A Mortal Song

by Megan Crewe

  This body might be slower and heavier without the aid of ki, but now that I was adjusting to that, I knew the dance of combat as well as I ever had.

  Still, it was also a body that tired quickly. My muscles burned as we burst into the hall. I glanced behind us. A stream of ghostlights was pouring out of the audience room in pursuit.

  “Keep going!” I shouted to the others. My parents were hustling onward, but the older man’s strength appeared to be flagging. I caught up with him as I dashed to the corner that led to the palace’s long main hall. His breath was coming in wheezes.

  “Just a little farther,” I said to him.

  A figure whipped around us with a blast of ki so strong it tingled to my core. The kami guard who’d transferred Inoue’s spirit held out his hand to me. I guessed he’d slipped his minders in the confusion.

  “Thank you,” I gasped, shoving a bundle of ofuda to him. He whirled around me again, banishing a cluster of ghostlights right behind me.

  We raced down the hall. Up ahead, Mrs. Ikeda stumbled, and Mr. Ikeda slowed to steady her.

  “Hurry!” I said. “We’re almost there.” The door was just beyond them, the painted crane with its wings spread beckoning us from the paper panel. I leapt to make sure they didn’t run past it.

  A fresh wave of ghostlights surged around us. As they started to solidify, I dug into my satchel and tossed salt in a circle around us. The dim shapes cringed back with a hiss, but a group of them had fallen on the older man behind me. He collapsed to the floor as they swarmed over him.

  “No!” I cried, reaching for another handful of salt. Before I could close my fingers around it, the air reverberated with a gunshot.

  Mr. Ikeda lurched against the wall. Blood welled through his shirt where he clutched his side. My stomach flipped over.

  With a silent, pained apology to the man we were abandoning, I sprinted the last few feet and hauled open the door. “We can make it,” I said, wrapping my arm around Mr. Ikeda’s shoulders to urge him through the doorway. Another shot rang out as we squeezed inside. I didn’t dare look behind me. If we could just get to the tourist stop with its shops and buses, we’d find help there.

  Mr. Ikeda’s breath had gone ragged, but he hurried on, Mrs. Ikeda close behind him. I jerked the door shut before running after them, sprinkling more salt on the floor as I went. That should at least stop the ghosts from following us directly.

  We hurried through the cave and staggered from the narrow crevice into the forest. “This way,” I said, clambering along the slope. It wouldn’t be long before the ghosts warned the sentries outside.

  One materialized in front of me and vanished just as swiftly with my thrust of an ofuda. Others turned corporeal above us, their shoes crunching over the pine needles. I urged the Ikedas in front of me along a winding path through the trees, hoping the trunks would shield us from bullets. Mr. Ikeda was still holding his side, his face streaked with sweat. Mrs. Ikeda gripped his arm. She cringed as a gunshot crackled behind us and pulled him along faster.

  A ghost charged up behind me, and I whipped around just long enough to banish him. Another shot rang out. Bark burst on the pine I’d just passed. I ran on, my thoughts rattling through my head. Were we leading a pack of murderers straight into a crowd of innocent tourists? Should we head for the road instead—surely someone there would stop and help us? The ghosts couldn’t outrun a car.

  “Sora,” Mrs. Ikeda whispered, looking up. I followed her gaze and blinked, not quite believing my eyes.

  A scarlet kite was soaring above the treetops. Dark green paint streaked across the fabric. The wind shifted, and I saw the name written on it.

  Sora.

  Someone had come for us. For me.

  Whoever it was had to be at the tourist stop—that was the only place nearby there’d be room to send up a real kite. With renewed vigor, I scrambled onward. Mr. Ikeda teetered. I lunged between two ghosts who appeared by his side and banished them. I only had four ofuda left, clutched in my right hand. My left closed around my last fistful of salt. But with a few more steps, I made out the shining colors of the cars in the parking lot through the tree trunks.

  The sharp snap of a gunshot split the air behind us, and my shoulder jerked forward with a lance of pain. My fingers twitched, dropping the salt. I cried out and pushed myself faster.

  We burst onto the thick grass between the forest and the parking lot. Amid the buses and cars, the kite’s string sliced down from the sky into the hands of a shaggy-haired boy in a rumpled blue T-shirt.

  My heart stuttered. “Keiji!” I yelled.

  He turned as we reached the pavement. “Keep after them!” a voice shouted behind us. Keiji must have seen the panic flash across my face. The kite string slipped from his fingers, and he dashed to a car parked a few feet away. Mrs. Ikeda and I helped Mr. Ikeda over the low fence surrounding the lot, ignoring the stares of the tourists.

  A slate-gray sedan jolted to a halt in front of us. Keiji waved us in from the driver’s seat. I yanked open the back door and pulled Mr. Ikeda inside, Mrs. Ikeda clambering in after us.

  “Go!” I said as she slammed the door. The car lurched forward and roared toward the road.

  “I can’t drive too fast,” Keiji said. “If I’m speeding... Technically the fact that I’m driving at all is illegal.”

  “I think this is fast enough,” I said, glancing through the back window. If the ghosts were still following us, they were staying hidden amid the trees.

  Mr. Ikeda groaned, slumping in the middle seat. Blood was seeping over his fingers. I pulled out my short sword and cut a strip off the bottom of my tunic. Then I leaned over and wrapped the fabric around his middle as tightly as I could.

  “We’ll get you to a hospital,” I said. And then, to Keiji, “There’s one in the first town this road passes through. We’ll have to turn at the first major road and watch for the signs.”

  He nodded, his knuckles pale where he was gripping the steering wheel. They whitened further as the car bumped over an uneven patch in the asphalt. I hesitated, watching the profile of his face.

  He’d come. Not Takeo or Chiyo or any of the kami, who might have had half a chance of taking on an army of ghosts alone, but him.

  Of course, they would never have thought to bring a car. Which was exactly what we’d needed.

  My own wound throbbed. I examined my shoulder. The bullet appeared to have only grazed me, but the short sleeve of my shirt was damp with blood. I cut another strip off the bottom and wound it around the side of my shoulder until the ends were short enough to tie. It still hurt, but at least that should contain the bleeding.

  My mind tripped back to our dash through the palace’s hall, to the older man who’d fallen. What had the ghosts done to him? What were they doing to him right now? If only I’d...

  But I couldn’t think of any way I could have gotten all of us out alive. It seemed like a miracle any of us had escaped.

  Mrs. Ikeda rubbed her husband’s back. He sighed. I glanced over at them and found them both watching me.

  “Thank you,” Mr. Ikeda said. He laid the fingers of his unbloodied hand over mine. “Daughter?”

  My arms stiffened. They were looking at me so earnestly. Hopeful, even after everything we’d just been through. This was what they’d come to the mountain for, after all. To find their real daughter.

  “Yes,” I said. My throat was so tight the word came out in a whisper.

  Mrs. Ikeda—my mother—leaned forward. “I am so sorry,” she said. “I should have known, we should have known, the moment we saw you. To not even recognize our own child... I can’t blame you for keeping your distance.”

  I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. Compassion told me to reach out to her, to reassure her that everything between us was fine now. Except it wasn’t. They were my birth parents. I hadn’t wanted them to die. But they were still the people who’d given me up, who’d traded my life for Chiyo’s.

  “It’ll take time,
” my father murmured. His head drooped against the back of the seat, but his gaze was steady as he held mine. “You don’t know us. And we don’t really know you yet.”

  “But we want to,” my mother broke in. “We want to very, very much. Every night, we looked toward Mt. Fuji and prayed that you were safe and well. We talked about what you might be doing, how you’d be growing up... I kept an album for you, with photographs and notes. To help you get back what you missed, when you returned to us.”

  The tangle inside me loosened just a little.

  “The kami were good to me,” I said. “I was happy on Mt. Fuji. I have to keep trying to help them. But I do want to know you too. When this war is over...”

  She nodded. “You must come by. We’ll look at the album together, and we’ll talk, and it’ll get easier. I’m sure it will. There is a space in our home waiting for you, whenever you’re ready to take it.”

  “I’ll come,” I said. It seemed better not to make any promise more specific than that.

  The slope of the road flattened as we left the mountain behind. Keiji drove through the thinning forest and into town. A few minutes after he turned off the highway, passing within a few streets of the Nagamotos’ house, we spotted the hospital’s sign.

  My mother and I helped my father out of the car and into the Emergency waiting area. As a nurse hustled over to help, I squeezed his hand and slipped back outside. I watched my birth parents be ushered down the hallway by a doctor. Then I opened the front passenger door of the car and sat down beside Keiji.

  “Okay,” I said.

  He didn’t ask what I meant. He just hit the gas and swung the car toward the highway.

  “Are you okay?” he asked after a minute.

  “Yes. Getting there.” But I might not have been if he hadn’t shown up. I groped for the right words, but nothing seemed adequate. “Thank you,” I said.

  He shrugged, his gaze darting to me and then back to the road. “I figured I owed you. Got you into trouble before, maybe this time I could get you out of it.”

  His light-hearted tone sounded forced. The memory of the “trouble before” hung between us. I ran my fingers along the edge of the leather seat. “Where did you get the car?”

  Keiji hesitated. “It’s—it was—my brother’s. He started taking me out where there weren’t many people around and teaching me how to drive when I was, like, twelve. Even kept up the lessons now and then after... you know.”

  Tension strained the corners of his eyes and mouth, as if he didn’t know whether to be sad or angry. The feeling echoed inside me. I thought of my human parents and of Mother and Father, decisions made and lies told, and how far I’d fought for them all the same. Betrayal didn’t stop you from caring about someone.

  “He mattered a lot to you,” I said.

  “He wasn’t a bad guy,” Keiji said in a rush. “Obviously he’s got his priorities all out of whack now, but he was always there for me, even when I was being a dumb little brother. I don’t know if I’d have made it as long as I have without him.”

  Looking at him, my pulse skipped in a now-familiar way. It wasn’t so hard to believe that he could have been misled by his brother without actually meaning to hurt us, was it? That he could have managed to ignore his suspicions about Tomoya’s true intentions? I’d missed the hints that Keiji was hiding something from me because I’d been so wrapped up in the idea of how he felt about me, and I’d known him less than a week. He’d depended on Tomoya all his life.

  But that hadn’t stopped him from rising to my defense when his brother had attacked me. From staying by my side after I’d banished Tomoya. Even now, he’d known he could be arrested for driving, he could have been swarmed by hostile ghosts, but he’d come anyway, for me.

  Something opened up in my chest, as if a shell protecting my heart had cracked open and fallen away. Keiji had picked me. And it wasn’t out of some inherent need to be loyal, like Takeo, but because he’d decided to.

  At the thought of Takeo, my muscles tensed. Despite the note I’d written, he wouldn’t have been happy about my disappearance. “What did you tell the others when you left?” I asked.

  “I kept my promise,” Keiji said. “I didn’t say anything about you. Actually, I didn’t tell them anything at all. You left, and I was sitting there, and I thought of the car and how in dangerous operations people always need a getaway vehicle, and... I didn’t want something to happen to you because I couldn’t get my act together in time. So I just went. They probably figure I ran off to find my brother.”

  “Well, when we catch up with them, they’ll see that wasn’t true. We should go back to Tokyo and check whether they’ve left a message for us, and then follow them to Ise.” If the fight went long or Takeo felt Chiyo needed more recovery time before rushing in, we might even be able to help there.

  “I don’t really care what they think,” Keiji said. “As long as...” He nudged his glasses up on his nose. “I know I was stupid, and I screwed things up. I lied about what was happening with Tomoya. But I want you to know, everything else, all the other things I said to you—I really meant them.”

  My lungs felt suddenly empty. I grasped for something to say, but all that came out was, “Okay.”

  He swallowed. “I know everything with us is probably too messed up now, and I’m not as strong or as brave or as whatever as Takeo is, but—”

  “Of course you are,” I interrupted, the words startled back into me. “You’re just as brave as him.”

  “Right,” Keiji said with a disbelieving laugh.

  “I mean it,” I said. “Takeo just is the way he is, the way kami are. His nature tells him how to react. When the people he’s loyal to are threatened, he defends them. It’s not really about bravery.” I remembered with a pang how I’d wished to be Sora the strong, charging into every situation without worries or fear. “Being human, the answers aren’t obvious. You have to choose whether you do the difficult thing or the easy thing. It takes a lot more courage to do the difficult thing you don’t have to do, that scares you, than to just... follow what you automatically know to do. So you’re more brave than he is, or Chiyo, really.”

  I stopped. Maybe I could have said the same thing about myself.

  Keiji’s lips curled slightly upward. “So... you don’t hate me then?”

  “Hate you?” The way I’d spoken to him in the keep, the way I’d avoided him afterward. Yes, it could have looked that way. “No,” I said. I’d felt anger, confusion, and hurt, certainly, but not hate. But saying that didn’t seem like enough. “I’m glad you came. It would have been really hard getting out of there without you.”

  He was definitely smiling now. I hadn’t seen his usual grin since we’d arrived in Tokyo, and I’d missed it.

  Then a shadow crossed his expression. “What your kami friend who escaped said about Omori’s plans... Did you see— Are they really—”

  The memory of the young woman’s body shuddering leapt into my mind, and bile rose to the back of my mouth. “They’re doing it,” I said quietly. “I saw— Omori forced one of the kami to put a ghost into a woman they’d kidnapped. It looked like, afterward, the woman’s spirit was just gone.” Smothered by the invader.

  “I don’t understand how Tomoya can think it’s right to take someone else’s life,” Keiji said. “I guess Omori has them all convinced... Maybe he’ll think twice now that he’s seen how humans can fight back.”

  “I don’t think he’d be that easily swayed,” I said. What had Omori made of our escape? I’d been too busy fending off ghosts to notice his reaction.

  Maybe he’d already put it out of his mind, focusing on the next steps of his plan. If the dead could become so wrapped up in their last thoughts they hardly noticed anything else, and Omori had already been inclined toward intense concentration, his mindset might be even narrower.

  But it had appeared as if there were still something more in him. I’d seen that moment of confusion. If any part of the man he’d b
een remained, if what Mrs. Kobayashi had said about him were even partly true, I couldn’t imagine he’d have felt at ease with his current methods. Was there some way we could reach that part of him, that was barely more than a glimmer?

  I rubbed my face. It wasn’t likely Omori would give us a chance.

  Keiji pulled a CD out of a thin binder attached to the flap over his head and inserted it into a slot in the dashboard. “You’re into music, right?” he said. “This band is one of my favorites.”

  A rumble of drums rolled from the speakers in a slow but powerful rhythm. One guitar and then another sprinkled the beat with a twisting line of notes. The soft keen of a violin lifted to meet them. Finally, a voice at turns smooth and ragged wound out between the instruments, singing his love for the town he called home. I let my head sink back, breathing in the song.

  “I like this,” I said, and Keiji’s smile returned.

  “Ah,” he said a few minutes later as the road curved past the first block of glinting high rises. “Back in the big city.”

  I peered out the window. Shops and office buildings whipped by. And then, in the window of a travel agency, a poster featuring a vibrant photo of Mt. Fuji.

  The sight broke me out of the music’s reverie. All those tour buses, the tourists wandering the parking lot and the courtyard, climbing to the peak. The tremors hadn’t put that much of a dent in the crowds.

  Tomorrow night, the veil between the afterworld and the world of the living would dim, and Omori’s army would have a hoard of unsuspecting bodies right there for the taking.

  Keiji had to park the car on a street a few blocks from the shrine. We hurried the rest of the way back, impatient to be continuing to Ise. Despite the torn hem of my shirt fluttering around my waist, the sword slung at my hip, and the dappling of blood surrounding the makeshift bandage on my shoulder, I received only a few brief stares from passers-by. For a couple of minutes, being lost in the city crowd was almost relaxing. No ghosts, no guns, no demons or ogres. The urban bustle wasn’t so bad.