Yamada caught up with Matsumura on the eastern beach of Junta Island, at sundown. Dressed in a simple blouse, dress slacks, and flat shoes, she was supervising JSDF troops installing a couple of hidden sand bunkers facing the Pacific. More troops scurried about, looking like they were preparing for an invasion.

Neither Yamada nor Matsumura were JSDF officers, but their department had special dispensation to work closely with the JSDF, to requisition troops, and to issue them orders to a certain extent.

A hundred yards inland, where the beach turned to jungle, was a huge two-story house which looked like it had been turned into a fortress. A sitting duck for the next tsunami, Yamada thought, but it wasn't his house so he didn't care. He was pretty sure he spied a couple of SAM – surface-to-air missile – batteries, about a hundred yards to either side of the house, their nosecones poking through the jungle canopy. He saw no other sign of civilization.

Matsumura made no comment on his disheveled, haggard appearance and obvious exhaustion. She merely glanced at her watch and said, "Within five days. Technically."

"Hiking through jungle and a long boat ride on the same day-"

"Spare me the details." She walked toward the house, obviously expecting him to follow, which he did. "Success?"

"Everything as promised."

She raised an eyebrow, surprised. "Indeed?"

"Wait – you doubted it?"

"It's a thousand-year-old legend. What do you think?"

"So you sent me all the way out there on the mere chance of a myth?!"

"Well I certainly wasn't going to hike through the jungle for it."

When they reached the front door, he handed her a thumb drive. She gazed at it with breathless wonder. Without looking at him, she whispered, "Go get cleaned up," and walked inside quickly.

 

An hour later Yamada looked and felt a lot better.

He found Matsumura alone in the second-floor conference room, sitting at the large table and using most of it. Many pages of notes lay splayed out in front of her, and she was writing still more while studying his video on a large wall-mounted monitor. He brought two coffees and set one by her, which she ignored. He sat a few seats away, sensing she needed a lot of space.

"You can return to Tokyo," she said without looking up.

"Is that an order?"

She gave the tiniest shrug. "Stay if you want. Just don't get in the way."

"Do your superiors know you're doing this?"

She flicked her eyes in his direction to give him the briefest glare. "I have broad discretion to do as I please."

He chuckled while taking a sip of coffee, then sat forward to read her notes.

The first which caught his eye read, Three unknown symbols in the middle; what do they mean?

He had also noticed the three strange symbols, assembled in a small row bisecting the spell's otherwise fluid vertical text. Since he was unable to contribute any knowledge or guesses on the matter, he ignored that comment and read a few others.

His eyes were drawn to a list she was assembling:

• Give him a set of clothes and a sense of modesty. We don't want to see him naked!
• Give him an average adult-level knowledge of the Japanese language and vocabulary.
• Give him an average adult-level knowledge of human interaction / body language / behavior.

Other items in the list, such as Make him docile and Give him a general knowledge of the world's governments / national borders, were crossed out.

He knew what she was doing. In addition to the transformation, the spell allowed the caster to include customized requests, granting the target knowledge or other attributes.

He said, "I wonder if giving him vocabulary will grant him general knowledge of our civilization by inference. I don't see how it couldn't not do."

"We'll find out," she said, still absorbed in her work.

"Including our knowledge of science. Take astronomy. Planet, solar system, orbit...these are common words in our vocabulary, but you can't know their definitions without understanding the larger concepts they relate to."

"Mm hmm." She clearly didn't care.

"Perhaps you should make him smarter. Or dumber."

"Our best analysis is that he's at least as smart as the top 20 percent of humans."

"The size of his cranium suggests he's the world's biggest genius."

"Oh, please, cranial size as an intelligence indicator was discredited years ago. But his tactics and quick adaptability in a fight have often demonstrated a certain shrewdness. He's definitely not stupid. By keeping his intelligence unchanged, we'll be able to measure it."

"If you're gonna kill him, why bother?"

She froze, just for a few seconds. Why, he couldn't tell. Then she resumed as if he hadn't spoken.

He sat back, sipping his coffee and wondering. He let a few moments slip by, then asked, "How will you lure him here?"

She looked up at him fully for the first time since he entered the room. "After dinner, I'll show you."

 

Matsumura and Yamada watched the armored semi slowly back into the large garage while a heavily armed platoon surrounded it. When the truck halted feet from the loading dock, Matsumura turned to the sergeant in charge of the platoon and said, "You may commence, Sergeant Fujisawa."

The sergeant opened the back of the truck to reveal a metal crate about twenty feet long, six feet tall, and eight feet wide. The crate had a console of lights and switches along one side. A trooper extended the truck's ramp.

Ten people wearing hazmat gear hopped inside the truck. They took down four long poles mounted on the truck's walls, slid them through hoops welded onto either side of the crate, lifted it, and carried it to the lab on the ground floor.

As the crate passed him, Yamada saw one of its displays: -200 C.

Yamada and Matsumura followed.

The lab's far corner was partitioned by transparent walls into a smaller room of about 200 square feet. A sign on the double doors leading to this area read Containment Room. Inside were several instrument panels, a winch, and a mounted flame thrower pointed at the center of the room.

Matsumura slid her security card through a slot by the containment room doors. A red light on the card reader turned green, and Sergeant Fujisawa and a trooper opened the doors. The people carrying the crate entered the room, but no one else. They carefully set the crate in front of the flame thrower. Seven of those people then stepped out of the room. The doors closed and the light returned to red.

One of the remaining people looked at Matsumura, who nodded. That person keyed a number sequence on the crate's control panel, and the top of the crate swung open. What looked like white smoke, or super-condensed steam, flowed out of the crate and straight to the floor.

The three people attached the winch to something inside the crate, then stepped back. One of them operated the winch, pulling one of Ghidorah's heads into view.

Yamada gasped. "What the hell?!" he erupted.

The head was covered in frost, its eyes closed. One of the people ran a hand-held instrument over it while another verified the temperature inside the crate. After a moment, the one who had opened the crate gave a thumbs up to Matsumura.

She nodded. The people in the containment room proceeded to put the gruesome head back in the crate and seal it.

Yamada turned to Matsumura. "Forgive my outburst," he said. Matsumura nodded. She knew Yamada was furious, but his Japanese sense of decorum refused to allow him to criticize a superior in front of others.

Matsumura turned to one of the people wearing a hazmat suit. "At least two biotechnicians will monitor the specimen every second. At the slightest sign of unplanned brain or cellular activity – and I mean the tiniest – you will utterly destroy the specimen with all haste and at any cost."

"Yes, ma'am."

Matsumura headed back to the conference room. Yamada followed. The door had barely clicked shut behind him when he let loose.

"Are you out of your mind?!" He struggled to keep himself from shouting. The conference room was not soundproof.

"I assure you, I am quite sane."

"You do know Ghidorah can regrow his entire body from just one part, right?!"

"Not swimming in liquid nitro he can't."

"You also know Godzilla can sense Ghidorah anywhere in the world, and comes straight to him?!"

Matsumura gave Yamada a funny look, as if he were an idiot. "That's. The. Point."

"I know that's the point. My point is: he's on his way right now!"

"We've had Ghidorah's frozen head for almost two years. Godzilla's never once attacked. With no brain or cellular activity, it's just a lump of flesh. It might as well be a potato. Listen – " she forestalled any further protest " – I'm not stupid, and I know all the parameters. Stop acting like I put no thought into this, or you'll find yourself swimming back to Tokyo in the next thirty seconds. Do you understand me?"

Yamada reigned himself in. "I understand you."

"Good. Now – do you have any protests or observations I haven't thought of?"

He breathed heavily, but calmed himself. "No. I can't think of any."

"Exactly," she breathed. She sat at the table, where she had sat before. Her notes from the video were still splayed in front of her.

After a moment, he sighed and sat also. "Sorry," he said.

"Don't worry about it. Your reaction is natural. We're handling one of the most dangerous biological objects the world has ever seen. Just trust me."

"So many people before you have tried what you're doing and failed," he whispered.

"And I stand on their shoulders. We must keep trying. We must succeed eventually! We cannot continue living under the shadows of monsters!"

He sat back, musing, then looked at her notes. "Do you have a Buddhist monk to cast the spell?"

"Isamu Takenaka. He arrived on the same transport which brought Ghidorah's head."

"Did he volunteer? Does he know what he's here for?"

"He did, and he does. He served as a young man. Staff sergeant."

"Hmm." He nodded toward her notes. "Did you work out what you need?"

She nodded. "I'm requesting as few things as possible. My philosophy is that simpler is better. Anything beyond modesty, language, and behavior is a luxury."

"Modesty is a luxury."

"I'm not interviewing him with his wang out."

"Not even to save the world?"

She shot him a brief, withering look. He just grinned.

"When does the operation commence?" he asked.

"We start at dawn. I want as much daylight as possible in case things go haywire."

"What happens if they do? What happens when you lure Godzilla to come look you in the face, and you find that that" – he pointed at her notes – "is just a bunch of Buddhist mumbo jumbo?"

"Then we'll die. You're already exhausted. The last transport leaves in twenty minutes. You should either be on it or get a good night's sleep."

"I think my presence here will not alter anything in the slightest, except to fill one more body bag. Nevertheless...I'll get a good night's sleep."