by Paul Krueger
“Do you see that?” Prince Jimuro said, pointing to a bright metal streetlamp as they passed it. “Tajiri is the greatest oil refinery in the civilized world. My grandfather, Steel Lord Kenjiro, saw fit to order that it be lit even better than our own fair city of Hagane, so the world could see the shining light of our progress.”
Tala rolled her eyes under the cover of her fedora’s wide brim.
“Of course,” the prince said, tone darkening again, “that explains perfectly well why the Shang were so eager to snap it up. I imagine I’ll be negotiating a lot of our reserves over to them just to keep them from putting it to the torch. As I said, Tala: barbarians.”
“And as I said: Keep your voice down. Where’s the safe house?”
“We have a bit more to go.” Prince Jimuro sighed. “But fear not; I remember the way.”
They walked past a well-lit booth offering deep-fried vegetables. The smell of frying oil filled Tala’s nose. “Would it have killed you to give us even one contact person?”
“Erega said we couldn’t rely on them. We don’t know how much of my family’s intelligence network was compromised when the empire fell.”
The way Prince Jimuro casually threw out the general’s name struck Tala. She remembered what he’d said that morning in the cabin: Being a head of state is a lonely thing, Sergeant.
“What was she like?” Tala said, unable to keep the reverence from creeping in around the edges of her voice. Before she’d been the leader of the Republic, before she’d been a general, Erega had already been a figure of awe. Dahal had been the first country to fall into open revolt against Tomodanese rule, but Erega had been leading and funding Sanbuna resistance efforts all over the archipelago for years before. She’d even paid for long-term care for any of her fighters that were wounded in action. When someone was deemed “a one-woman army,” it was generally praise for her fighting ability. But while Erega had proved a capable warrior in her own right, she’d also provided the leadership and logistical support to make herself truly worthy of the phrase.
“The first time we came face-to-face, I was…defiant,” Prince Jimuro said mildly, because he was the sort of person who could be mild about mouthing off to General Erega herself. “I’d read all the stories, listened to all the newsreels…she even appeared in a few of our movies, did you know that? We found just about the ugliest actress in all of Tomoda to play her…”
Tala scowled.
“Ah, yes,” Prince Jimuro said, coughing and readjusting his glasses. “The point is, I was prepared to make my brave last stand against a snarling, one-eyed demon who’d engineered sorrow after sorrow for my people. I was…well, how would you put it?”
“Scared shitless,” said Tala.
“I’m not inclined to use such vulgar terms, myself,” Prince Jimuro said, “but you’re not incorrect.” He looked as if he was about to continue, but his expression changed. “What’s the matter?”
“What?” said Tala, looking around. “What is it?”
“You’re frowning.”
“Where are your eyes? I’m always frowning.”
“No,” Prince Jimuro said. “I’m adjusting for your normal levels of surliness. What is it? What did I say?”
Tala’s mouth tightened. She hadn’t realized it until Prince Jimuro had pointed it out to her, but what he’d said just now had reminded her of the only other person in her life who bothered to chide her for her coarse vocabulary.
Prince Jimuro sighed. “That’s fine. I suppose I should’ve known better than to hope for a straight answer to a simple—”
“It’s Mang,” Tala said bluntly.
The prince did an admirable job of keeping his composure, but she could see through it. She knew he was bursting with questions, or at the very least snark. She was almost impressed when he managed to tamp it all down and ask a relatively subdued, “Why did you fight about me?”
“Why do you think?” Tala said. “He doesn’t want to devote his life to protecting the enemy.”
Prince Jimuro turned frosty. “We’re not enemies, Sergeant,” he said with aggressive overenunciation. “The war’s over.”
“You’re always going to be…his enemy, Your Brilliance,” Tala said. “It was one of your family’s bombs that dropped on our house, part of Tomoda’s revenge for…” She stopped just short of telling him that the bomb had fallen on the same day jungle-runners had tried to assassinate a boy who looked an awful lot like he did. That wouldn’t help anything now. So instead she just cleared her throat and continued: “It was your family’s soldiers trying to kill us, these past few years.”
Thankfully, Prince Jimuro didn’t notice her pause. “It was a war,” he hissed, indignant as a wet cat. “And now it’s over.”
Tala squeezed her eyes shut in annoyance. She’d thought she’d already gotten through to him on the road earlier. How could she make him understand?
“When you shadepact with a creature, you’re taking responsibility for its life,” she said. “The moment you say its name, every decision you make has to be made for two, not one. The legends say a great sage taught the Sanbuna people that at the dawn of time, sailing into the islands from the far southern sea.”
“I seem to recall a Shang legend of a wise man from the northern steppes, who taught their people shadepacting first. From the back of a golden-furred deer, if memory serves.”
“I don’t give a shit about the legends,” she said, ignoring the way the prince winced at her language. “I’m telling you how it is: When you shadepact, you don’t live for just you anymore.”
“But he thinks you are anyway?”
Tala frowned again: not at his question, but at the fact that the more she considered it, the more she found herself wondering if Mang really did have a point. It was hard for her to concentrate: She was tired from the day’s march, and the rising whine of car engines cut into her thoughts.
Fuck it, she thought. She had to know. “Why’d you come back for me, Your Brilliance?”
It was the prince’s turn to frown. “I would’ve thought that obvious.”
Tala stopped walking and turned to face him full-on. “If I’m asking, it’s not.”
“You’ve fought hard and well to protect my life against the impossible, all while despising the fact that we breathe the same air,” he said. “You take your duty seriously, and I can’t have made it pleasant for you. So yes, Sergeant, I thought your life was worth saving.”
Tala found herself flat-footed. She’d expected something strictly pragmatic: that he needed a good bodyguard, or at least that he’d wanted some company on the road. Honesty was just about the last thing she expected from the prince, especially if it was an honesty that painted her in anything approaching a good light.
She opened her mouth to answer, but she was cut off by a bright-red truck trundling past. A pair of riders preceded it on motorcycles, while two cars followed closely behind, full of Shang soldiers. In comparison with the quiet pact-powered Tomodanese cars, these vehicles were all clumsy, nasty beasts, their engines belching noise and black smoke in equal amounts.
Tala saw the citizens on the streets eye the motorcade warily as it passed. With a start, she was catapulted back in her memory, to a day ten years ago when she stood in a Lisan City street market. A black steel streetcar was carving its way through, while on either side Sanbuna people looked on. And all of them, including Mang, wore the exact same expression as the Tomodanese wore now.
She rejected the comparison. She found herself vaguely offended that she had even drawn it, since there was a night and a day’s difference between a people who’d been occupied and a people who were in the process of paying for their crimes.
And yet…
Prince Jimuro gritted his teeth as the second car passed. “That truck is built for the transportation of loot,” he said. “And the Shang are d
riving it up the most crowded thoroughfare in the city.” He pointed over the rearmost car, at the truck’s rear door. “They’re parading their plunder in front of the people from whom they stole it.” He spat. “Disgusting.”
“Watch yourself,” Tala said, snatching his wrist and yanking his hand down, but it was too late. The car’s taillights flashed red as it came to a stop.
All Tala’s senses flared to life. Even fatigued and venom-racked, she was still made for walking into fights and walking back out again. “Stay behind me, Your Brilliance,” she said. “And actually do it this time.”
She reached into her coat and wrapped her hand around the butt of her new Shang pistol. While she wished she’d had more time to acclimate herself to the weapon, she was just going to have to trust that when it came to a fight, a gun was a gun.
But then she saw that a black car had pulled into the intersection, cutting off the motorcade. Its doors flew open, and women and men piled out. Some wore suits, some wore kimonos, but all wore elaborate metal masks of some kind on their faces.
And all of them had weapons.
A stout masked man held a shotgun at his hip and blew one of the motorcycle riders off her saddle before she could react. Another, a tall and rail-thin woman, darted for the other motorcycle rider, carrying no weapon but a long sword in its sheath. As the rider shouted and brought up his pistol, her blade flashed, and both the rider’s hand and head fell to the ground, neatly separated from the rest of his body in a spray of blood.
While most citizens turned and ran, Tala’s sharp eyes caught a few in the crowd that were staying put. In fact, they were donning masks, too. Up close, she could see they were all the same shape: like an insect, with splayed wings over their wearers’ eyes.
“Cicadas?” Prince Jimuro muttered, and Tala’s whole gut jolted. She knew who they were dealing with. She’d been briefed on them during mission prep.
“We have to get out of here right now,” she said tersely. She grabbed his wrist again and yanked him back the other way, but her heart sank to see more Shang soldiers already en route.
As more gunshots erupted from the motorcade, a short masked man in a black wave-patterned kimono clambered up onto the hood of the black car, a megaphone in his hand. “Citizens of Tajiri!” he bellowed, his voice ringing out over the entire street. “Children of Tomoda! Tonight, we take back what is rightfully yours!”
Tala yanked at the Iron Prince, but he was rooted on the spot. He looked transfixed by the sound of the speaker’s voice. “Your Brilliance—!” she hissed.
“While the Copper Sages cower in Hagane, we will fight for you all!” the speaker roared. Most of the everyday citizens had deserted, and his cohorts were engaging the Shang troops, but he spoke as if there were a rapt audience before him.
“We will fight for your future!” he went on. “We are the Steel Cicadas, and we will fight for Tomoda!”
Even with the boost Lee gave Xiulan, the princess was still barely tall enough to haul herself up into the hole that Kou had gouged into the wall. “Would it have killed you to eat your vegetables growing up?”
“That sort of attitude will get you nowhere, Inspector Lee,” Xiulan grunted as her weight finally left Lee’s cupped hands.
Lee gestured to the top of her head. “It got me up here.”
She caught only a fleeting glimpse of the princess’s smile before Xiulan disappeared from sight completely. And then she stood there and waited to see if the door would open.
Of course it will, she thought. After everything they’d been through so far, why would the princess leave her behind now?
You have one rule, she reminded herself.
Lee frowned and pushed the thought away. That’s my rule, not hers.
Her finger wandered to her lips, which still tingled from Xiulan’s touch. It didn’t change much for her, honestly; of the many women and men Lee had teamed up with in her life of petty crime, she’d ended up in bed with most of them. And while Lee had been disappointed by partners like Lefty who hadn’t respected honor among thieves, Xiulan was a royal. That meant Lee already knew she couldn’t trust her.
But it was hard not to lose herself a bit in the fantasy of reliving that kiss. There’d been something electric there, and not just the sheer surprise of it. Though, thinking back to the hotel in Jungshao, to the princess’s question…was it really a surprise?
Look at me, she said to herself with a sigh. She was a woman whose palms could be dry and steady as they lifted a wallet from a copper’s tight-sealed pocket, but now they shook with a treacherous sort of excitement.
She frowned down at her fingers. “Cut it out,” she muttered.
The lock gave way with a clunk. Lee grabbed the door’s edge and pushed. As the door sank into the wall, she saw Xiulan just on the other side of it, pulling right along with her. And then the door was completely gone, and the two women stood face-to-face.
Their eyes met.
Xiulan’s lips parted ever so slightly.
Lee swallowed. Don’t do this, she thought. You always do this, and it always goes bad in the end.
So instead she offered up a gruff, “Nice one, Princess,” and slipped past her to the unconscious Dahali guard on the floor. It looked like Kou had chewed him up, but he would live. With experienced skill, her fingers roamed his uniform, picking out his spending money and the rings on his fingers. For good measure, she took the knife from his belt. It was relatively plain compared with Parkash’s, but Lee didn’t care about that. All she cared was that the blade was sharp. She wasn’t much for killing, but knives were good for more than that.
Xiulan eyed her with vague disapproval. Lee shrugged and slipped the knife into her belt anyway. “Gotta eat,” she said.
Neither of them had been black-bagged as they’d been escorted back to Kurihara manor. That meant that Lee had gotten a good eyeful of the place during their frog-march from the front door to their ad hoc cell. Thief that she was, it was a matter of course that she’d have kept an eye on the exits, but she was pleased to see Xiulan immediately head left, toward the one Lee herself had marked as the best way out.
Xiulan seemed to notice her approval, and grinned. “I am a detective, you know.”
“Like you’d ever let me forget,” Lee said, sighing. “Come on, then. We might even be able to get out clean, as long as we keep—”
From behind them came a high, sharp bark.
And then another. And another. And another.
Lee turned to see the dog there, the one that had come in with Chetan Parkash. She’d never seen it before today, but something looked vaguely familiar about it.
Xiulan appeared at her side. “Go away,” she hissed at it. “We don’t have time for you.”
But as she eyed that dog, something snagged in Lee’s head. She couldn’t quite place it, but she knew by now that her instincts were there for a reason. So instead of running from the dog, she took a careful step toward it.
“Inspector Lee,” Xiulan whispered. “What are you—?”
“Go with me on this,” Lee said, holding up a hand. “Um. Your Majesty.” She knelt down before the dog and carefully offered out a hand for it to smell. Furtively, it stepped forward and nosed her fingers, leaving a wet trail across them.
And then it pressed its face into her hand, licking at her palm eagerly.
Lee’s heart just about burst. “There you go,” she whispered. “Good…” She took a quick glance. “…girl.”
“Inspector Lee,” Xiulan said. “Is this really the time and place for this?”
Casually, Lee glanced back over her shoulder. “You hear her barking?”
That brought Xiulan up short.
Lee weighed the situation, then scooped the dog up into her arms and stood. The creature’s fur was short and soft and warm, and it made Lee painfully aware of how long
it had been since she’d petted a dog.
“All right,” she said as Xiulan gaped at the happy dog bundled in her arms. “Now we can go.”
Normally, Lee was cool in a bad situation, which this definitely was. But she was able to do that because no matter what else was going on, she could keep her eyes on the prize, whether that was a purse of jian, a priceless sculpture, or a hasty exit. This time, though, her focus was muddied: by the warm, wriggling dog in her arms, and by the tingling on her lips. The dog, Lee managed by gripping her tighter to keep her still.
The tingling, on the other hand, proved remarkably persistent.
Ease off, she thought as she ran. You’re the one who said to worry about it later.
But she couldn’t help it. She’d kissed sailors, cutthroats, sweet boys, stablehands, soldiers, whores, and barkeeps, but she’d never kissed a princess. And she’d certainly never been kissed by one.
When they got down the stairs, the dog started barking again. Lee stopped to let her down, but she just shuffled her forepaws excitedly and barked away.
“You know the Dahali word for ‘shut it’?” Lee said.
“My knowledge of their language is strictly academic,” Xiulan said. “I wouldn’t know idiomatic—”
“That’s a long walk to ‘no,’ ” Lee said. Not sure what else to do, she reached for the closest thing she could think of in Tomodanese. “Quiet.” She said it like her mom had taught her: with authority, so she’d listen, but not loudly, so she wouldn’t think Lee was barking back.
And to Lee’s surprise, the dog’s snout snapped shut as her pointy ears perked right up.
Xiulan stared. “Inspector Lee,” she said quietly, “how did you know how to do that?”
“Didn’t,” Lee said. “I just know dogs.”
“Sit, girl!” Xiulan tried, but her voice was too high, her words too fast. The dog cocked her head rather than obey, then started barking again.
