The next day at noon, it was once again poor Maya, home alone, minding the baby and making lunch.
Americans really do give river fish a wide berth. They've even come around to eating animal organs, yet hardly any of them will touch freshwater fish. It isn't that they're picky, or that foreign river fish tastes worse—it's simply that Westerners have no idea how to handle it. However you cook the stuff, the muddy, fishy tang is impossible to get out.
When Matt dropped off the ODM gear and the other items that morning, he'd brought along three enormous bass. Matt hadn't bought them—Stick had caught them in the Central Park lake the night before, while training the boy's hearing. The small ones he'd thrown back; these three ran a kilo to a kilo and a half apiece—two or three pounds—too good to waste. Knowing his girl disciple's cooking was superb, the old blind man had told Matt to bring them over so she could make him some fish balls to enjoy.
Maya didn't say no. Ever since she'd developed her cook-by-ninjutsu skill, quantity had long since stopped being any obstacle. Never mind five or six kilos of fish—she wouldn't blink at fifty. Worst case, she'd whip up a dozen Shadow Clones.
Maya laid a still-gasping bass on the cutting board, drew a knife lightly across the underside of its jaw between the two gills, and leveled her right palm at the cut, channeling force through the air.
(Author's note: A fish's heart is mostly located where the head joins the trunk, tucked at the center behind the two gills—not in the belly. The spot Maya's aiming for is right near the heart.)
Spurt, spurt—cold fish blood sprayed out and fell into the little porcelain bowl beside her.
Ba-boom-psshh—the fish's head abruptly blew apart into fragments.
Maya frowned and wiped the spattered blood from her face with a sleeve, murmuring, "Failed again? Why is the Delicate Illness Extraction Technique this hard? My control ought to be excellent by now. Where exactly am I going wrong?"
Yes—Maya was developing yet another new ninjutsu. This time her target was the Medical Ninjutsu from Naruto for treating internal injuries: the Delicate Illness Extraction Technique. Her earlier ones—the Healing Jutsu, the Mystical Palm Technique—both worked by activating the cells at the injury site so the wound would knit itself shut.
But what if it was poison?
For that, the ninja of Naruto had an answer too: by sensing the chaotic chakra inside the patient's body, you locate the root of the harm—toxins, pathogens, and the like—then open the afflicted area with a Chakra Scalpel and draw the poison out while healing the damaged tissue at the same time.
That was the principle behind the Delicate Illness Extraction Technique—a very advanced Medical Ninjutsu. Trained to a high enough level, it made you utterly impervious to every poison, chemical or biological alike.
With no one to teach her, Maya had to feel her way alone. Using human subjects would of course be ideal, but she was, after all, a normal person with a conscience—she wasn't about to start treating human lives as expendable. So livestock and small animals became her pick. As for lab mice—heh—mice are expensive too, a small "fortune" to buy. And Maya could hardly stroll into a bank to cash out the bonds she'd fleeced off Tony, could she? To blow her cover over a piddling little thing like this—how fish-brained would that be?
Unable to reason it out, Maya gave up chewing on the question altogether. She'd just practice more. Practice makes perfect.
And so all three big bass were drained of their blood alive. Maya shut her eyes again, and the Rasengan over her right palm caved from a sphere into a great bowl shape. She clapped the "bowl" down over a fish, and at once fingernail-sized scales came sloughing off in a rattling shower—only, before they could hit the ground, the pale-blue spinning force ground them to powder, and Maya steered the wind to funnel the scale-dust straight into the trash can.
Having pulled off a job that fiddly, reducing the fish flesh to paste was naturally easier still, so the rest needn't be told blow by blow.
At lunchtime, when Jennifer and Jack got home, they found the little dining table heaped with meatballs in every color.
"Maya, what's all this?" Jennifer asked, pointing.
"Lunch. Beef balls, pork balls, fish balls, veggie balls—some deep-fried, some simmered in clear broth. Take your pick."
As Maya finished, she looked up and caught the mottled bruising all over Jack's face. Startled, she couldn't help asking, "Huh—Jack, what happened to your face?"
Before Jack could get a word out, Jennifer burst into a triumphant laugh. "Ha ha ha—Maya, that idea of yours was brilliant, ha ha! Today, right at the evening rush, streets packed with people, I caught Audrey just as she stepped out—rushed her and clawed her good a few times, ha ha, tore out whole clumps of her hair! You have no idea—I had Audrey crying on the spot, and just like you said, she didn't dare hit back, only cringed there going sob, sob, sob. Ha ha—so satisfying, so satisfying!"
Pfft. I was just running my mouth last night—and you actually went and beat up the Black Widow as a homewrecker. Jennifer, you're something else, you've got guts! You made an Avenger cry—that's something even Thanos couldn't pull off. Jennifer, you have officially ascended. Do you even realize?
Looking at her mother preening across the table, Maya couldn't help breaking into a cold sweat on her behalf. The woman had just danced a ballet on the point of a knife—and hadn't the faintest idea.
"So then what happened to Jack?" The lousy plan had, after all, been Maya's own the night before, and she asked a little sheepishly.
"Ha ha ha, he had it coming!" Jennifer shot the silent Jack a glance and explained, gleeful. "After I finished with Audrey, Jack goes over and walks her back to the café—heh heh—and got a solid pounding from one of the café's male waiters. I half-caught that the kid's name is Clint, and get this: he's actually Audrey's boyfriend! Jack was flattering himself the whole time. Now you tell me—didn't he have it coming?"
Maya was truly out of words for this pair of oddballs. A prize couple, the both of them.
"Listen to me, Jennifer—from now on you have to be careful. Stay far, far away from that café. If you run into Audrey alone, do everything you can to avoid her, and if you truly can't, then shout—scream for the police, scream for help, whatever. Just make sure you shout first. Remember that."
At her daughter's earnest warning, Jennifer's face turned serious too. "Maya, don't think I'm a fool. Audrey's boyfriend put Jack on the ground in two or three moves—of course I'll steer clear of them from now on. And I asked around the neighborhood: nobody knows the first thing about where Audrey came from. In my years of experience, those two are definitely not ordinary people."
Knock, knock, knock!
Just then, a knock came at the living room door. Maya went to open it, and there in the doorway stood Lucious, their next-door neighbor.
Lucious had a white sun hat on his head, big coffee-brown-framed sunglasses on his face, a short-sleeved plaid button-down up top, and crisp cream-white slacks below. And of course, the requisite hip-hop-star bling—thick gold chains and a dainty little watch—hung off him, not one piece missing.
"Hey, Maya—what are you all having for lunch? Smells incredible."
And with that Lucious strolled right on into the living room, made straight for the table, pinched up a golden-brown meatball between two fingers, and popped it into his mouth.
"Mmf—wha' the fuck—mmf, this is delicious, this—this isn't beef, mm, it's fish—such a fresh, sweet fish ball, not a trace of that muddy tang, all the sweetness of the fish itself, mmf, and this chew—and it's still hot—you all made these yourselves?"
The three of them stared, dumbstruck, at Lucious. In the span of those few sentences, he'd already put away nearly half a plate of meatballs.