by Jay Kristoff
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.