Kaiah looked at Buruu, disdain in her gaze, fur gleaming like fresh winter snow.
Realization dawned, a cold slap to his face, an understanding so bright he wondered how he didn’t see it before. All of it …
All of it made sense now …
Yukiko’s illness at the rising of the sun. Her moods, constantly shifting, like sand upon a windswept beach. The heat and light of the world growing along with her strength, her inability to shut it out. The amplification of the Kenning, her power doubling over the course of the last few months.
Yukiko looked at him, eyes bright with uncertainty.
No, not doubling.
Tripling.
Buruu sighed, storm howling overhead, lighting reflected in the bottomless black of her eyes. The girl he loved more than anything in this world. The girl he would do anything to protect, to spare her even one more second of pain.
But he could not spare her this.
The sigh came from the heart of him.
She stared at him, mouth agape, hands moving slowly to her belly.
He nodded.
Yukiko sank to her knees, clutching her abdomen and staring at nothing at all. The gaijin knelt beside her, asking if she was well. She was pale as death, wide-eyed, fingers splayed on black glass as if the whole world were shifting beneath her.
Which he supposed, in a very real way, it was.
He looked at the islands around them, the spire of rusted copper, the nomad’s corpse, skinned and bloody, the gaijin torn to ragged meat and food for worms. This place that lay days from the Everstorm. Riddled with monkey-children like fleas on a cur. Miles from the islands the arashitora called home. Why was she here at all? Why was she not …
She stepped forward with a snarl, hackles raised.
He looked down at Yukiko, shell-shocked on the stone, fingers pressed to her belly, mouth agape as she sucked in breath after heaving breath.
Kaiah growled as he padded toward her.
He sensed a terrible sorrow within the Kenning, a river running too deep for Kaiah to hide it all.
He nodded to Yukiko.
Kaiah looked at the girl, something close to pity in her eyes. Waves crashed against the rocks, the roar and hiss of surf interwoven with the song of their father’s drums. She looked up at the storm-torn fray, breathed the scent of salt and rust and blood.
She tossed her head, rain spraying from her feathers, ghosts in her eyes. They stared at each other as Lady Sun crept higher in the sky, just a smudge of light behind the rolling clouds in eastern skies. The dawn was almost as dark as the night had been. Almost as if Amaterasu had never bothered to rise from her slumber.
Yet she
Even on the darkest day, the world could be beautiful. If only for a moment.
He could feel the little ones inside Yukiko—two tiny sparks of life, shapeless and bright, intertwined with her own heat. They pulsed, too formless to know true fear, but real enough to feel their mother’s terror, shock, sorrow through the Kenning. The fear spilled into him, fear for them, for the one who carried them, for the beating, bleeding heart of his world.
He knew Kaiah could feel them too.
Kaiah growled, deep in her throat, tail whipping side to side.
Buruu bowed his head, breathed deep, tasted defeat on his tongue. Nothing he could do. Nothing he could say. He could feel the ache in Kaiah’s heart. The ache that drove her to this razored shore. A sorrow too vast to see the edges. Little ones. Precious ones. Loved ones.
Gone.
Taken.
Kaiah padded over to Yukiko, knelt on the stone before her. The girl looked up, swollen, trembling lips and frightened, blackened eyes. An age passed, there in the howling storm, the clawing wind, the driving rain, until at
