“It might be weeks before we see each other again.” Her eyes searched his face, lingered on his lips. “But we have an hour or so until Buruu comes back…”
She pressed against him, hands parting the cloth on his chest, trailing along his skin, white hot. He glanced at the spilled liquor around their feet, the tide of blood staining her cheeks and lips the color of roses.
“Kiss me,” she breathed.
She stood on tiptoes, arms slipping around his neck, mouth drifting toward his.
“Kiss me…”
She was like gravity, pulling him closer, heavy as the earth beneath him. No noise. No light. Only motion, only the pull of her, down, down to a place he wanted so badly he could taste it, feel it singing inside his chest. A place he would kill for. A place he could happily die inside.
But not like this.
“No.” He took hold of her shoulders, eased her away. “No.”
“Kin—”
“This isn’t you, Yukiko.”
“Not me?” she frowned. “Who am I then?”
“I’m not sure I know.” He gestured to the sake bottle on the floor. “Perhaps you find out when you get to the bottom?”
She remained herself for just a tiny moment longer, plain behind her eyes, wounded and sad and desperately alone. The girl he loved. The girl he would do anything for. And then she was gone. Wiped away in a rush of heat, pupils flashing, leaving the rage behind. The stranger who lived inside her skin. What had Ayane called her?
“You don’t get to judge me, Kin.”
“Godsdammit, I’m not judging you. I care about you! And I see you turning into this …
“I let one of them live.” Her stare was cold. Defiant. “But maybe I should have let them firebomb the forest? Maybe I should have let them kill
“Since when were you a mass murderer?”
“Don’t you
The words were a slap to his face, rocking him back on his heels. The memory of pale-skinned women and children, row upon row of gaijin shuffling meekly to meet their boiling end. Rendered down into fertilizer, reborn in some far-flung field as beautiful, blood-red flowers. He knew it was true. Everything she said. But to hear her say it …
He blinked at her. Speechless. Senseless.
“I shouldn’t have said that,” she sighed. “I’m sorry.”
Yukiko breathed deep, clawed away her hair. He could see it written on her face. Boiling inside her. Curling her fingers into fists, her lips to a grimace. When she spoke again, her voice was soft with it, trembling at the outskirts.
“I know it wasn’t your fault, Kin. The gaijin. Inochi. All of it. I know there was nothing you could do to stop it. Kaori and the others say otherwise. They say there’s no steel in you, but I know helping me in Kigen took more courage than most could ever dream.
“But this is war, Kin. The Yukiko you knew? That frightened little girl in the Shogun’s palace? She’s gone.” Fire in her eyes. “She’s dead.”
“No steel in me…” he whispered, lips twisting in a bitter smile.
“It’s bullshit, Kin.” She took his hand, entwined her fingers with his own. “Don’t you believe it. Any of it. But know you have enemies here. People who see you as Guild first and everything else second. Stay close to Daichi while I’m gone. And stay as far from Ayane as you can. Don’t give them a reason to doubt you.”
“Why would I bother?” he spat. “They’re doing perfectly well without one…”
“Kin—”
“I hope you find the answers you seek.” He pulled his hand away, let it drop to his side. “I know Buruu will keep you safe.”
Hurt in her eyes as she chewed her lip, searched the dark for the right words to say.
“Kiss me good-bye?”
Hovering uncertain. Wanting it more than he could say. Pride and anger shushing want, leaving it alone and friendless. All he’d given, all he’d sacrificed, and this was the life he’d purchased. Watching her fly away. Leaving him, just like she’d left him in Kigen. Alone.
Again.
He put his hands to her cheeks, feeling the satin warmth of her skin, the sensation of it beneath his tingling fingertips almost crushing his resolve to powder. But in the end, tilting her head up to his, her lips parting ever so softly, he leaned down and kissed her gently on the brow.
“Good-bye, Stormdancer,” he said.
And then he turned and walked away.
Part of him screamed he was an idiot. That he would regret it. But anger and pride urged him on, the burning fuel of the indignant fool, and he stalked off into the dark with the waterfall of his blood thrashing in his ears. She called his name again, just once. But he didn’t stop. Didn’t turn his head. And somewhere deep in the back of his mind, a tiny thought found its voice for the first time; a whisper almost too faint to hear.
It kept him awake most of the night, belly-up on his mattress of straw, staring at the ceiling with sandbag eyes. Breathing. Listening. The limbo of insomnia, gray and bottomless as the hours dragged on forever, leaving him in the muddy dawn with a heart exhausted and seven words lodged in his mind like a handful of splinters.
The same question.
Over and over again.
10
SALT AND COPPER
Yoshi’s lashes fluttered against his cheeks as he stole along fly-blown gutters on four feather-light feet. Towers of fetid waste looming all around him, nostrils filled with rot and fresh death, blood leaking from a broken skull onto cracked cobbles. He skulked past a snarling brood—a sleek and fearsome bunch, fourteen strong— scratching and fighting as they tore strips from the new bones. Squealing and spitting at him as he scampered by. A warning. A challenge. First spoils to the finders. Leavings to the rest. Our meat. Our alley. Our dirt.
He could smell salt and sweet copper, his stomach growled for the slippery, lovely wanting of it, warm and sticky-lush. But on he scampered, up through the spindly broken-leg alleys, a stale ocean of refuse in which to swim. Whiskers twitching. Mangy hide inflamed from the furious worrying of a dozen fat, black fleas. Pausing to scratch with scabrous little claws, delighting in the bloody relief.
Stopping in the alley mouth across from the whorehouse, blinking with eyes as dark as river water, his tail twitching. Rough-looking men were gathered in the stoop, arms inked from shoulder to wrist, speaking in hushed, lotus-scarred voices. No clan tattoos on their shoulders, no, just floral patterns and geisha girls and interlocking scorpions marking them as Burakumin. Lowborns all—turned to the shadow trade calling every man birthed in Kigen’s gutters. The fist and the fade. The smoke and the skin. A den of them. A seething, sweltering nest of them.
