by Jay Kristoff
Kitsune looks after his own.
Not any more.
She pressed her cheek into the floor, gravel denting her flesh. After the longest time, she felt strong hands pulling her up, into someone’s arms. Cold, metallic skin, the whirr and hiss of ō-yoroi, the smell of fresh sweat and chi. She kept her eyes shut, hair draped over her face, a curtain of tangled black to hide behind. Childish fantasy; hoping that if she couldn’t see the world, then it wouldn’t see her either. Fingertips numb, cold sickness in the pit of her stomach, Buruu’s voice outside the closed door fading away into the black.
Hatred, poisonous and seething. For Yoritomo. For herself. Veins running thick with it, throat painted with bile, teeth grinding so hard she felt the enamel might crack, spitting splinters of jagged white and blood along with her curses. Floating impotent in the empty black behind her eyelids, sickness her only company. She could feel it filling her lungs with every breath, seeping into her skin. So complete and terrifying that it made her want to scream.
Sick of being used as a weapon to hurt the ones she loved. Sick of being the weak one, the frightened one. Sick of being a pawn, being a prisoner, being one tiny girl in a world so cold and brutal. Just fucking sick of it all.
Hiro pulled the bedroom door aside, carried her to the futon and tried to put her down. She held on as if her life depended on it, cold, unforgiving iron under her grip. Beneath the metal she could feel his warmth, threw her arms around it, pressed her cheek against his, wet with tears.
“Don’t let me go,” she whispered.
“I have dishonored myself.” He shook his head. “I have failed my Lord. I must beg forgiveness, or seek atonement in seppuku.”
“Don’t let me go.”
She drew away and stared into his eyes, down to his mouth. She felt the hate inside, the desire for blood swelling and roiling. She shied away from that darkness, put her hand to his cheek, thumb running across the smooth expanse of skin, lips trembling. She lunged at his mouth with her own, a desperate, hungry kiss that tasted of chi and old tears. He held her tight as she pressed against the iron encasing him, wishing it were her skin, her flesh inside, sealed in cold, hard lines, safe and untouchable.
He kissed her back, just like he had in her dreams. And if she closed her eyes for long enough, maybe she would wake up and none of this would be real. Not the failure. Not the hatred. Not the severed feathers lying on the floor.
“Make it go away,” she breathed around their tongues. “Make me feel something. Anything but this.”
* * *
She sat up in the bed afterward, watching him sleep, sweat drying on her skin. She traced the line of his irezumi with her fingertips, the beautiful tiger stalking down his right arm, the imperial sun on his left. She looked down at her own arm, to the mirror image of that hateful icon on her flesh. She knew what Daichi had meant now, when he called it a mark of slavery. She considered scorching it off with a red-hot knife, blood cauterized and burning black, peeling the mark of that maniac from her skin once and for all.
But would that make her free?
She could sympathize with the Kagé all she wanted, but that didn’t make her righteous. She knew that her spiraling hatred of Yoritomo came from her own pain, not some sense of injustice at the land’s rape, the mass extinctions, the bleeding sky. From her own hurt. Her own suffering, just like Michi had said. And as she recalled her words to Aisha, they rang false inside her head. The truth was she didn’t want justice any more. She wanted revenge.
Was Daichi any different? Were any of the Kagé? They talked of liberation and revolution, but she wondered how many of them would be singing that refrain if they’d been born a Lotusman, or the fat child of some zaibatsu noble. A conscience is easier to swallow on an empty belly, simpler to swing with a broken wrist. The people who hate money are the ones who don’t have any. The people who hate power are the ones who are powerless.
Were these even her feelings? Or were they Buruu’s?
In the end did it matter?
Gods, I don’t know what’s real any more.
She pushed her knuckles into her eyes. Warm breeze caressed her naked skin, flesh crawling with remembered goosebumps. Looking down at Hiro, recalling the taste of him. Expecting the palace guard to burst into the room at any moment and drag her off to prison with her father. At least she’d known his touch; at least she’d had this.
This was real. Right here. Aisha spoke truth: treasure your joys while you may.
She looked around the room, at the pieces of ō-yoroi scattered across the floor. She picked up a gauntlet, heavy as stone in her small hands. It was black, lifeless, power cable snaking out from its cuff, ending in an open, empty mouth. She smiled with the memory of clumsy fumbling, of switches and clasps and buckles, metal clattering to the wooden floor piece by piece. Slipping her hand inside the glove, she watched her tendons stand taut with the weight. She ran her fingers across the surface, metal embossed with unreadable Guild kanji and prowling tigers. The beasts stared at her, lifeless, etched stripes across flanks and faces.
She thought of Buruu alone in his prison and closed her eyes.
How he must hate me.
She wriggled her fingers inside the gauntlet, fingertips pressed against cool iron. A dozen pseudo-tendons flexed, the hand drawing partway closed. Even without power, the raw movement of the machinery was a beautiful dance. She wondered what it would feel like to wear a suit like this, to feel its strength at her command. To be impenetrable. Untouchable.
And then she thought of poor Kin, trapped in that half-body and half-life, plugged into his suit like an infant to its mother. Cables and wires and nutrients, never knowing the sun on his face or the breeze on his flesh, save through a few stolen moments in the dark and the quiet. What a price to pay, to be impervious. Never to be touched, all the days of your life.
She realized that she missed him. It had been nearly a month since their time in the Iishi. She wondered how he was, if his burns were better. She wondered how she might get a message to him. She knew now that he felt more for her that she did for him, that those long nights in the forest had made him see something in her that simply wasn’t real. But if she could speak to him, tell him the way she felt …
She looked down at Hiro again.
How do I feel?
Sick. Guilty. Nothing close to righteous.
Buruu was the victim here. The only real innocent. He hadn’t asked for any of this. He’d trusted her, trusted that she would lead them through the storm and out the other side, wind beneath their wings as they left this stinking city behind. And now they were nowhere. Her father imprisoned. Buruu grounded until his winter moult. How would he make it through six more months trapped in that reeking pit? How would her father?
They won’t. They’re going to die in those holes.
She narrowed her eyes, clenched her fist inside the gauntlet, feeling the sickness swell inside her again. And then she saw it, glinting in the light of the setting sun on the bedside table: the tiny mechanical arashitora Kin had made for her. She placed it in the palm of the ō-yoroi gauntlet, held it up to her face.
It was beautiful, intricate, spools of wire and pistons and interlocking teeth. Deft fingers and a mind of machines had sculpted it out of thin brass and clockwork. An Artificer’s idle hands and idle mind, slumped on a sickbed while his flesh limped back to a half-remembered shape.
A small face had been etched in the metal; proud eyes and a razor-sharp beak. Yukiko smiled. Kin had always liked Buruu, even if the arashitora hadn’t liked him back. It was a good likeness, a tiny portrait of better days painted in metal and solder.
The wings were strong, light, lengths of rice-paper reinforced with a skeleton of brass. She ran her fingers along the paper feathers and caught her breath, lips parted, eyes growing wide. She wound the spring, and the tiger leaped from her hands, wings blurring, floating down onto the bedspread with a sound like cricket-song.
An Artificer’s hands …
>
“The answer,” she whispered. “Gods above, that’s it.”
31
SURPRISES
People didn’t have expressions there. Just faces.
A hive. Pentagonal, honeycombed walls, illuminated by quartz halogen flickering in oily housings. The air was abuzz with the hymn of a thousand machines: a choir of gears, falsetto of pistons and hydraulics, baritone of iron on hollow brass and crackling voices. Slow interlaced choreography unfolded inside it, lubricated ball-joints and transmission fluid, glinting in the glow of blood-red eyes and swimming with the ever-present stench of chi.
His skin was supposed to filter it out. His purity screens were always green, blood untouched by the poison they’d filled their world with. But he swore he could taste it, clinging to the back of his throat and creeping across his gums. Ever since his thirteenth birthday, and the agony of the Awakening. Their gift to him, along with the metal shell for his flesh, the tubes plugged into his meat parts; the constant fear that what he’d seen, what they’d shown him that night, might one day come true.
“Skin is strong. Flesh is weak.”
The words were a whisper in his head, a conditioned response to the presence of self-doubt, destructive thought, drilled into him since before he even knew their meaning. He remembered the days when they used to bring him comfort, silence the questions that had no answers. The days he used to believe.
Kin touched his fingers to his brow as he passed three Shatei—Guild brethren—in the hallway. He stepped back against the wall to make way for the squat servitor that trundled along after them. The thing paused to query him with a single glowing red eye, two of its fine motor claws fluttering like antennae. It resembled a faceless fat man with spider-legs for arms, cast in metal and set trundling on two broad rubber tank tracks. He sometimes had nightmares about them, hatching moist in some vast sweltering nursery deep in the bowels of the chapterhouse. Not made, but grown.
The thing chattered at him and rolled after his fellows.
Smoke in the air, burning coal and chi, solder and sparks. The chapterhouse workshops were a vast series of cocoons, connected by stone umbilicals and irises of radiating steel, contracting and dilating as figures passed through. The broad test spaces of the Munitions Sect, the warrens of the False-Lifers, the endless corridors of the Skin-Weavers. A dozen different kinds of Artificer, thousands of machines, always in motion. No daylight lived here, no windows to let in the outside world. Just the constant hum of halogen bulbs, pressing bright fingers against sticky, smoke-stained yellow.
He walked out into the main hub, into the press and swell of skin on skin. A new shipload of gaijin were being pored over by the Inochi Techs; the only real livestock left in all of Shima now that the great slaughterhouses stood empty. The techs singled out a few large, fierce-looking men for future arena games; a short, brutal life spent killing their fellows to the deafening approval of the crowd. The strong and hale were pushed into motor-wagons bound for market, and from there, some endless pollen-choked field. The rest were hustled away in chains toward the inochi pits, more fuel for the machine.
He looked at their faces. Old and young. Women and children. Bewildered expressions, thousand-yard stares roaming this hellish pit peopled with metal insectoids and burned-flower stink. He wondered what the people outside these walls would do if they knew that their glorious war against the barbarian hordes was not fought for honor, nor renown, but because almost every warm-blooded creature in Shima had already been rounded up and slaughtered. Processed in the inochi vats and liquefied for orderly dispersal among the growing fields of swaying scarlet blooms that pumped the heart of the Shōgunate. How casually would Shima’s people sip their tea or smoke their pipes if they knew the flower that birthed their empire was called blood lotus for a reason?
He stared at a skinny gaijin girl, maybe five or six, her grubby hand entwined with a tall, wretchedly thin woman. Rags for shoes. Backs of her thighs smeared with filth. Face wet with tears.
It will all be over soon, little one. The lotus must bloom.
One of the bigger gaijin yelled in his guttural tongue as the Inochi Techs pulled a woman from his arms. He lashed out with his foot, tackled one of the techs to the ground. Shatei descended from all over, a swarm of clicking brass and hissing exhaust. Fists rose and fell; a metal percussion beneath the song of the woman’s screams. Kin closed his eyes, trying to block out the sound. It was easier to take if you didn’t think of them as people. If you imagined they were just one more commodity. That they didn’t think or feel. That they hadn’t once loved and laughed and dreamed of bright and wonderful things. It was easier to take if you could manage that. Somehow.
A familiar nausea swelled in Kin’s stomach as the sound of brass pounding on weak flesh faded. He could swear he tasted chi again in the back of his throat. He opened his eyes, pity-sick, watching them drag the bleeding body of the big gaijin toward the pits, silence the weeping woman with a popping spray from the barrel of a handheld shuriken-thrower. A Kyodai barked orders to gather up her body, pointing at the gleaming pools of blood and berating the murderer for “inefficiency.” The taste got so bad Kin thought he might vomit.
He turned and walked on, quick as he could without raising attention, through the heart of the chapterhouse and onto the elevator spire at its gut. He stepped inside the chamber of burnished steel and glowing numbers, floating skyward to the fourth floor. The habitat level was austere, dimly lit, row upon row of faceless black irises radiating out from a central hub.
He pulled a lever, stepped inside his habitat. His mechabacus was relaying the latest crop report from the Fushicho quartermasters into his skull: pounds of lotus (yield), numbers of dead slaves (collateral shrinkage), deadlands still growing at an exponential rate (corruption percentile). Figures and kanji flowed in his head and in his veins. The air filtration system spat its rattle and hum into the little room. He cranked the door shut behind him with a sigh of relief, the iris contracting with the sound of metal grating on metal, pressure seals sucking closed with an intake of hot breath.
He waited a few minutes to allow the vents to cycle. The diode on the purity monitor smudged slowly from red to green, a bright silver sound indicating it was safe to take off his skin. He touched the release, neck unfolding like lotus in bloom, pulling the helmet away from his head. The rubber seal clung to his flesh as if terrified to let go.
He sloughed off his gauntlets, ran a hand over close-cropped hair, trying to forget about that little girl, the sound of the woman’s screams. He was dripping with sweat, and the thought of a cool shower was a tiny promise of momentary escape, easing the frown on his face. He inspected his flesh in the small mirror above his cot. His burns were healing slowly, gauze coming away easily from the dimpled flesh of his throat.
Not too bad. Not so ugly that no one could want him.
Would she?
He closed his eyes, banished thoughts of Yukiko. The memories of their time together in the Iishi were locked in some small and hidden corner of his mind, a secret, brilliant joy he kept for himself, visiting only when the stench got too bad, the days grew too dark. But this was his life. Here in this chittering, steaming ants’ nest, bent over a tool station and working on the Shōgun’s pet projects until he was well enough to ship out again, away from the slaughter and the inescapable stink. Presuming they ever let him fly again, of course.
His father had been a great man. Third Bloom; a Fleet Master. He had made engines sing like the legendary nightingales, knew the troubles of an injection system or combustion chamber with a touch of his hands. Kin had inherited his father’s gift for machines, and Old Kioshi had passed on the bounty of his knowledge, raising his son high in the esteem of Second Bloom Kensai before he died and was processed in the vats. A great family. An honorable legacy. Kensai’s patronage had been enough to see Kin posted to a flagship like the Thunder Child, enough for them to allow him to carry his father’s name.
Problem was, he liked his own
.
And now he’d lost face. Been seen skinless by a hadanashi. An Impure one at that. A source of quiet disdain from his fellows, stinging rebukes from his Kyodai. Even with Kensai speaking on his behalf, an example needed to be made. And so they’d locked him in some far-flung workstation, given him a scribble marked with Yoritomo’s seal and commanded that he turn the lunatic’s vision into reality. They’d promised Yoritomo that the best Artificers in the entire Kigen chapterhouse would be working on his ridiculous saddle. That a dozen brethren would not rest until the Shōgun had his desire. In reality, there was only Kin and old Tatsuo pottering away on alternate shifts.
Truth was, antipathy for Yoritomo had been spreading among the Kigen Chapter for years. His excesses, his arrogance, his inability to provide final victory against the gaijin. But ever since Shateigashira Kensai’s recent meeting, the contempt from the Upper Blooms had become almost palpable. An indignant hush had descended when news of Yoritomo’s defiance spread among the Shatei. Who did this princeling think he was, to deny the Way of Purity?
We supply the weapons. We supply the armor. We supply the fuel for the war machine, and only we know the secret of its creation. We are Shima. Defy us at your peril, for what is given can be taken away.
The Shōgun had already been informed that “regrettable delays” meant his saddle would not be ready in time for the bicentennial. That Shateigashira Kensai would not be attending the gala due to “pressing Guild business.”
Secretly, Kin was overjoyed to hear of Yoritomo’s rebuke to Kigen’s Second Bloom. The thought of Yukiko kept him up at night: dark eyes reflecting emerald green, those brief, wonderful moments in the Iishi swimming so vibrant in his memory that sometimes he swore he could still feel the wind, taste the water. He could see the line of her face, closed his eyes now to reach out and touch it, aching with de-tox. She was in his veins. In his head.
