Year of the Demon

“Wait!” Kaida shouted, just as the stranger prepared to break her father’s wrist. She pushed her way through the grass and dumped her entire cache on the sand. “Here,” she said, “take it. For him. Let me have him back.”

The stranger looked at her with a mix of curiosity and amusement. Under his knee, her father howled like something inhuman, his cries punctuated by coughs and sputtering sandy sounds. His arm was like a rope in the outlander’s hands, boneless, jointless.

“Please,” Kaida said. She’d never seen violence like this, and with stepsisters like hers, violence was a part of her daily life. But theirs was vindictive, even joyful in its own twisted way. This was brutality at its purest, utterly devoid of emotion. “Please,” Kaida said, “let him go.”

“What have we here?” said the stranger, eerily calm and soft-spoken even after all he’d just done. “A little girl with half an arm and an armload of gifts. What are these?”

“From your ship,” she said. “I’ve been diving for them.”

“Have you, now? And what else have you found?”

Kaida looked at the other three strangers, who were still busily working at their knots. One of them looked over his shoulder, studied her for a moment, and went back to his work.

“This is all,” Kaida said. “This and my knife.” She put her hand on it, moved to pull it from her rope belt, then thought better of it. It wasn’t a good idea to draw a weapon on this man. “You can have it too, if you want. Just let him go.”

“Fond of blades, are you? I can see you like that little pigsticker better than all the rest. You keep it.” With his thumbnail he scratched his chin just behind his beard. “Who is this fool to you?”

Kaida swallowed. Her throat was growing tight, just as it did back in the dark hold of the ship. The way the stranger looked at her made her want to run away. She wished she could hear some sign of agitation in his voice, the tiniest little hint that the process of tearing another human being’s arm apart caused his pulse to quicken. She wanted to run, but she forced herself to stay; she even dug her feet a little deeper into the sand. “He’s my father.”

“And what is your name, child?”

“Kaida.”

“I’m afraid I’ll have to break your father’s wrist and fingers, Kaida-san. I am a man of my word.”

Without so much as a blink he snapped her father’s wrist. Another scream erupted from her father’s mouth, stifled by sand and a fit of coughing. Every cough jostled his maimed shoulder, which made him grunt and groan, which made him inhale more sand. His whole body trembled with pain. The stranger wrapped his fingers around her father’s thumb.

“You said arm,” Kaida said, spitting the words out all at once.

“I beg your pardon?”

“You said every joint in his arm. His fingers aren’t in his arm, they’re in his hand. You don’t have to break them.”

The outlander cocked his head and raised an eyebrow. “Hm,” he said. After a moment’s thought, he said, “A fair point,” and he stood up, dropping her father’s arm.

It flopped to the sand like a boned fish. Her father cried out but did not move. Was it fear or pain that pinned him there? Kaida could not tell. “I am Genzai,” said the stranger. “It is a pleasure to meet you, Kaida- san.”

Kaida didn’t know what else to do. Somehow the words “pleased to meet you” slipped out of her mouth and she found herself giving a little bow.

That made Genzai laugh. His unflappable calm had unnerved her, but his laugh was worse. It was a deep, sinister rumble, barely a laugh at all. “You’re a brave little girl,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me what all these trinkets are for?”

Kaida looked at the ground, where the mother-of-pearl chopsticks in their golden case lay atop all the other treasures she’d collected over the past few mornings. They didn’t seem like treasures now. She had imagined the outlanders would be impressed by all she’d gathered for them—clues, she had thought, as to what was in the wreck, or even who. She thought they’d thank her for saving them so much work. She hadn’t imagined one person could cripple three big men in the space of as many breaths. These people didn’t need her help. They were more than capable on their own. And now all her treasures seemed like a little girl’s toys.

“Well?” said Genzai.

“I thought . . . maybe . . .”

“Spit it out, child. Don’t tell me your courage has left you already.”

“I thought maybe you could take me with you. When you leave.”

Her father moved then. With an effort he raised his head to look at her. Half of his face was a white mask, sand clinging to sweat. “Kaida, what are you saying?”

“She’s saying your little village is too small,” said Genzai. “I should know. I come from a speck of a village like this myself. Little wonder that she wants to escape. Have you been buggering her? Your own daughter?”

He narrowed his eyes at her father, and for a moment Kaida feared he would go back to ripping bones out of sockets. At length he said, “No. She came to your rescue. Maybe she wants to leave because the men in your village need their teenage girls to rescue them. Is that it, Kaida-san? Is this place too small for a girl of such heroic bravery?”

“I’m not brave,” she said.

“Kaida, why?” said her father.

“Shut your mouth. We’re talking.” Genzai’s tone was still calm, exactly as it had been just before he destroyed her father’s arm. He scratched behind his beard, studying Kaida closely. “What makes you think I want to take a little girl with me when I leave here—a little girl with half an arm, no less?”

“You don’t. That’s why I brought you the . . . the treasures.”

That earned her another smile from Genzai. He laughed like an earthquake would laugh. “Treasures? Indeed. It must have taken you all morning to haul these up, what with that stump of an arm of yours.”

“Eight.”

“What’s that?”

“Eight mornings.”

“Oh, ho. Do you mean to tell me eight days ago, you woke up and decided to dive for ‘treasures,’ just hoping that someone like me would come along to ask you for them?”

“No,” Kaida said. Her face flushed and she looked down at the sand. She didn’t hope they would come. She knew they’d come. They had to come, because if they didn’t Kaida would be stuck in Ama-machi for two more years. At least two more, and even then her best hope of getting out was to marry some boy in another village just like Ama-machi. A bug-eyed, one-armed girl’s prospects for marriage were dismal indeed, and Kaida didn’t see much she liked in boys anyway. Most of them were mean, and the ones that weren’t had no more backbone than a jellyfish. Miyoko got them to pick on Kaida all the time. She enjoyed using her cruelty that way, the same as she enjoyed the baby sparrows she sometimes stole from nests, twisting their little necks to see how far they’d go. So either Kaida would get out with the outlanders, or else she’d stay here to get worn and hollow and brittle like a piece of driftwood.

But she couldn’t say any of that. Not with her father listening. Instead she just said, “I knew you’d come.”

“Then you have as much foresight as you have courage,” said Genzai. “Impressive in one so young. But useless nonetheless—and good luck for you that you are. Tell me, Kaida-san, what is it you imagine strangers would do with a little girl once they took her away?”

“I don’t care. Just so long as I get out.”

Her father gasped, as pained as she’d ever seen him. Genzai looked at her too, a hint of curiosity on his otherwise impassive face. “You make for interesting reading,” he said. “Too smart to be spouting such hopeless naivete. In another girl, yes, but not you. You really are desperate, aren’t you?”

Kaida glared at him. She felt her eyebrows and cheeks scrunch up, heard her breath coming loud through her nose. “Just take me with you,” she said.

“I’m sorry, Kaida-san. I don’t have any use for little one-armed girls, not here and not where we’re going