She could feel the shape of the hound’s mind, at once strange and familiar, like an old coat belonging to a stranger, yet fitting like it had been tailored for her. He was warm and soft, all curiosity and energy, tail beginning to wag again as she felt around his mind.
<
She frowned, trying to puzzle out what he meant, how she could frame the question in terms he’d understand. It had been years since she’d spent time swimming in the thoughts of a real dog; the last she’d Kenned was Aisha’s puppy, but she’d known him only briefly. Hounds could be intelligent, but they didn’t understand human concepts, focused instead on the immediate, the primary. As if on cue, she could feel the cold, wet nose of his thoughts snooping around the sliver she’d lodged inside his head.
She seized upon an idea, decided to see where it led.
The dog snapped to his feet, tail a blur.
The dog was already scampering away, and Yukiko only caught a glimpse of his room as she slipped behind his pupils. Gray walls. Metal cot and desk. A strange, crooked machine studded with glass vacuum tubes and buttons beside a stack of too-white paper. A banner on the wall; a black field set with a circle of twelve red stars.
Red nosed a rubber flap open and belted out into a long corridor of gray concrete, wind howling through the ducts overhead. They could smell the sea; the bite of salt, a hint of rust. But there was no rot entwined with it, no refuse like the waters of Kigen Bay. It was fresh and wonderful; a bright, caustic smell clinging to all around them.
They scampered past rows of closed doors, two large gaijin with hedge-thick beards and grubby yellow rainskins chatting beside stairs leading up and down. They could hear engines, a klaxon wailing in the building’s bowels, a sharp burst of laughter. Storm rumbling overhead, the structure murmuring in sympathy.
Out of the stairwell, into what looked to be a storage bay, crates stacked to the ceiling, static electricity standing their fur on end. Strange writing, wet bootprints, finally nosing their way through a rubber flap in towering doors. And at last, out into the wind and dark of night.
A gantry of wet, iron-gray stretched out before them, ending at a sturdy railing and a sudden drop into darkness. Forty feet below, black ocean swelled, towering waves crashing into the iron legs holding them aloft, hissing in fury as they were dashed to pieces, again and again. A soup-thick mist hung in the air, lightning whipping the gloom, illuminating long stretches of twin iron cables spilling out from overhead and off into the darkness. Thunder cracked so close they shrunk down against the floor, tail between their legs.
They turned their eyes to the sky, to the building towering at their back. Square windows watched the sea, lit from within like empty, hollow eyes. Three stories tall, flat walls of gray brick, crawling with piping and cable. Odd, conical structures rose from its roof like the points of a lopsided crown, still more dotting the fangs of rock in the ocean around them; metal rods, twelve feet high, topped with broad, flattened spheres. Each rod had a thinner pipe wound around it, circumference growing wider as it spiraled from tip to base. Orange metal, crusted with bright green oxide, scuffed by the kiss of a thousand scrubbing brushes.
A blue-white glow spilled from the roof, shimmering like sunlight through rippling water. Thunder rolled, and they crouched low again as lightning arced down from the sky a hundred feet away, kissing one of the copper spires out on the ocean. Electricity spiraled down the cone in a burst of blinding sparks, crackling across the twin cables back toward the building’s roof. The light in the windows pulsed briefly, the glow overhead flickering.
She peered through the hound’s eyes, into the raging storm. Out across the black swell, another burst of lightning struck a copper pylon, cascading along the cables in a tumble of raw electricity, up onto the impossible crown on the building’s roof. Darkness and rain and howling wind, thunder shaking their bones and shivering their skin. The dog’s terror folded into her, all tuck-tailed and whining, and she finally bid him back inside, away from the elemental fury and bottomless ocean, back into the echoing empty of the building’s innards.
The hound shook himself, jowls flapping, spraying rainwater in all directions. The walls around him rocked, mirroring Yukiko’s tremors as she closed off the Kenning, pulled back into her own tiny body, her own little self. A frail and shivering girl, cold and wet and alone, a thousand miles of storm and ocean and darkness between her and anything that might resemble home.
And of the brother who had brought her here, the mountain she’d set her back against, the one she’d come to depend on above all else, there was no sign at all.
20
A SIGH OR TWO
A match flared in the darkness; a burst of orange and sulfur in the palm of Michi’s hand. She cupped the light, gentle as a new-made mother, touching it to the candlewick. The wax was glossy, the color of fresh blood, perfumed with rose hip and honey. A luxury that a girl from a village like Daiyakawa would never have dreamed of.
The wick caught, and she snuffed the match with a single breath, watching the light creep along the walls. Padding across the floorboards, she placed the candle on the windowsill, pressing it against clouded glass; a lighthouse calling her comrade to treason. She stared into the palace courtyard, garden silhouettes shrouded in night, stone ancestor statuary and weeping trees, bent double under the weight of a poisoned sky. Father Moon was a faint pink stain across the haze, a featureless portrait on ashen canvas, face buried in his hands.
Leaving the light burning in the window, she crept back to the bed. She knelt and studied Ichizo’s face, the features she knew now almost as well as her own. He wasn’t a picture of perfection when he slept, some kami taken human form to lie beside her and steal her breath away. Cheek mashed into the pillow, hair tangled, drool upon his chin. Ichizo was all too real. And that was the problem.
