She eyed the False-Lifer up and down, lip curling.
“Is that why your leaders are backing Hiro? Because they’re too spineless to come here themselves now? They’d rather risk men with wives and children in the battle to bring me down, right? Better to see them die than more of their precious Shatei?”
“I am from Yama.” All nine of its functional arms rippled, and Yukiko was appalled to recognize the gesture as a shrug. “I do not know the politics of First House, or why the First Bloom bids Shateigashira Kensai to support the Tora boy. But I know seventy percent of our Munitions Sect were requisitioned by Kigen four weeks ago.”
Yukiko stared blankly.
“The Munitions Sect build machines that require human control,” Kin offered. “Motor-rickshaw, shreddermen, sky-ship engines and so on. Like I used to.”
Yukiko narrowed her eyes. “What are they working on?”
“I do not know, Stormdancer.” Another grotesque, multi-armed shrug.
“Don’t call her that.” Kin plucked three transistors from the mechabacus. “Her name is Yukiko.”
The boy snipped a final set of wires, gathered up the contraption’s guts and stuffed them back into its housing. Sealing the device closed with a few hasty screws, he stepped back.
“Done.”
The False-Lifer looked at Atsushi’s blade poised against its throat. The boy shifted his grip, one word from a bloodbath. Kin was watching her with pleading eyes. Yukiko stared for a pregnant moment, arms folded, eyes narrowed. The rain was falling harder, fat, clear droplets pounding the leaves around them and soaking everyone to the bones.
Everyone except the False-Lifer, of course.
“I have never seen rain that was not black before.” It turned its palms to the sky, droplets pattering upon its body, beading and running like quicksilver. “It is beautiful.”
Yukiko’s eyes were on the blade gleaming in Atsushi’s hand. The raindrops glittering on the steel like polished jewels.
Buruu growled.
Yukiko hissed, rubbed her eyes with balled fists. The Kenning headache was slinking forward on fox-light feet. The noise. The heat. Lurking in the back of her skull with leaden hands and bated breath.
“Take off your skin,” she said.
“What?” Kin raised an eyebrow. “What for?”
“If we’re taking it back, we’re not bringing a tracking device with us. It takes its skin and mechabacus off and we bury them here.”
“The mechabacus won’t work anym—”
“That’s the bargain, Kin. We bury its skin, or we bury
“She’s not an ‘it.’” Kin frowned. “Her name is Ayane.”
Isao scowled, shook his head. Yukiko turned to the False-Lifer, eyes and voice cold.
“Your choice. And I don’t mean to sound cruel, but I could sleep either way.”
The False-Lifer glanced at Atsushi’s blade, then to Kin. Without a word, it began twisting the wing-nut bolts studding its suit. Reaching back with its humanoid arms, it tinkered with the silver orb on its spine; the melon-sized hub from which the spider limbs sprang. It fumbled around for a moment, hissing softly.
“Can you help please, Kin-san? It is difficult to do this alone.”
Hesitantly, Kin stepped behind it, twisting each bolt dotting its spine, working several clasps under the False-Lifer’s direction. Yukiko heard a faint series of popping sounds, all over the grease-slick, gleaming body, followed by the wet sucking of air rushing into vacuum. The skin slackened, as if it were now a size too big. The thing tugged a zip cord running up to the base of its skull, another down to the small of its back. As Atsushi and Isao watched, revolted and fascinated, the False-Lifer bent double, and like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, chrysalis to imago, sloughed off its outer shell.
She was clad in a membrane of pale webbing beneath. Skin so pallid it was almost translucent. Her head utterly hairless; no eyelashes, eyebrows, nothing. Long slender limbs and tapered fingers, smooth curves studded with bayonet fixtures of black, gleaming metal. Seventeen, perhaps eighteen years old at most. Her lips were full and pouting, as if she’d been stung by something venomous, her features fragile and perfect; a porcelain doll on its first day in the sun. She narrowed her eyes, held one hand up against the light.
Inexplicably, Yukiko felt her heart sink.
Kin scowled at the gawping boys and removed his uwagi, slipped it around the pale girl’s shoulders. Yukiko could see the same bayonet fixtures in
“Take those off too.”
“I cannot.” The girl’s voice sounded soft and sweet now that she was outside her skin, underscored with a thin, trembling fear. “They are part of me. Rooted in my spinal column.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“Please, I am not lying.” The girl wrung her hands, still squinting. Her eyes were a rich, earthen brown, pupils contracting to pinpricks. “I could just as easily take off my legs.”
Yukiko scowled at the rippling silver fingers, needle-sharp, swollen-knuckled and gleaming with rain. She looked down at the False-Lifer’s toes, pressed into dark, wet earth, sick to her stomach. The headache slipped toward her temples, tightening at the base of her skull. A whisper. A promise.
“Bind her arms.” She glanced at Atsushi. “All of them.”
Kin looked vaguely hurt by the suggestion. “Yukiko, you don’t need to do that.”
“Please don’t tell me what I need, Kin.”
The girl folded her metallic arms at her back; functional limbs curling up like the legs of a dying spider, the broken one hanging near her shin, limp as a dead fish. Atsushi bound her with rope, wrapping it around her torso and pinning all her arms. Drawing a deep breath, steeling herself, the girl raised her eyes and looked at Yukiko for the first time. Her voice was almost lost beneath the whispering rain.
“Thank you for trusting me,” she said.
“I don’t trust you.”
“Then … thank you for not killing me.”
“Let’s get her back.” Yukiko motioned to the boys. “Isao, bury the skin deep as you can. Atsushi, come with us. I need to speak to Daichi.”
Isao nodded, started clearing a space of dead leaves. Atsushi poked the girl in the back with his nagamaki, hard enough for her to stumble. Kin reached out, caught her before she fell.
“Move,” Atsushi growled.
Yukiko moved off into the undergrowth with Buruu, skin prickling, head throbbing. Looking back, she saw Kin had placed a steadying hand on the knots at Ayane’s back, helping her navigate the uneven ground. Atsushi tromped along behind, a dark scowl on his face.
Ayane kept her eyes downcast, voice low. But she was speaking. Furtive and clearly afraid. Stretching out into the minds of the forest around them, inundating herself in a cascading pain, Yukiko could hear every word the False-Lifer spoke. See her through a hundred pairs of eyes, feel the pulse of a hundred heartbeats.
Blood began dripping from her nose.
