"For every sword

There is a sheath;

A wharf the Empire's

Lies beneath.

Harumi stands

On hollow ground

Within it Sato

Will be found."

It was fitting, Aar thought, that Project Phoenix's most dangerous venture would take place in the dark.

They lingered on the outskirts of Harumi Wharf, hidden behind a derelict brick building on the nearby road. Darkness cloaked them; the only light bled from the city beyond the harbor, even the moon a sliver in the sky. Aar could not make out the crease in Nora's brow, or the restless movement in King's legs. He could observe very little, but perhaps that was for the best. He could afford no distractions from the only factor he needed to observe—the movement of Empire guards.

A few days' worth of research, coupled with references from Project Phoenix's own files, had fleshed out the bare-bones puzzle their oracle had provided. Obviously, the riddle indicated Ms. Sato's location at Harumi Wharf, but the criminal presence around that wharf only became clear through review of the Project Phoenix records. These pinpointed Harumi as a transportation hub for the Empire, a mob-like organization with deadly control over the city. For decades, the Empire had committed brazen offenses, ranging from petty theft to murder of high-ranking officials, but its roots in the city were too strong for any objector to challenge it. Past heroes had attempted to take down the organization—one Tokyo hero, Dragonfly, had routinely battled the Empire figurehead called "the Emperor"—but the Empire had always seemed to regroup, rebuild.

Notable to Project Phoenix, agents of the Empire had been spotted blending into tourist crowds in the nearby Koto district, always coming or going from the Harumi warehouses. But the oracle had indicated Harumi was more than a mere transportation avenue. "For every sword," he had said, "there is a sheath." The sheath to a lethal organization, the heroes had reasoned, could only be its headquarters. Further research uncovered that the Empire guarded Harumi heavily. By day, the wharf serviced all of Tokyo, every business that relied on supplies from overseas. But by night, the "security officers" that patrolled the wharf were no government officials, and they possessed ties to external entities, entities that appeared in the Project Phoenix records again and again for Empire crime.

More disturbing were the oracle's words on the wharf itself. "Harumi stands on hollow ground," he had said, as well as noted that the Empire "sheath" existed beneath the wharf. Clearly, the hub of all Empire operations could not be run out of a lone warehouse. What the riddle implied was that the Empire headquarters stretched underneath the wharf, below the ground their guards patrolled. An entrance underground had to have been constructed inside one of the warehouses, where it would be inconspicuous during the daytime. Only by descending through that entrance could they access a hostage Ms. Sato.

But blocking that entrance was the security. Five of the six remaining heroes would need to infiltrate Empire headquarters without being gunned down—from her vantage point on a nearby hill, Irene had already observed semi-automatic rifles strapped to every patrolman, rifles that research indicated they would not hesitate to use. As coordinator of covert operations, Aar had worked with Irene to plan the heroes' entrance, placing Irene in a position where she could see using the project's magnification goggles. She would tell them where and when to move, and the heroes would follow. Once inside, Aar would hide and observe the door while the others retrieved Ms. Sato. The plan was highly risky, obviously—even the Declan Hart mission had guaranteed them more cover—but Project Phoenix could proceed in no other fashion. How else could they preserve the life of the woman who had done so much, for them and for the world?

The pressure was tangible. Just outside the wharf grounds, Aar felt it in his chest, squeezing at his windpipe. His mother had infiltrated facilities dozens of times, safely and efficiently. Yet he was not his mother, and his circumstances were not hers. His mother was always accompanied by swarms of fellow officials, ready to protect her and the cause without thought. His fellow heroes, on the other hand, were few in number. Their loyalty had been forged through trial, strengthening it so that it had not fractured even under this stress, but it could not compensate for their relative weakness. Any mistake they made tonight—any sign they inadvertently gave the Empire of their presence—meant instant death at the hands of a criminal behemoth. The thought made him feel fragile, as if any movement he made would crush him like an eggshell.

Aar's earpiece crackled, and Glacier and Reason's hands flew to the sides of their heads. "All clear," Irene murmured through the static. "King, it's time for the blowtorch."

In the dark, Aar could make out King's middling figure approaching the chain-link fence. He knelt, and the flame flickered to life in his hand. Slowly, the high-power blowtorch moved over the chain-link fence before him. Each silver link glowed red, then white; and then they melted, leaving a steadily growing gap as King continued.

At the bottom, the last few links finally gave way, and the flame blinked out. Aar could barely see the gap in the fence, but the soft jangling indicated that King was shifting the metal links aside, widening their point of entry.

"Clear," came the whisper from King.

"Excellent. Enter right now."

Without hesitation, the team advanced into the hornets' nest.

Stars twinkled faintly in the sky as Aar followed the four combat-assigned heroes onto Empire territory. Every few feet, Irene would issue a command—"keep going", or "head for the warehouse at two o'clock"—but Aar could not force that twinkling starlight from his mind, even as his breaths came short and fast.

It was fitting, Aar thought again, that they infiltrated the Empire in the dark.

Since speaking with the oracle, Aar had felt swathed by darkness at all hours. In the daylight, speaking on the phone with Sylvie; in the restaurant with conveyor-belt sushi they'd all visited; to Aar, every place had been a dark place. He had always dwelled with his own sense of inferiority, but the oracle had forced it outside of himself, into a cloud that circled his being. Even now, treading across invisible concrete as Irene told the group to stop and start, it served to worsen the pressure of an already-stressful situation.

"Go right on my command," said Irene, and the heroes waited behind a shapeless warehouse wall.

If anyone were to die here, it should be him. This was why he'd given himself one of the more dangerous tasks, guarding the door while the others investigated the facility. Depending on the headquarters' layout, if anyone came in after them, he'd almost certainly be caught and killed. But the others would be safer for his service, wouldn't they? They'd have time to hide, or to plan an escape around the new variable. Whether or not Aar died, he would have done some good, and this was all that mattered.

"Go right," said Irene, and the heroes followed her orders.

He didn't deserve to die. No one did, but if a hero needed to die—if a higher power told the group beforehand that only one would go—shouldn't it be him? Of course, the only thing that justified that decision was the way Aar felt, the personal darkness that enveloped him, but it was enough of a reason for him.

"You're almost there," said Irene, and the heroes continued on.

Why did he feel this way? He didn't know. He didn't care. For a few days now, he'd been overcome by the suspicion that his physiology was not what rendered him so lowly. When he separated himself from his own body in his mind, when he thought of himself as just a floating mass of energy, he felt the same as he always had. Intrinsically and extrinsically, he was inferior to the people he worked with every day. He would never know why it was; he only knew that it was.

"That's it," said Irene. "Right in front of you, inside there. Reason, bomb the guards."

But the stars twinkled over them still. As Reason rolled a capsule of her own pheromones towards the guards flanking the doorway, and as it erupted soundlessly, Aar could not dispel the image of those stars. Their light was faint, choked by the pollution that hovered over Tokyo, but they twinkled all the same.

The stars were beautiful, Aar thought.

The group rounded the corner of the final warehouse. There, the two guards who had protected the entrance stood at attention, bodies pointed toward Reason.

"Open the door, would you?" she purred, more softly than Aar had ever heard her speak.

Both guards moved at once, almost clumsy in their rush to follow the command. One punched a long string of numbers into a keypad on the door, while the other grasped the handle and tugged when the keypad beeped.

"Ignore us. We weren't here," said Reason, and the guards turned away as the troop of heroes entered the warehouse.

Inside, stark light white flooded the empty space, the concrete floor supporting absolutely nothing. The warehouse was strangely clean, as if even the daytime wharf workers were kept from storing their goods here. No guards were posted inside, and every team member simultaneously exhaled once the door had shut behind them.

"We are inside," Aar murmured for Irene's benefit. "No one is here."

"Good. There's a hatch or a staircase somewhere, right? People have been going in and out of there all night."

Fulfilling Irene's prediction, a steel-gray hatch seemed to be built into the floor, directly in the center of the warehouse. An idle observer might assume it would open to drain water, but as Nora grasped the handle and pulled, the panel swung up to reveal a steep staircase.

"We found the entrance," said Aar. "We are going in."

"See you soon," said Irene, and the staticky connection fizzled out.

The area into which the team now descended was encased in metal on all sides, giving a sterile impression to their surroundings. That, along with the sound of Nora closing the metal hatch behind him, did nothing to ease the pressure in Aar's chest. The staircase was long, clanging constantly as their boots collided with it, and thirty seconds had passed before Reason, at the front of the group, had even reached the bottom.

Instead of a lobby or large reception area, Aar found himself in a hallway. Closed doors lined the walls ahead, and the hall branched off in multiple directions.

"I will wait here," Aar whispered. Nora and Glacier nodded, and the four heroes continued deeper into the underground empire. Soon they had rounded a corner and were out of sight.

The mission would not be particularly stimulating for Aar, though it might cost him his life. True to his suspicions, there was no place to hide here, and Aar wedged himself into the corner between the entrance door's hinges and another door and prepared to wait.

A loud noise crackled in Aar's earpiece, though it ended as quickly as it had come. Aar squinted down the corridor, as if that would make his natural hearing any better. He was sure he had only heard the noise through his speaker, though—the group had already traveled out of earshot. Perhaps they had encountered a wandering Empire henchman; perhaps they had silenced the henchman.

A sudden movement at Aar's feet sent a shudder through his whole body.

Aar blinked. From underneath the closed door to his left, the door through which he had not entered, a manila folder had slid into the hallway.

His first thought was that someone had pushed the folder out accidentally, maybe dropping it or kicking it. Naturally, he expected this person to enter the main hallway to retrieve it, and he fled behind the entrance door and into the stairwell. After a few minutes of tense waiting, however—minutes during which Aar fully anticipated someone would enter the stairwell and shoot him, minutes that compacted his lungs—he passed back into the main hallway, assuming his own safety.

The folder was still there.

Aar knelt to examine it. It was blank on every surface except the tab sticking out, which read "SAKURA." The name only registered after a few moments of staring at it—Sakura was Ms. Sato's first name, though also a common name among Japanese women.

No one had come to retrieve the file. Maybe the person who had misplaced it hadn't noticed its absence. Examining it briefly wouldn't hurt.

When Aar opened the file, however, his hands began to shake.

The words on the page before him were violent words. The first lines that entered his sight were "accomplice to arson" and "complacent in poisoning", part of a long list written in small text interspersed with names and dates. The seconds lines were from the top of the page: "SAKURA SATO, EMPIRE HEIRESS."

He'd found a criminal record.

The name "Empress" had never bothered Aar. He had assumed it was something like "King", a name meant to reflect the power and status of the person possessing it. Truly, the name did reflect Ms. Sato's power and status, but Aar had not comprehended the true extent of that power and status before examining this file.

"Sato, Inc." He had known that company, had assumed that Ms. Sato possessed ties of some sort to the family in charge. He had not known that Sato, Inc. was a cover for the Empire, nor that Ms. Sato's father—the Emperor, the same Empire figurehead that Aar had already reviewed—had groomed her for the express purpose of taking over the organization. Her martial arts training was all here; indeed, it matched the skillset he had been informed she possessed.

Worse than this, however, was the list included with Ms. Sato's profile, the list detailing every crime for the Empire she had ever committed, aided, or had knowledge of. The acts were sickening and vile, though the intensity of the crimes varied depending on whether Ms. Sato had actually committed them or simply known about them. The awful crimes were the ones perpetrated by her father. The lesser crimes, mainly thefts, were hers.

The earpiece crackled with the sounds of a struggle. King's laughter echoed between screams, interspersed with expletives from Reason, but Aar could not hear it.

Ms. Sato had worked for the Empire. She had ranked highly within the Empire, had aided it in its horrific reign of Tokyo. Aar could not imagine that any of his fellow heroes knew what she had done.

Would anyone have joined Project Phoenix, knowing the material from which Sakura Sato was made?

"Found her," said Glacier's voice through the earpiece. "She's bound pretty tight. Oh, wait a second..." After a pause, he added, as if talking to someone else, "Well, that's the thing about fire-resistant shit. It's weak in the other direction."

Here was where Aar should stop them. Here was where Aar should read the information he had discovered over the earpiece, expose Ms. Sato for the acts she had committed and the place from which she came.

But he could not.

New facts circled in his mind. A prominent Empire base had burned to the ground recently—Aar had discovered this in his research. Now held Ms. Sato hostage. The setup could very well be a trap, intended to kill superheroes Ms. Sato had recruited for this express purpose, or...

"Free her as quickly as you can," Aar whispered. "She has suffered enough."

What Ms. Sato had been did not matter. What mattered was what she did now, what she intended to do. For her background, she was despicable, but for her purpose—for the values she had described to Aar on his first the day, the spread of peace and security—she was worth saving.

In his mind, the stars still twinkled. The file fell from his hand.