DESCRIBED in Aggro World as "a sort of Esalen Institute for lady asskickers," the mountainside retreat of the Sisterhood of Kunoichi Attentives stood on a promontory dappled in light and dark California greens above a small valley, only a couple of ridgelines from the SP tracks, final ascent being over dirt roads vexing enough to those who arrived in times of mud, and so deeply rutted when the season was dry that many an unwary seeker was brought to a high-centered pause out in this oil painting of a landscape, wheels spinning in empty air, creatures of the hillside only just interrupting grazing or predation to notice. Originally, in the days of the missions, built to house Las Hermanas de Nuestra Se?ora de los Pepinares — one of those ladies' auxiliaries that kept springing up around the Jesuits in seventeenth-century Spain, never recognized by Rome nor even by the Society, but persisting with grace and stamina there in California for hundreds of years — the place had acquired extensions and outbuildings, got wired and rewired, plumbed and replumbed, until a series of bad investments had forced what was left of the sodality to put it up for rent and disperse to cheaper housing, though they continued to market the world-famous cucumber brandy bearing their name.

By the 1960s the kunoichi, looking for some cash flow themselves, had begun to edge into the self-improvement business, not quite begun to boom as it would in a few more years, offering, eventually, fantasy marathons for devotees of the Orient, group rates on Kiddie Ninja Weekends, help for rejected disciples of Zen ("No bamboo sticks — ever!" promised the ads in Psychology Today) and other Eastern methods. Men of a certain age in safari outfits and military haircuts and quite often the grip of a merciless nostalgia could always be counted on to show up with ogling in mind, expecting some chorus line of Asian dewdrops. Imagine their surprise at the first day's orientation session, when the Sisters, all wearing ninja gear and unpromisingly distant expressions, filed onstage one by one. Not only were most of them non-Asian, many were actually black, a-and Mexican too! What went on?

"There it is," DL said, "check it out." They had rounded a curve, and under the bright moon the forest fell away and the land went sloping down in pastures and then thickets of alder to where a creek rushed and fell, and up beyond that, high on the other side, there stood the Retreat. Steep walls weather-stained over old whitewash did not so much tower above the rolling, breaking terrain as almost readably reflect it, as if they shone at all their different angles like great coarse mirrors, beneath ancient tile roofs gone darkening and corroded under the elements, with windows recessed into shadow and seeming to bear no relation to any set of levels that might be inside. As they got closer, Prairie saw archways, a bell tower, an interpenetration with the tall lime surfaces of cypresses, pepper trees, a fruit orchard . . . nothing looked especially creepy to her. She was a California kid, and she trusted in vegetation. What was creepy, the heart of creep-out, lay back down the road behind her, in, but not limited to, the person, hard and nearly invisible, like quartz, of her pursuer, Brock Vond.

DL was known at the gates outer and inner, getting long looks Prairie couldn't interpret. By the time they got up to the reception building, there was a welcoming committee standing in the lamp-lined drive, all in black gi, headed by a tall, fit, scholarly-looking woman named Sister Rochelle, who turned out to be Senior Attentive, or mother superior of the place. "DL-san," she greeted her longtime disciple and antagonist. "What new mischief now?" DL bowed and introduced Prairie, at whom Sister Rochelle had been gazing as if she knew her but was pretending for some reason that she didn't. They entered a small tiled courtyard with a fountain. Owls called and swooped. Women lay naked in the moonlight. Others, all in black, stood together in the gallery shadows. "Any interest from law enforcement here?" inquired Sister Rochelle.

DL's line should've been something like, "Oh, you working for them now?" delivered emphatically, but she only waited quietly in what Prairie would learn was the standard Attentive's Posture, her eyes lowered, her lip zipped.

"So will the sheriff break down the gate right away, do you think, or wait till Monday morning? This ain't The Hunchback of Notre Dame here, and even if she's not some kind of escapee, there's the Ninjette Oath you took, clause Eight, you'll recall, section B? 'To allow residence to no one who cannot take responsibility for both her input and her output.' "

"Like earn what you eat, secure what you shit, been doin' it for years," Prairie said, "what else?" Not in the first place the sort of kid to take stuff personally, getting ESP messages that around here it might not even be considered cool, she had been tending to the line of her spine and quietly meeting the woman's neutral but energetic gaze. "Well then maybe you have some kind of work-study program here, list of courses, price schedule, maybe pick something cheap, be a live-in student, work off the fees?" detaching from their eye contact long enough to look around, as if for chores that needed doing, trying to wish some deal into being.

The Head Ninjette seemed interested. "Can you cook?"

"Some. You mean you don't have a cook?"

"Worse. A lot of people who think they're cooks but are clinically deluded. We're notorious here for having the worst food in the seminar-providing community. And we're looking at another herd next weekend, and we try different staff combinations, but nothing works. The karmic invariance is, is we're paying for high discipline in the Sisterhood with a zoo in the kitchen. Come on, you'll see."

Out in the evening, she led Prairie and DL around a few corners and down a long trellised walkway toward the rear of the main building. Suppertime was over and some postprandial critique now vehemently in progress. People huddled, intimidated, by the back entrance, out which came an amazing racket, giant metal mixing bowls gonging and crashing around on the flagstone floors, voices screaming, for background the local 24-hour "New Age" music station, gushing into the environment billows of audio treacle. Inside, something ruined was still smoldering on the back of a stove. Folks stood around next to pots that would need scouring. There lay throughout the deep old kitchen a depressing odor of stale animal fat and disinfectant. The chef who was supposed tonight to have been in charge crouched with his head in an oven, weeping bitterly.

"Hi guys," caroled Sister Rochelle, "what y'all doin'?"

Holding their nightly self-criticism hour, of course, in which everybody got to trash the chef of the day personally for the failure of his or her menu, as well as plan more of the same for tomorrow.

"I did what I had to," the chef blubbered, iron and muffled, "I was true to the food."

One of the stoveside loungers looked over. "What are you calling 'food,' Gerhard? That meal tonight wasn't food."

"What you cook's stomach trouble with fat on it," fiercely added a lady holding a meat cleaver, with which she struck a nearby chopping block for emphasis.

"Even your Jell-O salads have scum on them," put in a stylish young man in a couturier chef's toque from Bullock's Wilshire.

"Please, enough," whimpered Gerhard.

"Total honesty," people reminded him. This meanspirited exercise, thought to be therapeutic, was part of everyone's assignment back here to what Gerhard called "indefinite culinary penance."

"Isn't that kidnapping?" Prairie would wonder later.

No — they had all signed instruments of indenture, releases, had all arrived somewhere in their lives where they needed to sign. They spoke of scullery duty as a decoding of individual patterns of not-eating, seeing thereby beyond dishes, pots, and pans each uniquely soiled, beyond accidents of personality to a level where you are not what you eat but how. ... At first Prairie had no time to appreciate many of these spiritual dimensions, because she was running her ass off nonstop. The penitents in the kitchen, weird-eyed as colonists on some galactic outpost, greeted her arrival as a major event. As it turned out, none of them could fix anything even they liked to eat. Some here had grown indifferent to food, others actively to hate it. Nevertheless, new recipes were seized on like advanced technology from beyond the local star system. After checking out the vegetable patch, the orchards, the walk-in freezers and pantries of the Retreat, wondering if she was violating some Prime Directive, Prairie taught them Spinach Casserole. And it proved to be just the ticket to get these folks going again as a team.

"What were you going to serve them?" she couldn't help asking. "Dip," chirped a Mill Valley real-estate agent. "Smores,"  chuckled a Milpitas scoutmaster, "with maple syrup."

"New England Boiled Dinner," replied an ex-institutional inmate with a shudder.

The secret to Spinach Casserole was the UBI, or Universal Binding Ingredient, cream of mushroom soup, whose presence in rows of giant cans there in the ninjette storerooms came as no surprise. Deep in the refrigerators were also to be scavenged many kinds of pieces of cheese, not to mention cases full of the more traditional Velveeta and Cheez Whiz, nor was spinach a problem, with countless blocks of it occupying their own wing of the freezer. So next day the classic recipe was the vegetarian entrée du jour at supper. For the meat eaters, a number of giant baloneys were set to roasting whole on spits, to be turned and attentively basted with a grape-jelly glaze by once-quarrelsome kitchen staff while others made croutons from old bread, bustling about while the spinach thawed, singing along with the radio, which someone had mercifully re-tuned to a rock and roll station.

DL popped her head in in the late afternoon and looked around. "Just what I thought — a teenage charismatic." "Not me," Prairie shrugged, "it's 'ese recipes." "Um, and those purple things, on the rotisserie?" "Just somethin' out of the TV section. What's up?" "Sister Rochelle wonders if you have a minute." Prairie went along watchfully, at her own tempo, making a point of inspecting a few assembled casseroles as well as checking the baloney spin rate before leaving the kitchen, reminding herself of a cat. Upstairs, in the Ninjette Coffee Lounge, the Head Ninjette, with a mug of coffee in her hand, slowly emerged, as they conversed, from invisibility. It seemed to the girl that this must be a magical gift. She learned later that Rochelle had memorized, in this room, all the shadows and how they changed, the cover, the exact spaces between things ... had come to know the room so completely that she could impersonate it, in its full transparency and emptiness.

"Could I learn to do that?"

"Takes a serious attention span." A look sideways. "Then the question of why should you want to?" Her voice was even, with a slow hoarseness suggesting alcohol and cigarettes. Prairie also thought she heard some distant country notes that Rochelle was suppressing on purpose, in favor of something more invisible.

Prairie shrugged. "Seems like it could come in handy."

"Common sense and hard work's all it is. Only the first of many kunoichi disillusionments — right, DL? — is finding that the knowledge won't come down all at once in any big transcendent moment."

"But Zen folks, like where I work, say —"

"Oh, that happens. But not around here. Here it's always out at the margins, using the millimeters and little tenths of a second, you understand, scuffling and scraping for everything we get."

"So don't get into it unless you mean it?"

"Well you ought to see how many gaga little twits we get up here, 'specially your age group, nothing personal, looking for secret powers on the cheap. Thinking we'll take 'em through the spiritual car wash, soap away all that road dirt, git 'em buffed up all cherry again, come out th' other end everybody hangin' around the Orange Julius next door go 'Wow!' 's what they think, like we'll keep 'em awake all weekend, maybe around dawn on Sunday they'll start hallucinating, have a mental adventure they can mistake for improvement in their life, and who knows? Or they get us mixed up with nuns or ballet?"

The girl made a point of looking at her watch, a multicolored plastic model from a Vineland swap meet. "Givin' those baloneys fifteen minutes a pound, think 'at's about right?"

DL smirked. "Not goin' for it, Rochelle-awe."

The Senior Attentive shifted gear. "Prairie, we subscribe to some outside data services here, but we also maintain our own library of computer files, including a good-size one on your mother."

Where Prairie had been, "your mother" in that tone of voice usually meant trouble, and she wasn't sure if this woman, who looked sort of middle-class, knew how it sounded. But Prairie was shaking with the need to find out anything she could, the way some girls she knew got about boys, his family's name in the phone book, anything. "Would it," slowly (should she bow?), "be OK if—"

"How about after supper?"

"Ohm mah way, as my Grampa the gaffer always sez." Not a minute too soon, she returned to find a number of casseroles beginning to redline, baloney glazes to decompose. Pretending to be setting an example, Prairie slid over to one of the work counters, wrestled a hot baloney into place, quickly sharpened a knife, and began to carve the object into steaming, purple-rimmed slices, which she arranged attractively on a serving platter, generously spooning more shiny grape liquid over the top, to be carried in and set on one of the mess-hall tables, where eaters would serve themselves — except for the people in assertiveness programs, of course, who sat over at their own table and each got a separate plate with the food already on it.

From the mess hall next door an ambiguous murmuring, part hunger, part apprehension, had grown in volume. Prairie grabbed a kettle of institutional tomato soup, carried it on in, and for the next couple of hours she also schlepped racks of newly washed cups and dishes in and bused dirty dishes out, cleaned off tabletops, poured coffee, going from one set of chores to another as they arose, sensing partial vacuums and flowing there to fill them, unable to help noticing that people were taking seconds on the Spinach Casserole, and the baloney too. Later she scrubbed out pots and pans and helped put stuff away and swab down the stone floor of the kitchen and scullery. By the time she got upstairs to the Ninjette Terminal Center and found out how to log on, the midsummer sunset had come and gone and the sounds of an evening koto workshop mixed with the good-nights of courtyard birds.

The file on Frenesi Gates, whose entries had been accumulating over the years, often haphazardly, from far and wide, reminded Prairie of scrapbooks kept by somebody's eccentric hippie uncle. Some was governmental, legal history with the DMV, letterhead memoranda from the FBI enhanced by Magic Marker, but there were also clippings from "underground" newspapers that had closed down long ago, transcripts of Frenesi's radio interviews on KPFK, and a lot of cross-references to something called 24fps, which Prairie recalled as the name of the film collective DL said she and Frenesi had been in together for a while.

So into it and then on Prairie followed, a girl in a haunted mansion, led room to room, sheet to sheet, by the peripheral whiteness, the earnest whisper, of her mother's ghost. She already knew about how literal computers could be — even spaces between characters mattered. She had wondered if ghosts were only literal in the same way. Could a ghost think for herself, or was she responsive totally to the needs of the still-living, needs like keystrokes entered into her world, lines of sorrow, loss, justice denied? . . . But to be of any use, to be "real," a ghost would have to be more than only that kind of elaborate pretending. . . .

Prairie found that she could also summon to the screen photographs, some personal, some from papers and magazines, images of her mom, most of the time holding a movie camera, at demonstrations, getting arrested, posing with various dimly recognizable Movement figures of the sixties, beaming a significant look at a cop in riot gear beside a chain-link fence someplace while one hand (Prairie would learn her mother's hands, read each gesture a dozen ways, imagine how they would have moved at other, unphotographed times) appeared to brush with its fingertips the underside of the barrel of his assault rifle. Gross! Her Mom? This girl with the old-fashioned hair and makeup, always wearing either miniskirts or those weird-looking bell-bottoms they had back then? In a few years Prairie would almost be that age, and she had an eerie feeling miniskirts would be back.

She paused at a shot of DL and Frenesi together. They were walking along on what might have been a college campus. In the distance was a pedestrian overpass, where tiny figures could be seen heading both ways, suggesting, at least for a moment, social tranquillity. The women's shadows were long, lapping up over curbs, across grass, between the spokes of cyclists. Catching the late or early sun were palm trees, flights of distant steps, a volleyball court, few if any glass windows. Frenesi's face was turned or turning toward her partner, perhaps her friend, a suspicious or withheld smile seeming to begin. . . . DL was talking. Her lower teeth flashed. It wasn't politics — Prairie could feel in the bright California colors, sharpened up pixel by pixel into deathlessness, the lilt of bodies, the unlined relaxation of faces that didn't have to be put on for each other, liberated from their authorized versions for a free, everyday breath of air. Yeah, Prairie thought at them, go ahead, you guys. Go ahead....

"Who was that boy," DL was asking, or "that 'dude,' at the protest rally? With the long hair and love beads, and the joint in his mouth?"

"You mean in the flowered bell-bottoms and the paisley shirt?"

"Right on, sister!"

"Psychedelic!" Slapping hands back and forth. Prairie wondered who'd taken the picture — one of the film collective, the FBI? Before the stained deep crystalline view she fell into a hyp-nagogic gaze, which the unit promptly sensed, beginning to blink, following this with a sound chip playing the hook from the Everlys' "Wake Up, Little Susie," over and over. Prairie remembered that she had to be up before sunrise, to prep for breakfast. As she reached toward the power button, she said good night to the machine.

"Why good night yourself, gentle User," it replied, "and may your sleep be in every way untroubled."

Back down in the computer library, in storage, quiescent ones and zeros scattered among millions of others, the two women, yet in some definable space, continued on their way across the low-lit campus, persisting, recoverable, friends by the time of this photo for nearly a year, woven together in an intricacy of backs covered, promises made and renegotiated, annoyances put up with, shortcuts worn in, ESP beyond the doubts of either. They would probably have met at some point, though who'd have been willing to bet they'd stick? The turbulence of the times was bringing all kinds of people together into towns like Berkeley, lured, like DL, by promises of action. In those days DL was just cruising up and down 101 looking for girl motorcycle gangs to terrorize, drinking drugstore vodka out of the bottle, hustling guys named Snake for enough double-cross whites to get her to the next population center offering a suitable risk to her safety. The night before she met Frenesi she had chased the entire membership of Tetas y Chetas M.C. northward through the dark farm country around Salinas, vegetables fallen in profusion from the trucks and then squashed and resquashed by traffic all day making the night streaming against her face smell like a giant salad. Finally she ran out of gas and had to let them go. By then she was close enough to Berkeley, and had been hearing enough on the radio, to want to go look in. She couldn't have said, then or later, what she thought she was looking for.

What she found was Frenesi, who'd been out with her camera and a bagful of bootlegged ECO stock since dawn, finally ending up on Telegraph Avenue filming a skirmish line of paramilitary coming up the street in riot gear, carrying small and she hoped only rubber-bullet-firing rifles. Last time she looked she'd been at the front edge of a crowd who were slowly retreating from the campus, trashing what they could as they went. When the film roll ended and she came up out of the safety of her viewfinder, Frenesi was alone, halfway between the people and the police, with no side street handy to go dodging down. Hmm. Shop doors were all secured with chain, windows shuttered over with heavy plywood. Her next step would've been just to go ahead and change rolls, get some more footage, but to go rooting around in her bag right now could only be taken as a threat by the boys in khaki, who'd come close enough that even above the lingering nose-wrenching ground note of tear gas she could still begin to smell them, the aftershave, the gunmetal in the sun, the new-issue uniforms whose armpits by now were musky with fear. Oh, I need Superman, she prayed, Tarzan on that vine. The basic stone bowelflash had come and gone about the time DL showed up, all in black including helmet and face shield, riding her esteemed and bad red and silver Czech motorcycle, the Che Zed, overdesigned in every part, up onto which she gathered Frenesi out of danger, camera, miniskirt, equipment bags, and all, and carried her away. Skidding among piles of street debris and paper fires, over crumbled auto glass, trying not to hit anybody lying on the pavement, up onto some sidewalk and around the corner at last and down the long hillside to the Bay flashing in the late sun they escaped, in a snarling dreamrush of speed and scent. With her bare thighs Frenesi gripped the leather hips of her benefactor, finding that she'd also pressed her face against the fragrant leather back — she never thought it might be a woman she hugged this way.

Biker rapture, for sure. They sat devouring cheeseburgers, fries, and shakes in a waterfront place full of refugees from the fighting up the hill, all their eyes, including ones that had wept, now lighted from the inside — was it only the overhead fluorescents, some trick of sun and water outside? no ... too many of these fevered lamps not to have origin across the line somewhere, in a world sprung new, not even defined yet, worth the loss of nearly everything in this one. The jukebox played the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Country Joe and the Fish. DL had taken off the helmet and shaken out her hair, which lit up in the approaching orange sunset like a comet. Frenesi, jittery, starving, and gaga all at once, was still trying to figure it out. "Somebody sent you, right?"

"Cruisin' through, was all. You sure sound paranoid."

Frenesi gestured with her burger, trailing drops of separating ketchup and fat, each drop warped by the forces of its flight into swirling micropatterns of red and beige, and — "It's the Revolution, girl — can't you feel it?"

DL narrowed her eyes, wondering, What have we here. She felt like an adult come upon a little kid alone at a dangerous time of day, not yet aware of her mom's absence. "I could see you were just all revved up," she told Frenesi, though months later. "I couldn't help teasin' you. You were bein' so —" but let it go, pretending she couldn't think of the word. It probably wasn't revolutionary, invoked in those days widely and sometimes lovingly and enjoying a wide range of meaning. Frenesi dreamed of a mysterious people's oneness, drawing together toward the best chances of light, achieved once or twice that she'd seen in the street, in short, timeless bursts, all paths, human and projectile, true, the people in a single presence, the police likewise simple as a moving blade — and individuals who in meetings might only bore or be pains in the ass here suddenly being seen to transcend, almost beyond will to move smoothly between baton and victim to take the blow instead, to lie down on the tracks as the iron rolled in or look into the gun muzzle and maintain the power of speech — there was no telling, in those days, who might unexpectedly change this way, or when. Some were in it, in fact, secretly for the possibilities of finding just such moments. But DL admitted she was a little less saintly— "Is the asskicking part's usually what I'm lookin' for," watching Frenesi, waiting for disapproval. "But somebody told me it don't mean much unless I make what they call the correct analysis? and then act on it? Ever hear of that one?"

Frenesi shrugged. "Heard of it. Maybe I don't have the patience. I have to trust the way this makes me feel. Feels right, DL. Like we're really going to change the world this time," looking back in the same go-ahead-say-something way. But DL was smiling lopsidedly to herself. Backlit by the last of the sun, Frenesi in dazed witness, her face had become possessed by that of a young man, distant, surmised — Moody Chastain, her father. Later, when they got to showing each other pictures of their lives, there he was, same face in silver and dye, confirming the earlier gleaming moment — the halo of fresh-drawn copper, the ghostly young hero who'd come to her rescue, the whoop-de-do that day, Revolution all around them, world-class burgers, jukebox solidarity, as the sun set behind Marin and the scent of DL's sweat and pussy excitation diffused out of the leather clothing, mixed with motor smells.

Moody. He'd once been a junior Texas rounder, promoting bad behavior all over the Harlingen, Brownsville, McAllen area. For a while he and a small gang had managed to migrate as far as Mobile Bay, spreading apprehension from Mertz to Magazine, but he was soon back in his native orbit, handing out to all the ladies Dauphin Island orchids kept fresh with the beer in an ice tub in the truckbed and resuming his ways, which included driving fast, discharging firearms inappropriately, and passing around open containers, till a sheriff's deputy friendly with the family suggested a choice between the Army now or Huntsville later. The war then approaching was never mentioned directly, but, "Well, what'lí I get to shoot?" Moody wanted to know.

"Any weapon, any caliber."

"I mean, who do I get to shoot?"

"Whoever they tell you. Interesting thing about that, way I see it, you don't have nearly the legal problems."

Sounded good to Moody, who went right down and joined up. He met Norleen while he was at Fort Hood at services in the same narrow wood church they got married in, just before he shipped out. It was about mid-Atlantic, surrounded by nothing that did not refer, finally, to steel, vomiting for days, imagining the horizon outside, the unnatural purity, before he understood how terrified he was. It was the first time in his career he couldn't climb in the truck and head for some borderline. He felt himself about to go crazy in this deep overcrowded hole, but he hung on, he tried to see through his fear, and when it came it was like finding Jesus — Moody saw, like the comics or Bible illustrations, a succession of scenes showing him the way he had to go, which was to imagine the worst and then himself be worse than that. He must torture the violent, deprive the greedy, give the drunks something to stagger about. He would have to become a Military Policeman, be as bad as he had to be to make it, using everything he knew from those rounder days. And so he did, pulling his first MP duty in London, on and about Shaftesbury Avenue, accessorized in virgin white, known, in military slang in those days, as a "snowdrop."

Darryl Louise was born right after the war, in Leavenworth, Kansas, after Moody, having made it through alive, was assigned to the Disciplinary Barracks there. In the years of war he'd done a lot of shooting, some wounding, a little killing, but despite his love of weaponry, he'd come to see bombs, artillery, even rifles, as too abstract and cold. The peacetime Moody wanted to get more personal now. Though he was already licensed to use life-threatening come-alongs, to crack heads and dislocate shoulders, he didn't really light up till he discovered the judo and jujitsu of the defeated Jap, then enjoying a postwar surge of interest. From then on Moody practiced when he could, wherever he happened to be posted, getting the best of East and West Coast schools of thought, working eventually part-time as an instructor with his own group of students. When DL was five or six she started tagging along with him down to the dojo.

"Could've been my mama thought he was slippin' around. Maybe I was supposed to keep an eye on him."

"Hmm-mm, I can see why." The snapshot Frenesi happened to be looking at showed Moody in his full-dress uniform, ribbons and medals and patches and fourragères, holding already oversize eight-month-old DL and grinning in the sunlight. There were palm trees behind them, so it couldn't've been Kansas anymore.

"Way it looks," Frenesi said, when they could say things like this comfortably, "is that he went over. A wild kid who ended up being that deputy sheriff."

"Uh-huh," nodding, sparkling, "and guess who he took it out on." DL had noticed as she got older that her mother, Norleen, was apt to be in and out of their housing unit of the moment on mysterious "chores," her word for something else that years later DL surmised could have been boyfriends. Among Moody's problem areas was a practice of bringing home with him emotional elements of his work. The morning after one of their bigger go-rounds, DL started hollering at her mother. "Why're you puttin' up with his shit?" But Norleen could only gaze tearfully back, needing to talk, all right, but not to her child, whom she must have thought she was protecting.

"Wait a minute," Frenesi broke in, "he beat on your mother?"

She got that who-the-fuck-are-you stare back. "Never heard of that where you come from?"

"He ever do it to you?"

She smiled tightly. "Nope. That was just it." Nodded, her jaw forward. "The son of a bitch, you see, wouldn't even work out with me — not even in public at the dojo, not even when we got to be the same size and rank. He would never get into the ring with me."

"He knew better."

"Oh, I wouldt'n've kicked his ass that hard. . . ." She kept a straight face while Frenesi grinned. "I'm serious, you don't let things like how you feel about your daddy get in the way. Not professional, bad for your spirit."

"What about your mom, why did she put up with it?"

Best Norleen could ever do was "It's his job," but DL still didn't get it. "He loves us, but sometimes he has to be like 'at." Her face that morning had been swollen, distorted enough to frighten the girl, as if her mother were slowly turning into some other creature, one that might even wish her harm.

"You mean, they're tellin' him to?"

Norleen answered with one of those sighs DL had by then learned to dread, a beaten saddening surrender of breath. "No, but they might's well be. Just how it is. Men are runnin' it, they don't ask us, better learn it now 'cause it doesn't end when you grow up either, Darryl Louise."

"You mean everybody has to —"

"Ever'body darlin'. Can you reach me that big spoon over there?" But years later, DL on a rare visit, her mother by then divorced and living in Houston, Norleen finally told her, "Why, the man had me scared spitless. What was I supposed to do? I didn't even know how to shoot any o' them ol' stupid guns he kept around. And I'm telling you, you're lucky you made it's far as you did. I know that something — Somebody — was lookin' out for me."

And by then DL was able easily to sit attentive, pressureless, through the Christer commercial that followed, one she'd already heard more than once over the phone. She was finally acknowledging her mother's soul, one more side benefit of life in the martial arts. The discipline had steered her early enough away from the powerlessness and the sooner or later self-poisoning hatred that had been waiting for her. Somewhere further along, she'd been given to understand, she would discover that all souls, human and otherwise, were different disguises of the same greater being — God at play. She respected Norleen's love of Jesus even though she'd had her own way to go since she was a girl, even before the Department of Defense, that well-known agent of enlightenment, ever thought of cutting Moody's orders for Japan.

This was during the lull between Korea and Vietnam, but the troops on R and R could still keep Moody plenty busy. Norleen was often out, running those chores of hers, so DL was left on her own. She started to ditch the dependents' school, intending to go look for an instructor in unarmed combat, usually winding up hanging around pachinko parlors and making shady acquaintances, picking up enough of the language to find built into it a whole charm school's worth of rules for getting along socially over here.

One day, in the ringing crepitation of millions of steel balls, ingeniously waxed pins, and spheriphagous "tulips," she grew aware of a gap in the web, a local redirection of interest. She looked around. He was dressed plainly and had the air of a servant. Bowing, precise, he asked, "You eat soba?"

Bowing back, "You buyin'?"

His name was Noboru, and he claimed to have the gift of seeing in a person what she was truly destined to be. "Don't get me wrong!" between slurps, "you have definite shodan potential at the game, but pachinko is not your destiny. I want you to come and meet my teacher."

"You're — some kind of guidance counselor?"

"Been out searching a long time. The sensei asked me to."

"Wait — I've been around the circuit enough to know it's the pupil who's supposed to go lookin' for the teacher. What kind of a no-class setup is this here?" But she'd been having no luck on her own, so maybe it was what her Aunt Tulsa liked to call "a message from beyond."

Throughout their first interview, Inoshiro Sensei, as feared, kept one hand on DL's leg while using the other hand to chain-smoke. The pitch was take-it-or-leave-it simple. In her pachinko playing his agent Noboru, with his infallible gift, had detected an advanced ruthlessness of spirit, which the master, going then secretly to observe, had confirmed. DL wondered if being already taller than most Japanese adults, plus her eye-catching head of hair, came into it at all. "There are things I am obliged to pass on. Skills no one owns, but which must be carried forward."

"I'm not even Japanese."

"One of my major karmic missions this time around is to get outside of Japanese insular craziness, be international assukikaa, ne? Come on," announced the sensei, "we're going dancing!"

"Huh?"

"See how you move!" They proceeded, DL squinting and frowning, to a water-trade joint around the corner called The Lucky Sea Urchin, where they danced some back-street two-step and DL waved off everything but 7-Up. It wasn't as if these jokers were accosting her at a real stable time of her life. At the school on the base, girls were given only a sketchy governmental account of puberty and adolescence. DL's were both turning out to be like vacationing on another planet and losing her traveler's checks. Not long before this her period, a major obsession by then, had arrived at last, plus lately she felt washed under by these long, sometimes daylong, waves of inattention, everybody looking at her weirdly, especially boys. The sensei had scowlingly little sympathy for any of this, however. In the traditional stories, a few of which DL would come to hear before she left Japan, the apprenticeship is harsh and long, someplace scenic up in the mountains where the student is put to work at menial outdoor tasks, learning patience and obedience, without which she can learn nothing else, and this alone, in some stories, takes years. What DL got from Inoshiro Sensei was more like the modernized crash course. Man here was clearly under some time pressure so heavy she didn't want to know, having herself decided it was a romantic terminal illness, an older woman someplace.. . . For ancient dark reasons, he could not return to the mountains, probably had killed somebody back there over this woman, and now, while she lay dying far away, he must live penitent, earthbound, down here in the ensnarling city, longing for her and the mist and the wind-shaped trees....

The sensei ran DL all over the map on incomprehensible, some would say pointless, fool errands. He blindfolded her with tape and dark glasses and took her on the Yamanote Line, riding around for hours switching subways, at last unsealing her eyes, handing her a stone of a certain shape and weight, and leaving her well lost, with instructions to get back to his house before nightfall, using only the stone. He gave her messages she didn't understand to take to people she didn't know, at addresses harshly drilled in, that would turn out either not to exist or to be something else, like a pachinko parlor. He also enrolled her in a small dojo nearby run by a former disciple. She would put in half her time on traditional forms and exercises, then slip outside, around the corner and down the alley, to a rendezvous more felonious than illicit.

Meantime, all her school ditching had become a problem at home. The truancy squad was now in her face as part of a daily routine. Moody ignored it till they finally came to bother him at work, in front of other men, including officers, not the best way to send him home with a smile on his lips. For a week and a half he would already be screaming as he came up the front path, silencing birds, sending neighbor dogs, cats, and children fleeing indoors, and it would go on, out the screened windows and across the neat little yards, on through suppertime, prime time, and beyond, blunt, embittered, what the sensei would have called lacking in style. Norleen as usual kept silent, trying to stay out of the way, though sometimes on impulse she was known to actually bring them coffee right in the very fierce middle of it. And as usual Moody made no least move upon his daughter, who might by now, far as he knew, be able to do him some real harm. To tell the truth, these days, pushing twenty years in the service, he was starting to kick back some, working a regular daytime shift for a couple years now, manipulating paper that only represented the adrenaline and guts of what he used to do, putting in less and less time at gym, track, pool, or dojo, content to sit behind his increasing embonpoint with a personalized coffee mug wired permanently to his right index finger and shoot the shit with numberless cronies from head-bashing days who dropped by all the time. He'd lost his old enthusiasm for unarmed combat, and DL found no way, reasonable or at the top of her voice, to get him to see where her own love of the discipline was taking her. She did tell them both, trying to sound dutiful, about the dojo, but not about Inoshiro Sensei, having sworn to keep silent and already feeling the depressing weight of Moody's suspicions. "I ever find you 'th one 'nem little slant-eyed jerkoffs," as he expressed it, "he gets killed, and you get a Clorox douche, you understand me?" DL hated with all her heart to say so, but she did.

Another message from beyond, no doubt. She saw a pattern. He was settling for spoiling, snarling, aiming his belly at her like a great smooth bomb snout and calling her Trash, Gook-lover, and, mystifyingly, Communist too. Norleen nibbled her lip and from under her lashes sent sorrowing looks that said, Why keep getting him worked up, he'll take it out on me. "I was just sadistic enough," DL admitted, years later, to herself and then to Norleen's face, "so mad at you for all 'at knucklin' under, that sure I provoked him. Also I 's wonderin' what it would take to get you to fight him back."

Norleen shrugged. The central air-conditioning pursued its dark slow pulsing, traffic breathed along the freeways, trees outside just managed to stir in the moist subtropical air. " 'Course you knew all the while I was seeing Captain Lanier. . .."

"What? Mama, his CO?" Well no, she sure hadn't known till now, how would she?

"He paid for the divorce, too."

DL shook her head, bewildered. "No shit?"

Norleen, born-again, mannerly and all, laughed like a girl with a garden hose in her hand. "No shit."

And DL guessed that Moody'd known about it all along, too. The Captain would have kept him reminded. Men had ways. She'd been living her childhood in a swamp full of intrigue, where, below, invisible sleek things without names kept brushing past, barely felt sliding across her skin, everybody pretending the surface was all there was. Till one day she had a moment. There just came flowing over her the certainty that only when she was away from them, learning to fight, did she feel any good. The sensei, for all his lechery, high-speed frenzies, temperamental snits and low-tolerance ways, had become a refuge from what lay breathing invisible somewhere back in the geometric sprawl of yards and fences and dumpsters of Dependents' Housing, more than ready to rise from its crouch and take her over. So instead of waiting for something dramatic enough to give her an excuse, which could be too dangerous, DL one day when they both happened to be out of the house just filled a small army bag with what she needed, turned much of the fridge's contents into sandwiches and packed them in a big number 66 market bag, stole a bottle of PX Chivas Regal for the sensei, and without any last look in at her room, went AWOL.

When she arrived at the sensei's house, she found most of the alley filled by a white Lincoln Continental whose ample dimensions had been beefed up further with armor plating, radar, gun pods, and command turrets. Nearby a detachment of smirking crew-cut young fellows in black suits and shirts, white neckties, black shades, posed and sauntered. She knew enough to keep out of the way, hunker down, wrap her hair in a scarf, wait in a shadow till she saw an elderly man in a suit and homburg hat come out the door with Inoshiro Sensei. They bowed, then clasped hands in a way not fully visible. The visitor was hustled by his kobun into the car, which then was carefully backed out of its tight squeeze. Pedestrian traffic resumed as if after a rainstorm, one more view of Edo.

Inside, DL found the place littered with foam plastic sake containers. They'd been sending out for it all day. Noboru was unconscious, but DL thought the sensei had a grip on himself. She asked him, respectfully, for asylum. He seemed amused. "Do you know who was just here?"

"Yakuza."

"You're too young for such things, Blondie!"

" 'Even a crying baby dummies up when she hears the name Yamaguchi-gumi,' " she recited in Japanese.

Sympathetic but leering, he reached for her. Mistake, sensei. She was immediately in a Vanishing Stance, surfaces loaded, ready to let him have it in any variety of ways, all depending on him. "Relax! Only testing you!"

"Uh-huh, tell me, sensei, if you're that tight with the Mob, and I'm working for you, does that mean —"

"Our connection is of very old giri, lot of details, Japanese names, you'd lose track. The war figures in heavily. But you and I, we're connected only by bonds of master and disciple, free to disconnect at any time. If you could leave your parents' house that lightly, you'll have no trouble leaving me."

What was this? Guilt? "You want me to go back?"

He cackled and fell into sounding not quite decipherable. "You will go back. Till you do, stick around!"

From then on she was able to devote herself full time to ninjitsu, including the forbidden steps outside its canons taken — it seemed long ago — by the sensei, through which the original purity of ninja intent had been subverted, made cruel and more worldly, bled of spirit, once eternal techniques now only one-shot and disposable, once greater patterns now only a string of encounters, single and multiple, none with any meaning beyond itself. This was what he felt he had to pass on — not the brave hard-won grace of any warrior, but the cheaper brutality of an assassin. When DL finally tumbled, she brought it to his attention.

"Sure," he told her, "this is for all the rest of us down here with the insects, the ones who don't quite get to make warrior, who with two tenths of a second to decide fail to get it right and live with it the rest of our lives — it's for us drunks, and sneaks, and people who can't feel enough to kill if they have to ... this is our equalizer, our edge — all we have to share. Because we have ancestors and descendants too — our generations . . . our traditions."

"But everybody's a hero at least once," she informed him, "maybe your chance hasn't come up yet."

"DL-san, you are crazy," he diagnosed gently, "seeing too many movies, maybe. Those you will be fighting — those you must resist — they are neither samurai nor ninja. They are sarariman, incrementalists, who cannot act boldly and feel only contempt for those who can. . . . Only for what I must teach you have they learned respect."

He taught her the Chinese Three Ways, Dim Ching, Dim Hsuen, and Dim Mak, with its Nine Fatal Blows, as well as the Tenth and Eleventh, which are never spoken of. She learned how to give people heart attacks without even touching them, how to get them to fall from high places, how through the Clouds of Guilt technique to make them commit seppuku and think it was their idea — plus a grab bag of strategies excluded from the Kumi-Uchi, or official ninja combat system, such as the Enraged Sparrow, the Hidden Foot, the Nosepicking of Death, and the truly unspeakable Gojira no Chimpira. Despite the accelerated schedule, some of the moves Inoshiro Sensei taught DL would only make sense ten years or more from now — requiring that much rigorous practice every day for her even to begin to understand — and until she did understand, she was forbidden to use any of them out in the world.

As days and weeks passed, DL found herself entering into a system of heresies about the human body. In an interview with Aggro World years later, she spoke of her time with Inoshiro Sensei as returning to herself, reclaiming her body, "Which they always like to brainwash you about, like they know it better, trying to keep you as spaced away from it as they can. Maybe they think people are easier to control that way." The schoolroom line was, You'll never know enough about your body to take responsibility for it, so better just hand it over to those who are qualified, doctors and lab technicians and by extension coaches, employers, boys with hardons, so forth — alarmed, not to mention pissed off, DL reached the radical conclusion that her body belonged to herself. That was back when she was still thinking about ninjitsu. After a few years she didn't think so much but would just keep working out every day, finding the time and space, often at high cost, but every day of her life.

As the sensei had predicted, she did go back to Norleen and Moody, at least for a while. There had always been channels between the yakuza and the American military, and so eventually everybody knew where she was and that she was safe. Both parents, for their own reasons, were just as happy to have her out of the house just then, and the only reason DL had to resume her role as dependent minor at all was that the CO's wife found out about him and Norleen and proceeded to make life unquiet till Moody and the family were Stateside again.

A few years later, competing by then, DL heard about the Sisterhood of Kunoichi Attentives at some meet, "You know, the way you do. Hitchhiked up as far as the end of the gravel, did the last few miles on foot. Back then they let anybody who showed up crash here for free. Early days, more idealistic, not so much into money." She and Prairie were out taking a break, down by the creek. It was a couple of weeks after their arrival, with Prairie by now an old hand in the computer room as well as the kitchen. "Yeah now it's group insurance, pension plans, financial consultant name of Vicki down in L.A. who moves it all around for us, lawyer in Century City, though Amber the paralegal has been taking over most of his work since the indictment." DL seemed a little on edge. Her partner, Takeshi Fumimota, was due in for some kind of health checkup, they'd arranged to meet here, but he still hadn't shown.

"Are you worried?" Prairie, though at heart not a nosy kid, did want to give her the chance to talk, if it would do any good.

"Nahh, the ol' son of Nippon can take care of himself."

"Uh, so how'd you guys meet?"

"Aauuhhgghh!" First time outside of Saturday-morning cartoons Prairie had ever seen anybody scream with this intensity.

"Gee, thought it was a pretty innocent question. . . ."