Khoe; A Tale of Sadness & Joy Ch. 01

*** I had another account that I wanted to use to test things. Based on the results, I doubt I'll ever use it again.

Anyway, I posted this there, but after about 9 hours and a comment which was unsavory enough for the administration of Lit - and not me - to remove on the different story that I'd begun there, I pulled this one off long before it was to appear.

I liked the characters in this too much anyhow.

I was a little undecided in which category to put this one in. I suppose that it could have gone in under 'interracial' since the main characters are of differing backgrounds, but then, thinking on it a little, I decided that the male protagonist probably wouldn't care - in fact, I know that he wouldn't. So here it is under 'romance'. Only 5 chapters long in various lengths, since I wanted it to be fairly brief. I might even get them all posted in one day.

This first chapter reveals more of the girl - since it has to. She's just a bit, um, different.

I just had the idea to write this and, not wanting to get too deep, I left out a lot of other associations that these people might have.

Well, I'm on vacation and this was just languishing on my hard drive. 0_o

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Part One: Taeko 妙子 "mysterious child"

The night was failing.

She pulled over on the deserted back-country road when she heard the chime indicating the receipt of a text message. On her way back from the final wipe-down and check, she read the fourth and last of the messages sent by the last of the men indicating successful completion - meaning a boarding call at the airport - on her short-lived phone before she turned it off and removed the back cover.

With a tiny LED flashlight held in her lips, she pulled out the battery and removed the tiny card which was the phone's identity from its little retaining clip. Turning off the light, she pulled back onto the road and drove to the repo yard out on the outskirts to park in darkness a block away for a few minutes, reviewing, looking for mistakes or more importantly, for omissions or neglected details.

Not in what was behind her, but rather what lay ahead.

For the moment, she found none and got out to transfer some articles from the vehicle to a small motorcycle hidden in some tall grass. That done, she removed the license plates from the car, pulled her mask on and put her hood up as she slipped into the yard, taking care to stay on path which she'd mapped out for herself; out of the view of the yard security cameras. A quick look to see that the drugged guard dog still slept soundly and she ran back out, reversing her course.

The fence locks were no trouble again, and then she idled the car in through the back gate where there were no cameras and parked it back in the weeds in the same spot that she'd removed it from hours before. There had been one camera which was positioned to view the back gate, but the system had been installed by amateurs who'd left the cable in plain view as it ran up the pole.

That's why there was no working camera there now.

The plates went onto another vehicle -- under the ones which were already there. She thought for a moment, and then she was certain that she'd left no prints inside of the car or out before she stole out to the street again and refastened the locks.

From there, it was a short sprint to the old Honda SuperCub 100. Pulling her helmet on, she had it running inside of three kicks and she was off then, down the paved concession road to the heavily-weeded entrance of an overgrown field two kilometers away. At this point, she needed to be away from the yard more than anything.

She rolled quietly to a spot diagonally across using the trail beaten down by the passage of many off-road bikes and four-wheelers. Her path grew even harder to follow when she pulled out onto the dirt road, being careful to stay in one of the worn ruts -- the same ones that would be driven on in maybe half an hour by people from the snobby monster-homes a little to the north as they drove to their well-paid day jobs.

She shut the little bike off and coasted silently down the road for 30 meters as she turned in at the storage rental place and pushed the bike past the barrier quietly, noting that the night man was still sawing wood as he did every night at this time. She pushed on to one of the units there. Opening the locked door quietly, she pushed the old bike inside and removed the plate in darkness. Her long bag went over her shoulder as she left and locked up before scaling the back fence and walking quickly across another field and an orchard. She saw a young doe looking at her and she was careful to walk on and change nothing in her step or her demeanor which might give the animal a clue that she was even aware of it.

Seeing the doe gave her a good feeling. It meant that the farmer wasn't nearby, or the deer wouldn't have been there to eat the apples that she'd left there for her.

She stopped at the edge of the orchard and looked at the house in the distance for a moment. She could hear the harvester running and watched as it rumbled out to begin the day's work right on time. The fact that it was headed in the opposite direction caused her to smile before she ran hunched over to the long little gully in the weeds twenty yards away. She passed her other bike still lying where she'd left it and went on until she was at the gate to open it just a little.

Back at the bike, she strained to muscle it upright before she inserted the key into the ignition. The engine cranked over six times and then it started just as it did any other time. With it idling quietly, she took off her helmet and removed her hood and mask before she removed the black cover from the brightly-painted helmet and put it on again. Her riding pants went over her thin black ones and her jacket went on after she'd pulled on her boots.

She was on her bike in a flash and idled it carefully out to the gate. With the gate closed, she made for the ruts on this dirt road and puttered out to a larger road.

At the stop sign, she looked up, judging that she had less than a half hour of darkness left to her.

Plenty of time.

It wasn't until then that she began to really breathe again, and it wasn't until she was on the secondary highway with the other early commuters that she really got out of idle, just another young woman on her way to work, it seemed.

There was still a bit of the morning gloom as she pulled into the garage of her rented home. She shut the motorcycle off and after a quick look around; she opened the long bag and began to care for her weapons.

It was all rather automatic to her now. She cleaned them and inspected them as she paid more attention to the sounds of the dawning day around her. With everything complete, she opened the hiding place and set the bag inside. If everything worked out today, she'd be back in here tonight to take the bag to a more permanent place of concealment.

With another look around, she stepped to the small workbench and placed her dismantled phone in a crucible, leaving out the battery, but including the little phenolic card. Lighting a small propane torch, she spent the next seven minutes burning what she could and melting the rest. As the smoke and fumes cleared, she looked over at her bike.

It had a lineage, being one of the smaller siblings of the model. It was coal black and a little worn, though not much. It had been supplied to her and now she wished to keep it for a time. A 600cc crotchrocket, though by the time of its manufacture, it had been made as more of a commuter machine, so while it wasn't a slug exactly, it was at best a toned-down version.

It suited her needs and was unremarkable and quiet enough to not raise eyebrows and she liked it. She wanted to smirk every time that she saw it; every time that her eye was drawn to the model name on the side covers -- ninja. The irony was not lost on her.

With everything done for the moment, she let herself into her temporary home. She turned on the coffeemaker and stepped into the shower. Her motions were a little automatic then themselves as she scrubbed her body and her washed hair well before she reached for a towel.

By the time that she sat down and looked out of the window at the new day, she knew that she'd done what she'd come all of this way to do.

Her birth mother was also here, though miles away in a city, being the grief-stricken parent that she was as she was comforted by the police and the other relevant authorities. The woman at the table didn't know of it, but once the spotlight and attention was off her mother, the woman would be visited late at night in her hotel room by another woman who had heard of the tragedy -- as though it were possible not to the way that the media had been all over the murder. The two women would weep together late at night and then part, the nature of the second woman's life requiring the clandestine nature of the visit and familial love and duty demanding that it happen.

Her mother was here to collect the body and see about having it shipped back with her to where it had been born and grew up belonging to a lively girl, the younger sibling who had but little knowledge of her family's long history and likely would have wanted to know nothing of it in any regard.

She'd wanted to be a doctor.

The woman opened a little vinyl pouch then and drew out a few old photographs, laying them out on the table. She looked at the images of her little sister for a long time as her tears fell silently.

So, she thought, it was over -- as 'over' as it was going to get, anyway. There were four bodies which would likely never be found and if they were, then the coroner's office would have the first of many challenges facing them.

Four male bodies with no heads, hands, genitals, or feet scattered in four locations, all very well hidden; the other body parts wrapped in galvanized mesh and weighed down before they'd been sunk in four different places in Lake Huron. The many fingertips had been run through a food processor and the pulp poured out and left for the gulls and fish at the waterline of two small and remote rock outcroppings in a bay about ten miles away from the rest and on the other side of a peninsula.

She shrugged slowly to ease the pent-up tension and stiffness from a long night of driving. It had required commitment and resolve, but then she had lots of those qualities. They'd been driven into her in her homelands long ago. Attention to detail just went with that, or you just weren't effective for very long -- which meant that you were a liability to those who had trained and were paying you.

Liabilities were not allowed.

The campus at the university would be buzzing in a day or so, she thought, but that was alright. She didn't attend any classes there, though her sister had. The place had a reputation for the frequent assaults on female students and for one reason or another, nothing much was ever done about it, other than to hire more security, which was about as effective as throwing noodles at a dartboard.

Well perhaps now, it would be the male students who were a little nervous to be there for the night classes.

If she were 'home' now she'd be having tea and preparing to sleep, but here, well, sleep was out of the question and so coffee it was.

She sipped from her mug and wondered what to do with the rest of her life. She couldn't go home, not yet anyway. She had no plans to return there for almost two years to keep attention from her mother and others.

And that was assuming of course, that she returned at all.

She'd done well for her employers many times over and before fatigue or the grief which was their concern caused her to slip, she'd been given a hiatus.

She smirked. What they hadn't said was that after this was done, she was to stay away for the set time, and if she was still alive and uncaught afterward, she might be allowed to return then.

Taeko, she thought for the millionth time as she traced the kanji for her name on the table top with her thumbnail.

妙子

Tae-ko, she thought; 'mysterious child'.

She smirked again slowly. Well she certainly was that. So mysterious that even she didn't know much of anything about some of her own origins and what she did know, she kept hidden. She'd been quite a mystery to herself in the beginning. At first, she knew only what the woman who had raised her had said of it. Now, she knew a lot more of herself than many people alive today know of their heritage, but most or all of it, depending on what one might believe, was cast in permanent shadow.

Twenty-seven years before, a young woman met several people who took her and her swollen belly to a coastal village where she boarded a trawler and traveled to what was perhaps the most remote little fishing village on an island which was in the Japanese group traditionally, but it was a place which was inside the old dispute with the USSR while there had been such a thing. The woman was someone for whom the birth of a child would be problematic to have to explain, but it didn't matter. The child was born en route at sea and there was another woman along who wanted the baby and this had been arranged by two parts of an ages-old family alliance.

The first woman gave birth to a little girl and left as soon as possible to complete her recovery at a private clinic in Japan. That woman now grieved the death of one of the two children that she could ever admit to having given birth to.

Taeko had been the first - the child who was born on a trawler out on the sea of Okhotsk on the way to the village of Chayvo and was never spoken of. She was the daughter who grew up and by her own force of will and desire to know had traversed a political border as well as two natural ones and overcome every single device set in place to prevent her from ever reaching that woman so that she might ask the things which she wanted and needed to know.

After their very tense meeting late one night in an old barn during the summer monsoon, her birth mother had lowered her blades and acquiesced. Over the next few weeks, she'd told her hidden daughter everything of her ancestry that she wished to know, all that she knew herself. It was a risky thing for them both since it was also forbidden. During that time, Taeko met and fell in love with her half-sister, Yukio -- which had caused Taeko to smile almost every time that the girl had crossed her mind since.

Yukio had a rare quality; she could cause anyone to fall in love with her -- anyone at all. Even now after the tragedy, Taeko found that she could almost smile a little. One minute, she'd been a guest in a home where she was an unacknowledged relative with Yukio hanging on her every word, fascinated to find that she had a sibling and obviously thrilled at the fact, and the next thing that Taeko knew, Yukio was there in her heart. Her other, slightly older half-sister had been away at school and Taeko had never met her.

Taeko supposed that was why this had happened in the first place. Her sister had been a very open and warm person. Perhaps it had made her a little too trusting.

By blood, Taeko was half-Japanese, her ancestry on that side coming from farming stock in the old Shinshu region. She knew enough from her own research of her birth mother to have reasonable certainty that she was descended from one of the poor who'd been recruited to be what the Japanese film industry might portray as kunoichi, trained in a school set up for the purpose sometime not long before 1573 AD. The school had been begun it was said, by Mochizuki Chiyome, a noblewoman whose existence is often disputed by modern scholars.

Taeko did not dispute it at all. She knew better.

From what she knew, Mochizuki Chiyome had come from the Koga clan and had connections to no fewer than five clans who all used shadow warriors of their own. As far as Taeko had been able to determine, the Lady Chiyome was no stranger to the shadow arts herself.

Taeko had traced her lineage to one of three women in that time period, all of the same family in the Takeda clan, all of them reputed to have been mikos, wandering female shamans who were often thought to be insane. It was what they showed often so that people would leave them alone as they wandered and sought for the information or the target which they'd been given. In truth, they'd been intelligence agents, gleaning information and every now and again, they'd also been used as assassins. As Shinto nuns, they were allowed to travel freely, and as what they were in reality, they were very adept at employing common, everyday implements and tools which could be easily hidden and used as deadly weapons.

The existence of that school was never proven and of course, in light of modern research, the notion was cast aside as popular legend of the day. Given the purpose and nature of her birth and childhood, Taeko only thought it fitting somehow. You allow to be known what you want to be known and hide everything else. What she knew was that the school had never existed as a place. It had been created and still lived on a very small scale as a method.

Well Taeko had traveled to Nagano Prefecture, what had once been known as Shinano Province. Before that, it had been called Shinshu and there she'd found the modern descendant of the old village of Nazu. It had been quite an odyssey.

Unless one was privileged by blood and could provide the necessary bona fides that she was a descendant, knew where to make her inquiries, and could back it up to the right people, showing lineage at every generation to pass the first two questionings, it was a dangerous undertaking. The mere act of inquiring at that level was to undertake a risk, since failure to answer to the satisfaction of the questioners would result in her quiet disappearance. Each stage had attracted one or two more examiners -- some from her own birth clan who had been summoned to act as witnesses.

The third 'examination' was to reveal the existence of a small tattoo located in an intimate place, after which one had to prove sufficient knowledge of the doings of a miko -- something which was not practiced anymore at all, other than in a ceremonial way at Shinto shrines. It was the application of that tattoo as a child which had sparked Taeko's need to know as much as she could. It wasn't large and it wasn't more than a few symbols, but it said a lot to someone who knew what it stood for.

After that, there was a test of ability. Since Taeko had schooling in these things, she passed all tests set for her and impressed the examiners enough with the other skills that she'd learned in her cold and often desolate island classroom that she was told that she would be shown whatever she wished to know -- after one last test.

Before that final trial, she'd been informed that it was her last chance to decline, but she knew that by that point, to decline was to ask for her death, and really, there was the cost to the examiners in the lives of the two men who were to be pitted against her. Either choice was the death of someone in this. It had lasted less than three minutes.

Taeko walked out of the old building alone.

At the end of that, her acceptance caused the two parts of the family to both use her as needed by mutual permission, if a favor was needed, or to mutual benefit. By that point, the existence of the weapon that was Taeko was known to both sides.

The other fifty percent of her lineage had been the result of her mother's capture by Russian authorities as a spy. Since she hadn't been acting on behalf of the government of Japan, it would normally have resulted in her quick and quiet disposal. Rather than just execute her quietly, someone had been paid to arrange to have her sent to the old prison complex in the settlement of Tymovskoye on the island of Sakhalin. The place had been officially closed for years by then and what the Russian government called a free settlement had begun there.