Storm

by Amanda Sun

  “Greene?” Ishikawa called. He and Tomo were halfway across the bridge already. “Little help?”

  I ran toward them, wrapping my arms around Tomo’s to help guide him across.

  “I’m okay,” Tomo said quietly. “I just need to...keep breathing...”

  I could hear the water swirling below us. Was the ink forming into something?

  We were near the other shore now. The fall weather meant not as many tourists around, but there were still enough to make things difficult. Tomo squeezed around the other side of the torii, to the other visitors’ confusion. They turned and bowed underneath the gateway, giving us a look of disapproval, like we’d just eaten the last piece of the birthday girl’s cake.

  “Never mind them.” Ishikawa laughed. “You’re the heir of a god, Yuuto. Who cares what they think?” I knew he was just trying to take Tomo’s mind off it, but it sounded eerily like the things Jun was always saying. You’re not human. You’re a prince destined to rule.

  The path turned sharply to the right through a huge expanse of gardens that were probably impressive in season. As it was, everything looked half-dead and grim, like some sort of apocalypse had hit.

  We were at the base of the mountains now, and they rose all around us, rolling hills blanketed entirely with trees. It felt like a different world. No wonder Tomo had said it was the Heavenly Bridge of the kami that we’d crossed. Something felt different here. I had so little ink in me, not even mine by right, and yet I could feel it pulling me forward, could feel it swirling as we neared the mirror.

  Tons of small shrines dotted the area. At the end of the clearing, several stone stairs rose up to a shrine flanked by wooden fences that blocked off the area beyond. Above the fence loomed two thatched, angular roofs, the tops of the roof extending out like a bright white X. The other shrines were easy to access, and each of them had a little touristy kanji sign beside it. Not so helpful for me, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t need a sign to know what the barricaded area was.

  The shrine of Amaterasu herself. The home of the mirror.

  And completely off-limits.

  Here we go again. Was Jun going to interfere again, all the way from Shizuoka? Was he even that powerful?

  “All right,” Ishikawa said. “Plans? There’s a large temple there.” He pointed to a building on our right, made of dark wood and white with golden scrollwork that wrapped around the rooftops. “The sign says it’s dedicated to Amaterasu.”

  Tomo shook his head, his eyes staying on the thatched rooftop behind the wall. “It’s in there,” he said. “It’s calling.”

  “You need to get your ears checked,” Ishikawa said, looking along the perimeter of the fence. Would a sacred site like this have guards? He glanced at the myriad priests walking around in their long white and yellow robes. “We could probably outrun them in that getup,” he added.

  “Could you be serious for a minute?” I said. “Unlike you, I don’t have a criminal record, and I want to keep it that way.”

  He narrowed his eyes at me. “Why’d you invite her along, anyway?”

  I fumed. “You weren’t even invited!”

  “Sato,” Tomo said, his voice trembling. “Katie.”

  “Tomo?”

  He climbed the steps one at a time, his arm reaching toward the wall. “My whole life I’ve fought against this curse, never thinking that I could be free of the ink, never understanding why it was so destructive.” He closed his eyes at the top, lowering his head as he gritted his teeth. “There’s a war inside me, right now. I’m tired of the noise. I’m ready for the truth. And to see that, I need to get to that mirror. No matter the consequences.”

  “I get it,” Ishikawa said softly. “The consequences are a lot bigger than jail time, huh?”

  Tomo stepped toward the wall, running his hand along the wood panel. “Takahashi said I’d take out a whole sector of Japan.”

  “Stay here,” Ishikawa said, pulling his dark news cap over his white hair. He shoved his hands into his pockets and strolled along the side of the wall, as if he was just another tourist. He blended right in—you could tell he’d had experience with this kind of thing.

  “Couldn’t you just draw a door again?” I asked, but Tomo shook his head.

  “Too much of a crowd. Anyway, the sections of fence I could draw on are against steep cliffs. I don’t think I could make the climb.”

  I glanced at Ishikawa out of the corner of my eye. He was standing by priest’s booth at the left of the stairs, which was attached to the long wall. The cloth lightning bolts attached to the hut fluttered in the wind, floating up toward the tree branches. “Too bad we can’t just fly,” I said.

  Tomo smirked. “I think ink wings would get just as much attention.”

  Ishikawa turned around and started walking toward the little building at the bottom of the stairs, where bamboo ladles were laid out to wash our hands before approaching the shrines. My heart was pounding, but I tried to walk down the stairs as casually as I could. I already looked out of place being the only blonde tourist at Ise Jingu this late in the year.

  Three priests passed us on their way up the stairs. “There’s so many of them,” I whispered to Tomo.

  “Yeah, more than five hundred.”

  I gaped. “Five hundred?”

  “That’s why we have to tread carefully. Believe me, Katie, every fiber in my soul wants me to break down that fence and get to the mirror. But I can’t be so reckless. If I am, then Takahashi will win.”

  “Don’t worry about him right now,” I said. “Right now we need to fight Tsukiyomi.”

  Tomo grimaced as we walked toward Ishikawa. The copper spikes of his hair flopped against his head, slicked with sweat. How much energy was it taking for him not to lose control?

  Ishikawa stepped toward us, hands still in his pockets. “Sorry, Yuuto.”

  “I figured,” Tomo said.

  “We’ll come back at night,” I said. “There’s tons of forest all around the inner shrine. I’m sure there’s got to be a way.”

  “I have an idea or two,” Tomo said.

  “Right,” Ishikawa said. “Lunchtime.”

  We wandered through the complex, the gravel crunching underneath our feet. The trees towered above us, their trunks covered in green moss and ropes draped with Shinto cloth thunderbolts. Tomo reached for my hand and threaded his fingers through mine. The motion startled me—it wasn’t like him to do that with so many people around. He was wincing with every step. I squeezed his hand. I could feel the power of Amaterasu here, too. It was like the dreams I’d had, but clearer, stronger. “Just a little longer,” I whispered to him.

  We found an udon place just outside Uji Bridge in the maze of ancient shops, and slurped the noodles down as quickly as they came out of the kitchen. Tomo ordered Ise Ebi with his, which I thought was a kind of shrimp, but it turned out to be a lobster with crazy antennae that could just about catch TV signals all the way from New York. They garnished his bowl with the head of the weird shellfish.

  “That thing’s creepy,” I said, flicking the antenna with my chopsticks. It swung back and forth, waving like a flagpole over his udon.

  “It’s tasty,” Tomo said, dropping a square of the meat into my noodle bowl. Seafood wasn’t my favorite thing, but I’d had lobster a couple times with Mom when we’d visited her friends in Maine. I popped the cube of Ise Ebi into my mouth and chewed. A little rubbery, but soft, like it had been soaked in butter.

  “Pretty good,” I decided.

  “So?” Ishikawa said. “How are we going to get to that mirror?”

  I put my finger to my lips. “You want the whole city to know?”

  Tomo didn’t look up from his noodles, the broth glistening on his lips. “Katie came up with a plan.”

  “Er... I did?”
>
  Tomo grinned, a dark look in his eyes. “We need to fly over that fence.”

  “Muri yo,” Ishikawa warned, shaking his head. “You know how that went down last time.”

  “He’s right,” I said. “No dragons. They’ll torch the place and probably eat you.”

  “I’m not planning on dragons,” Tomo said, resting his chopsticks on top of the now-empty bowl. “I need something that can fly, but also something nimble and quiet on the gravel or through the trees. And something that’s less likely to turn on me.”

  “Everything’s going to turn on you,” I said. “You know that, right?”

  “The horse I drew didn’t,” he said. “Remember?”

  I did. I could never forget riding the paper horse around Toro Iseki, my arms wrapped around Tomo as we galloped through the ancient village together.

  “Horses can’t jump that wall,” Ishikawa said.

  “A kirin can,” Tomo said.

  “A kirin?” I said.

  Ishikawa scrunched up his face, swiveling on his bar stool at the restaurant counter. “You’re going to draw a giraffe?”

  Tomo reached across me to swat Ishikawa in the head.

  “I-te!” Ishikawa cried out.

  “Not a giraffe, you idiot. The other kirin. The horse with one horn.”

  “A unicorn?” My eyes bulged. “A unicorn is your master plan?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not exactly a unicorn. It’s part goat, part ox, part dragon...actually, I don’t really know what it is. But I know it’ll get us over that wall, and probably without trying to maul us.”

  “Probably being the key word.” Ishikawa smirked.

  We counted out our yen and left the restaurant, nothing to do now but wait for nightfall.

  A kirin, an Asian unicorn. It was scary to think about Tomo drawing anything right now, knowing how unstable he was. And in the heart of Ise Jingu, here in Amaterasu’s shrine.

  There was no way this could go well.

  * * *

  Tomo’s hand moved in the darkness, the pen scratching across a page in his notebook. Ishikawa held his phone up to light the page, the ghostly LED light gleaming off of the nearby cedar and cypress trees. The air smelled sweet and cold, and of a fire lit somewhere nearby. Maybe by the priests, I thought; we’d spent some of our spare time waiting for night by researching the shrine, and had discovered all kinds of rituals the priests went through at different times of the day.

  My legs pulsed with pins and needles as we crouched near the perimeter of the Naiku shrine. We’d managed to cross Uji Bridge without notice, but with the main shrine closed at night, we’d veered off into the forests to get as close to the wooden fence as possible.

  “Keep the light down,” Tomo whispered, and Ishikawa readjusted the phone. A beam of light could give us away easily to any priests that might be watching. Did shrines like this have security at night? I wasn’t even sure, but I doubted we could just walk in and handle one of Japan’s national treasures without someone asking what we were doing.

  I wrapped my arms around myself, my coat buttoned all the way to the top. I’d slicked my hair back in a ponytail, tucking the end of it into my collar. If we were seen, I’d be the easiest one to spot. How many blonde girls were in Ise City at the time of the break and enter? I knew at least the train station would have video of me.

  Tomo’s fingers arced across the page, his face calm and focused. Drawing for him was dangerous, but it was also what he loved most in life. You could see it in his eyes, the joy his art brought him. I leaned over to see the drawing.

  The sketch looked a lot like the horse he’d drawn that day in Toro Iseki, but the proportions were different. The legs of the animal were slender and curvy, each ending in a cloven deer hoof. He shaded the cleft in darkly, sketching jig-jagged flops of fur over the ankles. The face was broader than a horse’s, more angular, more dragon-like. He drew sharp, pointed tufts of ears under a mop of floppy mane and then sketched in scales on the creature’s face and along the stomach—scales, like a reptile. I’d never seen a unicorn that looked like this.

  Tomo let out a breath, his hand trembling on the page.

  “Tomo?”

  His eyes were vacant pools of black, his drawing happening without his consciousness anymore.

  Ishikawa saw it, too, and his eyes widened. “Shit, Greene,” he said. “What now?”

  I could hear the voices gathering on the wind as the world began to blur in muted rainbow colors. It was strange, seeing colors in the night, but I could see them whirling around us, ghostly on the wind. A negative rainbow, a darker, softly glowing version of the kind that might spread across the sky. Murky lilacs and muted blues swirled on the wind, yellows that were like tarnished gold, and reds like blackened blood.

  Somewhere in the distance, I heard Ishikawa’s echoing voice. “Greene? Greene!”

  The world was drifting in stars, sparks of light everywhere around us, lit like beacons in the forest.

  I was between worlds, between the Kami and myself. I could feel it. I was drifting, like Tomo must be.

  Something cold and strong grabbed my arm.

  “Greene!”

  I shook my head and the colors faded, the whispers quieted. Ishikawa stood over me, his face knit up in confusion. “What’s going on?”

  “Sorry,” I said. My throat felt like I hadn’t used it in a thousand years. “It’s the ink. Tomo’s stirring it up, and I must have lost control.”

  Tomo was still lost, briskly sketching in a lion’s tail that splayed into feathered plumes. The tail flicked across the page as he filled in the details. One of the cloven hooves pawed the ground and the page ripped underneath the motion, curling up in a tiny spiral of torn paper.

  The kirin looked like some kind of elegant but terrifying cross between a deer and a dragon. I didn’t know how else to explain it—it was both primal and otherworldly at the same time. It looked like something that could exist, maybe, or could’ve existed, if only the boundaries of imagination were pushed just a little further.

  Tomo shifted his pen toward the head of the kirin, and the scales he’d drawn sliced into the side of his hand. Trickles of blood beaded on his skin as he drew in the horn of the creature, but not the small golden spiral that I associated with unicorns. Instead, he drew a single antler, jagged and rough and ancient. It didn’t point forward like a unicorn, but tipped back over the creature’s ears and neck, jutting out in knobs of polished bone.

  There was a rustle of leaves as the wind lifted around us, as it blew the scent of cedar and cypress around us. But there was another scent on the wind, something like the musty fur and hoofs of a wild animal.

  The whispers were on the wind once more, the rainbow colors faintly visible.

  The kirin stood among the trees, its head bobbing slowly as it took in the dark surroundings. Ink poured down from its withers like a constant waterfall, coating the creature with moving liquid fur, staining its hooves and the grass below them. The ink lifted from the ground around the animal in a shimmer of glistening, oily mauve.

  Its eyes gleamed with an unnerving white light, and when it flicked its tail, ink splattered on the cypress trunks around it. An old string looped around its antler in a tangle, and from it hung small magatama-shaped jewels that shone with lights of dark turquoise and sapphire. They swung and clinked together as the animal shook its head. Cold air swirled in a cloud around the kirin’s nostrils as it snorted.

  Ishikawa stared, his face frozen between awe and fear. He raised his phone to take a photo, but the animal bayed and he dropped it to the forest floor, the LED light illuminating the curve of an unfurled fern.

  “Put it away,” I hissed. It didn’t seem like a good idea to have photo evidence of Tomo’s drawing come to life. Ishikawa stooped down and pocketed the phone, his
eyes never leaving the kirin.

  Tomo’s pen dropped from his hand as he slumped forward over his notebook.

  “Tomo,” I said, resting a hand on his back. I kept the kirin in the corner of my eye, in case it decided to charge at us.

  “I’m okay,” he panted. I tried to see his eyes, but without Ishikawa’s phone we were just silhouettes in the dark.

  There was a crunching sound, and I looked up to see the kirin wading through the dried leaves to reach us. I tried to pull Tomo back with me, in case it wanted to maul him, but it moved slowly, its delicate hoofs somehow supporting its strong, powerful frame. The creature was taller and wider than a horse, but graceful on its hoofs, quiet. When Tomo didn’t budge, I stepped away, pressing my back against a nearby cedar tree. The kirin reached its large muzzle out toward Tomo and snorted, the air ruffling Tomo’s hair.

  “Yuuto,” Ishikawa said softly, his hands up in case things went wrong. “It has teeth, man. Get up.”

  Tomo lifted his hand slowly to the muzzle of the kirin. The tiny trails of blood had dried on the back of his hand. The creature shook its neck, black liquid spattering the trees, its scales shimmering in the moonlight before the ink flooded over them again. The jewels suspended from its antler glowed with their dark blue light.

  It hadn’t attacked us yet. Maybe it was a stable drawing, like the horse. But why were the drawings sometimes stable? I shook my head. There was always a flaw. Tomo was too powerful to ever stay in control for long.

  He must have thought the same thing, because he rose to his feet, tucking his notebook and pen into his backpack and slinging it over his shoulder. “We don’t have much time,” he said, his eyes never leaving the creature.

  Ishikawa stepped carefully toward the kirin and interlaced his fingers, palms up. Tomo pressed his hand against Ishikawa’s shoulder and rested his knee into the locked hands. With a nod, Ishikawa pushed Tomo’s knee upward just as Tomo leaped off the ground. He sailed through the air and onto the kirin’s back. The movement had looked way too practiced; I bet they’d snuck into a lot of places back in Shizuoka.