexperience, but some is because the attacker is favored in this situation. All else being equal.”

I frowned. “How so?”

“Well, in part this is survivorship bias,” she admitted. “I was always the attacker, and so if I’m here to talk to you about it, I must have seen the attacker winning, no? But another part is just the nature of the situation. Mostly, it has to do with determinacy, and with asymmetric knowledge in a game with imperfect and incomplete information.”

I blinked. That was…unexpected. I’d been expecting Capinera to be sad or reluctant when asked about this topic. Instead, she seemed actually to be more animated than usual. And she was analyzing it in an interesting way. I was having to dredge up memories from old college classes on game theory to keep up right now. “Determinacy,” I said after a momentary delay. “You mean the outcome is already determined? I’m in a losing position?”

“Not exactly,” she hedged. “The attacker doesn’t likely have a winning strategy, in a formal sense. But you can look at win conditions, and it’s clearly asymmetric. The attacker only has to win once in order to definitively win the game. You have to win every single encounter.” She shrugged. “Sooner or later, anyone will get unlucky.”

I frowned. “Because I don’t have a clear win condition,” I said slowly. “I mean, I guess there’s the potential to kill the assassin. But they didn’t exactly leave much room to do that.”

“That,” Capinera said, “and it might not matter. It’s…well, again, bias. This is informed by living among the Sidhe, where cat’s-paws and indirect action are very common. But when you are cut, do you blame the knife, or do you blame the hand that’s holding it?”

“You think that the person who planted the bomb was just working for someone else?”

She shrugged. “I think that evidence suggests the attacker doesn’t like to expose themself to danger. Why would they handle the explosive personally when they can maintain an additional layer of separation?”

I nodded. It made sense, really. And like she’d said, some of it might be that she was coming from a very twisty culture. The dvergar, for example, were much more inclined to direct leadership and honor codes, and I’d heard stories of even more rigidly honor-bound cultures existing in the Otherside.

But then again, by the time you’re planting bombs in a civilian area, honor’s pretty fucking far down your priority list already. And it would, I realized, also explain something else. I’d noticed immediately that there was a difference between the trap itself—an elegant, cunning design, something that would require an expert in several distinct and challenging skills—and the almost crude way that it had been used.

That felt significant. I wasn’t sure why, couldn’t put the thought into words yet, but it felt important.

“Okay,” I said. “I think I follow. And then you also mentioned information access?”

“Yes. Although there’s a difference there, in that the information is asymmetric, but not entirely in the attacker’s favor. The attacker has the advantage of knowing, a priori, roughly what the target is and what they are capable of. They know that an attack will happen, and when, and they have a guess as to the defender’s resources. But the defender can even many of those gaps, given time. And other things, like the extent of the defensive resources and positioning, are intrinsically weighted towards them.”

“Right, yeah. The attacker always has a degree of uncertainty.” I was fascinated at this point, by the content of the conversation and Capinera’s demeanor during it in roughly equal measure. I wasn’t sure I had ever seen her this animated before; her voice was quicker and lighter, her overall bearing alert in a way I wasn’t used to.

It occurred to me that she’d been calling this a game. I had, too, but in my case it was because I’d learned this kind of formal analysis as part of game theory. I was wondering whether Capinera was just used to thinking of things like this as games. This, too, felt significant in a way I couldn’t entirely pin down yet.

Regardless, she was nodding now, and smiling. She didn’t do that often, for obvious reasons. Her teeth were significantly sharper than human, in a way that made me think of needles. To the best of my knowledge, she and I were equally far from human, and in some ways we showed it to a comparable degree physically. But it was different in this respect; I looked entirely human, except for when I looked nothing like one. Capinera always looked almost like a human, but never quite.

“Yes, exactly,” she said. “You can estimate, but you’re never going to be certain that you haven’t overlooked something crucial, some secret or detail. But I tend to think that on the whole, the balance favors the attacker. The specificity is the big thing, I think. The attacker only has to prepare for one target, while the defender has to prepare for an arbitrarily large range of attackers.”

I sighed. I couldn’t find any real hole in her reasoning there, and while she was making some assumptions, they felt fairly plausible to me. And, ultimately, the biggest factor was also the most basic, the difference in win conditions. Seen through that lens, I didn’t even need the formal game theory to work it out. They could play to win; I could only play to not lose. The advantage was obvious.

It was not possible for me to win this game. Which meant I had to change the rules. If I was lucky, maybe I’d live long enough to figure out how.

We sat there in comfortable silence for a few minutes. The only sound in the room came from Raincloud, who was happily asleep next to me. Eventually, Capinera said, “You should get some rest.”

“Probably, yeah.” I didn’t like the idea; it felt like I should be up and moving, doing something useful with the time. But as my dissociated experience of the show earlier had demonstrated, it wouldn’t be a good idea. I was tired, stressed, and injured, and trying to keep moving right now was a poor choice. It would just result in things being done badly and me being even more tired later. I could recognize that, even if I didn’t like it.

“Definitely. ’Cloud has the right idea here. You should sleep.” Capinera stood up, got a second blanket out from under the table, and laid it out on the floor. Her attitude while doing so made it pretty clear she was expecting to be using it herself.

“I don’t want to put you out of your bed,” I said. It felt rude to me to do so; she was already doing me a significant favor, after all.

She just looked at me. Her eyes were a deep, vivid blue, enough so to be right at the edge of human range. They were also, at the moment, rather exasperated. “Kyoko,” she said, with the patience of someone who really doesn’t know why she has to repeat herself. “You are my friend. I can sleep restfully on the floor; you can’t. Now shush and rest.”

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