She pressed her fists to her temples, glanced over her shoulder at Kin.
The treetops parted like water as they descended through the canopy, showers of severed green tumbling earthward in their wake. Away from the glare of the garish day, Yukiko pulled her goggles down around her throat, ran her hand across her eyes.
She chewed her lip, listening to the faint cacophony on the edge of her subconscious.
She sighed, ran her fingers through his feathers.
They circled past a copse of maidenhairs, knotted branches and shovel-tip leaves laden with rain. The soft scent of green rot entwined with the perfume of deepening autumn, the leaden smell of the storm above. Thunder rumbled somewhere distant, as if the clouds were great ironclads, splitting and burning and tumbling from the skies. Yukiko could hear the echoes of old screams, faint and metallic, somewhere inside her head. The humidity was unbearable, her body aching, sweat mixing with rain on her skin and stinging at the corners of her eyes.
“There they are,” Kin said.
Two young men around her age stood about the edge of a broad pit trap. Buruu spread his pinions and reared back, cruising in to land as gracefully as he could on the broken ground. Yukiko and Kin slipped from his shoulders and made their way across snarled roots and green-clawed scrub, Buruu prowling behind, tail stretched like a whip.
Yukiko recognized the pair with an inward groan; Isao and Atsushi. The former had long dark hair drawn back into a topknot, angular features, chin shadowed with fuzz too soft to really be called whiskers. The latter was small and wiry, light-fingered, dark hair drawn back in braids, one hand on the haft of a long spear with a single- edged, curving blade.
The pair covered their fists and bowed.
“Hello, gentlemen,” she muttered. “Strange seeing you all the way out here.”
“We were scouting, Stormdancer,” Isao said.
“Scouting? Don’t you two usually do that through a hole in the bathroom wall?”
The pair looked at each other, then glanced at Buruu’s razored talons. The thunder tiger growled long and low, staring at each boy in turn, but his laughter was warm in Yukiko’s mind.
“W-we were looking for oni,” Atsushi stammered. “As Daichi-sama bid us. There have been reports of the demons moving in the deep woods. Their numbers are growing again.”
“They know nothing but hatred for our kind,” Isao said. “The children of the Endsinger do not sleep, Stormdancer.”
“Why do you call her that?” Kin scowled at the boys. “She has a name.”
Isao drummed his fingers on his war club, a studded tetsubo of solid oak, haft wrapped in bands of old, river-smooth leather. He glanced over briefly as Kin spoke, but dismissed the boy’s words without reply. Atsushi kept his eyes on Yukiko as if Kin hadn’t spoken at all.
Yukiko glanced at the pit trap. The hole was twenty feet cubed; big enough for an oni to fall into. It had been covered by a layer of foliage, concealed from anyone who wouldn’t recognize the warning markers around it. Judging from the hole in the covering, whatever had plunged through wasn’t much bigger than a man.
“We found it an hour ago.” Isao pointed to the trap with his war club. “It must have fallen in last night. Tracks came from the south.”
“Did you speak to it?”
“No.” Isao shook his head. “We saw it looked like Guild, so we sent Takeshi to find you and Daichi-sama. I’ll not speak to any bastard Lotusman. Their kind are poison.”
Yukiko saw the boy shoot a brief, venomous glance at Kin.
Yukiko poked out the aforementioned tongue and rolled her eyes.
Buruu prowled to the lip of the pit, peeked over the edge, wings spread. He snorted, amber eyes narrowed to knife-cuts. His tail swept from side to side in swift, agitated arcs.
Yukiko crept up beside him, put her arm around his neck and looked into the hole. Two bulbous red eyes stared back at her. She saw a humanoid figure, wasp-waisted, a featureless face. It was covered head to foot in some kind of skin-tight membrane, earth-brown, slick and glistening. A cluster of eight chromed arms uncurled from a melon-sized orb on its back, as if some eyeless metal spider were fused with its flesh.
Yukiko’s hand went reflexively to the tanto at her back, her voice dripping revulsion.
“What the hells is that?”
4
DOPPELGANGER
The slap was perfect. Hard enough to rock the girl’s head back on her shoulders, bring tears to already red
