The girl came running to him out of the shadows, eyes wide but face otherwise forcibly composed. She held out a handful of coins.

“If you carry me across the sea, I’ll give you these,” she said, voice calm and low. He raised both eyebrows, the corners of his lips twitching upwards in surprise. And maybe he was amused as well.

“If I carry you..?” he repeated slowly. “You’re a little big and conspicuous…”

She sucked in a breath through her nose, clutching the coins inside her fist and pointing to the hollow marionette on his back. He couldn’t help but laugh.

“You want to hide in there?” he exclaimed. “The people who go in there are my enemies, and they don’t come back out. It’s a –”

“I know. I know what it is. You’re a bunraku specialist, an assassin, part of a secret branch of ninja with hidden techniques. I’ve seen that kind of hollow puppet before. Hide me there. Kill me or hide me, but please, don’t leave me here.”

He gazed at her curiously, noting the long hair, the strange choice of dress for a cold wet night beside the docks, the wrong kind of shoes. No bag, no decorations aside from red marks across her neck and chest bone. Wide eyes. Controlled expression.

He wasn’t familiar with the precise layout of this town, and with the twisting alleys she could have come from anywhere. But she was clearly a runaway.

“This isn’t any of my business,” he told her. “Whatever it is you’re running from, I can’t help you.”

Her lips tightened, her eyes went hard.

“I didn’t ask you for help, or for you to listen to my story,” she replied. “I offered you fair exchange – passage across the sea for this money.”

It chinked. He eyed it appreciatively. A good woman was easy to buy, but good money was hard to find.

“You want passage, across the sea, in my puppet?” he clarified. She nodded tightly, just once, hair shifting out of place. Was it black, was it brown? The light was terrible. She looked like a Noh actress, skin bleached white in the fog and darkness.

He slung the barrel-like wooden weapon off of his shoulders and slid his hand across its imaginary belly. Slits opened up like an eyelid and the darkness within yawned like an empty stomach, craving food. He turned to the girl and grinned at her.

“Let’s go,” he said. “In you hop.”

Without hesitation, she whipped across the cobble and quickly slipped into the opening. He laughed, sharply, and placed both hands on either side of his puppet.

“You do realise that once I close this up, you may never see daylight again?” he asked her, grinning. Her face, half-black and half-white, was a monochrome picture of utter detachment.

“Kill me or hide me,” she said. “Just don’t leave me here.”

He laughed again. He couldn’t help it.

Then he closed the puppet and slung it back over his shoulders, readjusting the weight distribution. A piece of romanticism in him, the part that made him enter into  puppeteering and give his wooden weapons names and faces, imagined that he could feel her heartbeat against his back, fluttering like a bird. It made him laugh again, as he crossed slick cobbled streets to get back to the ship homeward. The sheer irony, the amusement, the contrast of it was like a wonderfully executed metaphor.

The hearts that went into his puppets were never beating for more than a few seconds. He wondered if she knew that.

He hardly noticed the extra weight as he climbed up the ship’s temporary steps and nodded to his comrades. In his ears an echo of clinking money could be heard, and against his back he enjoyed the imaginary feeling of a fluttering pulse beating in time with his.

Distantly, he wondered what it was she was running from that made her desperate enough to hide within a deadly marionette. And though he may have wondered, he knew, deep down, he didn’t really care.

He smiled to himself and settled the puppet off his back to a spot close beside him, getting comfortable for the trip home. He remembered a quote and whispered it to the wood, tapping out a tune in time with the words.

“The happiness of few depends on the misery of many. And you have made me happy.”