LITMIR.BIZ

      To my sisters and brothers

      Patricia, Anne, Peter, Matthew, Mary, and Christopher:

      First companions on the way.

Prologue DEMONS

      A famous physicist once said that it’s impossible to examine the world objectively: The very act of looking disturbs the gossamer filaments that bind the universe together and, as a result, they vibrate with unanticipated harmonics. Our mere existence changes everything.

      We move through life thinking that the distinction between ourselves and others, between ourselves and the world, is absolute. The Zen masters know better. We are linked in ways that are both intimate and fearsome.

      I have come to believe that this is so. I don’t think I could ever have anticipated the events that would have brought me somewhere far from my home, facing death beside the one person I most admired in the world. Looking back, it is as if we were drawn to that place by a chain that, for all its invisibility, was stronger than the steel of the sword that my master taught me to wield.

      Our progress through this world sets the sea of molecules in motion. Like tide or wind, our very passage through the world creates unseen patterns in the fabric of life. They churn and swirl. Some fade away into quiet; others spawn into things of a size and monstrous intensity we could never imagine.

      These, ultimately are the demons that haunt us. They are not some force from out there—they are creatures of our own making. They grow, sometimes without our awareness, spinning off into the darkness, until the day their orbit brings us once more into collision.

      The old teachers were men alive to the currents that swirled around them. Human storm cells themselves, they churned through life with an intensity that de-stabilized the system. And they knew this. So they searched the darkness, aching to divine the pattern of the cyclones that moved, just beyond the limen of consciousness. The power they sensed was something to harness, something to defend against. Something to fear.

      The sensei, students of both motion and stillness, know that the quest for mastery and control creates new currents, new powers, and new challenges.

      These challenges become tests that some survive. But all too often, only the bystanders remain to tell the story.

      Yet, the melancholy dignity they have passed on to those who follow in their footsteps is this: together, we can face the looming force in the darkness and not flinch.

1 BURN

      The snow burned. It had fallen and frozen into granules overnight, an early dusting of white that hissed across rocks, coiling in the wind like a snake.

      Higashi’s normally well-manicured hands were red and raw. He slipped as he scrambled across the stone bridge and cursed himself under his breath for being foolish enough to come out here. It was so unlike him to take the risk. He typically lived a life of tight control in a carefully constructed world of his own. But there was a fascination for him in actually seeing this subject, an intense fixation on this man, because Higashi’s discovery of him was important in ways no one else had suspected. Now his city shoes gave him no purchase on the icy patches, smooth and uncaring, of the pathway. He could feel the cold working through the thin soles,

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