Jack yawned as he closed and locked his apartment door behind him.

One A.M. Long day.

But he couldn't call it quits yet. Gia's mention of the Gaijin Masamune had set him to thinking, and he didn't like where his thoughts were going.

He pulled open the door to his closet and brought the scabbarded katana down from its high shelf. He pulled on the handle and unsheathed the blade. Vicky would be disappointed if she saw it, because it looked like a piece of junk. The blade was Swiss-cheesed and mottled with a random pattern of a hundred or so holes and pocks - not eaten or rusted out, melted out.

The story went that in the fourteenth century a gaijin warrior commissioned the legendary swordsmith Masamune to make a sword for him using metal that had fallen from the sky. It turned out to be the strongest steel Masamune had ever encountered, but he had enough for only a short kodachi. When the gaijin failed to return, Masamune melted down the kodachi and added more steel - Earth steel - but the two metals never fully blended. The resultant katana's mottled finish embarrassed the swordsmith, and so he didn't sign it. Instead he carved the two symbols for "gaijin" on the tang.

The so-called Gaijin Masamune became a legend - supposedly stronger and sharper than anything Masamune had ever made. Somehow it wound up at ground zero in Hiroshima on that fateful day. The atomic heat supposedly melted out the Earth steel, leaving only the metal from the sky, pocked and riddled with defects.

Jack angled the blade back and forth, watching the light play off the mottled surface. The edge and the undulating temper line that bordered it, however, were unmarred.

A lot of people had died by and for this sword. He wondered if it was cursed. Used to be Jack didn't believe in curses. Used to be he didn't believe in a lot of things he took for granted now.

Holding the katana safely away from his body - he'd seen what that blade could do - he wound through the Victorian oak furniture that cluttered his claustrophobic - Gia's term, not his - front room. He occupied the third floor of a West Eighties brownstone that was much too small for all the neat stuff he'd accumulated over the years.

When he reached the old fold-out secretary at the far end of the room, he angled it out from the wall and removed the lower rear panel. His collection of saps, knives, bullets, and pistols hung on self-adhering hooks or cluttered the floor of the space. By far the largest weapon was the huge Ruger SuperRedhawk revolver chambered for .454 Casulls. He had no use for it here in the city, but it always made him think of his dad. Maybe that was why he couldn't let it go. He wasn't good at letting go of stuff anyway.

On the other hand, something in the compartment wouldn't let go of him - a ten-by-twelve-inch flap of human skin. He'd buried it three times but it always returned to his apartment.

He unfolded the rectangle, as supple as suede, with no hint of decomposition. The pattern of pocked scars crisscrossed with fine, razor-thin cuts used to confound him. Later he learned it was a map of Opus Omega, the pocks indicating places where concrete pillars - some of them fashioned in the recently razed building on the Wm. Blagden & Sons grounds - had been buried around the world.

Everything was connected ... everything.

Another thing he'd learned about the skin was that he couldn't cut it up. He'd tried to slice it into pieces to get rid of it, but it wouldn't allow itself to be cut. Or rather, wouldn't allow itself to stay cut.

He wondered if that was still true.

He pulled out his Spyderco Endura and flipped out the curved blade. He pierced the skin with the point near a corner and sliced downward.

The blade parted the skin, which promptly sealed itself closed behind it. Just as before. Good.

As the Lady had said of the bullets fired at her yesterday: If they are of this Earth, they cannot harm me. Nothing of this Earth could harm her.

The Endura's blade was of this Earth.

But Gia had started Jack thinking about the blade of the Gaijin Masamune. It had "fallen from the sky." Which meant it was not of this Earth. Could it harm the Lady?

He picked up the katana and stretched the flap against the point. His gut clenched as he saw the pierced edges of the skin glow a ghostly blue as it poked through. But only briefly. Taking a breath, he sliced downward. Again the glow along the cut edges - which stayed cut and separate, even after the glow faded. No self-repair when cut by the Gaijin Masamune.

His saliva evaporated as he stared at the blade.

This could do it ... this could kill the Lady ... cause her third death ... end her existence.

At least that was the way it looked.

Only one person would know for sure.