Kinslayer

PROLOGUE

Now witness the end of the beginning.

A ghost-pale girl, sixteen years old, wisps of dark hair and warm scarlet scrawled across her face. A smiling tyrant, stained with his own sister’s blood, a smoking iron-thrower in a white-knuckle grip. The pair standing in the crowded Market Square as children’s ashes swirl and dance in the gulf between them. And she stretches out her hand, and opens her mouth, and speaks the last words the tyrant will ever hear.

“Let me show you what one little girl can do.”

Fifty-five days ago. Almost two months since the last son of the Kazumitsu Dynasty perished at her hands. So much chaos since then. The earth shifting beneath our feet. The threads beginning to unravel. One by one by one.

Our war of conquest against the round-eyed gaijin collapsed as news of the Shōgun’s death spread, the threat and promise of a now-empty throne coalescing in every clanlord’s mind. And as the shadow of civil war reared over the Seven Isles, the Lotus Guild urged only calm. Obeisance to their puppets in the Tiger clan. Threatening embargoes of their precious fuel—the blood-red chi driving the Shōgunate’s iron heart—to any who disobeyed their will.

Then came the truth of how that fuel was made.

The words that would begin the avalanche were transmitted over the pirate radio frequencies of the Kagé rebels. The Shadows revealed that inochi—the wondrous fertilizer used on blood lotus fields across the Seven Isles—had been manufactured with the remains of gaijin prisoners of war. And Shima’s people awoke to the horror that the Imperium, the technology driving it, their entire way of life—all had been watered with innocent blood.

Like flames on long-dead leaves after a breathless summer, or ripples on still water after rain’s first falling, the riots took seed and spread. Outraged. Bloody. But brief. Brutally suppressed beneath the heels of Iron Samurai still loyal to the vacant throne. Uneasy peace settled over the clan metropolises, broken glass crunching underfoot, as the forty-nine days of official mourning passed in shivering, breathless silence.

Until she returned.

Yukiko. Arashi-no-odoriko. Stormdancer. Astride the mighty thunder tiger Buruu, fire in her eyes, lightning crawling along his clockwork wings. Flying to every capital, from the Floating Palace in Danro to the Market Square in Kigen city. Her voice a clarion call. Urging the people to open their eyes and open their minds and close the fingers on their hands.

How I wish I could have been there.

How I wish I could have heard her speak. But since the moment Yoritomo’s corpse hit the cobbles, I have been running. Fleeing Kigen in a trail of blue-white flame. Abandoning the burnished brass I had worn all my life in some fallow field, my touch lingering on its surface as if I were saying farewell to my oldest friend. Long miles of empty road under my bleeding feet, endless skies of bloody red before my burning eyes, flesh hardened and torn from the weeks it has taken to make it back to the Iishi wilds.

Back to her.

And here I am. Almost there, now. The Lotus Guildsman who betrayed all he knew, all he was. Who gifted a crippled thunder tiger with metal wings to bear him from his prison. Who helped a lone girl slay the Kazumitsu Dynasty’s last son and plunge this nation into the tempest. Traitor is the name I will wear in the histories. Kioshi was the name I inherited after my father died.

But in truth, my name is Kin.

I remember what it was to be encased in metal skin. To see the world through blood-red glass. To stand apart and above and beyond and wonder if there was nothing more. And even now, here in the depths of Shima’s last wilderness, the dogs closing in around me, I can hear the whispers of the mechabacus in my head, feel the phantom weight of that skin on my back and on my bones, and part of me misses it so badly it makes my chest hurt.

I remember the night I learned the truth of myself—my future laid bare in the Chamber of Smoke. I remember the Inquisitors coming for me, swathed in black and soundless as cats, telling me it was time to see my What Will Be. And even as the screams of those brethren who failed the Awakening echoed in my head, I felt no fear. I clenched my fists, thought of my father, and vowed I would make him proud. That I would Wake.

Thirteen years old and they call you a man.

I had never watched the sun kiss the horizon, setting the sky on fire as it sank below the lip of the world. Never felt the whisper-gentle press of a night wind on my face. Never known what it was to belong or betray. To refuse or resist. To love or to lose.

But I knew who I was. I knew who I was supposed to be.

Skin was strong.

Flesh was weak.

I wonder now, how that boy could have been so blind.

1 THE GIRL ALL GUILDSMEN FEAR

Three Guild warships rumbled across a blood-red sky with all the finesse of fat drunkards lunging toward the privy. They were capital warships of the “ironclad” series; the heaviest dreadnoughts constructed in the Midland yards. Balloons the color of flame, shuriken-thrower turrets studding their inflatables, vomiting black exhaust into opiate skies.

The flagship leading the trio was a hundred feet long, three red banners embroidered with lotus blooms trailing at her stern. Her name flowed down her bow in broad, bold kanji—a warning to any fool who would stand in her way.

LADY IZANAMI’S HUNGER.

If Brother Jubei felt any trepidation about serving on a ship named for the Dark Mother’s appetites, he hid it well. He stood at the stern, warm inside the brass shell of his atmos-suit despite the freezing wind. Trying to still the butterflies in his stomach, quiet his pounding heart. Repeating the mantra: “skin is strong, flesh is weak, skin is strong, flesh is weak,” seeking his center. Yet try as he might, he couldn’t still the discontent ringing inside his head.

The fleet’s captain stood at the railing, surveying the Iishi Mountains below. His atmos-suit was decorated with ornate designs, brass fixtures and pistons embossed with steel-gray filigree. A mechabacus clicked and chittered on his chest; a device of counting beads and vacuum tubes, singing the tuneless song of windup insects. A dozen desiccated tiger tails hung from the spaulders covering the captain’s shoulders. They were rumored to have been a gift from the great Fleetmaster of the Tora Chapterhouse, Old Kioshi himself.

The captain’s name was Montaro, though his crew preferred to call him “Scourge of the Gaijin.” He was a veteran of the Morcheba invasion, had commanded the Guild fleet supporting Shōgunate ground troops against the round-eye barbarians across the Eastborne Sea. But when the war effort had begun disintegrating in the wake of the Shōgun’s assassination, Chapterhouse Kigen had recalled the captain and set him tracking a new foe, back on Shiman shores. To Brother Jubei’s great pride, of all the newly Awakened Shatei in Kigen, Second Bloom Kensai had selected him to serve as the Scourge’s new aide.

“Do you require anything, Captain?” Jubei stood at the Scourge’s back, a respectful distance away, eyes downcast.

“A sniff of our quarry would suffice.” Faint annoyance in the crackling buzz that passed for the captain’s voice. “Other than that, this weak flesh abides.” He touched a switch, spoke into his wrist. “Do you see anything up there, Shatei Masaki?”

“No movement, Captain.” The lookout’s reply was faint, despite him being perched only thirty feet above their heads. “But this forest canopy is thick as fog. Even with telescopics, we’re hard-pressed to pierce it.”

“Clever rabbit,” the Scourge hissed. “He’s heard our engines and gone to ground.”

Jubei watched a spire of rock drift past their starboard; a black iceberg in a sea of maple and cedar. Thin cloud clung to the mountaintops, peaks crusted in snow, the rumble of engines and heavy thupthupthup of propellers echoing in the forest beneath them. Autumn cupped the Iishi Mountains at the edge of a cold embrace, the colors of rust waiting at the edge of the stage.

The Scourge sighed, hollow and metallic.

“I know it to be the impulse of my weak flesh, but I confess I missed these skies.”

Jubei blinked back his surprise, wondering if he should engage his commanding officer in idle chatter. After long empty moments, the young Guildsman decided it would be impolite not to respond, speaking with hesitance.

“… How long were you stationed in Morcheba, Captain?”

“Eight years. Eight years with nothing but blood-drinkers and skinthieves for prey.”

“Is it true the skies above the round-eye lands are blue?”

“No.” The Scourge shook his head. “Not anymore. Closer to mauve now.”

“I would enjoy seeing them one day.”

“Well, the sooner we butcher our rabbit, the sooner we get back there.” Gauntleted fingers drummed the wooden railing. “I’d hoped to run him down before he reached the Iishi. But he’s resourceful, this one.”

Jubei looked at the ships around them, bristling with weaponry and mercenary marines. The discontent rapped at the inside of his teeth, demanding to be let out for air.

“Forgive me, Captain,” he ventured. “I know Old Kioshi’s son is a traitor. I know he must be punished for crafting the thunder tiger’s wings, aiding in its escape. But this fleet … all this effort to kill one boy seems…”

“Excessive?”

“Hai.” A slow nod. “I have heard rumor that Old Kioshi and Second Bloom Kensai were as brothers. That Kensai-sama raised the traitor as his own son. But, forgive my temerity—does it not seem to you there is more important prey for us to be hunting?”

“You speak of Yoritomo’s assassin.”

“And the Kagé rebels who shelter her.”

The Scourge glanced at him, grim amusement in his voice.

“Shelter her? She is not exactly hiding from us, young brother. Visiting all four clan capitals in the past fortnight. Bringing the skinless to the edge of outright rebellion. Slaying the Shōgun of this nation simply by looking at him.”

“All the more reason to hunt her down, surely?” Jubei felt righteous anger curdle his voice. “The citizenry say we in the Lotus Guild are afraid of her. A slip of a girl. A child. Do you know what they call her, Captain? The skinless, gathered in their filthy gambling pits and smoke houses? Do you know the name they give her?”

“Stormdancer,” the Scourge replied.

“Worse,” Jubei spat. “They call her ‘the girl all Guildsmen fear.’”

A hollow chuckle echoed inside the Scourge’s helm. “Not this Guildsman.”

Jubei lost his voice, stared at his feet, wondering if he had spoken out of turn. The Scourge glanced at one of their support vessels, the Lotus Wind, rumbling a mile off their stern, twin trails of blue-black exhaust spewing from the ironclad’s engines. He touched a switch at his chest, spoke again into his wrist, iron in his voice.

“Captain Hikita, report.”

“… o sign,” came the faint reply, almost inaudible through the static. “… ut we are almost directly abov … site where the Resplendent Glory picked … tsune girl last summer … ronghold should be … rby.”

“He cannot be far,” the Scourge growled. “He left the river only last night, and on foot. Have your munitioneers prepare a fire barrage. Five-hundred-foot spread from the water’s edge. Time to flush this rabbit from his hole.”

Confirmation crackled down the comms channels, tinged with reverb.

The Lotus Wind banked ponderously and trekked back south, the drone of its propellers smudged across the sky. Jubei saw fire crews swarming over the decks like tiny armored ants, loading incendiary barrels, setting ignition charges. He was scanning the forest canopy when the Wind’s captain signaled the barrage was finally primed and ready. The Scourge’s voice hissed down the all-comms frequency.

“Lookouts, eyes open. Captain Hikita, commence bombardment.”

Jubei saw a cluster of black shapes fall from the Wind’s belly, tumble down into the autumn shroud below. A second later, all peace shattered, a series of dull whumping booms accompanying the blossoms of flame bursting amidst the trees, unfurling a hundred feet into the air and buffeting the Hunger like a child’s toy. Faint vibrations pressed against Jubei’s metal skin as the Wind cruised the shuddering riverbank, setting huge swathes of the forest ablaze.

The flames caught and spread, licking autumn leaves with fevered tongues, a curtain of choking soot and char drifting through the woods on blackened feet. Off the starboard side, their second escort, Void’s Truth dumped a second cluster of firebombs amidst the ancient trees, trembling reverb echoing down the river valley. Flocks of shrieking birds took to the wing, animals of all shapes and sizes fleeing north through the undergrowth, away from the grasping flames. Jubei watched it all unfold with a kind of fascination—the power of his Guild’s technology obliterating what had taken centuries to grow in a matter of moments.

“Any sign?” the Scourge asked over all-comms.

“Negative,” reported the Wind’s lookouts.

“No sign,” from the Hunger’s eyes above.

The Truth’s reply popped with faint static. “We have contact. Three hundred yards, north-northeast. Acknowledge?”

“I have him,” reported the Hunger’s lookout. “Seventy degrees starboard.”

The Hunger’s pilot kicked the engines to full burn, the propellers’ song rising an octave as they swung about to begin pursuit. Jubei engaged his telescopics, scanning the shifting chinks in the forest canopy as a sudden sweat burned his eyes. The vista below crackling sharp in his vision. Smoke coiled amidst moss-encrusted giants. Falling leaves and fleeing birds. An empire of bark and stone. But at last, yes, he saw him, he saw him—a thin figure in dirty gray, darting between two gnarled and looming maples.

“There!” Jubei cried. “There he is!”

Short dark hair. Pale skin. Gone.

“Ground crews, prepare for pursuit.” The Scourge’s command was calm as millpond water. “’Thrower teams full alert. Second Bloom has ordered us to liquidate target on sight.”

The Truth’s shuriken-throwers opened up, followed by the Hunger’s; twin batteries of razor-sharp stars spraying from their flanks and shredding the curtain of curling leaves below. Severed branches crashed earthward, the chug!chug!chug!chug! of the ’throwers ringing over the rush of starving flames. Jubei thought he saw their quarry flitting amidst the undergrowth, a hail of gleaming death raining all around him. The Hunger’s marines were performing final weapons checks, readying to drop into the woods below. Flames to the south. Troops and spinning death from above. Ironclads overhead.

Jubei smiled to himself, surging flames reflected on metal skin. The rabbit had led them on a long chase, to be sure. But at last, his luck had come to an end.

The Scourge turned from the railing, grim satisfaction in his voice. “You may get to see Morcheba sooner than you—”

A flash of light.

Searing. Magnesium-white. It took a split second for the shock wave to catch up to the flare. Jubei saw the air around him grow brighter, highlights glinting on brass skin. And then came thunder—a shuddering, bone-shaking report sending Lady Izanami’s Hunger skidding sideways across the sky, engines wailing in soot-smeared protest. Jubei lost his balance, and to his shame, clutched the Scourge’s arm to stop himself falling.

A rush of superheated air. Tortured metal screaming, the hollow thudding booms of secondary explosions. Jubei turned, breath catching in his lungs, unable to comprehend what he was seeing.

The ironclad off their starboard. Void’s Truth. A complement of twenty Guild marines, twelve Lotusmen, four Artificers, six officers and thirty crew. All of them.

They were falling from the sky.

The inflatable was simply gone, a long, ragged fireball swelling within a blackened exoskeleton, great flaming hands reaching down to incinerate anything on her deck. Cables snapping, motors whining as she reared up under unrestrained thrust, bow pointing into the sky even as they plummeted earthward. The comms system was filled with screaming; tiny burning figures spilling over the railings and tumbling toward maws of rock hundreds of feet below. Jubei could see a few crewmen struggling with the aft lifeboat, bent low in terror. Another deafening explosion sounded as the Truth’s chi reserves ignited, her backside blew apart in a shower of blazing shrapnel, and she spun end over end toward her grave.

“What in the First Bloom’s name?” the Scourge bellowed into the comms system. “What hit us? Report!”

The Hunger’s crew was in chaos. Marines scrambling for the secondary shuriken-throwers. Shouted orders. Running feet. Fire teams on the dirigible yelling for target coordinates, lookouts aiming their telescopics through the billowing smoke, ashes falling like rain. Jubei saw the blue-white flare of rocket-trails through the haze off the starboard side; brothers who had survived the explosion and managed to engage their jet packs.

“There!” he yelled. “Survivors!”

The closest Shatei was forty feet from the Hunger’s railing when it took him. A flash of white amidst the smoke, the squealing crunch of ruptured metal, a strangled shout. And then Jubei saw the rocket pack flare and die, a haze of red, and the brother tumbled from the sky, the top half of his body struggling to keep pace with his legs.

“First Bloom, save us,” he whispered.

Jubei felt the Hunger shudder, heard a bass-thick crackling across blood-red skies. A sound that shivered the flesh inside his skin, rivets squealing, deck trembling under his feet like a child beneath his sheets in the thick, dead of night. The unmistakable roar of thunder. And yet, aside from the smoke, the skies around them were clear as polished glass …

“Battle stations!” the Scourge roared. “Battle stations!”

Jubei heard the shuriken-throwers arcing up again; a heavy chug!chug!chug!chug!, the hiss of pressurized gas, the clunking clatter of feeder belts. The sky around them sparkled with shards of razored steel, withering death sprayed blindly into the smoke. The mechabacus upon his chest spat a chattering spiel, confirmation requests from Chapterhouse Kigen flooding his inputs. His hands were shaking too hard to respond.

Screams again. Cries of “Contact! Contact!” A pinprick of flame off the stern. Jubei looked behind in time to see that same white silhouette skirting the Lotus Wind’s inflatable, talons rending the reinforced canvas of their sister ship like damp rice-paper.

The world held still for a fleeting second, the deathly hush between one heartbeat and the next. Jubei looked across the space between him and that white blur, a sky of spinning steel and acrid smoke, and in that tiny, fragile moment, he saw her: a black shape, long hair whipping in an ember wind, crouched between two metal wings on the back of an absolute impossibility. And as its long and terrible talons ripped the Wind’s inflatable asunder, he saw a flash of orange light in the girl’s hand, a tiny flame at the end of a handheld flare, tumbling from her fingertips toward the escaping hydrogen.

And then light. Rippling, deafening light.

The explosion rocked the Hunger on to her starboard, the shock wave sending four marines over the side and into the abyss. Fire blossomed, the Wind’s inflatable tearing apart like an overfull bladder, timbers snapping, choking smoke. The Scourge bellowing, the chatter of shuriken fire, the roar of wounded engines, the ironclad spinning like a child’s toy as the white shape swooped around and down the port side amidst a hail of ’thrower fire, taking the Wind’s engine off at her shoulder.

So fast. So impossibly fast.

“Concentrate fire! All ’throwers fire! FIRE!”

The shape wheeled away, keeping the Wind’s tumbling corpse between itself and the Hunger until it was well out of range, diving behind a towering knuckle of black mountain stone. Jubei heard a rumbling crash as the Wind hit bottom, flaring like a second sun as her chi tanks exploded, setting the autumn valley ablaze. The pilot was spinning the wheel beside him, the Hunger’s nose swinging toward their quarry. Jubei saw several rocket packs flaring, heard the rush of wings, lonely, awful screams out in the smoke. Bursts of shuriken fire. Metal thudding on wood. The Scourge shouting orders to the radio operator to report contact, request backup, a tumult of voices over the open frequency.

“Did you see it?”

“Report position!”

“What was it?”

“Need ammunition. ’Thrower four, twenty percent.”

“’Thrower seven, fifteen percent!”

“Eyes high! They came from above!”

“Do you see anything?”

“Arashitora!”

“This is Captain Montaro!” The Scourge’s roar cut through the babble like a chainkatana. “Clear comms of unnecessary chatter now! The next brother who speaks out of turn is headed straight for the inochi pits!”

Silence rang out, tinged with frightened static.

“Munitions, get those ’throwers restocked. I want extra eyes on the inflatable, compensators on, maximum contrast. Helm, get us out of this accursed smoke. Hard to port. Engines full. Ascend one hundred feet.”

The Scourge walked to the edge of the pilot’s deck where his crew could see him. The engines’ volume increased, a deep shuddering whine, thupthupthupping prop-blades. The smoke thinned, ashes coating the deck like flurries of gray snow.

“I know you, brothers. We’ve served together on this ship for years. The gaijin speak of Izanami’s Hunger with fear for a reason. A terror of the skies. Undefeated in battle. And I tell you now we will not quail before this—”

“Contact high! Port side!”

“Out of the sun! They’re coming at us out—”

“FIRE!”

Jubei heard it again. That awful thunder, turning his gut to water. The Hunger dropped thirty feet as if slapped out of the sky by the hands of angry gods. His legs were jelly-soft, mouth dry as ashes, gripping the rails so hard his gauntlets scored the wood. He longed to rip the helmet from his head, paw the salt burn from his eyes. For one moment of blessed relief.

He thought of his Awakening, the blurred and tumbling visions of his What Will Be, the destiny that could be his if only he had the strength to seize it. The Chamber of Smoke had showed him precious little of his future to make sense of, but he’d seen nothing about burning to death on this ship, being crushed to pulp on teeth of stone a hundred miles from the place he called home. And as the shuriken fire began again, as panic gripped their lookouts and that shape plummeted toward them out of the blinding sun, Jubei felt himself break. Red fear rising up and strangling reason, all the mantras and doctrine fleeing his mind, leaving him with a single truth burning bright before dilating pupils.

He was not meant to die here.

The terrified Lotusman ran to the bow’s edge, ignoring the Scourge’s bellowed order, fumbling with the ignition switches on his wrist. His boots scraped against the railing as he leapt up and over, snatched from gravity’s pull by blue-white flame. The rockets’ vibration shook his flesh, overshadowed by a spear of bright light at his back, the thunderous resonance of the Hunger’s inflatable bursting apart. His comms rig was filled with the screams of dying marines, the conflagration’s roar, the agony of flame on naked flesh. He switched it off, left with the frantic high-frequency data streams from his mechabacus, demands for someone—anyone—to report.

He set his pack to full burn, rocketing away from the Hunger’s death throes, the echoing crash of her ruin on the mountainside behind him. He could see the shape clearly in his mind’s eye, a lithograph etched in sweating fear and sour-tongue adrenaline. Wings twenty-five-feet wide, clad in iridescent metal. Sleek feathers at its head, eyes like molten amber, forelegs of iron-gray. Snow-white fur on its hindquarters, rippling stripes of pitch-black, long tail lashing like a whip behind it. Muscle and beak and claw; a creature from impossible fictions sprung inexplicably to life and spattered red with the blood of his brothers.

He prayed. For the first time he could remember, he prayed. To gods he knew weren’t there, who couldn’t listen. Figments of the imagination, crutches for the skinless and the ignorant, a superstition no Guildsman he knew really believed in. And yet he prayed with a fervor that would shame a priest. That his pack would fly him faster, get him out, away, his pulse rushing so hard he feared his veins would burst. If his heart were an engine, he would have thrashed it to breaking. If his blood were chi, he would have opened his veins and poured every last drop into his fuel tanks to fly just one foot farther.

And still, they caught him.

A rush of wind behind, the thunder of beating drums. He glanced over his shoulder and they hit him in a shower of sparks and flame. He bucked in the thing’s grip, arms pinned, his skin screeching like a wounded corpse-rat. Throat torn raw, spittle-flecked lips, screaming until at last he realized that, though he hung in those talons like a gaijin corpse above the inochi pits, completely at their mercy, the death blow hadn’t fallen.

They hadn’t killed him.

They flew for what seemed like years, south over the sky-clad ranges. A sweeping ocean turning slowly to the color of flame, an undulating carpet of whispering trees and frost-clad teeth that seemed to go on forever. Finally they descended, circling above a flattened spur of rock and snow. A sheer cliff face dropping down on to gray foothills below. The very edge of the Iishi.

Twenty feet from the cliff top, they dropped him. He fell with a crash, sparks and grinding metal, skull cracking against the inside of his helm, biting hard on his tongue. Skin squealing across the plateau, he skidded to a halt two feet shy of the precipice.

And he lay there, too terrified to move.

He heard them land behind him, the crunch of claw on frost, a thumping wind. He rolled over and saw the beast; a looming hunk of beak and talons and snow-white fur, spattered with thick sprays of crimson. Kioshi’s son—the rabbit they had chased across the entire country—was slumped on its shoulders, clutching a bloody wound on his arm, pale and sweat-slicked, but still very much alive. Grubby gray cloth, short, dark stubble on his scalp, knife-bright eyes. The boy did not look like much. Not the kind to raise his fist in defiance of all he’d been raised to believe. Not the kind a fleet should die for.

But Jubei’s gaze was pulled to her, the girl (just a girl) slipping down off the beast’s shoulders, light as feathers. She was clad in loose black cotton, long dark hair flowing around her shoulders, pale skin dusted with ash and daubed with blood. Polarized goggles covered her eyes, an old-fashioned katana strapped at her back, the obi about her waist stuffed with hand flares. She was slender, pretty, impossibly young.

“Take that off.” She gestured to his helmet, her voice cold. “I want to see your face.”

Jubei complied, fumbling with the latches at his throat. He pulled the helmet from his head, felt icy wind on his flesh. Licking his lips, he spat blood onto the snow between his feet. The world was garish, horribly bright, the sun scalding his eyes.

She drew her katana, the blade singing as it slipped from its scabbard. Marching over to him, she sat on his chest. The arashitora growled in warning, long and deep, setting the plates of his skin squealing. The girl pulled down her goggles so he could see her eyes; flat black glass, bloodshot with rage. She pressed her blade to his throat.

“You know who I am,” she said.

“… Hai.”

“You’ve seen what I can do.”

“H-hai.”

“Run back to your masters. Tell them what you saw here. And you tell them the next time they send a sky-ship near the Iishi Mountains, I’m going to carve my father’s name into her captain’s chest before I paint the sky with his insides. Do you understand me?”

Jubei nodded. “I do…”

She pressed on his neck, her blade sinking a little farther in. Jubei gasped, not daring to move, blood welling and running down his throat. For an awful, terrifying moment, he could see it in her face; the desire to simply open him up, ear to ear, to bathe in the spray of his carotid and jugular, lathering the bloody froth from his windpipe on her hands. Her lips peeled back from her teeth, blade twitching in his flesh, looming over him like a terror from some children’s story, some nightmare sprung inexplicably to life.

The girl all Guildsmen fear.

“Please,” he whispered. “Please…”

The wind was a lonely, howling voice between teeth of stone, a threadbare wail singing of death and the hunger of wolves. In it, he could hear the voices of his dying brothers. In her eyes, he could see an ending. The ending of all things. And he was afraid.

The boy on the thunder tiger’s back finally spoke, voice soft with concern.

“Yukiko?” he said.

The girl narrowed her eyes, still fixed on Jubei’s, hissing through clenched teeth.

“His name was Masaru.”

She smeared blood across her cheek with the back of one hand.

“My father’s name was Masaru.”

And then she stood, chest heaving, breathless. Knuckles white on her katana’s grip, she thrust it into the ground beside his head, left it quivering point-first in the snow. Without another word, she turned and stalked back to the beast, leaping onto his shoulders, her hair a long ribbon of black. The rabbit put his arms around her waist, leaned against her back. And with a rush of wind and that awful sound of breaking thunder, they dropped out into the void, soaring away on sweeping thermals, a swirling trail of ashes in their wake.

Jubei watched the three of them fly away, growing smaller and smaller on the smoke-stained horizon. And when they had disappeared from sight, when all he could see was red sky and gray cloud and distant fumes, he glanced at the sword beside his head, a faint smear of his own blood running down the steel.

He closed his eyes.

Lowered his head into his hands.

And he wept.

2 DROWNING

Slow flames danced in the light’s decline.

Her tantō rested near the fire pit’s edge, thrust tip-first into burning embers. Dark ripples coiling across the metal gave the impression of the grain in polished wood, or whorls at a finger’s tip. The blade was not blackened or smoking, nor incandescent with a forge’s heat. But a wise man might have noticed the way the air about it rippled, and like any man once burned, he would have left well enough alone.

Yukiko had watched the blade waiting on the glowing coals, no light in her eyes. The cedar logs crackled and sighed, oppressive heat smothering the air; a weight in her chest to match the one on her shoulders. She’d seen the air shivering around the steel and realized she was almost looking forward to it. To feeling again.

To feeling something.

“You do not have to do this yet.”

Daichi had watched her across the fire pit, eyes underscored by the flames.

“If not here, then where?” she asked. “If not now, then when?”

The old man’s skin was worn; leather browned too long beneath a scalding sun, his biceps a patchwork of burns. Long moustache, close-cropped hair, just a blue-gray shadow upon a scalp crisscrossed with scars.

“You should sleep. Tomorrow will be a hard day.” Daichi groped for the words. “Watching your father put to the pyre…”

“What makes you believe I’ll watch?”

The old man blinked. “Yukiko, you should attend his funeral. You should say good-bye.”

“It took us five days to fly here from Kigen. Do you know what this heat does to a body after five days, Daichi-sama?”

“I have a notion.”

“Then you know what you burn tomorrow is not my father.”

Daichi sighed. “Yukiko, go and sleep, I beg you.”

“I’m not tired.”

The old man folded his arms, his voice as hard as the steel gleaming on the embers.

“I will not do this.”

“After all I’ve done for you. After all you took from me.”

She’d glanced up then, and her expression had made the old man flinch.

“You owe me, Daichi.”

The Kagé leader had hung his head. Breathing deep, he coughed, once, twice, wincing as he swallowed. She could see it in his eyes as he stared at the callused hands in his lap. The blood that would never wash away. The stain of the child forever unborn. The mark of the mother who would never again hold her daughter in her arms. Her mother.

He spoke as if the word was bile in his mouth.

“… Hai.”

Daichi had picked up the jug of red saké beside him, rose like a man on his way to the executioner. Kneeling beside her, he retrieved the tantō from the flames.

Yukiko hadn’t looked up from the fire. She loosened the sash at her waist, shrugged her uwagi tunic off her shoulders, covering her breasts with her palms. Her irezumi gleamed in the firelight; the beautiful nine-tailed fox tattooed upon her right shoulder to mark her clan, the imperial sun across her left marking her as the Shōgun’s servant. She’d tossed her head, flicked her hair away from Yoritomo’s mark. A few stray strands still clung to damp flesh.

As he held the knife up, the air between them had rippled.

“Are you certain?”

“No lord.” She swallowed. “No master.”

He placed the saké jug on the floor between them.

“Do you want something to—”

“Daichi. Just do it.”

The old man had breathed deep, and without another word pressed the tantō to the ink.

Every muscle in her body seized tight as the blade touched her skin. The air was filled with the spittle-hiss of fresh fish upon a skillet, the sizzling tang of blackening meat and salt overpowering the scent of burning cedar. A long moan shuddered over her teeth and she closed her eyes, fighting the scream seething in her chest. She could smell herself burning.

Searing.

Charring.

She’d reached out with her mind, to the flood of warmth waiting just outside the door. Feather and fur and talons, wide amber eyes, his growl shaking the floorboards beneath him. The thunder tiger she’d found amidst storm-torn clouds, and now loved more dearly than anything beneath the sky.

Buruu …

YUKIKO.

Gods, it hurts, brother …

HOLD ON TO ME.

She’d clung to his thoughts; a mountain of cool stone amidst a flaming sea. Daichi peeled the steel from her shoulder, bringing ashen layers of tattooed skin with it. The blade that had killed her lover, Hiro. The blade that had been in her hands as she ended Shōgun Yoritomo, as the shot rang out and took her father away. Five days and a thousand years ago. She’d gasped as the agony receded to a dull ebb, and for a second, the urge to turn to Daichi and beg him to stop was almost overpowering. But she set her back against the thunder tiger’s strength, forced it down, far easier to swallow than the thought of that bastard’s mark still inked on her skin.

Anything was better than that.

She looked at the saké bottle on the floor beside her. Buruu’s thoughts washed over her like a summer breeze.

YOU HAVE BEEN STRONG ENOUGH FOR ONE DAY, SISTER.

Reaching for the bottle with trembling fingers, she gulped a mouthful of liquid fire, cooler than the steel in Daichi’s hand. The liquor rushed down her throat, burning her tongue, promising a return to the oblivion she’d been so eager to escape just moments before. The choice between agony and emptiness. Between living or existing.

It had been no choice at all on a night that dark.

“Do you want me to stop?” Daichi had asked.

She’d swallowed another mouthful, blinking back her tears.

“Get it off me,” she whispered. “Take all of it away.”

Yukiko closed her eyes, bloodshot and throbbing in their sockets.

The ground was a blur beneath them, falling leaves filling the spaces between each beat of Buruu’s wings. The air had the vaguest hint of chill, autumn’s pallid touch creeping through the Iishi wilds. The towering trees around them were fading; a subtle shift from gowns of dazzling emerald to a brief and brittle lime, their hems beginning to curl and rust.

They flew above it all. The pale girl swathed in mourning black, long hair flowing in the piercing wind. The boy with his dirty rags and dark, knowing eyes. The majestic beast beneath them, twenty-five feet of clockwork wings, cutting effortlessly through the sky.

Kin was perched behind her on Buruu’s back, one arm wrapped about her waist, the other hanging bloody at his side. He was obviously exhausted, shoulders slumped, head hung low. Yukiko could feel the heat of him through their clothing, hear the faint catch in his breath. Her mouth dry, stomach curdling with fading adrenaline. It’d been nearly two months since she’d seen him last—this boy who’d saved her life, who’d given up everything he was to see Buruu freed. In the chaos after Yoritomo’s death, the riots, her speeches, the threat of civil war, she’d spent every spare moment searching for him; urging the Kagé city cells to be on the lookout, patrolling the Iishi’s edge for hours on end in the hope of catching a glimpse. They’d owed him that much. That much and more. And now, to find him at last …

“Are you sure you’re all right, Kin-san?”

Yukiko spoke over her shoulder, concerned eyes hidden by polarized glass.

“Well enough,” he breathed. “My arm is bleeding…”

“We’re still an hour or so from the village. Can you hold on until then?”

A slow nod. “It took me over a month to get this far. A few more minutes won’t kill me.”

“Wandering the Iishi alone might have, though,” Yukiko said. “You were traveling the wrong way. Headed right toward Black Temple. You could have run into an oni, or gods know what else. The Kagé village is northeast of here.”

“I know,” he nodded. “Once I realized the ironclads were on my trail, I tried leading them away from the stronghold. I didn’t want to put anyone else in danger.”

Yukiko smiled, reached down and squeezed Kin’s hand. She should have known. Just as selfless as always. His own safety ever a distant second. Her thoughts were all a-tumble, emotions jostling for position in her chest; joy they’d found him, guilt it had taken so long, genuine fear at how close he’d come to death. Underscoring it all, the feel of his body pressed against hers, his hand about her waist, the tumult of confusion and adrenaline and Buruu’s fading bloodlust thudding in time with her own racing pulse.

She drew one shuddering breath, let it out slow.

“Try to get some rest, Kin-san. You’re safe now.”

They flew on toward the Kagé village, the smoke of the ironclads they’d torn from the sky still hanging in their wake. Kin rested his head against her back and closed his eyes, his breath slowing, exhaustion getting the better of him. Buruu’s muscles seethed beneath them, his eyes narrowed, amber and gold, glittering like embers in a forge’s belly. Sleek feathers and thick fur, the color of melting snow on the Iishi’s highest peaks, his hindquarters wrapped in long, snaking bands of deepest jet. Thunder tiger. Arashitora. The last of his kind in all of Shima.

His thoughts were intertwined with hers, images echoing in each other’s skulls, the pair of them linked by a bond deeper than blood. Yukiko and Buruu. Buruu and Yukiko. Harder and harder to tell where one ended and the other began these days. The ability to speak to the minds of beasts was called the Kenning in old folklore, but to even give it a name seemed to lessen it now. The truth was, it was more than a thing of weak and clumsy words. It was her father’s legacy, his gift to her, forging a friendship that had defied a Shōgun, ended an empire.

It was a reminder. A birthright. A blessing.

A curse?

THE BOY IS LUCKY WE FOUND HIM BEFORE ANY DEMONS DID.

She winced as Buruu’s thoughts filled her own, just a touch louder than they’d ever been before. The sky seemed a little too bright. Her skull a fraction too small.

I know. The western slopes are crawling with them lately.

FOOLISH OF HIM. STILL, I AM GLAD HE IS SAFE.

You must be. You didn’t even call him “monkey-child.”

WELL, DO NOT TELL HIM THAT. I HAVE A GRUFF DEMEANOR TO MAINTAIN.

Laughter died on her lips almost as soon as it had begun. Yukiko pushed up her goggles, pressed her fingers into her eyes. Pain throbbed at the base of her skull, the echoes of Buruu’s thoughts sending barbed tendrils up and across her temples. Ice-cold and burning.

YOUR HEAD STILL HURTS?

Only a little.

YOU ARE A TERRIBLE LIAR, GIRL.

There are worse character flaws. All things considered.

THIS PAIN HAS LINGERED FOR WEEKS. THIS IS NOT NORMAL.

I have more important things to worry about than headaches, Buruu.

FORTUNATE THEN, THAT I DO NOT.

You fret too much.

AND YOU NEVER ENOUGH.

You know what they say. Kitsune looks after his own.

Yukiko pressed against the mighty beast beneath her, felt the blood-red percussion of his pulse, the smooth motion of his flight. She ran her hands through the arashitora’s feathers, following the glass-smooth lines down his shoulders until her fingertips brushed the metal framing his crippled wings. The feathers clipped by a madman, barely a month in his grave.

At least now Kin is back and he can adjust your wings for you. This contraption looks ready to fall apart. How long until you molt?

YOU CHANGE THE SUBJECT AS ARTFULLY AS YOU LIE.

You’re becoming quite the master at avoiding questions, though.

The thunder tiger growled in the back of his throat.

I WILL HAVE NO NEW PLUMAGE FOR MONTHS. NOT UNTIL MY WINTER COAT GROWS IN.

Yukiko curled her fingers through sleek feathers, right where neck and shoulder met. His favorite spot.

And then what?

I DO NOT TAKE YOUR MEANING.

I mean what will you do after you can fly again under your own power?

WHAT DO YOU EXPECT ME TO DO?

I don’t know. Go home, maybe? Leave this place behind.

LEAVE YOU, IS YOUR MEANING.

… Yes.

AFTER ALL WE HAVE BEEN THROUGH?

This isn’t your fight. This isn’t your home. You could fly away right now and forget any of this ever happened.

YOU KNOW THAT IS A LIE.

Do I?

YOU KNOW ME. AS YOU KNOW YOURSELF.

I don’t know anything, Buruu.

THEN KNOW THIS. BETWEEN AND BENEATH AND BEYOND ANYTHING ELSE I MAY BE, I AM YOURS. I WILL NEVER LEAVE YOU. NEVER FORSAKE YOU. YOU MAY RELY UPON ME AS YOU RELY UPON SUN TO RISE AND MOON TO FALL. FOR YOU ARE THE HEART OF ME.

She rested her head on his neck, wrapped her arms around him and breathed. The burn scar on her shoulder was a distant, nagging ache. The last few weeks with Buruu had been like something from a dream—flying to the clan capitals and speaking to the people, watching the fire grow in their eyes as she spoke. In Kigen, the citizens had laid out hundreds of spirit stones in the place where her father died. In the Dragon capital of Kawa, their arrival had kicked off five days of rioting. In Yama city, home of her own clan, the Kitsune, they had been treated like heroes. The whole country felt ready to rise. To throw off the shackles of the old Imperium and forge something new.

And still, the memory remained. Grief turning to slow and smoldering rage. Her father’s death. His blood on her hands. Dying in her arms. She hadn’t attended his funeral pyre. Hadn’t watched the flames consume the swollen, bloated thing his body had become. Hadn’t visited his grave in the days since, to burn incense or pray or fall to her knees and weep.

She hadn’t shed a tear since the day he died.

She glanced over her shoulder at the boy pressed against her, his breath soft, eyelashes fluttering against smooth cheeks. One hand seeking his, the other pressed to Buruu’s feathers. Surrounded by those who cared for her. And still …

And still …

Part of me feels like I’m still trapped in Kigen, you know. I can see Yoritomo looking at me over the barrel of that iron-thrower. Hands stained with his own sister’s blood. It makes me want to scream. To reach inside his head and kill him all over again.

YORITOMO CAN HURT NO ONE NOW. HE IS DEAD. GONE.

He’s still all around us. In red skies and black rivers. In soldiers’ graves and blood lotus fields and dying soil. The Kazumitsu Dynasty is shattered, but even without a Shōgun, there’s still the Lotus Guild. They’re the cancer at this nation’s heart.

She shook her head, felt the warm swell of rage in her breast. Sudden and seething, curling her hands to fists. Remembering the heat of conflagration on her skin, the screams of dying Guildsmen as the sky rained ironclads. Because of them. Because of her.

And it felt right.

Daichi and the Kagé speak the truth. The Guild needs to be burned away.

AND YOU WILL BE THE SPARK? A HANDFUL OF WEEKS AGO, THE ACT OF TAKING A SINGLE LIFE WAS UNTHINKABLE FOR YOU. AND NOW—

A handful of weeks ago, my father was still alive.

THERE IS BLOOD DOWN THIS ROAD, SISTER. BLOOD LIKE A RIVER. AND THOUGH I SWIM IT GLADLY, I DO NOT WISH TO SEE YOU DROWN.

He bled out into my arms, Buruu. You don’t know what that’s like.

I KNOW THE SHAPE OF LOSS, YUKIKO. ALL TOO WELL.

Then you know what I have to do.

The thunder tiger sighed. His stare fixed on the ancient forest below, glazed and distant, staring into a future stained a deeper scarlet than the poisoned sky above.

WHAT WE HAVE TO DO.

We?

ALWAYS.

Buruu banked down into murmuring gloom.

ALWAYS.

Her bedroom trembled in the midnight hush, candles flickering on the walls like dawn through rippling autumn leaves. Yukiko watched the shadows play through the blur of her lashes, eyelids made of lead, the same blood-drenched pain that had plagued her for weeks pounding inside her skull. Fists to temples, breathing deep. Teeth clenched, focusing on the aching scar at her shoulder to stop her mind drifting back into the dark. The place where her father lay, cold and dead, the ashes of his funeral offerings caked on his face. The place where she was helpless. The little one. The frightened one.

She drew the back of her fist across her mouth.

Never again.

Buruu’s low growl dragged Yukiko from the throb inside her head, the ache in her body. She closed her eyes, tried to look through the Kenning to see what he was grumbling about. But as she reached inside his head, the world flared bright and loud, screeching and clawing—the thoughts of a hundred tiny lives out in the gloom flooding her skull. An owl soaring through the velvet dark (seekkilleatseekkilleat), a tiny furtive thing of fur and pounding heart hiding in long shadows (stillstillbestill), mockingbirds curled in their nests (warmandsafesafeandwarm), a lone monkey howling (hungreeeeeeee). So many. Too many. Never in her life so impossibly loud. Gasping, she closed off the Kenning, as if locking a disobedient child in an empty room in her mind. Breathing hard, she dragged her eyelids open, squinting out to the landing.

A figure stood in the shadows.

High cheekbones and steel-gray eyes. Dressed in dappled forest-green. An elegant, old-fashioned wakizashi sword at her waist, a scabbard embossed with golden cranes in flight. A long, black fringe cut to fall over one side of her face, almost concealing the jagged diagonal knife scar running from forehead to chin.

Another of Yoritomo’s legacies.

“Kaori.”

Daichi’s daughter lurked in the near darkness, wary eyes locked on the thunder tiger.

“He won’t hurt you,” Yukiko said. “Come in.”

Kaori hovered for a few uncertain moments, then slipped past Buruu as quickly as she could. The arashitora watched her, amber stare glittering. His metal-clad wings twitched, and he lay his head back down with a sigh and a hiss of pistons, tail sweeping in broad, lazy arcs.

The bedroom was ten feet square, unvarnished wood, wide windows looking out into a sea of night. The perfume of dried wisteria mingled with sweet candle smoke, doing their best to banish the pulsing ache at Yukiko’s temples. She lay back in her unmade bed with a sigh.

“The lookouts told me you had returned,” Kaori said.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come see you and Daichi-sama. I was tired.”

The woman looked her over with a critical eye, lips pressed tightly together. Her stare lingered on the empty saké bottle at the foot of the bed.

“You look awful. Are you unwell?”

“The Guild ships are dealt with.” Yukiko’s arm was slung over her face, words muffled in her sleeve. “They’re no threat to us anymore.”

“Your Guildsman is resting. He is torn. Bruised. But Old Mari says he will recover.”

“He’s not my Guildsman. He’s not a Guildsman anymore at all.”

“Indeed.”

“My thanks, anyway.” Her tone softened. “Your father honors me with his trust. I know what it means to have Kin here.”

“I sincerely doubt that, Stormdancer.”

“Don’t call me that.”

Uncomfortable silence fell between them, broken only by the whisper of dry leaves, the thunder-rumble breath of the arashitora outside. Yukiko kept her arm over her eyes, hoping to hear Kaori’s retreating footsteps. But the woman simply hovered, like dragonflies in the bamboo valley where Yukiko had spent her childhood. Poised. Motionless.

Finally, Yukiko dragged herself upright with an exasperated sigh. Pain flared at the base of her skull, claws curling up through her spinal cord.

“I’m tired, Kaori-san.”

“Thirsty too, no doubt.” Steel-gray eyes flickered to the empty saké bottle. “But we have news from our agents in Kigen city.”

She sensed the hesitation in Kaori’s scorn. The weight.

“Is Akihito all right?”

“Well enough. He cannot escape Kigen while rail and sky-ship traffic is locked down. But the local cell is looking after him.” Kaori walked to the window, avoided her reflection in the dark glass. “The city is in chaos. The Tiger bushimen can barely maintain the peace. We get new recruits every day. Talk of war is everywhere.”

“That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? The body thrashing without its head.”

“The Guild seek to grow it a new one.”

Yukiko blinked through the headache blur. “Meaning what?”

The woman sighed, clawing her fringe over her face, kohl-rimmed eyes downcast.

“I take little pleasure in telling you this…”

“Telling me what, Kaori?”

The woman looked at her palms, licked her lips. “Lord Hiro is alive.”

Yukiko felt the words as a blow to her stomach, a cold fist of dread knocking the wind from her lungs. She felt the room spin, the floor fall away into a beckoning nothing. And yet somehow, she managed to sway to her feet, to hold her center and pretend she didn’t feel like a stranger clawing at the insides of someone else’s skin.

She could see him in her memory, lying on sweat-stained sheets, the light of a choking moon playing on planes of smooth skin and taut muscle. His lips, soft as clouds and tasting of salt, pressed against hers in midnight’s hush. Peeled back from his teeth as she drove her blade into his chest, as Buruu’s beak sheared his right arm from his shoulder in a spray of hot crimson.

How could it be? He was dead. They killed him.

I killed him.

“Gods,” she whispered. “My gods…”

“I am sorry,” Kaori said, still staring into the dark. “We hear but whispers. We only have one operative left who can move freely within the palace grounds. But we know Hiro is one of three seeking the title of Daimyo. Rumor tells he has the full backing of the Lotus Guild. Once he secures position as clanlord, he will claim the Shōgun’s throne.”

“But that’s madness.” Yukiko tried to swallow, her mouth dry as desert dust. “Why would any of the other clanlords support him?”

“Their oaths of fealty bind them to the Kazumitsu Dynasty.”

“But Hiro is not of Kazumitsu’s blood. The dynasty died with Yoritomo.”

“There is one of Kazumitsu’s line who still lives.”

Yukiko frowned, trying to clear her thoughts. To focus. Buruu was on his feet, growling, his heat echoing through the corridors of her mind. She could feel the nightbirds beyond the window glass. Monkeys flitting across the trees. Tiny lives and tiny heartbeats—hundreds of them, bright and burning in the Kenning. So hard to think. To shut them out. To breathe.

“I don’t…”

“Aisha lives.”

A flash of memory in her mind’s eye. Yoritomo in Kigen arena. His eyes dancing with hate. Wiping his hand across the bleeding gouges on his cheek.

“No, my sister refused to betray you. And still she dared to beg me for mercy.”

Yukiko bent double, hands on her knees.

“She found none.”

Black flowers bloomed in her eyes, unfurling in time with the strobing pain in her skull.

YUKIKO?

“Hiro will cement his claim by joining the dynastic bloodline through its last surviving daughter.” Kaori spoke as if her words were a eulogy. “He and Aisha are to be wed.”

The dark fell still. Sudden and silent as death. No nightsong. No wind. A wet thump rang out in the room and Kaori flinched, squinting through the bedroom window to the black beyond. A small splash of blood was smeared on the glass. Another thump, against the far wall. Another.

And another.

She turned toward the girl, saw her doubled over in pain.

“Yukiko?”

YUKIKO!

A sparrow smashed itself against the window, colliding headfirst and dashing its skull open against the glass. Another bird followed, another, as dozens upon dozens of tiny bodies slammed into the bedroom walls, the ceiling, the glass. Kaori drew her wakizashi, blade gleaming in the candlelight, turning in circles, her face thin with fear as the pounding of flesh against wood became thunderous. A rain of soft, breathing bodies and brittle bones.

“Maker’s breath, what is this devilry?”

Yukiko was on her knees, hands pressed to her temples, forehead to the floor. Eyes shut tight, features twisted, teeth bared. She could hear them all—a thousand heartbeats out in the dark, a thousand lives, a thousand fires, hotter than the sun. Their voices in her skull, nausea rising black and greasy in the pit of her stomach, overlaid with the taste of his lips, the bitter words he had spoken right before she killed him, she killed him, gods, I killed him.

“Good-bye, Hiro…”

SISTER.

Buruu. Make them stop.

THEM? IT IS YOU. THIS IS YOU.

Me?

YOU ARE SCREAMING. STOP SCREAMING.

“Stop it,” she breathed.

Kaori took hold of her shoulder, squeezed tight. “Yukiko, what is happening?”

Hearts beating in thin, feathered chests. Blood pumping beneath fur and skin. Smashing themselves against the walls, falling broken and bloodied toward a grave of fallen leaves. Eyes burning bright, teeth gnashing, the girl inside their head screaming and screaming and screaming and they had to make it stop because it hurt what does she want why won’t she stop make her stop make her stop.

“Yukiko, stop it.”

SISTER, STOP IT.

Knuckles and pulses and a thousand, thousand sparks.

“Stop it!”

Her scream rang out in the darkness, her eyes wide and bloodshot, hair splayed in dark tendrils across her face. Silence fell like a hammer, broken only by the sound of small, still-warm bodies tumbling down into the darkness below. Bright spots of red spattered on the boards between her knees. She reached up to her nose, felt sticky warmth smeared down her lips. Pulse throbbing in her temples in time to the song of her heart, Buruu’s thoughts cupping her and holding tight, the Kenning’s heat receding like floodwaters out into a cold and empty black.

Kaori knelt beside her, blade still clutched in one trembling fist.

“Yukiko, are you all right?”

She dragged herself to her feet, smudged blood across her mouth with the back of one hand. Stumbling out the door, she wrapped her arms around Buruu’s neck. Sinking to her knees again, him beside her, wrapping her beneath his clockwork wings. Salty warmth on her lips, clogging her nose. Echoes bouncing inside her skull. The sparks of every animal out in the forest, out there in the dark, flaring brighter than she could ever remember.

“Good-bye, Hiro…”

She could feel everything.

“Gods, what’s happening to me?”

3 THE FIRST AND ONLY REASON

Yukiko’s dreams were of burning ironclads.

A golden throne and a boy with sea-green eyes.

Smiling at her.

Her sunlit hours were all motion. Visiting Kin in the infirmary. Speaking with the Kagé council about the ironclad attack. Talks of Hiro’s wedding. Concern over the flurry of small, warm bodies that had dashed themselves to dying against her bedroom walls. Halfhearted assurances that all was well. Disbelieving stares.

The ache in her skull swelled by the day—the thoughts of the surrounding wildlife encroaching just a fraction further, a thousand splinters digging ever deeper. But every night, she made it stop, reaching for the saké bottle to dull it all. A blunt force trauma knocking her wonderfully senseless, burning mouthfuls submerging her beneath a merciful, velvet silence.

She would sit with the bottle in her hands, fighting the urge to hurl it into the wall. To watch it shatter into a thousand pieces. To ruin something beyond repair.

To unmake.

Buruu’s concern was a constant white noise inside her skull. But if he thought less of her as he watched her retching up the dregs every morning, she felt no trace of it inside his mind.

Hauling herself from her bed in the splintering light of the third day, the ache flared inside her head; an old friend waiting in the wings with open arms. Liquor dregs sloshed inside her empty innards, hangover fingers buried in her skull all the way to the knuckles. She sat at breakfast with the rest of the village, avoiding Daichi’s watchful stare, swallowing her puke like medicine. It was almost midday before she made it to the infirmary, asked Old Mari if Kin would be well enough to take a walk with her.

She’d been putting this off for far too long.

The graveyard stood in a quiet clearing, guarded by ancient sugi trees. The sparks of a hundred tiny lives burned around her, the heat and pulse of Buruu beside her so overpowering it was almost nauseating. The forest was a smudge against sleep-gummed lashes, eyelids made of sand, pickaxes in her throbbing skull. She remembered the saké blurring the pain as Daichi burned away her tattoo, sensation fading to oblivion. She remembered her father, drowning his own gift in smoke and drink.

Don’t want it.

A sigh.

Just need it.

She looked down at the marker at her feet, at his name carved deep into the gravestone.

I think I understand you more and more each day, Father.

Her mouth was dry, tongue like ash. The Kenning burned in her mind alongside the memory of dozens of small, broken bodies scattered around the tree cradling her room. Wind moaned through the fading green, the Thunder God Raijin pounding on his drums above the gentle rain. Incense smoldered in the shrine, thin smoke weaving toward the heavens.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

Kin stood a few paces away, knife-bright eyes locked on hers, rain beading upon his lashes. He was clad in gray, his feet and arm wrapped in fresh bandages, fading burn scars etched on his throat and chin. She saw his flight from Kigen had taken its toll, turned him lean and hard, tanned his sun-starved skin. His once-shaved skull was now covered in dark stubble, short sleeves showing taut muscle and the strange metallic bayonet fixtures studding his flesh. Yukiko remembered unplugging him from his atmos-suit after he’d been burned, pulling black, snaking cables from his flesh, the plugs gaping like hungry mouths. All that remained of his suit now was a brass belt around his waist, stuffed with an assortment of tools and instrumentation—the only component he’d salvaged from the metal skin he’d worn for most of his life.

“No,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Your father loved you, Yukiko. And he knew you loved him before the end.”

“That won’t bring him back.”

“No. It won’t. But you can make his death mean something anyway.”

“I said I don’t want to talk about it, Kin. Please.”

He chewed his lip, eyes to the ground. “You seem … different somehow. Changed. What you did to those ships the other day…”

“I don’t really want to talk about that either.”

She knelt near the grave, dug her fingers into the soil. Dark earth on pale skin, rain rolling down her cheeks instead of the tears she should be crying. She could see Yoritomo’s face, eyes narrowed above the iron-thrower, hear his voice ringing inside her head.

“All you possess, I allow you to have. All you are, I allow you to be.”

Her hands curled into fists, eyes closed tight. She stood, face to the sky, cool rain on her cheeks washing none of it away. Buruu stretched his wings, shook himself like a soggy hound. His thoughts were so loud they made her wince.

YOU MUST LET HIM GO, YUKIKO.

I can’t just forget what’s happened, Buruu.

I FEEL THE RAGE IN YOU. GROWING BY THE DAY. IF YOU ALLOW IT, IT WILL BURN EVERYTHING AROUND YOU TO ASHES. EVERYTHING.

Am I supposed to be weeping? Crying for my da like some frightened little girl?

IT TAKES COURAGE TO SAY GOOD-BYE. TO STARE AT A THING LOST AND KNOW IT IS GONE FOREVER. SOME TEARS ARE IRON-FORGED.

She stared at the grave, sighed like the wind through the trees.

“Hiro is alive.”

“What?” Kin whispered, eyes growing wide.

“The Guild is backing him as Daimyo of the Tora clan. He’s going to marry Lady Aisha. Claim the Shōgun’s throne. We have to stop him.”

“Hiro.” Kin swallowed. “As Shōgun…”

She pictured a boy with sea-green eyes, remembered the way her stomach tumbled upward into the clouds when he smiled. All the sweet nothings he’d whispered in the long hours between dusk and dawn, touching her in ways and places no one ever had before. Holding her close, arm wrapped around her naked shoulders. That same arm they’d torn from his body, those beautiful eyes staring up at her in disbelief as she lay him on the stone, her tantō in his ribs.

If only she’d twisted it.

If only she’d torn it loose and opened up the smooth skin at his throat …

“Do you still love him?”

Yukiko blinked in surprise. Kin was watching her closely, eyes clothed in shadow. His fingers strayed to his wrist, fidgeted with the metal input stud in his flesh. She was reminded of the day they first met on the Thunder Child. The night they’d stood on the prow and breathed in the storm, let the rain wash their fear away.

“Hiro?”

“Hiro.”

“Of course I don’t, Kin. I thought I killed that bastard. I wish I had.”

“I…” His fingers twitched, and he stuffed his hands into his tool belt, scuffing dead leaves beneath his feet. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter.”

Yukiko heaved an impatient sigh. The headache squeezed tight, the pulse of the lives around her was thunder in her ears. Soaking wet. Miserable. And he wants to play games?

“Kin, say what you mean, godsdammit.”

“I’m going to sound like an idiot. I’m no good at this.” He waved at the spirit stones around them. “And a graveyard probably isn’t the best place for this conversation.”

“Izanagi’s balls, what conversation?”

He sucked his lip, looked into her eyes. She could see the words welling up in his throat, a flood pressing at a crumbling levy, bursting over in a tumble.

“Traveling here after Yoritomo died … on a road that long, you have a lot of time to think about what matters to you. And I know everyone is looking to you now. This war isn’t over, and I understand that. I don’t know how any of this is supposed to work. I spent my whole life in the Guild. I don’t know what … happens between men and women…”

Yukiko raised an eyebrow.

“I mean, I know what happens happens,” Kin added hastily. “I mean, I know what goes where and that there’s supposed to be flowers, and poetry fits in somehow too, but…”

Yukiko pressed her lips together, trying to smother a smile that somehow felt traitorous and out of place. She felt a lightness in her chest, breathing just a tiny bit easier. The simplicity of it. The sweet and awkward stumbling of it. The beauty of it.

She remembered.

The boy ran his hand across his scalp, threw a pleading glance to the heavens.

“I told you I’d sound like an idiot…”

“No, you don’t.”

YES, HE DOES.

Hush.

THIS IS MY HELL, I SWEAR IT. WHEN I PASS INTO THE AFTERLIFE AND AM PUNISHED FOR MY SINS, THIS WILL BE MY TORMENT. SURROUNDED BY A SEA OF MOONING, ADOLESCENT MONKEY-BOYS. MUDDLING ABOUT IN PUDDLES OF THEIR OWN DRIBBLE.

Her smile emerged, bright in its victory.

Kin was looking into her eyes. A soft stare full of silent hope. A hope that had made him betray everything he was—his family, his Guild, his way of life. A hope that had bid him gift Buruu with mechanical wings, that had freed them both from their prisons. Without him, Buruu would still be Yoritomo’s slave. Without him, she’d probably be dead. What had it taken, for him to throw everything he was away? To cast aside the metal he’d worn his entire life, trek all the way here just to find her? Not just hope.

Courage.

“I just want you to know…”

Strength.

“… I missed you.”

Love?

Yukiko blinked, opened her mouth to speak. She felt rooted to the spot, stomach lurching, heart thundering in her chest and echoing the storm above.

With a small huffing sound, Buruu stalked off into the forest.

“Kin, I…”

“It’s all right. There’s no rule saying you need to feel the same way I do.”

“… I don’t know how I feel. I haven’t had time to even think about it.”

“If you felt something, you’d know it. You wouldn’t need to think.”

“Kin, the last person I thought I loved tried to murder me.” The words tasted copperish, the bleed of an old wound reopening. The first boy she’d ever loved. The first she’d ever …

“I’d never hurt you,” he said. “Never betray you. Never.”

“I know that.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pressure you. I just … wanted you to know.”

“I care about you.” She took his hands, stared until he met her eyes. “I really do, Kin. I worried about you. We looked for you, every chance we got. And you being here now … it helps me breathe. You can’t know how much.”

“I know it.” He squeezed her fingers so hard it hurt. “You mean everything to me. Everything I’ve done. All of it. You’re the reason. The first and only reason.”

The forest seethed about them as they stood, fingers entwined. She could feel the heat of his skin radiating through rain-soaked cloth, the strength in his hands. He ran his thumbs across her knuckles, and some part of her wanted to feel those hands on her, to feel a warm body pressed against her again, to feel something other than the pain and hate growing inside her like a cancer. Butterflies lurched about her stomach, tongue dry, palms slick. His lips were parted, short, shallow breaths, water beading on his skin. He moved, almost imperceptibly closer, and she felt the uncertainty inside slip for just a second, washed away by gentle rain. The noise of the world felt a thousand miles away.

She moved to meet him, closed her eyes.

His lips were soft, a feather-light brush against her own, gentle as falling petals. She sighed as they touched hers, lighting a fire inside her, surging bright. He was wonderfully clumsy, hands fluttering at his sides like wounded birds, almost losing his balance as she pressed tight against him. She could feel the pulse inside his chest, his mouth opening to hers, breathing in her sighs. Her body waking as if from a dreamless sleep, frissons of light tingling across her skin. Feeling for the first time in weeks. Feeling.

Alive.

She pressed his hands against her, taut muscle beneath her fingertips. Something prowled behind her eyes, something forged in lightning and blinding rain, hungry and hot, bidding her dig her fingers into his skin, to bite at his lip. Her heartbeat was thunder, her blood rising like a tide, the uncertainty, the anger, the voices of the forest, all of it at last falling still—

“Stormdancer!”

The cry was high-pitched, urgent, shattering the moment into a thousand glittering pieces. She blinked, pulled away, trying to catch her fleeing breath. Looked toward the voice, the tempo of feet pounding dead leaves.

“Stormdancer!”

A boy dashed into the graveyard, almost slipping in his haste, red-faced and breathless. Stopping before her, he bent double, gasping, pawing the sweat from his eyes. He was a few years older than she, heavyset, an askew jaw and mincemeat face, as if someone had tried to bash it in when he was a child.

“Takeshi?” Yukiko put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “What is it?”

The boy shook his head, hands on his knees as he gasped like a landed fish. It took a few moments to regain breath enough to talk. He looked as if he’d been running from Lady Izanami, the Dark Mother herself.

“Scouts on the western rise … One of the pit traps…”

Yukiko felt dread stab her gut. As if bidden, Buruu crashed into the clearing in a flurry of dead leaves, hackles raised, the air filled with static electricity. His eyes were bright, pupils dilated around slivers of gleaming amber. The western rise was close to the Black Temple, where she and the arashitora had fought a legion of pit demons in the summer. If the creatures were probing the rise near the pit traps, that meant they were creeping closer to the village, and just one of the Dark Mother’s children loose in the lower woods …

“Gods, they caught an oni?” Yukiko asked.

“No. Worse than a demon.”

Takeshi spit on the dead leaves at his feet, shaking his head.

“Another Guildsman.”

She was conscious of Kin’s arms about her waist for the entire flight, strong hands and gentle grip. Soft breath tickling her neck. Warm as firelight. Her headache returning like a faithful hound, broken glass grinding at the base of her skull.

Clasping Buruu’s neck, she tried to ignore Kin’s hands on her hips, the play of muscle across his chest as he leaned against her. She entwined her fingers in the arashitora’s feathers, felt for the heat of his mind, growing more jagged and bright with each passing moment.

You’re awfully quiet.

ABOUT WHAT?

Don’t play coy with me.

YOU CHIDE ME FOR PLAYING COY. AFTER TELLING THE BOY YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW YOU FEEL, THEN LUNGING FOR HIS TONSILS A HEARTBEAT LATER.

I … He makes me feel something, Buruu. Something I think I need right now.

MMN.

Well, go on then. Get it off your chest.

The thunder tiger tossed his head, swooped around a castle of tangled sugi trees, wisps of lightning crackling at his wingtips. She could feel him in her mind, loud as the thunderstorm gathering overhead, stubborn as the mountains around them, reminding her so much of her father she could almost smell pipe smoke. She remembered the beast she’d roamed the Iishi with, the arrogance and pride, the fury coiled inside him. He’d been an animal then. Clever, yes, but still driven by instinct rather than conscious thought. Now he was more; ferocious cunning layered with human faculties for judgment. And she could feel the urge to speak his piece bubbling inside him like a wellspring, until finally he couldn’t stop himself.

I DO NOT UNDERSTAND YOUR KIND. WITH ARASHITORA, THE FEMALE CHOOSES THE MATE WITH THE STRONGEST WINGS, THE SHARPEST CLAWS. THE MALE HAS NO CHOICE AT ALL. HE IS SIMPLY A SLAVE TO INSTINCT AND THE FEMALE’S SCENT.

Well, that sounds awful.

IT IS SIMPLE. YOU HUMANS. ALL THIS SIGHING AND SPITTLE SWAPPING. YOUR COUPLING IS COMPLICATED BEYOND ALL NEED OR REASON.

Gods, please don’t use that word …

MY OTHER OPTIONS ARE LESS POLITE.

Because you’re usually a paragon of courtly manners?

The thunder tiger harrumphed, swooped lower so his belly brushed the tree line. Gentle rain began falling from the storm-washed skies.

TELL ME. THE MASHING OF YOUR FACES TOGETHER …

Kissing.

IT DEMONSTRATES AFFECTION.

Yes.

AND THE TONGUES?

… What?

HONESTLY, WHAT PURPOSE DOES THAT SERVE?

How under heaven did you …

SISTER, YOU WERE PROJECTING YOUR THOUGHTS OVER THE ENTIRE FOREST. IT WAS LIKE HIGH SPRING OUT THERE. A SWEATY TIDAL WAVE OF BARELY REPRESSED ADOLESCENT LUST DROWNING ALL BEFORE IT.

Gods, really?

THE MONKEYS IN PARTICULAR SEEMED … EXCITED.

She pressed her fists to her temples, glanced over her shoulder at Kin.

WELL, PERHAPS EXCITED IS THE WRONG WORD …

Yes, Buruu, I understand. Thank you.

TITILLATED?

Buruu …

ENGORGED, PERHAPS?

Oh my GODS, stop!

The treetops parted like water as they descended through the canopy, showers of severed green tumbling earthward in their wake. Away from the glare of the garish day, Yukiko pulled her goggles down around her throat, ran her hand across her eyes.

You could really hear what I was feeling?

LOUD AS THUNDER. AS IF I FELT IT MYSELF.

She chewed her lip, listening to the faint cacophony on the edge of her subconscious.

The Kenning has never been like this before, Buruu. Your thoughts are louder than I’ve ever heard. If I listen, I can hear every animal for miles. All those impulses and lives stacked atop one another. It’s deafening.

YOUR FATHER NEVER SPOKE TO YOU OF THIS?

He never even told me he had the gift. But, he drowned his Kenning in liquor and smoke. Maybe this is why? Maybe as we get older, it gets louder? Or maybe breaking Yoritomo’s mind did something to break mine?

She sighed, ran her fingers through his feathers.

I don’t understand any of this, brother …

They circled past a copse of maidenhairs, knotted branches and shovel-tip leaves laden with rain. The soft scent of green rot entwined with the perfume of deepening autumn, the leaden smell of the storm above. Thunder rumbled somewhere distant, as if the clouds were great ironclads, splitting and burning and tumbling from the skies. Yukiko could hear the echoes of old screams, faint and metallic, somewhere inside her head. The humidity was unbearable, her body aching, sweat mixing with rain on her skin and stinging at the corners of her eyes.

“There they are,” Kin said.

Two young men around her age stood about the edge of a broad pit trap. Buruu spread his pinions and reared back, cruising in to land as gracefully as he could on the broken ground. Yukiko and Kin slipped from his shoulders and made their way across snarled roots and green-clawed scrub, Buruu prowling behind, tail stretched like a whip.

Yukiko recognized the pair with an inward groan; Isao and Atsushi. The former had long dark hair drawn back into a topknot, angular features, chin shadowed with fuzz too soft to really be called whiskers. The latter was small and wiry, light-fingered, dark hair drawn back in braids, one hand on the haft of a long spear with a single-edged, curving blade.

The pair covered their fists and bowed.

“Hello, gentlemen,” she muttered. “Strange seeing you all the way out here.”

“We were scouting, Stormdancer,” Isao said.

“Scouting? Don’t you two usually do that through a hole in the bathroom wall?”

The pair looked at each other, then glanced at Buruu’s razored talons. The thunder tiger growled long and low, staring at each boy in turn, but his laughter was warm in Yukiko’s mind.

YOU ARE MERCILESS.

So I should be. They’ve seen me naked.

DO YOU PLAN TO TORTURE THEM FOREVER?

A few more years ought to cover it.

“W-we were looking for oni,” Atsushi stammered. “As Daichi-sama bid us. There have been reports of the demons moving in the deep woods. Their numbers are growing again.”

“They know nothing but hatred for our kind,” Isao said. “The children of the Endsinger do not sleep, Stormdancer.”

“Why do you call her that?” Kin scowled at the boys. “She has a name.”

Isao drummed his fingers on his war club, a studded tetsubo of solid oak, haft wrapped in bands of old, river-smooth leather. He glanced over briefly as Kin spoke, but dismissed the boy’s words without reply. Atsushi kept his eyes on Yukiko as if Kin hadn’t spoken at all.

Yukiko glanced at the pit trap. The hole was twenty feet cubed; big enough for an oni to fall into. It had been covered by a layer of foliage, concealed from anyone who wouldn’t recognize the warning markers around it. Judging from the hole in the covering, whatever had plunged through wasn’t much bigger than a man.

“We found it an hour ago.” Isao pointed to the trap with his war club. “It must have fallen in last night. Tracks came from the south.”

“Did you speak to it?”

“No.” Isao shook his head. “We saw it looked like Guild, so we sent Takeshi to find you and Daichi-sama. I’ll not speak to any bastard Lotusman. Their kind are poison.”

Yukiko saw the boy shoot a brief, venomous glance at Kin.

How did it find us?

PERHAPS YOU COULD USE YOUR TONGUE FOR ITS INTENDED PURPOSE AND ASK?

Yukiko poked out the aforementioned tongue and rolled her eyes.

Hilarious, you.

Buruu prowled to the lip of the pit, peeked over the edge, wings spread. He snorted, amber eyes narrowed to knife-cuts. His tail swept from side to side in swift, agitated arcs.

INTERESTING.

Yukiko crept up beside him, put her arm around his neck and looked into the hole. Two bulbous red eyes stared back at her. She saw a humanoid figure, wasp-waisted, a featureless face. It was covered head to foot in some kind of skin-tight membrane, earth-brown, slick and glistening. A cluster of eight chromed arms uncurled from a melon-sized orb on its back, as if some eyeless metal spider were fused with its flesh.

Yukiko’s hand went reflexively to the tantō at her back, her voice dripping revulsion.

“What the hells is that?”

4 DOPPELGANGER

The slap was perfect. Hard enough to rock the girl’s head back on her shoulders, bring tears to already red and swollen eyes. But not so hard as to split her lip, to leave a mark that wouldn’t set to fading after an hour or so. Spittle sprayed her face as the warden bellowed.

“Answer me, you little bitch!”

The girl hung her head, weeping, face hidden by a curtain of tangled hair. Her sobbing echoed off the damp stone of the prison cell, lank straw strewn underfoot. Manacled wrists, long knife wounds scabbed down her forearms. A cracked and swollen cheek healing slowly. Bare and bruised legs dotted with fresh lesions. A perceptive man might have noted the wounds were shaped like rat bites.

The warden’s patience had frayed to a few lonely threads over the past week. Each maidservant in his custody was technically nobility; in theory they had families to press the Tora Daimyo for their return—presuming a new clanlord was ever chosen, of course. Even after they’d been arrested, no official accusation was leveled by the disintegrating judiciary. And thus the warden was placed in the unenviable position of having to “make inquiries” of his prisoners without the burning iron or water torture usually employed during interrogations in Kigen jail.

It was enough to drive a fellow to drink.

The warden seized the girl’s throat, forced her head back so she could see his eyes. He saw naked fear, pupils dilated, discolored cheek wet with tears.

“You served Lady Aisha.” The girl gurgled as he tightened his grip. “Your mistress spent hours with the Kitsune girl, plotting her brother’s assassination. You were privy to all of it!”

“She always … sent us … out.” A croak through a cinched windpipe. “Always—”

“You are a Kagé spy! I want names, I want—”

“Warden!”

The shout rang out in the cell’s confines, taut with command. The warden turned and saw two bushimen in black-banded armor outside the cell, flanking a third man in a tailored kimono of rich scarlet.

The man’s hair was drawn back in an elaborate braid, pierced with golden pins. He was a good-looking fellow with a studious air; a handsome face with perpetually narrowed eyes, as if he spent too much time reading by lamplight. A chainkatana and wakizashi were crossed at his waist—the chainsaw daishō marking a nobleborn member of the military caste. He clutched a beautifully crafted iron fan in one hand. Smooth shaven, sharp jaw covered by an expensive clockwork breather. He was in his early twenties at most, but his rank was that of a man two decades older.

“Magistrate Ichizo.” The warden released the girl and bowed. “Your visit was unannounced.”

“Obviously.” The man’s eyes flickered to the girl crumpled on the stone. “This is how you treat your wards? Ladies of court? You disgrace yourself and dishonor our Lord, Warden.”

“Forgiveness, honorable Magistrate.” The warden bowed. “But I was commanded to uncover any Kagé operatives—”

“And you believe torturing handmaidens will bring you closer to them?”

“Each one of these girls served the traitor whore, Lady Aish—”

The blow was so swift, the warden almost couldn’t track it. Ichizo’s iron fan caught him full in the face, hard enough to open a small cut across his cheek. The crack of metal upon flesh faded, a stone-heavy silence in its wake, broken only by the girl’s quiet sobs.

“You speak of the last daughter of Kazumitsu’s line,” Ichizo hissed. “The blood of the first Shōgun flows in her veins, and the next heir to this empire will grow in her womb.” He slipped the fan into his sleeve. “Mind. Your. Tongue.”

The warden pawed the cut on his cheek, lowered his eyes.

“Forgiveness, Magistrate. But the Chief Treasurer demanded—”

“Chief Treasurer Nagahara resigned from office two hours ago. The stresses of public life have extracted a grievous toll upon his health. He has retired to his country estates with the blessings of our Lord, Daimyo Hiro.”

The warden sighed inwardly.

So. Another power shift.

At last count, three nobles had claimed leadership of the Tora zaibatsu; two senior ministers and the young Iron Samurai who had lost his arm (and very nearly his life) defending Yoritomo-no-miya from his assassin. Now it seemed the time for diplomacy was ending. Hiro’s faction had assassinated four high-ranking ministers in the last two weeks—courtly machinations turning inevitably toward the politics of the duelist’s katana and the assassin’s blade. Swordmen like the warden were caught in between—bound by oaths to the Daimyo, but unsure who the hells the Daimyo even was.

“This barbarism will end.” The magistrate’s gaze roamed the cell. “Lady Aisha’s handmaidens will be escorted to the palace and placed under house arrest. I will speak to each girl personally regarding their treatment whilst in your care.”

“This one was injured when she came in,” the warden mumbled. “I had the apothecary tend her wounds to ensure she wouldn’t fall to infection.”

“And the rat bites?”

“I—”

“I know the nature of her injuries, Warden. I have read the report. Multiple knife wounds. Beaten bloody, cheek cracked, comatose for days. Lucky to escape the Stormdancer with her life. Yet you believe she was in collusion with the Kitsune girl?”

“There were many secrets in the wh…” the warden cleared his throat, “… in the Lady Aisha’s chambers. Some of these maidens must have been privy to them.”

“This girl is barely seventeen years old.”

“All due respect, Magistrate, but Yoritomo-no-miya’s assassin was sixteen.”

“And you thought to beat the insurgency’s secrets out of a girl that same assassin had already beaten near to death?”

“I was commanded to investigate all—”

“Your loyalty is admirable, Warden. But your confusion about where to place it is of grave concern. You should invest thought in your future.” The magistrate’s eyes glittered above his breather. “My noble cousin, Daimyo Hiro, would be disappointed to learn you had also been … retired for the sake of your health.”

“I understand, Lord Magistrate,” he nodded. “My thanks for your wisdom.”

“Unchain her at once.”

The warden unlocked the girl’s manacles, blanching as he noted the raw bruises on her wrists. Ichizo shouldered him aside, throwing his robe around her to preserve her modesty. The magistrate tut-tutted as he assisted her from the cell.

“It is over, my dear.” His voice was soft as feather down. “It is all over now.”

The girl continued crying, hugging herself as the magistrate escorted her down the stone corridor. The warden heard the sound of heavy boots: more bushimen marching into the prison, barking orders at his men to release the other maidens. He could feel it all around him—the entire country teetering on a knife edge. The promise of bloody conflict looming among the clans. Kagé insurgents infecting the city like a cancer. Samurai thrashing about like spoiled children, concerned with nothing but carving paths toward the throne.

The warden sighed again, wished for a return to simpler days. Days when a soldier knew where his allegiances lay. Days before the Stormdancer had taken his world away.

Then he clomped out of the cell and went in search of that drink.

“Your suite, I believe.”

They stood in a wide palace hallway, flanked by four bushimen, the stink of their motor-rickshaw journey still clinging to her skin. The girl had stared out the window as they drove from the jail, forehead pressed to glass as Kigen city brushed past in all its misery. Market stalls standing empty and abandoned, broken glass crunching under their wheels. People in rich garments scurrying to and fro, hunched shoulders, nervous glances behind custom goggles. Past the empty, bloodstained arena, through the tall iron gates of the palace grounds. Stunted gardens behind high walls; gray stone with a broken-bottle crust. Autumn had finally broken the awful summer heat, and yet everywhere she looked, she could see the color of flame. Smell the tinder, waiting for the spark.

Waiting to burn.

Magistrate Ichizo slid the door to her suite open, and she stared into the small, familiar room. Unmade bed, drawers upended, clothes strewn over the floor. She could see the congealed bloodstain on the wicker matting, reached up to touch the scab at her cheek, the memory of the knife strikes on her forearms, the blow to her face, fresh and real in her mind.

“You will forgive the state of things.” Ichizo’s tone was apologetic. “Another minister must have ordered your possessions searched. The past month has been … turbulent. I am sure it will not take long to put all back in order.”

“My thanks, my Lord.”

“You … do not remember me, do you?”

A shake of her head. “Forgive me, my Lord.”

“We met last spring festival.” A gentle smile in his voice. “The Seii Taishōgun’s banquet. We spoke about poetry. The strengths of Hamada over Noritoshi. I recall that evening fondly…”

She looked up at him then, still clutching his robe about her shoulders, and her face crumpled like candle wax in a burning fireplace. She threw her arms around him and sobbed, pressing herself into his chest to muffle her wails. The magistrate was taken aback, unsure whether to embrace her or push her away. He nodded to the bushimen flanking him, and they retreated to spare her further loss of face.

“Come now, my dear.” He patted her awkwardly on her shoulder. “You shame yourself.”

“It was so awful.” Hot tears soaked into scarlet silk. “The l-last thing I remember was the Kitsune girl h-hitting me. Then I woke in that cell and they were screaming at me, calling me a tr-traitor. My gods, there was no servant more loyal to Yoritomo-no-miya than I…”

“Hush now.” He tried to hug and push her away simultaneously, failing on both counts. “They will not hurt you again. You may not leave these rooms unattended, but you will suffer no more ill-treatment. Upon my honor, I vow it.”

“Thank you, Lord Ichizo. Bless you.”

She stood on tiptoes and kissed him, soft as summer showers down his cheek, until at last she reached his lips. And there she pressed herself, just a little longer, pushing her body against his. He broke away with a nervous smile, extricating himself and straightening his kimono.

“Very good, very good.” A small cough. “Duty well served.”

She was ushered inside, tear-soaked, pawing her eyes with her sleeve. Ichizo bowed and backed out of the room, shutting and locking the door behind him, his cheeks a subtle shade of rose. She stood amidst the flotsam and jetsam and continued sobbing, just loud enough to be heard through the walls. As their footsteps faded across the polished boards, she counted one hundred heartbeats, weeping still. And finally, she dropped her hands away from her face and the tears stopped as if someone had choked them.

She stared into the warm void on the back of her eyelids, listening to the emptiness inside her head. Still and mute in the free air. Finally, she moved, stalking toward the washroom, toward clean water and sweet-smelling soap, intent on scrubbing the prison from her skin.

She glanced at the looking glass as she passed by, caught a glimpse of her reflection. For a terrifying moment, she was seized by the unshakeable sensation that a stranger stared back at her. Oh, the long dark hair, the slender body, the plump, pouting lips were all hers. But the face belonged to someone else entirely; a girl she didn’t know, and didn’t care to. A weakling whose skin she wore.

She stripped the rags and robe from her shoulders, stared at her body in the mirror. The stain of false tears on skin she had pinched until it was red and swollen. The knife wounds she had carved into her own arms. The cheek she had slammed against the corner of her own dresser. Remembering the rats squealing and flailing in her hands as she pressed them to her flesh. Anything, everything to evoke pity, to soften the hearts she longed to tear still-beating from their chests.

The urge to smash the reflection burned bright in her mind. She stared at her doppelganger, the tiny, broken girl she pretended to be, hands curling into fists.

“You are death,” she whispered. “Cold as winter dawn. Merciless as Lady Sun. Play the role. Play it so well you could fool yourself. But never forget who you are. What you are.”

She pointed at the glass, and her whisper was sharp as knives.

“You are Kagé Michi.”

5 CHRYSALIS

Cold nausea in her belly, bubbling past her lungs to the tip of her tongue.

Blood-red eyes stared at Yukiko from the pit trap’s gloom—polished glass affixed in a bone-smooth, mouthless face. The membrane covering the figure’s body was brown as old leather, glossy and supple, creased at the joints. A transistor-studded mechabacus on its chest and the cables snaking around it body marked it as Guild, the cluster of thin, chromed limbs at its back completing the horrific, arachnoid portrait.

“What the hells is that?” she breathed.

“A False-Lifer.” Kin frowned, pawing at his stubble.

“A what?”

Yukiko glanced at the boy beside her, hand still on her tantō hilt. Buruu loomed near her shoulder, watching the pit with narrowed eyes. The warmth radiating from his fur gave her goosebumps, that now-familiar scent of ozone and musk filling the air, flecked with electricity.

“They create the flesh-automata for the Guild.” Kin shrugged. “The servitors that work in the chapterhouses. The city criers that trundle about calling the hour. They conduct surgical procedures, install implants into newborns, that kind of thing.”

Four sets of eyes looked at him as if he were speaking gaijin.

“They build machines that emulate life.” He waved one hand in the air. “False. Lifer.”

“Gods above,” Atsushi breathed.

“What’s it doing here?” Isao demanded.

“Do I look like a mind reader?” Kin asked.

Isao glanced at Yukiko. “If we were alone, I’d tell you exactly what you look like, Guildsman.”

Kin blinked, opened his mouth to retort when a graveled, sibilant rasp drifted up from the pit. Half statement, half question, retched from the belly of some rusted metal serpent.

“Guildsman?” The thing tilted its head, looking at Kin. “You are Kioshi?”

The name sparked a chill in Yukiko’s gut, slick and oily. An unwelcome reminder of who and what Kin had been in days past. The name of a father long dead, a Lotusman of station and esteem, passed to his only son as Guild custom bid. The name Kin had called himself, encased in that metal skin. The name of the stranger. The enemy. Before she’d discover the boy beneath the brass. Before he’d …

“Shut up!” Isao raised his tetsubo, apparently amazed to hear the thing speak. “Shut your mouth or I’ll cave your skull in, bastard.”

The False-Lifer raised its hands. Seven of its metallic arms lifted up in unison. The eighth spat a shower of blue sparks and twitched, dangling beside the Guildsman’s leg.

“I mean no harm to any of you,” it hissed. “By the First Bloom, I vow it.”

“What the hells is a First Bloom?” Isao spat.

“The leader of the Lotus Guild,” Kin said. “The Second Bloom of every chapterhouse reports to him.”

“And you people swear by him like he’s a god?”

Kin stared at the boy for an empty moment, then turned back to the thing in the pit.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Looking for you, Kioshi-san.”

Looking for him?

“My name is Kin.”

“You … no longer bear your father’s name?”

“His name is none of your business.” Yukiko spoke through clenched teeth. “I’d stop asking questions and start answering them if I were you.”

The False-Lifer averted its smooth, glass eyes. Yukiko could have sworn it cringed.

“Forgiveness, Stormdancer.”

“What the hells are you doing here? What do you want?”

A small, helpless gesture, silver arms rippling. “To join you.”

“Join us?” she scoffed.

“Kiosh—” A pause. “Kin-san is not the only one who dreamed of escaping the Guild’s control. There are many of us within chapterhouses all over Shima, harboring secret thoughts of rebellion. But none thought it was possible. None were brave enough to risk it.” The thing looked at Kin, admiration in its voice. “Until he did.”

“We should kill it, Stormdancer.” Atsushi pointed his spear into the pit, rain running down its razored edge. “We can’t trust it.”

“Please…” the False-Lifer whispered. “I’ve come so far…”

Kin glared at Atsushi. “When a Guildsman’s skin suffers catastrophic damage, the mechabacus sends a distress beacon. The Guild will know exactly where we are.”

“Can you disable the beacon?” Yukiko pointed to the brass tool belt slung about his waist.

“I could.” Kin frowned. “But you’re not going to—”

Yukiko turned to Isao.

“Get it out of the pit.”

They tossed a rope down, Yukiko watching in disgust as the Guildsman crawled twenty feet up into the light. The arms on its back made a skittering, clicking noise as they moved, as if a hive of scuttling insects were housed in each limb. Glowing eyes lent a blood-soaked tinge to its glistening shell. Though the skin looked moist, dirt or dust didn’t cling to it at all.

As the Guildsman reached the pit’s edge, Yukiko realized it was wearing a long, buckle-studded apron, making it difficult to clear the lip of the trap. Isao seized one of its humanoid arms, dragged it out and dumped it without ceremony on the ground. Atsushi leveled his naginata at the thing’s throat. Yukiko stood back, well out of reach of the spider limbs, but the Guildsman made no threatening gestures, merely raised all its arms amidst more of that horrid clicking and slowly rose to its feet. Eyes averted. Shivering. Its mechabacus was silent, implanted over the swell of its …

Gods above.

“It’s a girl.” Yukiko frowned at Kin. “She’s a girl.”

Kin shrugged. “All False-Lifers are.”

“I didn’t think there were any women in the Guild.”

“Where do you think little Guildsmen come from?” A small, embarrassed smile.

Yukiko’s scowl grew darker still, and she gestured toward the False-Lifer’s mechabacus. The device chattered, counting beads clicking back and forth across a surface of relays, heat-sinks and glowing transistors.

“Disable it.”

Kin stepped forward, uncertain, drawing a screwdriver and pliers from his work belt. Looking a little awkward, he placed his hands on the Guildswoman’s chest. It kept its eyes downturned as he loosened a handful of screws. Dozens of insulated wires spilled out as he peeled the faceplate away.

“Um.” He held up the covering. “Can you hold this, please?”

The False-Lifer mutely complied, spider arms shuddering as its real hands cupped the metal. Yukiko felt her stomach turn, swallowing hard, mouth tasting of vomit. Her legs were trembling. Eyes watering. Sparrows called in the distance, the sound closer to screaming than singing. Three monkeys gathered in the trees overhead, roaring and shaking the branches. Heat all around her. Hands in fists.

ARE YOU WELL, SISTER?

I’m fine.

“What’s your name?” Kin said.

“Kin, don’t talk to it,” Yukiko growled.

He glanced over his shoulder. “Isn’t that the point of this exercise?”

Yukiko glared, scraped rain-slicked hair from her eyes. Kin turned back to the False-Lifer, unspooled several leads from its mechabacus, began tinkering in the machine’s guts. He offered an apologetic glance as he touched its breast again.

“What’s your name?” he repeated.

“… My mother’s name was Kei. Gifted to me when she died, as custom bids.”

He paused, looked into featureless glass eyes. “But what’s your name?”

A long silence. Yukiko ground her teeth. She could hear the sounds of a thousand gaijin children, sobbing as they were marched to slaughter inside the greasy yellow innards of the chapterhouses. High-pitched screaming amidst the crackling pyres around the Burning Stones. People like her, people with the Kenning, put to the torch for the sake of the Guild’s ridiculous “Way of Purity.” The False-Lifer’s reply sounded like a nest of spitting vipers.

“Ayane.”

“What chapterhouse are you from?”

“Yama.”

“Fox lands are a long walk from here.” Kin raised an eyebrow and went to work with a pair of wire snips. “How did you make it all the way? False-Lifers can’t fly.”

“I stole aboard a Guild liner in Yama harbor and fired the escape pod.” The spider limbs flexed, a ripple of silver in the air around it. “I flew as far as I could. Then I walked.”

“How did you know our direction?” Kin looked up from the innards, eyes illuminated by a burst of sparks.

“The Guild has known the general location of the Kagé stronghold since they rescued the two of you from the Thunder Child’s ruins. Since then, they have set up triangulation towers around the Iishi. Every time the Kagé transmit a radio signal, they zero closer.”

“If they know that much, why haven’t they massed their fleet to burn this forest down?” Yukiko snapped.

The False-Lifer turned her gaze to the earth, steadfastly refusing to meet Yukiko’s eyes.

“Much of the fleet is still overseeing the retreat in Morcheba. But the Guildsman you spared made it back to Yama with your message, Arashi-no-odoriko. The loss of three heavy ships was enough to give the Upper Blooms pause. The captain you killed was a war hero, you know. Kigen’s Third Bloom. Master of their fleet.”

“So?”

“So they are afraid of you.” It swallowed. “You and your thunder tiger.”

Kin was staring at her, the memory of a hundred dead Guildsmen swimming unspoken in his eyes. Yukiko licked her lips, feeling her skin crawl as the False-Lifer’s limbs shivered. She ran one hand along Buruu’s neck, fingers deep in feathers’ warmth.

I don’t trust her.

SENSIBLE.

It’s too good to be true that there would be more like Kin.

IN ALL HONESTY, THAT PART OF HER TALE IS EASY TO BELIEVE.

A rebellion inside the Guild? No, they’re just telling us what we want to hear.

THOSE OF THE GUILD ARE BORN TO IT. NO CHOICE. NO CONTROL. NOT SO HARD TO IMAGINE SOME WOULD RESENT THAT YOKE.

I don’t believe one of them would just tiptoe out of a chapterhouse and come all this way to find Kin. It’s probably just a survivor from the fleet we burned. Lying to save its skin.

WE LEFT ONLY ONE ALIVE, YUKIKO. YOU KNOW THAT.

This doesn’t make any godsdamned sense. It’s lying.

YOU MEAN “SHE” IS LYING.

I mean “it.”

She eyed the False-Lifer up and down, lip curling.

“Is that why your leaders are backing Hiro? Because they’re too spineless to come here themselves now? They’d rather risk men with wives and children in the battle to bring me down, right? Better to see them die than more of their precious Shatei?”

“I am from Yama.” All nine of its functional arms rippled, and Yukiko was appalled to recognize the gesture as a shrug. “I do not know the politics of First House, or why the First Bloom bids Shateigashira Kensai to support the Tora boy. But I know seventy percent of our Munitions Sect were requisitioned by Kigen four weeks ago.”

Yukiko stared blankly.

“The Munitions Sect build machines that require human control,” Kin offered. “Motor-rickshaw, shreddermen, sky-ship engines and so on. Like I used to.”

Yukiko narrowed her eyes. “What are they working on?”

“I do not know, Stormdancer.” Another grotesque, multi-armed shrug.

“Don’t call her that.” Kin plucked three transistors from the mechabacus. “Her name is Yukiko.”

The boy snipped a final set of wires, gathered up the contraption’s guts and stuffed them back into its housing. Sealing the device closed with a few hasty screws, he stepped back.

“Done.”

The False-Lifer looked at Atsushi’s blade poised against its throat. The boy shifted his grip, one word from a bloodbath. Kin was watching her with pleading eyes. Yukiko stared for a pregnant moment, arms folded, eyes narrowed. The rain was falling harder, fat, clear droplets pounding the leaves around them and soaking everyone to the bones.

Everyone except the False-Lifer, of course.

“I have never seen rain that was not black before.” It turned its palms to the sky, droplets pattering upon its body, beading and running like quicksilver. “It is beautiful.”

Yukiko’s eyes were on the blade gleaming in Atsushi’s hand. The raindrops glittering on the steel like polished jewels.

We should just get everything we can from her, then bury her.

Buruu growled.

WHAT IF SHE SPEAKS TRUTH? WHAT IF SHE IS WHAT SHE SAYS?

No one leaves the Guild. Everyone knows that.

EXCEPT YOUR KIN.

Don’t call him that.

I DID NOT TRUST HIM EITHER, REMEMBER? YET WITHOUT HIM, NEITHER OF US WOULD BE HERE.

I know that.

THEN YOU KNOW WE CANNOT END THIS GIRL ON MERE SUSPICION.

Yukiko hissed, rubbed her eyes with balled fists. The Kenning headache was slinking forward on fox-light feet. The noise. The heat. Lurking in the back of her skull with leaden hands and bated breath.

“Take off your skin,” she said.

“What?” Kin raised an eyebrow. “What for?”

“If we’re taking it back, we’re not bringing a tracking device with us. It takes its skin and mechabacus off and we bury them here.”

“The mechabacus won’t work anym—”

“That’s the bargain, Kin. We bury its skin, or we bury it.”

“She’s not an ‘it.’” Kin frowned. “Her name is Ayane.”

Isao scowled, shook his head. Yukiko turned to the False-Lifer, eyes and voice cold.

“Your choice. And I don’t mean to sound cruel, but I could sleep either way.”

The False-Lifer glanced at Atsushi’s blade, then to Kin. Without a word, it began twisting the wing-nut bolts studding its suit. Reaching back with its humanoid arms, it tinkered with the silver orb on its spine; the melon-sized hub from which the spider limbs sprang. It fumbled around for a moment, hissing softly.

“Can you help please, Kin-san? It is difficult to do this alone.”

Hesitantly, Kin stepped behind it, twisting each bolt dotting its spine, working several clasps under the False-Lifer’s direction. Yukiko heard a faint series of popping sounds, all over the grease-slick, gleaming body, followed by the wet sucking of air rushing into vacuum. The skin slackened, as if it were now a size too big. The thing tugged a zip cord running up to the base of its skull, another down to the small of its back. As Atsushi and Isao watched, revolted and fascinated, the False-Lifer bent double, and like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, chrysalis to imago, sloughed off its outer shell.

She was clad in a membrane of pale webbing beneath. Skin so pallid it was almost translucent. Her head utterly hairless; no eyelashes, eyebrows, nothing. Long slender limbs and tapered fingers, smooth curves studded with bayonet fixtures of black, gleaming metal. Seventeen, perhaps eighteen years old at most. Her lips were full and pouting, as if she’d been stung by something venomous, her features fragile and perfect; a porcelain doll on its first day in the sun. She narrowed her eyes, held one hand up against the light.

Inexplicably, Yukiko felt her heart sink.

She’s beautiful.

Kin scowled at the gawping boys and removed his uwagi, slipped it around the pale girl’s shoulders. Yukiko could see the same bayonet fixtures in his flesh, ruining smooth lines of lean muscle, fixed in the exact same location: wrists, shoulders, chest, collarbone, spine. The silver orb sat affixed to the girl’s back, spider limbs rippling, still making that horrid, inhuman noise. Yukiko pointed.

“Take those off too.”

“I cannot.” The girl’s voice sounded soft and sweet now that she was outside her skin, underscored with a thin, trembling fear. “They are part of me. Rooted in my spinal column.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

“Please, I am not lying.” The girl wrung her hands, still squinting. Her eyes were a rich, earthen brown, pupils contracting to pinpricks. “I could just as easily take off my legs.”

ONE WITH THE MACHINE. SUCH MADNESS.

Yukiko scowled at the rippling silver fingers, needle-sharp, swollen-knuckled and gleaming with rain. She looked down at the False-Lifer’s toes, pressed into dark, wet earth, sick to her stomach. The headache slipped toward her temples, tightening at the base of her skull. A whisper. A promise.

“Bind her arms.” She glanced at Atsushi. “All of them.”

Kin looked vaguely hurt by the suggestion. “Yukiko, you don’t need to do that.”

“Please don’t tell me what I need, Kin.”

The girl folded her metallic arms at her back; functional limbs curling up like the legs of a dying spider, the broken one hanging near her shin, limp as a dead fish. Atsushi bound her with rope, wrapping it around her torso and pinning all her arms. Drawing a deep breath, steeling herself, the girl raised her eyes and looked at Yukiko for the first time. Her voice was almost lost beneath the whispering rain.

“Thank you for trusting me,” she said.

“I don’t trust you.”

“Then … thank you for not killing me.”

“Let’s get her back.” Yukiko motioned to the boys. “Isao, bury the skin deep as you can. Atsushi, come with us. I need to speak to Daichi.”

Isao nodded, started clearing a space of dead leaves. Atsushi poked the girl in the back with his nagamaki, hard enough for her to stumble. Kin reached out, caught her before she fell.

“Move,” Atsushi growled.

Yukiko moved off into the undergrowth with Buruu, skin prickling, head throbbing. Looking back, she saw Kin had placed a steadying hand on the knots at Ayane’s back, helping her navigate the uneven ground. Atsushi tromped along behind, a dark scowl on his face.

Ayane kept her eyes downcast, voice low. But she was speaking. Furtive and clearly afraid. Stretching out into the minds of the forest around them, inundating herself in a cascading pain, Yukiko could hear every word the False-Lifer spoke. See her through a hundred pairs of eyes, feel the pulse of a hundred heartbeats.

Blood began dripping from her nose.

“Thank you, Kin-san,” Ayane was whispering.

“You have nothing to thank me for.” The boy shook his head. “We do what’s right up here. Yukiko’s a good person. She’s just suspicious of the Guild. She lost a lot because of them and the government. Most people here have.”

“Her father.”

“Friends too.”

“Are they going to hate me? The Kagé, I mean?”

“Probably.” Kin glanced back at Atsushi and his nagamaki. “They don’t trust our kind … I mean, the kind we used to be.”

“Then why do you stay?”

It was a long time before Kin answered; a wordless space filled by faint rain drumming on the canopy, as if a distant army were pounding earth with hollow bamboo. Yukiko could see him watching her, walking there in front of him, Buruu beside her. He looked at the forest, slowly turning the color of rust, cupped in the palms of autumn’s chill. And finally, he shrugged.

“Because there are things here I love. Because I’m part of this world, and I’ve sat by and watched it falling away for far too long, hoping someone else will save it.”

“So now you will save it, Kin-san? All by yourself?”

“Not by myself.” He shook his head. “We’re all in this together. We need more people to realize that. More people willing to stand up and say ‘enough.’ No matter what it costs.”

Ayane glanced at Kin and smiled, and her eyes sparkled like dew on polished stone. Beneath the fear, there was a strength in her voice, old as the mountains looming around them, deep as the earth beneath their feet.

“Enough,” she said.

The pain crested and swelled, hot and sharp, too much, too harsh. Yukiko broke away, slipped back into her own thoughts like a thief, wiping the blood from her lips. Buruu cast her a sideways glance, saying nothing, saying everything. She sniffed thickly, spat salty scarlet into the underbrush.

Hundreds of eyes followed them as they walked away.

6 DOWNSIDE UP

The other servants never called her by name.

The girl was short for her eighteen years, famine-thin, her impish face set with hollow cheeks and pointed chin. Raven-black hair was cut in a messy bob, damp with sweat. Her right eye was covered with a patch of dark leather, the faint stippling of scar tissue in her cheek, a deep hairless gouge bisecting her eyebrow. Her good eye was large, almost too round, so dark as to be nearly black.

A visitor to the Shōgun’s palace would have taken one look at her winter-pale complexion and wagered the girl was Kitsune-born—pasty as all the Fox clan were. But a glance beneath the cotton covering her right shoulder would have revealed no clan ink on her skin; shown her to be a lowborn mongrel, unfit for all but the most menial and unclean of labors.

Hence her nickname.

“You!” a voice called. “Shit Girl!”

The girl stopped in her tracks, sandals scuffing on polished floorboards. She turned to face the approaching house mistress, her gaze downcast, hands clasped together. As the plump, over-powdered woman stopped before her, the girl focused on the floor between her toes. Night was falling out in the palace grounds, but she could hear a lone sparrow singing—choking, really—its lungs full of oily lotus haze. The leaves in the wretched gardens were failing, autumn creeping into Kigen city and painting all with gray and rust-red during the sunlit hours. But the Shit Girl only roamed the palace after dark—the less seen of her in the harsh light of day, the better.

“My Lady?” she said.

“Where are you going?”

“The servant’s wing, my Lady.”

“The chamber pots in the guest wing need emptying when you’re done.”

She bowed. “Hai.”

“Go on then,” the woman waved. “And bathe tomorrow, for the Maker’s sake. There may be no Shōgun, but this is still the Shōgun’s palace. Serving here is an honor. Especially for one of your breed.”

“I will, my Lady. Thank you, my Lady.”

Bowing low, the girl waited for the mistress to retreat before continuing on her way. She shuffled to the servants’ quarters, the loose boards of the nightingale floor chirping and squeaking beneath her feet. Outside each door, a chamber pot awaited—black kiln-fired clay, a little smaller than an armful, with gifts inside just for her. She would carry each pot to a night soil drain at the rear of the grounds and dump the reeking contents. Wash them out and trudge back though the palace. Watching the slow, orchestrated chaos around her, ministers and soldiers and magistrates, scrabbling for power and gathering in tiny, muttering knots.

And she, beneath it all.

The house mistress had spoken truth—serving in the palace was an honor few lowborns ever enjoyed. Burakumin like her were the bottom of the barrel in Shima’s caste system, only employed at tasks regular citizens found unwholesome. Male clanless could join the army, of course, serve out a ten-year stint in exchange for genuine clan ink at the end of his tour. But that wasn’t an option for the Shit Girl, even if she felt the suicidal urge to serve as fodder for the gaijin lightning cannon. Besides, that plan hadn’t worked out so well for her father …

So here she was, slinging chamber pots in the Shōgun’s palace. Derided. Shunned. Constantly reminded she was unworthy of the honor. But lowborn or no, in the two years she’d worked those opulent halls, she’d learned a simple truth she’d suspected her entire life—no matter how honorable the backside producing it, shit never fails to stink.

Making her way back to the servant’s wing, she would slip the chamber pot through a slot in the bedroom doors, working her way down the row. Each room was sealed with a shiny new lock—Lady Aisha’s maidservants were all under house arrest, recently moved from Kigen jail. In fact, more than a few of the palace serving staff had been imprisoned after Shōgun Yoritomo’s death, suspected of either assisting the plot, or failing to stop it. But the Shit Girl? The clanless, worthless, bloodless mongrel wrapped in third-hand servant’s clothes? She swam as she always did. Beneath their contempt. Beneath their notice.

It had worked out well, all things considered.

She knelt by the final door in the row, reached inside her servant’s kimono and retrieved a small pad of rice-paper, a stick of charcoal. Glancing up and down the darkened corridor, she scrawled some hasty kanji on the paper, slipped it through the door slot.

“Daiyakawa,” it said.

The name of a little-known village somewhere in the northern Tora provinces, where years ago, a peasant uprising had been quietly quashed by Shōgunate troops. To most, the name would mean nothing. To the girl imprisoned within the room, everything.

Moments later, a note was slipped back through the slot, kanji marked in lipstick.

“Who are you?”

And so it began. Paper slipping into the hall, her eye scanning the notes, replies marked on the flip side. Listening for approaching footsteps as the girl imprisoned within the room scratched a new message, passed it through the space between doorframe and nightingale floor.

“Call me No One, Michi-chan. Kaori sends regards.”

“Do I know you?” came Michi’s response.

“Have served in palace two years, but you would not know me. Joined local Kagé a few weeks ago.”

“Why join now?”

“Saw Stormdancer speak in Market Square. Told me to raise my fist. So here I am.”

A small pause.

“And here I am.”

“Can you escape room?”

“Tried. Ceiling panels bolted in place. Window barred.”

“Why return here after Yoritomo died? Must have known you would be arrested.”

“Could not leave Aisha behind.”

“Brave.”

“Overheard rumors. Wedding? Lord Hiro?”

“True. Invitations sent to clanlords. Date set. Three weeks.”

“Aisha would never agree.”

“No choice.”

“Can speak to her?”

“Royal wing guarded like prison. Aisha never leaves rooms.”

“I must get out of here.”

“Magistrate Ichizo has only key.”

Another pause.

“Not for long.”

No One heard creaking footsteps, the low murmurs of two approaching bushimen.

“Must go. Light red candle in window when free to speak.”

Standing quickly, the girl scooped up the chamber pot and shuffled down the corridor, heart pounding in her chest. She forced her hands to be still, her breath to slow. But the guards gave her and her stinking armload a wide berth, neither of them sparing her a glance. Everyone knew who she was. Everyone knew to ignore her. This was the fate of the clanless in Shima—to be treated as less than a person. All her life, she’d been a walking, breathing absentee. Seldom spoken to. Never touched. For all intents and purposes, invisible.

It had worked out well, all things considered.

When she was a little girl, No One thought the smokestacks made the clouds. She remembered playing around the walls of Yama refinery with her brother, watching filthy children tramp in and out of wrought-iron gates to a steam whistle tune, jealous they got to work in a place so magical. Trudging home through the wretched streets of Downside, she felt a pang of remorse for that childish ignorance.

The chi refinery grew like a tumor off Kigen Bay; a tangled briar of swollen pipes and bloated tanks, glowering over the labyrinthine alleys with grubby glass eyes. Chimneys dotted with burning floodlights spattered the sky with tar, smothering the broken-back tumbledowns about it in a blanket of choking vapor. A corroded pipeline as tall as houses wormed out of the refinery’s bowels, north across the sluggish black depths of the Junsei River. Ramshackle apartment stacks and crumbling lean-tos lined the oil-slick streets of Downside—the cheapest and meanest stretch of broken cobbles in all of Kigen. A body had to be poor or desperate to even consider hanging her hat there.

Truth was, she’d spent eighteen years being both.

A threadbare cloak was slung around her servant’s clothes, grubby kerchief over her face, a broad straw hat pulled low over her good eye, narrowed against the rising sun. As she rounded the corner to her tenement tower, a figure prowled out of the gloom to meet her, quiet as final breath. A hulking shape, almost toddler-sized, missing both ears and half its tail, blue-black as lotus smoke. It had a mangled, snaggletoothed face, patchy fur stretched over crisscrossed scars. Its kind were rare as diamonds in Kigen these nights. Its eyes were the color of piss on fresh snow.

A cat. A demon-born bastard of a tomcat.

She knelt on the cobbles, scratched the creature behind one of its missing ears.

“Hello, Daken. Miss me?”

“Mreowwwwl,” he said, purring like a chainblade.

No One stomped up the tenement’s narrow stairwell, Daken trailing behind. The walls were plastered with posters for the Kigen army, slapped up just days after Yoritomo-no-miya died; a recruitment drive targeting the city’s poor and clanless, promising three squares a day, a clean bed, and a chance to die defending an empty chair.

Out onto the fourth-floor landing, she stepped over a crack-thin, crumpled figure, passed out in a puddle of his own waste. Gray skin, lotus-red eyes rolled back into his skull. It amazed her to think some fiends were still smoking now everybody knew how blood lotus was grown. Without sparing the wretch a glance, she unlocked her door and slipped inside.

“Sis.” Yoshi looked up from his card game. “How do?”

Her brother sat on the floor beside a low table scattered with cards and coins. His hair was tied in rows of elaborate braids, spilling around his shoulders in black, knotted ripples. He was terribly pale, sharp-edged and handsome, the same pointed chin and dark, round eyes as his sister, glittering like shuriken beneath his brows. The shadows of his first whiskers were a pale dusting on his upper lip and cheeks. He was grubby as a cloudwalker, clothed in dirty rags. A conical straw hat with a jagged tear through the brim sat crooked on his head. One year older than she, but still a youth—gutter-lean, hard muscle and long-limbs, slowly filling out into the man beneath his surface.

“I’m all right,” she sighed. “Can’t believe you’re still awake…”

“You’re not so old I can’t wait up for you, girl.” Yoshi hefted the bottle of cheap rice wine from the table. “Besides, there’s still a third left.”

She made a face, turned to the other boy. “You winning, Jurou?”

Jurou glanced up from the other side of the table, fingers hovering close to his stack of copper bits. He was around Yoshi’s age, shorter, darker in complexion. Softly curling bangs of black hair hung about shadowy eyes, cheeks flushed with wine. An empty smoking pipe dangled from pursed lips. A beautiful tiger tattoo coiled around a well-muscled arm; the kind you didn’t usually see in Downside unless it was attached to a corpse with very empty pockets.

“Winning? Always.” Jurou shot her his heartbreaker smile, turned over a maple card and flicked the straw brim back from Yoshi’s eyes. “Lucky hat my ass.”

Yoshi swore and pushed across his coin. The flat was claustrophobic, furnished with a low table and moldy cushions, dirty light guttering from a tungsten globe. A soundbox sat on the floor beside the boys; cheap tin and tangled copper wires, stolen from some peddler’s wagon last winter. A tiny window ushered in the pitiful breeze, the sounds of the rising dawn outside: the city stretching its limbs, automated criers trawling the streets, steam whistles from the distant refinery.

No One splashed a handful of copper kouka on the table amidst the playing cards. The coins were rectangular, two strips of plaited metal, dulled from the press of a thousand fingers.

Jurou whistled. “Izanagi’s balls. A month of slinging brown for that pittance? You’d be better off begging in the street, girl.”

“I’d be better off pimping you down at the sky-docks, too, if you’re that worried about it.”

“And we’d retire rich as lords in a fortnight.”

She laughed, and Jurou grinned around his empty pipe—the boy had quit smoking lotus once the origins of inochi fertilizer had broken, but chewing the stem had proven an unbreakable habit.

“Forgetting something?” Yoshi asked, raising a lazy eyebrow.

No One sighed, sinking down onto her haunches and scratching at the stippled scar below her eyepatch. She slipped a chunk of metal from inside her kimono, hefted it in her hand. The lump was snub-nosed with a thumb-broad barrel, matte-black and ugly as a copper-kouka whore. There was no symmetry to the design; it was all pipes and rivets and leaden menace. The handle was polished oak, inlaid with golden tigers, a deep scar in the wood from where its former owner had dropped it onto the cobbles at her feet as he died.

Shōgun Yoritomo’s iron-thrower.

It was heavy in her hand, seemingly cold and dead. But she’d been there in the Market Square when its trigger was pulled on the Black Fox of Shima. She’d seen what it could do. What one little girl could do too.

That was where it had started.

“Give it here,” Yoshi said. “You’ll blow your foot off.”

She passed the weapon back with a scowl, mumbled a threat about Yoshi’s privates.

“Not sure why you insist on carrying that thing around with you,” Jurou mused.

“You try being a girl walking alone in this city at night,” she replied.

“We should sell it. Make a fortune.”

“There’s fortunes to be made without selling anything.” Yoshi fixed Jurou in a pointed stare. “Besides, what pawnman would be crazed enough to turn grist on the Shōgun’s property?”

Her brother took a long pull from the bottle, glanced at her.

“So how was work?”

“Talk of clan war is all over the kitchens,” she shrugged. “Dragon clan are gearing up to attack the Foxes. Rumor has it the local bushimen are going to kick out all the gaijin merchants in Docktown today. Tell the round-eyes to sail back to Morcheba or have their ships burned into the bay.”

“Do you do anything in that place beside gossip?” Jurou smiled.

“I don’t gossip,” she pouted. “I just listen.”

Daken prowled up to the table, sharing his evil, piss-eyed glare with both boys, lamplight glittering in dirty yellow. The cat sniffed, as if objecting to the smell of the booze, then jumped up on the window ledge to stare out at the dawn, half-tail swishing.

Jurou held out the bottle; a lethal brand of brown rice wine the locals affectionately called “seppuku.”

“Drink?”

“You know that won’t happen.”

The boy shrugged, placed the bottle back on the table. In the distance, the trio heard six tolls upon an iron bell; an automated Guild crier trundling the streets on rubber tank tracks and ringing in the Hour of the Phoenix. No One leaned down and turned on their little soundbox, started trawling the shortwave frequencies.

“Izanagi’s balls, not the Kagé again…” Yoshi moaned.

“They transmit once an hour, one day a week,” she growled. “And I have to listen to your serial melodramas every other day, so up with the shut.”

Yoshi adopted a mocking tone, spoke into his fist. “You’re on rrrrrradio Kagé. We’ll be telling you how wonderful your lives are now the Shōgun’s dead for the next five minutes, or until the Guild kicks in our door and we scatter like fleas when the dog comes scratching. Thanks for listeniiiing.”

“Least they’re doing something,” she muttered. “At least they stand for something. They’re fighting to change the world, Yoshi.”

“Girl, if you were any more full of shit, your eye would be brown.”

“I’m supposed to point out my eye is brown now, right?”

“Oh my gods, when did that happen?”

She met his lopsided grin with a sour glare.

“Oh, come on now, sister-mine.” Yoshi leaned over and gave her a hug, planted a noisy kiss on her cheek. “You know it’s just in fun.”

Jurou took the bottle from Yoshi. “Seriously, girl. The way you glue your ears to those broadcasts … You’ll be telling us you’re joining up with those fools next…”

“Mad though she is, she’s not quite mad enough for that,” Yoshi smirked.

No One pursed her lips, said nothing. After a long search on the radio, she found a scrabbling snatch of low-fidelity static. Eye narrowed with concentration, she adjusted the dial in tiny increments until she latched on to the signal.

The transmission was distorted, awash with faint white noise. Turning the volume down, she leaned close to the speaker. She didn’t recognize the voice—truthfully she hadn’t been with the Kagé long enough for introductions to more than a few members, the one safe house on Kuro Street. Less risk that way. For them and her. None of the local cell even knew each other by name—everyone went by some kind of handle to lessen damage in the event of a capture. When Gray Wolf had asked her what she wanted to be called, she’d considered something romantic—something exotic or dangerous sounding. The name of a hero from some childhood story. But in the end, “No One” seemed to fit best.

She licked at dry lips, listened hard to the tiny voice.

“… curfew still in effect eight weeks after Yoritomo’s death. How long will this government continue to make its citizens prisoners in their own homes? Do they beat children and old women caught after dark without permits for the sake of your safety? Or because their slave state is crumbling? Because their fear of their own people is at last justified?

“Even now the Stormdancer is in council with Kagé leadership, planning their next strike against the murderous regime that has strangled this nation for two centuries. She is the tempest to wash away the dregs of the Kazumitsu Dynasty, and give birth to a shining new…”

The sound of heavy iron boots and screams in the street outside made her flinch, and she turned the volume down to a whisper. Orders to halt in the name of the Daimyo were followed by scuffling and a wet crunch on cobblestones. A sharp cry of pain.

“Might want to turn that off for a bit,” Yoshi said. “Unless you want to invite the bushi’ up here for a drink?”

No One sighed, flipped a small switch and silenced the soundbox. She settled herself on the cushion next to her brother and Daken jumped down into her lap. The girl ran her fingers through the big tom’s smoky fur, across the nubs where his ears used to be, the scars crisscrossing his body. The cat closed his eyes and purred like a motor-rickshaw.

“He stinks of dead rat,” Yoshi scowled.

“Funny that.” She gave the cat an experimental sniff.

“He shit in our bed again last night.”

The girl laughed. “I know.”

Yoshi brandished the iron-thrower. “He does it again, he might find himself divorced of more than ears.”

“Don’t even joke like that.” She scowled daggers, held the cat close to her thin breast. Daken opened his eyes, stared directly at the boy. A low feline growl rumbled in his chest.

“You don’t scare me, friend.” Yoshi waggled the weapon under the tom’s nose.

She made a face. “Little boy with his big toy.”

“Been telling stories about me again, Jurou?” Yoshi raised an eyebrow at the other boy, took another belt of rice wine. No One watched her brother drink, lips pressed shut, radiating faint disapproval. Even with one eye, she could stare down with the best of them, and Yoshi avoided her gaze. Draping Daken over her shoulder, she stood with a sigh.

“I’m going to bed.”

“What?” Jurou cried. “You just got in!”

“I’d rather sleep than watch you two get drunk and slobber over each other.”

“Well, you should go out and find yourself a pretty man.” Jurou waggled his eyebrows. “Slobber over him instead.”

“I’ve already got a man, don’t I, Daken?” She planted a kiss on the cat’s cheek, shuffled toward her room. “Yes, I do, my big brave man.”

“Mreoooowl,” Daken said.

Yoshi stared at her back, a sour look on his face.

“Makes a fellow ponder gouging his eyes out just thinking on it.” He scowled at the cat flopped over his sister’s shoulder, waved the bottle in his direction. “I mean it, you little bastard. You shit our bed again, I’ll feed you to the corpse-rats.”

The big tom blinked once, a broken-glass glint dancing in his eyes. His thoughts were a purr inside the siblings’ heads, the whisper of black velvet on silken sheets.

… would not sleep with your mouth open tonight if i were you …

7 A PALE INFERNO

Whether it’s a reeking pit in the heart of Kigen city, or a comfortable house with barred windows amidst the branches of an ancient sugi tree, a prison is a prison is a prison.

The room was divided down the center, thick bamboo bars separating the jailed from the jailers. Ayane sat against the far wall, her spine curved to accommodate the silver orb affixed between her shoulder blades. The long, thin spider legs sprouting from the bulbous hub were curled up against her back, motionless save for the broken limb trailing on the floor beside her. It had stopped spitting sparks once they’d come in from the rain, but still twitched occasionally, like a gutter-child stricken with palsy.

“I’m sorry.”

Kin stood outside the cell, hands wrapped around the bars. The forest air was cloying, sweat gleaming on his body. Ayane still wore the uwagi he’d given her, though she’d torn a hole in the back to accommodate her extra limbs. Someone had fished out a pair of oversized hakama to cover her legs, grubby and threadbare. Her feet were filthy, toes curling against the floorboards. The rain drummed insistent upon the ceiling.

“You need not apologize, Kin-san.” Ayane smiled despite her grim surroundings. “You cannot blame them for being suspicious. If I were a Kagé who had turned myself over to the Guild, the Inquisition would have arranged far less comfortable accommodations.”

“The Inquisition.” Kin sighed. “I haven’t thought about them in a long time.”

“Do you still dream?” Ayane’s eyes were wide. “Your Awakening, I mean?”

“Every night since I was thirteen.”

Ayane sighed, stared at the floor.

“I hoped … once I unplugged…” She ran a hand over her bare scalp. “It might stop.”

“What do you see?” Kin’s voice was soft as smoke.

She shook her head. “I do not want to talk about that.”

“Your What Will Be can’t be any worse than mine.”

She looked up at him again, and he saw sorrow welling in her eyes.

“There are secrets, and then there are secrets, Kin-san.”

Ayane drew her knees up to her chest and hugged them tight. The delicate limbs at her back unfurled, one pair at a time, folding around her, cocooning her in five-feet lengths of sharpened chrome. The clicking of a hundred wet mandibles filled the air, cutting through the chilled hum of the wind amidst the trees, the paper-dry conversations of falling leaves. The broken limb twitched, illuminating her face with faint bursts of blue-white.

“It feels so strange to be out of my skin.” She rubbed her knees as if savoring the sensation. “And First Bloom help me, the smells. I used to get skinless alone in my habitat, of course, but it was nothing like this…”

“Can you … feel them?” Kin pointed to the spider limbs. “Like your flesh?”

“No.” She shook her head. “But I feel them in my mind.”

“Does the broken one hurt?”

“It is giving me a headache.” A rippling shrug. “But I will have to live with it.”

Kin looked around the tiny cell, the moisture beading on her skin, slick upon the iron padlock. He remembered his own time in here, the agony of his burns with no anesthetic to numb him; fear and uncertainty intensified by physical pain. Empty hours alone, listening to the sound of his own breathing and counting the endless minutes in his head.

“I’ve got a tool kit here.” He pointed at his belt. “I could try fixing it?”

“Will that not get you in trouble?”

“They said you weren’t to leave the cell. You’re not.”

“Kin-san, I do not wish to cause you grief…”

Kin was already selecting tools from his belt. He gave her a small smile, held up a screwdriver. “Turn around. Let’s see what we can see.”

They sat together, her within the bars, him without, the hushed metallic tones of the tools and metal between them. As his fingers flitted over intricate clockwork, he realized how much he’d missed it—the language of the machine. The poetry of it. The absoluteness of it. A world governed by laws, immutable, unchangeable. A world of mass and force, equations and calibrations. So much simpler than a world of flesh, with all its chaos and complexity.

He murmured around the four screws pursed in his lips. “It feels good to be working with my hands again.”

“I am surprised they are not worked to the bone.”

“What do you mean?”

“… Forgiveness.” The girl shook her head. “I speak out of turn. It is not my place.”

Kin pulled the screws from his mouth, frowning. “No, Ayane. Say what you think.”

“It is just … your knowledge could make life up here so much easier…” The girl shivered, shook her head. “But no. I am a guest here. I do not understand their ways. I will be silent.”

Kin’s frown deepened. “Ayane, the Guild can’t hurt you here. There are no Inquisitors waiting in the shadows, no Kyodai to punish you, no Blooms to answer to. You’re your own person. Your choices are your own, too.”

“Then it is my right to choose to remain silent, is it not?”

“But why? You’re free now. What’s to be afraid of?”

Ayane glanced over her shoulder, spider limbs rippling.

“The girl all Guildsmen fear.”

Kaori’s glare was the color of water on polished steel, sharp at the edges.

“I cannot believe you brought it here.”

Four figures knelt in a semicircle around the fire pit in Daichi’s dwelling, lit by crackling flame. The assembled faces belonged to the Kagé military council; hard eyes, cool expressions, sword-grip calluses on every hand. There was Kaori, of course, fringe draped over her face, clad in simple clothing of dappled green. Maro and Ryusaki sat together—broad, flat faces, nut-brown skin, deeply lidded eyes that seemed almost closed even when they were fully awake. Ryusaki had a shaved head, a long plaited moustache, his occasional smiles revealing gums bereft of most of his front teeth. Maro’s hair was bound in warrior’s braids and he was missing an eye, the left lens on the goggles slung about his neck painted black. The brothers were former samurai who’d served under Daichi’s command, following him from Kigen city into the wilderness. Maro usually led the arson crew attacks on the southern lotus fields, and seemed perpetually wreathed in smoke. Ryusaki was a swordmaster, Michi’s sensei, and the man had been teaching Yukiko some bladework in the few moments she found spare.

Daichi himself knelt in the center, a cup of tea before him, fists on his knees. He ran his hand down through his long faded moustache, eyes the same blue-gray as his daughter’s. His old-fashioned katana rested in an alcove at his back, sibling to the wakizashi Kaori carried—a scabbard of black enamel, embossed with golden cranes.

Yukiko put her palm to her brow, headache digging its boots into the back of her eyeballs. Sickness swelled in her stomach, the floor of Daichi’s house rolling like the deck of a sky-ship in a storm. She’d tried to close off the Kenning, but could still feel Buruu waiting on the landing outside—a pale inferno burning in her mind’s eye.

“It was either bring her with us or kill her, Kaori.”

“So kill her,” the woman snapped. “Where is the issue?”

“I don’t kill helpless girls with their hands bound at their sides.”

“She’s not a girl,” Kaori growled. “She’s a godsdamn Guildsman.”

Peppermint tea. Burning cedar. Old leather, sword oil and dry flowers. A perfume filling Daichi’s sitting room, filling her lungs and head, too much input, sharp and pointed inside her skull. She fancied she could still smell charring meat, hear the sizzle of her skin as Daichi pressed the burning blade to her tattoo.

Yukiko stood and walked to the window. The laughing fire spread awful warmth into every corner, snapping blackened logs between its fingers and breathing smoke up through a beaten brass flue. She pushed the shutters aside, gulping down lungfuls of fresh, rain-sweet air.

Daichi watched Yukiko carefully, faint concern in his eyes.

“Nobody in this room has more reason to hate the Guild than me, Kaori.” Yukiko turned from the window, stared at the council. “But I’m not certain I want to be a butcher.”

“The crews of those ironclads you destroyed might say otherwise,” Kaori said.

“Oh, you fuc—”

“We all do what needs to be done, Stormdancer,” Kaori snapped. “You included. We will all turn the waters red when we bathe once this is finished. The lotus must burn.”

Yukiko looked to Daichi, waiting for him to weigh in, but the old man was staring at his hands, uncharacteristically silent.

“I wanted to check with you all before I did anything final.” Yukiko wiped sweat-soaked palms on her hakama legs. “It’s safe to bring her here. Kin assured me there’s no way for the Guild to track her out of her skin.”

“And you trust him?” Maro scoffed.

“Of course I trust him.” Yukiko’s voice was cold as winter morning. “He saved my life. I trust him more than I trust you.”

“Be it made of scales or brass, a snake who sheds his skin is still a snake.”

“There is no steel in that boy,” Kaori said. “No fire. Only treachery.”

“How can you say that?” Yukiko felt heat in her cheeks, memories of his lips rushing beneath her skin. “He gave up everything to be here with us.”

“He gave up everything to be here with you,” Kaori said. “He cares nothing for the revolution. If you left us, he’d be gone tomorrow. You are the reason he is here, Stormdancer. Open your eyes.”

Yukiko drew breath to reply, but found no words.

“You’re the reason. The first and only reason.”

“This is not about the boy.” Sensei Ryusaki’s low growl cut through the tension. “This is about the Guildsman, and what we do with it.”

“Kill it,” Maro said flatly. “Their kind are poison. The lotus must burn.”

“I agree,” Yukiko nodded. “We’d be fools to trust it.”

She looked amongst the council, noted the surprise on their faces.

“Look, I know that might make me a bitch, but at least I’m not a stupid bitch.”

“What if this girl speaks the truth?” Daichi’s voice cut the air like a knife. “What if there are more like her in the Guild?”

“Impossible,” Kaori said.

“Arashitora were impossible too, a few months ago.” Daichi’s voice was rough as bluestone gravel. “Now look at the magnificence outside this room.”

The council looked out through the open doorway at the thunder tiger sprawled upon the deck. Buruu was stretched out in the rain, idly tearing up talonfuls of planking. His yawn sent tremors through the floor.

TELL THEM IT IS RUDE TO STARE. EVEN AT MAGNIFICENCE.

Hush! Gods, you’re too loud. Go back to sleep.

She felt the thunder tiger trying to hold himself back, aware of her pain, allowing only a sliver of himself to creep across the bond between them. And though his thoughts were tinged with bright, crackling feedback, at least the volume receded to a tolerable level.

HOW CAN I SLEEP WITH YOUR MIND SO FULL OF NOISE?

I suppose you want to venture an opinion on all this?

YES. BUT I AM STILL BASKING IN THE “MAGNIFICENT” COMMENT. GIVE ME A MOMENT …

“Father, you cannot mean to trust it.” Kaori placed her hand on the old man’s knee.

Daichi sipped his tea, cleared his throat. “All I say is consider if she speaks truth. Think of what it would gain us to start a rebellion within the Guild. Think of the damage we could do. This girl could be the secret to bringing down the chi-mongers once and for all.”

Yukiko met the old man’s gaze. “I don’t think we can trust her.”

“Can we not, Stormdancer? Yet in the same breath, you would tell us to treat your Kin as one of our own?”

AH, THERE IT IS.

Yukiko winced, turned her head aside as if from an incoming slap.

Too loud!

Buruu pulled himself back again, curling inward until only a splinter remained.

I AM SORRY. I NEED NOT SHARE MY THOUGHTS WHEN THIS OLD MAN SPEAKS THEM FOR ME. I WILL REMAIN MAGNIFICENTLY SILENT.

“I wish you wouldn’t call me that.” Yukiko folded her arms, ignoring Buruu’s smug, self-satisfied warmth.

“Stormdancer?” Daichi’s eyebrows were raised over the rim of his teacup.

“It’s not my name.”

“It is what you are.”

“The way you all look at me … it’s like you expect to see lightning coming out of my hands, or flowers blooming wherever I walk. I haven’t done anything yet, and you act like I’ve saved the world.”

“You have given people hope,” Daichi said. “That is a precious thing.”

“It’s a dangerous thing.”

“No more dangerous than executing this girl for the sin of what she used to be.”

“Gods, Daichi, when we first came here you were willing to murder Kin on exactly the same suspicion. You were willing to kill me over a tattoo.”

“Perhaps I have learned a few lessons since then. From a new sensei.” Daichi smiled. “And you say you haven’t done anything yet.”

Yukiko stared at the old man, mute and still. It wasn’t so long ago she was standing over him in this very room, knife at his throat while he demanded she kill him. But it seemed every time Daichi spoke, some new facet of him came to light. His hatred of the Guild and government was tempered by steady hands and a fierce, calculating mind. She could see why the Kagé followed him. Why they were willing to risk their lives for his vision.

The truth was, he was a natural leader—the leader she feared she’d never be. All she had was the desire for revenge. The memory of her father’s death, his blood warm and sticky on her hands, bubbling on his lips as he died. The thought of it threatened to overwhelm her, pulsing in time with the headache splitting the bone at the base of her skull.

“It seems somehow out of balance, does it not?” Daichi coughed hard, cleared his throat as he looked around the council. “To spare the boy and end the girl?”

“We can always kill them both,” Kaori said.

Yukiko rubbed her pounding temples, closed her bloodshot eyes. She could feel the forest all around her, the myriad lives just beyond the window, the heat and chatter of their minds rising in her own. A barrage. A bedlam. Concussive and sickening, pouring over her like scalding water. And as she closed her eyes, tried to stifle the fires burning in her head, to her amazement, her absolute horror, she realized she could sense other pulses within the Kenning. Something beyond the fluttering thoughts of birds, the faint and furtive impulses of small warm things, the boiling heartbeat of the thunder tiger just outside the door.

She could feel the Kagé too.

Blurry and indistinct, all heat and light, alien shapes and impossible tangles of emotion. Everywhere. Like the answer to a perception puzzle that, once seen, can never be missed. She remembered reaching out to Yoritomo’s mind in the Market Square, trying to hold on to him like a handful of sand. But now, effortlessly, she could feel every person in the village. A low-level hum stacked upon itself, one person at a time, until the entire world was shapeless noise. She bent double, blinking hard, Buruu rising to his feet and whining.

SISTER?

Daichi took another sip of tea, his voice a dry whisper.

“Are you well, Stormdancer?”

She smoothed the hair from her brow, the sensation of her fingertips like sledgehammers across her skin. She tried to close herself off, to force the noise and heat away, curling up inside herself and closing down the Kenning completely.

Gods, what’s wrong with me?

“Yukiko,” Daichi said. “Are you well?”

She took a deep breath, exhaled slow. The world had fallen quiet, and yet she could still feel it, just outside her skull. The tide of it rushing back out to sea before its next surge, a tsunami rising to blot out the sun. She in its shadow, standing an insect high.

“I have a headache, Daichi-sama.”

“Perhaps you should rest?” Kaori asked.

“How can I rest?” She blinked at the older woman, out of breath as if she’d been sprinting. “The Lotus Guild is trying to reforge Kazumitsu’s Dynasty and you’re talking about killing Kin? We should be talking about Hiro. The wedding. What are we doing to stop it?”

“The Kuro Street cell are already at work,” Kaori said. “We have an operative inside the palace walls. The ceremony is weeks away. Calm yourself.”

“I am calm!”

“Yukiko…” Daichi said.

SISTER.

“No, godsdammit!” she shouted. “The whole nation was ready to rise a few days ago, and now you’re sitting on your hands while it all slips—”

“Yukiko!”

Daichi shouted this time, graveled voice like a slap on her skin. She forced herself to be still, caught her breath, felt Buruu’s concern flooding her receptors. The world pulsing, the thoughts of everyone in the room building against her crumbling little dam as the whole earth beneath her swayed.

“What?” she hissed.

“Your ears are bleeding,” Daichi said.

She reached up to her head, felt the flood of thick warmth down the sides of her neck, spattering on the floor. Black suns imploded in her vision, tiny singularities folding in upon themselves and drawing her with them. Buruu was at the doorway, his thoughts a storm in her skull, the crunch and crumble of thunder interspersed with white strobes of crackling lightning. She fought for breath, for space, for a moment’s silence inside her head.

The tide came rolling in.

The walls trembling, the floor beneath her rolling. She sank to her knees, clutching her temples, heard the clatter of the tiny ornaments on Daichi’s shelves, chess pieces tumbling and falling. People on their feet, shouting, their thoughts impossible to keep at bay, flooding into her and out of her nostrils in scarlet floods. A teacup smashing on the boards. Daichi’s sword falling from the wall. Cries of alarm from the villagers outside as the trees literally trembled in their roots, and in her head a tangle, a briar, thorned and tearing, all of their thoughts, their hopes, their fear (gods, their fear), everything they were and could have been and wanted to be filling her up and pulling her down to the dark beneath her feet.

YUKIKO!

Buruu, help me!

WHAT ARE YOU DOING?

I can’t keep it out!

It rose up on black wings, like some forgotten beast beneath the bed in the days when blankets were armor and her father’s voice the only sword she needed to keep the dark at bay. But he was gone, gone to his pyre, gone to the great judge Enma-ō. She could see him now; the ashes of offerings daubed on his face, cadaverous skin hanging loose from his bones, black blood still leaking from the hole in his throat. Her hands on the wound, trying to stop the flow, but it was too much, too deep, too late. Heat and thoughts and screams and floods, and as it rose up to swallow her, she felt Buruu in the black, groping toward her, burning in her mind.

HOLD ON TO ME.

Buruu!

HOLD ON TO ME, SISTER.

A tracery of blood vessels pulsing across the backs of her eyelids, strobing light beyond.

Reaching for him, her rock, her anchor, all that held her still in that gnashing swell.

His wings about her, ozone and feathers and warmth, soft as pillows.

And into the dark, she fell.

8 NO ONE

No matter the shape of the shoreline, or the color of the horizon, there are three breeds of drunk to be found beneath the rising and setting of the sun.

There’s the jovial kind who takes to the bottle when he has cause to celebrate, who has a few too many at festival feasts and revels in the rush of blood to his cheeks. He slurs his songs and argues with his friends about the gaijin war or the last arena match, grinning to the eyeteeth all the while. And though he might swim deep in the bottle, he doesn’t drown, and when he looks at the bottom he can still see his own reflection and smile.

Then there’s the kind who drinks like it’s his calling. Hunched silent over his glass, charging headlong toward stupor as fast as lips and throat can take him. He takes no joy in the journey, nor solace in company upon the road, but he keens for his destination with an intensity that leaves shadows under his eyes. Oblivion. A sleep where the dreams are so far submerged beneath Forgetting’s warm embrace that their voices are a vibration rather than a sound, like a mother’s lullaby in the blurred days before words had shape or meaning.

And then, there was No One’s father.

Seven shades mean, the kind who saw the bottle as a doorway to the black inside. A solvent to peel the paint from his mask, the luster of bone and blood beneath. A mumbled excuse for what had happened the last time, and the unspoken promise why it would happen the next.

The bottle’s lips pressed against his own like a mistress, a balm discovered in empty days after he returned from the war overseas. A tranquilizer to silence the cries of the gaijin that still haunted his dreams, numb the pain of the parts he was missing. And though he was a gambler too, hopeless and helpless, the bottle was his first and truest love.

But he loved her too, in his own stumbling, ugly way. He called their mother “bitch,” her brother “bastard.” But his daughter? His dearest? His flower? Even at his worst, he still called her by name.

Hana.

Her earliest memories of her mother were of tears spilling from swollen eyes, irises of gleaming blue. Of slumped shoulders, trembling hands and broken fingers. Of screamed abuse. Open palms and bloody lips and spitting teeth. Long days without a crumb to eat. Brief periods of plenty, of laden tables and tiny toys (dolls for her, soldiers for her brother) that he would give them with his broad, broken-toothed smile, and hock to the pawnman a few weeks later.

Running in the gutters of Yama city with other orphans of the bottle or the smoke or the war, she and Yoshi, both harder than a Lotusman’s skin by the time she was six. Violence and grime and bloody knuckles, wrapped in the stink of chi and shit. Fistfights. Broken glass. Blacklung beggars rotting in drains, or coughing their last in the squeezeways where the children played and laughed and forgot, if only for a moment. But through it all, they had each other. At least she and Yoshi had each other.

Blood is blood.

And then Father bought the farm. Literally. A tiny crop of lotus near Kigen city, snatched on a triple-nine hand in some yakuza smoke house. War hero turned man of the land. And so they left Yama, caught an airship south to Kigen; the first and only time in her life she’d ever flown. The engines were a thrum in her bones, and the wind a shower of gentle kisses on her cheeks, and she stood at the prow and watched the world sailing away beneath them, wishing they would never, ever have to come down from the clouds.

Yoshi hated him. Hated him like poison. But even when the beatings became too numerous to count, when the bottle had stolen all he was and would ever be, she loved him. She loved him with all her heart.

She couldn’t help it.

He was her da.

She’d rolled out of bed before the sunset and dragged on her servant’s clothes, the taste of stale exhaust buttered on her tongue. Washing her face in their bucket of tepid water, she felt at her cheek, her eyebrow, the scar tissue smooth beneath her fingers. Her memory awash with the gleam of candlelight on broken glass. Spit and blood. She straightened the patch over her eye, smoothed her unruly bob down as best she could and prepared to inhale her night. A glance into Yoshi and Jurou’s bedroom showed both boys asleep, sprawled across grubby sheets, mercifully free of cat excrement.

Bye, Daken.

The tom was sitting at the windowsill, a black silhouette against the slowly darkening sky, watching her with piss-colored eyes.

… careful …

No One picked up the iron-thrower, lying amidst the empty bottles and scattered playing cards. She slipped the weight into a hidden pocket beneath her shoulder, patted its bulk.

I’m always careful. See you tonight.

… will see you first …

Out the door and down the stairs into dirty streets and long shadows, hundreds of people scurrying about their business before the nighttime curfew fell. The city’s stink was waiting for her—human waste, black seawater and chi fumes. Autumn’s chill was a welcome relief after the blistering summer, but the scarlet sunset was still bright as a blast furnace, and she slipped her decrepit goggles over her eye to spare it the burn.

She could feel the noise pressing on her skin, the bustle and murmur of people hurrying to end their day, the hum of motor-rickshaw, generator growls. Beneath it all, more a vibration than a sound, she could sense the subtle ring of discontent. Of anger. Broken glass crunching underfoot, the straw-dry crackle of tinder, ready to ignite. Graffiti splashed over army recruitment posters; the same message on almost every street.

ARASHI-NO-ODORIKO COMES.

She walked over the tar-black Shoujo and Shiroi rivers, into the cramped symmetry of Upside. Here the mood shifted; neo-chōnin merchants scurrying about, hunched shoulders and nervous glances, market stalls standing empty. The sun was kissing the horizon by the time she made it to the palace grounds, bowing low before the gate guards, proffering her permit with downcast gaze. The lowly Shit Girl was unworthy of evening salutations, of course, and the men simply opened the gate and stood aside. The thought of speaking to a Burakumin would no more have crossed their minds than the thought of addressing raw sewage floating in the gutter.

Courtiers gathered in multicolored knots, murmurs hidden behind breather and fluttering fan, watchful eyes narrowed to paper cuts as she made her way to the royal wing to begin her nightly duties. A trio of wretchedly thin tigers strained against their chains in the gloom-soaked courtyard, wheezing in the poisoned air. Once she entered the Daimyo’s wing, everywhere she walked, the chirp and skritch and creak of nightingale floors followed like a shadow.

If the floors were not enough to dissuade potential assassins, the Guild had released a swarm of what were apparently called “spider-drones” inside the palace a week ago. The devices were fist-sized, set with a windup key and eight segmented legs, needle-sharp. They crawled the halls, the ceilings, delicate clockwork innards tick-tick-ticking. She’d picked one up out of curiosity when they first appeared, and it had vibrated in her hand and sang tang!tang!tang! until she put it down again. A fellow servant had warned her the devices transmitted everything they saw to their Guild masters, and from that day forth, No One had been looking over her shoulder for the accursed little machines. Between the floors and the Guild’s eyes, Lord Hiro’s claim to the throne was looking more secure by the day.

Stopping outside the Daimyo’s suite, she bowed low to the Iron Samurai guarding his door. Their golden tabards declared them members of the Kazumitsu Elite—the guardians of the royal line, wreathed in the shame of failure after the Shōgun’s assassination. They stood seven feet tall in their suits of ō-yoroi armor, all pistons and clockwork and roof-broad spaulders, chainsaw katana and wakizashi crossed at their waists. In the days before Yoritomo’s death, their suits had been enameled black, but now the armor was painted bone-white; the color of death daubed onto living men.

She’d heard rumors about the night of the Inochi Riots, when news of the Guild’s atrocities against gaijin war prisoners had first broken over the wireless. Stories about a legion of pale ghosts issuing forth from the royal palace to crush the uprising into the dust. A young captain leading their charge, flames glinting in eyes as green as hellsfire.

An almost imperceptible nod told No One she was allowed inside. Bowing low, she pulled aside the double doors, gaze downturned, shoulders hunched.

“Try now,” said a metallic, sibilant voice.

She stepped into the room, taking in the lantern-light scene before dropping to her knees and pressing forehead to floorboard. Three Guildsmen were gathered around a hospice chair. The first pair were indistinguishable; vaguely feminine in form, clad in skintight, earth-brown membranes and long, buckle-studded aprons. Silver orbs were affixed to their spines, eight long, gleaming limbs unfolding in a razor-sharp halo about them. They had featureless faces and bulbous eyes, glowing heartsblood red.

She recognized the third Guildsman immediately—Kensai, Second Bloom of Chapterhouse Kigen, voice of the Guild in the Tiger capital. A hulking figure over six feet tall, muscular lines shaped into the atmos-suit of burnished brass covering his flesh. Eyes aglow. Mechabacus on his chest, stuttering and chattering the indecipherable language of the machine. Disconcertingly, the face molded into the Second Bloom’s helm was that of a perfect, beautiful boy, segmented iron piping spilling from a mouth frozen in a perpetual scream. As always, the sight of him unleashed a slick of cold fear in the girl’s belly.

“Lord Hiro, please.” Kensai’s voice was an iron rasp. “Try again.”

No One glanced up swiftly, focused on the figure reclining in the hospice chair. Long dark hair and a pointed goatee. Piercing green eyes, like Kitsune jade. High cheekbones and smooth skin, bronzed and well-muscled, six small hills on an abdomen that seemed carved of kiri wood. She thought he could have been handsome in a different place, a different time. But sleepless nights had drawn gray circles around those beautiful eyes, and lack of appetite (she’d noted his meals were always untouched) had left him gaunt and stretched.

Lord Hiro lifted his right arm, frown darkening his brow, closing his fingers one by one.

No matter how many times she saw it, she had to admire the artistry. The ball-joint digits with their case-hardened tendons. The intricate lace of machinery, at once awful and beautiful. A hissing, whirring construct, cogs and interlocking teeth, crafted of dull, gray iron.

A clockwork arm.

“Excellent,” Kensai breathed. “Your response speed is most promising.”

“Will I be able to wield a sword soon?” Lord Hiro’s voice came from far away.

“Certainly.” A spider-woman nodded, silver limbs flexing. “The prosthetic is far stronger than mere meat and bone. But the finesse with which you wield a weapon is up to you. Practice, Hiro-sama. Skin is strong. Flesh is weak.”

“The lotus must bloom,” Kensai murmured.

The Tiger Daimyo stood slowly, flexing the arm amidst the hiss of pistons and small bursts of chi exhaust. An iron cuff sleeved his shoulder, hiding the junction where metal ended and meat began. His other shoulder was tattooed with the imperial sun, burning across sculpted muscle, a newly inked cluster of lotus blooms beneath indicating his rank as a clanlord. A Daimyo. Master of the Tiger zaibatsu.

Impressive work for an eighteen-year-old.

Slipping on a loose, silken robe, he finally spotted No One kneeling on the floor, caught her in the midst of one furtive glance. Blanching, she pressed her head back to the boards, heart pounding in her chest. She should have waited until they were gone. Should have started with the ministerial chambers instead of coming here, falling under those bloody stares—

“Be about your business, girl,” the Tiger Lord said.

“Great Lord.”

She stood swiftly, making her way into the dim bedchamber beyond. Kneeling by the chamber pot, listening to the drone of the Second Bloom’s voice.

“The Phoenix clanlords have accepted invitation to your wedding, great Lord. The Floating Palace is already on its way here. We have it on good authority the Dragons will soon follow. With Ryu and Fushicho ratifying your claim, the Kitsune will soon fall into line. If not, any thoughts of rebellion will be crushed once the Foxes set eyes on your wedding gift.”

“Wedding gift?”

“Hai. I will take you to Jukai province for an inspection. A week or so from now.”

“I have never been fond of surprises, Kensai.”

“Then this will be a first, great Lord.”

No One stood slowly, frowning, chamber pot in hand.

Wedding gift? What in the Maker’s name…?

She’d lingered too long for answers. Slipping from the bedchamber, gaze downturned, she carried her clay burden across the room. The assemblage paid her no more attention than a stain on the floor. The spider-women were packing away their tools, the Tiger Lord standing on the balcony, staring out over his city as evening smothered it into silence. The Second Bloom loomed at his back, the smell of grease and chi thick in the air.

“Now,” Kensai said. “We must speak of these … funerary theatrics among you and the other Kazumitsu Elite…”

Out the door, ducking between the two towering hulks of death-white iron standing vigil. Her mind awhirl. She had to get to the Kuro Street safe house, report to Gray Wolf. But to avoid suspicion, she’d have to work her full shift, straight-faced, no pace in her step, no fear in her eye. The girl nobody wanted, nobody knew. An insignificance in human guise, no more worthy of concern or notice than a cockroach crawling in the cracks.

Forcing those cracks wider by the day.

I am nothing.

I am No One.

The earthquake struck soon afterward—a thirty-second tremor shaking the palace walls, vases tumbling from their perches and tapestries from their hooks. The fitful tremblings of the ground beneath their feet provided momentary distraction amidst the mounting courtly intrigue, but of course, it was left to the servants to clear up the mess afterward. The house mistress was furious and No One, being who she was, wore the worst of her temper.

Lady Sun was perhaps half an hour from waking by the time No One escaped the palace. The girl walked slowly, straw hat pulled down low, through the grounds and out into the predawn still. She saw a beggar on an empty street corner, walking in circles, claiming the quake was proof of Lord Izanagi’s displeasure at the impending royal wedding. As she watched, the poor wretch was beset by fresh-faced bushimen in Hiro’s colors and treated to an impromptu boot party. When pressed by their captain, she showed her permit, and hurried on her way.

Across the river to Downside, daylight still an empty vow on the eastern horizon. Daken met her in his usual spot, slinking from the alley mouth like a blade from its sheath, the scent of freshly murdered corpse-rat smeared on his muzzle as he purred and pressed his face to hers.

… saw you first …

Clever. You want to keep lookout for me again?

… we go to thin house . .?

Just for a little while. I need to see my friends.

… Yoshi come . .?

No, Daken. Yoshi can’t know about them. My friends are a secret, remember?

… many secrets …

You won’t tell him, will you?

… have not told you his, have i . .?

The tom gifted her with a smug gaze, turned and dashed off into the gloom. For all his size, Daken moved like a shadow, silent as tombstones. From the tumbledown rooftops, he could see for miles—better than anyone who might follow her through the twisted labyrinth into Docktown. Hands hidden in her sleeves, the comforting weight of the iron-thrower beneath her arm, No One set off through the sprawl toward the bitter reek of Kigen Bay.

Doubling back. Checking at corners. Watching reflections in dirty shop-front glass. Just like they’d taught her. Her induction into the Kagé had been swift; need dictating pace. After witnessing Yoritomo’s death at the Stormdancer’s hands, a tiny spark had flared inside her, dimly illuminating a formerly lightless corner of her mind. The notion of rebelling—of not only standing apart but working against the government—it simply wasn’t something she’d ever considered possible. But it was surprising how the pillars of an unshakable worldview could be reduced to rubble when a sixteen-year-old girl murders the Lord of the Imperium right in front of you. Impossible notions become plausible in the face of an event that tectonic.

The problem being, of course, she had no way of tracking the Kagé down. No ingress through the doors of the cabal. The spark inside her flickered and dimmed, no kindling to help it flourish. Yoshi kept her clear of the Inochi Riots—told her flatly the systematic murder of thousands of gaijin prisoners for the sake of a flower crop was none of their business. But when the Stormdancer returned and made her speech in the Market Square during Yoritomo’s funeral, when the girl had looked into the crowd and stared right at her, No One had felt the spark burst into ravenous flame. As the Stormdancer had taken to the sky, despite the risks, despite knowing it was foolish, No One had found her fist in the air and tears in her eye and known, simply known she had to do something more.

The very next day, she’d been approached by Gray Wolf.

The safe house was an unassuming building, crammed between two warehouses, close to the towering sky-spires. Kuro Street was narrow, stubborn weeds struggling through the cracks into a life of suffocating exhaust. Boarded windows. Street courtesans beneath paper parasols stained gray by the toxic rain. Gutters overflowing with garbage, lotus fiends and blacklung beggars—just another stretch of Docktown real estate to any without eyes to see the truth of it.

No One nodded to one of the Kagé lookouts (a twelve-year-old girl inexplicably named “Butcher,” who had the most astonishingly foul mouth she’d ever heard) and walked up to the safe house’s narrow facade. Knocking four times, waiting until a thin elderly woman opened the door. She was dressed in dark cloth, silver hair in a single braid, mouth covered by a black kerchief. Her back bent, fingers worn, old lines deepened by hardship at the corners of her eyes.

“Gray Wolf.” No One bowed.

The old woman motioned with her head. “Come in.”

They walked past a narrow dining area, descending creaking stairs into a dingy cellar. The walls had been knocked out, connecting the basements of the neighboring buildings into one large room, multiple stairwells leading up into the adjacent structures. An impressive collection of radio equipment was arranged on a long table, maps of Kigen on the walls. A young woman with sleepy eyes was bent over the rig, at work with a soldering iron. A few others were scattered around the room, falling still as she entered. The biggest of them—a towering lump of muscle with shovel-broad hands—regarded her with an even stare.

“Who’s this?”

“Our friend in the palace,” Gray Wolf said. “Now come and say hello, you rude sod. You’re not so big I can’t take to you with the wooden spoon.”

The man smiled, and favoring his right leg, limped over and offered a bow. He stood a good foot taller than No One. Strong jaw, thick neck, cheeks that hadn’t felt a razor’s touch in weeks. His right shoulder was tattooed with a beautiful phoenix, his left with the Imperial Sun (she’d learned quickly that city operatives didn’t burn off their ink). He had a handsome face framed by tight braids, hard eyes ringed in shadow. A kusarigama hung from his obi, the sickle blade almost hidden by the folds of his grubby trousers.

“No One,” Gray Wolf said. “We call this unshaven lump the Huntsman.”

No One bowed. “Forgive my rudeness, but I have news.”

The Gray Wolf’s matronly smile evaporated. “What is it, child?”

“The Fushicho clanlords have thrown in with Lord Hiro. They will attend his wedding, and almost certainly support him as Shōgun. The Ryu are apparently set to roll over and ask to have their bellies scratched too.”

Gray Wolf sighed, shook her head. “So easily. I had hoped…”

“Their oaths bind them to the Kazumitsu,” the big man said. “If the dynasty lives, so does their obligation. But without the wedding, there’s no way in hells the Dragons would bow to someone like Hiro. Their army is huge. And the Phoenix hate bowing to anyone.”

“The Kitsune still have not answered. Perhaps the Foxes will choose—”

“Forgiveness, please,” No One interrupted. “But there is more. The Second Bloom was speaking of a wedding gift for Lord Hiro. An inspection tour in Jukai province.”

The Huntsman raised one eyebrow. “What kind of gift?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they’re building something? A weapon?”

Gray Wolf turned to one of the men by the radio rig. “Sparrow, send word to the Iishi. Ask if the Stormdancer’s Guildsman knows anything about this business.”

“How’s Michi?” the Huntsman asked. “Have you spoken to her?”

“Still under house arrest. All of Aisha’s maidservants are. Lord Hiro has appointed his cousin as Lord Magistrate, a man named Ichizo. He’s questioning the girls personally.”

“At least she’s out of Kigen jail,” the big man sighed. “I told her not to go back there…”

“She said she couldn’t abandon—”

… beware …

Daken’s thoughts flared in the Kenning, dulled with distance, sharp with urgency. She could feel him prowling rooftops to the north, caught a glimpse of the jagged skyline through his eyes, the sun just beginning to crest the horizon as a cruel stink drifted in off the bay.

What’s wrong?

… men coming iron clothes many …

Soldiers?

… yes …

“Gods.” No One glanced around the room, palms sweating. “We have to go.”

“What?” Gray Wolf frowned. “What do you—”

“There are bushimen coming. Lots of them. We have to get out of here. Now.”

“I didn’t hear any lookout sig—”

A brief whistle sounded in the streets above, two notes, faint and sharp. The signal was repeated, closer, drifting down the narrow stairwell.

“Dawn raid…” the old woman whispered.

It seemed to No One the next moment stretched for an age. Gray Wolf and the Huntsman exchanging glances. Faces paling ever so slightly, eyes growing wide. Daken’s urgent thoughts pressing on her own—the image of bushimen in blood-red tabards pouring through the alleyways toward the safe house. And all at once, everyone in the basement was moving; snatching up weapons and radio equipment, tearing maps from walls. The Huntsman grabbed No One’s arm, looked her hard in the eye.

“Were you followed?”

“Of course not!”

“Are you certain?”

“My lookout saw them before yours did!”

Gray Wolf was directing the other Kagé, the old woman’s voice calm as a millpond, hard as folded steel. “You all know the protocols. Check your drop boxes for word, speak to nobody until you hear from us. Move, move!”

Kagé were already scattering up the different stairwells into the neighboring buildings, a few casting baleful glares at No One as they left. The big man was still in her face, anger plain in his eyes. Gray Wolf poked him in the chest to get his attention.

“I said get out. Go! Take No One with you!”

“Are you mad?” the Huntsman growled. “I’m not taking her anywhere.”

“Wait, you think I sold you out?” No One was incredulous.

“This raid is coincidence, then?”

“If I wanted to give away the safe house, I could have just told the bushi’ where you were! I’d have to be an idiot to come here on the day they raided you!”

“Maybe you are an idiot,” the big man said.

A defiant scowl. “Pardon me, Huntsman-sama, but maybe you can kiss my—”

A cry of pain from upstairs, the percussion of running feet. Blades being drawn. Steel on steel. Roared commands to halt in the Daimyo’s name. A flurry of multicolored profanity from Butcher. Gray Wolf slapped the big man on the arm.

“I said get out right now!”

“What about you?”

“I can take care of myself,” the old woman said. “This girl is our only road into the palace. We need her. Make sure she gets away safely, Huntsman.”

The big man cursed, glancing up at the crash of splintering wood, heavy footsteps on the floorboards. Struggling bodies and defiant curses. “All right, come on.”

He grabbed her hand before she could protest, dragged her up the left-hand stairwell and into an abandoned warehouse. Hauling her fast as his limp could take him, through the back door and out into the glare of a rear squeezeway. No One heard breaking glass behind, hoarse screams, a flare of sunburnt light. She felt Daken in her mind, flitting across the rooftops, closing her eye and seeing through his. Bushimen closing in from all directions. Bodies prostrate in the street outside; some lying obediently with their hands on their heads, others bleeding quietly onto broken cobbles. The Huntsman dragged her west along the squeezeway, but she pulled back sharply, shaking her head.

“Not that way.”

“What?”

“There’s too many. Come on.”

The big man paused, reluctant and glacial. But pulling insistently on his wrist, she tugged him back along the thin alley, shrouded in the stink of rat urine. Sleek, furred shapes slunk away at their approach. Empty bottles, human waste, crumpled newssheets. They cut down the crowded brickway, the Huntsman limping hard, No One’s heart slapping the inside of her rib cage as she pulled up her goggles against spears of rusted daylight. Army recruitment posters smeared with white paint; a defiant warning in tall, bold kanji.

ARASHI-NO-ODORIKO COMES.

Out onto a main street, a limping dash across open ground into another alley. Squeezing through the narrow space, knee-deep in refuse, her grip on the Huntsman’s fingers slippery with sweat. Distant shouts. The tune of clashing steel, the thunder of iron-shod boots.

“How do you know where you’re going?” he gasped.

“Trust me.”

On they ran, or ran as best they could with the big man’s limp. His face was twisted, sweat-slick. One hand wrapped in hers, the other pressed to his right thigh, blood seeping through his pants leg. Two blocks later, No One was beginning to think they were in the clear when she heard Daken whisper a warning from above. Moments later, shouts echoed up the street, heavy tread ringing on the cobbles, citizens around them scattering. Two bushimen were charging, naginata spears outthrust, roaring “Halt in the Daimyo’s name!”

The Huntsman cursed, shoulders slumping, pulling his hand from her grip.

“This bastard leg…” he sighed. Unslinging the kusarigama from his waist, he hefted the sickle-shaped blade in one massive fist and nodded to her. “Go on, girl. Best keep running. If you’re the one who sold us out, I pray that Enma-ō feeds you to the hungry dead when you die.”

The big man turned to face the charging soldiers, letting his kusarigama’s chain slip through his fingers, swinging it around his head. With luck he’d take down one soldier before the second skewered him—but there was no chance he’d be walking away alive. No One blinked away the sweat, saw the inevitable outcome in her mind’s eye. The Huntsman sinking to the floor, chest punctured, ribs broken. Running back to her little hovel and little life, cut off from the Kagé as events spiraled out of control …

She squinted at the oncoming soldiers, realized they were raw recruits only a few years older than she. Scarlet tabards over banded breastplates, embroidered tigers, new kerchiefs. Young men, probably brought up on these same narrow streets, drafted into the military with the promise of regular meals and a place to belong.

The Huntsman threw his kusarigama, the weapon wrapping itself around an oncoming spear. The big man jerked the chain, pulling the wielder off balance and into an elbow that landed like falling concrete, snapping the boy’s jaw loose. Swinging the sickle blade, the Huntsman buried it in the bushiman’s neck, sent the soldier spinning away in a spray of red. His comrade roared, furious, thrusting his blade straight toward the big man’s heart.

No One raised a fistful of iron.

The shot was impossibly loud, recoil kicking up her forearm, knocking a frightened cry from her lips. The bushiman clutched his neck, a sticky red flower blooming in his fingers as he spun on the spot, gasping, scarlet gushing as he collapsed on the road in ruins.

The Huntsman was staring at her dumbfounded, a thin wisp of smoke rising from the iron-thrower’s barrel into the breathless space between them.

“If the Great Judge sends the hungry dead anywhere near me,” she gasped, “I’ll kick his privates so hard his throat will have three lumps.”

“Where the hells did you get that?”

… more coming go go …

“Later,” she said. “We have to move.”

The giant stooped, pulled his blade loose with a grunt, wiped the spatter of red from his face on his sleeve.

… friend . .?

No One looked to the rooftop overhead. She could see Daken’s silhouette against the bloody sky, a black shadow upon the eave, peering down to the drenched cobbles below. He saw the dead bushimen and licked his jowls.

Maybe …

“Huntsman, we need to go…”

“I have a flat, north of Downside.” The big man wrapped his kusarigama back around his waist. “It’s a trek, but we can lay low there for a while.”

No One eyed his leg, the bloodstain seeping through the fabric of his hakama. “My place is much closer. Easier to get to.”

“Is it safe?”

“Safer than being out here in broad daylight.”

The Huntsman looked around the street, down at the cooling meat at his feet.

… they coming …

“We need to go,” she said. “If you still think I brought the bushi’ here, ask yourself why I just shot one of them right in front of you. Ask yourself why I don’t blow out your kneecaps now and wait for more to arrive.”

He licked the sweat from his lips. Stared into her eye. Nodded slow.

“All right, then.”

“My name is Hana,” she said. “My real name, I mean.”

In the distance, they could hear running feet. Cries of alarm. The ringing of an iron bell. The big man sniffed, pulled his hat farther down over his face.

“Akihito,” he said. “My friends called me Akihito.”

9 A HEART EXHAUSTED

There weren’t tears enough for her grief.

All around her, she could hear the voices of the bamboo kami, the spirits in the stalks swaying with the gentle wind. The little girl stood by her brother’s grave, bloodshot eyes and sodden cheeks, Lady Sun filling the clearing with hateful, dappled light. The spirit stone on his burial plot was marked with his name, the day of his death and the day of his birth—the same day as hers.

Nine years ago that day.

“Happy birthday, Satoru,” Yukiko whispered.

It had been three months since the snake-strike. Three months since her twin died in her arms. It felt as if a part of her was missing—as if the gods had broken off a piece of her and left it bleeding on the floor. Her mother was lost in grief. Her father in guilt. But Yukiko? She was lost in the enormity of it all. A world too vast and lonely now that her brother wasn’t there to share it. An emptiness never filled. A hand never held. A question never answered.

“Ichigo.”

Her father’s voice, behind her, calling her by his pet name. She did not turn, simply stared through the tears at the bed where her brother would lay forever.

He knelt beside her on the warm ground, his long hair caught in the breeze and tickling her tear-stained cheeks. He touched her hand, gentle as snowflakes. She turned to look at him then, this man she called father that in truth she barely knew. A tanned and weatherworn face, roguish and handsome. Long moustache and dark hair, just beginning to gray at the temples. Dark, sparkling eyes, always searching.

He’d never been there when they were growing up, forever off on his grand hunts at the Shōgun’s behest. He would return to their little valley every once in a while, spoil them for a day or two, then disappear for months at a time. But he always brought the twins presents. He could always make her smile. And when he would lift her on his shoulders and carry her through the bamboo forest, it made her feel as tall as giants. Fierce as dragons.

“Have you finished packing your things?” he asked.

She blinked, avoided his gaze. She didn’t think it had been settled. She didn’t think her mother would ever agree to it. She thought maybe after her brother …

“We are still going to the Shōgun’s court then?”

“We must, Ichigo. My Lord commands and I obey.”

“But what about Satoru?” she whispered. “He’ll be all alo—”

The sentence cracked along with her voice and she turned her eyes to the grave at her feet. Tears swelled inside her, a choking ball of heat creeping up her throat. The empty yawned all about her, the world too big for her alone.

“I got you something,” her father said. “For your birthday.”

He held up a white box, tied with black ribbon. And if the sight of the sun gleaming on that dark silk made her heart beat a little faster, if thoughts of the countless mysteries that might lay within that box stilled the thoughts of her brother for a moment, she was only nine, after all.

She was only little.

She took the box in her hands, surprised at its weight.

“Open it,” he said.

She pulled at the ribbon, watching the bow fold in upon itself and fall open. Inside the box waited a gift so pretty it stole the breath from between her lips. A scabbard of lacquered wood, black as her father’s eyes, smooth as cat’s claws. Beside it, a six-inch length of folded steel, gleaming in the sun, so sharp it might cut the day in half.

“A knife?”

“A tantō,” he said. “All ladies of court carry one.”

“What do I need it for?”

“It will protect you.” He took the scabbard from the box, sheathed the blade and tucked it into her obi at the small of her back. “In the times when I cannot. And even when I’m not there, I will be with you.”

She felt strong arms around her then, lifting her off the ground, drawing her up into the sky. He said nothing at all, simply held her, rocked her back and forth and let her cry. She put her arms around his neck and held tight, as if he were the only thing to keep her from going under, falling away into the cold and black.

He pressed his lips against her cheek. His whiskers tickled her skin.

“I will be with you,” he said.

He could always make her smile.

A softness to her edges, satin weight on her eyelids. Her tongue too big for her mouth. The world swaying to a tune she couldn’t quite hear. The room spinning as she opened her eyes.

“You wake,” Daichi said.

Wind kami called down timeworn mountainsides, the spirits playing in the branches of the treetop village outside, bringing the brittle-crisp promise of winter to come. Yukiko sat up slowly, groaning and squeezing her eyes shut once more. The pulse of the entire world beat beneath her skin, the thoughts of every beast, man, woman and child around her, layered upon one another in a shapeless cacophony. She pawed blindly beside her bed, seized the half-empty saké jug, upending it into her mouth. Daichi murmured concern, tried to take the bottle from her hands but she pushed him away, molten fire pouring down her throat, rushing to fill the void inside her.

“Yukiko—”

“Stop, please,” she begged, curling into a ball with her fists to her temples. “Give me a minute. Just one minute.”

The old man sat in silence, legs crossed, palms upturned on his knees. He seemed a statue of some bygone warrior, katana slung across his back—a glacial stillness in contrast to the seething shift inside her head.

To even glance into the Kenning was to look at the sun. To make cinders of her eyes. But she could feel Buruu in there, rumbling beneath it all like thunder on a distant horizon. She reached for him, synapses ablaze—just a touch to let him know she was awake. The saké did its work; black velvet thrown over her head and smothering the noise and heat of the world. She felt it flow her to her edges, a beautiful gravity filling her to her fingernails, dragging the Kenning to some quiet corner in her mind and choking until it could barely breathe.

She didn’t know how long she lay there, curled like a babe in lightless, amniotic warmth. But finally she opened her eyes a sliver, saw the old man still seated at the edge of her bed, concern plain in those steel-gray eyes. He coughed once, twice, as if he’d been struggling to remain silent, wiping his knuckles across his lips. And finally he met her gaze.

“What is happening to you, Yukiko?”

His voice was graveled. Rusted. The muddy rasp of a pipe-fiend, so akin to her father’s for a moment she thought she was dreaming.

“I don’t know.” She shook her head, tongue numb. “I can hear everything. Animals. People. Everyone. Inside my head.”

The old man frowned. “Their thoughts?”

“Hai. But it’s like everyone shouting … all at once. It’s deafening.”

He stroked his moustache, slow and thoughtful. “The cause?”

“I don’t know. My father never told me about this. No one told me anything.”

“I do not mean to cause you alarm…” the old man paused, licked his lips, “but I think you caused an earthquake today.”

She stared at him, jaw slightly agape, blinking slow.

“Do you not remember the ground shaking?” Daichi asked. “Trees shivering like frightened children as you fell to your knees?”

“No.” A hollow whisper. “Gods…”

“Can you not hold it at bay? Control it?”

Yukiko fixed the old man in a bleary stare. The saké was heat in her veins and in her cheeks, pulling her eyelids closed. Legs trembling. Mouth dry. “My father … I think perhaps he smoked lotus to keep it quiet. Liquor seems to dull it, too.”

“That seems a dangerous road to walk. One that does not end in answers.”

“I know it,” she sighed, her tongue clumsy on her teeth. “Truly, I do. I don’t want to hide in the bottom of a bottle.”

“Kaori told me of the birds. The ones who killed themselves against your bedroom walls.”

“Buruu said it was because I was screaming. Inside their heads.”

“And now you say you can hear not just the thoughts of beasts, but of people too?”

Yukiko remained silent, awful certainty of Daichi’s destination building in her gut.

“Leave aside the earthquake for a moment,” he said. “The fact you may shake the very island beneath our feet when you get upset. Think for a moment what else might happen if you lose control again.”

“Are you saying—”

“I say nothing. I simply wonder if next time, it is not birds trying to silence your screams, but people.” The old man gestured around him. “Us.”

“Gods…”

“Indeed.”

Yukiko blinked, cold dread in her belly. She hadn’t even considered the thought …

“I don’t know what to do, Daichi,” she breathed, dragging her fingers through her hair. “I have nobody to ask how to control this thing. No teacher. No father. Nothing.”

Daichi steepled his hands beneath his chin, brows drawn together in thought. A long silence passed, his frown growing darker as moments turned to minutes.

“I did not wish to tell you this,” he finally said. “I should have spoken of it after the incident with the birds, but I hoped the matter not as grave as now I know it to be. And in truth, we cannot afford to lose you, Yukiko.”

“I don’t understand…”

“I know where you can find your answers. If answers exist to be found anywhere at all.” The old man coughed, wiped his mouth on his sleeve with a grimace. “A monastery on the isle of Shabishii, far north of here, near the Imperium’s edge. It was said the monks there kept the mysteries of the world inked on their flesh.”

“To keep them secret?”

“To keep them safe. Their order began with the rise of the Tenma Emperors, when the Imperial Censors first started burning ‘indecent’ literature. The monks tattooed themselves with ancient arts and the deepest secrets, that they would not be lost to the Imperium’s hubris. Much harder to kill a living man than incinerate a paper scroll.”

Yukiko raised an eyebrow. “But what happened when a monk died?”

“I do not know.” Daichi coughed again, rubbed at his throat as if pained. “I do not even know if the monastery still stands. I have heard rumor it was destroyed. Others say it is cursed.”

“People say the same about these mountains.”

“Precisely,” Daichi smiled. “I am hoping the Painted Brotherhood may encourage those rumors for the same reason we do. To keep away unwanted eyes.”

“Painted Brotherhood…”

“So they were named.”

Yukiko drew a deep, shivering breath, dragged her knuckles across her mouth. Beyond the saké blur, deep through the haze she’d plunged herself into, she could still hear it. The cacophony. The inferno waiting inside her head.

“But the wedding…” she said. “Aisha. The dynasty … I can’t leave now.”

“You see our dilemma. We need you and Buruu more than ever. And in truth, if all that was at stake were a few more birds, I could risk your presence here. But the people of this village … the wives and daughters and husbands and sons…”

“I’m a danger to them.”

The old man sighed, staring at empty palms as if they might hold the answers he sought.

“Hai.”

“So risk flying north on what might be a fool’s errand, or stay here and risk the entire village? Those are my options?”

A faint smile. “Nobody said being the Stormdancer would be easy.”

Yukiko pressed her knuckles to her temples, the throb pulsing just below the saké lull. Misery and pain and the swelling tide, pushing them all back with the simple, undeniable truth—that the choice Daichi presented was no choice at all. The path was clear. She need only start walking. And every second she wasted was another second the wedding drew closer. But still …

But still …

“We’ll be swift,” she said. “Fly to Shabishii as fast as we can, find what truths we may. At the very least, it’ll be a lot quieter in the sky.”

Daichi nodded. “You will be back in time to stop Aisha’s wedding, with a little luck.”

“You know what they say.” A tired, colorless smile. “Kitsune looks after his own…”

“So I will pray.”

Daichi reached out and took her hand. His fingers were callused, faint liver spots and wrinkles decades deep. She met his eyes, and for a moment, she saw past the mask he wore, the iron he encased his soul inside. He seemed terribly old, bent beneath his burdens, tired beyond all want of sleep. His smile was frayed at the hem.

“I know what it is we are asking of you, Yukiko. I see the toll it takes.”

She looked into his eyes, searching for a hint of scorn and finding none. The words inside her were like living things, bubbling in her throat, demanding to be aired. She forced her lips together, fighting a losing battle to keep them at bay. When finally they spilled forth, they were a whisper muffled by the curtain of her hair.

“It’s all weighing too heavy, Daichi.” She took a shuddering breath, sighed. “Being this thing. This Stormdancer. I feel like an utter fraud. A little girl stamping her feet and screaming life isn’t fair.”

“You give people hope, Yukiko. The strength at the heart of all strength. The steps you take now, the first steps—they are always the hardest. But the footprints you leave in the earth behind you will be followed by thousands.”

“I’m so afraid sometimes. I think about my father…” She shook her head. “I haven’t shed a single tear for him, did you know that? He’s dead and I can’t even bring myself to cry.”

“It is not fear that chases away your tears, Yukiko-chan.” Daichi’s voice was low, tinged at the edges with a charcoal rasp. “It is rage.”

“Buruu says the same. He says it will burn me up inside.”

“No.” Daichi leaned forward, pinned her in his stare. “No, you listen to me, girl. Look around you. At this world they have left you. Red skies. Black rivers. Mountains of bones. You should be angry. You should be furious.”

He took hold of her hand, squeezed it so tight her knuckles hurt.

“The time for fear is long since gone. It died with the last phoenix, the last butterfly. It died when we traded the ease of the machine for the grace of our souls. Nothing will change if we cherish our fear as if it were a blessing. If we are afraid to tear down the old, and lose what we may in that unmaking, we will never build the new.”

“I’m not sure I can be what you want me to be, Daichi.”

The old man sat up straight, released his grip on her hands.

“I am sure,” he said.

Reaching behind him, he lifted the ancient katana from his back, held it out on upturned palms. Yukiko caught her breath, eyes roaming the lacquer scabbard, the golden cranes embossed into gleaming wood. The words he spoke danced like static electricity upon her skin.

“I wielded this blade through many battles, none so great as the one before us. And so I give it to you, who need it now more than I.”

“Gods,” she breathed. “I can’t accept this, Daichi…”

“You can.” He ran his hand across the hilt, a lingering caress of farewell. “And as I give you this gift, I give it a name. I name this blade ‘Yofun.’”

“‘Anger,’” she whispered.

“My gift to you, Yukiko-chan.” He nodded. “Use it to cut away your fear, and leave nothing in its wake. Cherish it. And cherish this truth I speak to you now, if no other before or after: the greatest tempest Shima has ever known waits in the wings for you to call its name. Your anger can topple mountains. Crush empires. Change the very shape of the world.”

He pressed the blade into her hand, watched her with cool eyes the color of steel.

“Your anger is a gift.”

Kin sat alone on the rope bridge, feet dangling over the precipice, listening to the fading day. The transition never failed to fascinate him; the light’s slow descent from copper to auburn, through dried blood and on to tar black. Tiny noises that would be lost in garish daylight, sharp and clear under the blanket of night.

When he was younger, locked inside his skin, the entire world was muted beneath the metal, the ever-turning chatter of his mechabacus. Chapterhouse Kigen had no windows, no way to tell night from day. The glow of cutting torches had been his dawn, flickering disks of halogen his stars. He was fourteen years old before he saw his first sunset, on the deck of the Thunder Child as they sailed from Kigen Bay. Even now, he could recall the tightness in his chest as that blinding globe sank toward the horizon, setting the entire island ablaze. All was flame and taut, black shadows, reaching out to him like the hands of old, forgotten friends. His breath had caught so completely in his lungs that for a terrifying moment, he thought the bellows in his skin had failed. That he was suffocating.

But in the Iishi, he could hear a thousand tiny voices amongst the whispering leaves. The wood beneath him sighing and shifting, the cries of night birds in search of prey, the song of insects amidst gentle fingers of wisteria vines. The soft beat of approaching footsteps.

He shot to his feet, heart in his throat. “Yukiko?”

“Hello, Kin.”

He reached out to her, awkward and stumbling and feeling entirely idiotic, gifting her a clumsy hug. She pressed her head against his chest and sighed.

“I was worried about you,” he breathed.

As she turned her face up to his and smiled, he smelled something sharp and poisonous on her breath. Noticed a vacant glaze in her eyes. “I’m all right.”

Reluctantly he released his hold, sat down on the footbridge again. Yukiko sat beside him, dangling her feet over the edge and swinging them back and forth like a child, eyes shining with the light of a falling sun. He saw her cheeks were slightly flushed, noticed she was carrying a bottle of saké in her hand. He tried not to stare at the katana strapped to her back.

“I thought you’d want to know.” She took a pull from the bottle, closed her eyes. When she spoke again, her voice was strained. “Daichi and the council have voted. The False-Lifer will be kept alive. Locked up, of course. But they’re not going to kill her.”

“That’s good.” He glanced at the liquor again. “I’m glad.”

Sparrows sang to each other in the gloom, calling their good nights as the dark crept closer on velvet-quiet feet.

“Where’s Buruu?” he asked.

“Fishing.” She gifted him with a small smile. “Gorging himself before we leave. He eats like a lotusfiend on a comedown. I hope we can get off the ground.”

“Before you leave? Where are you going?”

“North. Shabishii Island.”

“Can I … come with you?”

She sighed, ran her knuckles across her brow. “I don’t think so. Your thoughts are like a tangle of thorns inside my head.” She held up the bottle, saké sloshing inside. “This is all that’s keeping them quiet.”

“My … thoughts?”

“Not just you.” She waved the bottle across the village. “Everyone. All of you. I can’t shut you out. So I’m just not sure it’s a wonderful idea for me to be around people right now.”

“That’s…” He floundered for the words, shaking his head. “That’s just…”

“Unbelievable?” she sighed. “Terrifying?”

“What’s causing it?”

“That’s what I’m hoping to find out in Shabishii. I have to control this power, Kin. I have to master it before it masters me. If I don’t, I’m a danger to everyone around me.” She touched his hand. “Including you.”

“Am I hurting you now? I mean … do you want me to go?”

“No.” Her finger trailed across his skin, goosebumps rising. “Not yet…”

Silence fell then. Crushing and empty. All the things he thought he should say sounded hollow in his head. The memory of her lips stirred in his blood, the thought of her body pressed against him echoed in his veins. It felt like she was running away from him. It felt like …

“Well, at least I’ll have something to do when you’re gone,” he shrugged.

She offered a teasing smile. “Miss me terribly?”

“I mean aside from that.” He gave her hand a shy squeeze. “I’m thinking about planting some blood lotus.”

“Lotus?” She blinked. “What for?”

“Experiment with it in a controlled environment. Maybe I can figure out a way to stop it killing the soil it grows in.”

“Why would you want to do that?”

“To save what’s left of Shima, of course.” He could feel the warmth radiating from her skin. “Aside from the Iishi, everything is lotus fields or poisoned deadlands.”

“We won’t save Shima by planting more lotus, Kin.”

“Then how will we save it?”

She looked at him strangely then, and her voice was that of a parent talking to an infant.

“We incinerate the fields. So there’s nothing left but ashes.”

“You want to light the whole island on fire?”

“The lotus must burn, Kin. The Guild along with it.”

“But what about afterward? When all this is done?”

“Don’t you think you’re putting the rickshaw before the runner? Instead of worrying about what we do after the war is over, maybe you should think of ways to help us win it?”

He watched her, silent and still. She stared out into the dark, took another pull from the saké bottle. Pale skin, shadows smudged under her eyes. She looked sick, as if she hadn’t eaten or slept properly in days. Oily fingers of anxiety wormed their way into his guts.

“Well, I was thinking about that too,” he said. “I thought we could salvage the ruins of those ironclads. There’s bound to be all kinds of scrap to make the village more defensible. Shuriken-throwers. Armor plating. There are pit traps on the western rise, of course, but everyone around here keeps talking about how there are more oni moving through the lower woods. Old Mari told me they usually get restless after an earthquake, and the one this morning was the worst anyone around here can remember. If they came down in force…”

She sighed, glanced at him in the deepening dark. “They’re not going to let you build anything that runs on chi, Kin.”

“No, we can do it without combustion. I can set up the ’thrower feeders so they’re hand-cranked. They’ll be slower to fire, but it’s gas pressure that does most of the work.” Excitement in his gut, voice running quicker at the thought of building, of creating something again. “I can see it in my head. I was talking about it with Ayane and—”

“Ayane?” Yukiko frowned. “When did you talk to her?”

He blinked, confused. “This afternoon. In the prison.”

“Kin, you shouldn’t do that. The Kagé don’t trust it … I mean ‘her.’ If you spend time with her, they’re not going to trust you either.”

“You heard Atsushi and Isao at the pit trap this morning.” He tried to keep the bitterness from his voice. “None of them trust me anyway.”

“All the more reason to stay away from her.”

“She came all this way to find us. Do you realize what she’s given up to be here?”

“I don’t care what—”

“She’s alone, Yukiko. For the first time since her Awakening, she’s unplugged from the mechabacus. She can’t hear the voice of the Guild anymore, can’t feel them inside her head. Imagine spending years by the hearth of an Upside bedhouse. Everything is light and voices and song. And then one day you get thrown into the dark. You’ve never even seen night before. Never felt cold. But now it’s everywhere. That’s what she’s feeling right now, locked in that cell. That’s what she chose when she decided to come here.”

“We don’t know she chose anything. They could have sent her here, Kin—”

“Did you know every female born in the Guild becomes a False-Lifer?” He felt anger creeping into his voice, turning it hard and ugly and cold. “They don’t get a say in what they want to be. Don’t get to decide who they’re paired with, or when it’s time to breed. They don’t even get to meet the father of their children. Just another False-Lifer with an inseminator tube and a bottle of lubricant.”

“Gods, Kin—”

“So don’t shit on the choices she’s made, Yukiko.” He snatched his hand from hers. “It’s the first thing she’s decided for herself in her entire life. Not everyone gets a thunder tiger to help them out of their mistakes, you know. Some people risk everything they have alone.”

“Kin, I’m sorry…”

He climbed to his feet, and she lurched up after him, knocking the saké bottle onto its side. Rose-colored liquid spilled from the neck, soaking the boards at their feet. Kin turned to leave but she grabbed his hand again, pulled him around to face her.

“Don’t leave like this. Please.”

She was standing just inches away, fingers entwined in his own, lips parted ever so slightly. The world swayed beneath his feet, heart pounding against his ribs like a steamhammer. He was conscious of nothing in the world except her. The scent of her hair entwined in liquor perfume. Her skin radiating the warmth of a kiln, melting his insides. His mouth was suddenly dry, palms soaked. And though he tried, he felt as though he would never catch his breath again.

“Don’t be angry with me, Kin.” She inched closer. “I don’t want to fight with you.”

“What do you want from me, Yukiko?”

“It might be weeks before we see each other again.” Her eyes searched his face, lingered on his lips. “But we have an hour or so until Buruu comes back…”

She pressed against him, hands parting the cloth on his chest, trailing along his skin, white hot. He glanced at the spilled liquor around their feet, the tide of blood staining her cheeks and lips the color of roses.

“Kiss me,” she breathed.

She stood on tiptoes, arms slipping around his neck, mouth drifting toward his.

“Kiss me…”

She was like gravity, pulling him closer, heavy as the earth beneath him. No noise. No light. Only motion, only the pull of her, down, down to a place he wanted so badly he could taste it, feel it singing inside his chest. A place he would kill for. A place he could happily die inside.

But not like this.

Not like this.

“No.” He took hold of her shoulders, eased her away. “No.”

“Kin—”

“This isn’t you, Yukiko.”

“Not me?” she frowned. “Who am I then?”

“I’m not sure I know.” He gestured to the saké bottle on the floor. “Perhaps you find out when you get to the bottom?”

She remained herself for just a tiny moment longer, plain behind her eyes, wounded and sad and desperately alone. The girl he loved. The girl he would do anything for. And then she was gone. Wiped away in a rush of heat, pupils flashing, leaving the rage behind. The stranger who lived inside her skin. What had Ayane called her?

“The girl all Guildsmen fear.”

“You don’t get to judge me, Kin.”

“Godsdammit, I’m not judging you. I care about you! And I see you turning into this … thing, this Stormdancer, and piece by piece I see the Yukiko I know falling away.” He sighed, dragging a hand across his scalp. “I mean … you killed those Guildsmen, Yukiko. Three ironclads full. Over a hundred people. And you killed them.”

“I let one of them live.” Her stare was cold. Defiant. “But maybe I should have let them firebomb the forest? Maybe I should have let them kill you?”

“Since when were you a mass murderer?”

“Don’t you dare.” A low growl, eyes wide. “You stood by while thousands died—”

The words were a slap to his face, rocking him back on his heels. The memory of pale-skinned women and children, row upon row of gaijin shuffling meekly to meet their boiling end. Rendered down into fertilizer, reborn in some far-flung field as beautiful, blood-red flowers. He knew it was true. Everything she said. But to hear her say it …

He blinked at her. Speechless. Senseless.

“I shouldn’t have said that,” she sighed. “I’m sorry.”

Yukiko breathed deep, clawed away her hair. He could see it written on her face. Boiling inside her. Curling her fingers into fists, her lips to a grimace. When she spoke again, her voice was soft with it, trembling at the outskirts.

“I know it wasn’t your fault, Kin. The gaijin. Inochi. All of it. I know there was nothing you could do to stop it. Kaori and the others say otherwise. They say there’s no steel in you, but I know helping me in Kigen took more courage than most could ever dream.

“But this is war, Kin. The Yukiko you knew? That frightened little girl in the Shōgun’s palace? She’s gone.” Fire in her eyes. “She’s dead.”

“No steel in me…” he whispered, lips twisting in a bitter smile.

“It’s bullshit, Kin.” She took his hand, entwined her fingers with his own. “Don’t you believe it. Any of it. But know you have enemies here. People who see you as Guild first and everything else second. Stay close to Daichi while I’m gone. And stay as far from Ayane as you can. Don’t give them a reason to doubt you.”

“Why would I bother?” he spat. “They’re doing perfectly well without one…”

“Kin—”

“I hope you find the answers you seek.” He pulled his hand away, let it drop to his side. “I know Buruu will keep you safe.”

Hurt in her eyes as she chewed her lip, searched the dark for the right words to say.

“Kiss me good-bye?”

Hovering uncertain. Wanting it more than he could say. Pride and anger shushing want, leaving it alone and friendless. All he’d given, all he’d sacrificed, and this was the life he’d purchased. Watching her fly away. Leaving him, just like she’d left him in Kigen. Alone.

Again.

He put his hands to her cheeks, feeling the satin warmth of her skin, the sensation of it beneath his tingling fingertips almost crushing his resolve to powder. But in the end, tilting her head up to his, her lips parting ever so softly, he leaned down and kissed her gently on the brow.

“Good-bye, Stormdancer,” he said.

And then he turned and walked away.

Part of him screamed he was an idiot. That he would regret it. But anger and pride urged him on, the burning fuel of the indignant fool, and he stalked off into the dark with the waterfall of his blood thrashing in his ears. She called his name again, just once. But he didn’t stop. Didn’t turn his head. And somewhere deep in the back of his mind, a tiny thought found its voice for the first time; a whisper almost too faint to hear.

It kept him awake most of the night, belly-up on his mattress of straw, staring at the ceiling with sandbag eyes. Breathing. Listening. The limbo of insomnia, gray and bottomless as the hours dragged on forever, leaving him in the muddy dawn with a heart exhausted and seven words lodged in his mind like a handful of splinters.

The same question.

Over and over again.

What the hells are you doing here?

10 SALT AND COPPER

Yoshi’s lashes fluttered against his cheeks as he stole along fly-blown gutters on four feather-light feet. Towers of fetid waste looming all around him, nostrils filled with rot and fresh death, blood leaking from a broken skull onto cracked cobbles. He skulked past a snarling brood—a sleek and fearsome bunch, fourteen strong—scratching and fighting as they tore strips from the new bones. Squealing and spitting at him as he scampered by. A warning. A challenge. First spoils to the finders. Leavings to the rest. Our meat. Our alley. Our dirt.

He could smell salt and sweet copper, his stomach growled for the slippery, lovely wanting of it, warm and sticky-lush. But on he scampered, up through the spindly broken-leg alleys, a stale ocean of refuse in which to swim. Whiskers twitching. Mangy hide inflamed from the furious worrying of a dozen fat, black fleas. Pausing to scratch with scabrous little claws, delighting in the bloody relief.

Stopping in the alley mouth across from the whorehouse, blinking with eyes as dark as river water, his tail twitching. Rough-looking men were gathered in the stoop, arms inked from shoulder to wrist, speaking in hushed, lotus-scarred voices. No clan tattoos on their shoulders, no, just floral patterns and geisha girls and interlocking scorpions marking them as Burakumin. Lowborns all—turned to the shadow trade calling every man birthed in Kigen’s gutters. The fist and the fade. The smoke and the skin. A den of them. A seething, sweltering nest of them.

Yakuza.

Minutes passed. Hours. The Moon God Tsukiyomi rode low in the sky behind a choking veil of fumes. More painted men strolled up to the stoop, ushered inside with gap-toothed smiles. And finally, as the hours wore on and the Goddess Amaterasu was just beginning to lighten the eastern skies, two men exited the building. The first, a skulking knife-thin bastard, yellowed teeth like broken stumps in dark gums. The second, a short, broad lump with piggy eyes and cauliflower ears. On their shoulders, each gangster carried a small beaten satchel, filled with the clink of muffled coin. Yoshi felt his whiskers curl, yellow teeth bared in what might have been a smile, and he whispered thanks to the body he rode and stole on back to his own.

He opened his eyes

the room throbbing and all

a-shudder flexed inside long limbs and hairless

flesh and grubby cloth the body he’d lived most of his

life inside feeling

for just a moment

longer

like something utterly

repulsively

wrong.

Jurou was sitting across from him as his vision came into shuddering focus. Dark bangs hanging in dew-moist eyes, empty lotus pipe utterly wasted on those perfect lips.

“Well?” he said.

“Same time. Every morning just before the dawn,” Yoshi smiled. “It’s a money-house for certain.”

“Who runs it?”

“Scorpion Children. Biggest yakuza crew in Downside.”

“You sure you want to start that heavy?”

“You recall a time old Yoshi ever did things by halves, Princess?”

“I’m just not—”

Yoshi put his finger to Jurou’s lips, frowning toward the door.

“Daken’s back. Hana too.”

Yoshi arranged himself on a pile of cushions in the corner, Jurou leaning against his bare chest. He sipped the dregs of their rice wine, felt the big tom drawing closer, the way a magnet must feel as iron draws near. Slouching on his cushion, legs askew, hand snagged in Jurou’s hair as Hana’s key twisted in the lock. Tipping his split-brimmed hat away from his eyes, he aimed a crooked smile at his little sister.

“This is the part where I juggle some comedy about what the cat dragged—”

Hana stole into the room, looking paler than usual, skin filmed in a sheen of fresh sweat. Behind her loomed one of the biggest men Yoshi had ever raised an eyebrow at. A straw hat pulled down low over his brow, ragged black cloak over street-worn thread. Door-broad shoulders, a jaw you could break your knuckles on, a few steps on the right side of handsome, truth be told—at least from what Yoshi could see. He walked with a pronounced limp.

“Well, well,” Jurou smiled. “Took my advice, girl?”

Hana muttered a mouthful, looking embarrassed. Shuffling before the pair like a disobedient child before the Great Judge, she gestured feebly to the giant still looming in the doorway. She spoke so fast her words tripped over each other in the rush to her teeth.

“AkihitothisismybrotherYoshiandhisfriendJurou.”

Jurou’s grin was all Kitsune-in-the-henhouse, aimed squarely at Hana, but he spared a glance for the newcomer. “How do?”

Yoshi’s eyes hadn’t left the big man. He nodded once. Slow as centuries.

“Akihito-san is going to be staying here for a few days,” Hana said.

“Do tell,” Yoshi frowned.

“Only a few.”

“Not like you to have houseguests, sister-mine.” His eyes shifted to the big man. “Can he cook? Doesn’t look much of a dancer.”

Her voice was soft, expression pleading. “Yoshi, please…”

Who the fuck is this, Daken?

The tomcat had assumed his usual perch on the windowsill, cleaning his paws with a tongue as rough as an iron file. His thoughts were velvet-smooth by contrast, a whispered purr rolling through Yoshi’s mind like sugared smoke.

… friend …

Yoshi sniffed. Squinted. Trying hard to find fault with it and coming up empty. She’d never brought anyone home before, but Hana was a big girl now. What she did, who she did, was her business. He leaned down, kissed Jurou on the forehead and shrugged.

“All good, sister-mine.”

She turned, gestured to the big fellow. “Come on.”

With a guilty nod aimed Yoshi’s way, the big man limped past the pair and into Hana’s bedroom. Hana was on her way to join him when Yoshi softly cleared his throat.

“Forgetting something?”

Hana made a face, reached inside her servant’s kimono, drew out the iron-thrower. Leaning down, she placed it in Yoshi’s open palm, whispered for his ears only.

“Explanations later.”

He glanced at Daken, now sawing away at his nethers with his long, pink tongue.

… don’t ask hers won’t tell yours …

“As you say.” He waved the ’thrower. “By the by, you can’t take this to work with you tonight. We need it.”

“What for?”

“Explanations later.”

The curiosity gleaming in Hana’s eye retreated with reluctance. She gave him a small nod, slipped into her bedroom. Daken prowled inside behind her and she quietly closed the door. Jurou had a grin on his face like he was the one about to do the mattress bounce. He leaned over and switched on the soundbox, turned up the volume to bestow some privacy, looking ready to turn a cartwheel.

“Good for her,” he grinned.

Yoshi lifted the iron-thrower and sniffed. A burned chemical smell, like generator oil and refinery stink wafting from the barrel. It felt just a touch lighter than it had yesterday. Just a little less death inside.

He pulled his lucky hat down over his eyes.

“Doubtless…”

Akihito perched by the window, peering out through dirty glass as Hana shut the bedroom door with a whispering click. The flat was four floors up, commanding a decent view of the street below; claustrophobic and wreathed in exhaust. But even with an elevated vantage point, he still felt utterly naked, shaking with nervous energy, belly doing cartwheels. His thoughts went to Gray Wolf, to Butcher and the others. Praying they’d gotten away safe or died fighting. He’d seen enough of Kigen jail to know it was no fit place for anyone to end.

Poor Kasumi …

Reaching inside a pouch on his obi, he retrieved an old chisel and a pinewood block, began whittling at the surface, his eyes still on the street below. No sign of bushi’ out there; just a few street urchins running dice on a corner, two lotusfiends playing pass the pipe. And still his nerves were bunched tighter than overwound clock springs, the chisel’s handle slippery in sweat-slick fingers.

“That’s pretty,” the girl said, gesturing to his carving. “What is it?”

“Present,” he muttered. “For a friend.”

“So what do you think happened? How did they find us?”

Akihito glanced to the doorway, the boys in the living room beyond. The beautiful tones of shamisen players were spilling from the soundbox, slightly muffled by the two inches of cracking plaster between them. He couldn’t shake the feeling of wrongness. Of being watched. Vulnerable. “It’s not safe to talk in here. We could be overheard.”

“It’s just my brother and his boyfriend.”

“And your neighbors? I’ve met blacklung beggars who weren’t as thin as these walls.”

The girl pouted, blew a stray lock from her eye. He sized her up with a slow stare—waif-thin, pointed chin, an old scar gouged down her brow and cheek, leather eyepatch hiding the worst of it. An unruly bob of straw-dry hair, black as cuttlefish ink. Hard, he decided. The kind of hard bought on broken concrete with an empty belly and bleeding fists. Smart? Smart enough for this whole thing to be a long game? Was she playing him?

Doesn’t make a lot of sense. But maybe …

She sat down in the middle of her grubby mattress. Glancing at the door. At him. Back to the door. The hint of a crooked smile curling her lips.

“Ohhhh,” she sighed, shivering.

Akihito frowned, hands falling still at his carving. He drew breath to speak when another low moan from the girl killed the words on his lips.

“Ohhhhhh, gods.”

The big man sat a little straighter, slightly disconcerted, jaw hanging loose. He watched the girl pull herself up on all fours, prowling across the sheets. Searching the room for somewhere else to look, he found the tomcat sitting at his feet, head tilted, staring at him with wide, pus-yellow eyes.

Blink. Blink.

Leaning up against the bedroom door, the girl groaned, throaty and breathless, as if in the throes of first-night passion. She slapped one hand against the doorframe, thumping her heels against the floorboards.

“Ohhh,” she purred. “Ohh, please.”

“What the hells—”

She held up a finger, silenced his protest, continued her performance against the wafer-thin wood. Her brother’s muffled curse seeped under the door—a plea to the great and beneficent Lord Izanagi to strike him deaf as stone, or failing that, for a quick and merciful death. Akihito heard what sounded like laughter and applause from the other boy.

“Oh. My. Go-o-o-o-ods,” Hana groaned.

The soundbox squealed in the room beyond, cranked to full over Yoshi’s prayers, the tiny speakers now strained and crackling under the increase in volume. Loud enough to drown out the girl’s groans. Loud enough to drown out her screams, truth be told. Hana plopped herself back down on the mattress, tucked her feet beneath her with a satisfied smile.

“Safe enough now?”

Akihito couldn’t help but chuckle. “Nice.”

“You’ll have to forgive my brother.” Hana began running fingers through her badly cut bob of raven hair. “I don’t usually have friends … stay over.”

“Has he always been like that?”

“You mean a smart-mouthed little bastard?” Hana laughed. “Always.”

“No, I mean like that.”

Hana blinked, taking a few moments to process.

“Ohhhh … You mean has he always liked boys?”

Akihito muttered a series of incomprehensible words.

“Why?” An eyebrow crept toward the girl’s hairline. “What do you care?”

“I don’t.” Akihito seemed mortified at the suggestion. “I’m just, well…”

“Not used to that sort of thing.”

“No.”

“Well, don’t fret.” Hana smiled lopsided, began tying her hair into braids. “You’re definitely not his type. Far too old.”

Akihito felt his cheeks flush. The girl’s laughter rang out on the walls, the empty beach-glass eyes staring onto smog-choked streets. The straining soundbox filled the void, drowning the murmur and hum outside. Hana watched him for a long time, saying nothing, working plaits across her scalp.

“So,” she finally said. “How did they find us?”

“Hells if I know,” he sighed, pulling off his hat and running one hand over his braids. “Trailed someone. Caught someone and made them sing. I’m still not one hundred percent sure you didn’t set us up, truth be told.”

The tomcat jumped into his lap without warning, and Akihito gasped as its claws sank into his flesh. Using his leg as a springboard, the cat vaulted up onto the windowsill and began licking at its nethers like they were made of sugar-rock. The big man winced, whispered a curse, massaged the old wound and new claw marks in his thigh.

The girl nodded to his bloodstained hakama. “How’s the leg by the way?”

“Hurts like a bastard,” Akihito murmured, still kneading the flesh.

“What happened to it?”

“You ask a lot of questions.”

“So?”

“So how would you feel if I asked what happened to your eye?” He gestured to the leather patch.

“I’d tell you my father was a mean drunk.” A small shrug.

“Izanagi’s balls…” Sudden guilt slapped him across the mouth. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. So how’d you hurt it?”

It had been over a month since the bloodbath during Masaru’s rescue from Kigen jail, but the sword-blow wasn’t healing well. Akihito knew he should have been resting, changing his dressings more often, but circumstances being what they were, he was just glad it hadn’t gone gangrenous. When Michi had gone back to the palace in search of Lady Aisha after the jailbreak went sour, she’d abandoned him with nothing but a tourniquet and vague directions to the sky-ship that was supposed to ferry everyone out of the city. Akihito hadn’t even limped halfway to Spire Row before the bushi’ locked Kigen down, sky-spires, rail yards and all. He’d returned to the Kagé safe house he’d sheltered in before the prison break, hooking up with Gray Wolf and other members of the city cell. His thinking was simple enough—if he couldn’t get to Yukiko, he’d do his best to help her from where he was.

Masaru would have wanted it that way.

Kasumi too.

“Just … helping a friend,” he said.

She nodded. “Well, I’ll see if I can find some bandages at the palace tomorrow.”

He scowled, turned his eyes back to the wood in his hand, carved off another chunk. A Guild sky-ship cut through the smog overhead, its engines rattling the windows. He thought of the ambush in Kigen jail, Kasumi’s blood glistening on the floor. The betrayal that had killed her. Killed Masaru. Almost killed him too.

“How did you know those bushi’ were coming tonight, Hana? You said your lookout spotted them before ours did, but who was your lookout? How did he get word to you?”

The girl peered at him, one dark eye gleaming between disobedient locks of hair. Standing slowly, she padded across the room to tug the window open. A faintly toxic breeze drifted inside, the bustling city song beyond nearly drowned by the soundbox wail. The girl stood back, folded her arms, staring at the cat perched on the windowsill above. For his part, the big tom seemed too intent on his not-so-privates to notice.

“Go on!” the girl finally yelled. “Get!”

The cat unfolded himself from his knot, made something close to a huffing sound and dropped to the lower sill. After a languorous stretch, he spared Hana a dagger-sharp stare, and finally slipped into the daylight. The girl slunk back to her mattress, her tread soundless. Sinking down with crossed legs and a challenging stare, she continued braiding her hair.

“How long have you been with the Kagé?” he frowned.

“Two weeks.”

“What made you join?”

“The Stormdancer.”

“Stormdancer?”

The girl looked at him as if he were a simpleton.

“The girl who tamed the thunder tiger? Brought it back from the Iishi single-handed? You must have heard of her. She’s all over the Kagé broadcasts. Someone’s even written a kabuki play about her; I saw it outside a brothel in Ibitsu Street last week, before the bushi’ started cracking skulls.”

“Oh, I’ve heard of her,” Akihito nodded. “I’m still just getting used to the name, to be honest. I always called her Yukiko.”

Hana’s eye narrowed. “You know her?”

Akihito considered the girl staring at him. Defiance. Suspicion. She was so wretchedly thin; fingers almost skeletal, pale skin covered in grime. He focused on that single dark eye, almost too large in her emaciated face. He wanted to trust her, but couldn’t quite fathom why. Was it because she was somehow familiar? Female? Young? How old could she be, anyway? Seventeen? Eighteen?

Almost the same age as …

“I hunted with her father, Kitsune Masaru.”

“The Black Fox of Shima?” Hana’s voice was awed, and she leaned forward, braids forgotten. “People lay spirit tablets for him near the Burning Stones!”

The big man held up the wood he’d been carving. “Who do you think started putting them there?”

“My gods, you knew them?” Hana breathed. “Did you meet her thunder tiger?”

“Meet it?” Akihito’s chest puffed out a little. “I helped catch the bloody thing.”

“Oh my gods!” Hana was back on her feet, hands over her mouth. “So help me, if you’re talking out of your—”

“I helped catch it. On the sky-ship Thunder Child, neck-deep in the worst storm I’ve ever seen.” The big man’s eyes shone. “Ryu Yamagata knew how to fly a ship, for godsdamn certain. He was a good man.” The light in his eyes dwindled and died. “They were all good men.”

“What’s she like?” Hana’s eye was bright, her imagination afire. “The Stormdancer?”

“A clever girl.” Akihito nodded. “Strong. Hellsborn stubborn. But sugar-sweet. Truth be told, she’s a lot like you, Hana-chan.” He glanced up at the windowsill where the tomcat had been perched a few minutes before, scratched the whiskers on his chin.

“She’s an awful lot like you.”

11 DESOLATION’S EDGE

Yukiko had forgotten how beautiful the world could be.

Towering mountains beneath them, ancient and unchangeable. Making her feel like a brief and tiny thing; a spark escaping the rush of a twilight fire, speeding into the sky even as it burned away to nothing. Trees arrayed in gowns of bloody scarlet and shining gold, of bright rust and fading rose, like dancers awaiting the moment autumn’s music would falter. And then they would shed their finery in a flurry, sleep naked in winter’s arms, and wait for spring to wake them with warm and gentle kisses in all their softest places.

Yukiko rested her head against Buruu’s neck and watched it all grow smaller and smaller. She’d closed herself off from the Kenning, just she and the wind in her hair, the world diminishing beyond lenses of polarized glass.

Yofun lay strapped across her spine with a length of braided cord. She’d found the katana clapped and scraped against the tantō at the small of her back, threatening to ruin the lacquer on both. Deciding the knife and sword made an argumentative pair, she’d stuffed her tantō into the bottom of one of Buruu’s satchels, melancholy thoughts of her father with it.

The saké had worn off, the memory of Kin’s cold farewell a hollow ache inside her. She reached out to Buruu, eyebrows knitted together, opening herself up just a hair’s breadth. A burst of heat, blinding, pulses in the forest below flaring bright—lives she’d never have been able to feel at this distance just a month ago.

She clenched her teeth, tried to make the Kenning contract, like an iris as the sun crests the horizon. Trying to build a wall of herself, brick by brick. A bulwark of will to hold the fire at bay, something stronger than the insubstantial numbness granted by a gutful of liquor. Images of her childhood. Memories and moments—anything that would tether her, anchor her, shield her from the inferno waiting beyond. Her breath came shorter, headache cinching tight.

Can you hear me, brother?

YES.

His voice was tiny, as if he stood on a distant mountaintop and called across a valley of burning red.

Don’t hold back. Speak like you would normally.

I DO NOT WANT TO HURT YOU.

No, I need to control this. I need your help. Please, Buruu. Do as I ask.

VERY WELL.

She hissed in pain, wincing, slumping forward across his shoulders. Her grip faltered as his thoughts crashed inside her skull, smashing her wall to splinters, her whole body aching. Buruu whined, holding his wings steady so as not to throw her from his back. Blood dripped from her nose, bright and gleaming, smeared through his feathers and upon her cheek.

It’s all right … I’m all right …

She felt him pull himself back, whispering across the link binding them together.

SMALL STEPS FIRST, AGREED?

She wiped the blood from her nose, a slick of crimson on her knuckles. She sniffed hard and spat, salty, bright red.

All right, agreed. Small steps first.

GOOD.

The thunder tiger nodded.

EVEN STORMDANCERS MUST WALK BEFORE THEY FLY.

They ascended, clouds rolling back across a bloody gray sky. The sun was a harsh glint on the edges of her goggles, sharp enough to cut her eyes from her head. The forest pulse receded as they rose above it all, the island shrinking beneath them as the air grew thin and brittle, blood-red ocean stretching all the way to the horizon.

Looking far behind them, miles upon miles to the south, she could see the Iishi Mountains melting into low foothills. And beyond them? Blood lotus. Everywhere. The blooms had been plucked as summer died, red fields stripped to undergarments of miserable green. The weed with a hundred uses, or so the Guild claimed. Proof the gods existed. But squinting across endless fields rippling in the toxic wind, Yukiko only saw proof of her people’s greed.

Deadlands. Great, smoking tracts of earth, stripped of life by the poison in the lotus roots—an infection spreading across Shima’s flesh. From this altitude, they could see how bad it had become, how far the soil-death had spread. Countless miles of ashen earth, rent with fissures as if the island was bursting; some sepsis forcing its way up through a broken crust. Dark mist drifted snot-thick over the deadlands, never straying far from the desolation’s edge.

Yukiko found herself wondering if Kin was right. If there was anything they could do to save the land. Some way to undo all the damage they’d wrought …

Buruu lurked behind her eyes, a gentle, cotton-pawed prowl. Feline grace, even in his thoughts, trying his best not to awaken the pain he could feel coiled and ready. She nodded to the southern fields, blurred by smog and distance.

That’s Kitsune country. My homeland. The valley I grew up in was filled with bamboo once. Bamboo and butterflies. And now it’s nothing but that accursed weed.

WHERE WILL YOUR PEOPLE GO, WHEN ALL THEIR SOIL IS ASHES?

Over the oceans. To steal others’ lands with the power chi gives them.

AND WHEN THOSE LANDS ARE ASH? WHEN EVERYTHING BENEATH THE RED SUN IS GONE TO DUST?

Unless we put an end to it? They’ll go to the hells, Buruu. And all of us with them. That’s why we must be swift. Hiro cannot marry Aisha. The dynasty cannot be reforged.

MY KIND WERE RIGHT TO LEAVE THIS PLACE. TO GO WHERE YOUR KIND CANNOT FOLLOW.

North?

He nodded.

EVERSTORM.

Everstorm?

THAT IS WHAT WE CALL IT.

What’s it like?

BEAUTIFUL. I WISH YOU COULD SEE IT.

Will you take me there one day? When all this is done?

She felt sadness in him then, a hint of something usually buried in the darkest corners of his mind. A glimpse was all she saw with the Kenning’s new strength, the shadow of something vast, some leviathan moving beneath black waters. And just as quickly, it was gone.

NO.

He sighed.

NO, I WILL NOT.

North across the Iishi wilderness, the sawtoothed peak and drop of the mountain range, turning to slow gold in autumn’s grip. They cleared the coast of Seidai Island, and she could see Shabishii in the distance; sheer granite cliffs rising like broken teeth from the bloody sea. The storm grew in ferocity, thunder rocking her bones. They slept as night fell, Yukiko’s arms bound around Buruu’s neck, the thunder tiger falling into a trancelike state; the not-quite unconsciousness of migratory birds who spend months with nothing but the sea for company.

By morning they were floating high above the water, the isle of Shabishii looming out of the mist. The ocean wandered away below them, getting lost before it reached the horizon and melting into the sky. She had never seen the sea before, save the black scum of Kigen Bay. It was nothing like the old paintings; not the color of deep forest or Kitsune jade or even the eyes of a samurai boy whose smile had filled her stomach with butterflies. It was red as blood, a seething swell reflecting the crimson sky above. And before it filled her heart with aching and she turned from the thought, she realized how childish it had been; to love a boy she didn’t even know. To name the shade of his eyes after a color she’d never seen. And how long ago it all seemed.

She thought of Kin. Eyes closed. Sighing. Running her fingers across her lips, the memory of his kiss lingering like the—

YOU ARE DOING IT AGAIN.

What?

I AM GOING TO START COMPOSING BAD POETRY SOON.

Gods, I’m sorry …

A GOOD THING THERE ARE NO MONKEYS AROUND.

They’d begun to find a balance between them: Buruu holding himself back enough that his thoughts didn’t make her headaches worse, but loud enough to constantly test her control. She still worked at the wall inside her head, pushing the pieces of herself into place like masonry onto budding ramparts, a dam to bear the brunt of the Kenning’s noise and heat. But her grip would often falter, bricks cracking and splintering, his words squealing inside her head like a feedback loop, her nose spitting blood. She felt the Kenning growing stronger; a tide swelling behind her eyes, dashing itself over and over against her slender defenses. And still, she had no answers why.

Circling for endless hours around Shabishii island, she finally spied the place she might find them. Glowering upon a natural plateau, rooted so well in the stone it was difficult to tell where the brickwork began and nature’s work ended. A skulking cluster of ancient buildings, sheltered against a sheer cliff face, outer walls dropping into the raging sea. Broad curving roofs, like decapitated pyramids stacked atop one another. Dark brick and black tiles.

The Monastery of the Painted Brethren.

No light gleaming in thin windows, no movement on high walls. The buildings were intact but overgrown, long vines working their way decade by dusty decade through the brick. The storm swelled overhead, a splinter of lightning stabbing the horizon, thrust blade-first into that blood-red sea as thunder broke the sky.

Can you see anyone?

NOT A SOUL.

Closer?

They circled. Lower. Nearer. She could see tangled fields in a vast quadrangle, what might have been food crops now trying to run wild in the vaguely poisoned air. A rope and pulley hung forlorn over a natural harbor, gnawed and slapped by the swell.

How the hells did they build this place?

They landed in the overgrown courtyard, cobbles choked by weeds, rain flooding in cackling waterfalls over the battlements. There was no sign of struggle—the outer doors were still whole and barred, the stonework unmarred by siege or fire. But slipping lightly off Buruu’s back and surveying the surroundings, Yukiko’s heart sank. Whoever lived here had done so long ago. Nobody builds a fortress in climes so inhospitable and then lets nature reclaim it.

Buruu surveyed the surrounds with unblinking, molten eyes, head tilted, puzzlement in his gaze. With a faint disquiet, Yukiko realized the world inside her head was almost completely silent. No blazing tangle of human thoughts, not even the burning sparks of birds or beasts. A few lonely gulls wailed at the very edges of her senses, but that was all. The monastery, the scrub-brushed cliffs, the entire vista felt almost entirely bereft of life. The storm was the only sound, the shushing of constant rain, a whip-crack of thunder setting Buruu to purring, thin fingers of lightning racing each other across the clouds.

I SMELL NOTHING.

Yukiko winced, flinching as if Buruu’s thoughts were a solid hook to her temple. Another inexplicable surge of power, always when she was least prepared, her wall dashed to pieces. Breathing ragged, body sore, suddenly and terribly tired of this; her closest friend in the world being the source of almost constant pain. She fought the welling frustration, knowing it would only make things worse, send the Kenning spiraling out of control. Toward what? Another earthquake? Her skull splitting open, brain flopping about at her feet like some drowning fish?

She pressed her hands to her brow, squeezed her eyes shut.

You’re so loud, brother …

I AM SORRY. I HATE TO HURT YOU.

Anger flared then, despite her best efforts to press it back. The Kenning had always simply been, never changing, never failing; taken for granted as thoughtlessly as talking or breathing. It was as if her legs had suddenly betrayed her, sending her skipping when she wanted to stand still, tripping her onto her face when she wanted to run. For the first time in her life, she was afraid of it. Truly afraid of who and what she was.

She looked up to the monastery’s silhouette, charcoal-etched against the lightning sky.

I hope we find our answers here, Buruu.

I DO NOT LIKE THIS, SISTER.

We’ve flown all this way. It seems foolish to stop at the threshold.

I THINK FOOLISH MAY BE BECOMING OUR SPECIALTY.

Thunder crashed again, rain falling like tiny hammers. Though part of her (part of him?) longed to be up in the clouds, her human side was shivering cold, drenched to her bones, the ever-increasing downpour doing little to ease the nagging ache at the base of her skull. She felt exhausted, sore from the flight, thirsty and miserable. A few moments out of the elements would be a welcome change, if nothing else.

We’ll find no answers out here in the rain, brother. And every moment we waste is another moment Hiro’s wedding draws closer.

A low growl, tail lashing. His volume receding slowly, not unlike an ebbing tide.

AS YOU WISH.

Tall double doors barred entry to the main building, heavy oak shod with iron. She lifted the knocker, rust flaking beneath her grip, pounding it against the wood. Waiting interminable minutes, pounding again, dragging rain-soaked hair from her eyes. She blinked up at empty windows, lightning reflected on cloudy, dust-dark glass.

Nobody home.

STAND ASIDE.

Yukiko backed well away, Buruu lowering his head, talons scarring the flagstones. She could feel it gathering around him—a whisper-rush of static charge, the hair on her arms standing tall, ozone thickening in the air. The thunder tiger spread his wings, pistons on his false-pinions creaking, shuddering, tiny wisps of lightning trickling across his sheared feathertips. The world fell still as he reared up on his hind legs, Yukiko clenching her teeth, covering her ears as Buruu clapped his wings together, giving birth to a deafening peal of Raijin Song.

It was written in the old legends that arashitora were children of the Thunder God, Raijin. That to mark them as his own, their father had gifted their wings some measure of his power. Yukiko had thought the tales a myth until she’d seen it with her own eyes—the night Buruu had almost blasted the Thunder Child from the skies.

A thunderous boom rocked the courtyard; the crack of a thousand bullwhips splitting the air in two, the shivering walls bleeding mortar. Flagstones burst skyward as if black powder were being ignited underground, rainwater vaporizing as the shock wave collided with the ancient wooden doors and sheared them to splinters. Iron buckled, rivets popped, hinges squealed as the doors burst inward. One was blasted clear of its moorings, the other hanging from a single stubborn hinge, swinging like a broken jaw.

Dust in the hallway beyond danced briefly in the calamity, echoes dying with reluctance.

Yukiko brought her hands away from her ears, a smile curling her lips. She put her arms around Buruu’s neck, stood on tiptoes and kissed his cheek. His purr set the broken stones at their feet trembling anew.

You are a little magnificent, you know.

ONLY A LITTLE?

Gasping, hand to her brow as his thoughts bounced like boulders around her skull. Slamming the door on the Kenning again; a recalcitrant child marched off to its bedroom to ponder its wrongdoings. Buruu whined, stepped away, tail tucked. Yukiko could sense he wanted to apologize, but without the bridge of thought between them, he had no way to do so. She wondered what it must feel like for him when she closed off her power completely—to be locked in the cold outside her head, just as alone as she was. Reaching out, she ran her hand down his throat, curling her fingers through whisper-soft feathers, giving him the only comfort she could. As she kissed him again, she saw she’d left a smear of scarlet on his cheek.

Wiping one hand across her nose, she brought it away gleaming and bloody. And with a grim nod to the arashitora, the pair stepped across the shattered threshold and walked inside.

12 ACRES OF SKIN

Skin prickling. Flinching at shadows. Teeth clenched so tight they ached.

A wide hallway stretched out before them into sodden-blanket gloom. Choked daylight streamed through filthy windows, leaking into the corridor as mud-bright stains. The wind was a hungry ghost, chilled fingers scrabbling at the shutters, moaning as it shambled about the halls. The timbers creaked like old men’s bones, walls shifting as if the monastery were some slumbering giant, lost in nightmares and praying for dawn.

Yukiko reached into the satchels over Buruu’s back, fetched a paper lantern and a wallet of matches. The crackling flare illuminated dozens of old tapestries, faded through the passing of years and the sea’s corrosive breath. Bitter cold winds howled through the blasted doors and set the talismans trembling on their hooks.

Buruu was all tingling spine and dilating eyes, wingtips scraping the walls. Brushing the feathers at his throat, her fingertips crackled with static electricity. His talons gouged the stone as they prowled into the dark, ears straining for lifesound. But there were only the tapestries whispering in the gloom, the blustering storm and their own synchronized heartbeats.

They searched every room, found nothing and no one. Dust-cloaked furniture, fabric slowly rotting, lanterns unlit for an age. The sea howling below, rainsong on the tiles above.

At the end of the hall they found an empty doorway, spitting a flight of stairs down into a gloom-soaked room. Yukiko stood on the landing, candle held high, feeble light trickling into a stubborn dark. Down the twisting stairs, she could see a vast chamber, lined with row upon row of dusty shelves. Buruu loomed behind, too big to fit through the narrow space, growling his displeasure, his nostrils filled with the pungent reek of old decay.

Bracing herself, she opened the Kenning again, reached for the thunder tiger’s mind. His warmth was sullen, distant, as if oppressed by the deafening silence around them. She could feel nothing but the two of them—no rats, mice, birds. Not a single spark of life. After weeks inundated in the Iishi, the hush should have been a blessing. Instead it planted the seeds of a slow dread in her belly, cold and deep, spreading through her insides with slick tendrils.

It looks like … a library.

YOU INTEND TO GO DOWN THERE?

If there are answers in this place, I’m guessing that’s where we’ll find them.

IT STINKS OF DEATH. THIS IS AN ASTONISHINGLY BAD IDEA.

This place has been deserted for decades, Buruu.

I WISH I HAD EYEBROWS, SO I COULD SCOWL AT YOU.

I can’t sense anything. There’s nobody here.

I WISH I HAD HANDS, SO I COULD WRITE A HISTORY OF YOUR EXPLOITS AND NAME THIS CHAPTER “THE WORST IDEA SHE EVER HAD.”

Gods, so just blast the wall with Raijin Song and come with me, then.

THE WALL IS SOLID GRANITE. WE WOULD HAVE BETTER LUCK KNOCKING HOLES IN IT WITH YOUR THICK HEAD.

Maybe you could just sarcasm it to death?

Buruu growled, fell into a moody silence. She could sense the worry in him, the affection clothed in sullen, sulky aggression. But beneath that, the pain was blooming again, the lubdub of her pulse like tiny hammer blows in the back of her head. Another surge was building, another squeal of psychic static to paint her lips crimson and make her ears bleed. She was tired of it. Tired of not knowing why.

I’ll be back soon, brother. Wait for me here.

Buruu sighed from the tip of his tail.

ALWAYS.

She turned and crept down the stairwell, the stone slick beneath her split-toed boots. Lantern light flickered on granite walls, diminishing the farther she descended. The temperature was chill, a faint smell of oil overlaid with subtle decay. Soft thunder rolled through the tiles overhead, long shadows dancing amongst tall rafters.

The shelves stood ten feet high, crisscrossing planks forming diamond-shaped partitions. Her heart beat faster as she saw the alcoves were piled with scrolls—hundreds upon hundreds, stacked one atop another, running the length of the room.

Daichi said these monks tattooed their secrets on their flesh.

YOU ARE WONDERING WHY THEY KEPT A LIBRARY.

You’re amazing. It’s like you can read my mind.

Buruu’s amusement echoed in the Kenning like a tiny earthquake, setting her temples throbbing. Approaching the first shelf, Yukiko set her lantern down, picked a scroll at random. The paper was greasy under her fingertips, a thick, heavy vellum that felt almost … moist.

Unfurling the scroll, she held it out in the guttering light. Browned with age, edges slightly uneven. She could see kanji inked on the surface, tiny verses she realized were haiku. Flicking her hair aside, eyes scanning the page, budding amazement coming to full bloom.

Gods, Buruu, this is labeled as Tora Tsunedo’s work …

WHO?

He was a poet in Emperor Hirose’s court. Four, maybe five centuries ago. He was put to death by the imperial magistrates, all copies of his work supposedly burned.

POETRY SO AWFUL HE WAS KILLED FOR IT. IMPRESSIVE.

They actually put him to death for “licentiousness.” Listen:

She brought the scroll closer, squinted at it in the guttering dark.

Between your petals,

Awaits silken paradise,

Your love unfurls oh, Izanagi’s BALLS …

Yukiko dropped the scroll to the floor, wiping her hand on her trouser leg. Face twisted in revulsion, mouth dry, she looked around the shelves in growing horror.

“YOUR LOVE UNFURLS OH, IZANAGI’S BALLS.” YES. I CAN SEE WHY THEY MURDERED HIM.

Oh my gods …

I TRUST IT WAS A PAINFUL DEATH?

Buruu, it’s a nipple.

The thunder tiger poked his head through the doorway above and blinked.

YOU MAY NEED TO REPEAT THAT.

On the scroll. The scroll has a godsdamned nipple, Buruu. This isn’t paper, it’s skin.

She backed away from the shelf, one trembling hand to her mouth.

All of this is human skin.

RAIJIN’S DRUMS …

“Hello, young miss.”

Yukiko whirled, hand on Yofun’s hilt as thunder crashed again. Buruu roared, hackles rippling down his spine, wings crackling with electricity. Lightning streaked across the sky, brilliant blue-white illuminating the gloom, and in the brief flash, she caught sight of a figure standing in the shadow of the stairs.

“Peace, young miss.” The figure raised its hands. “You have no need of steel here.”

Yukiko refrained from drawing the blade but kept her grip on the katana’s hilt, squinting in the gloom gathered after the lightning flare. The figure stood a little taller than she, wrapped in a simple monk’s robe of faded blue. A deep cowl hid its face, but the stature and voice were definitely male.

“Who are you?” she demanded.

“Is this the custom in Shima now, young miss? A stranger breaks into your home, and you are expected to make introductions?”

The voice was calm, somewhat hollow, almost breathless. Her heart was thumping in her chest at the sudden fright, fingertips tingling with adrenaline. Feedback crackled down the Kenning, sudden stress opening pathways to her synapses, Buruu looming louder than the storm. She could feel his senses layered over her own, that old familiar tangle—wings at her back, talons at her fingertips, not knowing where he ended and she began. All of it underscored with a vague fear of the waiting pain. The control slipping through her grip.

“My name is Kitsune Yukiko,” she said, trying to keep her voice even. “That’s my brother Buruu.”

“Well met,” the figure bowed. “My name is Shun. I am master of this monastery.”

The figure drew back its cowl, revealing a thin and pallid face. Hairless scalp, mouth creased with age, wisdom gleaming in the depths of heavily lidded eyes. His irises were milky, almost white, as if he suffered from cataracts. Yet his gaze was focused, drifting from her feet up to her face. He blinked. Three times. Rapid succession.

I CANNOT SMELL HIM.

Buruu’s thoughts crackled across hers with all the fury of the tempest above. She winced, tightened her grip on her sword.

I can’t feel him either. No thoughts. Nothing.

“Are you in need?” the pale monk breathed. “Do you hunger? Thirst?”

“I seek answers, Brother Shun, not comforts.”

“We have those in abundance, Kitsune Yukiko.”

“We?” Looking around the ghastly library, raising an eyebrow.

“The Painted Brethren.”

“Is it true you keep the mysteries of the world here? Secrets forgotten?”

Shun gestured to the shelves and their horrid burden. “Never forgotten.”

“Do you know the secrets of the Kenning?”

“Hmn … I believe Brother Bishamon wore some lore about beast-speaking.”

“May I talk to him? Where is he?”

“If memory serves…” the old man tapped his lip, eyes scanning the shelves, “… there. Third row. Second alcove. Though I fear you may find his conversational skills … lacking.”

Yukiko swallowed her disgust, a thick, curdled mouthful, drumming her fingers on Yofun’s hilt. “But I can … read him?”

“Hai.” Triple blink. “But it is traditional for a tithe to be given for access to our athenaeum. A small token of gratitude for the brotherhood’s efforts at preserving lore otherwise lost to the hands of time and the flames of fools.”

“I have no money.”

Shun offered a conciliatory smile. “Then we cannot ask it of you, young miss.”

Yukiko glanced at the clump of oily scrolls the brother had gestured to, saw one with the name BISHAMON carved into its handle. Buruu growled in warning, low and deadly. Lightning licked the windows, and in the shuddering flare, she became aware of other figures in the room. One cloaked in shadows behind Brother Shun, another behind her, two more at the foot of the stairs. All clad in those long bleach-blue robes, frayed hems scraping the floor, hands clasped, heads bowed. Motionless as statues. Silent as ghosts.

She was certain they hadn’t been there a moment ago.

GET OUT OF THERE, YUKIKO.

Sweat in her eyes. No spit in her mouth. The Kenning flaring wide, Buruu’s fear and aggression filling her, pupils dilating, stomach flooded with butterflies. The pain gripped tight, scalding her arteries, the answers she needed just a hand’s breadth away. She reached toward Bishamon’s scroll and Brother Shun moved, quick as lizards’ tongues, as dancing, fighting flies, grasping her wrist with one pale, ink-stained hand. His grip was cold as fresh snow, almost burning on her skin.

“Let go of me,” she gasped.

“The tithe first, young miss.”

She jerked her arm, unable to break his horrid, glacial hold. The burn scar at her shoulder stretched tight as her muscles strained, arm trembling. Two tons of thunder tiger pounded against a foot of solid granite. Buruu’s roar filled the room, rippling on the walls, in her chest, peeling her lips back from her teeth.

“I told you I don’t have any money,” she hissed.

“We have no need of iron.” Cataract eyes roamed her body, something akin to hunger swelling in their depths. “A foot should suffice.”

“What?” Yukiko twisted in his grip. “You want my feet?”

She jerked her arm again, the sleeve of Brother Shun’s robe slipping down, bunching at his elbow. And with a low moan of horror, she saw the entire limb had been peeled like fruit, skin flayed clean off, exposing wet dark muscle and gleaming bone beneath.

“Perhaps fourteen inches…” Shun smiled. “You did destroy our door, after all.”

“I said let go of me!” she roared.

Her free hand grasped Yofun’s hilt, drawing the blade with the crisp ring of metal against metal, bringing it down on the brother’s arm with all her strength. Folded steel sheared through cloth, muscle, bone, the brother flinching away with a shriek. Yukiko pivoted, kicked the monk behind her square in the privates, bringing a knee up into his face as he curled over in agony. The three others stepped forward, cutting her off from the stairs and her escape, hands outstretched. She snatched Bishamon’s scroll off the shelf, backed away from the monks. Away from Buruu. The thunder tiger roared again, pounding the walls.

YUKIKO, COME TO ME!

Head ringing with Buruu’s plea, Yukiko glanced at Yofun’s blade, noticed it was unstained. Thunder in her veins, the Kenning splitting her skull. Stuffing the ghastly scroll into her obi, she tried again to sense the brothers, seize the life within them as she’d done with Yoritomo, grind it beneath her heel. But there was nothing to grip, no heat or life to hold. Almost as if …

As if …

Brother Shun looked up at her with empty eyes, a ghastly smile splitting his lips. Reaching down to his severed arm, he plucked it from the floor, thrust it back onto the glistening stump (no blood, none at all) and as Yukiko watched in utter horror, flexed his fingers as if to ease some minor cramp. The brother whose privates she’d brutalized picked himself up off the stone, straightened the pulp she’d made of his nose, tilted his head until his vertebrae popped.

“Secrets in abundance,” Shun whispered. “As I said.”

They lunged, all five, a rolling, snarling bramble of gibber-grasping hands and milk-white eyes. The constant lessons she’d endured under her father and Kasumi and Sensei Ryusaki, the years of wooden sword drills came back to her in a flood, her body falling into the familiar stance, side-on, knees bent. She moved like liquid, like an angry tide, seething forward and rushing back, Yofun held gently in a double-handed grip, its hilt like a lover’s hand in her own. She divested one brother of his outstretched fingers, another of his leg below the knee, a third of his windpipe and jugular, the blade slicing clean through his throat. Through it all, she was backing down the row, feet skipping across the floor, wisps of hair in her eyes, hoping to double back through the shelves and make a desperate dash for the stairs.

No blood flowed from the wounds she inflicted, only mild grunts of surprise accompanied her sword’s travels, followed by the wet plopping of whatever extremity she’d removed hitting the stone. She noticed the leg she hacked away was skinless above the ankle. Slicing another monk across his chest, she saw no skin through the rend in his robe—merely gray pectoral muscle and a grin-white rib cage.

Thunder rolled above and she screamed to Buruu, loud as she could, heedless of the blood spilling down her nose. At the sight of the ruby fluid smeared across her lips, Shun and his brethren seemed to lose all semblance of sanity, eyes so wide she could see the whites all around, teeth bared and gleaming. Too many to fight under the best of circumstances, and her circumstances were a god’s throw from that. And so, sheathing the five feet of useless katana at her back, Yukiko did exactly what her father had told her to do in the face of overwhelming odds.

She turned and bolted.

Using the alcoves as handholds. Hauling herself up onto one of the shelves, kicking in a brother’s face as he seized her ankles. Hopping onto the ledge, she tore Yofun from its scabbard again, taking careful aim at the monk scrambling up after her. With a fierce cry, she sliced clean through his neck, blade cleaving bone as if it were butter. The brother crashed to the floor, head rolling away across the stone. Thunder roared overhead, shaking the walls. And with vomit pressing at trembling lips, Yukiko saw the headless corpse rolling about on the ground, hands groping toward its disembodied head. Lighting strobed, rendering the scene in a lurid, grisly glow. Clawing fingers. Eyes still blinking. Mouth still moving.

Maker’s breath …

Yukiko turned, leaped over the gap between one shelf and another, back toward the entrance, fighting for balance as the structure shifted underneath her. Shun and another of his brethren had scrambled up behind her, two more cresting the shelves ahead and cutting off her escape route to the stairs. She noticed more figures now, fading out of the gloom, clad in those same bruise-blue robes. Female forms standing in the corners with impassive faces, holding armfuls of their own entrails, lit by strobing lightning strikes. Others hauling themselves up onto different shelves, closing in all about her. Dozens. Upon dozens. Upon dozens.

Buruu!

Leaping across to another shelf. Shearing through an outstretched, skinless arm. Sweat in her eyes. Breath pounding in her lungs. Blood on her lips, in her mouth, in her veins. Painted Brethren closing in about her. Backing away toward the edge of her last shelf-top and clawing the loose hair from her eyes.

BURUU!

Thunder crashed, shaking the tiles above. Lashing out with her blade. Glancing behind. Grasping hands. Snow-white eyes. Grinning teeth. Ink-stained fingers. Heels at the edge.

Nowhere to run.

Thunder again, closer this time, loud enough to shake the floor. Yukiko gasped as the ceiling above disintegrated, clay tiles smashed to dust and rubble; a tumbling, jagged waterfall crashing onto brother Shun and smashing him to pulp. The shelf collapsed below her and she fell with a shriek, landed hard on the stone. Hands clawing at her, pulling her to her feet. And then a roar, the sound of wind and pistons, a white shape diving through the shattered ceiling and splintering the flagstones beside her. Shelves tumbled like dominos, Buruu roaring again, lashing out and splitting the brother holding her in half. He struck a second time, wings spread wide, clapping together with concussive force, timbers blasted apart, leather scrolls spinning in the crackling air like dead leaves.

SISTER!

Sheathing her sword. Leaping onto his shoulders. A sea of figures all around. Rain swirling through the ceiling, static electricity setting her skin tingling. Talons parting flesh, arms from shoulders, heads from necks. A roar shaking the stones beneath them. But in a rush, the sudden press of a starving gravity, they were airborne, more shelves tumbling in the blast of their wings, soaring up through the sundered tiles and out into the open air. Wind in their faces. Rain in their eyes. Blood on their lips, spilling from their ears. They were flooded (she was flooded), body shaking, nausea rising in a rush, out of her throat and into the void, spraying through their (her) teeth as she clawed and tore and pulled back from the brink, back into herself, into her body, this tiny trembling thing with no wings, clinging to his back, small and sick and afraid.

She slumped on his shoulders, wiping the blood and puke from her lips. The pain in her head was incandescent; a thing of rusted nails and serrated teeth and razor wire, coiled tight at the base of her skull. Panting. Breathless. Aching.

But alive.

Thank you, brother.

Buruu purred, thoughts kept to himself for fear of hurting her. She reached down to her obi, taking hold of Bishamon’s scroll, the oily, leathered surface giving birth to another round of nausea. The sight of those shelves lingered in her in memory, the miles of secrets and acres of skin. She wondered about the other truths kept there in the dark amidst that horrid brotherhood. What other secrets lay inked in that library of flesh.

But none of it mattered now. It had cost them precious days, the countdown to Hiro’s wedding ticking ever closer. But she’d gotten what she came for. She had what she needed.

She just hoped it had been worth it.

13 PROPOSAL

Blinding light was waiting for Hiro when he opened his eyes.

Squinting against the glare, he tried raising a hand to blot it out and realized he couldn’t move a muscle. Not that anything held him down, bound his arms to his side, or his body to the cool flat at his back. He simply felt nothing below his chin. A cold numbness, stained with vertigo, the dull sensation of something tugging at his core. He could hear wet clicking, as if a thousand larvae nested in the air above him, chewing blindly with oily mandibles. He inhaled and smelled blood, the sharp tang of metal.

Chi.

He lifted his head.

A dozen bulbous eyes stared back at him, blood-red, affixed in bone-smooth, mouthless faces, a tiny voice in back of his mind wondering how they breathed. Six figures were gathered around him; vaguely feminine forms with impossibly narrow waists. Clad head to foot in leather-brown membranes, mechabacii chattering upon their chests, buckles and straps running down their bellies and long, blood-spattered skirts. Clusters of eight chromed arms uncurled from their backs, slicked to the first knuckles in blood, clicking as they moved. If he could feel it, he was certain his skin would be crawling.

His eyes traced the long, silver line of the spider limbs down to his own flesh, pupils dilating, every artery running cold. They had peeled his chest open, folded the corners of his flesh back like origami, exposing the ribs beneath. The bone had been pried apart, wet and gleaming. They were planting lengths of glistening cable into his chest cavity, his shoulder laid open like a duck at a wedding feast. And as the horror seized hold and shook him side to side, he saw his right arm was missing entirely. Nothing remained but a ragged stump below his shoulder, punctured by translucent tubes and studded with bloody iron clamps.

Hiro fought to struggle in a body that felt nothing at all.

Drew ragged breath to scream.

And woke.

Woke as he did every morning. Sweat in his eyes. Heart rolling and heaving in his chest. Taste of metal on his tongue. And as he looked down at the mutilated nub of flesh where his sword arm should be, studded with bayonet fixtures and snaking iron cables, he sank his head into his hand—his only hand—and let out a shuddering, bone-deep sigh.

A False-Lifer was waiting outside his chambers, ready with the prosthetic cradled in her arms. He felt its weight as she slipped the limb onto its couplings, jacked hungry inputs with gushing feeds, clicking and snapping and tweaking and twisting, finally slipping a thin robe over his sweat-slick flesh. He flexed the arm back and forth; a slow grind of gears and pistons, a sound like chromed spider limbs. He could feel cable pulling beneath his skin. Smell grease.

Pushing open the balcony doors, he stepped out into the scorching sun. The city’s stink rushed inside, underscored with the sharp, wood-smoke tang of burned buildings and dissent. Garish heat licked his skin, a blast-furnace glare forcing his eyes closed. To the south, Tiger ironclads hung limp about the docking spires, forlorn in the poisoned wind. Faint, choking sparrow calls drifted in the gardens; pitiful wretches flitting about on clipped wings, staring mournfully at the red sky above.

He could feel it moving behind his back; the machine set in motion by the Guild and the ministers intelligent enough to have backed him from the outset. The machine of politics, grinding just beneath the palace’s skin. The promises of promotion or coin, the thugs and assassins dispatched to deal with those who could not be bought. Like the clockwork hanging from his right shoulder, smooth and unfeeling. All of this. This estate. This city. This clan.

Soon.

Hiro smiled bitterly. Shook his head. Finding no comfort.

Mine.

“Shateigashira Kensai, exalted Second Bloom of Chapterhouse Kigen!”

Matsu’s voice tore Hiro from his brooding. The servant stood behind him, bowing low, shaved head gleaming.

Heavy steps. The hiss of exhaust. Cloying chi-scent. Hiro glanced over his shoulder at the Shateigashira’s approach; extravagant polished brass, the beautiful, frozen face of a boy in his prime, black cable flooding from his lips. Kensai joined him on the balcony, floorboards groaning in protest.

“Shōgun Hiro.” The Lotusman covered his fist and nodded.

“Do not call me that,” Hiro said.

“Brethren of Chapterhouse Kawa have sent confirmation.” Kensai inclined his head; a small bow barely worthy of the label. “The Dragon clanlord has accepted invitation to your wedding, and is en route. You are one step closer to absolute rule of Shima.”

Hiro tried his best to scowl. He forced down the faint thrill that coursed through his veins at Kensai’s words, crushing it beneath suspicion’s weight.

“You really believe the clanlords will bow to me? I am barely eighteen years old, Kensai-san.”

“Yoritomo was thirteen when he ascended the throne.”

“Yoritomo-no-miya was a blooded firstborn son.”

“As your son will be.”

“This is madness. There is nothing close to Kazumitsu’s blood in my veins.”

“It is not your blood that matters. Only that of your bride. It is through her you bind yourself to Kazumitsu’s line. Through her you will restore the dynasty, and bring order to the chaos wrought by those Kagé dogs and that Impure abomination. The war effort against the gaijin has disintegrated without the banner of a Shōgun to rally behind. We have reports of Dragon and Fox forces actually firing upon each other during the retreat…”

“Their lords desire the throne for themselves.” Hiro’s mouth curled in disgust. “And is it any wonder? In days past the samurai of this nation believed in honor. In the Way of Bushido. But now?”

“Any nation is only as noble as its ruler.” Kensai’s atmos-suit hissed as he shrugged. “The fish rots from the head down.”

“Have a care.” Hiro glared at the Second Bloom. “I will brook no insult to the name of my murdered Lord. I am Kazumitsu Elite. My oath to Yoritomo holds even in death.”

“Until it passes to Kazumitsu’s heir.”

“Kazumitsu has no heir.”

“Not yet, Lord Hiro.” Kensai’s eyes glittered like a viper’s. “Not yet.”

“Why are you here, Kensai?” Hiro turned to the Shateigashira, glare narrowed. “Any minion could have delivered news of the Dragon clan’s acceptance.”

“Lady Aisha is recovering well. Our False-Lifers have deemed she no longer need be kept under constant sedation. She finds herself … distressed by her predicament.”

“If I awoke from a near-fatal beating to find myself engaged to a simple samurai’s son, I think I would be more than distressed, Kensai-san.”

“The topic of her impending nuptials…” Kensai shifted, as if discomfited by the notion, “has not yet been … broached with the Lady.”

Hiro stared at the Second Bloom, incredulous.

“We believe it is traditionally the groom who asks for his bride’s hand, after all. And since she has no living father or brother to seek blessing from, the one to vouchsafe the union would be her clanlord.”

A hollow intake of metallic breath.

“You.”

“Godless cowards,” Hiro breathed. “She is utterly at your mercy, and still you fear her.”

“We simply thought she would take the news better, coming from you.”

Hiro swore he could hear a cruel smile in Kensai’s voice.

“I have no desire to play your games, Kensai-san.”

“Oh, I know your desire, young Lord. Why you agree to this trial when tradition demands you take your own life at the death of your master. But know you will never attain it without the aid of the Lotus Guild.” Kensai stepped closer, only the vaguest hint of menace in his voice. “And so, if I request you do your Lady the honor of informing her of her approaching wedding, you will do so, content that it brings you one step closer to that which you do desire—to slay the Impure abomination who murdered your Lord and cast the shadow of insurrection over the shores of this great nation. The daughter of Masaru the Black Fox. Kitsune Yukiko.”

At the mention of her name, Hiro’s metal hand snapped shut with a clang. He blinked, forced it open again, to be still at his side.

“The prosthetic is fully functional I see.” Faint amusement in Kensai’s voice.

“It will serve.”

“As will we all.” Kensai covered his fist and bowed. “Shōgun.”

She lay on a bed large enough to get lost in, red silk pulled up to her chin, the tune of a hundred ticking clocks hanging in the air. A mountain of pillows was piled at her back, the curtain drawn away from cloudy beach-glass windows, bloody daylight creeping across the floorboards toward her. Machines chattered beside her bed, all dials and bellows, a language of punch cards and clicking beads and stuttering harmonics, cables snaking beneath her sheets. A small black-and-white terrier sat beside her on the bed, worrying a knotted ball of rope with puppy-sharp teeth. Its tail wagged as he entered.

She was not clad in a jûnihitoe as occasion would dictate; just a plain shift of deep red, rivers of long, raven hair spilling about her shoulders. No powder upon her bloodless face, nor kohl around her bloodshot eyes. Her right arm was bound in plaster, her lips pale and bereft of paint, left eye still surrounded by a faint yellow bruise, skin split almost to her chin down the left side of her mouth, stitched with delicate sutures. Yoritomo’s beating had been far more brutal than most in the court were allowed to believe.

And still, she was beautiful.

“My Lady Tora Aisha.” Hiro covered his fist and bowed from the waist. “First Daughter of Shima. Last of the line of Kazumitsu. I am honored you grant me audience.”

“Lord Tora Hiro.” She smiled faintly, as if afraid to split the sutures on her lip. “My heart lightens to see a noble samurai of this honorable house. I have not enjoyed such pleasant company for an age, it seems.”

Her eyes flickered to the two False-Lifers flanking her bed, arms crossed over the mechabacii on their breasts. The sound of their breathing was a vacant hiss, muted sunlight glittering on bulbous crimson eyes set in faceless heads.

Hiro knelt by the bed. Spring-driven ceiling fans rocked in the exposed beams overhead, circulating a feeble breeze throughout the room. Sweat beaded on Aisha’s brow, but she made no move to brush it away.

“I would speak to the Lady alone.” Hiro looked up at the False-Lifers.

The Guildsmen shared a mute glance, remained motionless.

“Leave us,” Hiro snapped.

“The lotus must bloom.”

The pair bowed, synchronized, walked to the door as if they were two bodies and one mind, their boots clicking across the floorboards in perfect unison. The chromed razors on their backs gleamed as they reached the rice-paper doors, sliding the panels away and stepping out into the hall like dancers taking their place upon the stage. The doors closed with a harsh thud behind them.

“Thank the gods,” Aisha breathed, voice trembling. “They have been with me every moment since I awoke. You are the first of Yoritomo’s men I have seen since…” She glanced about with wide eyes, as if the walls themselves had ears. “They are keeping me like a prisoner, Lord Hiro. They will not permit me to see Michi or any of my maidservants. They let me speak to no one…”

She sniffed, swallowed thickly.

“You must get me away from them. The Guild. I cannot believe the court would allow me to be treated so if they knew what was happening here. I have nothing to do, no one to speak to. They drug me. Treat me like a sack of meat. My gods…”

She clenched her teeth, fighting the fear, the tears. He could see it took everything she had not to break, to cry like a lost child, alone and afraid in the dark. The puppy stopped playing with his ball, watched her with one ear cocked, tail between his legs. Hiro sat and stared for an age, fists upon knees, face like granite. And then he spoke, his voice hard as a gravestone, as dead and cold as the ashes they’d interred in his Lord’s tomb.

“You deserve this.”

Wide eyes clouded with unspent tears, lips trembling like leaves in the autumn wind. A fragile, tiny whisper.

“What?”

“You deserve this, my Lady.” Hiro stared at her, pitiless and unblinking. “You betrayed your brother and sovereign Lord. The Shōgun of these islands, the man to whom all owed allegiance. You helped that Kitsune whore escape with Yoritomo’s prize. And because of you, he is dead, the country in chaos, and this clan in tatters.”

“Not you too?” she breathed. “Gods … have mercy upon me…”

“But they have, my Lady. They are far more merciful than I. They have given you the opportunity to atone. To alleviate the shame you have heaped upon yourself with your betrayal.”

“What are—”

“You and I are to be married.”

What little color remained in Aisha’s cheeks faded away, blood draining from her skin as if someone had cut her throat.

“The announcement has already been made,” Hiro said. “Clanlords of the Phoenix and Dragon have accepted invitation. We will be husband and wife by month’s end. And together, we will reforge the Kazumitsu Dynasty, restore the line you helped destroy.”

Hiro took Aisha’s hand, iron fingers closing around her own. The movements were clumsy, gears hissing and whirring like a Lotusman’s skin.

“So now I see.” Defiance burned in Aisha’s stare. Refusal to flinch from his touch. “Shōgun Hiro, is it?”

“You always were an insightful one, Lady.”

“So the Guild have bought you.” Her voice grew stronger, underscored with anger and faint contempt. She glanced at Hiro’s metal arm, lips curling in disgust. “Paid for and sold.”

“Do not dare pass judgment on me,” he growled. “Everything I do now, I do to right the wrongs you helped perpetrate.”

“Wrongs?” Half laughing, half sobbing. “You speak to me of wrongs?”

“He was your brother, Aisha. You were honor-bound to—”

“Do not speak to me of honor,” she snapped. “Your rhetoric about Bushido and sacrifice. Just look outside the window, Hiro-san. Look what this empire has done to the island we live on. Skies red as blood, earth black as pitch. Our addiction to chi draining the land of every drop of life. We wage war overseas, murdering gaijin by the thousands, and for what? More land. More fuel. Where will it end? When the deadlands split wide and drag us all down into the hells?”

“It will end when she is dead,” he spat.

“Ah.” Aisha looked at him with something akin to sympathy. “Now I see. It is not my betrayal that cuts you. It is hers. Yukiko.”

Hiro’s metal hand snapped into a fist. “Do not speak that name in my presence again.”

“She loved you, Hiro-san.”

“Shut up!” Iron fingers twitched.

“And still you failed. Even after you tore her heart from her chest, betrayed the girl who loved you true … still you failed to save your Lord’s life.”

Hiro leapt onto the bed, metal hand closing about Aisha’s throat. Her eyes bulged wide, color blooming in her cheeks as iron bit into her skin. The puppy barked, growling as he sank his fangs into the Daimyo’s robe and tugged. Hiro’s face was a madman’s mask, eyes wild, lips flecked with spittle, teeth gritted. He pressed down with all his weight, watching her face flush with blood.

“Shut your mouth, you honorless whore.”

Aisha’s voice was a strangled whisper, tears welling in her eyes.

“I … pity you…”

Hiro drew his face close to hers, twisted with hatred, staring into her eyes, watching their light fade as the moments ticked by into minutes. But as the end drew near, instead of terror and pain, he saw triumph, gloating and awful as she teetered upon the precipice. She did not struggle. Did not flail or kick or slap at his crushing grip. And with a moan of horror he seized hold of the prosthetic with his other hand and tore it away from her throat.

Aisha collapsed, gasping, her mountain of pillows scattered, thick drifts of hair tangled about her face, like a child’s plaything thrown into a corner when it was no longer wanted. The pup licked her fingers, whining. Hiro shrank from the ruin of the bed and staggered to his feet, gasping for breath.

“Very clever, my Lady.” He wiped sweat from his lips on the back of his real hand. “The men always spoke of how you played us like a shamisen. But not today.” He swallowed, shook his head. “You do not die today.”

Regaining his breath, he knelt by the bed, rearranged the pillows, straightened the bedclothes. And with trembling iron fingers, he brushed the stray hair away from her face.

“No escape,” he sighed, caressing the new bruises along her jaw. “For either of us. You will be my bride. The line of Kazumitsu will live on through us. At least long enough to see that bitch buried in an unmarked grave. After that, I don’t care what—”

She spit at him, then. A glistening spray, right into his face. He closed his eyes and flinched, lips drawing back from his teeth.

“You bastard coward,” she breathed.

Hiro grabbed a handful of her long, black hair, used it to wipe the spit from his eye and cheek. He coiled it in his fist, pulled her head back as she hissed in pain.

“I will leave you now, love.” He planted a gentle kiss on her brow. “Think well of me until I return.”

She glared at him, boiling hatred unmasked in her eyes. He stood and straightened his kimono, the swords at his waist, marched to the rice-paper doors. Sliding them apart, he turned to look at her one last time.

“Consider your position carefully, my Lady. Consider the people you hold dear. The maidservants who even now languish in their cells, awaiting judgment for their complicity in your betrayal.”

“Leave them alone,” she hissed. “They knew nothing of this.”

“So you say. But consider your life is not the only one at stake here. And consider there are far worse fates than death.”

“To live as you do, you mean?” she said. “On your knees? A Guildsman’s slave?”

“It is honor that bids me kneel, Lady. Honor to my oaths. My fallen Lord.” Contempt curling his lips. “A concept you would have no understanding of.”

“Honor,” she spat. “If you had any notion of it, you would have already committed seppuku, Hiro-san. Bad enough you allowed your Lord to perish. But for a member of the Kazumitsu Elite to live on while his Shōgun lies slain…”

She glared with narrowed, hate-filled eyes.

“You are a disgrace, boy.”

The ghost of a smile graced Hiro’s lips.

As empty as the jade-green eyes that rose to meet her own.

“As I said,” he nodded. “You always were an insightful one…”

14 INTOXICATION

Nothing.

Not a godsdamned thing.

They sat together at the tip of a black spur, dropping away into a raging sea. Buruu curled up, chin pressed to stone, a barrier of fur and feathers against the howling wind. Yukiko huddled against him, almost drunk on his warmth, the rhythm of his pulse entwined with her own as she pored over her grim prize, line by painstaking line.

Bishamon’s scroll was not, as she’d hoped, a work concerned with the Kenning’s mysteries. Rather, it was a compilation of mythologies concerning Stormdancers and their mystical bonds to the thunder tigers they rode. Though Yukiko had never really considered it in the past, it made sense that every Stormdancer in Shima’s history was possessed of her gift—how else would they bond with the arashitora they rode into battle? The scroll contained accounts of Kitsune no Akira’s battle against the Dragon of Forgetting. Kazuhiko the Red’s triumph over the One Hundred Ronin. An incomplete account of Tora Takehiko’s heroic charge into the Devil Gate (she presumed the rest of the legends were inked on some other part of Brother Bishamon’s body). But as to clues about how to control the power, or even accounts of it surging beyond control, there was no mention.

Yukiko hung her head, fighting back bitter tears, pushed knuckles into her eyes. Her hair hung over her face, the rain slicking it to her skin in sodden skeins. Lady Amaterasu was sinking to her rest, the Sun Goddess burning the cloud-choked western skies a scorched and bloody umber. Night was falling, and with it, all her hopes.

Slipping into Buruu’s mind, lips pressed tight, trying to focus the Kenning to a tiny point, like sunlight through an aperture of flesh and bone. Her skull ached, warm sickness swelling in her belly, pressing at her gorge. Sharp teeth waiting just beneath her skin.

Can you hear me, brother?

I HEAR YOU.

Wincing. Licking slowly at wind-parched lips. Too tired and disheartened to build her wall, to push bricks into place that would only come crashing down again.

There’s nothing in here that will help us. Legends of old heroes, long dead.

A bitter and helpless fury curled her fingers to fists. She looked up at a black sea rolling overhead, searching the skies for answers she knew were not there. The ache in her skull tightened its grip. The frustration made her want to scream.

AT LEAST THE EXERCISE WAS NOT AN UTTER WASTE OF TIME.

Why the hells do you say that?

The arashitora unfurled one clockwork wing, wrapped it around her shivering form. The static electricity made her tingle, wrapping her up in lightning’s scent.

NO REASON.

She smiled, closed her eyes and rested her head against him. Holding him tight, she pushed warmth into his mind, the gratitude she felt for him just being near. The promise he’d made her was bright in her memory, etched on the stone she set her back against.

“Beneath and between and beyond anything else I may be, I am yours. I will never leave you. Never forsake you. You may rely upon me as you rely upon sun to rise and moon to fall. For you are the heart of me.”

WE SHOULD HEAD BACK TO THE IISHI. THERE YOU CAN SLEEP. AND I CAN EAT.

I hope the Kagé have been treating Kin decently. I worry about him there alone.

HE IS NOT ALONE. THE GIRL IS WITH HIM.

That worries me even more.

SURELY YOU ARE NOT STILL JEALOUS?

Why on earth would I be jealous of Ayane?

… DOES NOT MATTER.

No, say what you mean.

He heaved a sigh, wind curling in the feathers beneath narrowed, amber eyes.

BECAUSE SHE KNOWS A PART OF HIM YOU NEVER WILL. BECAUSE YOU FEAR HE WILL SEE IN HER A KINSHIP HE CANNOT SEE IN YOU.

She pouted amidst her snug kingdom of fur and feathers.

I thought you said you didn’t understand human relationships.

DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE WHY. THE WHY NOT IS MUCH EASIER.

I don’t know what to do.

NO, YOU ARE SIMPLY FRIGHTENED OF WHAT DOING IT WILL MEAN. HE IS NOT HIRO. HE LOVES YOU.

I know that.

AND YOU HIM?

A part of me must. To feel this way. When I think of him and Ayane alone together, I want to choke something.

AH, YOUNG ROMANCE …

As the sun sank toward the world’s edge, she surveyed the storm looming on the northern horizon. Lightning arced across the clouds and Buruu turned to watch, melancholy staining his mind a somber blue. She reached out to touch it, still unsure of the Kenning’s strength, and as she smoothed it away, she recognized it for what it was.

You’re homesick.

THE TEMPEST REMINDS ME. ALWAYS.

Of the Everstorm?

WHERE THE GREAT SEA DRAGONS SLUMBER. WHERE RAIJIN AND SUSANO-Ō SING LULLABIES TO STILL THEIR HUNGER, FROM NOW UNTIL WORLD’S ENDING.

Are there many of you there? Arashitora?

A FEW SCATTERED PACKS. THE LAST OF MY KIND. WE ARE SLOW TO BREED. JEALOUS. PRIMITIVE. LIKE YOU IN MANY WAYS.

The question rose unbidden in her thoughts.

You never really explained why you came to Shima, you know. You said you were curious, but I’m sure there was more to it than that.

…

Buruu?

GUILD.

Her senses sharpened at the word, feeling his hackles rise in sharp peaks. Staring toward the horizon, squinting in the growing gloom, ears straining for the sound of engines.

I see nothing …

USE MY EYES.

She slipped into the warmth behind his pupils, saw the world as he did, flaring too bright for an agonizing moment as she wrestled for control. She could feel her nose bleeding, slick on her lips, narrowing her eyes as if staring at the sun. The details were picked out in brilliant relief; the shapes of the clouds, of every curling wave and foaming breaker. And to the north, she spotted a shadow, tiny as an infant lotusfly, stark black against iron-gray. The unmistakable snub-nosed silhouette of a Guild sky-ship.

What the hells are they doing all the way out there?

WAR.

Gaijin lands are east, not north. If they’re a warship, they’re way off course.

WE COULD ASK THEM?

Yukiko looked toward the northernmost tip of Seidai, then back toward the tiny silhouette. She knew they should be flying back to the Kagé. They had to plan the strike on Hiro’s wedding, Lady Aisha’s rescue. But if they let the Guild ship go, the opportunity might never arise to find out what they were up to again. And she had promised to deal harshly with the next ship they sent northward.

She gripped Yofun’s hilt, remembering Daichi’s words. Remembering the endless miles of deadlands they’d flown over during their visits to the clan capitals, the Guild’s stain seeping through every province. The rusted pipelines. The blacklung beggars. The Burning Stones.

Whatever the Guildsmen were doing, she’d bet her life it was no good.

All right.

She nodded.

Let’s follow and see what we can see.

Mechanical marvels they might be, but in the end, sky-ships suffered most limitations of their sea-bound cousins. The truth is, any dirigible is at the mercy of the Wind God Fūjin, no matter how powerful her engines. Heading directly into a gale consumes enormous amounts of fuel, and as the charred remains of three Guild ironclads and the Thunder Child before them could attest, the hydrogen in a sky-ship’s gut is highly flammable. Which is why, when Yukiko realized the Guild ship was not only flying directly into the wind, but also headed straight for a lightning storm, she knew the bastards were up to something on the south side of righteous.

They’d been flying for almost a day, and Buruu was showing signs of fatigue. He caught sleep in fits and starts, gliding high on ocean-born thermals, drifting in a kind of sleepwalker state. Yukiko kept watch while he dozed, slowly rebuilding the wall inside her head, but he showed a remarkable ability to remain aloft despite being, for all intents and purposes, fast asleep. Yukiko nibbled on the rice cakes at the bottom of her satchels, sipped water from her last gourd. She watched the horizon, gaze fixed on the ship she could now see with her own eyes.

The Guildsman was headed directly into the storm. Thunder rocked the skies, lightning splitting the horizon in hairline fractures. The distance between them was narrowing; the arashitora cut through headwinds a dirigible couldn’t. Yukiko fancied the ship wasn’t an ironclad—it looked too small to be a warship, and moved faster than a gunboat should.

Scout, maybe? But what are they scouting for out here?

PERHAPS THE PILOT IS JUST VERY DEPRESSED.

The gale grew stronger as day descended into night, the storm reaching out to them with eager hands, adrenaline coursing through Buruu’s veins. The thunder was a rumbling hymn in his ears, and each lightning strike birthed a tiny blue-white thrill of delight in his belly.

Could they be headed to the Everstorm?

WRONG COURSE FOR SUICIDE OF THAT FLAVOR.

Then where are they going?

THERE ARE ISLANDS NORTH OF HERE. BLACK GLASS. RAZOR ISLES, WE CALL THEM. BUT NO MONKEY-CHILD BOAT COULD SURVIVE THERE.

Well, I’m running out of food. And the wedding is drawing nearer every hour we use up here. It seems a godsdamned waste to turn back now, though. What do you think?

…

Buruu?

A long, whining growl rumbled in his chest, adrenaline kicking along his veins, pupils dilating. A feeble mote of scent hung on the air; a half-remembered sliver stirring something primal inside. For a second, Yukiko was overcome; Buruu losing all control and flaring bright inside her splitting head, an impulse traveling down the Kenning and filling their mouths with saliva, making their hearts beat faster, breath come quicker. Butterflies in their stomach, face and neck flushing with heat, thigh muscles quivering. They dug her fingers into his fur, felt every strand across their palms, goosebumps thrilling their skin.

With a gasp of effort, she pulled away, drew back from his mind and slammed hers shut, pawing at the blood dripping from her nose. She realized he’d put on a burst of speed, muscles taut, talons curled into fists. She could feel his heart pounding, taste the lingering rush in her veins. Recognizing the sensation from her nights in Hiro’s arms, the anticipation of that moment each evening when their lips would first touch after a day of longing, feeling the warmth spread from her stomach down between her thighs. The way Kin had made her feel in the graveyard, her body pressed against him, breathing him in like oxygen and fire.

It was lust.

No, something worse.

Something further from desire and closer to madness.

Buruu?

She reached into the Kenning, trying to expose only the smallest sliver of her psyche, as if opening a door just the tiniest of cracks. His heat burned brighter than the sun. The headache lurched about her skull, a stumble-drunk thing of avalanches and metal clubs, and she closed her eyes against it, holding her hand before her face as if shielding it from a bonfire.

Buruu? Can you hear me?

His only response was to fly faster. The rivets and bolts in his wing assembly groaned in protest, and he climbed higher, out of the wind snarling at the ocean’s face, up into smoother skies. Bearing north like a compass point, blood pounding, thudding, thrumming, focused on the faint fragments of scent now filling his mind, hooks in his skin, drowning out her voice and leaving nothing but the thunderous pulse at his temples.

Buruu, stop. Where are you going?

NORTH.

She reeled upon his back, almost falling, digging fingernails into his neck. So impossibly loud. So awfully bright. The pressure and heat turning her skull to glass and kicking at the insides with iron-shod boots.

She twisted to look behind them. Shabishii Island and the monastery were nowhere to be seen. Nothing but blood-dark ocean now, as the sun’s last light guttered and died. Howling wind all around, the break and hiss of vast seas below, and fear raised its cold, smooth head in her belly, spread fingers through her insides. Throwing her arms around Buruu’s neck, she pressed her face into his warmth. Tasting the echo of his thoughts, the intoxication filling his veins, like a junksick lotusfiend in a burning valley of smoke. And there, amidst his heartbeat’s pounding song, the blood-drunk rush of desire, she caught a hint of it. The thing that spurred him on, robbed him of all reason, reduced him once more to the beast she’d met in the shadows of the Iishi, prowling from the darkness, smeared with oni blood.

Somewhere north, a trace hanging on the wind, knotting itself amongst his feathers and dragging him onward, like lightning toward a spire of copper.

It was a female.

A female in heat.