Now witness the end of the beginning.
A ghost-pale girl, sixteen years old, wisps of dark hair and warm scarlet scrawled across her face. A smiling tyrant, stained with his own sister’s blood, a smoking iron-thrower in a white-knuckle grip. The pair standing in the crowded Market Square as children’s ashes swirl and dance in the gulf between them. And she stretches out her hand, and opens her mouth, and speaks the last words the tyrant will ever hear.
“Let me show you what one little girl can do.”
Fifty-five days ago. Almost two months since the last son of the Kazumitsu Dynasty perished at her hands. So much chaos since then. The earth shifting beneath our feet. The threads beginning to unravel. One by one by one.
Our war of conquest against the round-eyed gaijin collapsed as news of the Shogun’s death spread, the threat and promise of a now-empty throne coalescing in every clanlord’s mind. And as the shadow of civil war reared over the Seven Isles, the Lotus Guild urged only calm. Obeisance to their puppets in the Tiger clan. Threatening embargoes of their precious fuel—the blood-red chi driving the Shogunate’s iron heart—to any who disobeyed their will.
Then came the truth of how that fuel was made.
The words that would begin the avalanche were transmitted over the pirate radio frequencies of the Kage rebels. The Shadows revealed that inochi—the wondrous fertilizer used on blood lotus fields across the Seven Isles—had been manufactured with the remains of gaijin prisoners of war. And Shima’s people awoke to the horror that the Imperium, the technology driving it, their entire way of life—all had been watered with innocent blood.
Like flames on long-dead leaves after a breathless summer, or ripples on still water after rain’s first falling, the riots took seed and spread. Outraged. Bloody. But brief. Brutally suppressed beneath the heels of Iron Samurai still loyal to the vacant throne. Uneasy peace settled over the clan metropolises, broken glass crunching underfoot, as the forty-nine days of official mourning passed in shivering, breathless silence.
Until she returned.
Yukiko. Arashi-no-odoriko. Stormdancer. Astride the mighty thunder tiger Buruu, fire in her eyes, lightning crawling along his clockwork wings. Flying to every capital, from the Floating Palace in Danro to the Market Square in Kigen city. Her voice a clarion call. Urging the people to open their eyes and open their minds and close the fingers on their hands.
How I wish I could have been there.
How I wish I could have heard her speak. But since the moment Yoritomo’s corpse hit the cobbles, I have been running. Fleeing Kigen in a trail of blue-white flame. Abandoning the burnished brass I had worn all my life in some fallow field, my touch lingering on its surface as if I were saying farewell to my oldest friend. Long miles of empty road under my bleeding feet, endless skies of bloody red before my burning eyes, flesh hardened and torn from the weeks it has taken to make it back to the Iishi wilds.
Back to her.
And here I am. Almost there, now. The Lotus Guildsman who betrayed all he knew, all he was. Who gifted a crippled thunder tiger with metal wings to bear him from his prison. Who helped a lone girl slay the Kazumitsu Dynasty’s last son and plunge this nation into the tempest. Traitor is the name I will wear in the histories. Kioshi was the name I inherited after my father died.
But in truth, my name is Kin.
I remember what it was to be encased in metal skin. To see the world through blood-red glass. To stand apart and above and beyond and wonder if there was nothing more. And even now, here in the depths of Shima’s last wilderness, the dogs closing in around me, I can hear the whispers of the mechabacus in my head, feel the phantom weight of that skin on my back and on my bones, and part of me misses it so badly it makes my chest hurt.
I remember the night I learned the truth of myself—my future laid bare in the Chamber of Smoke. I remember the Inquisitors coming for me, swathed in black and soundless as cats, telling me it was time to see my What Will Be. And even as the screams of those brethren who failed the Awakening echoed in my head, I felt no fear. I clenched my fists, thought of my father, and vowed I would make him proud. That I would Wake.
Thirteen years old and they call you a man.
I had never watched the sun kiss the horizon, setting the sky on fire as it sank below the lip of the world. Never felt the whisper-gentle press of a night wind on my face. Never known what it was to belong or betray. To refuse or resist. To love or to lose.
But I knew who I was. I knew who I was supposed to be.
Skin was strong.
Flesh was weak.
I wonder now, how that boy could have been so blind.
1
THE GIRL ALL GUILDSMEN FEAR
Three Guild warships rumbled across a blood-red sky with all the finesse of fat drunkards lunging toward the privy. They were capital warships of the “ironclad” series; the heaviest dreadnoughts constructed in the Midland yards. Balloons the color of flame, shuriken-thrower turrets studding their inflatables, vomiting black exhaust into opiate skies.
The flagship leading the trio was a hundred feet long, three red banners embroidered with lotus blooms trailing at her stern. Her name flowed down her bow in broad, bold kanji—a warning to any fool who would stand in her way.
LADY IZANAMI’S HUNGER.
If Brother Jubei felt any trepidation about serving on a ship named for the Dark Mother’s appetites, he hid it well. He stood at the stern, warm inside the brass shell of his atmos-suit despite the freezing wind. Trying to still the butterflies in his stomach, quiet his pounding heart. Repeating the mantra: “skin is strong, flesh is weak, skin is strong, flesh is weak,” seeking his center. Yet try as he might, he couldn’t still the discontent ringing inside his head.
The fleet’s captain stood at the railing, surveying the Iishi Mountains below. His atmos-suit was decorated with ornate designs, brass fixtures and pistons embossed with steel-gray filigree. A mechabacus clicked and chittered on his chest; a device of counting beads and vacuum tubes, singing the tuneless song of windup insects. A dozen desiccated tiger tails hung from the spaulders covering the captain’s shoulders. They were rumored to have been a gift from the great Fleetmaster of the Tora Chapterhouse, Old Kioshi himself.
The captain’s name was Montaro, though his crew preferred to call him “Scourge of the Gaijin.” He was a veteran of the Morcheba invasion, had commanded the Guild fleet supporting Shogunate ground troops against the round-eye barbarians across the Eastborne Sea. But when the war effort had begun disintegrating in the wake of the Shogun’s assassination, Chapterhouse Kigen had recalled the captain and set him tracking a new foe, back on Shiman shores. To Brother Jubei’s great pride, of all the newly Awakened Shatei in Kigen, Second Bloom Kensai had selected him to serve as the Scourge’s new aide.
“Do you require anything, Captain?” Jubei stood at the Scourge’s back, a respectful distance away, eyes downcast.
“A sniff of our quarry would suffice.” Faint annoyance in the crackling buzz that passed for the captain’s voice. “Other than that, this weak flesh abides.” He touched a switch, spoke into his wrist. “Do you see anything up there, Shatei Masaki?”
“No movement, Captain.” The lookout’s reply was faint, despite him being perched only thirty feet above
