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    My lips started to move as I read down the page, but suddenly Aimi leaned forward and touched my lips with two of her fingertips, hushing me. “Don’t, Kevin! Don’t say her name. She wakes.” Then she started to cry.
    I looked up to say I’m sorry , but Aimi was gone, and sitting across from me was the most beautiful Asian woman I had ever seen. Her face was milk white, her lips fire red, and all of her was framed in blood red ropes of hair that almost seemed alive. She was clearly Japanese, but her eyes were as blue as mine, as blue as my mom’s had been. She smirked at me, a knowing look, and her teeth were very white and sharp in her mouth.
    “ Who?” I asked the woman, standing up. “Who wakes?” Suddenly it was very important to me.
    Flames sprang up from the book on the table in front of me, carving a name in the fragile rice pages.
    The name was RAIJU.
    Then I woke up.
     
     
     
     
    C H A P T E R T W O
     
    Thunder Underground
     
     
     
     
    1
     
    “ Kev! Coffee’s on!” Dad called from the kitchen where he was, even at this ungodly hour, already rattling around.
    What a night. I felt all banged up getting out of bed, like I’d fought a war, and the bedclothes were so tangled I figured I must have lost that war.
    And what a strange dream. I kept thinking about it as I climbed out of bed.
    The rain had stopped and all I could hear was the despondent drip-drip off the gutters outside, dishes clattering together in the kitchen, and the drone of the TV going. “Be right there,” I said, or gargled. I am so not a morning person.
    My bedroom faces east so the sun always hits me right in the face if I oversleep, even through the mesh industrial windows. But we’re a blue-collar working family, and I can’t remember the last time the sun beat me to rising. It’s black when I go to bed, and black when I get up, even on the weekend.
    I showered and dressed, choosing a black Nehru shirt I left untucked and a pair of faded black jeans with the knees ripped out. I wasn’t trying to be haute couture , but when you do your shopping at the Salvation Army, you take what you can get. The black suited me, made me look even bigger than I was. Maybe Snowman would challenge me today, maybe not. Either way, I was going in fighting. I sighed, hooked my damp hair behind my ear, and sat down on the closed lid of the toilet to smoke my morning cigarette with the bathroom window open.
    I was so lost in thought that I almost didn’t feel the floor quivering. I heard the soap dish rattle against the vanity and slowly got to my feet while most of my internal organs sank so far down they might as well have taken refuge in my big clunky biker boots. My first thought was, It’s back. The thing. Karkadon. Then I remembered how dead it was, how the President had said nothing like that would ever happen again, and how foolish I was being.
    I moved unhurriedly to the window that faces out over the East River. Nothing unusual was happening. Traffic was passing. People were moving in ordered chaos. A vendor was selling coffee and newspapers at a kiosk across the street. I waited, my heart slamming against my ribs like a frantic bird in a cage, but nothing dragged itself up the muddy banks of the East River. Nothing crawled up onto the suspension wires of the Brooklyn Bridge and began tearing it to shrapnel.
    I was being stupid, imagining things; it was probably the delivery truck rumbling by outside on its Tuesday morning drop, or maybe a news chopper passing overhead. I started breathing again, slowly, in, out, in, out. Anxiety Disorder. Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Doctors have all these fancy scientific terms for frantic human terror.
    “ Kevin?” my dad said from the kitchen. He sounded normal—tired, distracted, but not panicked. Was I imagining everything, I wondered?
    Then I glanced down at my hands and finally noticed that my cigarette was on fire. Not burning, mind you, but on fire , the little licking