Free Eight Million Gods-eARC by Wen Spencer

PIN number. Her hand was shaking as she keyed both in.
    There was a pause, and the machine asked for eight hundred yen.
    “Shit,” she hissed. Did that mean the PIN was right?
    Nikki dug out hundred yen coins, dropped the first coin twice before she managed to feed it into the machine. She was short a hundred yen coin, and she mindlessly fed five and ten yen coins in until the machine flashed “Thank you for use” and spit three of her last coins back out at her.
    The “in use” light was flashing. The door was unlocked.
    “Please,” she whispered. “No body parts.”
    She opened up the door.
    George had left a katana in the locker. She had figured he couldn’t carry a sword on the train without some kind of covering. She had picked out a light brown cotton fabric kendo travel bag with little dragonflies stamped randomly in white and red.
    Something tall and skinny leaned in shadows of the locker, wrapped in a tan fabric.
    Well, at least it wasn’t a body part.

7
    In the Shadow of the Swallowtail

    Nikki had been annoyed and dismayed when George stole the antique katana in Kyoto. He was supposed to be her romantic interest. There he was splashing kerosene onto the back of a temple’s gift shop to create a diversion for his theft.
    Of course, her hypergraphia had just scribbled “the sword” into her notebook without any description. George had been too caught up in the fear and excitement of his escalating crime to even notice what he clutched in his hand. After he killed and raped Yuuka, he nearly left it lying beside her dead body as he staggered away. He came back for it only after the sirens of the fire engines brought him to his senses.
    Nikki would have been stuck on the scene until she fleshed out all the little details, so she had thrown herself into researching samurai swords. She learned that the hilt of the katana wasn’t one solid piece but nearly a dozen items carefully fitted together. The hand guard, called a tsuba , was a disc of metal about three inches across with a slot in the center. Each tsuba was a hand-crafted piece of art and often had the samurai’s family crest, called a mon , worked into the design. After looking at dozens of web pages, she decided that the stolen katana had a tsuba made from a metal of gold and copper with a dark blue-purple patina called shakudo . It featured a swallowtail butterfly mon done in gold leaf against the purple.
    Surely the killer hadn’t stuck that closely to script.
    Nikki lifted out the bag, undid the ties, and shifted the fabric aside to look closer at the sword inside. Gold swallowtail wings gleamed on a violet field.
    She suddenly had an intense feeling that someone was watching her. She glanced around. Hundreds of people flowed around her, coming and going through the gates to the train platforms. Focused on getting to their destinations, none of them seemed to be paying any attention to her.
    “ Sumimasen, ” a salaryman apologized as he brushed past her. Before she realized what he was doing, he wedged a piece of luggage into the locker she had left open and shut the door. The “in use” light went on.
    “Wait!” she cried.
    “ Sumimasen. ” the salaryman apologized again, bowed, and hurried out of the train station.
    She whimpered as he disappeared. She hadn’t really meant to take the sword out of the locker. She glanced around for another locker and realized that hers had been the only unoccupied one. Every locker in sight had its “in use” light on. The feeling of being watched was still there, even though no one was looking at her. No one was even standing still, pretending to focus on a magazine or telephone conversation or oddly colored piece of floor. Everyone was coming and going, and she alone stood still like a rock in the ocean surf.
    What the hell was she supposed to do? George had burned down a temple and killed a girl to get the katana . What if her monolithic loon of a fan had done the same? If she called the