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by day, and at night, instead of sleeping, she wandered the streets searching for random criminals to beat up—in between picking up random men to fuck to within an inch of their lives.
    It wasn’t Kari’s place to judge, though. After all, it had been Emry who’d taught her the value of excess. Even as Sensei Villareal had carefully taught her how, when battle came, to master the cool, methodical monster her father had placed inside her, Emry had helped her learn that it was all right to relax and go crazy the rest of the time. Penance didn’t have to occupy every minute. Kari hoped that after the workout, she could remind Emry of that lesson, perhaps talk her into shuttling over to the Sheaf for a girls’ day out full of shopping and playing and man-watching and dressing up and showing off and dancing and other fulfilling wastes of time. She certainly wouldn’t mind if the evening ended with some male company for the both of them, so long as she could get Emry in the mood to have fun with it, to let the sex be healing rather than merely distracting. She was demure by nature, but Emry was good at pushing her past her inhibitions.
    Right now, though, it was time to concentrate. When Emry had called to invite her to a “workout,” her tone had made it clear to Kari that this would be a full-on bout, no punches pulled. Both Troubleshooters were in full light-armor costume, Green Blaze versus Tenshi, letting them cut loose with all their raw power.
    Of course, Emry was bigger and far stronger than Kari. But Koyama Saburo’s gengineers had designed his daughter’s body to be durable, flexible, and lightning-quick, and her brain to be preternaturally aware of every bit of it. As she was overcome by the tatakai no heiwa, the heightened serenity and awareness they had substituted for her fight-or-flight instinct, she felt her consciousness descend and spread throughout her body and beyond. The mind, the hand, the air it flew through, the flesh it struck, the gravity that sculpted its arc, all were one, all were within her soul. Yet at the same time she was outside of it in a sense, her body striking and reacting without conscious guidance. It was a Zen oneness with creation; it was a distributed AI network integrated with her nervous system, regulated by a cerebellar implant containing every martial-arts principle known to humanity. They were the same thing.
    Kari observed from a detached place as her body battled Emry, meeting fury with patient precision, brute force with gentle deflection. When an opportunity presented itself, she struck, hand or foot drawn to the optimal point of impact as inexorably as a cherry blossom is drawn to the earth. When she was struck in turn, she accepted the energy as a part of her, let herself be the conduit through which it flowed back to its source, as the rain striking the river returns to the sea. This was her father’s ideal, with one exception—through careful biofeedback and a spot of reprogramming, the Troubleshooter Corps had helped her retrain her instincts to incapacitate rather than kill. He would have found it dishonorable, a daughter defying her father’s wishes. The Vestan yakuza , unlike its Earthly counterpart, was a family business, a change Koyama Saburo had deemed necessary to maintain its Japanese purity in the multicultural Belt. Koyama had nominally kept it all-male as well, but in his eyes that had made Kari the perfect stealth assassin, a passive, decorative nonentity until she struck. But Kari had not wished to become a living weapon, even though rejecting that fate had meant betraying her beloved father and fleeing her home.
    She had fulfilled her father’s wishes in one sense, though, when he’d attempted to stop her escape. Perhaps he’d seen it as a redemption of her honor when the heiwa had taken her and she’d watched herself serenely, efficiently kill him.
    As her body fought, Kari let her attention widen. She noticed that their bout was drawing a