by Paul Krueger
She thought of the ways Jimuro formed his words, of the guttural tone she would have to use to sound like a proper native speaker. And when she thought she had a grip on the accent, she opened her mouth and said, “We don’t want any—”
The car rocketed away from her and toward the blockade, its open door flapping like a broken wing.
The Shang officer’s eyes bugged out as the car careened toward him. He fired a shot, but it went wild as he reeled from the fresh gunshot wound that had just blossomed across his chest. Tala whipped her gun over to the next-closest target, her soldier’s instincts keeping her panic at bay. Normally, panic would have had no place on her battlefield, but she wasn’t fighting alongside the fire-forged vets of the 13-52-2. She was fighting with a mad prince who seemed even more determined to kill himself than the rest of the world was.
Before the officer had a chance to fall, the black car rammed into him and flipped him right over its roof. The other soldiers scattered with a shout, but the Shang car couldn’t move in time. It crumpled like a can and screeched as Jimuro’s car dragged it across the face of the road.
“Your Bril—” Tala shouted before she caught herself. She took aim at the remaining soldiers as they broke for the tree line, only for her gun to click empty. Of course. She gritted her teeth and growled as she stared at the retreating blotches of red in the foliage. Instinct told her that they’d seen too much, and that she had no choice now but to pursue them with Beaky and make sure they didn’t get a chance to report any of it. But her sense of duty stayed her as she turned to eye the dented wreck of their car. She had to make sure the idiot prince hadn’t just rendered their entire mission moot.
The driver’s-side door of their car flung itself open, and Prince Jimuro climbed out. He wobbled unsteadily on his feet but otherwise looked no worse for the wear. “Lowlifes!” he bellowed at the trees. “Barbarians! Slavers! Come back here, you cowards, so I can send you to whatever—”
Without even skipping a beat, Tala stomped the distance between them and belted him right in the face, sending him spilling to the ground. Before he had a chance to sputter his outrage, she stood over him, pinning him by the chest with her boot. “What the hell were you thinking?” she roared.
“That someone needed to do something!” Prince Jimuro shouted, shoving her foot off him and sitting up.
“Not that!” Tala said, gesturing to the twisted, bichromatic lump of metal that was the wrecked cars. “What was in your head, soldier? What were you thinking right then, except that you wanted to play hero, and you didn’t give a shit what happened next?”
“I was thinking,” snarled the prince, “that these monsters have been a parasite on the people I’m supposed to protect and serve. Someone has to stand up for the people of Tomoda.”
“The people of Tomoda…!” Tala roared, then fell silent.
“What?” Jimuro said. “What is it? Are you going to tell me my people deserve bandits on their streets? Bombs falling from their skies? Empty pockets and salted fields?”
“Yes,” Tala said, though her thoughts betrayed her.
He threw his arms up in fury. “Then why are you even putting yourself through this, Sergeant?”
“Because unlike you steelhounds, I have honor,” Tala snarled. “This was unacceptable. I have a mission to complete, and we can’t fulfill it by gambling with your life. It’s too…” She hesitated. “Valuable.”
The prince’s jaw set. “A king should fight for his people. If I don’t fight for mine, then my life isn’t worth a fraction of the price you claim.”
It made Tala want to tear her hair out. How was it possible for someone to be so right and so wrong at the same time?
She brushed past him. “Arguing further is pointless. We have to make it to the next checkpoint before sundown. Is the car drivable?”
“If we could disentangle it from the other vehicle, I suppose.”
No thanks to you, she thought. “Can’t you use your…whatever you people do?”
“Not if you want me to have the energy to drive us the rest of the way,” the prince said. “To separate these two, we merely need brute force.” He eyed her meaningfully, and a ripple of pain across the back of her head only underlined it.
She shook her head as it filled with memories of her last discussion with Mang. “That’s not happening, Your Brilliance.” She dropped her gun, pulling another pistol off one of the dead Shang soldiers. She hefted the weapon experimentally. It felt flimsy compared with what she was used to, and she had no idea how long it would take her to get used to the sights, but it would have to do.
Then she began stomping down the road. “We’re walking.”
“Don’t be ridiculous!” the prince called behind her. His voice got smaller with each furious step she took. “Summon him this instant and—”
Tala didn’t even bother turning around. “We’re. Walking.”
She heard annoyed growling behind her, followed by muttered cursing, and then the rapid footsteps as he sprinted to catch up to her. “We’re still several kilometers from Tajiri, you know.”
Tala said nothing. She was a soldier, and no stranger to marching.
“To say nothing of the fact that we’ll be exposed to all manner of danger on this road.”
Tala said nothing. She was a soldier, and danger was an old, if uneasy, friend.
“We assumed we’d be driving to Tajiri, and we don’t have any rations to fuel us the rest of the way.”
That put a stop to her resolve. Tala was capable of immense fortitude, but all that could be easily short-circuited if food were taken out of the equation.
“You should’ve thought of that before you weaponized our ride,” she said after a long moment.
“I was using the weapon I had,” the prince said. “And now you need to use yours. Summon Dimangan back and make him disentangle our car so we can be on our way.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Tala said. But it did, a dark little voice reminded her. She would only need to apply a little psychic pressure, and Mang would do whatever she wanted.
The prince was thinking along similar lines. “Of course it does,” he said. “You say something, he does it. Like a good, obedient sla—”
A furious chill spread through her. She stopped in her tracks. “I told you what I would do to you if you used that word again.”
The prince pivoted back to face her. “You know my beliefs. Surely, you’re wise enough to realize no feat of rhetoric from you is likely to change them.”
“Your beliefs,” Tala snapped, “are shit. You don’t know anything about shadepacting, and you don’t know about Mang. We argued this morning, before we left Kinzokita, and he told me not to summon him anymore.”
“Why should I care what he wants?” Jimuro bristled.
“Because he wanted me to leave you to die and I wouldn’t,” Tala said.
For just a moment, he was stunned.
But then the color rose in the Iron Prince’s cheeks. “Well, I don’t know how your, your…conjuring is supposed to work!” he said. “I just know what I see: You say something, they do it. So bring out your slave and say, Fix our car, so he can do it.”
Tala’s cool didn’t melt so much as instantly evaporate. Before she knew what she was doing, her fist hurtled straight for the prince’s head again.
Surprise crossed his face, but he was ready for her this time. He turned her blow aside with his forearm, then slammed his knee right into her stomach. She tried to angle away from the hit, but she wasn’t fast enough. She staggered back a step, clutching at her midsection and fighting to keep her breath under control. She cursed at the way the spider venom had left her with lingering weakness. Any other day, this fight would’ve been over by now.
Prince Jimuro pivoted into a kick, but Tala jerked away from him just in time to avoid it. She
understood right away: He was compensating for his shorter height by using his legs to close the gap. She bulled toward him, arms up to block his next kick. She took one step inside his guard before her hand shot out. He tried to twist away from the punch, but it wasn’t a punch at all. She’d grabbed his tie, and with a hard yank she pulled his chin right into her waiting fist.
They heaped blow after blow onto each other, anger and hate weighting Tala’s like a set of brass knuckles. Each punch she landed brought her a sweet, stinging satisfaction, and each one she took only hardened her resolve to be the last one standing. The prince was a surprisingly capable fighter; he’d probably been trained by Tomoda’s best, and he didn’t show any of the shyness Tala usually saw from people who’d only ever thrown a punch in the safety of a gym.
But she was Sanbuna. He was Tomodanese. She’d been in this fight dozens of times before. Maybe even hundreds. And she hadn’t lost it yet.
She threw a punch he wasn’t nearly fast enough to avoid. But rather than fold from the impact, she felt his grip lock around her entire arm, and the unmistakable feeling of her feet leaving the ground. Gracefully, the prince moved with Tala’s own momentum and threw her over his head before flopping her onto the pavement like a pancake.
Tala’s entire body flared with sudden pain. She’d hit the back of her head, and the impact had sanded all the sharp edges off her thinking. She was aware of the dull roar coming from both of her shades demanding to be let out, but she pushed them aside. This was her fight.
The prince’s shadow fell over her. “Yield,” he gasped. “You—”
Tala pushed through all the aches and pains, windmilling her legs to catch the prince behind his knees. It took him right off his feet, and he landed hard on his back next to her.
For a long time, they both lay in the middle of the road, wheezing in and out of time with each other.
“You know,” he rasped eventually, “how to hit.”
Though he couldn’t see her, Tala nodded. “You know,” she panted, “how to,” she panted again, “take one.”
“If,” he said, “I sit up again, will you strike me?”
The temptation flitted across Tala’s mind, brief as a daydream. “Not,” she said, “this time.”
She heard him groan as he forced himself upright. His glasses were askew, his tie out of place, his topknot coming apart, and his bright-blue jacket streaked with dirt. He tottered to his feet, then offered a hand down to her.
She took it and he pulled her up, her arm and stomach muscles protesting the whole way. Without adrenaline to soften the blows, she was now starting to appreciate just how hard the prince could hit when he wanted to. Absently, she began to readjust her own outfit. Her coat sleeve was torn, her fedora rumpled, and she had a large bootprint stamped across her shirt and tie alike.
The prince observed her for a moment before he tsked and said, “Give me that.” Without waiting for an answer from her, he reached over and began re-knotting her tie.
She chafed at his casual touch. And he seemed to notice, because he froze mid-action, staring cagily at her.
She sighed. “Get on with it.”
When he finished, he yanked off his hair tie, letting his black hair fall to his chin. With practiced ease, he began to retie his topknot. “I’m sorry,” he said. “About the car.”
Tala grunted as she fiddled with her bootlaces. They weren’t even slightly out of place, but shame was making it hard for her to meet the prince’s eyes. She shouldn’t have lost control like that.
“The throne was always…abstract to me,” Prince Jimuro continued. “Its attendant duties, abstract as well. But now that I’ve been returned home, I keep turning over in my head the sheer scope of my responsibilities. You have to understand: I was supposed to have the rest of my mother’s lifetime to prepare for this. However else you may feel about me, surely you can at least understand that.”
Tala just nodded.
“So when those Shang bandits appeared on the road, all I could think was that they were only in my country because I’d failed as a ruler. I thought with every masu they stole from my people, I failed that much more. I…had to do something.”
Tala nodded again, but apparently that wasn’t good enough this time.
“Don’t make me feel like I’m back in my cell, Sergeant,” he said. “Say something…please.”
What was she even supposed to say to that? To him, this was all about thrones and kingdoms: all well above Tala’s pay grade. She was just a soldier, and not even a particularly important one.
But even as she thought that, Maki’s face swam through her vision for just a moment, fleeting as a dream. By the time she blinked, he was gone again.
She sucked in a breath. “You’re trying to do a job to honor the memory of the people you’ve lost,” she said haltingly. Each word tasted vaguely poisonous on her tongue, but something in her gut told her she had to make an effort. “I’m just a grunt, Your Brilliance, but I get that.”
He took off his glasses and polished them with the end of his tie. She found it striking, how odd the sight was to her. She knew they were an artificial addition to his face, but that didn’t change the fact that he looked incomplete without them.
“Something you’ve gotta remember about me, though,” Tala said, “is that I carry my lost ones with me everywhere I go, and I don’t mean in my heart.”
He sighed. “Listen, Sergeant—”
“No, you listen,” she said, her voice regaining some power. “What I did to Mang? That’s not something that’s supposed to happen. I can’t just dial him up like he’s delivery. When I summon him, it’s…” Her voice dropped away. “Imagine the day your mother died, Your Brilliance.”
His expression darkened. “I don’t have to.”
Her eyes burned as they met his. “Take that pain. Turn it into a knife, the sharpest you can. Then stab yourself a hundred times with your right hand…while with your left you stab your sister a thousand.” Her fists trembled at her sides. “That’s what I put him through every time I summon him. That’s what he lives with because one day I was a scared little girl who’d lost everything. To your people.”
The prince’s mouth hung open, as if he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Honestly, Tala couldn’t believe she was telling him any of it, but she could hardly stop the momentum now.
“So,” she said, “let me make one thing clear: I have a friend named Beaky. I have a brother named Dimangan. I don’t. Have. Slaves.”
Prince Jimuro stared at her as if something had short-circuited inside him. Tala had a vague feeling that now wasn’t the time to push this, but they’d just beaten the shit out of each other. When would she have a better time?
“So long as you understand,” he said eventually, “that I am not my mother, or my grandfather. I’m my own man, and I have better uses for my throne than to rebuild the world order as it was. Do we have that understanding?”
She didn’t know what trick he was doing with his voice to make her believe what he was saying, but somehow she did. At long last, she nodded.
With visible relief, Jimuro cleared his throat. “I offer my fullest apologies. You’ve sacrificed so much to get me this far, even though—and I know you tried to be subtle about it—I’m fairly certain you don’t like me all that much.”
And then he smiled uncertainly.
A bubble of ire swelled in the back of her head…and then popped.
She didn’t return the smile, but she did favor him with a single dry chuckle. “Heh.”
Apparently, it was good enough for Prince Jimuro. “Well,” he sighed, “thanks to me, it appears we have a bit of a stroll ahead of us.”
Tala nodded, then stood. She took her fedora off her head and massaged the dents out of it. “At least we’re out of cars for you to wreck.”
* * *
&
nbsp; —
The walk to Tajiri was a grueling five hours. By the time they reached town, it was well after sundown. Not that it really mattered once they staggered across the city limits; the streets were so thickly crowded with streetlamps that, unless she looked directly up at the blank dark sky, she never would’ve known it was night.
As an inland city, Tajiri hadn’t been a staging ground for the Garden Revolution’s invasion of Tomoda. But since the Copper Sages had surrendered in the Steel Lord’s stead, all three conquering nations had encroached farther and farther, eager to get at the riches of Tomoda that they hadn’t already bombed straight to hell. And from the red banners and white crane sigils that fluttered in every which direction, it seemed readily apparent to Tala that Tajiri had become Shang turf.
They were already tired, but Jimuro was actually in relatively good spirits, all things considered. He’d kept up commentary on the kinds of plants and animals they saw on the side of the road, explained the ingenuity of the Tomodanese highway system, and even sung snatches of songs when the mood struck him. When silence fell between them, it was no longer a tense, unstable thing, but almost comfortable…or at least tolerable.
But the moment he laid eyes on the Shang banners, the prince’s entire expression darkened. “Barbarians,” he said, glaring up at a banner fluttering from a windowsill.
Tala threw a wary look at a nearby trio of soldiers in red longcoats, who chattered away in Shang while crowds of Tomodanese citizens flowed around them. A large snake-shade circled them lazily, encouraging passersby to keep their distance.
“Keep your voice down,” Tala muttered, hurrying him along.
Tala wasn’t without her own misgivings about Shang. They’d been stalwart allies during the war itself—even adjusting for each country’s propaganda campaigns, they’d sacrificed the most bodies to the cause. But when General Erega had briefed the 13-52-2 on its escort mission, it had been the threat of Shang that she’d specifically highlighted. Shang had almost ten times the population of the Sanbu Republic, and a commensurately bottomless thirst for resources. That was one of the main reasons escorting Jimuro back safely was so important, the general had said: Without a strong Tomoda to act as a counterweight, there would be nothing to stop Shang from swallowing Sanbu whole if it ever got it in its head to try.
