"Tam, did you catch what just happened?" I'd walked back over to the terminals.
"I did." She was staring into space.
"Henderson was our best hope to get out of here alive. He has a suspicious mind the equal of Sherlock Holmes's. But now..."
"Matt, what's he going to do to us all?"
"Don't think it'll be pretty."
"Then . . ." She'd turned and was staring at the security entrance, wearing a quizzical expression.
I wheeled around to look too, and at first I thought I might have been hallucinating. A female figure was emerging through the doors, wearing an outfit whose style I couldn't quite place. Maybe it was one of those bulky creations such as Yohji Yamamoto or some other avant-garde Japanese designer might dream up, but it didn't resemble anything I'd ever seen before. Silk like a kimono, yet with a flowing quality. Ancient almost.
Then I had a vision, just offbeat enough to fit. An ink illustration out of the The Tale of Genji flashed before my eyes, and I realized I was seeing a hakama, something that hadn't been around the streets of Japan for roughly eight hundred years.
The woman in it was wearing peculiar makeup, not punk, though it might have been. It was pale, like the delicate ink shadings on a Heian hand scroll. She looked for all the world like a court lady of ages past; she'd have fit right in at some 1185 Heian linked-verse soiree. Old Kyoto come to life.
Is this the latest neo-New Wave? What in good Christ . . .