He prayed. For the first time he could remember, he prayed. To gods he knew weren’t there, who couldn’t listen. Figments of the imagination, crutches for the skinless and the ignorant, a superstition no Guildsman he knew really believed in. And yet he prayed with a fervor that would shame a priest. That his pack would fly him faster, get him out, away, his pulse rushing so hard he feared his veins would burst. If his heart were an engine, he would have thrashed it to breaking. If his blood were chi, he would have opened his veins and poured every last drop into his fuel tanks to fly just one foot farther.
And still, they caught him.
A rush of wind behind, the thunder of beating drums. He glanced over his shoulder and they hit him in a shower of sparks and flame. He bucked in the thing’s grip, arms pinned, his skin screeching like a wounded corpse-rat. Throat torn raw, spittle-flecked lips, screaming until at last he realized that, though he hung in those talons like a gaijin corpse above the inochi pits, completely at their mercy, the death blow hadn’t fallen.
They hadn’t killed him.
They flew for what seemed like years, south over the sky-clad ranges. A sweeping ocean turning slowly to the color of flame, an undulating carpet of whispering trees and frost-clad teeth that seemed to go on forever. Finally they descended, circling above a flattened spur of rock and snow. A sheer cliff face dropping down on to gray foothills below. The very edge of the Iishi.
Twenty feet from the cliff top, they dropped him. He fell with a crash, sparks and grinding metal, skull cracking against the inside of his helm, biting hard on his tongue. Skin squealing across the plateau, he skidded to a halt two feet shy of the precipice.
And he lay there, too terrified to move.
He heard them land behind him, the crunch of claw on frost, a thumping wind. He rolled over and saw the beast; a looming hunk of beak and talons and snow-white fur, spattered with thick sprays of crimson. Kioshi’s son—the rabbit they had chased across the entire country—was slumped on its shoulders, clutching a bloody wound on his arm, pale and sweat-slicked, but still very much alive. Grubby gray cloth, short, dark stubble on his scalp, knife-bright eyes. The boy did not look like much. Not the kind to raise his fist in defiance of all he’d been raised to believe. Not the kind a fleet should die for.
But Jubei’s gaze was pulled to her, the girl (just a girl) slipping down off the beast’s shoulders, light as feathers. She was clad in loose black cotton, long dark hair flowing around her shoulders, pale skin dusted with ash and daubed with blood. Polarized goggles covered her eyes, an old-fashioned katana strapped at her back, the obi about her waist stuffed with hand flares. She was slender, pretty, impossibly young.
“Take that off.” She gestured to his helmet, her voice cold. “I want to see your face.”
Jubei complied, fumbling with the latches at his throat. He pulled the helmet from his head, felt icy wind on his flesh. Licking his lips, he spat blood onto the snow between his feet. The world was garish, horribly bright, the sun scalding his eyes.
She drew her katana, the blade singing as it slipped from its scabbard. Marching over to him, she sat on his chest. The arashitora growled in warning, long and deep, setting the plates of his skin squealing. The girl pulled down her goggles so he could see her eyes; flat black glass, bloodshot with rage. She pressed her blade to his throat.
“You know who I am,” she said.
“… Hai.”
“You’ve seen what I can do.”
“H-hai.”
“Run back to your masters. Tell them what you saw here. And you tell them the next time they send a sky-ship near the Iishi Mountains, I’m going to carve my father’s name into her captain’s chest before I paint the sky with his insides. Do you understand me?”
Jubei nodded. “I do…”
She pressed on his neck, her blade sinking a little farther in. Jubei gasped, not daring to move, blood welling and running down his throat. For an awful, terrifying moment, he could see it in her face; the desire to simply open him up, ear to ear, to bathe in the spray of his carotid and jugular, lathering the bloody froth from his windpipe on her hands. Her lips peeled back from her teeth, blade twitching in his flesh, looming over him like a terror from some children’s story, some nightmare sprung inexplicably to life.
The girl all Guildsmen fear.
“Please,” he whispered. “Please…”
The wind was a lonely, howling voice between teeth of stone, a threadbare wail singing of death and the hunger of wolves. In it, he could hear the voices of his dying brothers. In her eyes, he could see an ending. The ending of all things. And he was afraid.
The boy on the thunder tiger’s back finally spoke, voice soft with concern.
“Yukiko?” he said.
The girl narrowed her eyes, still fixed on Jubei’s, hissing through clenched teeth.
“His name was Masaru.”
She smeared blood across her cheek with the back of one hand.
“My father’s name was Masaru.”
And then she stood, chest heaving, breathless. Knuckles white on her katana’s grip, she thrust it into the ground beside his head, left it quivering point-first in the snow. Without another word, she turned and stalked back to the beast, leaping onto his shoulders, her hair a long ribbon of black. The rabbit put his arms around her waist, leaned against her back. And with a rush of wind and that awful sound of breaking thunder, they dropped out into the void, soaring away on sweeping thermals, a swirling trail of ashes in their wake.
Jubei watched the three of them fly away, growing smaller and smaller on the smoke-stained horizon. And when they had disappeared from sight, when all he could see was red sky and gray cloud and distant fumes, he glanced at the sword beside his head, a faint smear of his own blood running down the steel.
He closed his eyes.
Lowered his head into his hands.
And he wept.
2
DROWNING
Slow flames danced in the light’s decline.
Her tantō rested near the fire pit’s edge, thrust tip-first into burning embers. Dark ripples coiling across the metal gave the impression of the grain in polished wood, or whorls at a finger’s tip. The blade was not blackened or smoking, nor incandescent with a forge’s heat. But a wise man might have noticed the way the air about it rippled, and like any man once burned, he would have left well enough alone.
Yukiko had watched the blade waiting on the glowing coals, no light in her eyes. The cedar logs crackled and sighed, oppressive heat smothering the air; a weight in her chest to match the one on her shoulders. She’d seen the air shivering around the steel and realized she was almost looking forward to it. To feeling again.
To feeling something.
“You do not have to do this yet.”
Daichi had watched her across the fire pit, eyes underscored by the flames.
“If not here, then where?” she asked. “If not now, then when?”