by Paul Krueger
When her hands came away, they were still covered in sweat.
Tala gulped. That wasn’t from the heat, and she knew it.
All around her, she saw bloody, burnt, and bandaged people. Most, she knew, were civilians. But among them were members of the resistance: the bravest of Sanbu’s children, who had grown increasingly bold in their efforts to pry open Tomoda’s steel grip. Just two weeks ago, reports had emerged that Erega had personally led a raid on a Tomodanese supply depot, making off with a huge stockpile of weapons. Now, in an irony that appealed deeply to twelve-year-old Tala’s sense of justice, they were being turned on the hands that had forged them.
Reading that report had been what had finally decided things for Tala. She’d kept her head down for a few years, but now she was certain: She wanted to join the jungle-runners of the resistance. She would live to see the day Tomoda was cast out of the Sanbu Islands forever, and she wanted to be part of the reason why.
But if she was going to fight, she needed a shade.
She already had a shade, of course. Not two years ago, she’d done something desperate. Something so unheard-of and taboo, even at age ten she’d known not to tell a single soul about it. Mang would’ve been a force to reckon with on the battlefield. For the outgunned and outmanned jungle-runners, he might have even become indispensable, if they were willing to use him. But Tala knew that one glimpse of him was all it would take to guarantee her a swift death warrant, even from Erega. A splintersoul—a real, living one—was an enemy to all nations.
So, no. If she was going to join the fight and avenge her family, Mang included, then she had no choice but to find another. To her, it seemed so obvious. She couldn’t retreat from being a splintersoul. Since shades were the thing Tomoda reviled most of all, Tala could think of no better monster to become.
“You don’t need to become a monster,” Mang had told her one night as she puzzled over how to make this happen. “There’s plenty of other good you can do.”
Through their connection, she’d felt a low-bubbling current of guilt. What he’d meant to say was, You don’t need to become a monster because of me.
She pushed past that. “Our parents were doing good,” she’d said savagely, ignoring the way her legs shook with the effort it took just to stay standing. She’d gotten better at bearing the pain that came with summoning him, but it was still overpowering. “Look where it got them.”
He leveled a huge frown at her. “What happened to them wasn’t their fault.”
Tala clenched her fists and glanced down at her bare, dirty feet. “I know,” she said. “Why do you think I want to be a monster?”
But despite her conviction, the path to it eluded her. She couldn’t go to a library to learn about it; the Tomodanese had removed as much information about shadepacting as they could from the public’s reach. And while there were a few adults in her life, mostly shopkeepers who were friendly when she needed food, this was hardly the sort of thing she could talk to any of them about. She’d even tried capturing rats and pigeons and even stray cats, hoping she could find one to pact with. But without her dying brother to steady her focus, she couldn’t reconnect with her own soul.
But then she’d remembered what Mang had explained to her about pacting. It wasn’t as simple as finding an animal you liked and petting it. There had to be resonance between one soul and another. Right now, her soul was consumed with the fires of rage, and the only thing that could feed it was war. What she needed was the soul of a warrior.
No. Of a soldier.
She was proud of the plan she’d landed on. She was going to be smart about this. If her suspicions were true, she would be reinstating a shade to service, to continue the fight that its partner no longer could. And if they weren’t true, then all she’d cost herself was an unpleasant visit to the hospital.
“It won’t work,” Mang had told her the night before, when she’d been going over the plan with him.
“It might not work,” Tala said. “I won’t know until I’ve tried.”
“But pacting directly with a shade?” he said. “A shade already bonded to someone else’s soul?”
“You’ve heard we can only pact with animals,” Tala said to him. “Did you also hear that we can’t pact with people?”
Mang had fallen silent. She’d been stung by the sadness in his eyes, but not enough to be dissuaded. More than anything, what she wanted now was to finish what Tomoda had started.
So in the light of day, she crept past the nurses and orderlies, down the stairs to the wing for “honored citizens.” Or at least, that was what the official signs declared it to be, so as not to arouse Tomodanese suspicion. But everyone on the street knew what the wing really housed: resistance fighters who’d almost died in the line of duty, but not quite made it all the way there. Rumor had it that Erega was using her own personal wealth to fund the wing and see that these fighters were cared for. Whether it was true or not, it inflated the woman to even greater stature in Tala’s mind. How incredibly noble was she, to be so dedicated to her troops even after their fight was over?
The floors down here were wooden, slick with varnish so they could be easily cleaned. The walls were white, and absent dust or errant droplets of blood. Even the bare lightbulbs seemed…not gentler, but at least less harsh. And yet these did nothing to still her heart, which only beat faster with each step she took.
She stopped in the middle of the corridor and sniffed deeply. Though its denizens were closer to death than any upstairs, the telltale scent was nowhere to be found.
There were no private rooms here, just a line of beds along either wall, with simple white curtains to separate them. In each bed was a woman or man wrapped in a clean white linen gown. Their sheets had been stripped away to protect them from the heat. Some had their eyes closed. Some stared with wide-open, bloodshot eyes at the ceiling above. But none of them moved.
Nurses bustled about from bed to bed, adjusting machinery and fluffing pillows. They chattered away to one another in medical jargon that went over Tala’s head. She stood there watching them for almost a full minute before one of them noticed she was there.
“Hello there!” he said pleasantly. It rankled Tala to hear him pitching his voice up at her like she was a child, even though she was a child. “Are you lost, little girl?”
Tala forced herself to undo her default scowl. Smiles never sat comfortably on her lips, so she had to rely on her youthful charms to make up the difference. “I’m here to see my…brother,” she said, then cursed. Why did she have to say “brother”? That already cut down half her choices in this ward. She would’ve kept her options open if she’d just said something like cousin or friend.
“Oh, of course,” said the nurse, widening his eyes and mouth into what he probably thought was a reassuring display. Tala appreciated that he meant well, but already her patience had worn thin.
She glanced at the nearest bed, where an older man lay at peace. The side of his face was a scabbed-over ruin. Her stomach turned at the sight of him. She glanced quickly at the chart hanging from the foot of his bed. It listed his cause of injury as “industrial accident,” but there was no mistaking a wound like that.
The nurse frowned for the first time. “He’s your brother?”
Immediately she reached for his limp hand, tamping down on how much the touch made her skin crawl. She squeezed it gently. “No one saw me coming. Not even our parents.”
The nurse studied her a long moment, then nodded. “Your parents haven’t been by.”
Tala didn’t have to fake the distant look in her eyes when she said, “They won’t be.”
The nurse blinked, tears forming in the corners of his eyes. Inwardly, Tala groaned. That was the last thing she needed right now.
“You poor thing,” he whispered to himself, clutching his heart. He looked down at the bed’s occupant, her
“brother.” “All those bad things happening out there? They’ll be over soon, I promise.”
Tala squeezed the sleeping man’s hand tighter, began to search for that warm place inside herself, and hoped he was wrong.
* * *
—
Xiulan had listened politely while Tala relayed all this to her. It had felt strange, voicing all of it aloud, like she had a splinter in her foot and she had felt it with every step she’d taken for the past ten years. Telling Xiulan hadn’t been like removing the splinter so much as finally taking medicine to dull the pain.
“It sounds as if you already have a steady grounding in the facts of the matter,” Xiulan said when Tala was done. Tala appreciated how attentive she’d been, but she was rapidly tiring of the princess’s ability to turn a three-word thought into a thirty-word sentence. “What benefit do you foresee from consulting with me?”
“I learned that day I could take someone’s shade if I wanted,” Tala said. “Making Dimangan into one changed something about me. But I never wanted to do it again, after the first time.”
“And now?”
Tala stared at her with haunted eyes. “It’s taking everything I have not to reach over and rip that rat out of you.”
Xiulan shrank back.
Tala held up a hand in apology. “I’m a soldier, Princess. I’m not going to touch you.”
“Anymore,” Xiulan grumbled, rubbing her forehead.
“I’m not going to apologize for that,” Tala said simply. “So, do you have an idea of what’s going on with me, or not?”
Xiulan sucked thoughtfully on her empty pipe. “This shade of yours…Beaky…he doesn’t originate from your own soul, correct? His origins lie with the man in the purple coat?”
Tala nodded.
“Then perhaps, ah, Beaky’s removal had an adverse effect on his own soul,” Xiulan said. “An adverse effect that’s been the proverbial engine under his equally proverbial hood, all these years.”
Tala narrowed her eyes. “Then you mean…?”
“I suppose what I’m saying,” Xiulan said carefully, “is that by removing Dimangan from you, he tore your own soul asunder…and that until you’ve been made whole once more, no other cure will suffice.”
Slow as a sinking balloon, Tala’s gaze drifted down to her hands.
Xiulan frowned. “I understand much of what I’ve said may be disturbing to you,” she said, ever sharp on the uptake. “I would remind you that the information I’ve given you here, despite my diversity of sources, is still at best a mix of reasonable guesswork, analogies based in folktales, and the occasional barely corroborated historical record. Which is to say, Sergeant Tala, that I can always be wrong.”
Tala glanced up at Xiulan, who fiddled with the pipe she clung to like a child with their favorite blanket. “That a habit of yours? Being wrong?”
“Not as such, no,” Xiulan said. “My educated guesses tend to be so well educated that the designation of ‘guess’ is more a matter of etiquette. But I remind you that the possibility—however slim—does exist. I would hope that a woman as resilient as you wouldn’t lose heart.”
Tala cocked an eyebrow. “So you care about the state of my heart now?”
“Of course I do,” the princess said. “If you didn’t notice, Sergeant, we’re in a fridge together.”
Tala snorted. Compared with all the other shit she’d been through in the past week, being trapped in a fridge seemed downright ordinary.
But the amusement lasted only a moment before it was drowned out again by the howling hunger inside her head. She tried not to think about it, but trying just made her think about it more. Warily, she eyed her twitching fingers. She needed to keep them under control, not consider how easily they would slip around Princess Xiulan’s throat and—
No, she said forcefully, bringing her mind to heel. She couldn’t let herself fall into this. She was too disciplined to become a mad dog like the splintersoul. She was a soldier.
But a voice in the back of her head whispered: So was he.
* * *
—
Tala wasn’t sure how much time passed before the door opened again, revealing Kurihara Kosuke. He glanced over her and the Shang princess a moment before gesturing to someone out of Tala’s line of sight. “Get them out here and bind them,” he said. “Use wood cuffs for the Sanbuna.”
Xiulan shot her a questioning look, but Tala avoided making eye contact. She’d neglected to fill Xiulan in on that detail, because the truth was that she hadn’t quite wrapped her mind around it, herself. She’d had long years to make peace with the reality of splintersouls, and that had been easy enough. Xiulan’s guesswork about her current condition even lined up pretty well with all that. But shadepacting and metalpacting? There was no precedent for that at all. Not in myth, not in movies, not in yesterday’s paper. Hell, Tala wouldn’t have been convinced of it herself, if she hadn’t seen the knife with her own eyes, and the cauterized stump it had left behind.
And not just that, a nagging voice in her head said as she remembered her fingers bloodlessly closing around Harada’s blade.
They were cuffed and hauled out of the fridge, then shoved to their knees in the middle of the dining car. The place was still in disarray from last night, the floors and walls covered in bloodstains and battle damage. But mercifully, it was at least empty of civilians.
“Lord Kurihara,” Xiulan said without preamble. “I know we’ve only recently made each other’s acquaintance, but I think it fair to remind you here of the stature I occupy in my native land of Shang.”
But Kurihara didn’t even bother to look at her. He was staring hard at Tala, his hands folded into the flowing sleeves of his kimono.
“However you may feel about Shang or its ruler—and rest assured, on the subject of my father you would likely find me a kindred spirit—you can’t deny the delicate diplomatic position in which Tomoda finds itself. Any harm that befalls me would doubtless be reflected in the tenor of the ensuing peace talks, which will surely determine—”
Kurihara’s hands withdrew from his sleeves. Tala steeled herself for the glint of his gun, ready to make a desperate bid for freedom before she got a bullet between the eyes. But rather than a heavy Tomodanese pistol, his hand held…
…another hand, covered in pactmarks.
The hand fell heavily to the floor in front of her. Tala stopped herself from reacting to the sight of it, but Xiulan didn’t have her discipline. She let out a curse in Shang and recoiled from it, as if she expected it to start crawling across the floor like a crab.
The Cicadas exchanged sneers, but Kurihara alone was unamused. He had eyes only for Tala. “Explain this,” he said. “All of it. You lie, I take a finger. You insult me, I take a finger. You call your slave, I take an eye.”
“Lord Kurihara,” Xiulan said insistently, “you should know that this woman has been taken on as a member of my personal retinue, and as such is subject to the same protections—”
With casual contempt, Kurihara backhanded her. From where Tala knelt, it didn’t look like much more than a light cuff, but it was enough to get Xiulan sputtering with outrage.
“Your father’s name is the only reason you’re still alive,” Kurihara said, still not deigning even to look at her. “Show your gratitude by not interrupting the adults while they’re talking.” He nodded to Tala. “Speaking of which: Start talking.”
Beaky’s name was half formed on Tala’s tongue before she caught herself. Her head had been consumed with vivid fantasies of setting him on the nearest Cicadas while she lunged straight for Kurihara, ready to wrap both hands around his throat—
And then what had seemed so appealing a second ago made her stomach turn. For shades’ sake, Tala, she told herself as she fought back the throbbing in her head, keep it the fuck together.
So instead
of Beaky’s name, she said, “I don’t know his name. All I know is that he steals shades from others with a touch.” She nodded to the disembodied hand, which itself bore three pactmarks that she could see. “From what I’ve seen, he’s got a big collection.”
Kurihara eyed her, as if tasting her words for the telltale flavor of falsehood. “Hn,” he said eventually. “Fine. What does he want with the Iron Prince?”
Tala hesitated. The last bits of information had been easy enough to give up. But the truth here would complicate things.
She swallowed. “Nothing,” she said. “He’s been after me.”
Kurihara adopted a very ugly look. “Your so-called protection was endangering His Brilliance the entire time, then?”
“We didn’t know,” Tala said. “We both thought he was after Jimu—”
The backhand that came for her was much harder than the one Kurihara used on Xiulan. It nearly sent Tala to the floor, and made her vision pop with stars. When she blinked to steady her sight, she saw Kurihara had leaned down next to her, so their faces were mere inches apart.
“You don’t get to speak his name,” he hissed to her. “You think you know him? You know less than nothing, slaver. You don’t get to speak his name.”
He leaned back, and his composure seemed to return more and more with each inch he put between them.
“Now,” he said. “How did you come to learn our sacred and noble art of metalpacting?”
Once again, Xiulan stared at Tala, now in disbelief.
Once again, Tala refused to meet her eye. One problem at a time, and right now Kurihara was her biggest one.
She chose her words carefully. She’d been truthful so far, and Kurihara had believed her. So it didn’t immediately lose her a finger when she said, “He taught me.”
Xiulan’s eye widened.
So did both of Kurihara’s, before falling back into a suspicious squint. “Who’s ‘he’?”
Tala grinned. “Who do you think?”