7
A PALE INFERNO
Whether it’s a reeking pit in the heart of Kigen city, or a comfortable house with barred windows amidst the branches of an ancient sugi tree, a prison is a prison is a prison.
The room was divided down the center, thick bamboo bars separating the jailed from the jailers. Ayane sat against the far wall, her spine curved to accommodate the silver orb affixed between her shoulder blades. The long, thin spider legs sprouting from the bulbous hub were curled up against her back, motionless save for the broken limb trailing on the floor beside her. It had stopped spitting sparks once they’d come in from the rain, but still twitched occasionally, like a gutter-child stricken with palsy.
“I’m sorry.”
Kin stood outside the cell, hands wrapped around the bars. The forest air was cloying, sweat gleaming on his body. Ayane still wore the uwagi he’d given her, though she’d torn a hole in the back to accommodate her extra limbs. Someone had fished out a pair of oversized hakama to cover her legs, grubby and threadbare. Her feet were filthy, toes curling against the floorboards. The rain drummed insistent upon the ceiling.
“You need not apologize, Kin-san.” Ayane smiled despite her grim surroundings. “You cannot blame them for being suspicious. If I were a Kage who had turned myself over to the Guild, the Inquisition would have arranged far less comfortable accommodations.”
“The Inquisition.” Kin sighed. “I haven’t thought about them in a long time.”
“Do you still dream?” Ayane’s eyes were wide. “Your Awakening, I mean?”
“Every night since I was thirteen.”
Ayane sighed, stared at the floor.
“I hoped … once I unplugged…” She ran a hand over her bare scalp. “It might stop.”
“What do you see?” Kin’s voice was soft as smoke.
She shook her head. “I do not want to talk about that.”
“Your What Will Be can’t be any worse than mine.”
She looked up at him again, and he saw sorrow welling in her eyes.
“There are secrets, and then there are secrets, Kin-san.”
Ayane drew her knees up to her chest and hugged them tight. The delicate limbs at her back unfurled, one pair at a time, folding around her, cocooning her in five-feet lengths of sharpened chrome. The clicking of a hundred wet mandibles filled the air, cutting through the chilled hum of the wind amidst the trees, the paper-dry conversations of falling leaves. The broken limb twitched, illuminating her face with faint bursts of blue-white.
“It feels so strange to be out of my skin.” She rubbed her knees as if savoring the sensation. “And First Bloom help me, the
“Can you … feel them?” Kin pointed to the spider limbs. “Like your flesh?”
“No.” She shook her head. “But I feel them in my mind.”
“Does the broken one hurt?”
“It is giving me a headache.” A rippling shrug. “But I will have to live with it.”
Kin looked around the tiny cell, the moisture beading on her skin, slick upon the iron padlock. He remembered his own time in here, the agony of his burns with no anesthetic to numb him; fear and uncertainty intensified by physical pain. Empty hours alone, listening to the sound of his own breathing and counting the endless minutes in his head.
“I’ve got a tool kit here.” He pointed at his belt. “I could try fixing it?”
“Will that not get you in trouble?”
“They said you weren’t to leave the cell. You’re not.”
“Kin-san, I do not wish to cause you grief…”
Kin was already selecting tools from his belt. He gave her a small smile, held up a screwdriver. “Turn around. Let’s see what we can see.”
They sat together, her within the bars, him without, the hushed metallic tones of the tools and metal between them. As his fingers flitted over intricate clockwork, he realized how much he’d missed it—the language of the machine. The poetry of it. The absoluteness of it. A world governed by laws, immutable, unchangeable. A world of mass and force, equations and calibrations. So much simpler than a world of flesh, with all its chaos and complexity.
He murmured around the four screws pursed in his lips. “It feels good to be working with my hands again.”
“I am surprised they are not worked to the bone.”
“What do you mean?”
“… Forgiveness.” The girl shook her head. “I speak out of turn. It is not my place.”
Kin pulled the screws from his mouth, frowning. “No, Ayane. Say what you think.”
“It is just … your knowledge could make life up here so much easier…” The girl shivered, shook her head. “But no. I am a guest here. I do not understand their ways. I will be silent.”
Kin’s frown deepened. “Ayane, the Guild can’t hurt you here. There are no Inquisitors waiting in the shadows, no Kyodai to punish you, no Blooms to answer to. You’re your own person. Your choices are your own, too.”
“Then it is my right to choose to remain silent, is it not?”
“But why? You’re free now. What’s to be afraid of?”
Ayane glanced over her shoulder, spider limbs rippling.
“The girl all Guildsmen fear.”
Kaori’s glare was the color of water on polished steel, sharp at the edges.
“I cannot believe you brought it here.”
Four figures knelt in a semicircle around the fire pit in Daichi’s dwelling, lit by crackling flame. The assembled faces belonged to the Kage military council; hard eyes, cool expressions, sword-grip calluses on every hand. There was Kaori, of course, fringe draped over her face, clad in simple clothing of dappled green. Maro and Ryusaki sat together—broad, flat faces, nut-brown skin, deeply lidded eyes that seemed almost closed even when they were fully awake. Ryusaki had a shaved head, a long plaited moustache, his occasional smiles revealing gums bereft of most of his front teeth. Maro’s hair was bound in warrior’s braids and he was missing an eye, the left lens on the goggles slung about his neck painted black. The brothers were former samurai who’d served under Daichi’s command, following him from Kigen city into the wilderness. Maro usually led the arson crew attacks on the southern lotus fields, and seemed perpetually wreathed in smoke. Ryusaki was a swordmaster, Michi’s sensei, and the man had been teaching Yukiko some bladework in the few moments she found spare.
Daichi himself knelt in the center, a cup of tea before him, fists on his knees. He ran his hand down through his long faded moustache, eyes the same blue-gray as his daughter’s. His old-fashioned katana rested in an alcove at his back, sibling to the wakizashi Kaori carried—a scabbard of black enamel, embossed with golden cranes.
Yukiko put her palm to her brow, headache digging its boots into the back of her eyeballs. Sickness swelled in her stomach, the floor of Daichi’s house rolling like the deck of a sky-ship in a storm. She’d tried to close off the Kenning, but could still feel Buruu waiting on the landing outside—a pale inferno burning in her mind’s eye.
“It was either bring her with us or kill her, Kaori.”
“So kill her,” the woman snapped. “Where is the issue?”
“I don’t kill helpless girls with their hands bound at their sides.”
“She’s not a girl,” Kaori growled. “She’s a godsdamn Guildsman.”
Peppermint tea. Burning cedar. Old leather, sword oil and dry flowers. A perfume filling Daichi’s sitting room, filling her lungs and head, too much input, sharp and pointed inside her skull. She fancied she could still
