by Jay Kristoff
I don’t trust her.
SENSIBLE.
It’s too good to be true that there would be more like Kin.
IN ALL HONESTY, THAT PART OF HER TALE IS EASY TO BELIEVE.
A rebellion inside the Guild? No, they’re just telling us what we want to hear.
THOSE OF THE GUILD ARE BORN TO IT. NO CHOICE. NO CONTROL. NOT SO HARD TO IMAGINE SOME WOULD RESENT THAT YOKE.
I don’t believe one of them would just tiptoe out of a chapterhouse and come all this way to find Kin. It’s probably just a survivor from the fleet we burned. Lying to save its skin.
WE LEFT ONLY ONE ALIVE, YUKIKO. YOU KNOW THAT.
This doesn’t make any godsdamned sense. It’s lying.
YOU MEAN “SHE” IS LYING.
I mean “it.”
She eyed the False-Lifer up and down, lip curling.
“Is that why your leaders are backing Hiro? Because they’re too spineless to come here themselves now? They’d rather risk men with wives and children in the battle to bring me down, right? Better to see them die than more of their precious Shatei?”
“I am from Yama.” All nine of its functional arms rippled, and Yukiko was appalled to recognize the gesture as a shrug. “I do not know the politics of First House, or why the First Bloom bids Shateigashira Kensai to support the Tora boy. But I know seventy percent of our Munitions Sect were requisitioned by Kigen four weeks ago.”
Yukiko stared blankly.
“The Munitions Sect build machines that require human control,” Kin offered. “Motor-rickshaw, shreddermen, sky-ship engines and so on. Like I used to.”
Yukiko narrowed her eyes. “What are they working on?”
“I do not know, Stormdancer.” Another grotesque, multi-armed shrug.
“Don’t call her that.” Kin plucked three transistors from the mechabacus. “Her name is Yukiko.”
The boy snipped a final set of wires, gathered up the contraption’s guts and stuffed them back into its housing. Sealing the device closed with a few hasty screws, he stepped back.
“Done.”
The False-Lifer looked at Atsushi’s blade poised against its throat. The boy shifted his grip, one word from a bloodbath. Kin was watching her with pleading eyes. Yukiko stared for a pregnant moment, arms folded, eyes narrowed. The rain was falling harder, fat, clear droplets pounding the leaves around them and soaking everyone to the bones.
Everyone except the False-Lifer, of course.
“I have never seen rain that was not black before.” It turned its palms to the sky, droplets pattering upon its body, beading and running like quicksilver. “It is beautiful.”
Yukiko’s eyes were on the blade gleaming in Atsushi’s hand. The raindrops glittering on the steel like polished jewels.
We should just get everything we can from her, then bury her.
Buruu growled.
WHAT IF SHE SPEAKS TRUTH? WHAT IF SHE IS WHAT SHE SAYS?
No one leaves the Guild. Everyone knows that.
EXCEPT YOUR KIN.
Don’t call him that.
I DID NOT TRUST HIM EITHER, REMEMBER? YET WITHOUT HIM, NEITHER OF US WOULD BE HERE.
I know that.
THEN YOU KNOW WE CANNOT END THIS GIRL ON MERE SUSPICION.
Yukiko hissed, rubbed her eyes with balled fists. The Kenning headache was slinking forward on fox-light feet. The noise. The heat. Lurking in the back of her skull with leaden hands and bated breath.
“Take off your skin,” she said.
“What?” Kin raised an eyebrow. “What for?”
“If we’re taking it back, we’re not bringing a tracking device with us. It takes its skin and mechabacus off and we bury them here.”
“The mechabacus won’t work anym—”
“That’s the bargain, Kin. We bury its skin, or we bury it.”
“She’s not an ‘it.’” Kin frowned. “Her name is Ayane.”
Isao scowled, shook his head. Yukiko turned to the False-Lifer, eyes and voice cold.
“Your choice. And I don’t mean to sound cruel, but I could sleep either way.”
The False-Lifer glanced at Atsushi’s blade, then to Kin. Without a word, it began twisting the wing-nut bolts studding its suit. Reaching back with its humanoid arms, it tinkered with the silver orb on its spine; the melon-sized hub from which the spider limbs sprang. It fumbled around for a moment, hissing softly.
“Can you help please, Kin-san? It is difficult to do this alone.”
Hesitantly, Kin stepped behind it, twisting each bolt dotting its spine, working several clasps under the False-Lifer’s direction. Yukiko heard a faint series of popping sounds, all over the grease-slick, gleaming body, followed by the wet sucking of air rushing into vacuum. The skin slackened, as if it were now a size too big. The thing tugged a zip cord running up to the base of its skull, another down to the small of its back. As Atsushi and Isao watched, revolted and fascinated, the False-Lifer bent double, and like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, chrysalis to imago, sloughed off its outer shell.
She was clad in a membrane of pale webbing beneath. Skin so pallid it was almost translucent. Her head utterly hairless; no eyelashes, eyebrows, nothing. Long slender limbs and tapered fingers, smooth curves studded with bayonet fixtures of black, gleaming metal. Seventeen, perhaps eighteen years old at most. Her lips were full and pouting, as if she’d been stung by something venomous, her features fragile and perfect; a porcelain doll on its first day in the sun. She narrowed her eyes, held one hand up against the light.
Inexplicably, Yukiko felt her heart sink.
She’s beautiful.
Kin scowled at the gawping boys and removed his uwagi, slipped it around the pale girl’s shoulders. Yukiko could see the same bayonet fixtures in his flesh, ruining smooth lines of lean muscle, fixed in the exact same location: wrists, shoulders, chest, collarbone, spine. The silver orb sat affixed to the girl’s back, spider limbs rippling, still making that horrid, inhuman noise. Yukiko pointed.
“Take those off too.”
“I cannot.” The girl’s voice sounded soft and sweet now that she was outside her skin, underscored with a thin, trembling fear. “They are part of me. Rooted in my spinal column.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“Please, I am not lying.” The girl wrung her hands, still squinting. Her eyes were a rich, earthen brown, pupils contracting to pinpricks. “I could just as easily take off my legs.”
ONE WITH THE MACHINE. SUCH MADNESS.
Yukiko scowled at the rippling silver fingers, needle-sharp, swollen-knuckled and gleaming with rain. She looked down at the False-Lifer’s toes, pressed into dark, wet earth, sick to her stomach. The headache slipped toward her temples, tightening at the base of her skull. A whisper. A promise.
“Bind her arms.” She glanced at Atsushi. “All of them.”
Kin looked vaguely hurt by the suggestion. “Yukiko, you don’t need to do that.”
“Please don’t tell me what I need, Kin.”
The girl folded her metallic arms at her back; functional limbs curling up like the legs of a dying spider, the broken one hanging near her shin, limp as a dead fish. Atsushi bound her with rope, wrapping it around her torso and pinning all her arms. Drawing a deep breath, steeling herself, the girl raised her eyes and looked at Yukiko for the first time. Her voice was almost lost beneath the whispering rain.
“Thank you for trusting me,” she said.
“I don’t trust you.”
“Then … thank you for not killing me.”
“Let’s get her back.” Yukiko motioned to the boys. “Isao, bury the skin deep as you can. Atsushi, come with us. I need to speak to Daichi.”
Isao nodded, started clearing a space of dead leaves. Atsushi poked the girl in the back with his nagamaki, hard enough for her to stumble. Kin reached out, caught her before she fell.
“Move,” Atsushi growled.
Yukiko moved off into the undergrowth with Buruu, skin prickling, head throbbing. Looki
ng back, she saw Kin had placed a steadying hand on the knots at Ayane’s back, helping her navigate the uneven ground. Atsushi tromped along behind, a dark scowl on his face.
Ayane kept her eyes downcast, voice low. But she was speaking. Furtive and clearly afraid. Stretching out into the minds of the forest around them, inundating herself in a cascading pain, Yukiko could hear every word the False-Lifer spoke. See her through a hundred pairs of eyes, feel the pulse of a hundred heartbeats.
Blood began dripping from her nose.
“Thank you, Kin-san,” Ayane was whispering.
“You have nothing to thank me for.” The boy shook his head. “We do what’s right up here. Yukiko’s a good person. She’s just suspicious of the Guild. She lost a lot because of them and the government. Most people here have.”
“Her father.”
“Friends too.”
“Are they going to hate me? The Kagé, I mean?”
“Probably.” Kin glanced back at Atsushi and his nagamaki. “They don’t trust our kind … I mean, the kind we used to be.”
“Then why do you stay?”
It was a long time before Kin answered; a wordless space filled by faint rain drumming on the canopy, as if a distant army were pounding earth with hollow bamboo. Yukiko could see him watching her, walking there in front of him, Buruu beside her. He looked at the forest, slowly turning the color of rust, cupped in the palms of autumn’s chill. And finally, he shrugged.
“Because there are things here I love. Because I’m part of this world, and I’ve sat by and watched it falling away for far too long, hoping someone else will save it.”
“So now you will save it, Kin-san? All by yourself?”
“Not by myself.” He shook his head. “We’re all in this together. We need more people to realize that. More people willing to stand up and say ‘enough.’ No matter what it costs.”
Ayane glanced at Kin and smiled, and her eyes sparkled like dew on polished stone. Beneath the fear, there was a strength in her voice, old as the mountains looming around them, deep as the earth beneath their feet.
“Enough,” she said.
The pain crested and swelled, hot and sharp, too much, too harsh. Yukiko broke away, slipped back into her own thoughts like a thief, wiping the blood from her lips. Buruu cast her a sideways glance, saying nothing, saying everything. She sniffed thickly, spat salty scarlet into the underbrush.
Hundreds of eyes followed them as they walked away.
6
DOWNSIDE UP
The other servants never called her by name.
The girl was short for her eighteen years, famine-thin, her impish face set with hollow cheeks and pointed chin. Raven-black hair was cut in a messy bob, damp with sweat. Her right eye was covered with a patch of dark leather, the faint stippling of scar tissue in her cheek, a deep hairless gouge bisecting her eyebrow. Her good eye was large, almost too round, so dark as to be nearly black.
A visitor to the Shōgun’s palace would have taken one look at her winter-pale complexion and wagered the girl was Kitsune-born—pasty as all the Fox clan were. But a glance beneath the cotton covering her right shoulder would have revealed no clan ink on her skin; shown her to be a lowborn mongrel, unfit for all but the most menial and unclean of labors.
Hence her nickname.
“You!” a voice called. “Shit Girl!”
The girl stopped in her tracks, sandals scuffing on polished floorboards. She turned to face the approaching house mistress, her gaze downcast, hands clasped together. As the plump, over-powdered woman stopped before her, the girl focused on the floor between her toes. Night was falling out in the palace grounds, but she could hear a lone sparrow singing—choking, really—its lungs full of oily lotus haze. The leaves in the wretched gardens were failing, autumn creeping into Kigen city and painting all with gray and rust-red during the sunlit hours. But the Shit Girl only roamed the palace after dark—the less seen of her in the harsh light of day, the better.
“My Lady?” she said.
“Where are you going?”
“The servant’s wing, my Lady.”
“The chamber pots in the guest wing need emptying when you’re done.”
She bowed. “Hai.”
“Go on then,” the woman waved. “And bathe tomorrow, for the Maker’s sake. There may be no Shōgun, but this is still the Shōgun’s palace. Serving here is an honor. Especially for one of your breed.”
“I will, my Lady. Thank you, my Lady.”
Bowing low, the girl waited for the mistress to retreat before continuing on her way. She shuffled to the servants’ quarters, the loose boards of the nightingale floor chirping and squeaking beneath her feet. Outside each door, a chamber pot awaited—black kiln-fired clay, a little smaller than an armful, with gifts inside just for her. She would carry each pot to a night soil drain at the rear of the grounds and dump the reeking contents. Wash them out and trudge back though the palace. Watching the slow, orchestrated chaos around her, ministers and soldiers and magistrates, scrabbling for power and gathering in tiny, muttering knots.
And she, beneath it all.
The house mistress had spoken truth—serving in the palace was an honor few lowborns ever enjoyed. Burakumin like her were the bottom of the barrel in Shima’s caste system, only employed at tasks regular citizens found unwholesome. Male clanless could join the army, of course, serve out a ten-year stint in exchange for genuine clan ink at the end of his tour. But that wasn’t an option for the Shit Girl, even if she felt the suicidal urge to serve as fodder for the gaijin lightning cannon. Besides, that plan hadn’t worked out so well for her father …
So here she was, slinging chamber pots in the Shōgun’s palace. Derided. Shunned. Constantly reminded she was unworthy of the honor. But lowborn or no, in the two years she’d worked those opulent halls, she’d learned a simple truth she’d suspected her entire life—no matter how honorable the backside producing it, shit never fails to stink.
Making her way back to the servant’s wing, she would slip the chamber pot through a slot in the bedroom doors, working her way down the row. Each room was sealed with a shiny new lock—Lady Aisha’s maidservants were all under house arrest, recently moved from Kigen jail. In fact, more than a few of the palace serving staff had been imprisoned after Shōgun Yoritomo’s death, suspected of either assisting the plot, or failing to stop it. But the Shit Girl? The clanless, worthless, bloodless mongrel wrapped in third-hand servant’s clothes? She swam as she always did. Beneath their contempt. Beneath their notice.
It had worked out well, all things considered.
She knelt by the final door in the row, reached inside her servant’s kimono and retrieved a small pad of rice-paper, a stick of charcoal. Glancing up and down the darkened corridor, she scrawled some hasty kanji on the paper, slipped it through the door slot.
“Daiyakawa,” it said.
The name of a little-known village somewhere in the northern Tora provinces, where years ago, a peasant uprising had been quietly quashed by Shōgunate troops. To most, the name would mean nothing. To the girl imprisoned within the room, everything.
Moments later, a note was slipped back through the slot, kanji marked in lipstick.
“Who are you?”
And so it began. Paper slipping into the hall, her eye scanning the notes, replies marked on the flip side. Listening for approaching footsteps as the girl imprisoned within the room scratched a new message, passed it through the space between doorframe and nightingale floor.
“Call me No One, Michi-chan. Kaori sends regards.”
“Do I know you?” came Michi’s response.
“Have served in palace two years, but you would not know me. Joined local Kagé a few weeks ago.”
“Why join now?”
“Saw Stormdancer speak in Market Square. Told me to raise my fist. So here I am.”
A small pause.
“And here I am.”
“Can you escape room?”
&nb
sp; “Tried. Ceiling panels bolted in place. Window barred.”
“Why return here after Yoritomo died? Must have known you would be arrested.”
“Could not leave Aisha behind.”
“Brave.”
“Overheard rumors. Wedding? Lord Hiro?”
“True. Invitations sent to clanlords. Date set. Three weeks.”
“Aisha would never agree.”
“No choice.”
“Can speak to her?”
“Royal wing guarded like prison. Aisha never leaves rooms.”
“I must get out of here.”
“Magistrate Ichizo has only key.”
Another pause.
“Not for long.”
No One heard creaking footsteps, the low murmurs of two approaching bushimen.
“Must go. Light red candle in window when free to speak.”
Standing quickly, the girl scooped up the chamber pot and shuffled down the corridor, heart pounding in her chest. She forced her hands to be still, her breath to slow. But the guards gave her and her stinking armload a wide berth, neither of them sparing her a glance. Everyone knew who she was. Everyone knew to ignore her. This was the fate of the clanless in Shima—to be treated as less than a person. All her life, she’d been a walking, breathing absentee. Seldom spoken to. Never touched. For all intents and purposes, invisible.
It had worked out well, all things considered.
* * *
When she was a little girl, No One thought the smokestacks made the clouds. She remembered playing around the walls of Yama refinery with her brother, watching filthy children tramp in and out of wrought-iron gates to a steam whistle tune, jealous they got to work in a place so magical. Trudging home through the wretched streets of Downside, she felt a pang of remorse for that childish ignorance.
The chi refinery grew like a tumor off Kigen Bay; a tangled briar of swollen pipes and bloated tanks, glowering over the labyrinthine alleys with grubby glass eyes. Chimneys dotted with burning floodlights spattered the sky with tar, smothering the broken-back tumbledowns about it in a blanket of choking vapor. A corroded pipeline as tall as houses wormed out of the refinery’s bowels, north across the sluggish black depths of the Junsei River. Ramshackle apartment stacks and crumbling lean-tos lined the oil-slick streets of Downside—the cheapest and meanest stretch of broken cobbles in all of Kigen. A body had to be poor or desperate to even consider hanging her hat there.
