“Do you know who I am?”
“No.” Yoshi gasped for breath. “No, I don’t.”
He stepped closer, hovering just inches away. Yoshi could see the pores in his skin, the lines at the corners of those bottomless eyes. There was no anger—not even a hint of malice in the man’s voice.
“I am the man who paid your rent. Paid the tailor who made your clothes. The artiste who inked your skin. I paid for your smoke. Your drink. I am the man whose face you spit in, every time you spent one of those stolen coins.”
“I’m sorry.” Yoshi swallowed. “I’m sorry, but please, my sister didn’t have anything to do with this, please just—”
“What is your name?”
“… Yoshi.”
“I am the Gentleman.” The man was staring at Yoshi’s inkless arm. “You are lowborn?”
“Hai.”
“It explains much.” The Gentleman paced in a long, slow circle around Yoshi. “Do you know how we differ, Yoshi-san?”
“No…”
“I am Burakumin, just like you. A boy born with nothing, no clan, no family, no name. And like you, I was forced to do terrible things, just to survive this place.” The Gentleman shook his head. “The things I have done, Yoshi-san. The things I will do…”
The man ceased pacing, looked Yoshi in the eye.
“But I am no thief. Everything I have, I bought with sweat and blood. I had the grace to look into men’s eyes as I took everything they had. That is the difference between us. Why I stand here, and you hang there. Without your little hand-cannon.” As the Gentleman spoke, he moved his face an inch or two closer to Yoshi’s with every word. “You. Are. A. Coward.”
Yoshi said nothing, mind awhirl. Desperate. Looking for something. Anything. Some way out of this hole, this pit he’d dragged her into. Gods, not Hana, please …
“You say your sister is blameless?” The Gentleman looked at her, then back to Yoshi. “That she knew nothing of your transgressions against the Scorpion Children?”
Sweat rolled down Yoshi’s face, blood in his eyes. “Nothing.”
“And you would have me let her go?”
“She doesn’t deserve any of this.” He licked at split lips. “Do what you want to me. I deserve it for what I did. But she doesn’t deserve to see it.”
The Gentleman stared, head tilted as if listening to hidden voices.
“I suppose, Yoshi-san, you are right. She doesn’t deserve to see this at all.”
Relief flooded through Yoshi and he almost sobbed, babbling thanks as the Gentleman turned away. And as he watched, the little man stepped up to Seimi and took the long-nosed pliers from his calloused hands, and in the space between one heartbeat and the next, the Gentleman leaned in close and plucked Hana’s eye from her socket.
Her scream filled the air, louder than Yoshi could have thought possible. He found his own voice caught up with hers, a shapeless roar of hatred, thrashing against the ropes binding him, spitting and screaming and flailing. The Gentleman touched the men holding Hana and they dropped her to the floor. She brought her bound hands up to her face and curled into a ball and screamed, screamed until Yoshi thought his heart would break. Tears blurred his sight, his captors reduced to smudges in the glare, the scent of smoke filling his lungs.
“You bastard!” he screamed. “You fucking bastard!”
The Gentleman dropped the pliers as if disgusted by them. They hit concrete with a dull, metallic clang. He drew a kerchief from his uwagi, cleaned the blood off his hands as he spoke with a slow and measured voice to Seimi.
“Release the girl when you are done. But this one?” The Gentleman looked Yoshi up and down. “I wish his suffering to be legendary. I wish Kigen to know, now and forever, the price of crossing the Scorpion Children. If you are an artiste, brother, let this boy’s flesh be the canvas upon which you paint your masterpiece. And when you are finished, you hang him on a wall in the Market Square for all the world to see. Do you understand me, Seimi-san?”
The man covered his fist and bowed. “Oyabun.”
A distant explosion tore the air. Marching boots. Steel and screams.
“If you brothers will excuse me, I have a wife and son to attend.”
The Gentleman spared a last glance for Hana, sobbing in a spatter of blood. Lips pursed, hands clasped behind his back. There was a brief flicker, just the tiniest moment of pity in his bottomless stare. But he blinked, and it was gone; the light of a single candle extinguished in a bottomless ocean of black. Motioning to the Scorpion Children on the spotlight’s edge, he strolled from the room, taking eight yakuza with him. Yoshi heard heavy doors open and close, the chaos from the streets outside swelling momentarily, smoke-scent growing stronger still.
Seimi was watching him with narrowed eyes.
“You’ve got balls, street trash, I’ll give you that.”
The yakuza walked to the table, picked up the chi-powered blowtorch, smiling faintly.
“But not for long.”
Yoshi drew a breath.
Held it for forever.
And there on the floor, amidst the anguish and the blood and the agony in the place where her eye had once been, Hana lay curled in a tiny ball and sobbed.
And shook.
And remembered.
* * *
The bottle fell, a long, scything arc ending in her throat and a spray of blood, thick and hot and bright. And Hana did what any thirteen-year-old girl would have done at that moment.
Yoshi crashed into their father, shapeless bellowing and flailing fists. He caught him on the cheek, the jaw, the pair falling on the table and smashing it to splinters. Hana stood and screamed over her mother’s body, head throbbing like it might burst, looking at that open, grinning throat and those beautiful blue eyes, empty now and forever.
Her father slapped Yoshi aside, his face purple, sweat and veins and spittle and teeth.
“Little bastard, I’ll kill you,” he growled.
Da raised the broken saké bottle in his good hand, leaned over Yoshi’s crumpled form. Blood on the glass. Blood on his hands. Her mother’s. Now her brother’s too? Too little to stop him. Too small to make a difference. But in that moment, Hana found herself roaring anyway, thoughtless, heedless, throwing herself at his back, beating on him with her tiny fists, screaming, “No, no, no,” as if all the storms in all the world lived inside her lungs. He spun around with horror etched on his face, as if he couldn’t believe she would turn on him. Not his Hana. Not his little flower.
“My gods,” he said. “Your eye…”
He pointed to her face with the blood-slicked bottle, features twisted in anguish.
“Gods above, no. No, not you…”
Yoshi leaped on Da’s back with a roar, wrapping his arms around his throat. Father swung his elbow, connected with Yoshi’s jaw. Teeth clapping together. Blood. Her brother fell amongst the table fragments, limp and senseless.
Da turned and slapped her, spun her like a top. She fell to her knees and he was on her, sitting on her chest and pinning her arms with his thighs. He was so heavy. So heavy she couldn’t breathe. Sobbing. Pleading.
“No, Da. Don’t!”
He pressed his stunted forearm to her throat, broken bottle still clutched in his hand.
“I should’ve known,” he hissed. “I should’ve known it was in you. She’s poisoned you.”
He pointed at their mother, irises glazed over like beach glass, the color of dragon silk.
“It’s in you,” her father was saying. “You gaijin trash. The white devils are in you. But I can see them. I can get them out…”
He held the bottle to her face, inches from Hana’s right eye, broken glass reflected in her iris.
“Da, no!” She shook her head, eyes closed tight. “No, no!”
Then he dug the bottle in.
“I can get them out…”
50
SENSATION
The world around her was so bright, so sharp, Ayane thought her e
yes might bleed.
Faint breeze tickled her ankles and shins, clothing rasped against bare flesh, raising the new hair on her body in goosebumps. When Kin turned to look at her, she could feel his breath on her face, feather-soft. She shivered at the overload of sensation, all this feeling, so fresh and new. But more than that, as she watched the old man by the window, shaking and coughing and slipping toward his grave one breath at a time, she was surprised to feel pity swelling inside her chest. Pity for him, standing so close to the edge, blissfully unaware of what yawned beneath his toes. And pity for herself, that all this would end almost as soon as it began.
The mechabacus chattered on her chest. In her head. Orders. Movements. Questions.
Questions she longed to answer.
Kin was looking at her, a pointed stare, smooth and hard. And so she stood and asked for directions to the privy, bowing low to Daichi before stepping on quiet feet to the stairwell.
Three floors down into the Kagé basement, the battle plan spread on the table, chess pieces and charcoal sticks and rice-paper. Ayane knelt in the corner, face upturned to the ceiling. She ran one finger along her arm, delighting in the sensation, watching the tiny hairs stir and rise. The finger trailed up her shoulder, over the empty output jack at her collarbone, down her breast. And there she found it. Smooth metal and cold transistors. Chittering weight hanging on the cord around her neck. She touched a length of corrugated rubber cable spilling from the mechabacus’s side, held it up to the light, staring at the bayonet studs at its head.
She closed her eyes and felt night air on her skin. Inhaling smoke and ash, listening to the swelling orchestra of the chaos outside. Holding her breath, as if she were about to dive into deep water. And then she plunged the cable into the output port at her collarbone, twisting it home with a sharp snap, exhalation drifting into a sigh.
Her fingers moved across the device’s face, shifting counting beads back and forth in a tiny, intricate dance. She felt the chatter swell, shift focus to the new transmission, the signal that had been missing from the choir these past weeks. Their voices in her head, the nattering, clattering tumbling voices, sounds of the real world drifting away. And as the sensation of her flesh became nothing at all, tears slipped over fluttering lashes and down her cheeks, falling away from flesh almost too insensate to mark their passing.
Almost.
* * *
They crawled through the sewer, no louder than the rats around them, sleek, flea-bitten shapes baring crooked yellow fangs at their approach. Kaori in front, sweat soaking through her kerchief, a hand-cranked tungsten torch burning in her hand. The rest of the Kagé behind, single file, breathing heavy in the dank confines of the tunnel’s gut.
They were half a dozen turns into the labyrinth when Kaori paused at a four-way junction, looked back the way they’d come. The Spider peered at her in the dark, eyes narrowed against the stink.
“Do you know where you’re going?” The lieutenant’s whisper was feather-light, almost inaudible behind the grubby cotton covering his mouth.
Kaori scowled, turned around, kept crawling.
They reached a four-way junction and Kaori paused again, looking left and right, chewing her lip. Her eyes were wide, pupils dilated.
“This makes no sense,” she whispered.
The Spider cursed beneath his breath, spat into the filth they crawled through.
“Raijin’s drums, what’s the problem?”
“We’re looking for an emergency access shaft, up into the maintenance subbasement. But we should have hit a T-junction, not a crossroads.”
The Spider took Kin’s map from Kaori’s hand, smeared with filth but still legible. The Kagé lieutenant frowned in the stuttering light, looking back the way they’d come, even turning the paper upside down.
“This is wrong,” he said. “We passed a five-way fork after the crossroads. But we shouldn’t have hit that until after the T-junction.”
“That’s what I just said,” Kaori hissed.
“Your Guildsman can’t even draw a godsdamned map.” The paper crumpled in one sodden fist. “Anyone would think the little bastard wanted us lost down here.”
Kaori looked at the Spider, he at her, watching her eyes grow wide.
“Oh gods…”
* * *
“What are you doing?”
The voice pulled Ayane from her trance, mechabacus fading to a whisper as she opened bloodshot eyes and saw Isao in the doorway. The boy’s face was flushed, fist curled around the haft of a wickedly sharp kusarigama, muscles taut along his forearm. He advanced toward her.
“You’re only supposed to be receiving, not transmitting. What are you doing?”
Ayane was on her feet, razored arms at her back unfolding with a bright, silver sound. The boy paused, one hand creeping up to his cheek; the thin red scar she’d given him on the bridge. Eyes on her fingers, still dancing on her mechabacus. He drew breath to shout for help.
A hand snaked over his mouth from behind and his eyes grew wide, a muffled, choking cry spilling through the fingers covering his lips. A knife gleamed red in the gloom.
“What’s my name, Isao?” Kin whispered.
Isao bucked, clawing blindly at Kin’s face. Kin stabbed again, red floods pouring down Isao’s back as he crumpled to his knees and toppled forward onto dusty concrete. Kin fell upon him, plunging the knife down again and again, scarlet spraying across the walls. Chest heaving, sucking breath through clenched teeth, finally pushing himself away from the corpse and spraying it with a mouthful of spittle, hands painted red, face white as snow.
Ayane watched him as if hypnotized. The silver at her back gleamed, long, razored needles rippling like branches in a gentle breeze. She walked up beside him and peered at Isao’s body, the blood pooling around him.
“You stabbed him in the back,” she said.
“So?”
Ayane reached out with one spider limb to poke the meat cooling on the basement floor. Kin grabbed her arm, glaring.
“I’m just touching…” she said.
“Well, don’t.”
“What was it like?” Head tilted, eyes a little too wide. “To kill him? How did it feel?”
“This isn’t the godsdamned time, Ayane.”
“Where are the others? Takeshi and Atsushi?”
“Already gone.” He gestured to the mechabacus on her chest. “Is it done?”
“Hai.” Ayane reached out ever so slowly, touched the blood on Kin’s cheek. “It is done.”
Kin sheathed his knife, walked up the stairs. “Then let’s get this over with.”
Ayane lingered, watching the punctured carrion cooling on the ground in front of her. She looked at the droplets of blood, winding in random paths down the walls, smeared on her fingertips. Her tongue emerged from between bee-stung lips and she touched it to her fingers, just once, shivering as she tasted copper and salt.
Licking her lips, she turned and followed Kin up the stairs.
* * *
He hadn’t moved from the window.
A silhouette against rising flames, sky-ships roaring overhead, the calls for calm, obedience, dispersal, hanging in the air with the smoke. He didn’t even look at them as they entered the room; Kin standing in the doorway, smeared in blood, Ayane leaning into a corner, a halo of silver needles fanned out along the walls.
“I wonder how history will remember us, Kin-san,” Daichi said, voice frail with pain. “I wonder what they will say.”
Kin’s reply was flat. Dead.
“They’ll probably call me traitor.”
Daichi nodded at the flames. “Probably.”
“They won’t call you anything at all.”
Daichi raised an eyebrow, turned toward the boy, and froze. He took in the unblinking eyes, the blood smeared across fingers and face, the dead-man expression.
“Nobody will remember your name, Daichi,” Kin said.
“What…” Daichi licked his lips, eyes fixed on those bloody han
ds, “… what have you done, Kin-san?”
“I told you,” Kin said. “I found a way for all of it to end.”
The window exploded at Daichi’s back, a rain of shattered glass and roar of blue-white flame. A Lotusman collided with the old man, knocked him off his feet, the pair crashing to the floor and tumbling across the boards. Another half-dozen suited shapes blasted in through the broken window, the roar of their burners almost deafening, filling the room with choking smoke.
Daichi kicked at the Guildsman tackling him, rolling away and drawing the old katana at his back from its battered scabbard, teeth gritted in agony. A second Lotusman advanced, brass fingers outstretched, and the old man struck with the blade, a dull note ringing out as folded steel connected with case-hardened brass. The hiss of breather bellows, the sound of metallic chuckling as the figures surrounded the old man, his sword raised high, gleaming in the light of bloody eyes.
They lunged and he moved; an ebb tide, flowing back then crashing forward, his katana’s point skewering one Guildsman through the glowing red glass over his eye. The Lotusman screamed, a high-pitched, agonized squeal, thick with reverb as he fell, blood streaming down a blank, motionless face. A quick strike severed the breathing tubes of two more Lotusmen, and the old man staggered back, one hand pressed to his ribs, the other still clutching his blade, knuckles white upon the hilt. Gasping for breath. Blood at his lips.
Swordmaster the old man might have been, but he was one, beaten and sick, and they were six, hard and cold. More still rushing up the stairs now; heavily armed Guild mercenaries with Kobiashi needle-throwers. And they fell on him, just a dull weight of numbers without finesse or craft, bearing him down as he thrashed, stabbing and punching, cursing them with every ragged, gasping breath. Curling up under their blows and finally falling still as they plunged the blacksleep needles into his flesh, his stare locked on the boy who even now sat slumped at the table, bathed in blood, flames reflected in knife-bright eyes.
Kin heard his father’s voice, the knowing rebuke amidst the workshop’s thrum. The words he’d heard so many times, the simple rote that had been as much a part of his life as breathing. And in that moment, he finally understood their truth.