Chapter 7: Osaka

The flight to Tokyo was four hours and Jarrin had used most of them to eat peanuts and pretend to read. The paper was Japanese anyway, a news magazine he'd grabbed from the seat pocket that might as well have been written in hieroglyphs. Jazz was asleep with her head on his shoulder, which she did when she felt safe enough to stop scanning for exits, and the hum of the engines had a way of putting everything into perspective at forty thousand feet.

Tony's voice crackled through the tracking beacon at the two-hour mark, reporting that the relay signal to Tokyo was holding. Then it dropped to static. Jazz woke up and looked at her phone. Jarrin looked at his phone. The screen just sat there, useless.

"The relay's cut out," Jazz said.

"I saw."

"You saw it."

"I saw it."

The signal hadn't degraded. It hadn't faded gradually across a few seconds. It had vanished, like someone had flipped a switch. Tony had warned them about that possibility when they were still at the facility, a remote severing of the connection, which meant the handler or someone on the Architect's side had the technical capacity to blind them.

They landed at Narita at dawn. The Japanese morning hit them with that specific dampness that came from standing at the edge of a sea that covered half a continent. Jarrin checked the transit board and stared at it for twenty seconds before giving up. The characters were fine, but the layout of the whole system, the way lines branched and recombined, and the way signs changed halfway through the station, it was a puzzle built by someone who wanted to lose people.

"We need to get to the signal," Jarrin said.

"The signal's gone," Jazz said. "I'm going by instinct."

They walked out of the airport into a world that was loud and clean and moving in ways Jarrin's brain couldn't process fast enough. The streets around the airport were wide and orderly, with cars flowing in lanes that seemed to have been designed by a mathematician who had opinions about efficiency. Jarrin took the wrong turn immediately. Jazz noticed.

"The station's that way."

"I know that. I'm going the right way. The signs are just confusing."

"The sign behind you has an arrow pointing the other direction."

"Arrow's old. Might be wrong."

They got on a bus. Jarrin asked the driver where they were going. The driver answered in Japanese and looked at them the way a driver looks at someone who asks directions in a foreign language. Jazz thanked the driver in Japanese, which apparently worked, since the bus stopped at every station anyway and the two of them got off at Shibuya by three in the afternoon.

The relay had been tracking a Stand signature, but that signature had died along with Lucien's. The signal to Tokyo was the handler's contingency, a ping that would show up on the relay before the third user activated, and it had gone silent an hour ago. Jazz could feel Stand resonance through Poker Face, a faint hum like standing near a high-voltage line. Right now, the hum was pointing west. Toward Osaka.

The question was how to get there with no signal, no Tony, and a city that was trying to get them lost at every corner.

They stood at a bus stop, Jazz holding a phone with no service, Jarrin holding a folded paper map that looked like it had been designed by a cartographer with a personal vendetta against clarity. A woman walked past them and glanced at the map with mild pity, which Jarrin registered and decided to interpret as something else entirely. He was not lost. He was gathering information. There was a difference.

"Tokyo Station is north," Jazz said, pointing at a marker on the map. "Osaka is south. We need the Chuo Line."

"The Chuo Line goes south?"

"Northwest. It's fine. The map is fine."

"The map shows the Chuo Line going east."

"The map is not fine." Jazz folded the paper up and put it in her jacket. "Give me your phone."

He handed it over. She held it at arm's length, turned it slowly, and stared at it like it had personally offended her. "No signal."

"Clearly."

"We're in Tokyo. No signal. Your phone does not have signal. The relay is dead. This is the most unreliable phone on the planet."

"My phone is fine. It's this city."

"Your phone is a model that was released two years ago."

"That's not what I meant."

Jazz pocketed the phone and started walking south. Jarrin fell in beside her. The streets around Shibuya were a wall of tourists, street vendors, and massive digital billboards cycling through ads that were too bright and too fast. People moved around them like water around a rock. Jazz walked with the same purposeful stride she used when approaching a target, scanning faces, noting exits, reading the room.

The Stand resonance was there. Faint, but steady. Jazz was tracking it like a dog on a scent. Every block, the hum shifted. Closer in one direction, weaker in another. She stopped twice to check. Each time, she moved the same direction. West. Toward Osaka.

They reached a crosswalk near a convenience store, and Jarrin stopped dead. His phone had one bar. Just one. He pulled it out and looked at it like he'd found gold. "Tony might be back. Maybe we can get the relay again. Maybe he's—"

The bar dropped to zero. Jarrin watched it happen in real time, like watching a star go out. He pocketed the phone.

They were in a commercial district now. Smaller streets, narrower buildings, more Japanese on every sign, and very few English-language anything. A vending machine glowed orange at the corner of a side street, selling canned coffee and canned soup. Jarrin bought a canned coffee and drank it standing up, while Jazz walked ten meters ahead, still reading the air.

He was lost. The fact had arrived, settled in, and made itself at home. They were not heading west. They were heading somewhere that was west of something, technically, but not west of Osaka, and Jazz was going to find out.

The police officer appeared around the corner of a building, a traffic cop with a reflective vest and a whistle around his neck, directing a small cluster of delivery trucks into a side street. Jarrin watched him for three seconds and then walked over, as though the two of them had been planning to meet all along.

"I'm sorry, officer," Jarrin said. The Japanese came out haltingly, mixed with broken English, and somehow still communicated enough. He showed his phone. No signal. "We have a legal matter. A time-sensitive case. I'm a private legal consultant. My wife is an associate."

The officer looked at the phone, then at Jazz, who was standing behind Jarrin with an expression that suggested she was considering letting him talk himself into a hole. Jarrin produced his law degree, which had come from nowhere in particular, and presented it with the gravitas of a man making a formal argument in a courtroom. The officer studied it. He was clearly unsure what to do with it, but the degree looked expensive, and Jarrin had the kind of smile that made people trust him when they didn't have time to think.

The officer gave them keys to a patrol car and pointed in a direction that the officer seemed to believe was correct. Jarrin had gotten a car. A real car. With a key and a government plate and a radio that worked. He held the keys up to Jazz like a trophy.

"I told you I had it handled."

"You asked a police officer for a car using your law degree."

"I was very polite."

"Still."

They got into the car. The seats were stiff and smelled like plastic. Jarrin started the engine and checked the map on his phone, which briefly showed a dot where they were, and then he forgot which direction he was supposed to be going and drove south.

The city unrolled around them. Residential blocks, then commercial, then a mix of both that got denser as the streets narrowed. Jarrin drove with the confidence of someone who was sure he was making the right choices, which in this case meant heading toward a neighborhood that was, in fact, south of their current location and technically closer to Osaka, but where the Stand resonance from Jazz's sense was growing weaker instead of stronger.

Jazz had her hand pressed against the car window. The glass was cool under her palm. Poker Face hummed against her side, a faint vibration that she could almost read like a compass. The needle pulled west. West and slightly north. Jarrin was driving south.

"Stop the car."

Jarrin pressed the brake. The car rolled to a stop at an intersection that had no stop sign, though the cross traffic clearly didn't care about rules. Jazz stepped out and walked to the middle of the street, her hand still on the window. The resonance was pulling her left. Left toward a side street that ran east-west.

"Go left. Park there. We walk."

Jarrin drove left. He parked on a side street. Jazz got out and walked, the resonance stronger now, pulling her toward a cluster of buildings that looked residential. Small. Cramped. The kind of place where people lived in boxes but seemed content enough.

"I'll go this way," Jazz said, pointing south. "You go that way. The apartments over there."

"Shouldn't we stay together?"

"We've been getting lost since Tokyo. Together we're just two people getting lost in the same direction. Split up. Cover ground."

Fair enough. Jarrin headed south toward the apartment block. Jazz went east into the narrow streets that wound between buildings too close together.

The apartments were three stories. Jarrin climbed the narrow staircase with its peeling paint and its smell of rice and cigarette smoke. Third floor. A door at the end of the corridor, slightly ajar. He pushed it open.

The apartment was small. One room. A kitchen that looked like it hadn't been used for cooking, walls covered in hand-drawn diagrams of electromagnetic fields, circuit patterns, waveforms, the sort of thing that a physicist would do if they'd dropped out and gone freelance. The room's only occupant was a young Japanese woman sitting at a desk with a laptop that was clearly on its last legs, a tangle of wires and components spread across the table around her.

She looked up. She was in her mid-twenties, with short black hair and glasses that were pushed up on her forehead. Her eyes were sharp. She looked at Jarrin, then at Jazz, who had arrived at the doorway behind Jarrin without making a sound.

"You're late," Rina said.

Jarrin opened his mouth. Jazz raised a hand to stop him.

"Tell us what you know," Jazz said.

Rina glanced at the laptop, then back at Jazz. "I've been tracking Stand signatures for three weeks. I'm not a fighter. I'm a technician. The Architect paid me to set up a monitoring grid, and he told me you'd come. He told me exactly when."

"When?" Jarrin asked.

"Right now."

A shimmer appeared beside Rina, translucent and flickering, wreathed in arcs of blue-white electricity. Velvet Thunder. The Stand had no clear shape, more like a column of charged air than a person, and the room's fluorescent lights flickered in time with it. The diagrams on the walls seemed to pulse, as though someone had redrawn them in real time.

Rina's eyes were cold. She had been prepared for this. She'd been waiting, probably for hours, for exactly this moment.

Velvet Thunder fired. A pulse of electromagnetic energy surged across the room, and Jarrin dove to the left, but Jolly Roger was caught mid-bubble. The bubble froze, its kinetic charge disrupted, and Jarrin felt the feedback in his own chest. The bubble popped harmlessly, releasing nothing.

Jazz threw a card. Card portal. She stepped through, appearing behind Rina, but Velvet Thunder's field warped the card's energy mid-transit. Jazz rematerialized three meters off target and slammed into the wall. Poker Face flickered. Jazz winced.

Jarrin pulled a second bubble from Jolly Roger's hand. The bubble floated toward Velvet Thunder, but the Stand's field grabbed it, distorted it, slowed its flight to a crawl. Jarrin watched it move through the air like it was wading through syrup. He couldn't aim. Couldn't close the distance.

Rina raised her hand. Velvet Thunder crackled, and the apartment's wiring flared. Live current ran through the walls, the ceiling, the floor. Jazz's card portals destabilized, fizzling out before she could use them. The EMP burst hit, and both Jarrin and Jazz were thrown backward, slamming into opposite walls.

Jarrin's vision swam. He pressed his back against the wall and listened to Velvet Thunder gathering charge. Rina stepped forward. A focused strike, charged through Velvet Thunder's arm, aimed at Jarrin's chest. Jazz was still down. Jazz couldn't get up. If Velvet Thunder hit him with that, Jolly Roger would go with him, and he'd be defenseless.

A phone lay on the floor near his knee. A smartphone, the kind that cost less than a dollar. Jarrin grabbed it and held it up. Jolly Roger's bubble formed around the phone, and the bubble's surface shimmered as it stole the phone's electromagnetic field. The property left the phone and entered the bubble. The phone went dead, inert, just a piece of glass and plastic. But the bubble now held the electromagnetic field, charged and ready.

"Jazz! Card! Now!"

Jazz threw a card. It hit the bubble's surface, and Poker Face's ability fused the card's concept with the bubble's stolen property. The result was a pulse card. A card that carried an EMP charge. Jarrin snatched it from the air and hurled it at Velvet Thunder.

The card detonated. An EMP burst exploded outward, filling the room in a pulse of white light. Velvet Thunder shrieked, a sound that wasn't a sound at all, more like a pressure wave in Jarrin's skull. Rina staggered. The current in the walls cut off. Velvet Thunder collapsed, its arcs dying, and Rina went down on her knees, unconscious before she hit the floor.

Jarrin pressed his back against the wall and tried to remember what his ribs felt like before they'd been against a wall. Jazz was getting up, rubbing her side.

"I'm fine," she said. Which meant she was not fine, but would argue about it later.

Rina woke. She blinked at the ceiling, then at Jarrin and Jazz, and sat up. Her eyes were clear.

"The Architect sent me orders," she said. "A warehouse. By the river. Tonight. He wants you brought in alive."

Jazz pulled out her phone. "What time is the warehouse meeting?"

"Eight o'clock."

Jazz checked the clock on her phone. "It's eight thirty."

They were already late. The Architect's plan hadn't accounted for the delay between Tokyo and Osaka, or for the fact that Jarrin had gotten them lost in the first twenty minutes. Rina had been waiting for them at eight. They'd arrived at eight thirty. The warehouse was thirty minutes away on foot. They'd been there for fifteen minutes already.

Jazz grabbed Rina's arm and pulled her up. "Walk. Now."

They made it to the warehouse district in twenty minutes. Rina walked ahead of them, reading the maps on her phone, leading them through back streets that ran between industrial blocks toward a wide river. The warehouse was a long, low building at the edge of the water, with metal doors and concrete walls that had been painted over three times. The river was dark and still. The sky above it was the gray of early evening, thick with clouds that looked like they might rain any minute.

The warehouse doors opened.

A dozen figures stepped out. They wore dark tactical gear, and their weapons were not standard issue. Rifles with scopes that looked too big for the calibers they were chambered in, compact pistols with suppressed barrels, and a few carry cases that looked like they held something specialized. They moved in a formation that suggested training. Not military. Something more focused. More private.

A speaker system crackled to life above the door. A voice came through it, the same voice from the glass wall in the facility, processed through a filter that flattened the pitch and removed the personality, turning it into something that sounded like a machine reading a legal document.

"Mr. Jostar. Ms. Zepelli. A simple offer. Surrender Ms. Zepelli to us, and you will be released unharmed. Refuse, and we will use our ammunition. We have prepared rounds designed specifically to penetrate Stand barriers. Your Stand cannot protect you from what we are carrying. The choice is yours."