On a quieter night, the saw blade’s rasp would have brought every bushiman in the city running, but it was lost beneath the engine’s din. Kaori pulled a corroded bar away from the crosspiece, the space just narrow enough to squeeze through. She motioned the others forward, and one by one, the Kagé wriggled through the gap, down into near-darkness and a deathly chemical reek. Kaori found herself alone on the bank, slipping her wakizashi off her back and sparing one last glance to the clouds above. Rolling black, illuminated with thick fingers of firelight and floodlights from the shouting sky-ships.
She could smell it on the wind above the river’s stench; the faint perfume of smoking timber and spice, the sharp tang of chi burning in the Docktown warehouses, spitting from the power units of the Iron Samurai marching to defend them.
The music of chaos.
Smiling, she turned and crawled into the black.
47
CRESCENDO
In years to come, Hana would remember the night the Kagé attacked Kigen city as one of the darkest in her life. Not the worst. Not by far. But dark enough to leave a scar that would never truly heal.
There she stood, just at the beginning of it, unaware of what lay coiled and waiting in the hours ahead. She could hear the crowds outside their apartment walls, the clash of steel, the war-drum rhythm of running feet. Yoshi was crouched in a corner, iron-thrower in hand. She hovered by the window, peering into the charcoal haze, the flickering glow of growing flames reflected on the goggles strapped across her brow.
Sick with fear. Hands shaking. Somehow, some tiny part of her sensing the tremors of the incoming hurt. And as the dread rose up inside her, a slick, ice-cold bellyful, so too did the memory. Just like always.
The pain of it. The taste of it. In a life full of awful, crushing days, the yardstick by which all days would be measured.
The Worst Day of Her Life.
It began like every other. Rising with the sun, washing in brackish water and slipping into threadbare, third-hand clothes. Hana shuffled to the kitchen, cold rice leftovers serving as breakfast. Yoshi sat opposite, told her a dirty joke he’d heard in town that made her spit a mouthful all over the table. He couldn’t laugh with her, much as he wanted to; the inch-long split in his lip was still healing. The bruise under his eye was a toxic, sickly yellow, knuckles torn with the pattern of Father’s teeth.
Funny thing was, Da had never laid a finger on her.
She could never figure out why. He beat their mother until she couldn’t walk. Beat Yoshi like he was a pillow. But not once in her entire life had he ever raised his hand to her.
Not his little flower. Not his Hana.
It was autumn, and their pitiful lotus crop had already been stripped of blooms for the chi refineries. The ground was in terrible shape; blackening and beginning to crack in the worst of it. They stayed well away from the charred soil as they worked—Hana had tripped and fallen onto the dead ground the previous summer, spent an entire week vomiting and delirious, weeping black tears. The temperature was scalding, and the siblings were exhausted and filthy by sunset, creeping back to the house like kicked dogs slinking to their master’s feet.
The table was set with cracked plates and a posy of dried grass. Their father knelt at the head, already halfway into his bottle, cheeks and nose aglow with broken capillaries. The stump where his right hand used to be was unwrapped, shiny and pink. Medals hung on the wall behind him, remnants of an old life, gleaming like seashells on a deserted beach. Trophies for the hero; the lowborn Burakumin translator who saved the lives of seventeen Kitsune bushimen. A platoon of blooded clansmen saved by the heroism of a clanless dog.
Their mother stood in the tiny kitchen, boiling rice with some seasoning she’d scrounged from gods knew where. Pale skin, vacant blue-eyed stare, black ink under her fingernails from when she’d last dyed her hair.
Just another trophy for the hero.
Hana washed up, knelt to await the meal in silence. The fear was there, always, hovering in the back of her mind. She listened to her father pour another shot, shadows in the room growing longer, the darkness at the head of the table slowly deepening. A weight sat on her shoulders, the question always hanging in the air waiting to be answered.
What will set him off tonight?
Yoshi knelt opposite her, shappo on his head, tied beneath his chin. He’d won the hat from a city boy in a game of oicho-kabu three days ago and he was terribly proud of it, strutting in front of her like an emerald crane in a courting dance, laughing as hard as split lips would let him.
“Take that thing off,” their father growled.
Here it comes.
“Why?” Yoshi asked.
“Because you look like a damned fool. That’s a man’s hat. It’s too big for you.”
“Aren’t you always telling me to be a man?”
No. Don’t push it, Yoshi.
“I think he looks very handsome.”
Mother smiled as she placed a pot of steaming rice on the table. Tired blue eyes, full of love, crinkled at the edges as she stared at her son. Her Little Man.
Father glanced at her, and Hana saw the look on his face. Her heart sank into her belly, tongue cleaving to the roof of her mouth.
“What the hells would you know?”
Clenched teeth. A spray of spittle.
Oh, gods …
Mother turned paler still, bottom lip quivering. She took a half step back, terrified and mute. To say anything at that point would be making it worse—to beg or apologize, even to whimper. As helpless as a field mouse in the shadow of black wings.
Da snatched up the saké bottle in his good hand, knuckles white as he rose to his feet.
“You worthless gaijin whore, I said what would you know?”
And just like that, just for that, he swung.
Hana saw the bottle connect with her mother’s jaw, time slowing to a crawl, watching the spray of red and teeth. She felt something warm and sticky splash onto her cheek, saw her father’s face twisted beyond reason or recognition. Screaming he should have left her there, in her accursed homeland with her bastard people, and he flourished the stump where his sword hand had been and roared.
“Look what they took from me!” Face purpling, skin taut and blood-flushed. “Look at it! And all I have to show for it is you!”
He loomed over their mother, and for the first time in as long as she could remember, Hana saw rage burning in those brilliant blue eyes.
“You pig.” Mother’s words were slurred around her broken jaw. “You drunken slaver pig. Do you know who I am? Do you have any idea what I was?”
Spit on his lips as he raised the bottle again. “I know what you’re going to be…”
Yoshi opened his mouth to yell, rising from his knees, hands outstretched.