Read The Mask: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel for Free Online

fingers across a headlamp and need tingled through her limbs the same way saliva flowed at the idea of vinegar. She knew the models by sight, could quote engine size, speed, torque, weight, trail, rake, and wheel base; knew how they handled, what she wanted, and why.
    She continued the slow walk to the end of the line and stopped in front of a Ninja ZX 14-R: black-grilled, deep cherry-red, faster, angrier, and half the price of the Ducati she’d left behind in Dallas just over a year ago. And there she stayed, motionless, staring down at the machine, afraid to touch it, contemplating the freedom the bike represented and what it would mean to ride again.
    Bradford put his arm around her shoulders and drew her tight to him. He kissed her temple and whispered, “Like getting back on after the horse has thrown you off.”
    Munroe nodded, unable to speak, but she didn’t need to, because Bradford understood the present and the past in a way that defied the need for words.
    She knelt beside the bike, one knee to the pavement, pressed a palm to the molded plastic, and let the memories wash through her. Bradford knelt beside her and placed a hand on her thigh, reassuring and fully present. Munroe rested her hand on top of his and wrapped her fingers between the empty spaces.
    “You’ll be okay,” he said.
    She leaned her head on his shoulder.
    Nearly a month of concrete, grime, and population density had left her wanting to go where things were green and there was air, in a way that didn’t require chaining her time to train and bus schedules or to Bradford’s work hours the way borrowing his car did. Acquiring her own wheels was inevitable, but that didn’t make one of the fastest production bikes around the default choice.
    It had been a long time, too long, since she’d felt the roar, the self-induced terror, and the adrenaline rush that only a machine like this could give.
    The last time she’d ridden she’d been tranquilized and kidnapped.
    Then her world had burned down as, one by one, those she’d loved most had been tortured or killed as a way to control her.
    Bradford tweaked her thigh and, keeping his hand in hers, Munroe stood. She stared down at the machine again, bright red, conspicuous and loud, everything opposite the nonstatement black on black that had always adorned her carnage on wheels.
    Things were different now.
    Different machine.
    Different colors.
    Different country.
    Different circumstances.
    Different life.
    She wasn’t superstitious in that way, but she’d be happy for the placebo effect all the same if that’s what reverting to superstitions would bring her.
    It wouldn’t. But she couldn’t have known that then.

Those who win every battle are not really skillful. Those who render others’ armies helpless without fighting are the best of all.
    —MASTER SUN TZU

    Nonomi Sato pulled into the lot, which was already half full. She found a spot, turned off the engine, set papers out on the passenger seat, and leaned over just slightly under the pretense of studying them.
    Work didn’t begin for another forty minutes, but her supervisors would have been in the lab since six at least, and she only had so much time before her absence would become an unspoken mark against her. Even so, there were priorities and greater priorities.
    She waited for the cowboy.
    He would arrive soon. He’d done well for a foreigner in embracing the hard hours required by company loyalty—an American, no less, a rugged individualist from a land of individualists, adapting to a culture where self-identity came from belonging, and companies, as givers of self-value and worth, demanded work take precedence over everything else.
    He’d done exceedingly well.
    Maybe the cowboy, too, would suffer
kar
ō
shi
.
    Death from overwork.
    It simply wasn’t possible for any person to work twelve or more hours, day after day, year after year, without rest on weekends or holidays.
    Not without paying a physical price.
    Sato