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  He sat down cross-legged on the packed-clay floor well away from the puddle and thought of the monastery and his training.

  He could pierce the Asian man’s skin in several places, near several vital nerve clusters, and cause him pain that would telegraph up his limbs into the base of his skull, where it would feel like his head were being squeezed, popped like a pimple from his shoulders. Amit had learned that in pressure point training.

  He could use his fingers to dig into the man’s eyes without piercing his brain. He hadn’t learned that through experience, but it had been discussed.

  Everything in his training had been focused on honing the body, on combat, defense, and the many systems and ways to exploit them. The shadow monks were a fringe order, taught to never, ever end a life unless strictly necessary. Anything done to one sentient being was done to them all, so it was said, and every wrong committed on another harmed the perpetrator’s karma. But if that were the case, why had they spent most hours of every day training themselves to be deadly? Finger exercises, intended to turn them into lightning-fast deadly weapons. Stretching, always aimed at practical uses in evasion and defense. Tuning of their autonomic, involuntary systems in order to feign death, to do things a body shouldn’t be able to do. The monks had learned to re-route blood away from a wound, effectively eliminating the need for a tourniquet in all but the worst cases. They’d learned to strike a dime-sized spot on an opponent’s neck using their toes. And speaking of toes? Amit could conduct a knife fight from either foot, and defeat an average man using his hands. Thanks to intuitive conditioning and practice reading the most minute of gestures, shadow monks could appear to dodge bullets by making sure they were never truly in the line of fire when the trigger was pulled. They had practiced disarming with their hands tied, fighting multiple men with guns firing live ammunition.

  But why, if they were never supposed to use those skills?

  To teach bodily discipline and control, the elders insisted.

  Nonsense. Exercises built control, not sparring with bullets. It was like arguing that assault weapons were required for hunting rabbit.

  Amit looked up at the man hanging from the rafters and reminded himself that the universe had orchestrated this. He wasn’t deviating from his order. He wasn’t deviating from morality. He wasn’t deviating from Sri. He was not violating the will of the cosmos, or his soul, his karma, or his dharma. He was embracing all of those things. He had not entered this with horrors on his mind. He was pushed. Causality had led him inexorably here, and he, in a very real sense, was doing what he’d been born to do.

  Amit stood back up. The upside-down man rolled his eyes toward him. The look was barely malevolent. It seemed dizzy.

  “I do not wish to cut you again,” Amit said. “But if I must, I will, and if I do, my feet will be dyed red for weeks afterward. This will encourage me to be thorough, to end things quickly, if only to make my stained feet worth it. So please, spare us both and tell me: Who gave you the order?”

  “Fuck. You.” Big breath between the words.

  Amit sighed, then walked forward. “I will need to remove all of the skin from this arm,” he said, feet wetting with blood. “Please hold still.” He extended his arm, positioning the X-Acto blade near the existing wound — and why not; his starting place was there already. He touched the tip to the bleeding incision, poking around, preparing to start the peeling.

  He made one small poke, just under the skin.

  “OKAY! OKAY!” The man blurted. Amit looked up. It was as if he’d just realized that Amit was going to hurt him. Stupid man. That was how they had begun the discussion. Why had the idiot not realized he meant business earlier? He’d still have two functional arms and would still be able to put tobacco in his cheek without it dribbling onto his shirt collar.

  “Yes?”

  “The Right Hand. Okay? That’s what they call him. He’s the boss’s man. His number two. He sent us. Okay?”

  Amit lowered the knife, listening to the man’s words, assessing the timbre of his voice to determine if he was telling the truth, or simply giving Amit something to stop his ministrations.

  The man was telling the truth. The shape of his voice in Amit’s mind left him no doubt.

  “Thank you,” Amit said. “Now all I need is this Right Hand’s address.”

  Chapter 4

  11:47 A.M. ON SATURDAY

  There was already one body on the floor; soon there would be more. Amit decided that he was okay with that. The order would disagree, but the universe was not always, on a small level that mortals could understand, beautiful and fair. In the end, if one pulled back enough in space and time and looked down at life on planet Earth, energy was benevolent and all the world beautiful. But on the level of a life, there were ups and downs, backs and forths. Sometimes bad things had to happen before good things could, and sometimes the path to enlightenment and understanding was littered with bodies. Sometimes killing was a pilgrim’s righteous path. One had to see that, accept it, read the signs, and swim downstream.

  In the middle of the circle of mostly-armed men, Amit closed his eyes, breathed through his nose, and felt an inner ball of explosive rage dissipate and leak into his every cell, allowing his exterior to remain calm.

  He tried to understand the five men, tried to see them as men sent to do a job — a job like any other, with no emotion behind it. He tried to summon compassion. What would be done would be done. But he would need to approach his task with calm, because there were things he needed to know from these men to set his world right.

  “I do not wish to harm you,” he lied.

  The five men all cracked smiles. Two chuckled — the pair with guns on their belts. The one with the bat, the one with the machete, and the one who was going in bare-handed just to round things out didn’t laugh. Amit did not smile. He was a jovial man and smiled often — even when in the grip of rage which he would not show — but right now, he wasn’t joking. They were hefting weapons and circling like movie bandits as Amit stood in the center, light-blue robes above his bare feet, but he wasn’t making a joke by implying the encounter’s likely outcome. It was five against one — hardly fair for the men holding weapons.

  “That’s fortunate,” said a big man wearing a thick beard and a black-leather vest. His shoulders, visible at the vest’s edges, were massive and covered in hair. “Because, buddy, I’m afraid we do wish to harm you.”

  “Wish to is overstating it,” said the unarmed man. “You happened to show up at the wrong time; I’d say ‘willing to.’” He was tall with dark-black hair and appeared to be Asian. Two of the men were Caucasian. The remaining pair was black.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” Amit said. “I do wish to harm you. But also believe that I am supposed to harm you. So, when I break your leg hard enough that the bone erupts through your skin … ” He pointed at one of the black men. “ … I have decided to allow myself to enjoy it. It does not matter which of you did what has been done here. I will enjoy your pain equally.”

  The man Amit had pointed to looked at the big, hairy man in the leather jacket, who seemed to be the group’s leader. They were five beasts to one strange, thin, motionless monk with no weapons, but none seemed able to bring themselves to do the obvious and grab him. Amit couldn’t blame them. He looked harmless enough, but this wasn’t how a man in his position was supposed to behave. He should be on the floor, curled up over the body at his feet, crying as he allowed emotion to rule him. Amit felt all of that emotion — along with the darker emotions that made him want to kill — but expressing them in a more “normal” way would be wasteful. Blubbering and being consumed with emotion right now would be like running an engine in one room and a heater in another. The wise man would find a way to channel the engine’s lost heat, to use it as the heater.

  Painful emotions, wielded correctly, could make for terribly effective weapons.

  The man with the vest looked back at the black man. He scratched his thick beard w
ith one big hand, then twirled his machete with the other.

  “You don’t have to die too, friend,” said the big man. “Our work here is done. But you keep talking crazy, and we won’t feel comfortable leaving you.”

  “You should not feel comfortable,” said Amit.

  “So, you’d rather we kill you.”

  “If you try,” said Amit, “it will make me feel better about killing you.”

  The big man laughed. “That so?”

  Amit nodded.

  The smile tried staying beneath the man’s beard, but after a few long seconds it dissipated. Only Amit’s eyes moved as he stood in the center of the circle, flicking his gaze to each of the men. They were trying to look menacing, but none could quite manage. He saw the uncertainty in their eyes and read it as weakness. They should have come at him by now. Raised their bats. Or the machete. Maybe unholstered their guns. Yet the men were merely pacing, circling him and the other body (for now it was only a body; later Amit could address it as something else, when time allowed), waiting to see what he would do.

  “What you want to do with this guy, Mike?” said one of the white men. He was bald like Amit, larger through the shoulders, and carried a gun on his hip. “We going, we finishing him off, we teaching him a lesson … what?”

  The big man looked to Amit.

  “Your call, fella. You want us to leave, or you want us to lay you dead?”

  “I want you to tell me what this is all about.”

  “Hey,” said the big man, apparently named Mike, “we’re just soldiers. What it’s all about is something for the bosses to decide. We’re given an order, we follow.” His expression was surprisingly even, as if regarding Amit as equal.

  “Then who gave the order?”

  One of the black men laughed. “Let’s just kill this motherfucker.” He reached for the gun tucked into his pants.

  “Who gave the order?” Amit repeated, looking at Mike.

  “What are you going to do, bitch?” said the black man with the gun. It wasn’t yet drawn, but he seemed ready. The standoff was getting stupid, seeing how easy the five men all seemed to think it would be to end.

  “First,” said Amit, “I am going to kill each of you for what you have done, whether you were following orders or not. I will do it using your own weapons. I will kill all but one of you. I will take the remaining man and hang him from that pulley … ” He pointed across the barn to a dangling contraption, “ … and question him. The pleasantness of that questioning will depend on how forthcoming my subject is with information.”

  “This motherfucker is crazy,” said the black man, drawing and aiming his gun. He hadn’t yet cocked it. He was probably saving that for dramatic effect. Amit could read each of the men. He already knew what each was thinking, what each was feeling, and what each was most likely to do when the fighting begun. The man with the gun wouldn’t hesitate to kill him, and he could do it calmly and without remorse, but until he cocked the gun, he wouldn’t be able to fire straight under pressure. He’d have to squeeze too hard to be accurate, and if he rushed that first shot, it would be high enough to duck under.

  “Put your gun down, Justin,” said Mike. “Neighbors hear a shot, they’ll call the cops.”

  Justin didn’t lower his gun. They were well out in the country and the closest inhabited building to the barn was hundreds of yards off. Even if the people in that house heard and took the small distant popping for a gunshot and called the cops, chances that police would arrive in time to catch them were basically nil.

  “I’m not gonna sit here and listen to any more of this bullshit,” he said, leveling the gun between Amit’s appraising eyes.

  “Fine,” said Mike, seeming to make a decision. “Marcus, grab this asshole and shut him the fuck up.”

  Marcus looked over, his gaze uncertain.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, Mike. Maybe he’s one of those crazy guys, who sets themselves on fire or something.”

  “Maybe,” said Amit.

  Mike looked at Marcus for a long moment, then rolled his eyes, raised his machete, said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” and marched into the circle.

  Mike wasn’t apparently interested in drawing things out, swinging the machete in his big, strong arm on approach. But because he was the group’s alpha, he swung for the prestige strike — high, at Amit’s head, rather than at the larger target of his torso. Amit channeled his training and ducked superhumanly fast, his head vanishing below the machete’s swipe in a billow of rustling robes. Mike was confident, as Amit had known he would be, and had put his entire weight behind his swing, so the machete went almost around in a circle as it met empty air. Mike’s arm and then whole body went with it, so Amit popped back up, grabbed the blade, and dragged it harder into the spin until Mike’s arm ended up wrapped around his upper body, machete cocked past his ear and resting against his neck. Mike, tied like a pretzel, rolled his eyes up. Amit simply pushed the big man’s head along the blade, opening his windpipe and carotid artery. Mike gasped for breath, stumbling backward as his hairy chest and leather vest were covered in a gusher of blood. He fell to the clay as a pool spread beneath him.

  “Next,” said Amit, standing erect.

  “Jesus,” said the other white man.

  “Shoot him, Justin,” ordered the bat man.

  “Yes,” said Amit. “Shoot me, Justin.”

  “JUST FUCKING SHOOT THAT FUCKER!”

  Justin’s head jittered toward Mike’s gurgling corpse, his brain still trying to process whatever it was that had just happened. It had all gone too fast. One moment Mike was charging the monk and swinging to pop his top, and the next he was twitching on the ground with his throat slit end to end.

  Now Justin was in the spotlight, all eyes on him to end things. He had a gun out and pointed, but the pressure seemed suddenly too much. He fired, barely seeming to see what he was aiming at. Amit easily ducked the shot as the gun, with its long trigger pull, went high just as he’d known it would. The gun — a silver semiautomatic — was now cocked and deadlier in Justin’s hands, but Amit twisted it from his grip before his arm recovered from the first shot’s recoil. The shot struck something in the barn’s loft, and there was the sound of wood splintering, but by the time anyone heard it Amit had turned the gun around and had it pointed between Justin’s eyes. Justin, who bore at least a fifth of the responsibility for the dead woman at Amit’s feet.

  “It works better like this,” said Amit, and squeezed the trigger. A red blossom of brain and blood exploded like a water balloon on a post behind what used to be Justin as his body was blasted onto its back by the shot’s blunt force. His face was charred hamburger.

  Amit threw the gun into the loft, because he’d promised to kill each man with his own weapon, and a monk did not break his promises.

  The second man with a gun would have to be next, because he was already drawing. It was a shame. Amit was fluent in martial graces, and here he’d already killed one man rather inelegantly, with a firearm. Guns were for thugs, not monks. The draw was so long and so clumsy, though, the Asian man reached him first, tackling him with an arm around his neck. Amit had heard him approaching from behind, had felt the wind of his passage. He twisted the man around and used him as a bludgeon to strike the last man as he was raising his bat. The bat hit the unarmed man in the leg, then the flail of limbs hit the man with the bat. Both flew to the dirt. Finally the man with the gun had his weapon out, so Amit ducked into a scissor-split and pulled his legs out from under him. The man struck the clay hard, concussively, and the gun rattled free. Amit climbed onto the man’s chest and reached for it, taking the cool metal in his hand.

  He swung the gun toward the men he’d felled a moment before, to keep them at bay. There was no need; they’d barely recovered. He turned his attention to the pinned man, who Amit had noticed earlier had blood on his hands. Nisha’s blood.

  “We were just following orders!” he yelled as Amit, still on his c
hest, pointed the gun down at him.

  Amit looked at the man’s hands, crimson with innocence. He looked up at the inelegant firearm, then spun it on its trigger guard so the muzzle was below his fist and smashed it hard into the man’s eye. Years of training made Amit deceptively strong, and he felt the man’s skull give at the eye socket as he smashed the barrel deep, fracturing it and allowing the metal to pulverize the right side of his frontal lobe.

  The bat man scrambled to his feet and started to run. Amit eyed the Asian man, who was still dazed and unmoving, and followed. He made it as far as the barn’s front door. Amit easily caught up with him, and when the man tried to hook around the door’s support post and outside, Amit grabbed him by the back of the neck and rammed his face hard into it. The man slumped, scalp bleeding and nose broken. Amit looked back into the barn to keep an eye on the last man — the man he’d have to interrogate — and saw the four surrounding bodies.

  His training slipped. Rage welled inside him, taking over his senses. He looked at the man on the floor and screamed in agony, then knelt by him and rammed his knuckles hard enough into the gurgling throat to shatter the man’s neck and pierce his spinal column. Then he wrenched the man’s head backward hard, touching the back of his head to the spot between his shoulder blades. There was a satisfying final crack, and the body went still.

  Amit closed his eyes and drew a breath, fighting emotions into their corners.

  He approached the Asian man, who’d apparently broken a leg, and knelt by him.

  “I have done a terrible thing,” Amit said.

  The man’s eyes widened, seeing reprieve through the mercy of a suddenly regretful killer.