Kinslayer

15 THE HOUR OF THE PHOENIX

Father was just another word for failure.

Slumped at the table with a bottle in his hand, shrouded in old sweat and liquor. Medals on the wall behind, bright ribbons and tarnished bronze, engraved with kanji like VALOR and SACRIFICE. Empty eyes in a bloated, sunburned face, a spit-slick sheen on the whiskers at his chin. An ugly stump where his hand used to be, forearm mangled, shining skin. Hair like a scarecrow in a crowless field, shoulders buckled under the weight of regret. Knuckles scabbed from their mother’s teeth. The land outside running to ruin while he drank himself stupid and blamed the weather, the blood in his veins, the gods, the war. But never himself.

Never himself.

“Where’ve you been, Yoshi?” he growls.

The boy is drenched in sweat, pollen fogging his goggles, skin blistered from his day in the sun. He hasn’t even had time to wash his face, drink a mouthful of water, and already it’s begun.

“Where do you think?” He holds up his hands, black dirt under broken fingernails.

“And now you’re off to town, eh?” his father slurs. “Prancing about with your pretty little friends? You think I don’t know what you do? Who you do it with?”

“Who and what I do is my business.”

“You act like lowborn trash, that’s all people are ever going to see.”

“You’d know, right Da?”

“I made something of myself, you little bastard. I was a soldier. A hero. Lowborn or not.” He waves at the medals on the walls. “I proved to those Kitsune bastards it doesn’t matter what blood flows inside a man. It’s the heart that beats in his chest.”

“Gods, spare me…”

“You’re old enough now,” he spits. “Time to grow up. Be a man. Be a soldier.”

“Tell me more, Da. Tell me all about the man I’m supposed to be.”

“Watch your mouth.” He sways upright, the first unsteady steps of a familiar dance routine. “You act like a woman, I’ll treat you like one.”

Yoshi’s mother is in the kitchen, head down, bright blue eyes squeezed shut. Hana comes in from the fields, clad in threadbare cotton and lotus pollen. She pulls her goggles down around her throat and glances back and forth between her father and brother. The boy sees the look on her face. The fear. Her eyes are bright with it, brimming with the terror that darkens her every day. Twelve-year-old girls weren’t supposed to have eyes like that.

“Have another drink, war hero,” Yoshi says. “You look thirsty.”

The man stalks toward him. Hana starts pleading to her father, begging. His flower, his baby girl. The only one he loves. Between all the blood and all the years, the only thing father and son have in common. She won’t move him a foot, or sway him an inch. But still she tries. She tries every time.

Yoshi raises his fists.

He won’t win. His father is bigger. Seven shades meaner. But the boy is getting stronger every day. Faster. And his father is getting fatter and slower and drunker. Every day.

Yoshi won’t win. Not this time.

But soon.

Brisk footfalls broke the predawn hush, echoing down the suffocated gloom of Kigen’s streets. A pair of long shadows preceded their owners across shattered cobbles, through palls of sweat-stale lotus exhaust; dark slivers wearing the shapes of men. The men themselves wore black kerchiefs, broad hats, shoulders cloaked in dark gray against autumn’s chill. They walked empty lanes and broken roads, listening to the Guild criers calling in the Hour of the Phoenix and paying the Daimyo’s curfew less notice than Lady Sun pays to Father Moon.

Hida clomped along in front; short, ox-wide, a broad, flat face set with piggy eyes, his ears so deformed from years of fistfighting they resembled an extra set of knuckles on the sides of his head. Seimi followed close behind, taller, leaner, crumbling yellow rubble for teeth, sharp lines of his cheeks and chin betraying a feral, gutter-born cunning. Each man carried a clinking satchel and a wooden tetsubo studded with fat iron rivets. Both clubs were stained at the business end; dark smudges that only a simpleton would confuse with varnish.

A tomcat yowled his lust somewhere in the distance; a solitary cry almost unheard of in Kigen these nights. A pack of corpse-rats perked up their ears, hearing a dinner bell instead. All glinting eyes and crooked fangs, they scampered off through the choking smog.

“Three irons say they get him,” said Seimi.

Hida shrugged, said not a word.

They walked on through Docktown’s warehouse district, as sure of their welcome as a groom at a wedding feast. Past rusting shells, empty windows like sightless eyes. As they crossed over the sluggish tar reek of the Shiroi River, Seimi looked south toward the dry-docked sky-ships, hanging around the Docktown spires like flayed rats in a butcher’s shop window. The pentagonal flanks of the Guild chapterhouse loomed on their right, yellow stone stained by black rain. Seimi doffed his hat in the building’s direction.

When the Kagé rebels dropped their bombshell and kick-started the so called “Inochi Riots” four weeks back, the Communications Ministry had rebuffed all claims about the fertilizer’s manufacture. But that didn’t mean the rioters themselves were to go unpunished. Hells, no. Not a drop of chi had been shipped from Kigen’s refinery since the uprising. The embargo was a “reminder to the people” about where their loyalties should lie. And as the engines ground to a halt, as the price of fuel rocketed skyward, they sure as hells remembered quick.

Rationing began almost immediately; sky-ship traffic had slowed since Yoritomo’s death, and the trains hadn’t run since his corpse hit the cobbles. Commonplace items became luxuries overnight. As the city shivered with tiny ripples of civil unrest, curfews were tightened, martial law extended. Music to the ears of men who made their living in the shadows, who swam in markets from murky gray all the way through to ink-black. Men who made it their business to get people what they wanted. What they needed. Provided the price was right.

Men like the Scorpion Children.

Hida and Seimi turned off the thoroughfare, cutting through Kigen’s network of filthy alleyways. The pair were lieutenants of the Children, hard as gravestones, moving through the sprawling labyrinth as easily as a koi fish through still water. The tomcat shrieked nearby, hissing, spitting. Rats screeched, the sound of scuffling bodies rang out in the dark. Seimi grinned through tumbledown teeth.

“Got him.”

The squeezeway was a thin stretch of broken cobbles stinking of beggar piss. It was barely wide enough for the pair to walk down, crawling with sleek, black corpse-rats as long as a wakizashi. But the shortcut would steer them clear of the bushi’ patrols on the main drag, not to mention shave a few minutes off their trip. As it was, the Gentleman was going to chew them out for making him wait past dawn, and neither man was really in the mood for a stabbing.

The rats perked up on their mounds of filth, watched the gangsters approach with eyes like black marbles.

“Mei still giving you trouble?” Seimi asked.

His comrade grunted in reply; Hida never used a word when a shapeless noise would do. He could go days at a time without forming a whole sentence.

“If she’s such a bother, why keep her at all?” Seimi aimed a kick at a fat corpse-rat running between his feet. “The little brothers should be dealing with the White Crane gang, not gutting each other over a dancer. Izanagi’s balls, we’re ninkyō dantai, not—”

Seimi heard soft scratching on the corrugated metal above. He looked up and saw smoke-gray fur, missing ears; a huge tomcat peering at him with bright yellow eyes. The thing stood on the awning overhead, spattered with rat blood. Seimi tilted his hat away from his eyes.

“Well, I’ll b—”

“Is that what you call yourselves?” A voice rang out in the smog ahead.

Hida ground to a halt, feet scuffing the gravel, hefting his tetsubo in sausage-thick fingers. Seimi squinted into the rolling pall of exhaust fumes, making out a lone silhouette in a broad straw hat at the alley exit ahead.

“Ninkyō dantai?” The smile behind the figure’s kerchief was obvious. “‘Chivalrous organization?’ Who you fooling, yakuza?”

“Yakuza?” Seimi hefted his tetsubo, he and Hida stalking toward the stranger. “That’s a dangerous accusation to be throwing about, friend.”

“Close enough, friend,” the figure warned.

The yakuza kept advancing, knuckles white on the hafts of their war clubs. Seimi could make out the figure a little clearer. His straw hat had a four-inch gouge down the front, as if someone had taken a swipe with a blade and barely missed. Even behind the black kerchief, it was obvious the stranger was young. Pale, dirty skin and big black eyes. Skinny. Unarmed.

Seimi laughed.

“Does your mother know where you are, boy?”

The boy reached into his obi, drew out a snub-nosed shape. The device gave out a small hiss, a stuttering click. Hida and Seimi rumbled to a stop and stared down the barrel.

“Where the hells did—”

“Seems I’m the one who should be singing now, friend.” The smile in the boy’s voice was long gone. “Seems you’d best grab a cushion and listen a spell.”

The men heard soft footsteps behind, saw a figure drop from the rooftop and cut off their retreat. Another boy by the look, straw hat and dark clothes, a club studded with roofing nails.

Seimi was incredulous.

“Do you know who we are?”

“Clueless, me,” the boy replied. “Now toss the satchels, Scorpion Children.”

Hida spread his stance, rocking back and forth on his heels. The boy at the alley’s mouth aimed the iron-thrower at the yakuza’s chest, pulling ever so slightly on the trigger.

“Gambler?” The boy tilted his head. “Partial to a roll myself, matter of fact.”

“Don’t be stupid,” the one behind them growled. “Walk off or be carried. Either way, we get those bags.”

“Hells with it.” The big-eyed boy leveled the weapon at Hida’s head. “I venture we just do them. Two shots is no bother. Boy my age has plenty more in the pipe, after all…”

“All right, you little bastards.” Seimi dropped his tetsubo, raised his hands. “Take it.”

He slipped the satchel off his shoulder, tossed it to the figure behind.

“What about you, Gambler?” The boy wiggled his eyebrows at Hida.

Hida stood perfectly still, face impassive as a brick wall. He stared for a slow minute, down the iron-thrower’s barrel, up at the calm black eyes hovering beyond. Sparing a scowl for his partner, he slipped his bag from his shoulder and tossed it to the thief behind.

“Very wise, friend.”

The iron-thrower boy waited until his comrade had slunk off into the fog, yakuza and thief staring each other down. The boy’s arm was solid as a statue’s, weapon still aimed at Hida’s head. The yakuza nodded; a small gesture, barely perceptible. His voice was soft as gravel.

“See you soon. Friend.”

The boy tipped his hat.

“Doubtless.”

He disappeared into the smog like a dorsal fin beneath black water.

The Gentleman had killed his first man when he was thirteen years old.

A gang fight in some Kigen back lot, a bloody scrap over a stretch of dirty brick and concrete less than half a city block. He’d dashed into the melee, eager to show his worth to the older gangers. He’d spotted the other boy amongst the crowd, smelled the fear in a heartbeat. So he waded across the mob, blade in hand, and plunged it into the other boy’s gut.

He still remembered the warmth and smell as blood gushed over his hands. Viscous, copperish, far darker than he’d expected. He could still see the look on the boy’s face as he pulled the knife free, stuck it in again a few inches higher. Punching through ribs, twisting as it went, feeling bone crack. The boy clutched his shoulder as the Gentleman looked into his eyes, pain-bright, pulling out the knife and stabbing again. And again. Not out of any need or lust. Just because he wanted to know what it felt like. To take what could never be given back.

The Oyabun of the Scorpion Children wasn’t the most frightening man on the island to look at—truth be told, he appeared entirely unremarkable. Graying hair swept back from sharp brows. Dark eyes, tanned skin. Softly spoken, unfailingly polite. Even his enemies called him “the Gentleman.” His real name had passed the way of the panda bears of Shima’s bamboo forests, the tigers that prowled her in yesterday’s dark. Gone. Very nearly forgotten.

Calloused hands around a small cup, he took a sip of red saké. The bottles came from Danro, the Phoenix capital; quality that was hard to find in Kigen these nights. He savored the sting, the warmth spreading on his tongue. He thought of the woman waiting at home, soft hands and warm thighs. His son would be long in bed by the time he stepped inside from the smog-filled streets. But she would wait up, even past dawn. She knew by now not to disappoint him.

Where are they …

His office was a modest affair; old maple desks, reams of paperwork, a windup ceiling fan clunking away in the creeping autumn chill. Sluggish lotusflies buzzed around a small bonsai tree, suffering silently in the lotus stink. A visitor could be forgiven for mistaking the room as the office of a legitimate businessman; a man who made his living selling furniture or carpets or spring motors.

The Gentleman’s accountant, Jimen, sat at the other desk. Head clean-shaven, thin and quick, dark, knowing eyes. The little man was arranging coins into stacks, pausing after the construction of each tower to shift a bead across the antique abacus on the desk beside him. His sleeveless uwagi revealed full-sleeve tattoos on both arms. Two scorpions dueled in the negative space on his right shoulder, claws intertwined, stingers raised.

“Books look good.” Jimen flapped a bamboo fan in his face, despite the cool. “Profit is up seventeen percent this quarter.”

“Remind me to send a note of thanks to our would-be Daimyo,” the Gentleman murmured. “On the good stationery.”

He raised the saké bottle with an inquiring eyebrow.

“Never seen the black market this busy.” Jimen nodded, held out his cup. “The Guild will lift the embargo soon. If this Tiger pup secures the Daimyo’s chair, he might even start the trains running to let people attend his bloody wedding. So we’d best make the most of it while it lasts.” Jimen scowled. “And the White Crane are still a problem.”

“Not for long,” the Gentleman said. “Downside is ours now. Docktown is next.”

“Scorpion Children.” Jimen raised his glass. “The last crew standing.”

“Banzai.” The Gentleman nodded, taking another small sip.

As he swallowed the saké, the Gentleman heard floorboards creaking outside his office, soon followed by a soft knock on the door. Heavy breathing. The smell of cheap liquor and sweat. The clink of a tetsubo’s studs against iron rings. Hida and Seimi.

“Come,” he said.

His lieutenants entered the room, eyes downcast. He looked up, ready to rebuke them for their tardiness, stopping short when he saw the looks on their faces. The Gentleman took note of the faltering steps. The hands clasped before them.

The empty hands clasped before them.

“An interesting morning, brothers?”

A single iron kouka in Kigen city could buy you a woman for the night. Not some gutter-trash from Downside, mind. A quality courtesan—the kind of lady who could recite the poetry of Fushicho Hamada, debate matters theological or political, and round out the evening with a finale to make a cloudwalker blush. It could buy you a night in a good inn with a warm meal, a cool bath and a bed with a remarkably low quotient of lice per square foot. It could buy you a bag of decent smoke, a bottle of top-shelf rice wine (local of course, not Danroan) or the promise of discretion from an innkeeper about the nocturnal habits of his guests.

Yoshi was staring at over a hundred of them.

Scattered across the mattress in their bedroom, illuminated by a splinter of sunlight piercing the grubby window. Jurou was crouched beside them with a grin as wide as the Eastborne Sea, dry pipe hanging from the edge of his mouth.

“Izanagi’s balls, how much you figure is here?”

“There’s enough. That’s all we need to know for now, Princess.”

Yoshi’s hat was sitting on the mattress beside the kouka piles, and Jurou fingered the four-inch gouge through the brim.

“I’m wondering if it’s ‘enough’ for you to splash out on a new shappo.”

“That’s my lucky hat. I’d sell you before I sold it.”

Jurou made a face, muttered something unintelligible.

The boys hunkered down by the light of the risen sun, listening to the hymns of the waking streets outside. The sweat from their dash across town was still drying on their skin, smiles still tripping in their eyes. It had been so much easier than he expected. So much cleaner. For all their weight, those yakuza had melted like wax. Like godsdamned snow. All thanks to a tiny iron lump in the palm of one little hand—

“Yoshi?” Hana’s sleep-drunk voice from outside the bedroom. “You back?”

“Shit!” he hissed, lunging for a pillow as his sister knocked gently and opened the door. He threw himself and his thin, feather-stuffed shield over their haul, a strangled “oof!” slipping through his lips as Jurou sat on top of him, the pair drawing more attention to the coins than if they’d lit them on fire.

Daken followed Hana into the room, regarding Yoshi with a glittering stare.

… smooth, boy …

“What the hells?” Hana breathed, sleep-crusted eye growing wide. “Where did you—?”

Yoshi rolled to his feet, pulled her inside. Glancing across the living space at his sister’s bedroom door, he pushed his own shut, quick and quiet. Hana was fully awake now, her frown building up a slow head of steam.

“Where did all this money come from, Yoshi?”

“A friendly kami gave it to me,” he whispered. “Maybe if you sing louder, it’ll flit back with second helpings.”

She fixed him in that paint-flaying, one-eyed glare. “I’m serious.”

“So am I,” he hissed, glancing at the closed door. “Volume down. Unless you want your lump of mattress-meat to overhear?”

The pair fell into a silent staring contest, which Yoshi eventually broke from. Hana felt around her eyepatch, touched her forehead, running fingertips across pale, grubby skin. She snatched up the tiny looking glass on Yoshi’s dilapidated dresser and made a show of squinting at her reflection, still pawing at her brow.

Jurou frowned up at her. “What the hells you doing, girl?”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” She glared at Yoshi again. “I just figured someone had tattooed ‘idiot’ on my forehead while I was sleeping. You take the ’thrower out for the night and just happen to find a Daimyo’s fortune in iron? What are you in, Yoshi?”

“I was all set to ask you the same yesterday before I remembered whose business I’m supposed to mind.”

“Me?” Hana flipped hair from her eye. “Chamber pots are about the size of my affairs.”

“Must be some scary brown in that palace, if you have to go around shooting at it.” Yoshi folded his arms. “Or did you think I wouldn’t spy the ’thrower was one shot light? And who the hells is that lump of beef in your room? Your whole life, I’ve never seen you bring anyone back home for a roll, and that cripple has been here two days straight.”

“Don’t talk about him that way.”

“You don’t tell me how to talk, little sister. I’m the man in this pit.”

“Keep running that mouth, you’re gonna wake up a lady, brother-mine.”

Yoshi grinned, despite himself. “All sweet. You keep your secrets. But this coin is mine. I’ll air my skeletons when you decide you’ve got some. Until then, no questions asked. I’m taking care of us. All of us. Blood is blood. That’s about the measure of the knowing you need.”

Hana glowered, looked to Jurou for backup and received only a helpless shrug. With a muttered curse, she turned and stalked from the room. Daken remained behind, wriggling what was left of his ears. The cat sniffed the air, nose wrinkled with contempt.

… this room stinks, boy …

Yoshi glanced around the grubby little space, into the living room beyond. With all this coin, they could afford something in a nice part of town, far from where the Scorpion Children did their business. A few more rips, they’d have enough to go wherever they wanted. No more scrounging or small-time scams. No more slinging rich man’s shit for Hana. No more looking over their shoulder or wondering where the next meal might come from.

He nodded at Daken.

This whole place stinks, little brother. You just keep helping me do what needs to get done, and we’ll be scampering from this hole with no looks back.

… have Hana help? seven eyes better than six …

Hana can’t know, you hear? Not about any of this. I’d never hear the godsdamned end of it. I’m the man of this family. I take care of us.

… not understand …

You don’t need to. If she asks, don’t say anything at all.

… how long will that work …

Yoshi peered through the tiny window, out into the swelling shift and roll of the city beyond. He could hear Jurou counting coin, feel the prickle of Hana’s glare on his skin. The weight of a fistful of iron in the small of his back. The tingling promise of coin in the palms of his hands.

Freedom.

Long enough, my friend.

He closed the bedroom door.

Long enough.

16 UNDERTOW

Three days.

Three days of screaming gales and blinding rain. Of aching muscle and bitter-sharp cold. Of red water and black fear and snow-white knuckles. Three days long. And in the midst of those endless dark hours, there came a single, awful moment that threatened to break Yukiko entirely.

Not the moment she swallowed her last morsels of food, her final mouthful of water. Not tying her hands around Buruu’s neck for fear she might fall asleep and tumble into the void. Not in the wind whipping her across his back like a doll of rags. Not even the complete absence of anything but clouded sky and blood-red ocean, stretching to the brink of every horizon.

It was the moment she realized her best friend in the world was a complete stranger.

She begged him. Pleaded. Screamed into his mind until her nose bled and her head split. He could barely manage monosyllabic replies beneath the rush of blood in his veins, the arousal that spilled into her mind if she lingered more than a moment in his. He was an imposter wearing an all-too-familiar skin, like one of those automated Guild criers, set to a single series of functions.

<seek>

<mate>

<repeat>

Storm clouds mustered to the north, glowering black, and as they’d drawn closer, the need inside him had grown worse. The scent was a drug; a curling heat spreading through his system, rushing toward a terrifying high. Yukiko felt some tiny spark of him behind the thunder in his veins, almost extinguished by the absolute need filling every other part of him. And as hours stretched into days, and she hunched shivering and miserable on his back, she’d realized there was a part of Buruu she didn’t know at all.

In days past, she’d only caught glimpses of the animal inside him. Her humanity had leaked through the Kenning from the first time she’d shared his eyes, changing what he was. Even in the darkest hours of their imprisonment, it had tempered the pure, primal edge of him. But now that veil was torn away, ripped to shreds and left drifting in the storm, wings pounding at the air, muscles taut, eyes bright, lungs straining as his heart thrashed against its moorings.

She remembered his promise sailing above the Iishi, the words that warmed her soul.

“I will never leave you. Never forsake you. For you are the heart of me.”

It terrified her, how easily she’d been cast aside. But if the thought made her cry, for its part, the rain did its best to hide her tears.

In the gray, blurry dawn of the third day, she spotted jagged islands in the swell beneath them. Some as big as houses, others no more than slivers. It was as if some great beast lurked beneath the water, mouth open to the sky, baring teeth of dark stone. Toward noon, she spied wreckage; a sky-ship’s remains bent and broken over a small island, Guild kanji on the inflatable. Later, as the sun slunk below the horizon like a kicked hound, she could have sworn she saw the ruins of another sky-ship; heavier, armed for war, more Guild markings scrawled across her balloon. She couldn’t tell if either were the ship they’d followed into the tempest.

These storms would mean death for any cloudwalker crew, Guild or not. What madness drove them up here over and over again?

The wind was a pack of snarling wolves, howls of thunder and teeth of frost. Sleep came in fitful moments—no sooner would she doze off than it would snatch her like a child’s toy, fear flooding her insides as she clung to Buruu for dear life. Lightning intensifying as they flew farther north; dazzling, carpet-bomb barrages that left her comatose, black streaks in her vision, ears ringing in the aftershocks. The rain was a numbing deluge, soaking her lips blue.

On the morning of the fourth day she’d woken from dreams of falling to the sight of islands in the distance. Some were towers, higher than any building, twisting at impossible angles like fingers broken back and forth at every knuckle. Others were flat, squat, as if beheaded by the sword of an angry god. They were made of what seemed to be black glass, glittering like razors as the lightning kissed their edges, veiled in rain and mist.

Buruu, can you hear me? Are these the Razor Isles?

No reply, save the swell of the lust in his mind, the poison of weariness mirroring her own desperate fatigue. The female was close—so close he could taste her. But he could feel her mating time was almost done, scent fading like flowers at the end of spring, and the desperation to find her before she cooled filled every vein, every muscle, every corner of his mind.

Long, cold hours swept by, flying low through the salt-spray sting. At first she thought them a mirage; a fever vision brought on by sleep deprivation and the storm’s relentless assault. But as Yukiko squinted into the blood-red water beneath them, she realized things were pursuing them below the ocean’s surface. Serpentine tails slicing the swell, mouths full of needles gnashing at the waves, spines down their backs like the dorsal fins of deep tuna. Eyes as big as her fist, yellow and slitted like a cat’s.

She’d seen their pictures painted on drinking-house walls, the backs of playing cards, tattooed down the arms of her countrymen. She’d thought them long dead and gone. But then, she’d thought the same of thunder tigers.

Sea dragons.

The beasts were infants by the look, only twice as long as a man was tall. Bright scales, rolling eyes and serrated grins. And though they couldn’t keep pace with Buruu, falling behind and whipping the ocean into angry foam, the very sight of them filled Yukiko with cold terror, enough for her to open up the Kenning and scream into his mind until her nose bled and her whole body shook. And in the end, when he ignored her, when every cry fell on deaf ears, she found herself taking hold of him and squeezing tight, chin and lips slicked with blood at the effort, eyes screwed shut, heart hammering, skull creaking, forcing him to pull away from the surface and the monstrosities lurking beneath it.

Shaking with fear and exhaustion. Sick to her stomach, wind clawing her skin. Obsidian hands reached toward them, looming out of the mist like shadows of the hungry dead. Her throat was parched, teeth chattering as she opened her mouth to the rain. Closing her eyes, she saw lightning flash beyond her skin. And beneath the roaring storm, wind howling between jagged black glass, she heard it.

The faint thunder of beating wings.

Buruu whined; a long, grating ululation, like no sound she’d ever heard him make. Yukiko opened her eyes and caught a glimpse of pearlescence between spires of black glass, off through the lightning-flecked gloom. And for a second all the fear and fatigue and sadness melted away, and all she felt was wonder that the world could make something so magnificent.

Arashitora.

She was like Buruu, but not like him at all. Smaller, sleeker, like an edge of folded steel. A hooked beak, black as the stone around them, eyes of molten honey, ringed with charcoal. Her head was the white of Iishi snow, plumage like a fan of knives running down her throat, wings as broad as houses. They cut the air, blade-sharp, feathers spread like vast, white hands, cupping the tempest as if a summer breeze. She was muscle and fur, light and hard, razored talons as black as night, hindquarters and long tail slashed with thick bands of ebony.

My gods, she’s beautiful.

Buruu roared, but the female seemed already aware of his presence, spiraling up through a thicket of glass. He followed like an iron filing drawn to starmetal, mind alight with her scent, so overpowering Yukiko broke off the tenuous link between them, thrust herself out into cold air and clean rain, her insides shivering with the strength of his desire.

They twisted through the stone forest, diving and rolling across fangs of gleaming obsidian. She was smaller, faster, and Buruu struggled to keep pace or follow her through the impossible gaps between broken black towers. She led them west, west toward the muted sunset, and Yukiko reached between the rain with the smallest sliver of herself, narrowing her eyes with the effort, almost blinded by the female’s spark.

Hello?

A flash of aggression. Confusion.

Can you hear me?

—WHO?—

Her voice was loud as a thunderclap, honey-warm, edged with a softness like wreaths of blue-black smoke from her father’s pipe.

—WHAT ARE YOU?—

I’m the yōkai-kin on the back of the sex-crazed thunder tiger behind you.

The female banked right, swooping up between two fangs of stone. She shot a quick glance over her shoulder, and Yukiko felt curiosity swell inside her. Beneath it, contempt. Anger. Something approaching hatred.

—YOU RIDE THE KINSLAYER?—

Kinslayer?

—FALSE WINGS?—

Yukiko shrieked and pressed herself to Buruu’s neck as he banked 90 degrees, streaking between two obsidian knuckles. She felt the stone pass inches from her spine, gravity clutching her, praying the knotted obi around Buruu’s neck would hold. She was seconds from slipping off his back when he righted himself, swooped beneath a crooked overhang.

The female was a flash of white through the rain ahead.

Listen, I know it’s probably expected of you to make him work for his supper, but if you could skip the foreplay and let him catch you, I’d really appreciate it. We’ve been flying for four days and he’s about to have a heart attack.

—DID NOT COME HERE TO FIND MALE, MONKEY-CHILD. LEAST OF ALL HIM.—

What’s so bad about him?

—FOOL. KNOW NOTHING. GO HOME.—

Izanagi’s balls, that’s what I’m trying to do!

—TRY HARDER.—

They raced amongst the islands, still weaving west. Yukiko could have sworn the female was toying with Buruu, slowing her pace, letting him creep closer before putting on a burst of speed or maneuvering where he couldn’t follow. She could sense grim amusement flickering across the female’s mind, screeching as they fell behind yet again, but Yukiko worried about Buruu’s metal wings—if Kin’s workmanship would hold up under this kind of punishment.

Across miles of red ocean and black glass. Glittering spray and snarling waves. Nature unleashed in all its callous beauty. And there, with Buruu’s heart straining to its limits, as Raijin thundered his drums, she saw it—an enormous lopsided structure of metal and stone, rising from the ocean on iron legs, crowned with spires of winding copper. Its roof was covered by an impossible machine, all glass tubes and snarled pipes and thick cable, shuddering and pulsing with a glow that wore the color of new lightning. A smaller machine resembling a giant dragonfly with three sets of propeller wings was chained on the ceiling. And running about it, swathed in slick yellow oilcloths, Yukiko saw the tiny figures of men.

Of men.

They were calling. Pointing at her.

What in the name of the gods?

She heard a sudden roar—nothing like stormsong—the shadow of broad wings falling over them both. Tearing her mind from the female’s, Yukiko caught the barest glimpse of burning heat in the Kenning before they were hit; a terrifying impact rattling the teeth in her skull. She felt a flash of pain from Buruu, screamed as she was flung from his neck, clawing the air as she plummeted down through the rain. The water rushed up to meet her, a long-neglected lover with open, bloody arms. She hit the surface like a comet, breath driven from her lungs as a deathly chill reached toward the marrow in her bones.

Akihito had taught her to swim when she was a child; she and her brother Satoru paddling in the stream running by their little bamboo house. But the water there was smooth as crow’s eyes, not cresting in waves as tall as a chapterhouse. Foaming white hammers crashed upon her head, clothes dragging her down, katana on her back heavy as lead. The current drove her toward the crooked building’s iron legs, but it was all she could do to stay afloat, let alone choose a direction. Finally she couldn’t even manage that. The water closed over her head, a suffocating, frozen blanket, driving her below, her last sight the silhouettes of two arashitora clashing in the lightning-bright skies above.

Buruu! Help me!

The current dragged her through an underwater forest as her lungs began to burn; towers of cruel reef snarled with rubbery kelp.

BURUU!

No answer save the roaring surf, the undertow swelling in her ears. She struggled to the last, unwilling to end, clawing dark water in a futile attempt to make the surface. But she didn’t even know which way was up. The ocean pushed into her lungs, salt and cold and black, and as the light died and all became nothing, she felt the grip of water kami come to claim her spirit and drag her before the Judge of the Nine Hells.

Would he weigh her fair? With no one to burn offerings and no ashes on her face?

Would Buruu miss her?

Would Kin?

17 THE SWEETEST POISON

Her lips tasted of strawberries and sweat, warm as spring and soft as Kitsune silk. Wet beneath his fingertips, thighs smooth as glass, a river of glossy black spilling around her face and clinging to dripping breasts. She swayed above him; a long, slow dance in the lamplight, spilling across her contours, down into soft curves and sodden furrows. Soaking all around him, slick and scalding to the touch. She took his hands, pressed them against her, biting her lip and sawing back and forth atop him. Her sighs were the only sound in his world, her heat soaking through to his center. Her hips moved like a summer haze over lotus fields, climbing the mountain as she moaned his name over and over again.

“Ichizo.” Her lips on his own, breathing into his mouth. “Ichizo…”

He cried out as she finished him, arcs of lightning behind his eyes, every muscle afire. She collapsed atop him and lay there for a blissful forever, sweat mingling with his own, flesh slippery against his. He gasped for breath, the sheets beneath them a soaked and tangled mess.

“You…” Ichizo swallowed, “… will be the death of me, Michi-chan.”

A shy grin curled her lips as she rolled off him. Dragging a sheet around herself, Michi sat up on the futon’s edge, picked up the perspiring bottle of rice wine. He watched her profile in the dim light, throat shifting as she drank, a single droplet running down her chin, pooling in the groove at her clavicle. She tossed long hair back from her face, glanced at him with dark, smoky eyes and offered the bottle. He shook his head, collapsed back onto the pillows.

“Truthfully, are you looking to end me and escape?” His heart thundered behind his ribs. “I’m helpless after that, you should get it over with…”

She laughed, small voice husky with liquor.

“I fear I won’t have to lift a finger if you’re late for the council meeting, my Lord.” She slipped back into bed, rested her cheek against his chest. “Your cousin will have you commit seppuku to prove a point.”

“Gods.” Ichizo sat bolt upright. “What time is it?”

“It must be close to Snake Hour by now.”

“Izanagi’s balls!” Rolling from the ruins of the bed, he charged toward the washroom. He cracked a gong, and two serving girls scurried in from the hallway, heads bowed, eyes downturned. “Why didn’t you say something?”

“I did say something.” That same shy, delicate smile. “Ichizo. Ohhhh, Ichizo…”

“Demon woman.” His laughter carried over splashing water. “Two nights in your bed and you’ve bewitched me. I should send for a Purifier, have him cleanse me of your taint.”

“What would be the point, my Lord?” She pulled up the sheets to cover herself, curled beneath them. “When the next night you poison yourself anew?”

Ichizo emerged from the washroom shortly, scrubbed and smelling of lavender. The servants had slicked his hair into a topknot, arranged a long scarlet kimono upon his shoulders. He sat in front of the looking glass as one of the girls slipped a tall, tasseled hat onto his head, pierced it with long, golden needles. His robe spoke of lavish wealth, the irezumi on his skin was the work of a master inksmith. He stood as the second girl wrapped a silken obi around his waist, and he slipped two ornate chainswords into the folds at his left hip. The daishō had the unmistakable gleam of weapons that had never seen battle, yet he wore them like a man who knew the art of the blade.

At a nod from Ichizo, the servants vanished without a sound.

“Well?” He turned to the girl curled on the bed. “How do I look?”

Michi pulled the sheet down from her shoulders to expose a few teasing inches of skin, staring up at him through kohl-smeared lashes.

“Still hungry…”

“Gods, you do want me dead. How would I court you from the underworld?”

“Court me?” A short laugh. “I believe it’s customary to do that before you bed me, my Lord Magistrate.”

He leaned close and kissed her, tasted salt on her lips, wine on her tongue.

It had seemed foolish at first, to be spending so much time in Michi’s room. But the memory of her kiss on the day they met lingered on his skin, and with all the turmoil at court recently, he supposed a few moments in her company would not be noticed. And so he’d visited each day, watched as she whisked and steeped his tea, eyes drifting up slowly to meet his, gift him with that small, shy smile. Questions about Lady Aisha and the Kitsune girl’s assault had given way to queries about her family, her childhood. And two evenings ago, as he bowed to take his leave, he’d straightened to find her standing only a breath away. Lips parted. Cheeks flushed. Shivering. She had breathed his name, just once, like a prayer.

And he had not been able to help himself.

He smoothed the damp hair from her cheek, caressing her skin softly as he may.

“Would it make you happy to be on my arm in public, Michi-chan?”

“Of course.” She sat up straighter, bedclothes clutched about her. “But I’m not certain that should bring any comfort, considering I’d walk on the arm of the Endsinger herself to escape these rooms.”

Ichizo leaned back, searched her eyes. “Would you rather still be in prison?”

She lowered her gaze. “A cage with silken sheets is still a cage, my Lord.”

“I am trying. It will take time.” He touched the old scar fading on her cheek. “I know how you suffer.”

“But do you?” The small dark line Ichizo had begun to hate appeared between her brows. “No charge has been brought against me, and still my honor is in question. The Kitsune traitor who slew Yoritomo tried to kill me too. I have the scars to prove it.”

“I know.” He ran a finger across the top of her breast. “I’ve seen.”

“You declare affection in the same breath you make jest of my disgrace?”

“These things take time, Michi-chan.” He straightened with a sigh. “Lord Hiro is about to broker deals with both of his political rivals. Yoritomo’s old bodyguard have thrown in with him to a man. The Guild already back him. The Daimyo’s chair will be his by weeksend. The plight of Lady Aisha’s ladies means very little to him right now, I’m afraid.”

“And how is my Lady?” Michi met his eyes again for just a heartbeat. “I’m not allowed to see her. Though she betrayed our Shōgun, she was my friend as well as my mistress. I loved her, Ichizo.”

“Precisely why you should stay away from her. If you wish to prove your fidelity, consorting with a traitor is the last thing you should do.”

“Lord Hiro is your cousin. Who can convince him of my innocence if not you?”

“My cousin is a complicated man, love…”

“Promise me.” The furrow in her brow deepened. “Promise you’ll get me out of here.”

“I will try.”

She sighed, wiped at her eyes. “Trying is not doing.”

“All right, all right. Izanagi’s balls, woman. I promise.”

A smile, bright as sunlight slipping out from behind the clouds. She grabbed his hand, kissing his fingertips, one after another.

“Oh, my Lord,” she sighed. “Thank you. Thank you for everything you’ve done. Your kindness … I can think of no way to repay it.”

“I am sure we can remedy that when I return.” He straightened again, backed away to the door. “But now I must go, or Hiro will have my life and all will be for naught.”

She planted a feather-light kiss onto her fingertips and blew it to him. “I’ll miss you.”

“I will return, fear not.”

He slipped from the room with his serving retinue, leaving her alone amidst the fading footsteps. He did not see the smile fall from her lips like a mask at the end of a kabuki play.

He did not see her wipe his taste from her lips.

He did not hear her whisper.

“I fear nothing.”

She was six years old when the Iron Samurai came to Daiyakawa. She remembered the sound their armor made, like a snake pit full of twisting metal, heavy boots drumming on the sun-cracked road. The bushimen came behind, so many that the dust in their wake was as tall as a tsunami. But really, the Iron Samurai would have been enough. The other soldiers were present for show; the feathers of a peacock spread to impress his rivals.

The morale of the Daiyakawa men was worn paper-thin, courage hanging by a thread. It was rage that had given them the strength to defy the government and sow their fields with whatever crops they saw fit, plant the magistrate’s head on a spike along the Kigen road. But rage soon gave way to fear; to realization about what they’d done and where it must inevitably lead. Michi was only a child at the time, but in later years she would understand the listless steps and hollow eyes: the look of men who believe they are already dead, and are simply waiting for the world to confirm their suspicion.

But her uncle was a man of courage. He spoke with the voice of a tiger, the voice of a man whom other men would follow. Urging them to resist to the last. That if this was to be their end, then it should be worthy of remembrance. But the Iron Samurai cut through their overturned wagons and pitiful barricades without pause, sheared through leather armor and pitchfork spears like torchlight through shadow. And as they dragged her cousins and aunt into the street and executed them before him, Michi saw her uncle’s spirit shatter like glass. In that last moment, in that final breath before they bid him plunge his own knife into his gut, she knew he was broken. And the world knew it too.

She looked at the samurai captain, into cold steel-gray eyes behind his tiger mempō, and vowed she would never share her uncle’s fate.

Hard years followed, as Daiyakawa’s farmers tried to rebuild their lives, forget their exhilaration as the guardhouse went up in flames; their tiny moment of infinite possibility. The memory was a curse to most, a leaden weight on their backs, doubling the burden of the Guild yoke retied around their necks. And if they spoke of the riot at all, it was with hushed voices in darkened corners, shoulders slumped and tongues bitter with the taste of regret.

Michi’s parents had passed when she was five, and now without family to care for her, she felt like a burden and was treated as one. She longed for the day she would be old enough to find her own way. To leave Daiyakawa and the hungry ghosts haunting its streets far, far behind.

And one day a samurai came to the village. Old-fashioned swords were crossed in his obi, gilt cranes taking wing across the lacquer. He wore black cloth, like a man in mourning, a broad, bowl-shaped shappo on his head. A young girl walked beside him, covered in the dust of the road, long fringe and a black kerchief obscuring her features. And as they stood in the village square and the man tilted the hat away from his face, Michi recognized his eyes. The same eyes that had watched from behind an iron tiger mask as his men carved her kin to pieces.

Their captain.

She had screamed then; snatched up a switch of wood and charged, swung it with all the might a nine-year-old could muster. And he caught her up and held her tight against his chest, held her as she screamed and kicked and thrashed and bit, calling down the curses of all the gods upon his head. Held her until there was nothing left inside her, until she sagged, broken-doll limp in his arms.

And then he spoke. Of regret. Of guilt’s burden. Of the falsities of the Way of Bushido, and the crimes he had committed in the name of loyalty and honor. Of a group to the north who saw the truth, who had vowed as she had done, never to kneel again, and never to break.

He spoke with the voice of a tiger. A voice other men would follow.

“My name is Kagé Daichi,” he said.

And in that moment, she knew she would follow him too.

18 CONTOURS

Ayane was starting to look like a human being.

Her stubble was a shadow across her scalp, black as the water in Kigen Bay. Even inside her cell, the mountain air had done her good, and the few supervised moments the Kagé allowed her in the dappled sunlight had given her skin just the slightest hint of color. Fresh fish and wild rice had filled out the flesh on her bones, and when she laughed, her eyes lit up like kindling-wheels on Lord Izanagi’s feast day.

Kin was seated outside the bars of her cell, a sheet of rice-paper and some charcoal sticks spread out before him. The girl sat opposite, legs crossed, spider limbs curled at her back.

“You look better with eyebrows,” he smiled.

“They feel strange.” Ayane rubbed her forehead, frowning.

“Well, they suit you. Very distinguished.”

When she stuck out her chin and wiggled an eyebrow in dramatic fashion, they both laughed. Just like real people.

“I had a dream last night,” she said. “It is the first one I have had aside from my Awakening in as long as I can remember. Has that ever happened to you?”

“No.” A small shake of his head. “I only have the one. Over and over.”

“Awful is it not?”

“I’m used to it.” A shrug. “What was your dream about?”

The girl stared down at the fingers entwined in her lap. A faint blush lit her cheeks.

“You,” she said.

Kin was unsure where to look. He cleared his throat, lips twisting into something between a grin and a grimace, feeling his own cheeks flush. Embarrassment stole over Ayane’s face and she gave a short, uncomfortable chuckle, eyes searching the room, finally seizing on the paper spread out at his feet.

“So … this is your infamous defense perimeter?”

“Ah, it is…” He nodded, lunging toward the new topic as fast as his lips would take him. “A schematic, anyways. The real thing is almost complete. We salvaged seven heavy shuriken-throwers from the ironclad ruins, set them up near the pit traps. I’ve modified the feeders to work on hand-cranked power, but we’re still getting pressure loss in the firing chambers.” A shrug. “I can’t figure it out.”

“I do not know why you are asking me.” Fingers curled beneath her chin, earth-brown eyes scanning the drawings. “You are Munitions Sect. I am just a False-Lifer, remember?”

“You were a False-Lifer.”

Bumblebee lips curled in another small, embarrassed smile. “I confess I am still getting used to thinking like that.”

“Another set of eyes always helps. Besides, you have a way with machines. I can tell.”

“It would be easier if I could see the modifications firsthand. Instead of just plans.”

“I’m working on it,” Kin shrugged. “The Kagé have other things on their minds.”

“Arashi … I mean, Yukiko?”

“It’s been eight days. She should be back by now.”

Ayane looked at him through the bars, head tilted. “Are you concerned?”

“A little.” A sigh. “But she’s with Buruu. He’ll take care of her.”

“Do you miss her?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Well, just…” Ayane sucked her bottom lip. “Just the way you speak about her, is all. I thought perhaps she was special to you.”

“Would you mind if we didn’t talk about this?”

“I am sorry.” She reached through the bars and placed a gentle hand upon his knee. “I am certain she is all right.”

Kin gave her fingers a soft squeeze, turned his eyes to the blueprints.

“Isn’t this a pretty picture…”

Ayane started at the voice, Kin turning more slowly, cold fear greasing his insides. They were standing in the doorway—three boys around his age; sword-grip hands and battle-hard stares. He felt a surge of adrenaline, the instinctive reaction of a trapped animal, flight and fight tumbling over one another inside his head.

He pulled himself to his feet, jaw clenched, staring at each boy in turn.

“Hello, Guildsman.” Isao ran a hand along the thin stubble on his chin, up through the topknot of long, dark hair. His face was angular, cut rather than molded by the Maker’s hand. Short sleeves showed burns where his irezumi used to be, hard muscles and tanned skin.

Two other boys crowded the doorway behind him. Kin knew their names: small and wiry Atsushi, the boy who’d found Ayane in her pit. His big crooked-faced cousin Takeshi, who’d interrupted Yukiko’s kiss in the graveyard. Arms folded, jaws set, goggles hiding the flint and steel in their eyes. Both growled salutations ending with the word “Guildsman.”

“My name is Kin,” he said.

“Your name is shit,” Isao spat.

“What do you want, Isao-san?”

“You gone, whoreson,” Atsushi growled.

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Isao stepped forward, fists clenched. He was a little younger than Kin, but bigger. Weatherworn and battle-tested.

“You’re going to the Yomi underworld for what you’ve done to these islands. You and this little spider-legged bitch.” He gestured at Ayane, pale and wide-eyed with fright. “You and all your kind are poison.”

“They’re not our kind, Isao.” Kin licked his lips, tried to keep the anger from his voice. “You have no idea what it cost us to be here. You don’t know anything about us.”

“I know you’re a traitor.” Isao took another step closer, just a few feet away now. “A liar who sold out his own kind. And now you’re up here spreading your cancer among my family. The little toys you make for the children. Your marvelous machines spitting poison into—”

“They’re not chi-driven, you imbecile,” Kin spat. “The shuriken-throwers are just hydraulics and gas-power. You don’t need to burn lotus to—”

“What did you call me?” Isao’s lips pulled back from his teeth.

“You heard.”

“Please…” Ayane began. “We want no trouble.”

Isao spit on the decking, glaring at the girl. “My mother and father both died of blacklung from the poison your machines shit into the sky. Takeshi’s mother was executed for sedition when he was six. Atsushi’s sister was burned at the godsdamned stake by your bastard Purifiers.” He narrowed his eyes. “You think we give a shit what you want?”

“We’re going to hurt you, Guildsman.” Takeshi scowled at Kin, crooked jaw, cracking knuckles. “Until you squeal.”

“And we’re going to keep hurting you until you see you don’t belong here,” Isao said. “Until you and this bitch crawl back to your five-sided pit and leave us the hell alone.”

“Stay away from us.” Kin kept the tremor from his voice, raising his fists. “I mean it.”

Isao laughed, looked at the other boys. “Look out, he means—”

Kin’s strike took him on the jaw, rocked his head back on his neck. A bone-hard ball of knuckles, landing heavy enough to split the younger boy’s lip. Isao staggered back as Kin grabbed his collar, swinging wildly with his free fist. He got in another solid hit to Isao’s temple, knocking his goggles askew before the others tore him off.

The gut punch knocked his breath loose, and his legs were swept out from under him. He fell back, cracked his head on the bars, bright stars bursting in his eyes. Ayane screamed as two kicks thudded against his ribs, curled him into a ball. He lashed out blindly, caught one of the boys on the shins.

“A little fight in you, eh?”

Isao rolled Kin onto his back as Takeshi grabbed his feet, held them in place. The younger boy sat on his chest, pinned Kin’s arms with his knees. Blood from his split lip spattered against Kin’s cheek. Isao drew a blade from his obi, tore Kin’s tunic open, pressed the knife-point into the bayonet socket beneath Kin’s collarbone. Kin felt the cable move beneath his skin as Isao twisted his blade. The metals made an awful sound as they kissed.

Skrrrritch. Skrrrritch.

“Stop it!” Ayane screamed. “Please!”

“You’re going to pay for that.” Isao licked his busted lip. “And maybe when we’re done, we’ll unlock this cage, play with your little sister here? You think she’d like that, Guildsman?”

A mouthful of spit sprayed into Isao’s eye.

“MY NAME IS KIN!”

“You boys!” A woman’s shout. “Leave him alone!”

Kin heard sandals slapping against the floorboards, felt the weight on his chest ease. Isao stood and sheathed his tantō, wiped the spittle from his face. His cheeks were flushed with rage, breath coming in quick, heaving gasps. The blood on his mouth was red as the wounded sky outside, bottom lip already swelling.

Kin rolled to his knees, dry retching and clutching his collarbone. Through the blur of sweat and pain, he saw Old Mari standing in the doorway, brandishing a cane as ancient and gnarled as she was.

“Get away from him.” The old woman’s voice was hoarse with indignation. “Go on, off with you. Three against one? You shame yourselves.”

The boys muttered and shuffled toward the door. Isao straightened his goggles, lips curled into an upside-down grin. He pointed at Kin, spit blood at his feet.

“See you tomorrow, Guildsman.”

Old Mari shoved through the boys as they loped out, smacking Takeshi on the behind with her walking stick. Ayane reached through the bars, clutched at Kin’s hand.

“First Bloom, are you all right?”

It took a minute or two for him to catch his breath, crouched with one palm planted on the floor. He touched his ribs and winced, straightened with a groan.

“I’m all right…”

“Disgraceful.” Mari clapped her cane upon the boards, scowling after the boys. “What matter if Isao and Takeshi are oni killers? You’d think before teaching them the sword, Sensei Ryusaki would teach them some damned courtesy.”

Kin looked at the old woman, tried to twist his grimace into a smile. She was a good foot shorter than he, stick-thin, back bent as if she carried the world upon her shoulders. One hand clasped her walking stick, the other a basket laden with fish and rice. Her skin was like leather, gray hair bound in a widow’s bun, rheumy eyes pouched in bags so heavy Kin wondered how she could see at all. She was in charge of the Kagé infirmary, had cared for Kin as he recovered from his trek to the Iishi. Her bedside manner was as pleasant as a flying kick to the privates, but she’d patched him up well enough.

“That was damned foolish of you.” She looked him up and down, her scowl undiminished. “Taking on three at once. Who do you think you are, Kitsune no Akira? The old Stormdancers usually had thunder tigers with them in battle.”

“They cornered us.” He touched the input jack at his collar, wincing. “I’ve done all the running I’m going to do. A man faces his enemies.”

“Oh, so you’re a man, are you? Ready to take on the world alone?”

“Ready to stand up for myself, at least.”

“The best thing you can do is tell Daichi.”

“No.” Ayane looked at the old woman with pleading eyes. “I do not wish for there to be any trouble on my account.”

“Daichi won’t care, Mari,” Kin sighed.

“Remain a fool, then,” Mari shrugged. “But if Yukiko were here, she’d—”

“Well, she’s not here, is she? And sometimes I wonder why the hells I am.”

Kin ran one hand over the stubble at his scalp, pulled his anger into check. Talking like that in front of Ayane wasn’t going to make her feel any more at ease. It wasn’t going to make him feel better, either. He glanced sideways at the old woman, sighing.

“What are you doing here, anyway?”

“I heard the False-Lifer cry out.”

“Her name is Ayane.”

Old Mari pursed her lips, utterly ignoring the girl behind the bars. “Don’t you have work to do? Something other than serving as a punching bag, I mean? Ryusaki was looking for you earlier.”

“I know, I know.” He pointed to the crumpled plans strewn across the floor. “I was just about to head out to the line.”

A scowling sigh. “Well, I’m on my way to take the boys breakfast now, if you wish to skulk along behind me. Just don’t walk too close.”

Kin turned to Ayane. “Are you going to be all right here?”

The girl offered him a tiny, frightened smile. “I cannot be anywhere else, can I?”

“I’ll come back and check on you tonight, if you like?”

“Hai.” The smile broadened. “Very much.”

Kin gathered up the scattered plans, nodded good-bye, limped out the door. Old Mari led the way, her cane beating crisp upon swaying footbridges. Nodding and smiling to the other villagers and studiously ignoring Kin, careful not to give the impression they were walking together. The old woman was remarkably spry, even with her arms laden, scaling down one of the winding ladders from the hidden village to the forest floor. As Kin stumbled after her through the undergrowth, autumn’s scent wrapped him in soft hands, the warm perfume soothing the ache of footprints on his ribs. Walking miles through beautiful green and rusting hues, Old Mari slowed down enough for Kin to catch up with her. She said nothing, but occasionally the boy caught her watching him out of the corner of her sandbag eyes.

Finally arriving at the first of the emplacements, Kin found a group of Kagé standing beside the bent and scowling lump of a heavy shuriken-thrower. Truth be told, it wasn’t the prettiest contraption Kin had ever turned a wrench on; four long, flattened barrels, a twisted knot of hydraulics and feeder belts, planted in the earth on a tripod of hastily welded iron. An operator’s seat was affixed to the ’throwers backside, allowing the controller to swivel with the weapon as it moved. Cylinders of pressurized gas were bolted at the base, cable winding up the turret like a cluster of serpents. When fired, the ’throwers sputtered and lurched about like violent drunkards, and were only a little more accurate.

“Ugly as a pack of copper-coin rent boys,” was the descriptor Kaori had chosen when she first laid eyes on them, and Kin had found it hard to disagree. But, unsightly as they might look, the test runs had gone well, pressure fluctuations aside. The forest in front of the ’thrower emplacement was shredded in a neat 180-degree arc—scrubs torn down to miserable stumps, saplings beheaded, bleeding rends torn through ancient trunks.

A half-dozen more of the emplacements were set up along the northwest of the village, the mountains and the pit traps funneling any potential approach from Black Temple into a relatively defensible zone. Kagé scouts still undertook dangerous patrols out in the wilds, but should it actually come to an attack, at least they wouldn’t have to fight hand to hand against a legion of twelve-foot pit demons.

Probably a good thing, since Yukiko isn’t here to help them this time …

Kin sighed, stomach turning, worry gnawing his insides as the memory of Yukiko’s lips set his heart to pounding. He knew Buruu would never let anything happen to her, but still, the fear of having no word, the ache of her absence …

The Kagé gathered around the ’thrower were clad in shades of autumn foliage, split-toed boots crunching in dead leaves. Most of the men eyed him with suspicion, the remainder with outright hostility. Sensei Ryusaki was the most senior figure present—a member of the Kagé military council, and a renowned swordmaster who had served under Daichi’s old command. The man had deeply tanned skin, a shaved skull and a long black moustache. He was missing his front teeth, compliments of a bar fight in his youth (in one of the few strained conversations they’d had, he’d warned Kin to beware of pretty girls with older brothers) and whistled through the gap almost constantly.

The captain stood, chin buttered with grease, pipe wrench in one hand, smiling at Old Mari. The old woman handed over her basket of food and promptly admonished the captain about eating properly.

Ryusaki glanced at Kin after receiving his dressing-down, narrowed a critical eye.

“Been in the wars, boy?”

“Just a skirmish.” Kin rubbed his input jack again.

“Serious enough to pop your lining.” The man pointed to Kin’s arm.

Kin realized the scuffle with Isao and his fellows had opened up the wound he’d earned during the ironclad attack. Blood was seeping through the fabric at his shoulder, staining the gray a deep, somber red.

“You should head to the infirmary,” Ryusaki said. “Get it looked at.”

“Old Mari has called me a fool twice already this morning.” Kin gestured to the woman. “That’s enough of her ministrations for one day, I think.”

Ryusaki aimed a toothless grin at Mari. “Been picking on our little Guildsman, mother?”

“Hmph.” The old woman scowled Kin up and down. “Boy is foolish enough to take on three young bucks at once, he should thank Kitsune some burst stitching was the worst of it.”

“Three?” Ryusaki raised an eyebrow. “Who did you tangle with, boy?”

“It is no matter, Ryusaki-sama.” A bow. “My thanks for your concern.”

The captain stared for half a moment, shrugged, and turned his eyes on the ’thrower.

“We took the entire line for a test run early this morning. ’Throwers four through six did surprisingly well. Number one popped a seal and lost power; two, three and seven are still suffering pressure failure. But we’re getting there. Kaori was dark as thunder when Daichi approved this madness of yours, but there might be reason to it after all.”

“I think I can fix the pressure issues.” Kin hoisted his schematics. “I almost have it right in my head.”

“A good thing. That earthquake has the oni riled up worse than a Docktown whorehouse on soldier’s payday, no mistake.”

Mari slapped his arm. “Watch that toothless filthpit of yours before I fetch the soap…”

A soft chuckle whistling through missing teeth. “Forgiveness.”

The captain turned his gaze to the northwest, grin slowly fading, eyes narrowed in the dim light. Kin stood beside him, looking out into the growing gloom. The wind was picking up, howling through the trees, a storm gathering strength among the surrounding peaks. Thunder cracked somewhere to the north, dead leaves falling around the captain like rain.

“I know you weren’t there for the battle last summer, boy,” Ryusaki said, voice somber. “I know you’ve never seen one of these things up close. And you strike me as the sort who doesn’t put stock in what he hasn’t seen with his own eyes. But these oni, they’re spat direct from the Yomi underworld, make no mistake, and our scouts have seen packs of the bastards moving near Black Temple over the last two days. I’m thinking that earthquake tore one of the cracks in the mountain wider, let a few more of the little ones squeeze through. Straight from the Endsinger’s belly, full of all her hatred for the world of men.”

“… We’d best get to work, then,” Kin said.

Ryusaki nodded. “I’m heading out tomorrow, by the by. I’ll be gone two weeks or thereabouts, so you’ll be reporting direct to Kaori.”

Kin groaned inwardly at the thought. “Where do you go, Ryusaki-sama?”

The captain hid his distrust well, but Kin could still feel it prickling on his skin.

“… South,” Ryusaki said.

Kin pursed his lips, nodded slow. No more than he should have expected, truth be told. Turning to the ’thrower, he pried off the firing mechanism housing. Placing it on the ground with a wince, he rubbed at his bloodstained shoulder. The old woman watched him, something a few feet shy of guilt in her eyes.

“Listen … if you wish to come back with me, get that wound restitched…”

“I am fine,” Kin said. “Truly.”

Mari clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “You remind me of my husband, Guildsman. He was stubborn as a mule too. Right up to the day he got killed.”

“I appreciate the concern, Mari-san.” Kin turned his eyes to the machine, tried to keep the anger from his voice. “But I can take care of myself.”

“Have it your way,” Mari sighed. “I’ll be in the infirmary when the dust settles. But you’re a fool if you think you can deal with all your troubles alone.”

The boy plucked a torque wrench from his belt, looked over the ’thrower emplacement with a sigh.

“A man can dream…”

Hundreds of eyes, red as sunset, staring up at Kin with as much adoration as glass could muster. A sea of brass faces, stretching into dark corners, smooth and featureless. Infinite repetitions of the same iteration; no individuality or personality, no expression or humanity in each razor-sharp contour. His own face, but not his at all. Over and over again.

Walls of stone, yellow and dripping, the songs of engine and piston and gears blurring into a monotone hum, a broken-clock rhythm that seeded at the base of his skull and sent out roots to claw the backs of his eyes. And he stood above them on the gantry, stared down at their upturned faces, felt the comforting weight of metal on his bones and knew that he was home.

They were calling his name.

He held his arms wide, fingertips spread, the lights of their eyes glinting on the edges of his skin. The gunmetal-gray filigree embossed upon his fingertips, the cuffs of his gauntlets, the edges of his spaulders. A new skin for his flesh; the skin of rank, of privilege and authority. Everything they had promised, everything he had feared had come to pass. It was True.

This was Truth.

They called his name, the assembled Shatei, holding their hands aloft. And even as he drew breath to speak, the words rang in his head like a funeral song, and he felt whatever was left of his soul slipping up and away into the dark.

He knew he was asleep; knew this was only the dream of a thirteen-year-old boy, huddled in the Chamber of Smoke as the poison crept into his lungs. The same vision that had plagued him every single night since he Awakened. But he could still taste the lotus on his tongue, feel the weight of his skin upon his flesh and the gut-wrenching fear as his What Will Be was laid bare before him.

The multitude below fell silent. He looked down at the scarlet pinpricks in the dark, swaying and flickering like fireflies on a winter breeze. His voice was a fierce cry, hollow and metallic behind the brass covering his lips.

“Do not call me Kin. That is not my name.”

In the dream, he felt his lips curl into a smile.

“Call me First Bloom.”

19 CATCHING THE SKY

The pain in her lungs was a living thing; a fire pressing against her ribs as black flowers bloomed before her eyes. The shock of impact, the water’s chill clawing at her marrow, rocks as sharp as demon’s teeth tearing her flesh—all of it secondary to the burning in her chest, the screaming in her head, the desperation forcing her mouth open to the black and the salt and the death that lay inside a single lungful.

Breathe.

She swam up. Or down. One as good as the other, the swell tumbling her like throwing sticks between forests of cruel stone, slick with grasping weed. Dull roaring in her ears, pressing her down, the blinding desire for oxygen becoming more than just a need; a reflex impulse over which she finally lost all control.

BREATHE.

She opened her lungs to the ocean, and the ocean dived inside.

Yukiko woke with a start, sobbing, gasping as sweet, blessed air filled her lungs. Her clothing was drenched, hair plastered to her face in thick, black drifts. She tried to claw it from her eyes, felt restraints around her wrists; leather thongs binding her to the flanks of an iron bed frame, clean sheets entwined about her ankles. She thrashed for a moment, vertigo swelling, staring around the dank, gray room without any idea where she was.

A voice spoke. Tangled words she didn’t understand.

She jerked toward the sound, saw a fierce-looking man reaching for her. Perhaps thirty years old, dressed in a long white coat of a strange cut, old bloodstains at the cuffs. Cropped dark hair and a pale, weather-beaten face, framed by a pointed beard.

She shied away, kicked against the ties on her ankles. The man held her shoulders and shook her gently, mouthing nonsensical words as his features coalesced. A long scar ran down his right cheek, another curved along his left, and he was missing his left ear entirely. His right eye was chalk-white; probably blinded by whatever had mangled his face. But beneath salt-encrusted eyebrows, she saw his left eye was a pale, sparkling blue.

White skin.

Blue eyes.

My gods, he’s gaijin.

Smoothing the hair from her face, he spoke more of his incomprehensible language. Yukiko pulled back from his touch, but he offered a tin cup, filled with fresh water. The taste of salt was thick on her tongue, throat parched, and she gulped it down without pause. Eyes closed in the mercy of dimming thirst, she was startled by another voice speaking from the doorway.

“Piotr.”

The only round-eyes she’d ever seen were the merchantmen selling leather goods on the Kigen docks, so it was difficult to judge. But as she squinted at the speaker, she guessed this second gaijin was only a little older than she. Damp, shoulder-length blond hair swept behind his ears, a small tuft of beard on his chin, tanned skin. There was a symmetry to his features she might have found handsome if he didn’t look so utterly alien. Scruffy red tunic of a bizarre cut, decorated with a shawl of pale-gray fur, thick leather gloves, insignia on his collars, goggles slung around his neck. He stared at her with eyes the color of tarnished silver, burning with curiosity.

There was something familiar about him …

As she watched, he took a small cylinder of white paper from a flat tin box in his coat, put it in his mouth. He drew a small slab of dull steel from a pocket, touched it to the stick. Pale gray smoke drifted from the end of the paper cylinder, filling the room with the scent of cinnamon and honey. His hands were shaking.

The smell dragged a dim memory back up through the sea-drenched fog in her brain: she was curled up on rain-slick metal, coughing lungfuls of brine. A silhouette crouched over her, thick rope lashed around his waist, sodden blond hair plastered to his face.

She remembered her mouth had tasted strange. Something over the salt and bile …

Cinnamon and honey.

“You…” she said. “You saved me?”

The blond boy spoke—incomprehensible and guttural. The dark-haired man stood and walked to the doorway, and the pair talked in hushed tones, glancing over occasionally while Yukiko’s eyes roamed the room.

Some kind of hospice, lined with metal cots, perhaps a dozen in all. The sharp smell of liquor and burned hair, jars of chemicals stacked beneath a cast-iron sink. Gray walls, glistening with damp, wind howling through ventilation ducts lining the ceiling. Grubby bulbs in rusted, wall-mounted housings, flickering in time with the toneless howl of the wind outside. Beneath it, she could hear the roll and crack of surf, thunder rumbling across sharp rock.

The ocean’s song.

She reached out with the Kenning, tentative, the headache cinching at the base of her skull. She could feel the gaijin in the room, just like she’d felt the people of the Kagé village; indistinct smudges of alien warmth. Pushing them aside, she groped around the nearby darkness, felt the impression of something warm; an animal with a familiar shape, far too small to be a thunder tiger.

Gritting her teeth, she stretched into the gloom beyond, trying to wrest the Kenning under some kind of control. It felt like opening herself up to a hurricane, stepping naked into wind and fire, a rolling sea beneath her. She could sense a cluster of warmth; dozens of gaijin crammed together, above, below, around. Pushing out further. Wincing at the pain. Feeling something warm in the distance, the sound of a tempest, a flash of heat.

Buruu?

And then she sensed them. Far below, like nothing she’d touched before. Cold and slippery and bejeweled, staring back at her with eyes of polished yellow glass.

Hissing.

She withdrew, slammed the door shut on her power, folded down on herself and drew a long, shuddering breath. Even with her newfound strength, she hadn’t been able to sense Buruu. Was he unconscious? Dead? What had happened to him?

Blinking, ignoring the pounding ache in her head, she tried to remember. The sensation of falling came first; the terrifying split second of inertia as momentum failed and gravity took hold. Choppy red water beneath her, rising fast. Impact knocking the breath from her lungs. Sodden clothes dragging her down, shapes in the sky above as lightning flashed.

Arashitora. Two males.

And they were fighting.

“Shima?”

The familiar word pulled her back into the room, into the half-blind stare of the dark-haired man. The gaijin was looking at her intently, arms folded, a far throw from friendly. The blond boy stared at the floor, sucking on the smoking stick, exhaling clouds of honey-scented gray. The headache was a raw wound drilled behind her ears, chiseled atop her spine.

“You Shima?” Astonishingly, the scarred man was speaking in her own tongue—he had a broken, bowlegged accent, but his words were Shiman nonetheless. Stepping closer, he pointed to her, then waved in a direction she presumed was south. The gaijin walked with a severe limp, and when his right foot hit the stone, she heard the chink of metal.

“Hai,” she nodded. “Shima.”

The man scowled and turned on the blond boy, raising his hand as if to strike him, spitting angry gibberish. The boy flinched away, smoke stick crushed between gritted teeth.

“Please.” She licked her lips, voice cracking. “Where am I?”

“Eh?” The scarred man frowned, turned toward her.

“Can you understand me?”

“Little.” He pinched the air between forefinger and thumb. “Little.”

“Where am I?” She annunciated the words clearly. “Where?”

He snapped at her—an angry spiel she didn’t understand.

“I don’t—”

Roaring, face growing red, storming over to the cot. He raised his hand and she shied away, cringing against the wall. The slap caught her full on the cheek, knocked her near-senseless, kindling the pain lurking behind her eyes. Sinking down onto the mattress, she screwed one eye shut in anticipation of another blow.

“Piotr.” The blond boy spoke a mouthful of tumbling words, concern plain in his voice.

Yukiko looked up at the dark-haired gaijin, blood in her mouth, salt biting at the split in her lip. She thrashed briefly against her restraints.

“You touch me again and I’ll kill you…” she spat.

The man lowered his hand, calloused, broad as a war fan. He stared at his fingers and mumbled, limped back to the blond, spitting out another tangle of nonsense. The boy stalked from the room, wet footprints in his wake. The older man lurked by the doorway, running one finger down the scar beneath his eye, thunderclouds gathered over his head.

With shaking hands, he fished a wooden pipe carved like a fish from his pocket, stuffing it with dry leaves from a leather pouch. Yukiko could see a red jacket with brass buttons beneath his white coat, more insignia pinned to the collar.

Crossed swords.

A soldier?

“Sorry.” He waved to her face. “He sorry, you.”

Yukiko stared at the man’s leg, saying nothing. She could see a metal brace buckled around his shin, a piston-driven actuator at his knee. Flesh, augmented with machinery.

Like the Guild …

The man snapped his fingers on another slab of burnished steel lifted from a breast pocket. Fire gleamed in his blind eye, deepened the shadow of the hooked scar along his left cheek as he coaxed his pipe to life. He snapped his fingers again and the flame was snuffed out.

“Who are you people?” she asked.

The man shrugged, muttered words Yukiko didn’t understand. She hung her head, breathing deep, suddenly and terribly afraid. The scent drifting from the gaijin’s lips reminded her of her father. Of cloying smoke curling up through a graying moustache. Of stained fingers and a bloated body wrapped all in white, waiting for the fire to claim it. And she hadn’t even been there. Hadn’t even said good-bye …

Don’t cry.

Don’t you dare.

“Gods?”

She looked up at the gaijin’s face. He was pointing to the sky, the brow above his blind eye raised in question.

“Have gods?”

“Hai,” she nodded. “I have gods.”

The man put his pipe to his lips, shook his head, spoke through clenched teeth as he shuffled from the room.

“Pray.”

Yukiko sat in the dark for long moments, waiting for the headache to subside. She could hear crashing surf, smell rust and oil hanging in the air. Shivering in her damp clothes, she clenched her fists repeatedly, thongs cutting into her wrists. And finally, when the ache had dimmed to a pale flicker, she pulled her slender defenses back together, brick by brick. A bulwark of all the substance she could muster; the rage Daichi had assured her was her greatest strength, mortar made of memories. Yoritomo’s blade cleaving through Buruu’s feathers. Her father’s grave. His blood on her hands. Teeth gritted. Seething. And with her wall in place, she reached out with the Kenning again.

A quick, directionless stab, feeling for any sign of Buruu, like a shout in a darkened room. But there was nothing close to his warmth nearby, and the distant, muddy heat she sensed didn’t wear his shape at all. Almost as soon as she opened herself up, the headache flared, the heat of the human bodies around her crackling, flame-bright and brittle. Beneath her feet, she felt those things waiting for her, cold and ancient and reptilian. And so she shut it off, locked inside her skull and leaving herself utterly alone.

Her face felt tender where the scarred man had slapped her, tongue probing her split lip. She tasted salt. Blood.

Closing her eyes, she remembered the smaller warmth she’d felt close by. Reaching out with a tiny, narrowed sliver of herself, she found it not far away. Curled up beside a heating duct, just a few doors down. An old blanket beneath him, tail wagging as he worried a strip of rawhide clamped between his front paws.

A dog.

Hello?

Head tilted to one side, tail falling still, one ear standing to attention.

who that!?

I’m Yukiko.

who?

Yukiko.

She could feel the shape of the hound’s mind, at once strange and familiar, like an old coat belonging to a stranger, yet fitting like it had been tailored for her. He was warm and soft, all curiosity and energy, tail beginning to wag again as she felt around his mind.

food!?

I don’t have any food. I’m sorry. What’s your name?

red!

Hello, Red.

where you? can’t see!?

I’m in a locked room down the hall.

play!?

Maybe later.

<whine>

Can you tell me what this place is, Red?

… is?

What do the men do here?

catching the sky!

Catching the sky?

so silly!

She frowned, trying to puzzle out what he meant, how she could frame the question in terms he’d understand. It had been years since she’d spent time swimming in the thoughts of a real dog; the last she’d Kenned was Aisha’s puppy, but she’d known him only briefly. Hounds could be intelligent, but they didn’t understand human concepts, focused instead on the immediate, the primary. As if on cue, she could feel the cold, wet nose of his thoughts snooping around the sliver she’d lodged inside his head.

food!?

She seized upon an idea, decided to see where it led.

I think there was food outside.

The dog snapped to his feet, tail a blur.

really!?

I think so.

let’s find we share!

I’m going to use your eyes, if you don’t mind.

The dog was already scampering away, and Yukiko only caught a glimpse of his room as she slipped behind his pupils. Gray walls. Metal cot and desk. A strange, crooked machine studded with glass vacuum tubes and buttons beside a stack of too-white paper. A banner on the wall; a black field set with a circle of twelve red stars.

Red nosed a rubber flap open and belted out into a long corridor of gray concrete, wind howling through the ducts overhead. They could smell the sea; the bite of salt, a hint of rust. But there was no rot entwined with it, no refuse like the waters of Kigen Bay. It was fresh and wonderful; a bright, caustic smell clinging to all around them.

They scampered past rows of closed doors, two large gaijin with hedge-thick beards and grubby yellow rainskins chatting beside stairs leading up and down. They could hear engines, a klaxon wailing in the building’s bowels, a sharp burst of laughter. Storm rumbling overhead, the structure murmuring in sympathy.

Out of the stairwell, into what looked to be a storage bay, crates stacked to the ceiling, static electricity standing their fur on end. Strange writing, wet bootprints, finally nosing their way through a rubber flap in towering doors. And at last, out into the wind and dark of night.

A gantry of wet, iron-gray stretched out before them, ending at a sturdy railing and a sudden drop into darkness. Forty feet below, black ocean swelled, towering waves crashing into the iron legs holding them aloft, hissing in fury as they were dashed to pieces, again and again. A soup-thick mist hung in the air, lightning whipping the gloom, illuminating long stretches of twin iron cables spilling out from overhead and off into the darkness. Thunder cracked so close they shrunk down against the floor, tail between their legs.

can’t smell food you sure!?

Up. Look up.

They turned their eyes to the sky, to the building towering at their back. Square windows watched the sea, lit from within like empty, hollow eyes. Three stories tall, flat walls of gray brick, crawling with piping and cable. Odd, conical structures rose from its roof like the points of a lopsided crown, still more dotting the fangs of rock in the ocean around them; metal rods, twelve feet high, topped with broad, flattened spheres. Each rod had a thinner pipe wound around it, circumference growing wider as it spiraled from tip to base. Orange metal, crusted with bright green oxide, scuffed by the kiss of a thousand scrubbing brushes.

Copper.

A blue-white glow spilled from the roof, shimmering like sunlight through rippling water. Thunder rolled, and they crouched low again as lightning arced down from the sky a hundred feet away, kissing one of the copper spires out on the ocean. Electricity spiraled down the cone in a burst of blinding sparks, crackling across the twin cables back toward the building’s roof. The light in the windows pulsed briefly, the glow overhead flickering.

What are they doing?

catching the sky!

The lightning? What do they do with it?

keep in jars!

She peered through the hound’s eyes, into the raging storm. Out across the black swell, another burst of lightning struck a copper pylon, cascading along the cables in a tumble of raw electricity, up onto the impossible crown on the building’s roof. Darkness and rain and howling wind, thunder shaking their bones and shivering their skin. The dog’s terror folded into her, all tuck-tailed and whining, and she finally bid him back inside, away from the elemental fury and bottomless ocean, back into the echoing empty of the building’s innards.

The hound shook himself, jowls flapping, spraying rainwater in all directions. The walls around him rocked, mirroring Yukiko’s tremors as she closed off the Kenning, pulled back into her own tiny body, her own little self. A frail and shivering girl, cold and wet and alone, a thousand miles of storm and ocean and darkness between her and anything that might resemble home.

And of the brother who had brought her here, the mountain she’d set her back against, the one she’d come to depend on above all else, there was no sign at all.

Gods, Buruu, where are you?

20 A SIGH OR TWO

A match flared in the darkness; a burst of orange and sulfur in the palm of Michi’s hand. She cupped the light, gentle as a new-made mother, touching it to the candlewick. The wax was glossy, the color of fresh blood, perfumed with rose hip and honey. A luxury that a girl from a village like Daiyakawa would never have dreamed of.

The wick caught, and she snuffed the match with a single breath, watching the light creep along the walls. Padding across the floorboards, she placed the candle on the windowsill, pressing it against clouded glass; a lighthouse calling her comrade to treason. She stared into the palace courtyard, garden silhouettes shrouded in night, stone ancestor statuary and weeping trees, bent double under the weight of a poisoned sky. Father Moon was a faint pink stain across the haze, a featureless portrait on ashen canvas, face buried in his hands.

Leaving the light burning in the window, she crept back to the bed. She knelt and studied Ichizo’s face, the features she knew now almost as well as her own. He wasn’t a picture of perfection when he slept, some kami taken human form to lie beside her and steal her breath away. Cheek mashed into the pillow, hair tangled, drool upon his chin. Ichizo was all too real. And that was the problem.

Too good to be true.

She ran one finger across his cheek, smoothed strands of silken black from his eyes. He smiled then, like a little boy on his naming day, murmuring in his sleep.

“I know what you are,” she whispered.

Seducing her jailer had been the most logical route out of her cell, so seducing her jailer was exactly what she’d done. He was mere flesh after all, and she a woman who knew the simple craft of turning a man’s head. And if the sour taste of giving over her body bothered her at first, it was soon sweetened by the fact that Hiro’s new Lord Magistrate was not an unattractive man, nor entirely unpleasant company if all truths were told. Learned, but not arrogant. A philosopher, a lover of poetry, a noble not inclined to cruelty toward his servants. There were worse men to find keeping the keys to her cell in the palace of the Tora Daimyo.

She was a murderer. A killer who had ended a dozen men and lost not a wink of sleep over it. She’d committed the highest treason, abetted a terrorist, sought to bring down the government of the Imperium itself. What was the thought of giving over her body next to that? If she could take a man’s life, destroy everything he was and would ever be with a wave of her hand, she could certainly spread her legs and fake a sigh or two. For the opportunity to escape her cage, to find Aisha and free her from whatever contrivance kept her chained within these walls? She could fake more than a sigh.

The problem being, of course, that Ichizo was almost certainly playing the same game she was.

The first time she’d felt his lips pressed to hers, she’d known. His kiss was too tender, too hesitant. She’d had to coax his hands onto her skin, throw herself upon him. He played the smitten fool, whispering sweet words, showering her with secret gifts. And it might have been plausible—she might have almost believed it, until last night when he’d cupped her cheek in his palm, kissed her on each eyelid and whispered that he thought perhaps he loved her.

Love.

No magistrate, no servant of the Tora could be that obtuse.

This bastard was playing her, as surely as she was playing him. Any night now, she expected him to turn talk to Aisha. To Yukiko. To the Kagé. Only a matter of time. She had to be out of here before he realized she knew exactly what he was.

The nightingale floor began singing; the high-pitched chirp of nails within metal clamps, the creak of dry pine. She heard footsteps, too light to be a bushiman, too cautious to be a servant simply doing her rounds.

No One.

Michi watched Ichizo’s face, listened for any catch in his breathing as the footsteps stopped outside her door. But his features were as serene as a sleeping babe’s, the rise and fall of his chest smooth as clockwork in a Lotusman’s skin. She stood, fluid motion and whispering silk, making less sound than the candlelight shadows flickering on the walls. And in four silent steps, she knelt beside the threshold and waited.

Moments later, a scrap of rice-paper slipped through the crack between door and floorboards. Three inches square, covered in artless kanji.

“Safe to talk?”

Flipping the paper over, she marked her reply with a kohl stick.

“Not alone. Must be swift.”

She slipped the paper back under the door, waiting for the reply.

“Who with?”

“Lord Magistrate Ichizo.”

A deathly still pause. A catch in the girl’s breath beyond the door. Michi heard her rise, thought for a moment she might be leaving. When she opened the next note, it was hastily scrawled with a trembling hand.

“Are you mad?”

“Some would say.”

“Overheard rumor he spoke to Daimyo on your behalf. Wondered why. Makes sense now.”

“Ichizo spoke to Hiro?”

“Asked him to release you. Bushimen said he was mooning over you like lovesick boy.”

Michi glanced back to the bed, eyes narrowed.

“He is a serpent. Nothing more. Hiro’s response?”

“Refused. Cares only for power consolidation and Stormdancer’s death.”

“What of Aisha?”

“Saw her yesterday evening on balcony.”

“How was she?”

“Could not ask. Guildsmen with her.”

“How did she look?”

“Bruised. Sick. Sad.”

“Wedding?”

“Proceeding. Dragon and Phoenix clanlords both en route.”

“What news from the Iishi?”

“Kuro Street safe house hit in dawn raid. No way to talk to Iishi.”

Cold panic set her jaw to clenching, breath catching in her lungs. She glanced over her shoulder at Ichizo’s sleeping form, licked at suddenly dry lips.

“Raid? How? Anyone taken?”

“Akihito safe. Staying with me. Others maybe scattered. Maybe imprisoned. Checking drop box again today with Akihito when shift finishes. No word yet.”

“If we cannot speak to Iishi, must save Aisha ourselves.”

“The three of us?”

“Wedding must be stopped.”

“Cannot even escape room?”

Michi sat for a handful of heartbeats, listening to Ichizo breathing, the wind whispering in the stunted gardens outside. Eyes roaming the bedchamber that was her prison. Mind racing.

“Wait.”

She stood, moving like smoke. Formless. Soundless. Stooping beside Ichizo’s clothes tumbled at the foot of the futon, she fished amongst silk and cotton, fingertips finally brushing a cold circlet of iron. And holding it tight in her fist, the clink and tink muted beneath the fabric, she drew the magistrate’s keys out into the flickering light.

With a soft breath, she blew out the candle in her window, its center melted into a deep scarlet pool about the smoking wick. She poured the wax into a saucer from her tea service, waiting a few moments for it to cool. And holding up Ichizo’s keys, she chose the one she’d seen him use on her bedroom door more times than she cared to remember, and pressed it into soft, blood-red warmth.

She watched him, counting his breaths, refusing to remember the feel of him inside her. The way he breathed into her hair afterward, speaking his lies. Talk of courting and love, promises she would attend Hiro’s wedding on his arm, that all whispers of her treachery would soon be put to rest. She’d played the fool of course, pretended she believed him, thanking him in the most obvious way a dishonored lady in waiting could. But the truth was she was a warrior, this bed just another battleground, her body just another weapon.

The lotus must burn.

Pulling the key free of the candle wax, she squinted at the impression it left behind: good and deep, sharp lines, more than enough to craft a forgery. More than enough to free her from this serpent’s nest.

She slunk back across the boards, eyes on Ichizo, not making a sound. Kneeling by the door she slipped the saucer beneath; a soft scrape of porcelain upon polished pine. No One’s note swiftly traveled back across the threshold.

“Key to your room? Why not come with me now?”

“Will not leave this palace without Aisha. Can work with this?”

A tremulous pause.

“Can have Akihito carve replica.”

Michi nodded, glanced over her shoulder at the man in her bed.

“Be swift, No One. Sleeping with a snake. Will bite me soon.”

She heard No One rise, quiet as she may, the faint click of her sandals and the scrape of the chamber pot upon the pine. And then she was moving, just another servant on night duty, floorboards singing beneath her. Ichizo frowned and murmured in his sleep, and Michi stood, lotusfly-quick, slipping the kohl stick into her pocket and the keys back into his belt.

She shrugged the kimono from her shoulders. It crumpled about her ankles as she slipped back to bed, crawled naked beneath the sheets. And as the motion across the mattress finally roused him, eyelids fluttering open, she pressed her mouth and body to his, hands descending, whispering his name.

He was awake then, if he hadn’t been before. And though his mouth tasted of saké and sugar, she imagined she could taste the venom beneath, the poison of the chi-mongers seeping through his veins and onto his tongue.

But not if I bite you first …

Daiyakawa was the village where she’d been forged, but the Iishi was the place she was honed.

She’d wanted to be a warrior, to fight in the field with the other Kagé on the day they rose against the Shōgunate. And so she trained hard—perhaps not as strong as the boys, but faster again by half, her blade swift as dappled sunlight through the trees. She practiced with Sensei Ryusaki until her fingers bled, until the blade was no longer in her hand, but part of her arm, and more, until there was no blade and no arm at all.

But to fight with steel in hand beneath a burning sky was not to be her fate.

She was perfect, Kaori had insisted. Young enough to unlearn her provincial ways, pretty enough to enjoy the attentions of the duller sex, but not so beautiful she would stand out in a crowd. And so they began training her for a different battleground, just as deadly as those stalked by Iron Samurai and bushimen. A battleground of polished pine and fluttering fans and rippling curtains of blood-red silk.

Kaori had been raised in the Shōgun’s court, privy to the upbringing of a “lady of station.” And so, she became Michi’s new sensei. Hour after hour, day after day. Music lessons. Poetry. Philosophy. Dancing. The crushing, mindless tedium of tea ceremonies, intricacies of courtly fashion, poise, diction, face. And then came her weapons training. Innuendo. Rumor mongering. Eavesdropping. Lip-reading. Flirtation. Sex. And if the thought of it all terrified her in the long, empty watches of the night, she needed only think of her cousins lying beheaded in the street, the emptiness in her uncle’s eyes as he plunged the blade into his own belly and dragged it right to left, and the fear became less than nothing; the weakness of a girl-child who had perished beside her cousins in the village square.

“Remember,” she would breathe. “Remember Daiyakawa.”

They smuggled her to Yama, and from there to Kigen. Paid an iron fortune to have her irezumi re-inked by a master artisan, decorating her flesh with the artistry a woman of her “breeding” deserved. She played the role of a sole-surviving daughter to a noble Tora family, murdered in a fire lit by Kagé insurgents, come to beg the First Daughter for mercy now that the Shadows had taken everything she was. And the Lady Aisha had looked at her with narrowed, puff-adder eyes as Michi told her story, false tears spilling down her cheeks, lower lip trembling just so; an audition for a role in the most dangerous treason afoot in all of Shima.

And then the Lady had smiled.

“You are perfect,” she said.

21 WEBS AND SPIDERS

Rebel. Traitor. Servant. Sister. Clanless. Kagé. Nothing. No One.

The line between who Hana was and wanted to be was growing more indistinct by the day. At the turning of dawn and dusk, she would peel away her mask like a snake shedding skin, one identity left crumpled in the corner as she shrugged on the new one, hoping it still fit.

And she had never felt more alive.

Evening hours were spent shuffling through the Daimyo’s palace. Watching the wedding preparations unfold, guest rooms being prepared for the clanlords of the Dragon and Phoenix, the huge retinues each would bring in tow. Listening for the tick-tick-tick of the spider-drones, watching for the palace bushimen, other servants, the house mistress and her powdered scowl. Cautious steps. Downcast gaze. Head bowed. Playing the role of the lowly Shit Girl nobody saw or heard or cared about. Counting down to the day they would have no choice.

By day, she would keep company with Akihito in her room—the big man watching the street from his perch by the windowsill, the girl sitting on her bed as they talked of revolution, of bright futures and distant dreams. He was at least ten years older than she, a decade deeper in the world. But when he laughed, she would feel it in her chest. When he told tales about hunting the arashitora, she found herself squirming on her mattress. She would watch him carve his blocks of clay or pine into works of beauty, the Lady Sun lighting his profile as if the Goddess herself adored him. And Hana would think of the boys she’d known—the clumsy fumbling and promises unkept—and wonder what other tricks Akihito’s hands might know.

He slept in the corner, a thin blanket for a pillow, as far from her as he could be. And when she woke in the evening as the sun was failing, he would be gone.

She’d asked Daken to follow him two days ago, more out of curiosity than concern. It turned out Akihito spent his days at the Market Square in the shadow of the Burning Stones. Pillars of blackened rock, the lingering scent of burnt hair, ashes swept into corners by a wailing wind, as if Fūjin himself were ashamed of the sight. The altar where Guild Purifiers burned children in their campaign against “Impurity.” The place where the Black Fox had been shot, where Hana had seen the Stormdancer kill Shōgun Yoritomo right before her wondering eye.

The square was filled with spirit tablets now, carved from wood, stone, clay. Wreaths of paper flowers rippling in the dirty breeze. Hundreds of names scribed by hundreds of hands. Tributes for the slaughtered gaijin, the Black Fox, sons and fathers killed in the war overseas. Akihito would work on his carvings, occasionally place a new tablet among the others. Daken was unable to read the names he scribed. Hana had a notion she knew who they were for anyway.

When she’d arrived home from her shift this morning, she found a package laid out for her on her mattress—thin black crepe tied with a bow of real silk. Unwrapping it with trembling fingers, she’d found new clothes of soft, dark fabric, a pair of good, split-toed boots. A comb of Kitsune jade and kohl to wipe around the edge of her eye. A bottle of black dye. A handful of coins. Beneath it all, a small note written in a messy hand she’d recognize anywhere.

“Love you, sister-mine.”

She’d stolen into Yoshi’s room, but found the bed empty, sheets still warm. She was still smiling as she slipped from her tenement tower a few minutes later, a poisoned autumn wind on her skin, into the bleak and empty dark before the dawn. Daken prowled beside her, his thoughts a soft purr within her own. The streets were near abandoned, smudged with dark fingerprints of exhaust, a few blacklung beggars rocking back and forth before their alms bowls in the muddy gloom. She stepped into the bathhouse on the corner, handed a copper kouka to the old woman yawning behind the counter and sat down to wait.

… bath again . .?

Again? My last one was two weeks ago, Daken.

… so . .?

So I stink like an oni’s asshole.

… whole city stinks … get clean good way to get noticed …

Let’s hope so.

The old woman nodded that all was ready, and Hana stepped into the bathroom, Daken keeping watch from a rooftop outside. A broad wooden tub was filled with cloudy water, the air hung thick with steam. Hana stripped off her grubby clothes, stared at herself in the fog-blurred looking glass. Insect-thin, long-limbed, ribs showing clearly beneath her skin. A too-flat chest, a narrow neck, hung with a tiny amulet on a leather thong. It gleamed in the candlelight; a golden oval set with a rearing stag, three tiny horns shaped like crescent moons. No matter how hungry, no matter how desperate things got, Yoshi had never let her sell it. It had been a gift from their mother, those brilliant blue eyes shining with love as she’d tied it around Hana’s neck on her tenth birthday.

“Wear it with pride,” she had said.

All they had left of her.

Sitting on the edge of the tub, rinsing black dye through her hair and watching the stains pool on the tile about her feet, she looked at the pile of new clothes Yoshi had brought her. The cut was good, the thread was fine. The boots alone would have cost two irons. Her thoughts turned to dark places, and she wondered again where her brother’s coin had come from. Who was missing it out there in the dark.

She’d asked Daken of course, but the cat had simply set sandpaper tongue to his not-so-privates, pretending like she’d never spoken. Though it had been Hana who raised the tom, though he slept beside her every day, it was Yoshi who’d fished the crying, bedraggled mop of fur from the storm drain all those years ago. The kitten had been near-dead, chewed by vermin, ears missing, tail gnawed; a lucky escapee from one of the last restaurants with coin to run the breathing pens required to keep kittens alive in Kigen’s roiling stink. And ever since that moment, there was something between Daken and Yoshi—something beneath the violent jibes and the excrement surprises planted beneath the bedclothes. An affection she supposed brothers would share, hidden behind coarseness and cruel jokes and indifference.

A debt as heavy as a sopping handful of mewling fur.

And so, Hana let it drop, let the cat and her brother keep their secrets. She knew one night she might learn the hard way where the money came from, but for the next few days at least, she had bigger issues to think about …

And walking through the predawn streets of the refinery district half an hour later, there he was. Leaning in an empty doorway. Framed by the crumbling shell and boarded windows of an abandoned tannery like some street-side master’s portrait.

“Well, well,” Akihito smiled. “I almost didn’t recognize you.”

“Bath day,” she shrugged. “New clothes.”

“You look nice,” he said, eyes on the street over her shoulder.

Hana smiled, trying to still the thrill of delight inside her. “I finally spoke to Michi. She has a plan to get herself out of her cell.”

Akihito nodded. “You can tell me about it when we get back to your flat.”

Daken prowled up to the big man, brushed against his leg, purring. Akihito stooped with a smile, scruffed the tom behind his mangled ears.

“You know he usually hates people,” Hana said. “Last stranger who tried to pet him got opened up from elbow to wrist. But he’s taken to you like a fiend to the pipe.”

“Well, we hunters have to stick together.”

Hana watched Daken push back against Akihito’s fingers, purring soft, eyes closed.

Gods, you’re a slattern, boy.

… nice hands …

Don’t tease.

… my job …

“All right then.” She nodded to Akihito. “Shall we be off?”

“Hai.” He straightened, pulling his hat down over his brow. “The drop box is secluded, but there might still be bushi’ about, so keep your eyes open—” Akihito’s gaze snagged on her leather patch, his cheeks flushing.

She smirked to see him stumble, running one hand over his braids, abashed and mumbling and sweet as sugar-rock.

“Gods, I’m sorry,” he said. “You know what I mean…”

“I know what you mean, Akihito-san. And it’s fine, really.”

A small smile, hidden by her new kerchief.

I have hundreds, after all.

They stole through the gloomy, tangled warren of Downside, Akihito limping in front, Hana close behind. The days were growing colder, night falling heavier. Each afternoon as the Sun Goddess sank to her rest, Kigen’s citizens slunk homeward, curfew nipping at their heels like hungry wolves. The distant tread of bushimen ringing across cracked cobbles, the city’s once-crowded streets as empty as her throne. And behind closed doors, Kigen’s people looked toward the palace crouched upon the hillside, and whispered. Or plotted. Or prayed.

The pair kept to the deepest shadows, the girl taking the lead, quiet as whispers. The smell of Kigen Bay crawled up from the city’s nethers, the hiss and stutter-clank of the refinery, strangling the glow of distant stars. Chi lanterns lined the streets; tiny pinpricks of light burning in braziers shaped like lotus blooms. A Guild crier trundled past on rubber treads; looking like a short, faceless fat man of riveted metal, spine dotted with exhaust pipes, bells clutched in each stunted hand.

The smoke in the mechanoid’s wake made Akihito’s throat burn as they passed by. The scent reminded him of Masaru’s pipe, stained fingers, his friend’s eyes alight with laughter.

You should never have left them.

He looked down at his leg, the dull pain of his wound flaring every time his right heel struck the ground. He could still see them in his mind’s eye; Masaru crouched in the jail cell, hands and lips smeared with red. Kasumi lying against the wall, pool of blood swelling all around her, bubbling on her lips as she spoke her last words to him.

“Fight another day, you big lump.”

The last time he’d ever seen either of them alive.

At least Yukiko had taken Masaru’s body with her when she flew north. At least he would’ve received a decent burial. But would the Shōgun’s dogs have burned offerings for Kasumi to Enma-ō? Would they have painted her face with ashes, as the Book of Ten Thousand Days commanded? Or did they just throw her body into some dank alleyway to be gnawed by corpse-rats? Would the Judge of the Nine Hells have weighed her fair, with no rites held in her name? Would the spirit stones Akihito left in Market Square be enough to see her soul through?

Curse you for a coward. You should’ve died with them. And if she was cast into Yomi to languish as a hungry ghost, at least you would’ve been with her. At least she wouldn’t be alone.

Hana grabbed his hand, tearing him from gloomy thoughts and back into the deeper gloom of Kigen’s streets. She dragged him into a narrow alley between a grubby textile store and a small temple. Slipping in beside him, she pressed against his arm, breathing low and measured.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Hssst!” A finger on his lips.

Akihito frowned, remained mute. The girl was staring directly at the wall, eye curling up inside its socket, lashes flickering. He heard the sound of heavy boots, peered out into the street, saw two bushimen emerging from an alley half a block away; black iron and blood-red tabards. They were pushing a young woman before them.

Their voices were low, just snatches beneath the refinery’s groan and clank, Akihito’s heart pounding in his chest. The first bushiman shoved the girl again; a small, pretty thing, clutching a torn servant’s kimono at her throat. Tear-streaked face, kohl running down her cheeks, hair tangled across bloodshot eyes.

“Be off.” One bushiman was retying his obi, war club under his arm. “You’ll find no more sport here, girl. Your master should know better than to send you into Downside before dawn.”

The girl ran weeping, back in the direction of the Upside mansions on the hill. The second soldier yelled after her.

“We catch you out again after curfew, we’ll send you home with more than a limp!”

Akihito glanced at Hana as the servant passed by, torn clothes, sobbing and wretched. The girl met his stare, shrugging as if it meant nothing—a mask of indifference learned from a life at the bottom of the pile. But he could see the clenched jaw. Trembling fists.

The two bushi’ meandered past the narrow alley mouth, chuckling between themselves, passing by without so much as a glance. When their footfalls and rough talk had faded to a whisper, Hana nodded to Akihito, and the pair hurried on through the dark.

“How did you know they were there?” The big man spared a passing glance down the alleyway the serving girl would never forget. Two fat corpse-rats peered at him across shin-high piles of trash. One snuffled the air, baring crooked yellow daggers in black gums.

“I heard them.” Hana didn’t look back, kept her voice low.

“Funny that I didn’t.”

“Try losing an eye. See how much your hearing improves.”

They flitted on through the haze, stopping several times at Hana’s signal, slipping into shadows or squeezeways to avoid bushimen patrols or sky-ships rumbling overhead. The soldiers cut across the streets in random patterns, but Hana never failed to hear them, to hiss a quiet warning and drag him from the light. She moved like a fish through water, falling still as stone when the bushi’ drew close, melting away like smoke. It was uncanny. Unnerving.

As they neared the drop box, she pushed him into an alcove beside a baker’s shopfront, cracked awnings and cloudy beach glass. Pressing in beside him, she stared off into space. Again, her eyelid fluttered as if in a breeze, iris rolling up in her head. Daken leaped over the space between the rooftops above, his grace belying his bulk.

Akihito thought of Masaru then, stalking the last of Shima’s monsters together in long-gone days, Sensei Rikkimaru and Kasumi by their sides. The big man could see his friend clearly, as if the great hunts were only yesterday: yew bow held in stone-steady hands, string taut, arrow nocked, the Black Fox’s eyes rolling up in his head as he fired.

Never missing.

And looking now at this slip of a girl beside him, head tilted on a pale, slender neck, eye rolled back in her socket, he knew. Knew why that tomcat clung to her and her brother like iron to a lodestone. Why rats never squeaked at their approach. Why she reminded him so much of Yukiko.

He knew.

“We’ll have to wait.” Hana pulled her kerchief down to spit. “More bushi’ ahead.”

He nodded. “As you say, little fox.”

“‘Little fox’?” Her smile was crooked. “I’m not Kitsune.”

“Well, you remind me of a few I’ve known. You move like them. And gods know you’re pale enough to be Fox clan. Even we Phoenix have a little color about us.” He poked her on the chin, and she smiled again. “But you’re white as Iishi snow.”

“We used to live in Kitsune lands,” she shrugged. “There’s probably some Fox in our blood, way back down the line.”

“You father was lowborn too?”

“Soldier,” she nodded. “Fought the gaijin in Morcheba.”

Looking out to the street, she scowled and muttered.

“Fought them back here too…”

Akihito frowned, unsure what she meant. “So when did you come to Kigen?”

“When I was ten. We flew on a Kitsune merchant ship. So high we could almost see the whole island.” Her face lit up as if the sun had stolen out from behind the clouds. “The people below looked like children’s toys. I’ll never forget it. What I wouldn’t give to live up there…”

“What happened to your parents?” he asked. “Where are they?”

“Gone.”

“Don’t you have family somewhere?”

“Yoshi and Jurou are my family. The only ones I need. Anyways, why do you care?”

“Well, because this is no way for you children to be living, that’s why.”

She turned on him, a scowl darkening her face, eye narrowed near to shutting.

“Children?” Her expression was disbelieving. “Is that what you think of me?”

“Well—”

“Do you know what it takes to live in Shima’s gutters, Akihito-san?” Her voice hardened, became a thing of cold stone. “Have you ever had to break someone’s skull for a scrap of food or a dry corner to sleep in? Ever watched your friends selling their bodies for copper bits? Has your life ever been so awful that a job slinging shit in the royal palace sounds like paradise?” She glanced at the beggars, the bloodstains and rot around them. “You honestly think children live here anymore?”

“I didn’t mean—”

“I know what you meant. Oh, and before you spit on the way I live? In case you didn’t notice, you’re living right there with me, Akihito.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You don’t know me.” Her lips were tight across her teeth. “You don’t know anything about me. The things I’ve seen. The things I’ve done. I’m risking my life every day in that palace, and the two people I love most in this world don’t even know I’m doing it. Most people in this city wouldn’t piss on me if I were on fire, and I do it anyway. Because it’s right. Because no one else will. Fuck you, calling me a godsdamned child…”

He put his hand on her shoulder, squeezing tight as she tried to flinch away. He could feel the too-thin flesh beneath new cloth, the bird-brittle bones beneath that.

“I’m sorry, Hana.”

She stared at him, mute and unblinking, jaw clenched. The breeze blew sweat-damp locks about her eye, bright in the dark, too large in that gaunt and bloodless face. A long minute ticked by in silence, and Akihito saw the truth of her words; the way she stood, fierce and unafraid, fingers curled to fists at her side, muscles overwound, staring him down. There was nothing left of a child inside her. Kigen had stolen every part of it away. And finally, after a breathless span in the chi lamps’ flickering light, she relented. Gifted him with a sharp nod. Breathed deep.

“Come on.” She crooked a thumb. “The bushimen are gone. If we’re quick, we can be in and out before they’re back.”

She stepped from the shadows, smoke-soft footfalls on hard stone. He limped behind, beneath the cramped archway of a small arcade. The stores were barred, windows boarded up. The cobbles were newly stained; dry blood turned to muddy brown, broken glass glittering in the flagstone seams. They kept to the gloom, Akihito bending with a wince and shifting a loose brick near the storm drain while Hana kept watch, lashes fluttering against her cheek.

He pawed through the dirt, heart lurching in his chest as he felt a small scrap of paper crumpled in one corner. Unraveling it, he quickly scanned the contents. Address. Time. Tomorrow’s date. Someone else had made it out from Kuro Street, gotten in touch with the Iishi cell. That meant they still had radio capability. That meant they were still in business.

Thank the gods …

Committing the address to memory, he stuffed the paper into his mouth, chewed and swallowed. Replacing the brick, he stood, grimacing, nodded to Hana. He heard the soft whisper of padded feet above, saw Daken flitting back over the rooftops toward the tenement tower. As he and the girl faded into the shadows and followed the tom, Akihito couldn’t stifle his grin despite the pain in his leg.

“Good news?” Hana whispered.

“It’s news,” he nodded. “So it’s good. I’ll tell you all about it somewhere safer.”

As the pair melted into the gloom, a tiny fistful of chrome uncurled from its hiding place in a downspout and stood to watch them go. Eight silvered spider legs clicked softly as it ticked its way across the roof tiles, windup key spinning along its spine. A single glowing eye marked their passing, its light burning softly in the poisoned dark.

Blood-red.

22 SKINNED

Sometimes a bowl of puke-warm slop can seem the greatest gift in the world.

The scarred, dark-haired gaijin sat across from Yukiko’s cot, feeding her heaped spoonfuls of seafood chowder, wiping her greasy chin with a rag. After four days on Buruu’s back with almost nothing to eat, even with her nausea, her ice-pick headache, the constant fear that every hour she spent trapped here was another hour Hiro’s wedding drew closer, the meal tasted more delicious than any Yukiko had eaten in her life.

The man loosened her restraints when he noticed her fingernails were purple, careful to do it one bond at a time. She watched him, eyes flitting over the insignia at his collars, the pistons and brace strapped around his crippled leg. A short knife hung from his belt, flanked by a tube of coiled copper and delicate glass globes that reminded her of Yoritomo’s iron-thrower. When he’d entered the room with her meal, his shoulders had been wrapped in an animal skin, but he’d shrugged it off and hung it up as soon as he’d shut the door. She looked at it now; shawl of dark fur, long tail dragging on the floor. Yukiko thought it might be a wolf pelt, but if so, it had belonged to the biggest wolf she’d ever heard of.

The occasional crack of thunder shook the walls, lightning flashing through the small glass window high above her. The room’s lights would glow brighter then, buzzing in their sockets as the building vibrated around her.

Catching the sky …

“Piotr.” The gaijin pointed to his chest. “Piotr.”

“Yukiko,” she said, pointing to herself as best she could.

Piotr brushed his fingers across the same cheek he’d slapped. She could feel it bruising. His touch made her skin crawl.

He seemed about to speak again when heavy footfalls rang down the corridor. The gaijin stood with a wince, pistons hissing. He snatched the animal skin off the wall and threw it around his shoulders, just as the blond boy who had saved her life appeared in the doorway.

The boy stumbled forward as if shoved, and a huge gaijin appeared behind him. The man looked in his mid-forties, as tall and broad as Akihito. A thick beard tied in three plaits, short copper hair, hint of gray at the temples, a tanned, windswept face, nicked with scars—chin, eyebrow, cheeks. He held a long cylindrical object wrapped in oilskin. A heavy dark red jacket was smeared with black grease, insignia on his collars trimmed with frayed golden thread. The skin of some enormous animal rested over his coat; bristling fur, front paws as big as Yukiko’s head, knotted around his neck. The pelt might have belonged to a panda bear once, save that it was rust-brown all over. A set of heavy welding goggles sat above pale blue eyes, dark lenses glinting the same color as the disembodied shapes mounted upon his shoulders.

Yukiko’s heart lurched as she noticed them. The helmets had been beaten flat, mounted on his shoulders like spaulders, but the snarling oni faceplates were still recognizable.

Iron Samurai helms. Half a dozen, at least.

The big gaijin was wearing them like trophies.

Behind him stood the first gaijin woman Yukiko had ever seen. Her hair was so blond it was almost white, tangled into a series of long knotted braids interwoven with insulated wiring, reaching down to her hips. She might have been pretty once, but her face was marred by symmetrical scars; three on each cheek, four running from lip to chin in jagged, lightning patterns. Clad head to foot in dark leather, adorned with wiring and transistors and heat sinks; machine components of all shapes and sizes. Plates of burnished brass covered her torso, shins and forearms. An enormous pair of boots with thick rubber heels lifted her to average height, long fingernails and lips unpainted. Her shoulders were adorned with the remnants of insectoid helmets, severed breather tubes spilling from the mouths, eyes of red glass. Yukiko would recognize them anywhere.

Lotusmen helms.

It was as if she’d flayed the metal skin from their flesh and turned them into skin of her own.

The woman stepped into the room, her movements feline, minimalist. Her adornments swayed and shifted, making a clicking, hollow music. Yukiko would guess she was close to thirty, but it was difficult to tell; beyond the scarification and outlandish clothing, there was something altogether alien about her. She tilted her head and stared, and Yukiko saw her eyes were mismatched; one black as Kigen Bay, the other a strange, luminous rose, aglow like the choking moon. She spoke, her voice low, lilting and completely indecipherable.

The big man wearing the bearskin murmured a reply, nodded. Respectful.

A dog darted into the room, scorched copper fur, eyes to match. He jumped onto the bed and slobbered over Yukiko’s face before burying his nose into the chowder bowl. Piotr yelled at the hound, who promptly jumped off the bed and slunk into a corner.

She steeled herself, gathering her wall about her, pushing a tiny fragment into his mind.

Hello, Red.

it’s you! girl!

A flare of pain. Brittle-sharp. Bearable.

These are friends of yours?

He blinked at the knot of people in the doorway, speaking in hushed voices.

boy yes men no mean lady no

Mean lady?

she kick me

Oh.

i am gooddog don’t need the kicking

I’m sure you’re very good.

and men hit my boy don’t like it boy is mine my boy i am gooddog yes I am

Can you understand what they’re saying?

Red tilted his head to one side, blinking.

Never mind …

By the doorway, Piotr’s face was flushed, and he stabbed the air with his finger, pointing at Yukiko and making gestures not even a foreigner could mistake for friendly. Yukiko presumed the big man wearing the samurai trophies was an authority figure—when he spoke, Piotr stopped talking, listened intently. The woman in the flayed Lotusman skins simply stared at Yukiko, head cocked, running one fingernail along the helms on her shoulder. The boy who’d rescued her from the sea leaned against the wall and said nothing at all.

“She.” The dark-haired man spoke. “Pretty girl.”

The gaijin were all looking at her now. Red was eyeing the chowder bowl, wondering how best to steal it without catching someone’s boot. Her skull was pounding, stomach lurching, mouth dust-dry and tasting of salt. She felt as though she might vomit.

“Me?” she answered.

“Why here?”

The two gaijin men gathered around the bed, the woman lurking by the door, hands clasped as if in prayer, pale lips curled in a faint smile. The boy quietly shuffled away from her, standing against the opposite wall.

The dark-haired man who’d called himself Piotr pulled up a stool, sat down, wincing as he straightened his crippled leg. The pistons hissed, joints creaking despite the black grease smeared butter-thick on the metal. As he leaned closer, she smelled salt and liquor, chemicals and greasy smoke. His good eye was bloodshot.

“Who are these people?” Yukiko said.

The man blinked, taken aback. “Me asking in the question.”

“Yukiko.” She pointed to herself as best she could with bound wrists. “Piotr.” She pointed to him. “Them?” A nod toward the others.

The man growled, said nothing.

“Ilyitch,” said the blond boy, exhaling smoke. He pointed to the big gaijin with the samurai trophies. “Danyk.” The woman. “Katya.”

Piotr snarled something in his own tongue. The big man roared, stepped forward and slapped the boy’s face, sending his smoke stick flying in a shower of sparks. The language was coarse to Yukiko’s ears, almost frightening. Her temples throbbed. The woman still stared, mute, head tilted, hips swaying as if she heard music.

“Why she here?” The dark-haired man poked her chest to regain her attention.

Yukiko jerked away from his touch, scowling. “I fell off my thunder tiger, if it’s any of your business.”

The man blinked.

“Thunder tiger.” She tried to make a flapping motion with her bound hands. “Arashitora.”

“Gryfon,” the woman said with a strange, hungry voice.

Piotr made a questioning noise, turned to look at her. The woman spoke again, pointing skyward. Danyk spoke, eyebrows rising to his hairline. The woman nodded and whispered a mouthful of guttural nonsense.

“She snake?” Piotr glared at Yukiko.

“A snake?” she scowled.

“She snake for the pleasing!”

“What the hells are you talking about?”

“Coming here.” Piotr pointed at the ground, growing angrier by the second. “Taking words away for the Shima, da? Snake.” He clicked his fingers. “Spy! She spy!”

“I’m not a godsdamned spy.” Yukiko rose up off the pillow, growling, the memory of his slap burning on her cheek. “I didn’t want to come here, you mad round-eye bastard. I flew here on an idiot with his penis where his brain used to be.”

Piotr looked utterly befuddled.

“Penis!” Yukiko pointed at the man’s crotch. “Your other head! The one you think with for most of your godsdamned lives!”

Piotr covered his groin with both hands, shuffled his stool a few feet away. Katya laughed, clapping her hands as if delighted, and Yukiko saw the woman had filed her teeth into sharp, gleaming points. Even the boy managed a grin, despite the handprint on his cheek. Piotr started yammering, shaking his head. The room devolved into general chaos until Danyk’s roar rose above the clamor.

Piotr turned back to her, brow creased in concentration as he searched for the words.

“Beast,” he finally managed. “Gryfon.”

He made a flapping motion, pointed to the sky.

“Arashitora,” Yukiko said.

Piotr nodded. “Where is? Where?”

Yukiko frowned. “I don’t know where he is.”

“Die?” Piotr closed his eyes, crossed his hands over his chest. “Is die?”

“I…” Her voice cracked and she cleared her throat. “I don’t know.”

“Call?” Piotr put his fingers to his lips, gave a shrill whistle. “Calling him?”

“Izanagi’s balls, he’s not a dog.” She eyed the gaijin one by one, anger swelling her chest. “And believe me, the last thing you want is him coming here. He’d tear this little tin can of yours to pieces. He’d show you the color of your insides.”

Piotr shook his head and spoke with an apologetic tone to Danyk. The woman shrugged, addressing the men as if they were children, and with a sigh, the big man nodded. He held up the cylindrical object in his hand, unwrapped the oilskin, and Yukiko caught her breath as she saw her katana gleaming in the half-light.

“Yofun,” she whispered.

She’d thought it’d been lost in the ocean.

“That’s mine, bastard,” she hissed.

Piotr offered what she assumed was an abridged translation. Danyk drew the katana, soft music of folded steel ringing against the backdrop of the storm. He tilted the blade, watched the light rippling across the polished face. With a grunt of admiration, he looked down at Yukiko.

“Spy,” he said.

“No.” Yukiko grit her teeth. “I am not a spy.”

Danyk lowered the blade by inches, until it was level with Yukiko’s throat. She swallowed her rising fear, forced away the pain at the base of her skull, the pounding of the world just outside her head. She met the gaijin’s stare. Unblinking. Unafraid.

Danyk spoke to Piotr, a sharp mouthful tinged with command.

“What soul you pledge to?” Piotr said.

“Soul?” Yukiko shook her throbbing head, eyes still on Danyk. “What the hells are you talking about?”

“Name.” The man slapped his right shoulder. “Name!”

“I told you, my name is Yukiko!”

Danyk growled deep in his chest, muttered a word. Piotr reached out and took hold of Yukiko’s collar, still damp with seawater.

“Sorry,” he said, meeting her eyes. “Sorry you.”

“Wha—”

The gaijin jerked her uwagi back and down, exposing her shoulders and breasts. Yukiko’s words became a shriek of outrage, bucking on the bed, blood flooding her cheeks as she swore and spit and thrashed in impotent fury, that beautiful, wonderful rage returning with a vengeance. Veins standing out like cable in her neck, restraints cutting into her flesh as she cursed them for cowards, screaming, snarling, vowing if they came near her, she’d kick in their heads, gouge out their eyes, tear their throats apart with her teeth.

Katya caught her breath, mismatched eyes turning deathly cold as she stared at Yukiko’s tattoo. Without a sound, she turned and stalked from the room. The boy, Ilyitch, lowered his gaze to the floor, cheeks flushing at her nakedness. Piotr looked to his leader, but his eyes kept drifting back to Yukiko’s body.

Danyk lowered the katana until it touched Yukiko’s skin. She ceased her struggles, breath hissing through spit-slick teeth, eyes narrowed in defiance. Bringing the razored edge to rest against her throat, he ran it down her naked shoulder, over the beautiful clan tattoo curling around her right arm. The Nine-Tailed Fox she’d not had the heart to ask Daichi to burn away. All she had left of the family she’d lost. The person she’d been. Danyk spoke to Piotr and the man stood, limped from the room. With an apologetic glance, the blond boy followed.

The big gaijin spoke then, ice-blue glare fixed on her ink. Words mangled by his thick accent, cold and hard; an accusation so full of hatred that it fairly dripped upon the floor.

“Keetsoonay,” he growled. “Sahmoorayee.”

Yukiko found herself terrified, acutely aware of her naked skin, burning under the gaijin’s stare. They were the only two in the room now, her wrists and feet still bound, a thousand miles from home, no Buruu, no Kin, no one to help her at all …

She narrowed her stare, feeling the Kenning build up inside her, pain crackling across her skull. Remembering Yoritomo collapsing in the Market Square, blood spilling from his eyes. But would she be strong enough without her father helping her? Could she hurt this man before he—

Danyk scowled, muttered something indecipherable, sheathed her katana at his waist. And stalking to the door, he slammed it shut behind him, leaving her utterly alone.

Breathing deep, heart pounding, mouth dry as dust.

Alone …

Yukiko closed her eyes, face upturned to the ceiling.

Thank the gods …

23 DELUGE

The forest-sweet scent of peppermint and cedar, warmth filling him, skin tingling. A wisp-faint breeze slipping through the hole in the floorboards, the cedar bough twisting through the ceiling, as much a part of the furniture as the fire pit. The low rumble of autumn storms outside wooden shutters, fire curling over blackened logs, smoke upon tongue’s tip. Kin breathed deep, savored the taste, understanding why Daichi was spending so much time indoors lately.

It is quiet here. Inside and out.

He pressed his forehead to the matting, waited for the old man to speak.

“Kin-san.” Daichi’s voice was dry as the bottom of an alcoholic’s bottle. “Welcome.”

Kin lifted his head, sat on his heels. “Do you know you’re one of the only people in this village who calls me that?”

“Surely no surprise dwells in that house for either of us.”

“No surprise. Disappointment perhaps.”

A sip of tea.

“Kin-san, you do not honestly believe children’s toys and a few semi-functional shuriken-throwers will win their favor?”

“Semi-functional?” Kin tried to keep the hurt feelings from his voice. “The line is fully operational, Daichi-sama. Pressure issues are all resolved, stress testing is complete. I’ve arranged for a demonstration tomorrow. In front of the entire village.”

“Even if these trinkets work, will it make people forget who you were? What you were?”

“Everyone here was someone else once. Why not me?”

“Why not indeed.”

Kin sighed, chewed his lip. The old man took another slow sip of tea, eyes never leaving the boy’s.

“Do you play?” Daichi asked.

“Play?”

Daichi nodded to the chessboard on the table. It was a marvelous set, obsidian and jade, each figure carved in intricate detail. The dark pieces were Yomi horrors; hungry dead and bone dragons and oni, led by Enma-ō and Lady Izanami upon thrones of skulls. The light pieces were the likenesses of heavenly celestials; Raijin and his drums, Susano-ō and his Grasscutter Sword, Amaterasu the Sun Goddess and Tsukiyomi the Moon Father. The Emperor, of course, was Lord Izanagi, the Maker God. The board was stained oak and pine, tiles inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The seal of a Phoenix artisan was embossed in one corner.

“It’s beautiful,” Kin said.

“One of the few pieces of my old life I carried with me.” Daichi’s voice was somber. “That, my swords, my daughter, and my regrets.”

“You were Iron Samurai once.”

“To my everlasting shame,” Daichi sighed. “Though we may shed our skins, the stains of our pasts dwell as deep as our bones.”

Kin stared at the board, saying nothing.

“So,” Daichi said. “Do you play?”

“I play. Although I’m not very good.”

“Much can be learned by defeat.” Daichi knelt by the board, tea in hand, gestured to the other side. “Sometimes there is no finer sensei under heaven than a boot to the throat.”

Kin stood and took his place opposite the old man. He noticed Daichi had opted to play the dark side, which surprised him more than a little. Jade moved first, and Kin made a standard foray with his pawn. Daichi followed immediately, calloused fingers on black glass. He moved without hesitation or flourish, stone-steady; the hand of a sword-saint. No trace of age or frailty in his motion, even if the same could not be said of his flesh.

They played without speaking, soundless save for the crackling spit of cedar logs, the hymn of fading autumn. Whenever Kin glanced up, Daichi was watching the board, intent solely on the game. Kin considered each step, shifting into gradual attack. Daichi would clear his throat and sip his tea, then move with seemingly little thought, but Kin soon realized the old man was a masterful player. His first attack was repelled, the second ended with a crushing loss, and Daichi’s riposte finished with Lord Izanagi threatened on three facings.

Kin laid the Maker God on his side.

“You do not commit.” Daichi poured himself more tea from a charred pot by the fire. “You defend and attack, at odds even with yourself.”

Kin shrugged. “My style, I suppose.”

The old man picked up Kin’s empress, sitting untouched on the rear line. “You hold on to her like she will save you.”

“She’s the strongest piece on the board.”

“She is worthless unless you use her, Kin-san.”

“Losing her means losing the game.”

“Folly. One piece matters, and one only.” He tapped his Emperor upon the head. “All else is fodder.”

“You can’t win the game with only an Emperor.”

“He and a single pawn are enough, if you strip your opponent of all he possesses. It is worth losing almost everything if you leave the enemy with nothing at all.”

“Victory at any cost?”

“The stakes demand conviction. There is no prize for second in this game.”

“You just said defeat could be a great teacher.”

“I did.” Daichi winced as he cleared his throat. “But there comes a time when the cost of losing is too high. When all must be risked for victory.”

The old man was seized by a coughing fit, a long wracking spasm, stifled with another mouthful of tea. He regained his breath, hawked a mouthful of spit to sizzle in the fire. When he wiped his hand across his lips, Kin’s heart lurched about his insides, cold dread stilling his belly.

A black stain glistened on Daichi’s knuckles.

“Oh, no…” Kin said.

Daichi stared at the smear for a long moment, steady hands, measured breath.

“And there comes a time when there is no time left at all,” he murmured.

“… You have blacklung.”

“A fitting end,” Daichi shrugged. “There are few more deserving.”

“How long have you known?”

“Not long.” The old man sniffed. “Long enough.”

“I’m so sorry, Daichi…”

“Do not be.” He rubbed the burn scars on his arms. “It is a fate well earned.”

“Does Kaori know?”

“She does not.” The old man glared. “And she will not learn it from you either.”

“You don’t think she’s going to find out eventually?”

“In time.” A shrug. “All things become clear as Iishi rain in time.”

Kin ran his palm through the short hair on his scalp, across the back of his neck. He felt sick, stomach in oily knots, thinking about the fate awaiting Daichi down the road. Not a warrior’s end. Not a hero’s. He pictured the blacklung beggars in Kigen’s gutters; wretches coughing their insides out, trembling hands filled with dark, bloody mouthfuls.

He knew the things Daichi had done, the murder that stained his hands—the Daiyakawa peasants, Yukiko’s own pregnant mother. But nobody deserved to die like that.

Daichi took another sip of tea.

“You did not come here to play chess.”

Kin blinked. “No, I didn’t. I want you to release Ayane from her cage.”

“The lotusgirl has done nothing to inspire our faith. Freeing her would be unwise.”

“If you’re worried about her, why not release into my care? I guarantee—”

“There are few amongst us who hold faith in you either, Kin-san.”

“But do you?”

The old man wiped blackened knuckles on his hakama. “A little more each day.”

“Then wouldn’t you feel better knowing I was watching her full time?”

“Why, would you?”

They looked at each other across the ruins of Kin’s forces. Brick-heavy silence, firelight flickering in double crescents across Daichi’s eyes.

Kin heard soft footsteps on the landing, creaking floorboards. A quiet knock, the door peeling open to admit muted daylight, still painfully bright after so long in the gloom. Kaori stepped into the room with whisper-light feet, fringe swept back under the goggles perched upon her head. Her scar gleamed angry red on teak-stain skin.

“Father, Ryusaki sends word. They are near Jukai prov—”

She stopped short as her eyes adjusted, spied Kin kneeling by the chessboard.

“Jukai province?” Kin blinked. “You mean the Stain? Is that where Ryusaki was headed? The Guild staging grounds are…”

Kaori glared. Mute. Hand on her wakizashi hilt.

“… I will take my leave, then.” Kin stood, covered his fist and bowed.

“I enjoyed our game, Kin-san.” Daichi nodded to the board. “Though when next we play, I will expect more commitment in your attack. Perhaps tomorrow?”

“I’d like that.”

Kin gave Kaori a short bow, but the woman didn’t even blink. Her eyes followed him as he left; a bird of prey watching a field mouse in the shadows of long, yellow grass.

Stepping out into the light, he looked around the village; the men dragging venison to the slaughterhouse, women repairing thatched roofs, children gathered at sensei’s feet, chalk tablets in hand. The trees around him seemed afire; foliage swaying like flame tongues, curling along dry, brittle branches. Leaves tumbled between the trees as if stars from empty red skies.

So much at stake here. So much to lose.

Kin wondered if Daichi really would risk it all for final victory.

Memories of his Awakening came unbidden to his mind. Hundreds of glowing red eyes, staring up at him with more affection in a single featureless face than lay in all of the Kagé combined. The memory turned his gut slick with dread.

When the time comes, will you?

An iron bell in the night. A cry ringing amidst the trees. A word.

Kin opened his eyes, cocked his head, straining to hear.

“Oni!”

A faint cry, almost lost beneath nightsong and the rumble of Iishi storms.

“Oni!”

Rolling from his bed, Kin scrambled to his feet and stumbled from his door, dashing in the direction of the cries. He could see bobbing lanterns in the distance, hear a rising gaggle of voices. Rope bridges swayed beneath him, bare feet pounding unfinished wood, dead leaves falling in a snarling wind. He came upon a group gathered outside Daichi’s dwelling—Kaori, Maro, Isao, Takeshi, Atsushi, two dozen others, men and women, warriors all. Daichi stood in the center of the ring, clad in a banded iron breastplate, a great ōdachi sword in his hands at least as tall as Kin was. The old man’s voice was hoarse, tired, but fire burned in his eyes.

“Scouts report an oni war band from Black Temple moving toward the village.” Daichi’s stare roamed from one warrior to the next. “At least two dozen.”

Uneasy murmurs. An exchange of wary glances.

So many …

“Take heart,” he said. “We have faced such numbers before.”

“With the Stormdancer at our side.” Atsushi echoed Kin’s own thoughts. “But where is she now? How can we face such a force without her?”

“We have another equalizer,” Daichi said. “Kin’s shuriken-throwers will thin the demon’s ranks enough for us to deal with the remainder. We will make our stand along the ’thrower line.”

Isao shook his head, raising voice in protest.

“Daichi-sama, we cannot be certain the Guildsman’s contraptions will not fall to pieces in battle. And we have no maneuverability if we chain ourselves to his perimeter.”

“I agree with Isao-san, Father.” Kaori nodded. “I suggest we ambush. Wait until the oni are moving among the pit traps, then strike from the trees.”

“We did that last time, didn’t we?”

All eyes turned on Kin as he spoke. Distrust. Hostility. Anger. The boy ignored the stares, met Kaori’s eyes.

“We won’t get them the same way a second time,” he said. “The survivors of the last attack will have told their brethren we struck from the treetops.”

“We?” Isao spat. “I don’t recall seeing you there, Guildsman…”

“Because I was locked in your prison,” Kin replied. “After you threatened to cut my throat. Don’t you remember?”

A hateful stare. Clenched jaw. Isao turned back to Daichi.

“This is madness,” the boy said. “We cannot trust the Guildsman’s machines.”

“With all due respect, I agree, Daichi-sama.” Atsushi stood at Isao’s back, something close to fear in his stare. Takeshi stood beside him, all nerves and wide eyes, fingernails chewed to the quick.

“Your concern is noted, gentlemen,” the old man said.

“Father—”

Daichi placed a gentle hand on his daughter’s arm, eyes still on Kin.

“You truly believe your ’throwers will hold, Kin-san? These are not stones and trees we fire at. These are demons fresh from the pits of Yomi. Twelve feet tall. Claws that rend steel. The strength of the Endsinger herself flows in their veins.”

Kin tore his gaze from Isao’s, looked at the old man. Teeth gritted, balled fists, fear in his gut. But the tests had run perfectly, no pressure loss, no chamber failure. He knew it. He would stake his life on it.

“They will hold,” he replied.

Daichi glanced at his captains. Maro was silent, arms folded across his armored chest, but his eyes spoke no. Kaori met her father’s gaze, shook her head. Thunder rocked the skies above, lightning clawing at the clouds, every passing second bringing the demons closer.

Daichi looked at Kin again. Drew one rasping breath.

Closer.

“We will have a small force ambush the demons, and draw them on to the ’thrower line.”

“Daichi-sama—” Isao began.

A cold glare choked the boy’s protest. The old man nodded as Isao fell silent, turned to his captain. “Maro-san, take half a dozen Shadows and bring the oni to us. The rest of you, come with me.”

Maro glanced at Kaori, grim-faced, but still covered his fist and bowed.

“Hai.”

Kin saw dark looks exchanged between Isao, Takeshi and Atsushi. Something else passing between the trio. Desperation? Fear? Takeshi opened his mouth to speak, but Isao shook his head, motioning for silence. A cold dread seeped into Kin’s belly. Thunder shook the treetops, shaking his insides.

“Daichi-sama,” he said. “With your permission, I will come with you. I can operate one of the ’throwers. Free up another blade for those demons who make it through to the line.” He stared at Isao as he spoke, the younger boy’s face pale as bleached bones. “And I’ll be there in case anything goes wrong…”

The old man nodded, stifled a dry cough with the back of one hand.

“I would have it no other way, Kin-san.”

He looked amongst his warriors, lightning gleaming across steel-gray irises.

“Come. Let us send these abominations back into the hells.”

Steady rain falling on the leaves above his head, a thousand drumbeats per minute, shushing all in the world beneath. Sweating still, despite the storm, the boy crouched in the ’throwers’ operator’s seat, damp palms pressed to targeting controls. He blinked the burn from his eyes, squinting into the dark, blind, deaf and mute.

Kin grit his teeth, tightened his grip on the feeder crank. All around him, Kagé warriors were gathered, hidden in scrub and dead leaf drifts, all eyes on the approach. Daichi was crouched in a thick copse of mountain fern beside Kin’s emplacement, so utterly still the boy couldn’t tell him from the leaves around him. The storm was growing worse, thunder jolting him in his seat every time Raijin struck his drums. And there, amidst the fear and tempest and rising doubt, it was all Kin could do to stop himself falling back to the familiar mantras—the words he knew by rote, explaining all about life he had ever needed to know.

Skin is strong.

Flesh is weak.

He felt naked. Tiny. The metal beneath his hands the only comfort, the only certainty. These machines of death he’d assembled, dragged from scorched wreckage and filled with new life—these he knew. But demons? Children of the Endsinger? He’d been raised to scoff at such superstitions. Tales of gods and goddesses were crutches for the skinless. Those who had never breathed warm blue-black in the Chamber of Smoke. Never been shown their Truth.

Call me First Bloom.

A distant cry, a rumbling, croaking roar. Faint sounds through the storm, not unlike music. Bright steel, ringing crisp beneath the cloud’s percussion, running feet amidst the hissing deluge. The signal floated down the line—a series of short nightbird whistles. And eyes narrowed, peering into the gloom, Kin saw tiny figures swathed in dark, dappled cloth, dashing back toward the ’throwers fast as swift feet might carry them. And behind them …

Behind them …

Kin had never seen the like. Not in his bleakest imaginings. Loping and croaking and growling deep, long sinewed arms dragging knuckles on the earth, black, wicked talons at the end of every finger’s tip. A dozen shades of blue among their skins, midnight to azure, all muddied and smothered in the cold and the dark, lit only by frantic lightning and the bloody light of their own glowing eyes. Faces wrought of nightmare, adorned with rusted metal rings, tusks curling cruel and sharp from jagged underbites. Their blades and war clubs tall and sharp enough to fell the stoutest tree. A language dark as sin, roared amidst the trees by black maggot tongues.

“They come,” Daichi said.

Oni.

Maro and his scouts were swift, weaving between the Kagé pits with the demons close on their tails. One oni crashed through the scrim of branches and dead leaves covering a trap, tumbled headfirst, twenty feet down into a tomb of sharpened bamboo spikes. Maro’s blade was black with blood, the oni enraged, rushing on heedless, another of the demons crashing into a Kagé trap and plummeting to its end. But the monsters numbered in the dozens, twelve feet tall and seething, the death of their fellows seeming only to stoke their fury. Warbling screams and guttural roars, blood-red eyes aglow as pierced lips pulled back from crooked teeth, long loping strides bringing them ever closer to the fleeing scouts.

Kin’s fingers tightened on the firing stud. Breath coming fast. Fear rising.

“Come on,” he breathed. “Faster…”

One scout stumbled on an upthrust tree root, slipped in the muck. The oni behind was on him in a moment, tetsubo raised high, bringing it down with a delighted howl and smashing the unfortunate man into mush. The remaining scouts kept running, no time for grief, on through the brambles and ferns and grasping branches.

Kin set his sights on a pit demon, crosshairs centered on its chest.

“Faster…”

Lightning struck the skies, splashing all with grisly white. Thunder shook his bones, gut to water, pupils dilated. And as they finally closed within range of the line, Maro gave his signal, and as one, each scout dropped behind stones or fallen trunks, out of sight and out of harm.

“That’s it,” Kin hissed.

Daichi rose up from his fern, held his ōdachi aloft.

“Fire!”

Kin squeezed the firing stud, felt his ’thrower lurch, and chug!chug!chug!chug!chug! came the song all the way down the line, brilliant and bright and bellowing, filling the air with death. His ’thrower shook like an infant in a tantrum, squealing and shuddering as Kin cranked the feeder belts, short bursts of pressurized gas bursting from its flanks with every shuriken it spat. Spinning, razored death flew from each ’thrower barrel, glittering in the rain as lightning struck again, and as elation surged in his gut, Kin saw the oni begin to fall, one by one, clutching throats and chests and guts, black blood spraying between the raindrops, blood-red eyes wide with shock and surprise as the air about them turned to carnage.

The reverb shook Kin to his core, metal beneath him groaning, shuddering, bucking as his creations tore through the oni lines like a hot blade through fresh snow. A dozen demons fell in the first few seconds, riddled with fresh holes, elation filling him to bursting. He glanced to Daichi, a tiny moment amidst the butchery, a lunatic grin on his face. The old man was looking back at him, gifting him a small nod that for a brief and beautiful moment wrapped Kin up tight, filled him with a sensation he’d almost forgotten.

Pride.

chug!chug!chug!chug!chug!

Chest-swelling, heart-warming pride.

chug!chug!chug!chug!chug!

And then the ’throwers began to fail.

Number three blew first, the seals on the firing chambers bursting like overfilled balloons, gas shrieking in the dark. Kin’s ’thrower went next, a bright burst of light and a rush of vapor, the bucking metal beast he rode falling still, sagging like a puppet with broken strings. All down the line, almost simultaneously, the machines coughed and went silent, shivering in their rivets like men dying of blacklung. Murderous percussion replaced with feeble thunder and whispering rain, so dim after the deafening chorus Kin could barely hear them at all.

Dread stole his breath, gripped his heart tight and squeezed. He lurched from his seat, eyes roaming the ruptured seals, fingers pressed to the damage as if with will alone he could mend it. But no time. No time at all …

“Oh, no…” he breathed.

A roar, black and harrowing, reverberating through the trees. Looking up, Kin saw a tall shape unfold itself from the cover of an ancient maple, its head adorned with the skull of some colossal eagle, armor of bone arrayed on its chest. Taller than its brethren, skin so dark it was almost ebony, all muscle and sinew and fangs. And raising a war club studded with rusted iron rivets, twice as long as Kin was tall, it pointed at the ’thrower line, lips drawing back from broken fangs.

Bellowing hatred.

Daichi tossed his head, wiped the rain from his eyes. His stare was fixed on the demons as the other Kagé emerged from cover, gathered around their leader. Their blades gleamed as the lightning flickered, the scouts dashing across the clearing and rejoining the line. The oni formed up around their dread captain, only half a dozen now, bloodied and grim. But still more than a match for a handful of men and women half their size, armed with tiny, sharpened toothpicks.

Rusted grins gleamed in the light of bloody eyes.

Daichi spared Kin a solemn glance. Cold and empty. And the pride that had swelled his chest a moment before fled on broken wings, shoulders slumping as cold fear seeped in to take its place. Hands shaking. Lips parting as if to speak, and finding no words at all.

Daichi turned to his warriors. Each one in turn. Steel in his gaze. And raising his blade, he pointed to the demon pack.

“Banzai!” he cried.

“Banzaiiii!” came the reply, two dozen Kagé roaring in answer. Thunder crashed, the warriors dashing across the clearing with blades held high. Kin dragged himself from the ’thrower, stumbled down to the soaking earth, watching the foes plunge toward each other through the swirling rain. Tiny figures and giant hellspawn, moving amidst the lightning strobe. His chest thumping, mouth bitter, panic and guilt and rage filling him to blinding, looking up and down the line of useless ’throwers as the Thunder God laughed in the sky above.

How could this be?

The battle was joined out in the dark, Kin stumbling toward it, a heavy wrench dragged from his tool belt to serve as a weapon. He had no warrior’s training, but still, he couldn’t sit back and do nothing. Figures swayed and danced in the rain, cries of pain and awful roars filling the empty spaces between one peal of thunder and the next. Kaori fighting on the left flank, just a blur in the darkness. Daichi in the thick of it, blade slick with dark blood. Moving as if to music, flowing without pause, step to feint to strike to thrust, cleaving broad swathes of sticky black, swinging his mighty two-handed blade as if an extension of his own arm. A flick of his wrist and an oni’s leg toppled to the ground in a spray of dark gore, followed swiftly by its howling owner. A step to the left and a casual wave, cleaving throat to the bone, swaying amidst the blows, a poet writing his masterpiece in warmest, blackest ink.

A rolling seething mob, oni and Kagé falling in equal measure, Kaori scaling one demon’s back and plunging her blade into the base of its skull. Maro’s arm hanging limp, battling side by side with Isao and Takeshi over a fallen comrade, the three of them slicing their foe’s gut open, wading ankle deep in rolling coils of intestine. The tide was turning, the Kagé gaining ground. But the oni lord had cleared a swathe through his foes, eyes set on Daichi, looming through the mob as Kin shouted warning.

The old man turned, steel flashing, stepping to one side as the demon brought his war club crashing down. Mud spattering, dead leaves flying, Daichi’s eyes narrowed in contempt as he stepped forward, sliced the oni across its belly. Kin running through the muck, an oni looming out of the gloom in front of him. The boy dodged past its blade, almost slipping on the dead leaf carpet as three Kagé stepped up to meet the demon’s challenge. Panic in his chest, knowledge that he had no place here—no business on a battlefield with a wrench in his hand and fear in his heart—but still he turned and fought, bashing at the oni’s shins as it whirled to face him, the blow jarring his arms, the stench of funeral pyres assailing his nose, the demon roaring as if all the hells lived inside its mouth. He rolled aside as its blade swept over his head, the Kagé striking from behind, steel and rain and blood and thunder, black spots blooming in his eyes as he lurched to his feet, sparing a glance for Daichi through the now blinding downpour.

The old man’s chest heaved, lips pressed thin, blade slicked with gore as the oni lord swung with reckless abandon. The demon was bloodied in a dozen places; arms, legs, gut, face, and had yet to land a single blow on the old Iron Samurai. Rage turned its eyes incandescent, burning with the fury of Lady Sun as it lunged forward and received yet another wound for its troubles. The old man was fighting as if whittling wood, carving off one chunk at a time, dancing back out of striking range and allowing bloodloss and fatigue to do most of his heavy lifting. The power of Yomi versus a lifetime of steel’s tutelage. The fury of all the hells versus a tranquility born of the love of the blade, the way of war, the heart of a tiger true.

Until the old man started coughing.

A sputter at first, widening his eyes just a fraction. A wet intake of breath, muscles clenched tight. Stepping aside from another blow, Daichi coughed again, damp and sputtering, pressing one hand to his chest as if pained. Kin yelled warning, roaring to Kaori, turning from the snarling demon facing him and dashing through the rain. Daichi staggered, mouth pressed to sleeve, and as he lifted his blade to ward off a savage blow, Kin swore he could see a dark stain on the old man’s lips. A blacklung spasm, gripping him now of all times, the disease slowly reaching into the old man’s chest and turning all to ruin.

Daichi fell back, coughing still, Kaori rising from the steaming ruin of a pit demon’s corpse and yelling above the storm. Maro answered with a cry—“To Daichi! Daichi!”, the Kagé charging toward their failing captain, blades raised high. And the oni lord lifted its war club, lips split in a jagged grin, spit hissing through its teeth as it swung in a whistling arc, smashing Daichi’s sword into glittering fragments. The old man staggered, crying out amidst sodden gasps, the demon lord following up with a savage kick directly into the old man’s chest.

Kaori screamed, Kin along with her, Daichi sailing half a dozen feet to land crumpled and bleeding in the muck. The demon lord stepped forward, intent only on the old man’s murder, raising its war club high. With a desperate cry, Kin hurled his wrench—just a tiny, gleaming sliver of greasy metal against this towering monstrosity. The throw struck true, cracking into the back of the oni lord’s skull, just a fleabite onto hardened leather. But it was enough to give the demon pause, a second to snarl and flinch, and in that moment, Kaori closed in, a black shark through bloodied water, stepping up onto a broken tree stump and leaping through the air, her blade sinking into the oni lord’s back. Maro struck a moment later, carving a gouge through the demon’s Achilles tendon, the monster roaring in pain, falling to one knee. Others struck now, Isao, Atsushi, Takeshi, blades rising and falling like abattoir knives and beneath the flood, the rain, the flashing steel, the demon lord fell roaring and flailing, silenced at the last by a scything blow from Kaori’s blade, ear to pointed ear, bathing the woman in a black, hissing spray.

“Father!” she cried, stumbling to her knees at the old man’s side. Daichi lay on his back, hand clutched to chest, drawing bloody breath through bubbling lips. The other Kagé gathered around him, painted in black gore, faces pale and horrified.

Kin caught several dark stares as he approached, muttered curses, glances toward the failed ’throwers. He heard the word “accursed” and “Guildsman,” felt angry eyes on him in the dark, and a cool dread seeped into his belly. He tried to push through the mob to Daichi’s side, found his way barred by Maro’s heavy hand, the Kagé captain looking at him with bitter rage.

“Stay the hells away from him,” he hissed.

“I can help h—”

“Don’t you think you’ve done enough, you godless little bastard?” Maro hissed.

“Maro, forget the Guildsman!” Kaori yelled, tears in her eyes. “Help me with my father!”

The captain turned from Kin with a snarl, knelt beside Daichi. Four Kagé lifted the old man onto their shoulders and he cried out, clutching his ribs, mouth painted in a bloody O. Kaori bid them run swift, carrying their fallen leader back to Old Mari’s infirmary. With a hateful glance at Kin, she selected a few warriors to remain behind and ensure every demon had breathed their last. The remainder were set to task gathering up their wounded brethren.

Thunder roaring overhead. Wind clawing through the trees. Rain hissing like a serpent’s nest. Limping and bleeding and dazed, the Kagé headed back to the shelter of the village. Kin stood amidst it all, lost and adrift, knocked aside by one warrior, yet another spitting at his feet. His agonized gaze was fixed on the silent ’throwers, the ruptured seals, wondering again how it was possible. For one to fail, perhaps. Two an outside chance. But for all to malfunction at once? How could it be?

He staggered through the rain toward his emplacement, sickness roiling in his belly.

“Guildsman.”

Isao’s voice brought him up short. Grabbed him by the throat and bid him turn to stare.

Three of them stood there in the rain. Isao. Atsushi. Takeshi. Arms folded, fists clenched, anger and contempt unveiled on their faces. Takeshi took a step toward him, but Isao put out a restraining hand, muttered something too low for Kin to hear. With a snarl, the big boy turned to the fallen oni, Atsushi by his side. Walking from body to body, they chopped at the pit demon’s throats, sluices of black blood arcing in the rain, ensuring every one of them was dead.

Isao remained. Eyes narrowed. Sword sheathed at his back. And lifting one slow hand, he pointed at Kin, then made a sawing motion at his throat.

Dread lined Kin’s guts with a sickly chill. The other Kagé had already moved off, his knowledge that he was alone out here burning with sudden clarity in his mind. And so he slunk into the scrub, into the shadows, finally bolting for the Kagé prison. It was the only place he could think to go. He knew now the boys would stop at nothing. If they were willing to do this, they were willing to do anything.

He recalled Isao’s appeal for Daichi not to fight at the ’thrower line. The boy had been pleading. Almost desperate. And now, Kin finally understood why. The image lingering in his mind’s eye as he ran—Isao sawing away at his throat, the telltale black stain in the flickering storm light.

Grease stains on his hands.

24 MERCIES

Ichizo watched the Daimyo of the Tora Clan raise his sword, blood-red sunlight gleaming on the blade, level with his opponent’s throat. Hiro’s foe drew breath through clenched teeth, weapon hanging from his grip as if it were an armful of bricks. Hiro glared at the samurai facing him across polished boards, amidst the lifeless stares of hollow men, muscles gleaming, iron arm spitting a thin plume of exhaust into the stifling air.

Then he lunged.

Ichizo could barely track his cousin’s movement, Hiro’s prosthetic a blur, his blade smashing aside his foe’s guard, the Daimyo spinning on the spot and bringing his katana in a sweeping arc across the man’s ribs. The wooden blade cracked against the samurai’s breastplate, denting the metal, a spattered, damp exhalation leaving his lips as the man fell to his knees, clutching his side, face twisted in pain. Hiro stood above him, sword raised above his head for the would-be deathblow.

The samurai raised his hand in surrender.

“Yield, great Lord,” he rasped. “I yield.”

Ichizo’s applause mingled with that of the servants, Hiro’s four other sparring partners, bent and bruised and hovering at the training dojo’s edge. Their Daimyo had been beating on the men for the best part of an hour, Ichizo hovering outside, listening to the sharp cries, the grunts of pain, until he had finally lost patience, entering to seek words with his clanlord.

Hiro helped his opponent to his feet, and noticing Ichizo amidst the retinue, raised an eyebrow in question. The Daimyo was fighting unarmored, all muscle and sweat, flesh gleaming in the fading light. Long black hair was drawn back in a tail, a sodden river trailing down his chest, clinging to his skin. A short puncture scar marred the taut pectoral muscle above his heart, just a few inches shy of a killing blow. The flesh at his right shoulder was inked with a mangled tiger tattoo, an iron collar affixed around his bicep, hiding the union between his flesh and the prosthetic the Guild had gifted him. Ichizo was unnerved by the sight—the union of meat and machine far too akin to a Lotusman for his tastes.

Shōgun Yoritomo had always kept his distance from the chi-mongers—always kept the delineation between throne and Guild clear. But it seemed Hiro had thrown in with them without so much as a backward glance. He knew the power the Lotusmen offered his cousin, knew how much rode upon this union between Hiro and Lady Aisha, what would become of the nation if the clans fell to civil war. And yet, unease at this overt alliance with the Guild grew in him daily—more than the threat of Kagé insurgents hiding in the shadows, the Stormdancer fermenting discontent from the north. And he wondered what price the Daimyo would truly pay for his throne.

And yet Hiro was his cousin. His blood. His Lord. To think such things—

“You wish to speak with me, Ichizo-san?”

Hiro dropped his bokken to the floor, the wooden sword striking the boards with a sharp clatter. A servant scuttled from the periphery with a cup of almost clear water, hovering by his Lord’s side.

“It is no matter, great Lord.” Ichizo bowed. “I should not have interrupted your training. It can wait.”

“Well, you have interrupted now. We might as well kill two birds with one stone.”

The Daimyo motioned to the row of wooden katana, the training dummies clad in practice armor. A small smile on his lips.

“I fear I would prove little contest for you, great Lord,” Ichizo said.

Hiro grinned. “Since when did that stop you in the past?”

“Oh ho.” Ichizo grinned in return. “I recall besting you once or twice, at least.”

“Make it three times, then. Or are those magistrate’s robes I put you in sending you soft?”

Ichizo bowed with a wry smile, walking to one of the wooden figures and slipping on the training armor, a servant buckling it in place. Hiro sipped his water as Ichizo suited up—heavy gauntlets, breastplate, a cowled helm—watching his cousin test a half-dozen practice blades before he found one with balance to his liking. The Lord Magistrate finally stepped into the sparring circle, raised his sword in salute. The Daimyo tossed his cup to another servant, swept his ponytail back over his shoulder and flourished a new bokken with his iron sword arm.

“Defend yourself,” Hiro hissed.

The Daimyo charged across the room, footsteps echoing floor to high ceiling, bringing his sword down toward his Lord Magistrate’s head. Ichizo parried, impact jarring his wrists, knocked aside amidst the hiss and whirr of Hiro’s prosthetic. A foot to his chest sent him stumbling back, hissing and coughing, opening his eyes just in time to fend off another flurry of blows from Hiro’s blade—face, chest, gut.

He backed away, astonished at the ferocity of the attack. Hiro smiled, watching him over the edge of his blade, waiting for his counter.

“So,” he said. “Speak.”

Ichizo lunged, once, twice, Hiro fending off both strikes with practiced ease, the sharp notes of wood cracking against wood ringing in his ears.

“It is of little import, great Lord.”

Strike. Parry. Lunge.

“Come now,” Hiro said, dancing away. “It seems I speak of nothing these days save wedding plans.” Strike. “Of ministers who cannot be allowed to sit with magistrates at the reception because of slights three decades old.” Feint. “Of whether to offer insult to the attending Guildsmen by serving food and drink they consider impure, or insult by serving nothing at all.”

“My sympathies, cousin.” Ichizo ducked a scything blow aimed at his head, fell back for breathing room. “I suppose dominion over an entire nation comes with its drawbacks. But the wedding at least will be over soon.”

Feint. Dodge. Lunge.

“Hai,” Hiro nodded. “All the oni in the hells could not stop it now.”

“… Would you wish them to?”

Hiro struck, clipped Ichizo’s shoulder, kicked him again in the chest. The Lord Magistrate staggered away, blade at half-guard, but the Daimyo did not press.

“Come,” Hiro said, breathing easy, flexing his iron arm. “Speak your piece. Your intrigues offer welcome diversion if nothing else.”

Ichizo waved the request away with one hand, sweat burning his eyes.

“I fear it is a trifling thing, great Lord.”

“Trifling. This would be about your prisoner, then…”

Ichizo felt his stomach turn. He risked a glance at the servants. The other samurai. A humorless smile creased Hiro’s lips, and he dismissed the retinue with a wave of his blade. The group shuffled from the room with low bows, the sparring partners looking particularly grateful. Silence descended on the dojo, broken only by the sparrows choking in the gardens outside, the creak of the boards beneath their feet, Ichizo’s sodden gasps dragged into burning lungs.

The Lord Magistrate cleared his throat. Swallowed hard.

“You have heard.”

“You would be surprised what the Guild knows about the happenings in this palace.”

Ichizo glanced at the spider-drone perched on the railing of the mezzanine above. That cursed blood-red eye, seeing and telling all. “It displeases you?”

Hiro’s eyes were as hard as the prosthetic at his side. Just as cold. Just as lifeless. Ichizo searched his cousin’s face for some remnant of the boy he had played soldiers with around his father’s estates; toy bokken in their hands, swiping the wooden swords at imaginary legions of Shima’s enemies. Always smiling, always laughing.

Centuries ago.

“It displeases me,” Hiro said.

“She is beautiful, cousin. Like the first flower after winter’s end.”

“She is dangerous. I asked you to question these girls, Ichizo, not bed them. You have lost your clarity. Her mistress is purest poison. Who is to say how far her taint spread?”

“Yoritomo’s assassin tried to murder this girl. Cut her to pieces and nearly caved her head in. That hardly seems in keeping if they were allies. I am not a fool, Hiro.”

“No? And what does your beauty say when she lies in your arms at night? That she loves you?” Hiro flourished his blade in his iron hand, hissing fingers drumming across the hilt. “A woman’s betrayal cuts bone-deep, cousin.”

“Not all of them are liars, Hiro. Not all of them are false.”

“What would you have of me?”

“To set Michi-chan free. Under my recognizance. She wishes to see her mistr—”

“We have spoken of this before.”

His breath returned, Ichizo struck without warning, the blow narrowly missing Hiro’s face. The Daimyo struck back, ferocious, no smile on his lips, pressing hard with blow after blow until Ichizo again backed away.

“Tenacity is one of my strengths, great Lord,” he grinned, gasping.

“You ask the impossible, Lord Magistrate.”

“I would consider it a personal favor, Daimyo.” Ichizo looked at his cousin, eyes pleading. “To a kinsman who ran with you when the deadlands in Blackstone province were still lotus fields, and who always let you beat him with the bokken.”

“Let me beat you?”

Hiro laughed despite himself, his smile bright. For a brief moment, the facade of the Daimyo, the Iron Samurai, fell away, and all that remained was the boy Ichizo had always known. The boy he’d grown up with. The boy he trusted.

“Lord Izanagi strike you down for a bastard and a liar, cousin,” Hiro grinned.

“Please, cousin.” Ichizo stepped closer, smile slowly fading. “There is much to be said for a merciful rule.”

Hiro stroked his goatee, breathed deep. He stood for a silent minute, motionless as the training dummies surrounding them. Blue-black smoke hung about his brow, turned his eyes the deep green of lotus leaves. When he finally spoke, his voice rang across the dojo, cold and hard as a knife sinking into Ichizo’s back.

“Those boys you spoke of are men now, Ichizo-san. Those days you spoke of are gone. Best to forget they ever were, and remember what you are.”

“I am a man in love, cousin.”

Ichizo looked at Hiro with pleading eyes.

“Surely, you remember what that was like?”

Without a sound, Hiro raised his blade and struck, faster than Ichizo would have believed possible. The blade cracked across his shoulder, another strike smashing his sword from nerveless fingers. Hiro circled behind, struck him across his back so hard the blade simply shattered, a hail of splinters filling the air along with a damp spray of spittle, a strangled cry as Ichizo stumbled forward, collapsed to his knees.

The Lord Magistrate rolled onto his back, wincing, gasping, empty palm upheld in surrender. His Daimyo stood above him, shattered blade clutched in his iron hand. His voice was cold as tombs.

“I remember what it was to be a man in love, cousin.”

Hiro cast the broken sword onto the floor with a clatter, held up iron fingers, curling them into a solid, hissing fist.

“Every single night.”

“I wonder what you would say, if I asked you to marry me.”

They lay entwined amidst the bed’s ruins, sweat drying on their skin. Michi’s hair adrift across her cheeks, her head upon his chest, lulled almost to sleeping by the song of his heart. But his words dragged her back into full waking, incredulity creeping into her voice as she raised herself up on one elbow and stared at the viper in her arms.

“… What?”

Ichizo was watching the ceiling, one arm behind his head, the other wrapped around her shoulder. Her body was pressed tight against him, the swell of her hips and breasts, the leg thrown over his thigh, like puzzle pieces made to interlock perfectly with his own.

Like all men and women interlock, foolish girl …

“I said I wonder what you would say, if I asked you to marry me.”

A slow blink.

“You are asking me to marry you?”

“No,” he smiled. “I simply wonder what you would say.”

“I would say you were crazed, my Lord,” she scoffed, resting her head back against his chest. “I would say you have only known me for a handful of heartbeats. I would say the lotus you were smoking must be of a rare breed indeed, and wonder if you might lend me your pipe when you were done.”

A soft chuckle. “That is what I thought you might say.”

“A good thing, then, you did not ask.”

Ichizo was silent a moment, a frown slowly creeping into his voice.

“What do you mean I do not know you? I have known you since last spring festival.”

“You knew me after a glance across a crowded room and a three-minute conversation about poetry?”

“I knew you were beautiful. Intelligent. Possessed of a keen wit and a romantic soul.”

“Oh, indeed? A romantic, am I?”

“Poetry calls not to a heart of stone, Michi-chan.”

She was silent, one finger tracing the lines of muscle down his stomach, a landscape of hard foothills and deep valleys, traversed by a thousand goosebumps.

“And why should we not be married?” Ichizo was truly frowning now, rolling her off his chest, raising himself up to stare into her eyes. “I know you better than Hiro knows Lady Aisha, and they are to be wed.”

“To prevent the entire nation falling into chaos,” Michi replied. “To reforge a dynasty two centuries deep. I hardly think the Imperium will come crashing to an end or spring miraculously back to life if we make our little fling official, my Lord. Not to mention the difficulties we might face squeezing our guests inside this pleasant little prison cell of mine.”

“A fling?” He blinked. “Is that what you think of me?”

“Better that than the alternative.”

“What, that I love you true?”

She stared deep into his eyes, watching his pupils for fight or flight response.

“That you still believe me part of the Kagé rebellion,” she said. “That all this is simply a magistrate interrogating a suspect.” A small smile, just the right mix of hopeful and afraid. “That at the end of all this, you will break my heart.”

Warning in his eyes. Pupils dilating. Fear? Suspicion? She had struck true, surely …

“I might say the same about you.”

Too much, silly girl. Too far. Pull away. Swiftly.

She pushed him back with a long kiss, straddling him, pinning his wrists above his head, long dark hair draped about her face. Leaning in close, swathed in perfume and fresh sweat, feeling him stir as she breathed the words, lips brushing as if feathers against his own.

“Say it then, my Lord. Say you do not trust me. Say all this is a lie.”

“But that would be the greatest lie of all,” he whispered, leaning in for a kiss, denied as she drew back out of reach. “I am yours, my Lady. At your mercy. Ask anything. Give voice to any question and I will answer.”

His smile seemed true. No veiled intent behind his eyes. He was so good at this.

So good it frightens you.

“Do you love me, then?” She moved her hips, the simplest gesture, shifting the entire world. He sighed with her, muscles flexed as she pressed at his wrists, leaned in close again, breathing into his ear. “Love me true?”

Her mouth upon his, gifting him the kiss he’d sought as he shuddered beneath her.

“I love you,” he breathed. “Gods help me, I do.”

This is not real.

A voice in her head. The voice of a girl who watched her family butchered in Daiyakawa square. Who had grown hard and cold and fierce in the shadow of the Iishi. Who lived only to see Aisha freed, the wedding stopped, the Guild’s plans turned to ash and ruin. Who hated this man, his masters, the entire Imperium with everything she had inside her.

This is not real.

But as they rolled amidst the silk, his hands on her skin and his breath in her lungs, she almost forgot who she was, where she was from, why she was here. The little girl from Daiyakawa evaporating, scorched away beneath the fire of his touch, the heat of his skin, the flame of his tongue, leaving only her; a woman, loved and beloved, pure and unscarred and unafraid beneath a choking sky.

This is not real.

She almost forgot.

This is not …

Almost.

This

is

…

25 IMPETUS

Blood.

On his talons. On his tongue.

Buruu awoke on black glass, howling wind pushing sea spray into his eyes, his wounds, bringing a bitter, antiseptic sting. The gash on his belly ached, and he licked the matted, bloody fur, grateful that the gouge wasn’t gut-deep. His metal wings had borne the worst of it.

The very worst.

A deadweight on his shoulders, snapped pivots and shredded canvas, groaning as he moved. The harness and frame had protected him from the blindside, at least—if he’d been mere flesh and bone, he would never have had the opportunity to fight back, to give as hard as he’d received, rending and tearing, knuckle-deep, locked together with his foe and plummeting from the sky. But in the aftermath, the wreckage of his false wings was a handicap, a twisted snarl hampering movement, bereft of any former synthetic grace.

He was weak. Hungry. The island around him was barren stone, jet-black and cruel, as if Susano-ō had seized a fistful of obsidian and squeezed. A strange spire of coiled metal rose at the promontory, twelve feet high, twin lengths of thick iron cable connected to its core and trailing out over thrashing water.

And off in the distance, Buruu could smell him: the other male, crashed onto the same outcropping as he, torn from rib cage to haunches by his hind claws. Dying? Vengeful? Or yet overcome with lust for the prize?

The female’s scent still clouded Buruu’s senses, now tempered by pain and the stink of his own blood. And amidst the rolling dark and howling rain and copper tang in his mouth, one thought swam above the mud of pheromones and endorphins. One thought to make his chest ache more fiercely than any wound from beak or claw.

The thought that he had lost himself again.

The thought that he had failed her.

Just like he had failed them.

YUKIKO?

“Buruu!”

Yukiko shouted his name, lurching upright in the cot, pulled up short by the leather bindings at her wrists. For a second she thought she was back in the Iishi; wondered at the salt in the air, the absence of wisteria and mountain wind. And then she recalled where she was, the shape of him in her dream, feeling a flood of relief so deep she almost burst into tears.

He’s still alive.

She stretched out the Kenning, straining to her limits, heedless of the pain and growing nausea in her belly. She felt Red’s small warm glow, dimmed near to nothing in slumber. The gaijin around her, like a storm of fireflies. Far in the distance, she felt the heat and shape of the female arashitora wheeling amongst the thunderclaps, glowing in her mind like fireworks. She could feel cold flickering beneath her, the sheen of scales under the water, eons deep. But out on the edges, she found a newly awakened heat, so distant it was simply a blur, almost too soft to see. And yet she knew it all the same.

Yukiko pushed her voice out into the black, screaming as loud as she could.

Buruu!

No answer. No flicker of acknowledgement. She whispered a prayer to Kitsune, begging for the Nine-Tailed Fox’s fortune. Screwing her eyes shut, she reached down inside herself, heart straining, tearing away her wall to expose herself utterly, pain arcing at the base of her skull and crackling toward her temples. Something warm and sticky dripped from her nostrils, painted her lips in salt.

Hello?

Nothing save the rolling black, the empty, howling wind.

Hello?

—YŌKAI-KIN. YOU YET LIVE.—

The female’s voice was small, fragmented, as if she were shouting over some great distance into barking, snapping wind. Yukiko sighed, felt relief threatening to spill over once more into grateful tears.

I’m alive, yes.

—STRONG SWIMMER.—

I need your help.

—WITH?—

My friend. The arashitora I came here with. He’s hurt. Can you help him?

—WOULD HELP HIM WHY?—

He’s arashitora like you. One of the last ones left. You can’t just let him die!

—WRONG.—

Please!

—CAME HERE TO AVOID MOTHERHOOD. NOT CODDLE A FULL GROWN LIKE A NEWBORN CUB.—

You came out here so no one could mate with you?

—NEVER AGAIN, MONKEY-CHILD.—

The female’s mind burned with impossible heat.

—NEVER AGAIN.—

Well, you didn’t come far enough. Buruu could smell you days’ away.

—WIND BLOWS SOUTH HERE. TRUE ARASHITORA DO NOT FLY SOUTH.—

What about the other male? He must have smelled you too?

—SO?—

So why did he attack us?

Laughter in her mind.

—HE IS MALE, MONKEY-CHILD.—

Well, my friend is hurt now. He can’t fly and can’t hunt.

—AND?—

And I’m asking you to help him. Please.

—NO.—

Why not?

—WILL NOT AID THE KINSLAYER.—

His name is Buruu.

—HE HAS FORSAKEN ANY RIGHT TO A NAME, YŌKAI-KIN.—

… You know him?

—BETTER THAN YOU.—

The contact broke; a bullwhip crack that left a searing trail of pain across her brow. Yukiko winced, wiping her nose on her shoulder, smearing blood across her lips and chin. Her skull ached as if it had been stomped underfoot, ears ringing with a steel-toe tune. She felt absolutely awful—“Like an oni had shit in her head,” her father would’ve said. And the thought of him washed over her in the dark, five days’ worth of fatigue crashing down with the weight of anvils, threatening to tip her over the precipice.

Don’t you dare cry.

She thought of him on his slab. Ashes caked on his swollen face. She thought of his last words, bleeding out into her arms in the skies above Kigen. She searched for the rage but could find none, tears welling instead, clotting her lashes, and she screwed her eyes shut as if she could stop them spilling over.

She reached out on instinct for Buruu; a reflex action, like she’d reach for a handhold if she felt herself falling. But there was almost nothing waiting for her; just a tiny blob of muddy heat in the cold, vast dark where he used to be, laced with the hunger of reptiles. And that was the last push that sent her sailing over the edge.

She curled up in the dark, like a child in womb’s black.

And she wept.

The smell of warm porridge and hot tea roused her from dreams of growling wind, and she woke to find the noise was the hunger in her own belly. Dim daylight shone beyond the tiny window, smeared storm-gray. Piotr was sitting beside the bed, metal tray on his lap, watching her intently with his one good eye.

As she blinked the grit from her lashes, he said something in his rolling, guttural language and reached over, pulling her uwagi up around her shoulders, covering her naked chest. She flinched away, cheeks burning, remembering the blinding outrage she’d felt as he pulled the tunic open, exposing her tattoo and all else besides.

What the hells was so important about the ink on my skin?

Piotr smoothed the tangle of hair from her face, offered a spoonful of porridge. As much as the way he looked at her was unsettling, the memory of her indignities still smoldering in her mind, the food smelled delicious. Her empty stomach murmured, and she swallowed her pride along with the first mouthful, wolfing down everything he gave her.

When she was finished, she tugged the bindings on her wrists and ankles, looked at them pointedly.

“Can you untie me?”

“He cannot.” Piotr scowled and shook his head. “Pretty girl.”

“Where am I going to go?”

Piotr touched her cheek, tucking stray hairs behind her ears. He gathered up the utensils and bowls, set them aside, leaned back in his chair. Reaching into his white coat, he retrieved his fish-shaped pipe, stuffing it with that same dried, brown herb.

“Better she not here.” He shook his head. “Better all.”

“You could let me go?” Yukiko pulled at the restraints again.

“Too late.” He lit the pipe with his flame-box, exhaled a cloud of ignition fumes into the air. “Is now coming she, they.”

“What?”

“Zryachniye,” he sighed. “Zryachniye.”

“How do you speak Shiman?” Yukiko titled her head. “Were you a merchant?”

Sadness and anger thickened his voice. “Prisoner.”

Realization arrived with a wave of nausea, and at last she understood the man’s animosity. The slap to her cheek. Scarred face, blinded eye, crippled leg.

Samurai believed it was better to commit seppuku than fall into enemy hands. A gaijin soldier who allowed himself to be captured would have been viewed as beneath contempt; a wretch without honor or worth. If Piotr had been a soldier captured by Shōgunate troops during the invasion, she could only imagine what he’d been through at her countrymen’s hands.

The man seemed an utter bastard. But nobody deserved to be tortured.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured.

“Sorry?” The gaijin sucked his pipe, breathed pale gray. “Save sorry for herself.”

He stood, limped out the door and closed it behind him. The wind howled like a lonely dog, a solitary voice in dark wilderness, dawn a lifetime away.

As the hallway light was shut out, she realized at last that she was alone out here. On an impossible metal island in the middle of vast oceans, surrounded by people who saw her as a spy, an invader, an enemy. She had no idea which way land might lay. Nobody knew she was in trouble, and even if they did, nobody knew where to find her.

No one could help her. No Buruu to fly her to safety. No Kin to build mechanical wings that could see them freed. No Kagé, no father, no friends. She realized if anyone was going to get her out of this, it was her. But if she didn’t do it soon, Buruu was going to starve out there in the storm. Hiro’s wedding would go ahead unopposed, Aisha would be slaved for the sake of his legitimacy, and the nation would simply have traded one Shōgun for another. Everything they worked for, her father died for, all of it would be for nothing.

So enough with sitting here in the dark and crying herself to sleep. Enough with waiting for lightning to strike. Time to stand instead of crawling. Time to start digging out of this hole with whatever tools she could scrounge.

If she found none, there was always her fingernails.

Buruu’s warmth had emanated somewhere north, dulled with the distance between them. Somehow she had to get out to those islands, fix his wings. She considered the flying machine on the roof of the complex, but realized she had no idea how to operate it. The female arashitora was going to be no help at all; that much was clear. As for the gaijin, Danyk and Katya clearly saw her as an enemy, and the memory of Piotr slapping her, ignoring her struggles as he tore off her uwagi, still filled her with bitter, helpless outrage.

But she needed someone. By herself, she had no chance of getting out of this room, let alone rescuing Buruu.

Ilyitch was her best bet. He was young, didn’t get along with Danyk or Piotr, seemed to be an underling afforded little respect. And of course, he’d saved her from the ocean, risked his life for hers. Surely that spoke of a good heart? A kind soul? Guilt swelled at the thought of what might happen to him if his fellows caught him helping her, but she quickly quashed it under the weight of the stakes in play: not just her life. Buruu’s. Aisha’s too. All of Shima.

She had to get back. There was still hope. If they left soon, she might still reach Kigen in time to stop Hiro’s wedding. And besides, if she couldn’t trust the boy who’d dived into a freezing ocean full of sea dragons to save her life, who the hells could she trust?

But he doesn’t speak Shiman. How do I even talk to him?

She sighed, shutting her eyes. She opened up the Kenning again—just a fraction—feeling about as gently as she could beyond the wall of herself. Again, she could sense the gaijin around her, muddy and indistinct. The headache reared up like a snake behind her eyes and she whimpered in pain.

She remembered touching Yoritomo’s mind at the Burning Stones, crushing it to pulp with her thoughts. Her father had been there to help her that day, augmenting her strength with his own. But whatever was happening to the Kenning inside her, it had grown so strong she was certain she’d be able to hurt someone by herself now. Maybe not kill them outright. But definitely make them bleed.

But could she talk to them?

Not hurt them—just do something as simple as speaking?

She wouldn’t even know where to begin. The Kenning had been with her since she was six years old, seeming totally natural to her as a child. She was able to use it because nobody ever told her she couldn’t. And she’d grown up taking the gift for granted, as reflexive as walking or breathing. But this was something new. Something utterly untested, more like turning a cartwheel than placing one foot in front of another. Would she hurt him? Kill him? If she put words into the boy’s head, would he simply think himself mad?

Only one way to find out.

She reached into the Kenning, felt for the boy’s mind amidst the rolling, seething storm of gaijin around her. But almost immediately, she realized she had no way of telling one blinding tangle from another. It wasn’t as if she could read their thoughts to tell them apart—the mental reflection of every round-eye felt nearly identical. And even if she could tell one from another, she was uncertain if she could project herself into their minds without line of sight.

Line of sight …

Red.

The dog lifted his head, rawhide strip in his mouth, curled up on his blanket in His Boy’s room. His tail began wagging.

girl!

Red, will you do something for me?

will try i am gooddog!

Find your Boy.

food?

I’ll get you some food, yes.

Red jumped up from his blanket, and she slipped into the glass-smooth space behind his eyes. It was like being in the bamboo forest of her childhood again; she and her brother Satoru wrapped inside their old hound’s head—the original Buruu who died defending them from a starving wolf.

She felt the faint disconnect between the dog’s motion and her own stationary body, the influx of scent, the clarity of sound. Machines rumbled in the building’s belly, the storm wailed with enough fury to shake the foundations. The relentless sea pounded the iron supports as if it wished the building scrubbed from its surface, nothing left behind save rusting metal and clean, feather-white bones, sunk too deep for sunlight to ever touch again.

Red scampered through the corridors, past a large room set with tables and dozens of chairs, food-scent hanging in the air. He trotted through what Yukiko presumed were barracks; bunk beds and a strong, musty scent that was distinctly male. He tried to make it up to the roof, but the door was shut with no dog flap to slip through. Red turned and padded back down three floors, slipped into a broad corridor and finally came to a halt outside a pair of heavy doors, slightly ajar. The dog whined and paced back and forth, ears pressed flat to his head.

What’s wrong?

not allowed here …

Why?

loud place bad place!

Is your Boy inside?

Red sniffed the air, the concrete floor.

yes …

Come on, let’s look. You’re too clever for them to catch you.

Uncertain but overjoyed with her flattery, the hound nosed his way into what looked like a vast boiler room. Dozens of men in dirty red coveralls were at work on a great system of cables and valves cast in greasy iron. Enormous, glittering spirals of glass descended from metal intakes in the ceiling, down to a series of strange, lopsided machines encrusted with incomprehensible controls, tight bundles of coiled copper and glass cylinders filled with a thick solution the color of urine. Thunder shook the walls around them, shivering the apparatus in their brackets. As she watched, the ceiling pulsed with a lightning strobe, and the glass spirals filled with a blinding blue-white illumination that danced across the mirrored lenses of the gaijin’s goggles. Every globe in every wall socket grew momentarily brighter, and she felt Red’s fur bristle in the crackling air.

A hollow, sucking hiss filled the room, and Red cringed as raw current arced and twisted down the copper coils and into the cylinders of yellow liquid. Yukiko felt ashamed at having tricked the dog into a situation he was so obviously frightened of, but the thought of Buruu pushed her misgivings aside. The men shouted to each other, throwing switches and clamping cables. As the light faded, squat metal trolleys were rushed in, and the gaijin shuffled the glass tanks along squeaking iron rails. The solution inside had changed color to a luminescent blue-white, a frosting of condensation forming on the glass. The smell of ozone was hung fog-thick in the air alongside a fading, high-pitched squeal.

Catching the sky …

keep in jars so silly can’t eat sky!

Let’s find your Boy.

not allowed here …

Please, Red.

they yell at me they hit

Please?

He whined.

shouldn’t be baddog

Red …

going now i am gooddog

The hound turned to leave. Yukiko thought of Buruu again, bleeding and starving out in the storm. Her best friend in the world. Her brother. More to her than life itself. And though the guilt made her wince, the breath catch in her lungs, she reached inside the Kenning, and found herself making it hard. Iron. Not the soft voice of suggestion, or even the subtle press of manipulation. It was crude and heavy-handed; a subtraction of will, the strings of a puppeteer upon a flinching marionette. Head pounding as if it might burst, warmth trickling over her lips.

Red. Do as I say.

Not asking. Commanding.

And with another soft whine, the dog tucked his tail and obeyed.

He stole across the generator room, several gaijin shouting at him, trying to shoo him away. Yukiko noticed none of the workers had insignia on their collars or animal skins on their shoulders. They looked messier than Danyk and his fellows, more unkempt. Several sported what looked to be burn scars on their exposed skin.

The hound nosed his way up onto a gantry of steel mesh, into a thicket of pipes and bright red valve handles. A large picture hung on the wall, covered in gaijin writing. It resembled a spider’s web; a central hub connected to smaller nodes by thin, fluorescent wires. Each node was set with a small globe and scribed with a symbol. One bulb in the topmost corner was glowing faint blue-white, a trail of fluorescence leading back to the web’s center, light slowly fading as the static electricity in the room died. Yukiko noticed a stylized sea dragon curled around what looked like a compass in the bottom corner and realized what she was seeing.

A map.

A map of the lightning farm and the surrounding pylons.

Gaijin men were gathered around a cluster of controls nearby, and one of them soon spotted Red standing before the glowing diagram. A hulking uniform-clad shape Yukiko recognized as Danyk appeared, bellowing at the top of his voice. Red cowered low, belly to the floor. Blue-white light glinted across the flattened samurai helms on the big man’s shoulders.

told you baddog now …

I’m sorry, Red. I really am.

Danyk picked up a wrench and made to throw it at the dog, roaring again. Ilyitch appeared from behind a cluster of pipes, a dripping mop in his hands, faint hand-shaped bruise on his cheek. The big man cuffed the boy across the back of his head, sending his goggles flying. Scooping them back up off the grille, Ilyitch grabbed Red by his collar and dragged him down the stairs, berating the hound in his strange language. She sensed Red’s shame, vague resentment mixed with confusion about why he’d done something so thoroughly baddog. She felt awful guilt; a pity-sick disquiet that she’d turned the Kenning into something so overt. So cruel.

She eased away from the contact with the hound, blinking hard, licking at the blood drying on her upper lip. And tentatively, she projected herself through Red’s eyes, reaching out to touch the boy’s thoughts. The migraine grew awful; like a metal vise grinding the base of her skull. She had to fight to maintain her grip, to stay inside the noise and light of a human mind, so utterly different from the beasts she’d swam in for most of her life.

The boy dragged Red across the catchment room floor, through the double doors and up the spiral stairwell. Yukiko tried to speak into his head, to frame words Ilyitch might understand, but they slipped away from her, all a-tumble, white and empty noise, like hollow pipes falling upon a sodden floor.

The boy stopped, looked around him with a frown. Red whined, hackles rising. She could feel the dog’s trepidation, his instinctive sense that something was very wrong.

She tried again, to form a greeting and project it through the dog, but it collapsed like a castle of sand between her fingers; just a muddled jumble of consonants and vowels and hissing static. Ilyitch tilted his head to one side, eyes screwed shut, holding his nose and trying to pop his eardrums. Yukiko backed off, lingering on the edge of his warmth, and he grabbed Red’s collar again, hauled him up the stairs.

This isn’t working. I can’t form the words.

It was as if the constructs in the boy’s head were too different from her own: square pegs into round holes. Language was never an issue with animals, but perhaps that was because animals didn’t really speak? Perhaps the Kenning was never meant for this?

What could she do? How could she leap the barrier between them? She needed a way of communicating that they both understood …

She recalled Danyk looming over her, the katana blade slipping down over her tattoo. His eyes fixed upon the picture inked into her skin, the symbol he understood without her needing to speak a word.

“Keetsoonay. Sahmoorayee.”

… That was it.

The answer.

Not words. Pictures.

Yukiko formed an image and pushed it into Ilyitch’s mind; herself, sinking beneath the waves as he dove into the thrashing waters to save her. The boy reeled back against the railing, hand to his brow. She gave him another image; of her and Buruu flying through clear skies, her arms around his neck. She tried to inject emotional content into the picture, the simple warmth of friendship and trust.

Ilyitch steadied himself, blinking as if he’d been struck in the face. Sure enough, the boy loosed his grip on Red’s collar and looked to the stairwell above. He ascended at a scuffing, cautious pace, Red on his heels, heavy footfalls ringing on metal as he reached the landing and started down the corridor toward her room.

The sensation was disorientating, almost nauseating; watching the boy walking down the hallway, Red beside him, hearing their footfalls through Ilyitch’s ears, the same footsteps coming closer in her own. So she broke full contact and opened her eyes, wiped her nose as best she could on her shoulder and leaned back against the wall. As she did so, she pushed one last picture out to the gaijin boy; an image of herself, helpless, frightened and wretched. Bound wrists and pleading eyes, desperate and alone, looking to him, her only hope.

When Ilyitch opened the door a few moments later, that was exactly what he saw.

26 FOOTPRINTS IN THE SNOW

The Gentleman knelt on a satin cushion at the head of a long oaken table. The reflections of the overheads on its surface were tiny stars on lacquered midnight, twinkling with more vibrancy than the real stars overhead could ever dream. A pretty duet of koto and shamisen music drifted through the drinking house walls, competing with the growl of the generator downstairs.

The table was dressed for eight, each place set with fine porcelain, a saké cup, a thousand-thread linen napkin; all as white as Iishi snow. Jimen the accountant sat at the Gentleman’s right hand. Each other cushion was occupied by a yakuza lieutenant; a collection of muscle and scars, narrowed eyes and gleaming, tattooed flesh. Five men and one woman, each stripped to the waist, every inch of flesh below their necks and above their wrists sporting beautiful, intricate ink work. Canvases of flesh, painted by the greatest artisans in Kigen.

Seimi knelt with fists upon knees, Hida beside him, pawing at one cauliflower ear. The room was cool as autumn’s kiss, the heady scent of liquor veiling the stink of sweat and exhaust from nearby sky-docks. Seimi could see the horizon through the bay windows, the shades of night studded with the silhouettes of docked sky-ships, forlorn as abandoned lovers.

And not a breath of wind.

“Brothers.” Jimen looked around the room. “The Gentleman thanks you all for coming.”

As one, the lieutenants covered their fists and bowed. The Gentleman nodded in return, saying nothing.

“Why are you here?” Jimen asked.

Uncertain glances flickering amongst the yakuza. No one made a sound.

The Gentleman waited a long, silent moment, breathing slow, the mournful notes of the duet drifting in the air like the scent of old chi.

He clapped his hands.

Half a dozen serving girls slipped into the room, charcoal eyes downcast, painted faces pale as the hungry dead. Pink kimonos, drum bows the color of rain clouds at their waists, tiny steps as quiet as smoke. Delicate hands laid two rice-paper bundles before each lieutenant. The packages were long and cylindrical, arranged on the place settings with all the precision of a tea ceremony. When they were done, the girls bowed as one to the Gentleman, then scuttled from the room with eyes still on the floor.

“Open them,” Jimen said.

The room was filled with the whisper of tearing paper, translucent strips fluttering to the ground. When he was done, Seimi stared down at the gifts before him. The thicker package contained a tantō in a short, lacquered sheath, mother-of-pearl inlays gleaming on the hilt. The second gift was a six-inch iron file: sawtoothed and thoroughly ordinary.

“Each of you has failed our oyabun.” Jimen stared around the room, not a hint of anger in his voice. “Each of you has been robbed by these gutter-thieves who plague us. Each of you will now be given the opportunity to atone.”

The Gentleman said nothing. Simply folded his arms and waited, patient as a glacier.

Seimi and Hida glanced at each other, then picked up their napkins. The other lieutenants followed suit, using the snow-white cloth to tie a tight knot around the top knuckle of their left-most fingers. Several were already missing the tips of their smallest digits and were forced to tie the knot at the second knuckle. Seimi unsheathed the tantō, watched his fingernail turning purple. The lieutenants filled the room with the ring of drawn blades.

All save one.

“Nakai-san.” Jimen aimed a cold stare in one man’s direction. “You falter?”

The other yakuza looked at Nakai. He was a few years older than the rest, graying hair swept into a thin topknot. His ink was faded with the slow press of time, blacks running to blue. A knot of lean muscle, bloodshot eyes and a slightly gray hue to his skin telling his fellows that he’d been hitting the smoke a little too hard recently. He stared at his left hand, at the empty knuckle where his little finger should have been, the ring finger already missing its first joint. He held it up to the Gentleman, blinking over severed digits.

“Oyabun,” he said. “My sword grip will be ruined.”

“Why do you need a sword?” Jimen raised an eyebrow. “In a room full of your kin?”

“Not here.” He nodded toward the window. “Out there.”

“On the street?”

“Hai.”

“The streets where children play in shadows they once feared? Where two guttersnipes are enough to see a lieutenant of the Scorpion Children hand over his iron, then tuck tail and run? Those streets, Nakai-san?”

“You do not speak to me that way,” Nakai spat. “You’re a godsdamned accountant. A book-monger. You know less than nothing about life in this city.”

“I know you shame yourself now.” The little man’s voice was soft. Dangerous. “Just as you shamed yourself when you handed over our coin to children.”

“They had an iron-thrower. What was I supposed to—”

The Gentleman hardly seemed to move at all. Nakai paused midsentence, staring like a half-wit at the tantō handle protruding from his chest, the thin line of blood running down his belly. He sucked in a shuddering breath, coughed scarlet. Clutching the hilt, he gurgled and slumped forward onto the table. Blood leaked across polished wood. The smell of urine mingled with sweat and smoke.

“You were supposed to do that, Nakai-san.” The Gentleman wiped already-spotless hands on his napkin. “Something like that would have served you well indeed.”

Nakai twitched once and was still.

“Know that I am not ashamed of any of you.” The Gentleman glanced around the room. “But I tell you truly that I have never been less proud.”

Seimi slapped his hand onto his dinner plate, fingers spread. With a single fluid motion, he sliced his little finger clean through at the top knuckle. The others around him followed suit, each removing a segment from their smallest digit. The blood upon their plates was bright, almost gaudy. Pale chunks of bloodless meat remained behind as each yakuza elevated their wounded hand, wrapped the napkin over their severed digit, curled their fingers into fists. Seimi looked down at the plate, noted his fingernail wasn’t purple anymore.

The Gentleman nodded once, lifted a saké bottle from the warming tray and poured himself a shot. He raised his cup, waited until each lieutenant had done the same. He looked each one in the eye.

“Scorpion Children!” he barked.

“Scorpion Children!” Six shouts in return.

The Gentleman and his crew threw back the liquor, returned their cups to their proper place. Several shared uneasy glances, but none seemed eager to speak. Finally, Hida growled, picked up the iron file and held it out to his oyabun.

The Gentleman smiled at him. “Hida?”

The Gentleman never smiled.

“Why?” Hida looked from his oyabun to the iron file and back again.

“A hound. A hound to set upon thieves, brother.”

“How do they know where we’re moving coin?” Seimi kept the pain of his wounded hand from his voice, gritting the yellow ruin he called teeth. “We follow no set route, yet they’ve hit us four nights running.”

“They don’t strike the stash houses.” A pock-faced lump called Bao spoke. “They hit us when we move. They ambush, like the jade adder. Like the pit spider.”

“Someone inside?” The female lieutenant, Geisu, voiced the ugly thought every man was afraid to speak. “A traitor?”

“Impossible,” came the muttered replies. “Unthinkable.”

“Then how are they doing it?” Seimi slapped his good hand onto the wood.

The room descended into brief clamor, each man offering his own theory. The Gentleman’s voice cut through the noise like a tantō through knuckle.

“We can ask them when we catch them.”

“How?” Hida still held the file in his fist, still stared at his oyabun.

“Footprints in the snow, my brother.”

The Gentleman smiled again.

“Footprints in the snow.”

27 A MOUNTAIN OF BONES

The blood on Daichi’s lips was a bubbling lather, pink as the hyacinths on the western rises. Shuddering groans running the length of him, froth bubbling from his nostrils as his pulse grew dim and the light in his eyes dimmer still.

Old Mari cut the straps of his crumpled breastplate, peeled the iron away and sliced his uwagi open, the flesh beneath already bruised, collarbone to belly. Her hands were flecked with blood, hair a bedraggled mess about her face, yelling at the Kagé onlookers with a shrill, shaking voice.

“If you’re not in here helping, get out of the bloody room!” She whirled on a younger girl. “Suki, fetch more lanterns from next door. Eiko, we need boiling water, I don’t care how, but get it fast. And somebody get me some lotus, for Amaterasu’s sake!”

Daichi drew his legs up as the pain overtook him. He coughed, bloody foam spattering the air. The wound was lung-deep, and Mari knew there was little they could do. Several men held Daichi down as she leaned in close, pressing at his ribs, feeling bone shift and pop, cursing again for more light.

“Is he going to die?”

Kaori stood nearby, wretched and trembling. Sodden fringe draped down over her scar, steel-gray eyes bloodshot with rage and grief. To see him go like this …

“He’s not going to die,” Mari said. “Not if I can help it.”

But she couldn’t. And she knew it. Daichi was halfway to the Mountain of Bones already. Blood trickled from his lips with each bubbling gasp, pooling beside his head. Every breath was a labor, thinning by the moment, his blood pressure steadily dropping with each struggling beat of his heart.

The best anyone could pray for was that he passed without pain.

“Where is that lotus?” she shrieked.

She heard a clamor on the verandah outside, angry voices swelling. Kaori looked up, jaw clenched, scowling like Enma-ō himself as Kin walked into the room, drenched to the bone. Following the boy was a tall, slender girl with earth-brown eyes and dark, cropped hair. Her lips were the color of bruised roses, so full it looked as if someone had cuffed her across the mouth. Dressed in a threadbare hakama, bare feet, a dirty uwagi with a hole torn in its back to accommodate the swell of a silver orb, a cluster of chromed, insectoid limbs curled at her back.

A gaggle of onlookers gathered in the doorway, dark stares and darker mutterings.

“Mari, you’ve met Ayane,” said Kin.

“Gods above…” the old woman breathed.

“What is the meaning of this?” Kaori hissed. “How did you get out of your cell?”

“She’s here to help, Kaori,” Kin replied.

The False-Lifer stepped up to the bloody table, eyes sweeping Daichi’s body. She peeled back one of his eyelids with her thumb, pressed two fingers against his throat and leaned close to hear the breath rattling in his lungs. The old man coughed, spattering her face with blood. She stood, turned to Kin and blinked once. Twice.

“His lung has collapsed. He will be dead soon.”

“By all the gods in the heavens, Guildsman, are you insane?” Kaori still glared at Kin, outrage in her eyes. “You seriously believe I would let this accursed freak treat my father?”

“Would you rather he died?” Kin asked.

“This is madness. Are you going to run cables beneath his flesh? Plug him into one of those cursed mechabacii? I’d rather bury you both alongside him.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Kin slammed his hands on the table. “She’s offering to save his life, and you repay her with threats?” Kin glared at the faces peering through the windows. “Aren’t you supposed to be the ones who’ll free this island? You should be better than this!”

Kaori stepped close to Kin, her face inches from his. “If it weren’t for your damnable machines, none of this would have happened!”

“Your people are the reason this happened! The shuriken-throwers were sabotaged, Kaori!”

“You are wasting time.” Ayane’s voice cut through the clamor, soft as silk, sharp as the limbs on her back. “With respect, this man has precious little left. If we do nothing, he is as good as dead. I do not see how allowing me to try can make matters worse.”

Kin ran his hand over his scalp, met Kaori’s stare with defiance.

“What say you, Kaori? Will you trust Ayane, or watch your father die?”

Kaori’s eyes drifted to her father. His struggles had grown feeble, shallow breath sucked ragged through bloody teeth. Fear carved long furrows across her brow, into the corners of her mouth. Clenched fists, clenched jaw, trembling breath. She looked at Ayane, moments ticking by like minutes, like hours, like days until at last Daichi started coughing, coughing, his whole body shaking and shuddering, lips painted with blood. Kaori knelt by her father’s side, clutching his hand. Tears welled in her eyes.

“Can you really save him, girl?”

The chromed arms uncurled from Ayane’s back one pair at a time, like peacock feathers, gleaming in the lantern light. She touched the blood spattered on her face, smearing it between her fingers as if savoring the sensation.

“I can save him.”

Kaori sighed.

Nodded once.

“… Then do it.”

28 MOVING PICTURES

There is power in words.

There are words that bid us laugh and make us weep. Words to begin with and words to end by. Words that seize the hearts in our chests and squeeze them tight, that set the skin on our bones to tingling. Words so beautiful they shape us, forever change us, live inside us for as long as we have breath to speak them. There are forgotten words. Killing words. Great and frightening and terrible words. There are True words.

And then there are pictures.

It was a slow process at first. Sitting opposite one another on the metal cot, Yukiko pushing images into Ilyitch’s mind, waiting for him to form his clumsy replies. His eyes were wide, mouth slack. And though he had no idea how it was all happening, the boy seemed enthralled enough by the process that he didn’t waste time seeking explanations.

Ilyitch’s images were blurry impressions; finger paintings in the rain, running and bleeding at the edges. By comparison, Yukiko’s thoughts were intricate, full of light and color. But they found an equilibrium between them, and she soon found enough meaning in the gaijin’s mental shorthand to understand his intentions. She tried to inject emotion into her thoughts, to make him feel like she was a friend, but had no idea if she was succeeding.

Her nose started bleeding almost as soon as they began, and it took a long time to explain that the blood was nothing to be concerned about, that there were more important things at stake. Her skull was close to splitting, the wall she’d once again built herself trembling with the strain, barely keeping the Kenning’s fire at bay. But something held it in place, stopped it collapsing utterly; something fierce and bright and desperate inside her. Born perhaps of fear for Buruu, lost out there in the dark, or perhaps rage at her own helplessness to save him.

She started by showing Ilyitch an image of Shima’s armies in retreat, packing up and flying home after Yoritomo’s death. She tried to show him the war was over. That she was not an enemy, or at least, not his.

In turn, the young man showed her burned crops and gutted buildings. Gaijin soldiers cut down under white flags, prison camps, wailing children dragged into sky-ships and flown away, never to be seen again.

She showed him Yoritomo, murdered in the Market Square. An empty throne.

Ilyitch replied with the image of a tall woman in a stone chair, grim and terrible. She had blond hair, the same mismatched eyes as Katya—one black, the other glittering rose quartz. She wore a suit of iron, black feathers adorned her shoulders, a huge bird’s skull with a cruel, hooked beak on her head. Twelve stars lay at her feet, and she gathered them in her lap, one by one.

He showed her legions of stern-faced gaijin, skins of great wolves and bears upon their shoulders, naked swords in their hands. A fleet of ships, iron fortresses floating on a storm sea, powered by the lightning they hauled from the sky.

And then Ilyitch showed her an hourglass, its sand almost run out.

So Yukiko turned away from the war and focused on Buruu. She formed pictures of the great hunt on the Thunder Child, their time trapped alone in the Iishi, their captivity in Kigen and the battle with Yoritomo’s samurai in the arena. Ilyitch watched her with something like awe during this passage, jaw slack, running his fingers over the fur at his shoulders.

The boy projected a stylized picture of Yukiko, katana held aloft, sunlight in her hair, thousands of samurai kneeling at her feet. The picture was tinged with uncertainty.

His eyebrows raised in question.

She smiled and shook her head. Showed the Kagé village in the mountains; a peaceful place, herself and Buruu laying in dappled sunlight. A quiet life.

He frowned at her then, as if he didn’t quite understand.

Yukiko projected an image of Buruu, bleeding and twisted on the rocks. A compass needle pointing north, and the pylon she’d seen near Buruu in her dream.

Ilyitch shook his head, pushed her a childish version of the map she’d seen on the wall downstairs. Dozens of pylons, studded all over the islands around the lightning farm. Not all of them were connected directly; most of the cables threaded amongst multiple towers back to the central hub, like strands of a crooked spider’s web. If the picture she’d shown him was correct, Buruu was trapped at the very end of the lines.

Miles away.

Yukiko used one of his own images; the hourglass running out of sand. A picture of food. An arashitora skeleton on black rocks.

She reached out, leather thong tight around her wrist, fingers stretching toward his own in vain. He frowned, put his hand in hers. She squeezed tight.

“Please,” she said, tears welling. “Please.”

Ilyitch sighed, glanced at the doorway behind him. Avoiding her eyes, the boy stood, pointed at Red and spoke a stern command. Red lay flat and wagged his tail.

“W-wait.” Yukiko sat up straighter, frowning. “Where are you going?”

The gaijin spoke a handful of words, held up both hands as if urging her to be still. Then he turned and clomped out of the room, shutting the door behind him.

Where is he going, Red?

don’t know i stay here am gooddog

Yukiko listened to Ilyitch’s footprints receding down the hall. She had no idea if she’d convinced him, no clue as to whether he was headed to get supplies to help her, or to turn her in to Danyk. But for the first time since she’d arrived here, she found herself alone with Red.

So either way, she wasn’t going to wait to find out.

The dog had gnawed through one of the tethers binding her wrists and was halfway through the second when she heard stealthy footfalls in the corridor. She looked at Red, paused with his teeth upon the leather, one ear pointing to the sky as his tail started wagging.

Is that Ilyitch?

The dog blinked.

Your Boy? Is that your Boy coming?

… no

Yukiko strained against the weakened strap, finally tearing it loose, tugging at the bindings on her ankles as the footsteps arrived in the hallway outside. She was up and coiled in the shadows as the handle turned and the door opened wide.

A figure limped into the gloom, and she struck, wrapping the bedsheet over its head and kicking the back of its knee. The figure dropped to the ground with the whine of pistons and a muffled cry of pain. She grabbed the contraption on his belt and tore it from its holster. The figure pulled the tangled sheet away from his face and turned to face her, and she recognized Piotr, pale as the sheet she’d wrapped him in, hands reaching for the ceiling.

“Stop!” His one good eye locked upon the device in her hand. “Don’t!”

Yukiko realized the man was drunk; the reek of liquor on his breath and skin so strong he might have bathed in it. She pointed the contraption at his head, finger poised over what she hoped was the trigger.

“What are you doing here?” she growled.

“Please.” He motioned to the hallway. “Please. I am wanting for you.”

“Why? What do you want with me?”

“Using you.” He licked his lips, gaze roaming from head to toe. “The body. Using for the body.”

“My body?”

He reached up, put his hands on her shoulders, ran them down over her breasts. Yukiko took a step back, lip curling in disgust.

“Please.” Piotr looked her up and down, put his finger to his lips. “Wanting you. Come for me. We must come.”

“You sick bastard,” she growled.

“Sick?” The man frowned. “No get sick, is—”

Her knee collided with his crotch midsentence, her elbow with his jaw. His head twisted across his shoulders, spittle and blood spraying between split lips, eyes rolling up in their sockets as he hit the concrete with a wet thud. Red hopped off the bed and snuffled at the man’s face, licking his nose with a hopeful wag of his tail.

killed!?

No, I didn’t.

She massaged the pain in her knuckles, stared at the gaijin with utter contempt.

Although I should. Godsdamned pervert. He’s old enough to be my father.

A quick search of the man’s clothing revealed his carved fish pipe, a satchel of the strange leaf that gaijin all seemed to smoke, and a ring of iron keys. She was eyeing off the strange weapon in her hand when Red heard Ilyitch’s footprints in the corridor. She stood and pointed the device at the doorway, not knowing how her benefactor might react upon seeing his unconscious comrade.

Ilyitch stopped at the threshold, frowning. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he saw Yukiko and the contraption coiled in her hands. He raised one eyebrow, letting the three satchels he was carrying fall to the ground. Catching sight of Piotr collapsed beside her, he shuffled forward with hands raised, crouching and searching for the man’s pulse. A stream of nonsensical words followed, hissed through clenched teeth, accompanied by furious hand gestures.

Yukiko pushed the picture of Piotr’s attempted assault into his mind, the image of his hands pawing her chest. The boy fell silent, looked at his fallen comrade with an uneasy expression. He put a comforting hand on her shoulder but she shied away, and Ilyitch let his arm drop. Turning to the satchels he’d brought with him, he knelt and rummaged inside the largest. He tossed Yukiko a dirty red coverall, heavy boots, and a yellow rubber rainskin. Not needing to be told, Yukiko slipped into the coverall and rainskin (too big), sat on the bed and buckled up the boots (also too big). She pulled the hood over her head, tugged the hem-ties as tight as she could.

Ilyitch had two coils of thick rope looped over his shoulders. He peeled one off and hung it around her neck, hefted one of the satchels, handed her another. The bag was heavy, stinking of raw fish. She guessed it was Buruu’s dinner, and she was momentarily overcome with gratitude for this strange boy with tarnished silver eyes.

She stepped up and kissed his cheek, careful of the swollen, purple bruise. His skin was salty smooth against her lips.

“Thank you, Ilyitch,” she said.

The gaijin shot her a pretty smile, scratching at the base of his skull and blushing. She stooped to pat Red, let him lick her nose.

You stay here, all right?

can’t come with you?

Not unless you can fly.

flew here

You did?

from houses on the water

Houses?

so many so loud!

“Yukiko.”

Hearing Ilyitch say her name pulled her from the dog’s mind. The boy nodded toward the door, motioned for her to follow.

Good-bye, Red. I’m sorry about before. For making you be bad.

She gave him an affectionate scratch behind his ears.

You’re a gooddog. Always.

you goodgirl too

A faint, grim smile.

Not that good.

Hood pulled low over her eyes, she followed the gaijin from her cell.

“You can’t be serious!”

Shrieking gales snatched the words from her mouth, dragging them off to drown in the sideways rain. Cautious feet had brought them up an auxiliary stairwell near the catchment room and from there onto the roof. The storm was so heavy it seemed night had fallen, and the glow of grubby tungsten was all that stood between them and almost pitch blackness.

Black clouds rolled overhead, thunderous, flashes of lightning catching the world in freeze-frame. All around them, copper spires stretched into the sky, twin cables as thick as her wrist leading off into the dark. She could hear the ocean below, waves crashing against the structure and shivering it in its moorings. The cables hummed in the wind; a lonely, metallic dirge over the percussion of Raijin’s drums.

Ilyitch laughed and handed her the contraption, took another from the storage locker at the base of the lightning spire. Yukiko stared at the device he’d given her, stomach sinking toward her toes.

It was solid iron, slippery with rain and grease. Four grooved rubber wheels lined up along a cross-shaped bar, fixed at either side with what looked like crank handles. A leather harness was affixed to a clip at the bottom of the crossbar, and Ilyitch was already strapping himself in. Yukiko had a dreadful feeling she knew where this was going, buckling herself into her own harness as the storm raged about them. She leaned against the railing as the wind buffeted her like a plaything. Lightning struck a spire out on the ocean to the south, raced along the cables up to the building’s roof. Yukiko flinched, shielding her eyes against the blue-white burn seething through the vast machine behind them. Goosebumps trawled her skin.

Ilyitch looked to the sky, then scampered up the lightning spire, using the copper coils like a ladder. He slung the contraption onto the double lengths of cable, grooved rubber wheels fitting snugly around the circumference of each. In one smooth motion he kicked off the tower, the device whizzing along the cables, sending him thirty feet out into the gloom. He dangled from the harness beneath the crossbar, reached up to the hand cranks and began turning them. The contraption wheeled slowly back toward the tower. Ilyitch spun the cranks the other way as if to demonstrate, the contraption traveling in the opposite direction. He looked at her and smiled.

It’s a flying fox.

Yukiko yelled over the wind.

“What happens if lightning hits our cables?”

A raised eyebrow.

“Lightning!” She pointed at the sky, then along the iron, gave her best impression of an explosion.

Ilyitch held his finger aloft, then hooked it through a metal pin at the front of his harness. Without a sound, he yanked the pin free and fell down into darkness.

Yukiko screamed, reached out for the falling gaijin, knowing he was too far away to save. But five feet into the fall, a rubber thong in the harness snapped taut, and Ilyitch jerked to a sudden halt. He held out both hands and grinned, twisting in the storm like a wind chime.

“You bastard,” Yukiko muttered.

Ilyitch climbed the tether hand over fist, swung up and hooked his legs over the cables to give himself enough slack to reinsert the pin.

He beckoned with one hand, yelling over the wind.

Yukiko licked her lips, tasted fresh salt, clean rain. Her knuckles were white on the railing, heart pounding against her ribs, fear-born nausea slicking her insides. Lightning arced across the clouds above, and she made the mistake of looking down. The ocean was a black, thrashing snarl, roaring and crashing in towers twenty feet high. But in the split second before the lightning faded and the blanket of gloom fell again, she saw the glint of a long, serpentine tail cutting through the waves.

Sea dragons.

Reaching out with the Kenning, she felt them below. Smooth as polished steel, cold and sharp and hungry. Their shape was ancient, stirring a primal fear inside her, much deeper than the thought of lightning striking the cables or the journey to come. Her mind shied away instinctively; a child fleeing into the safety of a parent’s bed.

Her hands were shaking.

But then she pictured Buruu, alone and bleeding, somewhere out there in the dark. And she grit her teeth and snatched up the flying fox, climbed the lightning spire and slung the device over the cables without another thought.

Holding her breath, eyes wide, she kicked out into the windswept dark.

29 A TREMBLING EARTH

Sometimes Hiro could still feel his hand.

He would wake in the deep of night, troubled by some itch or spasm, reaching toward it and finding only an empty mattress, the slippery kiss of silken sheets. In the dark, he would search the place where his arm should have been, groping about until he found the nub of flesh they had left him with: the puckered suture scars, the gristle-twisted knot of meat studded with bayonet fixtures, not even half a bicep remaining below the swell of his shoulder. And in the quiet and the still, he would picture her face and dream of all the ways he could break it.

“Yukiko.”

He breathed her name as if it were a toxic fume. And every time he woke to that nub of flesh, every time his hand itched and he couldn’t scratch it, he was poisoned anew. She was inside him. A cell-deep sepsis. A wound refusing to heal. Like the scars of blackened ash drifting away below his feet, the thrum of motors settling like cancer in his bones.

The ironclad Blessed Light was a thumbprint on the waking dawn, smoking black against bloody red as Lady Amaterasu crested the horizon and set fire to the sky. Hiro stood at her prow, half a dozen Iron Samurai looming around him, the sunrise tinting their bone-white armor immolation-red. The Daimyo of the Tora clan clasped his hands behind his back, sea-green eyes upon the tortured soil of Jukai province below.

The snowcapped spires of the Tōnan Mountains lay to the west, and Hiro knew somewhere amidst those peaks crouched the impregnable perch of First House—the heart of the Lotus Guild in Shima. It was there the Guild had begun, two centuries ago, just after Kazumitsu I took his throne. When the Tiger, Dragon, Phoenix and Fox zaibatsu began consuming the lesser clans; the blood of Falcon, Panda, Serpent and their fellows just a feast for the Four.

The first production-grade crops of blood lotus had been cultivated here, centuries ago. Once this had been the most fertile region in all of the Imperium, but now all was ashen earth and black smoke curling from the cracks—as if a master painter had spent his last on a landscape of rarest beauty, and some jealous lover had smudged inch-thick handfuls of charcoal onto the canvas, drying and splitting in the noonday sun. On maps, the ruined land was still named Jukai province—a name meaning “Evergreen.” But Shima’s citizens knew it by another name.

The Stain.

“It’s getting worse.” Hiro glanced at the Guildsman beside him. “So much worse.”

Second Bloom Kensai refused to look down, bloody eyes fixed on the proving grounds ahead. The rising sun kissed his perfect, metal cheek, the smooth features of a gilded youth retching up breather cables, his hulking atmos-suit spitting fumes and hissing with every breath. A child’s head atop a monster’s body.

“All will be well once inochi supplies are restored.” Kensai’s voice rumbled in Hiro’s gut. “But now you see why the war must be renewed. We need more prisoners, Shōgun. More gaijin to feed the lotus. And more land to plant it.”

Hiro frowned, his mind turning to dark places. “Is there no other way? Some other—”

“No.” Kensai folded his arms. “Sacrifices must be made. The lotus must bloom.”

“It troubles me to think—”

“Nature knows not of mercy. The blood of the meek slakes the conqueror’s thirst. This is not a law unique to the Guild. This is the way of all things, Shōgun.”

“Do not call me that.”

“And why not?”

“Because I am not Shōgun. Just because two clanlords have deigned to attend my wedding, does not guarantee they will swear allegiance.”

“They will kneel before you, young Lord. All of them.”

“And if not? How will the clans fight the Kagé or the gaijin if we spend our strength fighting each other? You wish to craft me a throne of my countrymen’s bones?”

“You need not fight the other clans, Shōgun. All they require is a rallying point. A banner grand and terrifying enough to stand behind.”

Kensai pointed into the distance.

“And so we give it to you.”

Hiro looked at the proving grounds, coalescing out of the ashen haze ahead. Forges and smelting plants rising like blood blisters behind a barbed-wire forest, wreathed in smoke. Trains rolling on rusted tracks, hauling iron and coal from the Midland mines, broad roads of black gravel, dotted by watchtowers. The grounds swarmed with activity; atmos-suits moving to and fro, a hundred cutting torches twinkling like stars in the long-lost sky. Row upon row of armored machines, like soldiers at muster, fifteen feet high even in repose, scythe arms ending in sawtoothed chainblades. Four legs apiece, each one thick as tree trunks, skin gleaming yellow in the light of the scorching sun. Hundreds of them.

Hiro raised his eyebrows.

“Shreddermen suits?”

“The Kagé feather their nests in the Iishi forest,” Kensai said. “So we will leave no forest standing in our wake.”

Hiro squinted through the pall to the far end of the grounds; gantries and walkways built around a towering shadow. Cutting torches arced and spat, Lotusmen trailed bright blue flames around the hulking figure, rocket packs blazing. The Guildsmen were insects beside it—some vast sleeping giant, nodding off in a sea of mosquitoes, too enormous to feel their sting. Three hundred feet high, eight legs curled up beneath its bloated metal belly like a waiting spider. Saw-blade arms with teeth big as men, pistons tall as houses, great chimney stacks running down its spine and piercing the sky like blades. The sound of its engines was a choir of earthquakes.

A machine. A colossus. A behemoth of black iron and blacker smoke.

Hiro stared in wonder. “What in the name of the gods…”

“Look now upon the doom of the Kagé.”

Hiro wiped the ash from his goggles, stared at the metal giant. It was beyond anything he’d dreamed. A looming, rumbling, cast-iron impossibility.

“The Shadows have their standard bearer,” Kensai continued. “Now we have ours. Our creation will be the rallying cry to unite the zaibatsu. Dragon, Phoenix, Fox: none are foolish enough to field an army against such a machine. They will fall into line, one after another, with you at their head. And you will lead them into the Iishi, and level every tree, crush every stone, until there are no more holes for the rebels to hide inside. You will avenge your Lord and restore your honor. You will kill the Impure one and the fools who follow her.”

Hiro licked his lips, tasted chi smoke. Adrenaline sour in the back of his throat. He struggled to swallow.

“It’s incredible.”

“It will be ready to march within weeks. All of Shima will tremble at its approach. You will march in the vanguard, that the other Daimyo will have no illusions about where the Guild’s allegiance lies. We will end this petty civil war and set the clan armies to task. The Kagé must be eliminated. And that Impure abomination must burn.”

Behind that perfect mask, Hiro could hear the smile in Kensai’s voice.

“And you said you did not enjoy surprises.” He bowed, hand over fist. “Shōgun.”

Hiro looked at the towering colossus of iron and smoke. He closed his eyes, inhaled the fumes, savored the taste on his teeth and tongue. He could feel the fingers on his missing hand itching, the iron arm they’d given him trembling in sympathy. A phantom reminder of all she’d taken from him. The promise of everything he would take from her.

“Does it have a name?” he asked.

“Of course.”

Kensai spread his arms wide.

“Behold the Earthcrusher.”

The ground was a sea of ashes wreathed in blackened fumes. Every step raised a cloud of vapor, swirling about their ankles and hanging from their shoulders like shrouds. Dawn struggled to pierce the haze; sickly, vomit-gray, the air cold as winter snow. They were somewhere east of the Guild bastion of First House, miles deep into the plains where the first production-grade lotus crops had been grown, centuries ago, the earth ruined beyond repair.

Ryusaki knew now why this place was called “the Stain.”

The Kagé captain’s breather was choked and useless, the device like a stone about his face. The internal mechanism had failed yesterday, and only the filter scrims kept the deadly fumes at bay now. He felt dirtier than he could ever remember; like he’d taken a bath in fresh sewage and dried off by rolling in rotting corpses. Every breath was a black ache, eyes scummed with charcoal tears behind his goggles, throat parched, lips cracking. But he dared not remove the breather to drink, not even for a second. Not even for a mouthful.

He knew the Guild had built their factory here in the Stain for that very reason—an aerial approach would be intercepted by ironclads, the roads and rail lines were a bottleneck, always watched, and an approach overland through the deadlands was virtual suicide. The soldier in him had to admire the bastards.

“How you faring, boys?”

Ryusaki looked back at his fellow Kagé and saw Shintaro and Jun both looked like hell. Faces hidden beneath breathers and goggles, swathed head to foot, heavy gloves and boots, tied off at the hemlines. But their postures showed both were feeling the effects of the deadlands just as much as Ryusaki was. Jun in particular was doing it hard—he’d puked into his breather last night and had to take the mask off to clean it, sucking down a few lungfuls of fumes. His eyes were so bloodshot, Ryusaki could almost see them glowing behind his goggles.

A weary thumbs-up from Shintaro was all he got, so he turned and slogged on, earth crumbling beneath his weight as if the surface was a rotten, hollowed shell. Deep footprints marked their trail from the northern rail lines; the trio had stowed away on a freight train loaded with iron, hitching as close to the staging grounds as they dared before leaping off into the deadlands the night before last.

One day and two nights in the hells …

Daichi had asked for volunteers, and Ryusaki had known the risks when he stepped forward. But the message from the Kigen cell was clear: the Guild was building something in the Stain, and at this stage of the game, the Kagé couldn’t afford to be blind. If the Stormdancer had returned, the council could have used her eyes. As it was, they had to do it the hard way. The way they’d been doing it for years before the girl arrived on her thunder tiger.

Suited Ryusaki just fine.

The three Kagé trudged through the wasteland, following sky-ship exhaust trails. Chill winds howled across the desolate plains but utterly failed to stir the vapor: the fumes clung to the soil like a toddler to its mother’s kimono. The rents in the earth were worse than he’d ever seen; some stretching ten feet deep, and the trio was forced to climb down into the fissures if they proved too wide to leap across. The vapor hung heavy within these cracks; a tar-thick, sticky smog, deathly cold, choking daylight utterly. In the deepest of them, he swore he could hear a voice, lilting and sweet, whispering just beyond the edge of understanding.

A woman’s voice …

They marched on, one shuffling step at a time, until his feet bled and his legs trembled. At last Jun could walk no more, sinking to his knees. He retched again into his breather, black and vile, filling the eyeholes. And Ryusaki was forced to watch, helpless, as the young man tore his mask away and puked again; a gurgling fountain of gray and scarlet, slumping face-first into the corrupted earth.

His eyes had turned black.

Twenty-two years old.

They whispered a prayer to Enma-ō, begging the Great Judge to weigh the boy fair. They had no offerings, no wooden coin or incense to burn for him. Looking at the deadland ashes already caked on the boy’s face, Ryusaki hoped they would be enough to grant his soul a hearing at the Court of Hells. The entire countryside had been burned to produce them, after all. That should be offering enough for any judge.

Miles. Hours. Fumes so thick his vision swam, head buzzing, the taste of death chalked on his tongue. Shintaro stumbled behind him, fell under the weight of his pack, and Ryusaki dragged him upright and slapped his back, promising a decent cup of Danroan saké when they returned to civilization. The boy was nearly delirious, but he nodded and kept walking, shoulders slumped, like a man on his way to the executioner’s scaffold.

They crested a small hill near dusk. And across the sea of fumes, they saw it.

The Guild staging grounds.

Ironclads hanging in the air like bloated lotusflies. Walls of razor wire, halogen lamps and cutting torches burning as Lady Amaterasu slipped toward her rest. Ryusaki fumbled with the spyglass at his belt, thumbed the ash from the lenses, cursing beneath his breath as he held it to his eye. Squinting into the Guild compound, blinking black tears, he caught sight of hulking machines lined up in formation, close to a hundred in all. Four legged, brittle-yellow, chainsaw blades for hands. It took a few moments to realize they were shreddermen suits.

Why would the Guild need a legion of those?

He hissed through gritted teeth as realization dawned.

To cut a forest down …

He shook his head, started to turn away when he spotted it. Just a glimpse; a shadow within shadows, something vast and black lurking amidst the smog. But then Lady Sun hit the horizon, flaring bright as she laid down to sleep, and he saw it; a kettle-bellied, sawtoothed colossus with smokestack spines and the legs of some vast, iron spider. A machine the likes of which he had never seen.

“Raijin’s drums, what is that?” he breathed.

Shintaro slumped down in the ash, staring at his hand as if amazed he owned a set of fingers. Ryusaki coughed, tasting black on his tongue. Unbuckling Shintaro’s pack, he pulled aside its oilskin, revealing the graceless bulk of a wireless transmitter. He cranked the handle, but the machine made a sound like a meat grinder, refusing to register power.

“Shit.” Ryusaki thumped the radio as Shintaro keeled over beside him, gasping like a landed fish. “Come on, you bastard, work…”

If it heard him, the transmitter made no effort to obey.

He could feel a sickness in his belly that had nothing to do with fear. An ashen, blackened nausea, creeping into his bones, up toward his heart. He could feel it inside him. Death taken root. Fear beside it. But not here. Not yet.

Ryusaki lurched to his feet, cut loose his own gear and slung the transmitter’s weight across his back. Shintaro was spasming, black foam filling his breather, and Ryusaki knelt long enough to give him a blade to the heart. Better to die quick. Better not to suffer.

Not like he was going to.

The Kagé captain drew a ragged breath, adjusted the transmitter on his back and turned north, toward the rail lines. He had to get far enough from the smog that the device might work, send a message to the closest listening post, on again, until it reached the Iishi. Because Ryusaki knew now he never would.

Never see those mountains again, hear the windsong in the trees, watch flowers bloom in a blessed spring. Never see his brother again. Never again be scolded by his mother for not eating right or cursing too much. Never to see this war end.

He closed his eyes, willed away the grief, the fear, the despair. Not a second to waste on any of it. Because he refused to die for nothing. To allow Shintaro and Jun to have died for nothing. This news would reach the Iishi, even if it killed him.

Head bowed, fighting for every breath, Ryusaki began trekking north.

Even if it killed him.

30 A MOMENT OF EMPTY

Even though he’d broken the lock on her cell, Ayane had insisted she return to her prison after seeing to Daichi’s wounds. Quietly closing the door behind her and sitting in the dark to wait, despite all of Kin’s protests. She said she wanted permission before she would leave her cage again. Validation. Vindication. Finally given by an old man with bruised and ragged breath, awakening yestereve from a sleep that would have become death, if not for the accursed lotusgirl and her gleaming spider limbs.

Freedom at last.

Ayane stepped from the cell and threw her arms around his neck, her smile as wide as the sky. She smelled of sweat, damp cotton, dried blood. Kin gave a weak hug in return, waiting for her to release him. Her arms slipped away from his shoulders reluctantly, and she stepped back to look him over with those dark, liquid eyes, skin as pale as moonlight.

“Kin-san, what’s wrong?”

“… Nothing.”

“First Bloom, you could not lie a little harder, could you?” A wry smile. “That way I could at least try to believe you.”

“Why do you still do that?”

“Do what?”

“Swear by the First Bloom. You’re not Guild anymore.”

“Old habit?” The girl shrugged, silver limbs rippling on her back.

“It makes you stand out. Reminds people who you used to be. Daichi agreed to release you because you saved his life. But the less they think of you as Guild, the better.”

“Then who should I swear by? Thunder Gods and their drums? Maybe the Maker and his testicles?” She adopted a gruff voice, slapped a mock frown onto her face. “Izanagi’s bawwwwls.”

Kin smiled despite himself. “You do that very well.”

“My thanks, my Lord.” The girl bowed from the knees, like a lady of court. “Now, will you tell me what troubles you, or should we pretend you are a halfway decent liar and have you show me the bathhouse instead?”

“Just … all of it,” he shrugged. “The ’thrower malfunction. Daichi nearly dying. They think it’s my fault. Everything has gone to hell since Yukiko and Buruu left.” A sigh. “And they should be back by now.”

The words sounded as though someone else were speaking them. Someone in a distant room, indulging in idle gossip, too foolish to even contemplate.

Yukiko missing? Nonsense. The last time he’d seen her, they’d had a screaming fight. Fate would never be so cruel as to take her away without giving him a chance to—

“You are worried about her,” Ayane said.

He stared at the floor. Nodded.

“I am certain she is all right, Kin. Wherever she is. She is the Stormdancer. She destroyed three ironclads without so much as a scratch. Killed a Shōgun simply by looking at him.”

Kin shook his head.

“That’s not her. The way you all see her…” He sighed, rubbed the crease between his brow. “You don’t know her at all.”

Ayane touched his hand, fingertips as gentle as cobwebs across his skin. A frail smile bloomed on her lips.

“You are very sweet, you know, Kin-san. You always think the best of everyone.”

He glanced down as her fingers touched his, raising unexpected goosebumps on his skin. Looking up into her eyes, he realized how close she stood. And before he knew what was happening, her lips were touching his, full and soft and warm, her body pressed against him, gently, as if he might break. He lingered for a second, and two, and three, breath caught in his lungs, white noise in his ears, until at last he broke away, stepping back and raising his hands. Ayane stood still as stone, eyes closed, silver limbs unfurling and rippling about her, bruised-pink lips curled in a delicate, tiny smile.

“So that is what it feels like,” she breathed.

“Why did you do that?”

Ayane opened her eyes, blinking rapidly. The silver limbs shivered.

“Just to feel,” she said. “Just to know.”

“You shouldn’t do something like that. Not without asking first.”

“You did not like it?”

“No, I didn’t.”

Didn’t you?

“I am sorry. I just thought…” She clasped her hands together. “I thought if you did not want me to, you would have stopped me…”

“Don’t do it again, please.”

“Do not be angry at me.”

“I’m not angry…”

“You are.” Tears welled in the girl’s eyes. “I am sorry. It is just … everything, all this…” She shook her head, groping blindly for the words. “Now I have the chance to feel something, I just want to feel it all…”

The tears spilled over her new eyelashes, down those moon-pale cheeks.

“I am so sorry, Kin-san.”

“It’s all right.” He opened his arms, offered an awkward hug. She pressed against him and shivered, chest heaving softly, and he ran his hand over the stubble on her head and whispered, “It’ll be all right, don’t cry, hush now,” feeling altogether wretched.

Not long ago, he was just like her, spreading his wings for the first time in a world he’d never known. He remembered what it was to feel that way; to be the unwanted one, the one outside looking in, and for one brief, impossible moment, he forgot about a girl with long dark hair and skin like smooth cream and eyes so deep he could drown, flying away on her thunder tiger and taking his heart with her. Forgot that she was missing, that she could be dead, that the last time he spoke to her could be the last time they ever spoke at all.

Forgot about her entirely.

But only for a moment.

A single, empty moment.

Angry stares prickled on the back of his neck.

Ayane walked beside him, seemingly lost in the flood of sights and smells, a small smile on her face as she squinted at the treetops and breathed deep, as if every lungful were her first and last. But Kin could feel it. See it in the Kagé’s grim expressions, shoulders set, pausing in their labors as the pair walked by and making the warding sign against evil when they thought he could not see.

Some looked upon Ayane with vague approval; it seemed rumor about her saving Daichi’s life had spread. But for him, there was only mistrust. Anger and contempt.

They stepped onto a footbridge, Ayane chattering about the way the wind made the hairs on her arms stand up in tiny rows, how it felt like static current, and how strange it was to have hair on her arms at all. Kin prickled under the angry stares, teeth gritted, rankling at the injustice of it all. If not for his ’throwers, that oni war band would have been unstoppable—the Kagé could never have met them in battle, let alone bested them. If not for his perimeter, even now those hellspawn would be roaming the forest with abandon, and the Kagé would be holed up in their trees and praying for Yukiko to return. Before they failed, the emplacements had taken out more than a dozen of the monsters. But did that matter to anyone? Did anyone take even a second to think what might have happened if Kin had not been here at all? And did no one else think it suspicious that every single ’thrower failed within seconds of each other?

How the hells did they get those seals to rupture?

“Guildsman.”

The voice was a fist in his gut, hard and freezing, the memory of the knife twisting his input jack setting his teeth on edge.

Skritch.

Skriiiitch.

“Go away, Isao,” Kin said.

The boys were standing at the end of the footbridge, cutting off their passage to the bathhouse; Isao in front, Atsushi lurking like a shadow behind. Kin stopped, pulled Ayane to a halt. The girl blinked and looked around, doe-eyed and confused.

“What is it, Kin-san?”

“Go back to the prison.” He kept his voice low. “Wait for me there.”

“I told you what would happen if you didn’t leave.” Isao hefted a pair of tonfa; wooden clubs with a short handle perpendicular to the shaft. “You should have listened.”

Kin noticed movement behind him; Takeshi standing at the other end of the bridge, smile stretched across that crooked face. He looked around to the villagers on the other platforms, but none would meet his gaze. They picked up their bundles, or simply abandoned their tasks and walked away. The boys were all oni killers—if they had issue with the Guildsmen, it seemed not many Kagé considered it their business after the disaster at the ’thrower line.

Kin squeezed Ayane’s hand, pulled her behind him.

“Stay out of the way, Ayane.”

“Your accursed shuriken-throwers nearly got Daichi-sama killed,” Isao spat. “I warned you.”

Ten feet away.

“My ’throwers?” Kin hissed through gritted teeth. “You’re the bastards who sabotaged them. That’s why you begged Daichi not to fight at the line. You set them to fail, but you wanted them to blow in the test run with the whole village watching, not in the middle of—”

“How the hells would I know how to sabotage your machines, Guildsman?”

“I saw your hands after the battle, Isao. They were covered in grease.”

“Grease, you fool?” Isao scoffed. “Was it black? Sticky? Like oni blood?”

Five feet.

“When Daichi hears about this—”

“And how is he going to hear about it?” Isao smiled. “Dead men don’t talk.”

Two feet. Close enough to see the sweat beaded upon the boy’s skin. The hatred unveiled in his eyes.

“Isao, don’t—”

The tonfa whistled past his jaw, Kin jerking away and cracking the back of his head into Ayane’s nose. The girl squealed and put her hands to her face, staggered back, grasping at the rope railing for balance. The bridge swayed beneath them.

Kin stepped forward and grabbed the second tonfa, wood smacking sharply against his palms. He tried to wrestle the weapon from Isao’s grip, but the boy lashed out with the other club, once, twice, cracking into his solar plexus and ribs, bringing the wind up from his lungs with a mouthful of vomit. Kin aimed a clumsy elbow as he fell, clipping Isao’s chin. A foot to his gut curled him up on the deck as he heard Ayane cry out, a sharp snatch of laughter from Takeshi as he seized the girl’s arms.

Isao hauled Kin to his feet, punched him in the stomach again, and again, and again, until the pain burned white and his breath turned red and the world lurched side to side as if a giant were shaking it in clumsy, fat fists. He felt himself being pushed against the railing, bridge rocking beneath them, Isao’s hand wrapped in his collar, the other clutching his obi and dragging him upward, dangling him out over the sixty-foot drop to the forest below.

“Do you have a machine to help you fly, Guildsman?”

Kin wheezed, tasted blood, clutching the hand at his throat. He could feel the forest breeze, cool and crisp, leaves the color of fire tumbling from the canopy and falling into the space below. Would he flutter as they did? Spinning end over end, down to sudden rest, closing his eyes and dreaming no more? Was this how he ended?

Was the Chamber of Smoke all a lie?

Hundreds of eyes, red as sunset, aglow and unblinking and staring up at him with as much adoration as glass could muster.

His own face, but not his at all.

“Do not call me Kin. That is not my name.”

Stray sunlight glinted through the canopy, a lance of bloody red, dazzling his eyes.

Yukiko, where are you?

He felt a wet spray across his face, heard a scream over whistling, silver music. Isao released his grip, lurched away, Kin crumpling to his knees as sharp cries of fear and pain filled the air. He blinked into the shifting light, saw Ayane standing over him, bloody face, hands outstretched, trembling fingers splayed as if feeling the air. The spider limbs were arched at her back, each one glazed with a thin film of scarlet.

Isao was backing away, clutching his face, fingers painted red, eyes fixed on the swaying silver at Ayane’s back. Atsushi was behind him, howling like a hungry baby, fingers shredded, forearms and biceps punctured as if he’d tangled with a needle-thrower. Takeshi lay curled on the bridge, clutching his arm, thin ribbons of scarlet trailing up toward his shoulder, spattered on the wood beneath him.

Ayane’s lower lip trembled, dark eyes wide with fear.

“Stay away from him.” Her voice small, shaking. “Do not touch him.”

“Monster,” Isao spat. “Abomination.”

The girl glanced at the boy behind her, back to Isao, cheeks wet with tears and blood.

“Just leave us alone,” she whispered.

Takeshi pulled himself to his feet, dragging himself away, scarlet footprints left behind. Isao and Atsushi also retreated, eyes fixed on the trembling girl, brimming with hatred. Leaves fell from the branches above, filling the gulf between them with patterns of orange and yellow and soaking blood-red, a slow and beautiful dance spiraling down, down toward the place they all knew it would end.

They were gone.

Ayane took hold of Kin, helped him to his feet. She was shaking so badly she could barely manage his weight. His stomach felt like it had been put through a meat grinder, every breath a battle, copper marching on his tongue. She slung his arm around her shoulder and led him away. Her voice was small and fragile as snowflakes.

“You told me the Kagé were good people, Kin-san. That they believed in what was right.”

Kin wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, brought it away bloody. It hurt to speak the words. More than he could imagine. And yet he spoke them all the same.

“Maybe I was wrong.”

31 PRECIPICE

Blistered palms and aching muscles and sweat burning her eyes. The scarred flesh where Yukiko’s tattoo used to be a knot of constant pain, arms shaking with fatigue as she turned the hand cranks and propelled herself over the thirty-foot drop to the raging ocean below.

They were twelve hours and twenty-seven cables deep into the network now, the lightning farm a distant smear of light, blinking behind the rise and fall of the waves. The first half of each run was an effortless journey; the natural sag in the lines would propel them as if they were rolling downhill, the flying foxes giving off a high-pitched whine. But halfway, inertia would pull them to a halt, and they would have to turn the hand cranks along the rest of the line, up the steepening incline to the next tower. The few final feet were always the worst, and the ascent to the last tower had almost beaten her.

The wind pushed her back, rain trickling down her oilskin’s sleeves, the rope coiled over her shoulder a soaking, leaden weight. Headache swelling in her skull, a thing of knives and rust and broken glass. And all the while, she sensed long, sleek shapes coiling through the water below, staring up with hungry, slitted eyes.

A hush fell; a split second of stillness as if the storm itself was drawing breath. An arc of brilliant blue-white hit a tower not two hundred feet east of theirs. Yukiko watched raw current crackling across the neighboring cables, off toward the lightning farm. She wondered if she’d be fast enough to pull the pin on her harness if their line actually got struck.

Ilyitch had made the next tower, jumping down onto the small island it sprouted from. He turned back to her, shouted words she couldn’t understand. She gritted her teeth and kicked her legs as if she were running, hands shaking, gaining inch by agonizing inch.

In the last few feet, her arms were trembling so violently she could barely turn the cranks. Ilyitch climbed the tower and held out his hand. She snatched at it, fingers slipping on his own, wind buffeting her as if she were a dandelion seed. Lunging, he caught her sleeve, dragged her toward him, wrapping strong arms around her chest and pulling her in tight. She could smell him; cinnamon and honey, mixed with the faint scent of grease and rubber. They struggled to unhitch her flying fox from the cables, Ilyitch’s boots slipping on the tower as the contraption finally came loose. The pair tumbled onto the stone in a tangle of limbs and curse words, Yukiko landing atop the gaijin, her hair draped over his face. The flying fox landed beside them with a clang.

She rolled off him and they lay together on rain-drenched rock, breathless, too tired to move. Reaching out with the Kenning, pushing the bricks of her wall far enough apart to reach through, fumbling in the dark as her head throbbed. She could feel the female arashitora circling above, reveling in each peal of thunder. She could feel the cold shapes of the sea dragons circling the island, filling her with dread. She could feel Ilyitch beside her. And in the distance, she felt a surge of bright warmth that wore a familiar shape.

“Gods, Buruu…” she breathed.

Ilyitch was busy rubbing a bruised shin. Yukiko grabbed his arm and screamed over the storm.

“We’re close!”

She pointed north, dragged herself to her feet, pain and fatigue forgotten. Closing her eyes, reaching out beyond her barricade, she threw her thoughts into the void.

Buruu, can you hear me?

A long silence, empty and awful.

YUKIKO.

Gods, yes, it’s me! Are you all right?

FALSE WINGS BROKEN. BUT MY MIND IS MY OWN AGAIN. I AM SO SORRY …

It’s all right.

HER SCENT. I COULD NOT—

I’m on my way, just stay where you are.

NOT MUCH CHOICE.

We’ll be there soon. Just hold on.

BE WARY.

I know, I feel the dragons.

NOT DRAGONS. THE OTHER ARASHITORA. HE IS HERE WITH ME.

Is he hurt?

YES. AND HE IS HUNGRY.

Buruu had curled up in the shelter of an obsidian splinter, curved against his back, shielding him from the wind. His belly had long ago ceased grumbling, his hunger reduced to a gnawing, hollow ache, clutching fistfuls of his insides. His thoughts still swam with the female’s scent, driving him near to madness, the stone around him gouged with frustrated desire. But even though he could smell her lingering in the storm above, the impulse had weakened over the last day: her mating time must be very close to its end.

Yet still, her musk made his blood sing when the wind blew the right way, breath coming quicker, shuddering need filling his mind. He fought it down, clung to the knowledge that he’d failed Yukiko, endangered her by giving himself over to it. He’d lost too much to the beast inside him, in darker days beyond the desire for recollection.

He’d almost lost her too.

The minutes ticked by like hours; rain and thunder and snarling ocean the only sounds, until a long, low growl shook him from his melancholy. Lifting his head from beneath his wing, blinking in the downpour. He caught the scent of old blood, a breath-brief snatch of ozone amongst snarling winds. He heard talons ring upon razored stone, shale crumbling beneath titanic weight. And then, piercing the dark, a long roar of challenge.

LICKED YOUR WOUNDS ENOUGH, I SEE.

Buruu rose from his shelter, padded out into the open. The island they’d crashed on was perhaps three hundred feet across, crooked sheets of black glass slanting up toward the north. The copper lightning catcher rose on the southernmost tip, seven or eight feet from the ocean’s surface. The northern shore stood perhaps forty feet above sea level, a bluff dropping into the teeth of the sea. It was from here the male approached.

Buruu answered the roar, all thunder and spittle, the stones beneath him quavering. He saw a shadow slink across the tumbledown stone on the bluff, saw the play of faint lightning across his wings. He didn’t recognize the scent, doubted any of his former pack would have flown this far south anyway.

A NOMAD, THEN.

He roared again, asking who it was that challenged.

The nomad shrieked its name.

The arashitora prowled closer, and a flash of lightning overhead gave Buruu a good look at his foe. Smaller. Younger. Barely past his blooding by the looks, the stripes on his haunches indistinct, claws still smoke-gray. The feathers at his neck were matted with gore, and he favored his right side. Buruu could see the nomad’s wings were intact, but long gashes trailed from his shoulder into the muscle across his spine. The nomad had avoided flight with the wound still fresh, but territoriality and the female’s failing scent had forced him to challenge as soon as he felt strong enough to win.

Buruu remembered what it was like to be a slave to that instinct, the monster within. He’d thought himself beyond it, that his bond with Yukiko had laid that demon to rest and washed the taste of his own from his tongue. But how easily he’d fallen back inside. How quickly he’d taken up the mantle of who he used to be.

He deserved what they’d done to him. What they’d taken from him.

Buruu roared warning that he would give no quarter. That this was not a ritual fight for mate or pride of place in a pack. That there was no Khan’s law here. That this would end in death.

Yours, came the reply.

Yours.

Yukiko had taken the lead, energized by the knowledge that Buruu was close. The agony in her muscles, sweat burning the raw blisters on her hands, all of it faded beneath an electrifying rush of adrenaline. She pushed herself across three more cables, barely stopping to rest between them. Ilyitch was lagging behind, and she would stop occasionally to look back and scream over the storm, begging him to hurry in words she knew he couldn’t comprehend.

Nothing mattered. Not the pain. Not the sorrow. Not thoughts of her father, or of Hiro or Kin or the Guild. She was an engine, a machine, cranking along iron cables one desperate foot at a time. Wind in her face, pushing her back, howling she was too small, too weak. Her flesh trembled and her fingers bled, weak and human and threatening to break at every hard-won foot.

But something inside wouldn’t let her stop; a fire burning within her chest that made her grit her teeth, suck down one more desperate lungful, force her arms to move one more foot when everything inside her screamed to stop, to rest, to buckle. And she saw it for what it was, saw that within it lay a strength far deeper than the watered promise found in hatred or fear or even anger. Saw in it a light that left no substance to the shadows she’d filled herself with after her father died. Saw it as the strength behind the wall she’d built in her mind, the bulwark to keep the Kenning’s fury at bay. And she saw it was all that mattered.

Love.

Inch by inch. Foot by foot. The flailing, grasping hands of the wind, the rain pounding like a nail-thrower upon her skin. Lightning struck a tower to the west, cascaded down the cables back the way they’d come. Too far away to remember now. Too much effort to think what lay behind. Worse backward than forward. Standing still meant lying down.

And then she saw it through the spray and hissing downpour. A hulking fang of obsidian shale, rising like an upraised fist out of the ocean ahead. She reached out with the Kenning, flinching away from the serpents beneath her feet, sensing three bright sources of heat to the north. The dimly remembered shape of the arashitora who had struck them, rippling with challenge. The blade-smooth lines of the female overhead, tinged with curiosity, drawn to the conflict despite herself. And the shape of her friend. Her brother. Her one constant in a world that had shifted and spun so violently over the last few months, she’d lost any and all sense of direction. She’d lost herself—in anger, in liquor and guilt. She had lost her way completely.

Forward, she realized.

The way is forward.

Buruu, I’m here.

The pair touched the way black powder touches naked flame.

A charge across broken stone, sparks curling on their wings and the glass at their feet. The nomad pounced into the air, talons spread like a fan of knives, roaring challenge. Buruu rose to meet him, sheared feathers and narrowed eyes, colliding with the force of a hurricane. The nomad seized a talonful of harness and kicked out with his hind legs as Buruu raked at his throat, blood purchased on both sides, crashing earthward amidst broken shards of obsidian.

Raijin pounded his drums as they rolled apart, Buruu lashing out with his claws and sending the nomad springing back with a growl. Fresh blood at his throat, repainting old gore, eyes alight with fury. Buruu’s own neck and gut were torn, water-thinned scarlet dripping from his fur.

He was bigger. Stronger. But weak from starvation. Still exhausted from his flight. And the nomad was faster. Younger. Hungrier.

Buruu, I’m here.

He glanced over his shoulder, saw Yukiko working her way along the cables, perhaps fifty feet away. He glimpsed someone behind her, fell backward as the nomad sprang to attack, aiming a flurry of talons at his face. Buruu thrashed his wings, the broken mechanism along his spine groaning in protest, canvas feathers torn loose, gaining a few precious feet. Landing on a broken outcropping, retreating as the nomad lashed out again, sparks flying. Clapping his wings together, giving birth to a thunderous peal of Raijin Song; a sonic boom blasting the younger arashitora back across the stone. He clapped his wings again, raindrops shearing sideways in the shock wave, spraying into the nomad’s face.

The attacker circled away, roared in defiance.

Buruu retreated, put the lightning tower to his back, getting between Yukiko and two tons of furious thunder tiger.

She was drawing closer. Thirty feet now.

STAY AWAY.

Are you mad?

HE WILL KILL YOU.

The nomad took to the sky, bloody wings launching him high into the air, swooping down into a razored dive. Buruu stepped aside, ground shattering on impact, lunging at the nomad’s wing and tearing away a mouthful of feathers. They fell into a snarling tangle again, talons locked as they reared up on their hind legs, flashing feathers and snapping beaks, low rumbling snarls of fury.

He felt Yukiko at his back. Stubborn as a mountain runs deep. Pain of her aching muscles in his head. Blisters on their hands. Desperate need.

Twenty feet away.

STAY BACK.

I can help you!

Buruu thrust the smaller arashitora away with a thundering roar, sending him twisting over onto his back. Pressing the advantage, he tore the nomad’s ribs, trying to seize a mouthful of throat as the young one rolled away. Wings thrashing, snarling as he scrambled to his feet, bright red droplets flying between the raindrops and painting snow-white fur the color of slaughter. It was the nomad’s turn to use the Raijin Song now, blasting Buruu back as the thunder from his wings threw puddles high into the shivering air. The downpour bent like a bowstring, droplets as fat as lotusflies splitting into blinding steam-thin spray.

The thunder tigers circled each other, both blooded and wary. The nomad crouched low, gathered for a spring. He looked beyond the crest of Buruu’s wings, caught sight of Yukiko on the cables, the gaijin struggling behind her. Eyes flashing. Pupils dilating. A guttural snarl of outrage.

Interlopers. Monkey-children. Meat.

He spread his wings, springing skyward, eyes on the girl.

NO.

Buruu leaped into the air, beating broken wings with all his fury, rivets and ball joints shrieking. He collided with the younger buck and held him close, bore them both down into the stone. The nomad landed on his back, breath spraying from his lungs, snarling, screeching, all flashing claws and thrashing wings. The thunder tigers rolled across the shale in a tumble of twisted metal and orphaned feathers.

Buruu felt Yukiko crank across the last few feet of cable, hook her legs around the tower and pull herself in. She turned to help the gaijin, elbow crooked around the copper spiral, fingers outstretched. They grasped hands and she pulled him closer, one leg hooked in the spire as they struggled to uncouple him from the contraption connected to the cables above.

The nomad’s roar was an earsplitting bellow of rage. But beneath that, Buruu heard Raijin suck in a breath, felt faint electricity tingling down his spine.

YUKIKO, GET OFF THE TOWER.

I’m trying, the harness is—

YUKIKO, GET OFF NOW!

An arc of impossible blue crackled across the clouds above, reached down with a single, crooked finger. Yukiko had time to scream a warning and push the boy away before she jumped backward, hair streaming in a long, sodden ribbon. The world stilled in the split second before impact, frozen and silent and perfect. The bolt struck copper with a metallic whump and the hiss of superheated vapor. She threw her arms up over her face to blot out the light, brighter than the sun. Crashing onto black stone, head cracking against broken glass.

The aftershock sucked the air from Buruu’s chest, scorching his fur, crackling across his own wings and his foe’s as they broke apart in a spray of rain and blood.

The world after the strike seemed muted, as if the storm sat within an old, rusty soundbox on the other side of a darkened room. Yukiko blinked at the black stains upon her eyes, rolling about on her back, head still ringing with one constant, high-pitched note. Buruu backed off, stood between her and the nomad, wings spread, feet planted like the roots of mountains.

ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?

I think so …

LUCKY.

Kitsune looks after his own.

THE BOY?

Yukiko sat up, squinted into the blurred gloom.

“Ilyitch?”

“Yukiko!”

A faint cry, almost inaudible over the crashing waves, the roaring storm. And with dread rising in her gut, Yukiko realized the gaijin had been knocked away by the lightning strike, plummeting over the precipice and into the raging ocean below.

“Ilyitch!”

Yukiko scrambled to her feet, ran to the tower. The rain was hissing where it touched the copper, sizzling like oil on a skillet. She stepped back, too frightened to touch it. Screaming the gaijin’s name again, she saw him thrashing for a brief moment between towering breakers, reaching toward her. The ocean rushed into his rainskin, and the flying fox he was still buckled to dragged him down, fingers clawing at the surface as if it were solid enough to hold on to.

But it wasn’t.

32 TREMORS

They’d stepped out into chilled autumn air, tall and proud as lords.

Jurou in charcoal silk, a splash of Tora red at his obi, neck adorned with new jade. Yoshi in black, balloon hakama about his legs and a thigh-length uwagi of tailored silk, hair bound in tight braids, streaming down his back like snakes. The pair had sauntered down the boulevard, Yoshi tipping the split brim of his hat to anyone who looked their way.

A fine day to be alive.

Upside seemed busier than usual, people running to and fro, more bushimen than Jurou could ever remember seeing. Palace Way was awash with grimy flesh, motor-rickshaws running on fumes. They’d caught a foot ’shaw to Docktown, Yoshi tipping the finger-thin driver handsomely, stepping into the tattoo parlor’s confines. And there they lay, shirtless in the mild chill, as an ancient little Fushicho man and his pock-faced son drew forth bamboo needles and bottles of Danroan ink and set about inflicting an enormous amount of pain in the name of vanity.

Yoshi had commissioned a new piece; a beautiful portrait of Lord Izanagi stirring the formless ocean of creation with his spear tip, running from the mouthwatering curve of his right pectoral muscle down to his hip. Jurou was having some flourish added to his clan irezumi; great and beautiful Tiger prowling around his bicep, looking as if he were about to leap off the boy’s flesh and tear the world to rags.

Jurou’s pipe dangled from his lips, and he ran a gentle tongue upon the tip, sucking down lungfuls of beautiful blue-black. He knew he shouldn’t be on the lotus, knew the price paid for his little high was waist-deep blood. But the itching need had been hitting him hard the last few days, and it wasn’t as if he couldn’t stop if he wanted. He listened to the buzz in the streets outside, the lotusflies in the rafters, swelling velvet and soporific between his ears. Sensation faded beneath the familiar lotus kiss, tongue too thick for his mouth, staring at the boy he loved, flinching and flexing as the old man’s needles danced upon his skin.

“You should get Lady Izanami done on the other side,” he said, pointing to Yoshi’s chest.

The old man looked up sharply, gave the warding sign against evil.

“Smoke is going to your brain, Princess.” Yoshi winced as the old man’s needles began dancing again. “Never let the dragon steer the ship.”

“Why not?” Jurou exhaled a plume of sweetness in Yoshi’s direction.

“Why the hells would I have the Endsinger inked on my skin?”

“Life and death. Light and dark.” A hand waving, vaguely. “You know, symmetry.”

“Crazier than a Docktown whore, you.”

“Lady Izanami wasn’t always a death goddess.” The pock-faced artiste seemed to be digging his needles extra hard, but Jurou couldn’t bring himself to care. “She was the Earth Mother once. Gave birth to this entire island and seven more besides. It’s not her fault Lord Izanagi couldn’t get her back from Yomi. It’s not her fault he left her there in the dark.”

“Why don’t you get her inked on you, then?”

“Maybe I will.”

“And maybe I’ll find myself a boy who doesn’t paint himself for life while smoke-drunk.”

“Mmm.” Jurou smiled, heavy lids over dark, knowing eyes. “Somehow I doubt that.”

Yoshi looked him up and down, smiled in return, crooked and beautiful.

“Me too.”

“I love you, you know.”

They were crouched atop a three-story tenement, waiting for the game to begin again. The moon was entirely hidden behind a veil of exhaust, shadows tumbling thick upon the cobbles below. It was the kind of dark that left you feeling alone, even if you were skin to skin. The kind of dark that turned your eyes inward, since there was nothing to see without.

“Hmm?” Yoshi was perched upon the gutter’s edge, eyelashes fluttering, like some carrion bird awaiting supper. “D’you say?”

If it was brighter, Jurou could have seen it from up here, even all the way from Downside. The estates clustered on the hills east of the Daimyo’s palace, trying desperately to keep their nose above the stink-line, the noble-born inside averting their eyes from the squalor below, all their pretty gardens turning gray. His father’s house amongst them, high ceilings and gardens of smooth stone where he and his brother Kazuya played as children. His father watching, potbelly swelling his Kitsune-silk kimono (only the finest), bald pate gleaming with sweat as he fretted for his money and honor and name.

“Family,” he would say. “There is nothing more important in this world. Show me a man’s friends, I will show you the man. But show me a man’s sons, I will show you his future.”

They were trained, he and Kazuya, from the day they could walk. To stand amongst Kigen’s nobility, to inherit the family estates; the vast farmlands their father had bought from struggling farmers at fire-sale prices, now worked by gaijin slaves. Jurou had been betrothed when he was thirteen, a daughter of a family ally, a pact to seal friendship in blood. And to his lasting surprise, Jurou found himself utterly smitten, struck to the core by dark beautiful eyes and full lips and smooth, sweet curves. Not his betrothed, of course, poor thing.

Her brother.

It had been brief, and blinding, and beautiful. But it ended as it was always going to—with discovery. Not by a servant or his bride to be, but by his brother; little Kazuya stumbling across them in the sweat-soaked shadows of the garden pavilion. And the boy had run quick as silver, singing like a nightingale, clever enough at ten years old to know a sole heir would be wealthier than a second-born son. And his father had grown pale, rent his kimono in anguish, and cursed Jurou as a bastard, a wretch, a disgrace.

“What did I do,” he’d cried, “to deserve the shame of a son such as you?”

Jurou pictured him now; the image that superseded all others, overshadowing the smiling hugs on naming days, the pride at family dinners. Spittle on his lips, katana held high as he chased Jurou from his house, vowing to kill him if his shadow ever darkened the doorstep again.

“No blood of mine,” he’d screamed.

“No son of mine.”

And there on the rooftop, waiting for the game to begin again, Jurou brushed at his eyes, stared in the direction of the house he’d grown up in. Now so distant, so empty, a hollow ache that clung to the inside of his ribs and pulled the breath from his lungs.

Dark night. Darker thoughts.

“I said I love you,” he whispered, to no one in particular.

A strong arm around his shoulders.

Lips on his cheek.

A crooked smile, close enough for him to see every perfect detail, no matter how dark it got. Here. Now. All that mattered.

Yoshi.

“I love you too, Princess.”

There were four of them, broad as doorways, moving quick despite their bulk. Shappo pulled low over their features, creeping down alleys and dashing across streets, hearts all aflutter. Yoshi watched them through glittering black eyes, yellow teeth in his gums, hide crawling with blood-fat fleas. He ran with them down the narrow cracks between buildings, the labyrinth of Downside streets, the tangled knot of crushed brick and bloody gravel and graffiti scrawled in letters ten feet high.

ARASHI-NO-ODORIKO COMES.

“Should send that bitch flowers.” He smiled, eyelids near to closing. “These boys wouldn’t be half as rich without Little Miss Thunder Tiger.”

He watched the yakuza darting closer, shadows within shadows, fat satchels and war clubs in dirty hands. Moving across the rooftops to intercept. Rats to the cat. Flies to the spider.

“How do, gentlemen?”

The iron-thrower hissed as Yoshi engaged the pressure, finger kissing trigger, arm extended and pointing death at the lead yakuza’s head. The men skidded to a halt, fourth bumping into third, narrowed eyes and kerchiefed faces. They looked up at Yoshi, crouched on the gutter at the alley’s end, tipping his split-brimmed hat in their general direction.

“You,” the second one hissed.

“Looks like.” Yoshi smiled crooked, aimed the iron-thrower between the talkative one’s eyes. “If you’d do me the honor of tossing those satchels, my little sponge cakes, you can all be on your way back home to mother. Kiss her on the mouth for me, hear?”

Jurou stepped around the corner, same alley’s mouth the yakuza had entered by. He upended a sack with a flourish, contents ringing brightly upon broken concrete. They were “crow’s-feet”; two lengths of sharpened wire, braided together and bent so that one of the four points always faced upward. A hundred of them now covered the deck between the yakuza and retreat. Yoshi and his iron-thrower hovered above their advance.

Jurou stepped back with his roofing-nail war club, watching the gangsters close. He didn’t bother minding the street: Yoshi had other eyes in play.

What you seeing, Daken?

… no guards down. moving riverside to look up …

“Don’t be mistaking me for the type who asks twice, Scorpion Children.” Yoshi waved the iron-thrower. “The iron. Count of five.”

“You know who we are then?”

The lead yakuza pulled his kerchief down, tipped back his bowl-shaped hat. He was a wide, red-faced fellow, freshly shaved and sweaty, his ugly smile missing four front teeth.

Yoshi’s hands were stone. “Four…”

“We’re gonna get you, you know.”

“Three…”

“A little shit with big coin isn’t hard to find in streets this narrow.”

“Two…”

The yakuza relented, aimed his gap-toothed grin in Yoshi’s direction, hefted his satchel with fat, stubby fingers. And then a frown crossed his face, one eyebrow creeping skyward as he looked around in alarm.

The roof beneath Yoshi began to vibrate, a subtle tremor at first, increasing in intensity. He thought for a moment the house might be collapsing, brickwork giving way beneath his weight. But then he realized the yakuza were feeling it too; a shivering rumble reaching up through the earth, as if the whole island were moving beneath their feet.

“What the hells?” Jurou called out in alarm.

… what is that?…

Yoshi crouched low, one hand on the eave to steady himself. He watched mortar dust drifting from the walls, listened to the fragile tune of splintering glass.

Another earthquake.

Just as suddenly as it had begun, the tremor subsided. Stillness fell over Kigen, angry voices and wailing babies splitting the still of the predawn dark. Yoshi collected his wits, turned back to the yakuza. Still, it happened so quickly, he almost didn’t catch it.

A glimpse of movement. Just a flash of pale light on steel, speeding from the gangster’s hand toward Yoshi’s heart. Jurou cried out as Yoshi rolled, quake forgotten, just fast enough, knife slipping past and opening him up rib-deep. Yoshi twisted sideways, hissing in the spray of heat and wet. And without thinking, he bit down and pulled the trigger.

The iron-thrower roared.

The shot caught the yakuza in the chest, just above his heart, blooming at his back like lotus blossoms in the first light of spring. The fat man clutched the eyeball-sized hole, dark red spilling down his uwagi, coughing once as he dropped like bricks onto the alley floor. The three other gangsters bolted, sprinting away from Jurou’s crow’s-feet toward the other end of the alley. Yoshi fired again as they ran beneath, another gangster falling, gasping, big body skidding to a damp halt on the gravel. The remaining two were ghosts, already gone, feet pounding the street as confused residents spilled from their tenements, pale and shaken in the quake’s aftermath.

Yoshi lay against the tiles, hand pressed to gashed ribs, sticky and red. His ears still rang with the iron-thrower’s roar. He hissed, rolled off the roof and landed in a crouch, stuffing the still-warm ’thrower back into his obi. The red-faced fellow was laid out, motionless, eyes like clouded glass. The other gangster was moaning, flopping onto his belly and drawing his legs up underneath him, ground painted scarlet.

“Yoshi!” Jurou shuffled carefully through the crow’s-feet and ran to his side. “Izanagi’s balls, are you all right?”

Jurou cradled his head, pale with fear, pulling Yoshi’s uwagi off to inspect the wound. His eyes widened at the blood, so much of it, soaking into the bandage over the new tattoo, spattered on the bare flesh of Yoshi’s right arm.

The gangster groaned again, pink froth on his lips.

“Yoshi, is it?” he bubbled, grinning like a drunkard, teeth slicked and gleaming dark. His eyes were fixed on the place where Yoshi’s clan tattoo should have been. “You’re fucking dead, Burakumin Yoshi…”

… coming …

Daken’s voice rang out clear in Yoshi’s mind.

… heard shots. iron men coming …

The gangster rolled over onto his back, his uwagi soaked through, a hole in his chest the size of a fist, coughing thick and red. Yoshi climbed to his feet, wincing, one hand pressed against his bleeding side, the other scrabbling for purchase on a chunk of broken cobblestone.

Bushimen were on their way.

The yakuza might be dead before they arrived.

But he might not.

And he knows my name.

“Yoshi, don’t,” said Jurou.

The gangster pulled himself up into sitting position, blood streaming down his chin. Yoshi stumbled forward, blinking sweat from his eyes, white-knuckle grip on the stone. He was fourteen years old again, his father rising from the table, lashing out with the saké bottle, glass meeting bone and painting the walls blood-red.

… they are coming. run, boy …

“Yoshi, don’t.” Jurou tried to drag him away. “Don’t, please.”

“Don’t, please.” The gangster affected Jurou’s voice, high-pitched and mocking. “You two married or something? Who wears the dress?”

Yoshi raised the stone above his head.

Fourteen years old.

His sister screaming.

Mother bleeding.

Hands curled into fists.

“You don’t have the balls, you little bitch,” the gangster spat.

He was wrong.

33 BETWEEN BENDING AND BREAKING

The bruises spread like an oil slick; a swirling pattern of blacks and grays and dark, fermenting reds, traceries of broken blood vessels spun out like embroidery across his belly.

It hurt to move.

It hurt to breathe.

They were holed up in Yukiko’s room, empty saké bottles on the floor, reminders of her everywhere he looked. Kin didn’t think it was safe to stay at the infirmary. Truth be told, with Daichi laid up, he didn’t know anywhere in the village that would be safe anymore.

Ayane’s eyes never left the doorway, as if she expected the Kagé to kick it down at any moment, drag her out and hurl her over the balcony for attacking one of their own. Silver limbs curled around her in a thin, razored cocoon, knees drawn up to her chin, arms wrapped about her ankles like a bow. A perfect little package of fear.

The balm Mari had given him dulled the pain to a deep ache. The old woman had obligingly clucked over him for the few moments he was in her care, but he noted bitterly how relieved she’d seemed when he’d hobbled from the infirmary. The old woman seemed glad to be rid of him. Distracted. Worried.

They all seemed so very worried.

Fear about Daichi’s near-death and Yukiko and Buruu’s absence had spread amongst the treetops, settling in like rot in a blacklung victim. No children running across the bridges, arms spread in flight, roaring challenges to imaginary enemies. No songs in the dark, no easy talk around burning firesides. Just hushed voices on the wind, running footsteps, a tension settling like fog. And beneath it, he and Ayane stayed low, the question hanging in the air between them like wisteria perfume. Invisible. Omnipresent.

Why are we still here?

By evening, Kin felt well enough to walk. He struggled to his feet, holding his stomach as if it might burst and wash the floor with his innards. He leaned against the wall, wincing, Ayane watching him with big, frightened eyes.

There was a knock at the door.

“… Who is it?” Kin called.

“Kaori.” The woman’s voice was muffled by wood and rice-paper.

“What do you want, Kaori-san?”

“My father wishes to speak with you, Guildsman.”

Ayane stared, shook her head. Kin sighed, ran a hand over his scalp. His hair was getting longer, smooth against his palm, the sensation still so alien it barely registered as his own.

“I’ll meet you there,” he called.

Kaori hovered a few moments longer, a shadow on the landing. Finally padding away without a sound.

“Do not go, Kin-san.” Ayane’s voice was small and frightened.

“I need to speak to Daichi.”

“Do not tell him what they did. It will only be more trouble for us.” The girl hugged her knees. “For me.”

“Do you want to come with me?” Kin asked.

Ayane looked at the doorway, and her silver arms trembled like a child in winter’s chill. She shook her head. Her voice sounded as if it came from someplace dark and empty.

“I was a fool to come here.”

“Don’t talk like that. It’s going to be all right, Ayane.”

She looked at him, lips pressed into her knees. Feeble moonlight seeped through the open window, gleaming on wet cheeks. He shuffled over, knelt with a wince, brushing the tears away as gently as he could. Her words were muffled against her skin, but he could hear every one, clear as mountain rain.

“I knew I would never truly be one of them, but I hoped … I thought…” She shook her head. “But there is no place for me here. Nothing here for someone like me.”

Someone like me …

“It will be all right.” His voice was weak. Weary. “I promise.”

He bent down and kissed her eyes, one after the other. Warmth on his lips, tasting of salt and nothingness. She found his hand, squeezed it tight, her words a frail and breathless plea, sharp as silver needles.

“I do not belong here, Kin-san.”

She turned her eyes to the floor.

“We don’t belong here.”

They were waiting for him in Daichi’s house, three figures around the fire pit, warm glow and cold stares. Kin hadn’t knocked, simply shuffled up amidst hushed and angry voices, slid the door aside and stepped into the Kagé council meeting.

Kaori knelt to the left, eyes downturned to the flames. Maro on the right, bloodshot eye, cheeks damp, his left arm in a sling. He was dressed in mourning black, head bowed, shoulders slumped. Daichi sat in the center, tea in one hand, bound in bandages, belly to throat. A small bloodstain seeping through from his ribs, cuts scabbing on his face and knuckles, breathing hard. His eyes found Kin’s as the boy stepped through the door, his voice the sound of crumbling shale and weathered hinges.

“Kin-san.” He cleared his throat, wincing.

“Should you not be in the infirmary, Daichi-sama?”

The old man brushed the question away with a wave.

“I am more comfortable here. Old Mari has … other matters to attend to.” He gestured to the other side of the fire. “Please, sit.”

“I’ll stand.” He tried to keep the ache of his stomach and ribs from his voice, much as the old man did. “If it is all the same to you.”

“Are you well?”

He thought about answering truthfully. Telling Daichi all of it; the beatings, the threats, the murder attempt. He wanted to place his faith in this man, as Yukiko did. He wanted to believe. The words were on the tip of his tongue when Kaori spoke, her voice flat and cold.

“We have more pressing concerns than the Guildsman’s well-being, Father.”

“Godsdamned right,” Maro nodded, glowing embers reflected in his tears.

And the desire in Kin died then, snuffed out like a candle. Despite his own pain, his own troubles, Daichi might care; might honestly see him as more than what he’d been. But Kaori and Maro? They cared about their own, their revolution. They cared only about his mistakes, about the blood spilled because he had somehow failed. And though they might deny it, Kin knew the simple truth. Had known it for as long as he’d lived here.

In their eyes, he was still the enemy.

“You summoned me, Daichi-sama?” he said. “If this is about the ’thrower failures, I’ve not yet—”

“Hells with your accursed ’throwers.” Maro’s voice was taut. Controlled. “We have word from the south. Word my brother and two other Shadows died to bring us.”

Kin blinked. “Sensei Ryusaki is dead?”

A slow nod. Narrowed stare. “Hai.”

“I am sorry, Maro-san. Please give my condolences to—”

“Enough,” Kaori snapped. “This is no time for false sympathies, Guildsman.”

Kin met the woman’s cold stare, as tired as he could ever remember being.

“Speak then.”

“The Guild are building an army northwest of Kigen,” Kaori said. “Hundreds of shreddermen suits, no doubt intended to rout us from this forest.”

“But more concerning is the machine they are building to lead the vanguard.” Daichi spoke carefully, hand pressed to ribs. “A colossus, Kin-san.”

A flicker of dread in Kin’s stomach alongside the ache.

“Three hundred feet high,” Kaori said. “Black iron and chainsaw blades as broad as sky-ships. Chimney stacks that pierce the sky. Engines that shake the very ground.”

“Earthcrusher,” Kin whispered.

“You know it?” Maro’s eyes narrowed. “You knew this thing existed?”

“Existed? No.” Kin licked at dry lips, tasting Ayane’s tears. “But I knew the concept. It was a pet project of the Tora Shateigashira. A man named Kensai.”

“Second Bloom of Kigen,” Daichi muttered.

“The same,” Kin nodded. “He’d talked about it for years. A machine to end the war in Morcheba and bring the gaijin to their knees. A weapon that could reduce entire cities to rubble. Like nothing the round-eyes had ever seen. But he never had support to build it. Something must have happened, to get the First Bloom onside.”

Father and daughter looked at each other, each reading the other’s thoughts.

“Yukiko,” said Kaori.

“Ayane said Chapterhouse Kigen requisitioned most of Yama’s Munitions Sect,” Kin breathed. “It must have been to work on the Earthcrusher. Gods, they’re actually building it…”

He could scarcely believe it. Kin had seen a copy of the plans years ago—Kensai had enlisted Kin’s father to help on the fuel intakes and engine designs, and their work was held up to initiates as an example of rare genius. But the Guild would have to expend enormous resources in the Earthcrusher’s construction. The chi alone required to run it was unthinkable; enough to operate twenty ironclads and a full complement of Guild crew simultaneously.

They must want her dead so badly …

He stared at the flames, holding his breath.

Yukiko, where are you?

“So why are you telling me this?”

“We must destroy this machine,” Maro growled. “The question is how.”

“You can’t,” Kin said.

Maro’s spit hissed upon the embers. “You lie.”

“I’m not lying.” Anger flared in Kin’s chest, bright and hot. “I saw the plans years ago. I could destroy it from the inside, but attacking this thing frontally is suicide.” He turned to Daichi. “They’re building it at the proving grounds in Jukai province, right? The Stain?”

Daichi nodded, shifting with a wince. “Hai.”

“The place is a fortress, surrounded by deadlands.” Kin shook his head. “It’s probably the most tightly guarded Guild facility on the islands next to First House. They have more firepower than any chapterhouse in Shima. We’ll never get in there.”

Kaori glared at him across the blaze. “Who is ‘we,’ Guildsman?”

“There is still Aisha,” Daichi said. “Hiro’s wedding.”

“Aisha be damned,” Maro spat. “There’s more at stake now than the virtue of—”

“She sacrificed everything for us, Maro-san.” Kaori’s eyes flashed. “Do not dare dishonor her name.”

“I mean no disrespect, but this army will spell the death of the Kagé!”

“We can’t leave her to be raped for a throne!”

“We cannot risk all for one! Not with this Earthcrusher threatening everything. What can we do against an army of shreddermen, let alone a machine like this?”

“This is not just about one! What do you think will happen if the dynasty is reforged? If Hiro is given legitimacy? Everything we’ve done will be in vain!”

Kin watched them go back and forth, saying nothing. His head swam with the noise, the smoke, the ache in his stomach and chest. And as wretched as he felt, he was glad he hadn’t brought up Isao and the others to Daichi. If he’d done so, he would have felt pitiful now. A child crying over a skinned knee. Instead he felt utterly alone. Detached and swimming in lightless black. The outsider. The other.

“Who is ‘we,’ Guildsman?”

Stepping to the doorway, he slipped outside.

The others were too engrossed in their rage to mark his passing.

He walked quietly, hands in his sleeves, shadow to shadow on bare feet. Father Moon’s light was weak and choked, piercing the canopy with thin spears of muted gray. The night sang around him, a thousand lives calling and hunting and fleeing out in the dark. He moved through the forest, no more than a murmur amidst the whispering trees and falling leaves, until at last he stood before the towering silhouette of one of his shuriken-throwers.

The machine looked mournful, slumped and listing to one side, as if ashamed it had failed in their hour of need. Kin climbed up the ladder into the controller’s seat, the pain in his ribs and gut like someone had replaced his intestines with bundles of razor wire.

A bird screeched somewhere out in the dark.

The wind whispered to the trees.

Secrets.

Warnings.

Kin peered around in the dark, and seeing no one, struck a match against the pump’s flank. Orange light and sulfur heat, flaring bright. He lit the paper lantern he’d brought with him, too frightened for a moment to breathe. He imagined Isao and his cohort stumbling upon him here in the dark, the easy accusations that would spill from clenched teeth. The bloodshed that would follow, easier still.

The ’thrower groaned beneath him.

He leaned close, uncoupled a hatch and peeled it back from the machine’s skin. Taking a wrench from his belt, he lost himself in the work, minutes slipping past like thieves. Remembering countless days in the chapterhouse belly, the patient voice of his sensei, his father’s gentle hands, the warming praise as he excelled. He was gifted, and he’d known it; even before the Chamber of Smoke, even before he was promised a destiny greater than most Guildsmen could ever dream.

He remembered Second Bloom Kensai, his father’s close friend; a man he might have called uncle if they were normal people with normal lives. He remembered the grief in Kensai’s voice as he told Kin his father was dead, clumsy metal hands on his shoulders. He remembered crying inside his skin, tears flowing down cheeks he couldn’t touch, watching as they consigned his father’s corpse to the Inochi vats, words of the Purifiers ringing in his ears.

“The prelude was Void,

And unto Void we return.

Black as mother’s womb.”

But even in grief, there had been the warm sunlight of burning solder, the shelter of housings and transistors and gears, the scripture of interlocking iron teeth. A language he knew as well as his own. It whispered to him, all those long and lonely nights. Telling him he belonged. That he was home.

Had being in the Guild really been so bad?

He shook his head at the thought. It had been worse than bad. It had been slavery, and he a prisoner within a cage of brass. Captive of predetermination, of the Inquisition and their What Will Be and their black metal smiles in the Chamber of Smoke, their whispers of a future so terrifying it woke him sweating every night of his life.

“Call me First Bloom.”

Witness to the wholesale slaughter of innocents for the sake of more chi, more power, more fuel to drive the war machine. Never to feel the touch of another’s hand. Never to know true friendship. Never to know love.

But what friendship do you know now? In this hole you call freedom?

The voice in his head was his own, a metallic rasp within a mask of burnished brass, the hiss and swoosh of breather bellows, reeking of chi.

Whose love do you know now?

He blinked hard, elbow deep in the ’thrower’s innards.

… Yukiko.

Laughter in his mind, like the chatter of the mechabacus. Like the wings of a thousand lotusflies.

Love you? She doesn’t even know you.

His hands fell still, fingers resting upon smooth piping and greasy metal. The machine knew him. Knew everything. Its place. Its purpose. Its function. All it was, and all it would ever be. A simple matter of placing the right component in the correct sequence, engaging the proper force at the precise time. No unsolvable mysteries, no problems that simple intellect and experience couldn’t unravel.

If only it were that easy with people.

If only it were that easy with her.

Isao’s words surfaced unbidden in his mind; the memory of a knife twisting the input jack in his flesh, the metal that would always be a part of him, that he would never, ever be rid of.

“You and all your kind are poison.”

And there in the flickering lantern light, in the shadowed guts of that machine, he saw it. The answer that had been in front of him the entire time, coming upon him so suddenly it stole his breath away. A shuddering intake of cold air into bruised lungs, a picture so clear he could almost reach out and touch it. The awful truth, as hard and real as the metal in his hands.

Inescapable.

Undeniable.

They will never let me know a moment’s peace here.

The wrench fell from nerveless fingers, clattering upon iron a thousand miles away, the noise as distant as Father Moon and his feeble light.

They will never let me be.

And without a sound, he descended and shuffled back into the darkness.

He’d closed the door when he left her. And now it stood ajar.

A cold lump of fear in his throat, squeezing his windpipe shut as he hobbled onto the landing outside Yukiko’s room, close enough now to hear quiet sobbing. He pushed through the door and saw her curled up in the far corner, and the first thing he noticed wasn’t that her clothes were torn, how she flinched at his footsteps like some beaten dog, how she kicked at the floor with her heels in some vain attempt to push herself farther back into the corner. It was the way the blood on her skin, on her face, between her legs, looked so dark it was almost black.

“First Bloom…” he whispered. “What have they done?”

She wailed in fear as he stepped closer. Bruises on her face, those bee-stung lips swollen further still, ugly purple around her wrists, across her thighs. And blood.

So little, and yet so very much blood.

“Ayane.” One hand stretching into the space between them. “Ayane, it’s me.”

He knelt beside her, ignoring the pain in his gut and ribs. And at the sound of his voice she latched on to him like a child, like a broken porcelain doll, and the sobs that shook her whole body traveled down through the floor, into the earth at the roots of ancient trees, and sent the whole structure shaking.

Another wail of terror spilled over bloody lips, her fingers digging into his skin as the room shuddered, empty bottles rattling upon the sill. Kin realized this was actually happening; the room was shaking, the island trembling in the grip of yet another earthquake. Dust drifted from the ceiling, dead leaves falling outside like a flurry of dry and curling snow.

He held her tight, palms pressed to bare and bloodied flesh. The sobbing wracked her, shook her; a cutting, bone-deep sound he prayed he would never hear again. As suddenly as it had begun to tremble, the world fell still. Still and quiet as the space between seconds, the empty brink between one torment and the next.

“Who was it?” A hard whisper. “Who did this to you, Ayane?”

It was a long while before she caught her breath, faced pressed into his chest as her spider limbs closed around him like a flytrap plant, needle points dipped in blood.

“Isao…” A whispered curse. “Isao and … the others.”

He exhaled, vile and hateful. Her whole body shaking in silent sobs. Gasping through clenched teeth. Kin hung his head, closed his eyes.

How did it come to this?

“Let’s just go, Kin.” Her voice was cracked and broken, raw with tears, slurred behind swollen lips. “Let’s just leave, please. We don’t belong here. We should never have come here, oh, please Kin…”

“Where would we go?” he asked, already knowing what she would say.

“Home.” She squeezed so hard he couldn’t breathe, pushed her face into his neck, skin slick and warm with tears. “We have to go home, Kin.”

He held her tight and listened to her weep, staring at the black beyond the window glass. This place he thought he could belong. This place he had sought peace, and failed to find a single, solitary moment of it. His voice was an echo in the darkness, darker still.

“We’ll go home.”

He squeezed her tight as she sobbed in relief.

“But not without saying good-bye.”

34 THE JAGGED SHORE

The iron pulled him beneath the waves with half a breath in his lungs, dragging him down like an addict to the bottle’s lip. Ilyitch clawed at the harness, fumbling in his gloves, wasting precious seconds to slough them off. He kicked at freezing water with leaden boots, the call of the waves above an all-too-distant roar. His fingers found purchase, iron buckles finally snapping loose. Twisting underwater, he shrugged the harness off his shoulders, watching it spiral away into the dark beneath his feet.

And then he saw them. Long ribbons of silver, snaking up through the depths below. Mouthfuls of needles, the kind of eyes that stared from children’s closets in the dead of night. A stab of terror in his chest so sharp he actually screamed, wasting what was left of his breath, rushing over his lips in a bubbling flurry. Hundreds of perfect spheres, glass-smooth, tumbling up, up, up toward the surface. With all the speed his panic could muster, he followed.

The silver shapes did the same.

Yukiko saw Ilyitch break the surface, sucking in a desperate lungful and spending it immediately in a terrified wail. He was fifteen feet from the ledge, struggling to keep his head above water and suck down breath enough to scream again.

Buruu’s eyes were locked on the snarling nomad, circling to attack again, but he risked a quick, desperate glance as she kicked aside her oversized boots, sloughed off the rainskin. The rope was wrapped around her waist, the knot looped through copper coils as tight as she could make it.

YOU CANNOT DO THIS.

He did the same for me!

I WILL NOT LET—

He saved my life, Buruu! When you couldn’t even hear me screaming for help. I’d have drowned if not for him.

Without looking over her shoulder, Yukiko dove arrow-straight into the seething black. She could feel them in the water around her, spiraling upward in broad, lazy circles, nowhere for their prey to run. Gleaming and slick, eyes of slitted gold, ribbon fins along their flanks and spines undulating in the water at the whim of the thrashing swell.

Forked tongues and razors.

She struggled through the waves, barely able to swim herself. But her dive had taken her most of the way, and a crashing wave got her close enough to throw her arms about Ilyitch’s neck before he sank again. Buruu glanced over his shoulder, roared a warning as a long, serpentine head broke the surface, slowly rising from the water just five feet away. It moved like a cobra, rearing back and spreading the fins at its throat in a broad, shivering fan, dripping salt water and venom. A long, chattering hiss spilled from its needle-lined maw.

BEHIND!

A second dragon rose from the depths, echoing its cousin’s rasp, cutting off retreat. A third dorsal fin sliced in a broad arc around them, all spines and scales and long, smooth lines. Buruu gathered himself on the jagged shore, ready to dive into the waves and stain the ocean a deeper red. But the nomad crashed onto him from behind, the pair falling into a snarling, screaming heap, clumsy as children fighting over a new toy. Buruu bellowed with rage, lashing out with all his strength, tearing and biting in a desperate attempt to break loose from the nomad’s grasp. Knowing he was too far away to help. That it was already too late.

NO! YUKIKO!

Six cold reptilian eyes peered down at Yukiko and Ilyitch, angry hisses spilling through bared fangs. Thunder rocked the heavens, wind shrieking like a wounded oni. Ilyitch closed his eyes, muttering what sounded like a prayer, struggling to remain above the rolling, crashing swell. A blinding arc of lightning reached out across the sky. The largest dragon snarled and swayed, spines at its throat rattling, drawing back and opening its jaws for the death strike.

And Yukiko held up her hand.

Water sparkled on her skin; tiny droplets pooling along the underside of each fingertip before falling back into the ocean around them. The storm held its breath. The rain became a hushed whisper between loving cloud and gentle earth, Raijin stilling his drums with broad, flat hands, time crawling upon its belly for the sheer wonder of it all.

And the sea dragons fell still.

Breath hissing in the caverns of their lungs, venom dripping between translucent katana teeth. They narrowed their eyes, heads tilted, leaning so close she could smell the poison and salt upon their breath, see tiny silver shards amongst the smooth gold in their eyes. They watched her watching them. And they wondered.

Ilyitch clutched the rope connecting Yukiko to the lightning tower. Wrapping his legs around the girl’s waist, he hauled them both toward the shore, desperate, half-mad with fear. The dragons watched them go, snakes before the charmer, swaying to the ocean’s pulse and the music of her mind. Ilyitch reached the island, bellowed at Yukiko. The girl slung her arm about his neck, one hand still extended toward the dragons, staring at them through half-closed eyes. Towering waves crashed against them, battering them on the stone, threatening to drag them down into cold and empty black. And with her holding tight, Ilyitch climbed the sodden rope, teeth gritted, muscle and tendon stretched to tearing, dragging them both from the sea.

The arashitora were still locked together in a screaming, tumbling frenzy. Buruu managed to finally break loose, kicking the younger thunder tiger away with his hind legs. The nomad rolled backward, landing skull first upon shattered stone. Buruu was on his feet in an instant, pounding back toward the island’s rim, eyes alight with panic. He saw Yukiko’s rope taut with weight, sawing across razored shale, coming apart strand by strand.

Two tons of blindside crashed against his ribs, spinning him up onto a sharp outcropping. Shards splintered in the impact, iridescent metal screeching beneath his furious roar. The nomad was on him in a blink, foot planted on his wing. Beak descending toward his exposed throat, shrieking like an oni fresh from the gates of the Nine Hells.

“Stop!”

Yukiko’s roar was louder than the storm above, echoing like thunder. The nomad froze, turned to the girl with a snarl. She lowered her chin, eyes narrowed, dripping floods of seawater onto the stone.

“Don’t you touch him.”

She spoke with lips and teeth and tongue, but her words echoed down the Kenning, swimming in their thoughts as burning, living things. Her hair was a smooth sheet of black draped over one half of her face, single eye glaring between closing curtains. The rain fell upon her skin as if she were stone, trickling down her cheek and beading in her lashes. Stepping forward, the boy splayed and coughing on the rocks behind her, she held up one bloody hand, the other curled into a fist. Trembling, pale and rigid, teeth clenched, a spray of rain from bloodless lips accompanying every word.

“Do you know what I am?”

The force of her bore down on the nomad like deep summer and a noonday sun. Raijin bent double and pounded his drums as if the world itself were ending. The Kenning fairly rippled with the heat of her, voice resounding in the umbra as she took another step forward. The nomad took one step back, cringing low to shattered stone, her words burning in his mind.

“I am a daughter of foxes. Slayer of Shōguns. Ender of empires. The greatest tempest Shima has ever known waits in the wings for me to call its name, and its coming will shake her foundations like the drums of the Thunder God.”

The clouds crashed above her, a halo of lightning playing in the sky over her head.

“I am a Stormdancer. And you will hear me now.”

35 CHILDREN OF THE GRAVE

The door to the apartment burst open, Hana almost screaming in fright. Akihito loomed to his feet as Jurou dragged Yoshi inside, kicked the door shut behind. Both boys were painted bloody, her brother leaning on Jurou’s shoulder, his face agony-pale.

“Gods, Yoshi!” Hana was on her feet, rushing to his side, helping him to his pile of cushions. “What happened?”

“Bar fight.” Wincing, Yoshi peeled back his bloody tunic and emptied a bottle of seppuku onto a vicious cut across his ribs. Hana tore off her kerchief, pressed it to the inch-deep slice, warm and sticky-slick beneath her fingers.

“A bar fight?”

Yoshi nodded, tipping the last of the rice wine into his mouth. “Drunken beggar monk came at me with his prayer beads. Those things are bloody sharp…”

Hana pulled back, hands on her hips. “Yoshi, can you be serious for once in your godsdamned life?”

“Now where’s the sense in that?” He took a moment to catch his breath, looked her new outfit up and down, smiled crookedly. “You scrub up prettier than springtime, sister-mine.”

Hana scowled at the flattery, fingers slick with Yoshi’s blood. She looked to Jurou, the boy obviously panicked, fresh scarlet on his hands, dark, dew-moist eyes wide with new fear. Akihito stood in the corner, silent as tombs, looking back and forth between the siblings. Finally, she turned to glare at Daken, curled atop his customary throne over the windowsill, unblinking.

“Someone tell me what the hells is going on…”

With no answers forthcoming, she reached out into the Kenning. Feeling amidst the local corpse-rats; a quick flight through a dozen sets of eyes within shouting distance of the tenement tower. And there in the distance …

… the distance …

.… a brood of six, gathered on the body of a dead beggar. Her siblings scattering like lotusflies at the sound of approaching boots. She looked up from her meat, glittering black eyes, fur and whiskers slick with blood. Squealing in anger.

Soldiers. Polarized goggles. Naked steel. And her belly wasn’t even full.

A split-toed boot descended toward her head …

“The rats,” Hana breathed. “Oh shit…”

She looked to Yoshi, his eyes losing focus, growing wide as they met hers.

“Shit’s about the size of it.”

“There’s at least a dozen…”

“Out back maybe. Look in front.”

“What is it?” Jurou asked, glancing between the pair.

“Bushimen.” Yoshi pulled himself to his feet, wincing in pain. “Lots of them.”

“Who says they’re after us?”

“You fixing to wait and find out?”

Daken slipped out through the tiny window, darting across the eaves below and crawling up a downspout onto the roof. Jurou disappeared into their bedroom, returning with four bulging satchels of what could only be coin slung over his shoulders. No time for questions—Hana grabbed Akihito by the hand, and the four were slipping out the door without a backward glance.

Yoshi took the lead, bloody hand pressed to his side, the other on the iron-thrower at the small of his back. Jurou brought up the rear, Akihito second, Hana stumbling between them, eyelid fluttering as she rode Daken’s sight. They avoided the stairwell, padding to the broad rice-paper window at the end of the hall. Yoshi tugged at the swollen wood, and the window gave way with a rust-red groan, opening out onto the three-story drop between the ramshackle tenements. The sun’s scarlet glare was sharp on the cobbles and gutter below, shockingly bright.

Hana crawled out first, clinging to a corroded downspout. She scrambled down spider-quick, Yoshi close behind. Slinging one leg over the sill, Akihito hauled himself out of the window, grasping the pipe with hands as broad as dinner plates. He descended using only his upper-body strength, his good leg scrabbling against the brick. Jurou had more trouble, slipping and cursing his way down the spout, doubled over like a monkey and shimmying down the last twelve feet.

Yoshi gave a soft wolf whistle, whispered up at the other boy.

“Fine view down here. But you might want to up with the hurry.”

“Shut up, you’ll make me fall.”

“I’ll catch you, Princess.”

Jurou managed to scramble low enough to drop to the ground, hitting the concrete and rolling to his feet with something approaching flair. Yoshi gave a small round of applause, pulled his kerchief up over his grin. Upstairs, they heard heavy boots in the stairwell, followed by splintering wood and angry shouts.

“Time to go.” Hana pulled on her goggles.

“Doubtless.”

Yoshi slipped down the exhaust-choked alley on the tips of his toes, the others following close behind. Hana reached out to the nearby corpse-rats again, mind awash with rich gutter-scent and maddening flea-itch. She could still sense a few rogues in the drains out front, but the pack at the building’s flank had scattered when the guards approached. Too few eyes. Too few breaths. Fright drawing her stomach tight, her gums chalk-dry, lips sticking to her teeth.

The quartet stole eastward along one crud-ridden alley, Akihito’s hand wrapped in hers. She glanced at the big man. His face was cold and hard, his kusarigama clutched in one fist, blade glinting in the scorching light.

Her voice was a whisper. “Do you think they’re—”

“Daken seeing anything, Hana?” Yoshi glanced over his shoulder.

“He’s up top.” Hana scanned the rooftops, voice cracking. “The way out front is no good, we’ll have to—”

Yoshi and the bushiman rounded the corner simultaneously, ran straight into each other at almost full tilt. Yoshi’s face bounced off the soldier’s breastplate and he staggered back, hand to nose, cursing up a storm. The bushiman fumbled for his naginata—a long spear with a three-foot blade—bringing the weapon to bear and adopting a front-foot battle stance.

“Halt in the Daimyo’s name!”

Yoshi blinked away tears, the red knuckles he wiped across his nose coming away bloodier. The bushiman was clad in scarlet and black iron, tigers embroidered on his tabard in gold thread. His jaw was set, stance fierce, naginata’s blade glittering and death-sharp.

“Against the wall!” A bark of command. “Now!”

“Corpsefucker, I think you broke my nose…”

“I have him!” the bushiman yelled over his shoulder. “He’s here!”

Hana heard the heavy drum of approaching boots. Metal on metal. Shrill whistles. More soldiers on the way, corpse-rats fleeing into the drains as the bushi’ thundered across the cracking concrete, beggars and lotusfiends scattering.

The bushi’ fixed his glare on Akihito, blade leveled at the big man’s chest.

“I said against the wall, Kagé scum!”

Yoshi blinked. Looked back and forth between the bushi’ and Akihito as Hana’s stomach dropped into her toes.

“Kagé?” A darkening frown. “Wait … you’re here for him?”

Akihito released her hand, stepped forward, a blur of movement, wrapping his kusarigama chain around the bushiman’s spear and dragging the boy off balance. Teeth bared in a silent snarl, he swung his sickle blade upward, burying it beneath the soldier’s chin, punching straight out through the top of his head. More soldiers were rounding the corner as Akihito tore his blade loose, the bushi’s lower jaw with it, and with a howl, the big man waded into the mob.

He slung his chain across one soldier’s face, cleaved a naginata off at the haft. Hana whirled as she heard soldiers behind, three more charging down the alleyway at their backs. The roar of flame above, the girl shielding her eye against the blast-furnace sun as she looked up and saw two Lotusmen alight on the eaves overhead, red eyes aglow, pointing with brass-clad fingers.

“Alive!” one cried with a cicada voice. “Take him alive!”

The shot rang out, shattering the air, bouncing off the narrow walls and making her wince. A bushiman fell with half his face missing, screaming, bloody gauntlets clutching the gaping wound. His comrades ducked for cover back around the corner, cursing as Yoshi fired again, blasting a star-shaped hole through the back of a fleeing soldier and dropping him like a stone amidst a spray of fine red mist.

“He’s got an iron-thrower!”

The acrid stink of burning chemicals filled her nose. Yoshi whirled on the spot and leveled the weapon at the bushi’ behind them, the Lotusmen above them, figures scattering like autumn leaves in a storm wind. Jurou was yelling something, screaming, but the echo of the shots was filling Hana’s head, the sight of the blood, boys no older than she lying dead on the ground, puddles of bright and sticky red, water-thin yellow, howling voices, Yoshi’s face, bloodless and snarling. She was thirteen years old again, the weight on her chest, broken glass pressed to her cheek as she screamed and screamed and screamed.

“I can get them out…”

“Hana, move!” Yoshi roared, pushing her toward Jurou. The boy had peeled back the storm drain cover in the alley’s gutter, was already disappearing down into the dark. She blinked, pulled herself together, Daken’s voice a whisper in her mind—gogogo—as she fell to her knees and crawled into the drain, down into a stinking rush of dark, ankle-deep slush, a pipe of black stone, ten feet wide. She heard her brother snarl a warning to the other soldiers as Akihito dropped down beside her, Yoshi tumbling on top of them a second later. A burst of high-pressure flame rushed in through the drain, Jurou dragging her down into the filth as the fire scorched the air above their heads, Lotusmen shouting, faint and distorted.

Heavy tread.

Ringing steel.

Blurred sunlight spilled down the grubby stone walls, the reek of smoke and shit and old death filling her nose. Jurou had her by the hand and was up and running, splashing, stumbling in the dark, the echoes of their footprints amplified tenfold in the bottomless gloom. A pain-hoarse cry behind, the whistling song of Akihito’s kusarigama chain in the black. She reached out to the rats above and below, pulling Jurou left through a junction, straight at the next, footfalls and gasping and sweat in her eye, slick on her hands, stink making her gag. Running, running until her breath was fire and her legs shook, until her heart pumped oil and acid and her stomach rolled, cold and churning. Corpse-rats streaming about her, dark and sharp, shit-slicked, dead doll’s eyes piercing the murk ahead.

Footsteps behind them, dozens splashing through the filth, lantern light setting their shadows dancing on the moist black walls. Akihito’s heavy breath, limping tread, grunts of pain. Yoshi stumbling, hand pressed to his bloody ribs. The Lotusmen would have been too big in their suits to follow, but it sounded like half the Kigen army was still back there, metal-clad hounds running swift, fangs bared, tight tight tight on the rabbits’ trail.

She reached out into the Kenning, the tiny minds and tiny eyes and long yellow grins. Turning fear to anger, flooding them with it, the sleek broods and hulking rogues gathered in the quiet, lovely dark—their dark—now filled and fouled with the noise and the reek and the steel of these accursed men. Calling them to her, one by one, looking over her shoulder to her brother, his face pale and blood-spattered, eyes wide, loose tendrils of black hair scrawled like cracks upon his skin.

“Help me, Yoshi,” she gasped.

He swallowed, winced, nodded. Together, entwined, reaching out and calling, pulling, pleading. The flood began with one black droplet, streaking past them with dirty fangs bared. A handful more followed, then a dozen, heeding the call scritch-scratching at the backs of their minds, ringing in the empty behind their eyes, swelling, rising, all mangy fur and tails like lengths of old knotted rope, filth-encrusted claws and mouths bathed in death. Hana heard a soldier cry out, the clang of steel striking stone, more of the mongrel, gutter-born flood flowing past them as they ran on and on and on.

More shouts behind. Screams of pain. No time to stop and listen, to press or to fight. Just to run, to run when every new step seemed an impossibility, when the vomit rose scalding and boiling in the back of her throat to the edge of her teeth, when every muscle wept and screamed, drawn taut and tight and stretched to snapping. Turning blind at every junction, straight, left, left, right, the black stabbed through by occasional blinding light from the drain grilles overhead. Akihito finally gasped, fell against the wall and collapsed into the filth, hands pressed to the weeping wound at his thigh. Yoshi skidded to his knees, blood spilling thick and red and hot from his side down his fingers. Hana on all fours, retching, gasping, weeping, tears on her cheeks as the reek scored her throat.

And as her heartbeat pounded in her temples, as her breath seethed in her chest, she stretched out to the children of the grave around her—the scabrous, worm-ridden horde—and found no other men in their eyes. No soldiers in their fears. Only them. Only her. Licking scabby jowls with flat gray tongues, and wondering if she fell facedown into the murk right now, spent her last throes inhaling that soup into her lungs, what her pretty, pretty eye might taste like.

“They’re gone…” she gasped, coughing. “… We … lost them…”

Jurou leaned against the concave wall, chest rising and falling like sparrows’ wings. “Izanagi’s balls…”

Akihito reached out, groping for her hand in the dark. “Are you … all right?”

“Worry about yourself, whoreson!” Yoshi snarled, jamming the iron-thrower up under Akihito’s chin and forcing him back against the wall.

“Yoshi, stop it!” Hana cried.

Though he outweighed the boy by eighty pounds and stood half a foot taller, Akihito allowed himself to be pressed against the slimy brick, the ’thrower’s barrel jammed against his larynx. He raised his hands slowly, scarlet-slicked, eyes fixed on Yoshi’s.

“Calm down, son…”

“You fixing to be my da, old man? Because I promise that’ll end less than pretty.” Yoshi leaned closer, pressing harder on the ’thrower, his tone a boiling cocktail of incredulity and rage. “You’re a godsdamned rebel hiding out in my home? Dragging my sister into your shit? The bushi’ through our front door? I should end you!” Spittle flying. “I should feed you to the fucking rats!”

“He didn’t drag me into anything, Yoshi!” Hana shouted. “Stop it!”

“Izanagi’s balls, Hana, he’s in the fucking Kagé!”

“I’m in the Kagé!”

A hollow silence, lined with teeth, Yoshi turning and peering at her in the dark with bewildered eyes. “Tell me you’re joking…”

“I joined weeks ago. After the Stormdancer came back to—”

“Have you lost your godsdamned mind?” Eyes narrowed to knife cuts. Voice rising to a roar. “I said have you lost—”

“I heard you the first time!” Hana shouted.

“What the hells were you thinking?”

“I told you! They stand for something, Yoshi! They stand and they fight. The Guild, the lotus, inochi, all of this shit. I swim up to my eyeballs in it every single day and it makes me want to puke. There are people out there fighting and dying for this! For us! And you want me to sit back and do nothing? Hope someone else fixes it for me?”

“You know what we are.” Yoshi turned on her, pointing to the streets above their heads. “You know those bastards up there wouldn’t give one speck of lotusfly shit for you or me if they really knew. We don’t owe them a thing. Not a godsdamned drop!”

“Yoshi,” Jurou pleaded, touching his arm. “Calm down.”

Akihito’s voice was soft. “Listen to your—”

Yoshi whirled, aimed the ’thrower between Akihito’s eyes.

“You wanna stay handsome, best stay quiet,” he spat. “This is family talk now.”

He turned back to Hana, voice growing cold and hard as ice.

“This little dance is over, sister-mine. You ran with heroes and had your fun and now it’s done. We’re ghosting, right now, and leaving this fellow to his tricks. We don’t see or speak to him again. We’re walking away. And we’re not looking back.”

Hana shook her head, scowled. “You don’t tell me what to do, brother-mine.”

“Not telling you what you’re doing.” Yoshi stood slowly, took Jurou’s hand and hauled himself out of the muck. “Telling you what we’re doing.”

Hana glanced at Jurou, the boy’s face pale and pained. But he stood beside Yoshi, smeared in rot, squeezing his hand tight. “Please, Hana…”

“I’m not dying for folks who’d gladly light me on fire,” Yoshi said. “I’m not waiting for the bushi’ to kick down my door again, drag me to die blind and starved in the belly of Kigen jail. Not for people who wouldn’t spare a drop of piss for me if I was dying of thirst. Not now. Not ever. Now you think about that, and you decide if they’re worth dying for.”

“Your brother’s right, Hana.” The siblings glanced over as Akihito got slowly to his feet, clutching his bleeding thigh. “You should go with your family.”

Yoshi blinked, confused.

“Doubtless,” he finally nodded.

“This is my fault,” the big man said. “I should never have brought it into your home. Never placed your family in danger. I’m sorry.”

“Akihito…” Stupid, girlish tears welled inside her and she clenched her teeth, stamping them down into her boots. “I can’t turn my back now…”

“You should go. I’ve seen enough of my friends die over this. Over what I could have done and failed to do.” He stared down at those broad, clever hands, smeared in blood and filth. Shrugging helplessly. “I don’t want to be carving spirit stones for you too.”

“Mreowwwwl.”

The four of them looked up, Daken’s silhouette peering down at them from the storm drain above, etched in black against the scalding, garish daylight.

“I’ll keep moving,” Akihito said. “Exit a few blocks down, nowhere near you three.”

“You do that,” Yoshi growled, sparing him a toxic glance. He held out his hand to Hana, eyes locked on hers. “Come with?”

The tears were flowing now, spilling and burning down her cheek. Hateful, horrid things, making her feel a weak and frightened girl, the child she’d tried to kill long ago. She was thirteen years old again, small and afraid, shaking so hard she couldn’t stand. Yoshi rising from the ruins, fists clenched, drenched in scarlet …

She couldn’t leave him now. Not after all he’d done. All for her.

All for me.

Hana hung her head. Took one step toward her brother, a few inches and a thousand miles, reaching out to clutch his hand. She looked back at the big man, blurry through her tears.

“I’m sorry…” she sobbed. “Akihito, I’m so sorry…”

“It’s all right,” he said, forcing a smile. “You’ve done enough. More than most.”

The big man spared an apologetic glance for Yoshi and Jurou, met by a pitiless scowl and uncertain, doleful eyes. And then he turned, hand pressed to thigh, foot dragging through the muck as he limped into the dark. The sound of his tread echoed off the sweating walls, bounced down into the tunnel depths, in the cavern of her chest and the empty in her heart.

Thump-slush.

Thump-slush.

“Don’t fret now, Hana.” Yoshi took her hand, looked her in the eye. “I take care of us. Always. Blood is blood, remember?”

Lips trembling. Cheeks burning. Throat squeezed tight. But still she managed it. To force them out. The words. The vow. All she had left.

“… Blood is blood.”

36 TAKE

The rain sang a hymn of white noise on the ocean’s skin in the space between one thunderclap and the next. The nomad was pressed low to the ground, blood-drunk and snarling. Buruu hauled himself to his feet, shook himself like a sodden dog, glaring at the younger thunder tiger as hackles rippled down his spine. Yukiko held out a gentle hand, took one step closer to Buruu’s foe. Her voice rang in the Kenning, loud enough for them both to hear.

“It’s all right, don’t be afraid.”

*FEAR NOTHING. NO ONE.*

The nomad’s thoughts were a shout in her skull, bright as a shot from an iron-thrower, loud enough to be felt as physical pain. She winced, shuddering with effort, pushing her wall between them in the Kenning, as if she were damming a river and allowing only a trickle of him through. His trepidation was obvious; his fear in the face of this strange girl who spoke to his thoughts, whose will beat upon him heavy as the storm itself.

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

*CAN TRY.*

“I want to talk to you.”

*HOW YOU TALK IN MY MIND?*

“I am Yōkai-kin.”

The nomad blinked, looked at her with narrowed, amber eyes. The intensity of his thoughts was making her head ache, even behind her mental barricade. She realized her nose was bleeding again.

“You’re a wanderer? You have no pack?”

*WILL MAKE MY OWN.*

Yukiko glanced up at the female she could still feel wheeling about their heads.

“She doesn’t seem interested, friend.”

*FEMALE STRONG. NEEDS STRONGER MATE. ONE WHO HAS WON GLORY. SUCH IS OUR WAY.*

“I have a better way.”

*BETTER?*

“A way to win glory untold.”

* … HOW?*

“Join our pack.”

The nomad looked at Buruu, made a snorting sound that sounded like laughter.

*SKRAAI JOIN KINSLAYER? NEVER.*

Yukiko blinked the rain from her eyes, frowning.

“Why do you call him that?”

*WHAT HE IS.*

“But you call yourself Skraai?”

*MY NAME.*

“Before I met him, Buruu didn’t have a name. I didn’t think…”

Buruu stepped forward, eyes downcast.

YUKIKO …

The nomad tossed his head, snorting again.

*KINSLAYER HAD NAME. THEY TAKE FROM HIM, MONKEY-CHILD.*

The sound of retching drew Yukiko’s attention away. Ilyitch was curled on wet stone, hair tangled about his face, coughing up seawater. Her concern swelled, the conversation with Skraai momentarily forgotten. She walked to her fallen satchel, hauled out two deep tuna, each as long as her leg. Sliding one across the ground to Buruu, she tossed the other to the nomad with a grunt.

“You two think you can enjoy a meal without tearing each other to pieces?”

The arashitora regarded each other with wary stares. Yukiko knelt beside the gaijin, smoothed the hair from his face. The tempest had lessened, wind slowing to a gale, rain falling in sheets rather than blankets. Ilyitch looked up at her and gave a weak smile, leaned back against broken rock and pulled his wolf skin tight about himself. Running one hand over the pelt, fingers in sodden fur, he murmured beneath his breath. Eyes closed. Head bowed. He seemed to be giving thanks. Yukiko wondered what gods he prayed to.

After a sentence or two, Ilyitch pulled a tin box from inside his coveralls, produced one of his smoke sticks and put it to his lips with trembling hands. Realizing it was soaked with seawater, he spit it out again in disgust.

Yukiko stood and walked over to Buruu, running her fingertips along the misshapen lines of his clockwork wings. Some of the canvas quills had been ripped loose in the struggle with Skraai and the harness was badly torn, but the skeleton seemed reasonably intact. Bent and crumpled, certainly; it’d be impossible to fly with them in their current state. But with the right tools, she might be able to beat them back into shape.

Problem was, they hadn’t brought any tools with them.

She turned back to Ilyitch, still slumped on the stone, catching his breath. She pushed a picture into his mind; the shape of tools, of hands working on the mechanical wings. The boy wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, gave a weary nod.

“So how do we get the tools out here?” Yukiko pointed to the cable network again, made a pedaling motion with her hands. “We have to go back and get them.”

The thought made her entire body ache.

The gaijin held up a finger as if to say “watch and learn.” He reached into his own satchel, produced a bundle wrapped in brown oilskin. Unfolding a few layers, he revealed a cylinder of black metal, perhaps a foot long. Yukiko helped him to his feet, and he smiled and muttered what she presumed was thanks. Walking to the island’s edge with the oilskin beneath his arm, he twisted the cylinder, held it above his head, pointed to the clouds. A puff of smoke spat from the haft, the tube hissing. Magnesium-bright light flared, and an object shot into the sky, fifty feet into the tempest. A tiny second sun, hissing and popping in the rain, trailing a long cloud of pale gray smoke. Buruu and Skraai looked up from their meals, watched the white fire glowing above. Buruu growled. Yukiko stepped forward, confused and frowning.

“What are you doing?” She raised her voice, as if it would help him understand her better. “Ilyitch? Won’t they see that from the farm?”

The gaijin turned to her with a smile. Reaching into his oilskin he drew out a tube of coiled brass and delicate glass globes. He raised it toward Buruu.

“Oh gods, n—”

A crackling arc of white light burst from the tube, reaching across the space between Ilyitch and Buruu and filling it with thunder. The arashitora reared back and took the bolt to his chest, knocking the breath from his lungs and sending him crashing into the rocks behind. Yukiko screamed and lunged toward the weapon, and a backhand from Ilyitch landed on her jaw, sent her tumbling. Skraai roared, spread his wings and charged headlong into another burst of deafening white light. It hit him like a wrecking ball, rolling his eyes back in his skull as he collapsed, skidding to a halt three feet from the gaijin’s toes, steam rising from his fur.

Yukiko blinked black light from her eyes, reaching toward Ilyitch’s mind with the intention of crushing it to pulp. He aimed a savage kick at her ribs and the wind left her lungs, accompanied by a spray of spittle and the clap of iron-capped boots on bone. He kicked her again in the back of the head and she curled into a ball, stars bursting and falling behind her eyes.

Ilyitch fished around in his satchel, weapon pointed lazily at the stunned arashitora. Yukiko struggled to roll onto her belly, get her wind back, ignore the broken-glass pain in her skull. Ilyitch growled a warning, weapon aimed at her face, shaking his head. Thunder rumbled above, lightning crackled across roiling black. The boy produced another flare and fired it shrieking into the sky. Yukiko rested her cheek against the obsidian beneath her, wonderfully cool, slick with rain. It called out to her with a voice as old as the earth.

Sleep.

Sleep now, child.

She clenched her jaw, voice strangled. “Why are you doing this?”

Ilyitch snarled incomprehensible words, waved the brass tube, finger to his lips.

Ignoring the pain blooming bloody across her thoughts, she reached out to Buruu through the Kenning. She could feel his warmth, run through with vertigo; the sparkling numbness of a newly landed fish, cracked across the stern to render it senseless. Skraai was in a similar state, clawing back toward waking from a darkness lined with coils of brass and tiny glass globes.

But they were alive.

“Godsdamn you…” Yukiko clawed sodden hair from her mouth, tried to pull herself up. “I saved your life. Why are you doing this?”

Ilyitch’s shout was as good as fingers around her throat, squeezing tight. Yukiko pressed her hands to her bruised ribs, arms wrapped around herself. Moments passed—minutes or hours, her concussion fading all to gray. But finally, beneath the storm’s howl, she realized she could hear a rhythmic pulse, a dull whumphwhumphwhumph, swelling at her back, drawing ever closer. She didn’t even need to turn to see what it was—the flying machine from the lightning farm’s roof. The metal dragonfly.

She reached out through her wall and touched the boy’s thoughts again, resisting the impulse to squeeze. But what would it cost her to kill him? How much would she spend of herself? How much would be left to fight the gaijin headed toward her in the belly of that metal insect?

He used me. Used me to catch them both. But why?

She watched Ilyitch rummaging in his bag again, stare falling on the pale wolf pelt across his shoulders. Yukiko thought back to the brown bearskin on Danyk’s back, the samurai helms bolted on his broad shoulders, the flayed Lotusman skin over Katya’s leathers. Every gaijin soldier she’d seen wore the skin of an enemy or an animal.

But nothing so fantastic as an arashitora.

Oh gods, no …

The thought turned her stomach, filled her with a fear that dwarfed anything felt in Yoritomo’s clutches.

He couldn’t …

The boy found what he was looking for, dragged it from the satchel with his right hand. It gleamed as a flash of lighting lit the sky, at least a foot long, hooked and cruel.

A knife.

“No, you can’t…”

She tried to claw her way to her feet, her skull ready to split open, seizing hold of his thoughts and squeezing tight. His eyes widening in pain and flooding bloodshot, Ilyitch stepped up and kicked her in the head, the world falling away as she briefly flew, shoulders crashing upon broken black glass. She blinked at the storm above, only dimly aware of the boy grabbing her hands, binding them tight. He punched her in the face again and again, consciousness threatening to flee on dark wings.

Buruu …

She could hear the gaijin flying machine drawing closer, its engines like the pulse throbbing at her temples, the beating of distant drums.

Whumpwhumpwhump.

She flopped over onto her stomach, vision blurred, watching Ilyitch crouch beside Buruu. The twitching tail was the only sign of life, but she could feel him, struggling toward the surface, the rippling light of a distant sun above. She tried to reach into the Kenning, but her thoughts slipped away between the cracks in her skull, bleeding from her ears.

Buruu, WAKE UP!

Ilyitch scowled as he inspected the metal wings, running his fingers over iridescent metal, ball joints, pistons and false quills. Lifting the canvas covering, he pawed at the blunt, severed feathers that were Yoritomo’s legacy, hacked off in Kigen arena ten thousand lifetimes ago. And with a muttered curse, the gaijin boy stood, spat on the ground and stalked over to Skraai.

Boots crunching on shattered obsidian.

Howling wind.

Thunder.

Whumpwhumpwhump.

The nomad was stirring, talons that could rend an ironclad like cloth curling into fists, leaving gouges in the black glass beneath. Ilyitch ran his fingers through the feathers at the arashitora’s neck, over the mighty wings, breathing deep, a slow smile alighting on his face. The quills glowed with a faint luster; the charge of static electricity lighting his eyes with hunger.

He nodded.

Whumpwhumpwhump.

“No,” she moaned. “Don’t…”

Ilyitch straddled the arashitora’s head, one boot on either side, face turned to the sky.

“Imperatritsa, butye svidetilem!” he cried. “Moya dobicha! Moya slava!”

Whumpwhumpwhump.

The boy raised the knife.

“Ilyitch, don’t!”

Lightning in the skies, reflected in the blade.

Descending.

“NO!”

And with a flash of steel, an impossible gush of red, the boy opened up the thunder tiger’s throat.