by Jay Kristoff
“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 s
ilent 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.
