Only one way to find out.
She reached into the Kenning, felt for the boy’s mind amidst the rolling, seething storm of gaijin around her. But almost immediately, she realized she had no way of telling one blinding tangle from another. It wasn’t as if she could read their thoughts to tell them apart—the mental reflection of every round-eye felt nearly identical. And even if she
Line of sight …
The dog lifted his head, rawhide strip in his mouth, curled up on his blanket in His Boy’s room. His tail began wagging.
Red jumped up from his blanket, and she slipped into the glass-smooth space behind his eyes. It was like being in the bamboo forest of her childhood again; she and her brother Satoru wrapped inside their old hound’s head—the original Buruu who died defending them from a starving wolf.
She felt the faint disconnect between the dog’s motion and her own stationary body, the influx of scent, the clarity of sound. Machines rumbled in the building’s belly, the storm wailed with enough fury to shake the foundations. The relentless sea pounded the iron supports as if it wished the building scrubbed from its surface, nothing left behind save rusting metal and clean, feather-white bones, sunk too deep for sunlight to ever touch again.
Red scampered through the corridors, past a large room set with tables and dozens of chairs, food-scent hanging in the air. He trotted through what Yukiko presumed were barracks; bunk beds and a strong, musty scent that was distinctly male. He tried to make it up to the roof, but the door was shut with no dog flap to slip through. Red turned and padded back down three floors, slipped into a broad corridor and finally came to a halt outside a pair of heavy doors, slightly ajar. The dog whined and paced back and forth, ears pressed flat to his head.
Red sniffed the air, the concrete floor.
Uncertain but overjoyed with her flattery, the hound nosed his way into what looked like a vast boiler room. Dozens of men in dirty red coveralls were at work on a great system of cables and valves cast in greasy iron. Enormous, glittering spirals of glass descended from metal intakes in the ceiling, down to a series of strange, lopsided machines encrusted with incomprehensible controls, tight bundles of coiled copper and glass cylinders filled with a thick solution the color of urine. Thunder shook the walls around them, shivering the apparatus in their brackets. As she watched, the ceiling pulsed with a lightning strobe, and the glass spirals filled with a blinding blue-white illumination that danced across the mirrored lenses of the gaijin’s goggles. Every globe in every wall socket grew momentarily brighter, and she felt Red’s fur bristle in the crackling air.
A hollow, sucking hiss filled the room, and Red cringed as raw current arced and twisted down the copper coils and into the cylinders of yellow liquid. Yukiko felt ashamed at having tricked the dog into a situation he was so obviously frightened of, but the thought of Buruu pushed her misgivings aside. The men shouted to each other, throwing switches and clamping cables. As the light faded, squat metal trolleys were rushed in, and the gaijin shuffled the glass tanks along squeaking iron rails. The solution inside had changed color to a luminescent blue- white, a frosting of condensation forming on the glass. The smell of ozone was hung fog-thick in the air alongside a fading, high-pitched squeal.
He whined.
The hound turned to leave. Yukiko thought of Buruu again, bleeding and starving out in the storm. Her best friend in the world. Her brother. More to her than life itself. And though the guilt made her wince, the breath catch in her lungs, she reached inside the Kenning, and found herself making it hard. Iron. Not the soft voice of suggestion, or even the subtle press of manipulation. It was crude and heavy-handed; a subtraction of will, the strings of a puppeteer upon a flinching marionette. Head pounding as if it might burst, warmth trickling over her lips.
Not asking. Commanding.
And with another soft whine, the dog tucked his tail and obeyed.
He stole across the generator room, several gaijin shouting at him, trying to shoo him away. Yukiko noticed none of the workers had insignia on their collars or animal skins on their shoulders. They looked messier than Danyk and his fellows, more unkempt. Several sported what looked to be burn scars on their exposed skin.
The hound nosed his way up onto a gantry of steel mesh, into a thicket of pipes and bright red valve handles. A large picture hung on the wall, covered in gaijin writing. It resembled a spider’s web; a central hub connected to smaller nodes by thin, fluorescent wires. Each node was set with a small globe and scribed with a symbol. One bulb in the topmost corner was glowing faint blue-white, a trail of fluorescence leading back to the web’s center, light slowly fading as the static electricity in the room died. Yukiko noticed a stylized sea dragon curled around what looked like a compass in the bottom corner and realized what she was seeing.
A map.
A map of the lightning farm and the surrounding pylons.
Gaijin men were gathered around a cluster of controls nearby, and one of them soon spotted Red standing before the glowing diagram. A hulking uniform-clad shape Yukiko recognized as Danyk appeared, bellowing at the top of his voice. Red cowered low, belly to the floor. Blue-white light glinted across the flattened samurai helms on the big man’s shoulders.
Danyk picked up a wrench and made to throw it at the dog, roaring again. Ilyitch appeared from behind a cluster of pipes, a dripping mop in his hands, faint hand-shaped bruise on his cheek. The big man cuffed the boy across the back of his head, sending his goggles flying. Scooping them back up off the grille, Ilyitch grabbed Red by his collar and dragged him down the stairs, berating the hound in his strange language. She sensed Red’s shame, vague resentment mixed with confusion about why he’d done something so thoroughly
