The geisha to the left of his throne drifted forward, pulling a thin sword from her sleeve. The blade hissed out of the silk. Light glinted off the folded steel.
I clenched my hands together tighter and breathed out Last Light, Last Breath, pretty sure this really was my last one.
“Apologies, Almighty Shogun Genkei!” Kest’s voice made the bottom drop out of my stomach. I shut my eyes, wishing she would magically disappear to somewhere far away and safe, but she went on talking. “Please, powerful and respected leader of the Eight-Legged Dragons, withhold your executioner for just a minute. There is a piece of information you haven’t been made aware of.”
Her boots scuffed the floor as she came forward. I reopened my eyes, watching her pass me and kneel at the foot of the dais, pressing her forehead to the bottom step. The sword geisha looked down at her emotionlessly.
“I don’t have unlimited patience, Selken,” the Shogun snarled. “What is it I need to know?”
Kest straightened up and held out her real hand to the sword geisha. In her fingers, a business-card-sized piece of platinum caught the light.
It was the favor card from the train, the one I’d taken from the mantis, along with Sushi’s bottle and Warcry’s fan.
The geisha took the platinum card and brought it to Shogun Genkei.
He frowned down at it, turning it over in his paw. “How did you get this?”
“It’s not mine, Almighty Shogun, it’s Hake’s,” Kest said. “It grants him a single unconditional favor from Emperor Takeshi-ketsu, Eight-Legged Dragon Double-0. The card was redeemed as a full pardon an hour ago. Right now, the Emperor’s people are on the way from Shinotochi-Ryu to collect the redeemed favor card along with Hake and the rest of us. Given the likelihood of a full-scale gang war with the Heavenly Contrails over the broken treaty, the Emperor wants a Death cultivator close.”
The Shogun’s lips peeled back to show huge, yellowed fangs, and the pressure doubled, flattening the air out of my lungs. Kest grunted as it shoved her back down to a kowtowing position.
“Confirm that,” Shogun Genkei ordered.
Both the guys at the desks started swiping at their HUD screens. The one on the right came up with an answer first.
“The Emperor’s transport will be waiting outside the Van Diemann atmosphere two days from now. Any CPA guard ships in the area will be taken care of. They want the Selkens, the Burning Hatred cultivator, and the Death cultivator, and they assure us that the Van Diemann leg of the Dragons will be rewarded handsomely for bringing these treasured finds to the Emperor’s attention.”
The Shogun swiped his paw over his head like he was smoothing his hair back. The pressure disappeared, and I sucked down a huge breath.
With a rumbling growl, he muttered, “Tell the Emperor that Shogun Genkei lives to serve the Eight-Legged Dragons.”
Solitary Confinement
I WANTED TO TALK TO Warcry, Kest, and Rali, but for the next two days, we were kept in separate rooms, on different floors.
The isolation probably sucked most for Rali since he didn’t have a HUD and hated having no one to talk to. He’d told me once he could cultivate wherever he was content, which was everywhere, but now he couldn’t even do that because I’d gotten his Spirit sea destroyed.
Like she was trying to make up for Rali not being able to talk to anyone, Kest messaged me a lot while we were locked apart. She told me how she’d seen another platinum favor card while she was on Shinotochi-Ryu, and the owner had explained where it’d come from. She’d had ours verified at a pawnshop to make sure it was legit. Apparently, she’d been about to tell me when everything went nuts and suddenly the only thing anyone could talk about was three Dragon recruits who had started a gang war. It had taken some bribing of her Technol superiors, but they’d eventually agreed to let her put off her probationary mission to check on her brother. She’d contracted Naph to smuggle her back onto Van Diemann, where she finally got in touch with Warcry and found out what was going on.
She didn’t mention me slaughtering Contrails or turning on my own gang. I should’ve been happy that she didn’t bring it up, but for some reason, her ignoring it twisted a knife in my guts. Killing one guy who was trying to kill me made sense, at least according to her logic. I couldn’t see how she would justify nuking hundreds of people who hadn’t even been close to me. Maybe she couldn’t, and that was why she didn’t want to talk about it.
So, I went along with it. Talked to her about other stuff, like the biotech in her new arm and the prototype leg she’d built for Warcry and what we could do to help Rali with his broken Spirit sea. Every now and then, I thought about what Rali had said around the campfire about never wanting to become that guy again whose entire worth was invested in his kishotenketsu. I wondered whether he wasn’t a little bit relieved that it was broken, but I didn’t say anything about that to Kest. She seemed determined to find a way to repair him.
Mixed in with all the other stuff, there were some really good messages. The kind that derailed every awful thought in my brain. Stuff about Kest wanting to be together where we could hold hands and kiss again. Those usually came in at the end of the conversation, just before she went to bed. I kept coming back to them later and rereading them, trying to burn them into my skull forever.
I didn’t sleep much over those two days. One, because I’d just come out of a weeklong
