by Paul Krueger
Tala rubbed her eyes with the heels of her palms. When she looked back up, her gaze was clear and collected.
And when she spoke, it was to answer Xiulan’s question.
The sun was up and the clouds were gone, but the air was still heavy the way it always got after a good, hard rain. The bugs in the trees had just begun to sing for the day, a grating counterpoint to the trills of the morning birds. The countryside had been verdant enough yesterday, but last night’s rain had made the grass and the leaves much more vibrant. If Lee were the kind of woman who enjoyed nature, she might have found it peaceful.
But even if she were that kind of woman, it still wouldn’t have been truly peaceful, because she wasn’t alone. She had Bootstrap barking away inside her, begging to be let out. And Lee wanted to. Really, she did. She was feeling bad enough about what kind of partner she was, and she didn’t want to let a second one down. But she knew if she did that, it’d grind their whole morning to a halt. And for whatever reason, Lee was feeling a powerful urge to make good time.
Not that her other companion was being much help on that front.
“Where are you even taking me?” Prince Jimuro said. He marched in front of her, his hands bound behind his back by a scrap of upholstery from the train. His blue suit was rumpled, his glasses scratched and cracked. His topknot was sloppy and dissolved more with each passing minute, while a thin dusting of stubble had appeared on his chin and upper lip. And yet despite looking like shit, he still talked like he was better than her.
“You’re the most valuable beating heart on this shitheap of an island,” Lee said. “I could take you to any street corner in the country, start the bidding at ten thousand masu, and someone would offer me twenty.”
“Is every agent of the Li-Quan so noble?” Prince Jimuro sniffed.
“No,” Lee said. “But they’re not the ones who’ve got you, are they?”
That shut him up for a moment, so Lee could think a bit, hard as it was with Bootstrap intruding into her every stray thought. After her rough night, Lee figured she’d earned the fun she was having, playing the rogue. But that didn’t change the fact that she’d been pondering the same question since they’d hopped off the abandoned train car: What was she going to do here?
Xiulan would know, her traitor mind hissed, but she tamped those thoughts down. Xiulan was fine. She was capable of looking after herself, and she would find Lee soon enough. After all, she’d found Lee the once, hadn’t she?
“You’re not Shang, are you?” the princeling said eventually.
“Took you that long to figure it out?” said Lee. “What, do we all look the same to you?”
An uncomfortable silence followed.
“You’re not serious,” Lee said. “We all look the same to you?”
“I’ve learned much in the past three years,” the princeling said, a little defensively. “Even more so in the past three days. So you’re what? Yu-Kung?”
Lee rolled her eyes at his back. “Yu-Kung? You see me stopping to pray at the sun?” They were another set of folks that Shang didn’t like to talk about, a people in the kingdom’s far west who rejected Heaven’s primacy in favor of the sun’s warmth.
“Fine. Jeongsonese, then.”
Lee couldn’t help but be a little bit impressed. Normally, it took people twice as long when they got it in their heads to play this guessing game. “So I might have roots in Danggae. What’s it to you?”
“I’ve heard of your people. The Shang have mistreated you for centuries. You don’t have to listen to that princess anymore.”
Frost spread all across the inside of Lee’s chest at the mention of her.
But then she hardened her heart against that cold. “You think I’m doing this for her?”
“She identified herself as your partner and seemed quite concerned with your well-being, so yes, I thought that was a reasonable assumption to make.”
His description of Xiulan sent blades of guilt carving through Lee. “The dogs take me, you talk as much as she does,” she snapped. “Were you both born that way, or does that just happen when you grow up around people who aren’t allowed to tell you to shut it?”
“You seem to have no shortage of things to say,” the princeling said tightly.
“I didn’t pass up the last chance I got to tell a royal what I thought of them. What makes you think I’d pass up this one?” said Lee. “You don’t get to call up the ghosts of my people when you couldn’t even see me for who I was. And you don’t get to tell me about how the Shang are when the Tomodanese were just as bad.”
“We weren’t—” The princeling hung his head. “Never mind. I suspect you’re right. So I suppose there’s no point in appealing to you on my honor as a son of Tomoda?”
Lee snorted.
“Fair enough.” He resumed walking. “Then allow me to make an appeal to you on logical grounds. Did you see the man who attacked the train?”
An involuntary shudder passed through Lee’s body. She’d seen him, all right. But while fleeing such a man who defied all the known laws of magic squared neatly with her rogue persona, being afraid of him didn’t. So she affected an easygoing tone as she said, “Nice coat, bad hair, lots of tattoos, scary beyond all reason? I might’ve caught me a glimpse.”
“Then you know what danger your partner is in,” said Prince Jimuro. “If you let me loose, I can get us a car, and we can race ahead. They were following a train track, after all. It wouldn’t be hard to find them, even after all this time.”
For a moment, she was tempted. Obviously, she wanted to know that Xiulan was alive and okay. Lee would even be able to spin it perfectly: that she hadn’t fled in fear, but rather had seized an opportunity and merely gotten separated. She and Xiulan could reunite, their prize finally in tow, and then present him to the Crane Emperor together. Xiulan would become First Princess and someday Crane Empress, and Lee would get her promised kickbacks. Everything would come together, neat as the folds of a paper crane.
If she’s alive, that voice in her head hissed again.
She shut it out. Of course Xiulan was alive. She had to be. She was the cleverest woman Lee had ever known. If Lee had to stack her up against whatever Sanbuna meathead or Cicada fanatics were still on that train, her money was on Xiulan.
And the purple guy?
She refocused. The purple guy wasn’t a problem. Xiulan was smart enough to know he wasn’t worth fighting. She would’ve gotten herself clear.
Somehow.
“Keep walking,” Lee muttered. Her stomach growled softly, but she ignored it. She’d eaten relatively well since joining Xiulan’s company, but before all that had been a lifetime full of missed meals. Hunger was an old friend, and like Lee’s other old friends, it was an opportunistic shit who’d tried to sell her out at one point or another.
“Do you even know where the nearest Shang military base is?” the princeling said. “And when you show up on their doorstep, how do you suppose they’ll greet you, a daughter of Jeongson with neither a badge to flash nor a princess in your pocket?”
The thought had crossed Lee’s mind, but she was annoyed that it had crossed his, too. She was winging it here, and the last thing she needed was the princeling picking at her while she was trying to think. “That’s not your problem.”
The prince sighed. “Given that you’re trying to off-load me, I’d disagree. But fair enough. Allow me to offer one further perspective.”
And then the bastard just turned and ran.
“Hey!” Lee shouted. “Get back here, you royal idiot!”
She rushed to follow, but her boots were meant more for sneaking than running, and only on good ground, at that. The waterlogged dirt tugged greedily at her feet every time she picked them up.
She’d thought that three years in a Sanbuna prison would take the edge off Prince Jimuro, bu
t he moved faster than she ever would have thought possible. She was out of her element in nature. There was no way she’d catch him.
She stopped and rolled her eyes. She’d officially run out of time for this. You wanted to come out and play, girl? she thought. Well, here you go. “Bootstrap!”
A flare of white light appeared, followed by a big, galumphing dog-shade. “Get him, girl,” Lee said.
Bootstrap barked, then hared off after the princeling. He only had a moment to look over his shoulder, eyes widening in surprise as he was engulfed by the shadow of the leaping dog…
…who pinned him right to the ground and began showering his face with licks. As she did, images flitted through Lee’s head. She saw Bootstrap the way she used to be: a small dog, thigh-high to the boy she lived with, tackling him to the grass of their palace and sitting on his chest to pin him in place. As the boy laughed, she frantically licked every inch of his face clean, eager to show him how much she loved him…
Something caught in Lee’s breath, and it dropped her hard back into the moment unfolding in front of her. The Iron Prince was squirming and sputtering as a tongue larger than his own head matted down his hair and sent his glasses flying into the grass. “Ah!” he cried out between licks. “Down! Kohaku, down!”
Lee felt a little pulse from her dog-shade. Before she could unpack what it meant, though, she watched in surprise as Bootstrap immediately stopped licking the Iron Prince and sat down on top of him. She waited there expectantly, as her three tails pounded the grass flat with their wagging.
Jimuro sat up, breathing hard. “My glasses,” he said. “Please, my—”
Lee had already picked them up. “Hold still,” she said, then jammed them awkwardly onto his face.
He blinked owlishly, trying to see through cracked lenses that were smeared with drool. But apparently he could see well enough, because he squinted up at the shade pinning him in place, a spark of recognition dawning in his eyes. “What…?” He squirmed to get out from under her, but Bootstrap sat obediently, tongue lolling and tails wagging excitedly. Lee was about to will Bootstrap to let him up, but then the princeling said, “Kohaku?”
Bootstrap whined. Her huge paws shuffled on either side of the prince’s prone form in an excited little dance…or at least, what had been a little dance in her previous life. Now she ran the very real risk of popping Prince Jimuro’s head like a grape.
“Bootstrap,” Lee said in Jeongsonese. “Back it off.”
Bootstrap shot an imploring look at Lee. Couldn’t she see, her friend was right there! He was right there, and what in the world could possibly be more exciting? The dog-shade’s heart was swollen to bursting with how much she cherished the princeling’s sight and scent, and even the faint echoes of her joy that Lee felt hit her somewhere deep.
Jimuro rolled over, offering up his bonds. “Would you mind?” he said in a quiet, choked voice. “I promise, I’m not going to run.” He coughed. “Again.”
Lee’s mouth twisted. This went against all of her instincts. But either she was in a soft mood, or Bootstrap’s joy had put her in one. So she knelt and undid the knot, and then the Iron Prince’s hands were free. She backed away before he could attack her, but he didn’t even try. Instead, he picked himself up off the ground, wiping off his glasses with the tattered remains of his tie. She figured it would only take a few moments for his surprise and joy to turn into outrage. That, she was ready for.
What she wasn’t ready for were the tears.
Rather than recoil, he wandered forward two steps, an arm outstretched. And with ginger gentleness, he laid a hand on Bootstrap’s snout, just past her huge, wet nose. “Kohaku,” he whispered.
Her eyes stared back at his, bright and brown like amber in sunlight.
He threw his arms around her thick neck in a tight hug, burying his face in her fur. Lee kept watching for the telltale signs of Tomodanese disgust or disdain; after all, this wasn’t just any animal she’d pacted with.
But all she saw was a boy and a dog who loved each other very much.
Eventually, Prince Jimuro pulled himself away. He stared at Bootstrap, drinking in the dog-shade’s face greedily, as if he still couldn’t quite believe he was seeing her. “Where did you find her?” he said.
“Kohoyama,” Lee said carefully. A bubble of discomfort hovered somewhere around her gut, and it grew larger with each passing second. “The Dahali there were taking care of her.”
Jimuro nodded, accepting this. “And your…pact?”
Lee hesitated. “She got caught in some crossfire. I couldn’t leave her behind, and I couldn’t let her die. She made me promise to help her find you. That was our pact.”
She expected the princeling to be moved by this, but the asshole looked away, chuckling.
Heat rose in her ears. “What?” she said. “There something funny about that to you?”
He waved her off and shook his head no. “You’re not dissimilar to someone very important to me, that’s all.”
“The hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“That it’s difficult to compliment someone who could find an insult in a bouquet of peonies.”
It wasn’t lost on her, how he’d chosen to use the Shang national flower for his example. Mentally, she took a step back. There she was, getting defensive again. It wasn’t like her to get hot under the collar. The dogs take her, why did she feel so off-balance?
“I’m not a flowers kind of girl,” Lee said, hoping her tone would convey enough of an apology that she wouldn’t need to offer up a verbal one. “And I’m not too wild about peonies in particular, if you get my drift.”
Prince Jimuro inclined his head, as if to say Fair enough. “My whole family’s dead,” he said simply, running his fingers through Bootstrap’s thick golden fur.
“I know,” Lee said. “Local kids got the day off from school after the news broke about your old man.”
Jimuro shot her a narrow-eyed look, and the bubble of discomfort inside her inflated a little more.
“When we held court, I always had people around me: servants, friends, playmates. There were hundreds of them at all times, and they always wanted something from me. Captain Sakura wanted to protect me, Lord Kurihara wanted me to fall in love with his son so he could marry into the family, and my mother wanted me to pay attention so someday I could be the greatest Steel Lord in history. There were only two people who never wanted anything from me except my companionship. One died on a mission to rescue me from Sanbu. The other, I thought would be dead for sure. I would’ve given anything to see her again. I can’t believe I’m saying this, Inspector, but…thank you.”
Lee shifted her weight uncomfortably. “Lee,” she said. “It’s ‘Lee,’ not ‘Inspector.’ ”
“Lee? Just Lee?”
She tried to smile. “Lee’s all you need to know.” Normally, her roguish grin would’ve come so easily to her right about now. But her smile faltered as she found herself staring at this man and her dog.
Images flashed through her head: her mother, spending her dying breaths on children who wouldn’t even be talking to one another two years later. Petting every dog she passed on the street, just in case. Half throwing herself out of a speeding car to scoop up Bootstrap’s magic-addled body, feeling the flutter of her failing heart just beneath her chest…
…and of course, the woman in the driver’s seat.
At the thought of Xiulan’s one-eyed smile, Bootstrap’s ears pricked up. Her tails grew still. And her head cocked hard to the south. She barked once, just once.
“What is it?” Prince Jimuro said. “What’s gotten into Kohaku?”
Lee ignored him. She had eyes only for the southbound road. Was it possible? Bootstrap’s impeccable nose had managed to pick up Prince Jimuro’s scent from half a country away, just because of the connection between the two of them. Was he
r nose even better than Lee had thought? Had it managed to dig up yet another connection that was stronger than the miles that separated one end of it from the other?
And yet, despite her doubts, she could feel it…the stink of axle grease, the vaguely fiery smell of metal on metal, the earthiness of…mushrooms?
Still, there was no mistaking it: It was her. Relief flooded Lee’s body as she noted the absence of the telltale stench of death. Shang Xiulan was alive, and she was headed south.
But the longer Lee stared southward, the larger that bubble of discomfort inside her grew. She felt as if something inside her needed to be washed and scrubbed away, with the roughest steel wool she could find in Tomoda.
That bubble didn’t pop when she said to the princeling, “Come on, then.”
It didn’t pop when she nodded to Bootstrap and said, “Lead the way.”
It didn’t pop when she took her first step on the road to Hagane, or her second, or her fifth, or her tenth. In fact, the more she considered having to look Xiulan in the face again at the end of this journey, the bigger still the bubble became.
Lee Yeon-Ji walked on just the same.
The hospital stank of blood, and shit, and scorched flesh, and always death.
The last one, Tala never could’ve described precisely. But she always knew it when she smelled it, and never was it stronger than in places like this. The staff had gamely attempted to cover it with flowers, and then with industrial bleaches and chemicals, but those scents had merely draped over the hospital’s true stench like an ill-fitting dress.
It didn’t help that it was a typically sweltering day in Lisan City. The heat seemed to agitate all the bad smells, and the humidity ensured that they hung in the air, heavy as a body in a noose. She wiped sweat from her forehead with a small hand and felt a fresh layer replace it almost instantly. She wiped her hand on her dress, then shook its top hem a few times to give the rest of her body a momentary respite from the roasting heat.
