Crossed swords.
A soldier?
“Sorry.” He waved to her face. “He sorry, you.”
Yukiko stared at the man’s leg, saying nothing. She could see a metal brace buckled around his shin, a piston-driven actuator at his knee. Flesh, augmented with machinery.
Like the Guild …
The man snapped his fingers on another slab of burnished steel lifted from a breast pocket. Fire gleamed in his blind eye, deepened the shadow of the hooked scar along his left cheek as he coaxed his pipe to life. He snapped his fingers again and the flame was snuffed out.
“Who are you people?” she asked.
The man shrugged, muttered words Yukiko didn’t understand. She hung her head, breathing deep, suddenly and terribly afraid. The scent drifting from the gaijin’s lips reminded her of her father. Of cloying smoke curling up through a graying moustache. Of stained fingers and a bloated body wrapped all in white, waiting for the fire to claim it. And she hadn’t even been there. Hadn’t even said good-bye …
Don’t cry.
Don’t you dare.
“Gods?”
She looked up at the gaijin’s face. He was pointing to the sky, the brow above his blind eye raised in question.
“Have gods?”
“Hai,” she nodded. “I have gods.”
The man put his pipe to his lips, shook his head, spoke through clenched teeth as he shuffled from the room.
“Pray.”
Yukiko sat in the dark for long moments, waiting for the headache to subside. She could hear crashing surf, smell rust and oil hanging in the air. Shivering in her damp clothes, she clenched her fists repeatedly, thongs cutting into her wrists. And finally, when the ache had dimmed to a pale flicker, she pulled her slender defenses back together, brick by brick. A bulwark of all the substance she could muster; the rage Daichi had assured her was her greatest strength, mortar made of memories. Yoritomo’s blade cleaving through Buruu’s feathers. Her father’s grave. His blood on her hands. Teeth gritted. Seething. And with her wall in place, she reached out with the Kenning again.
A quick, directionless stab, feeling for any sign of Buruu, like a shout in a darkened room. But there was nothing close to his warmth nearby, and the distant, muddy heat she sensed didn’t wear his shape at all. Almost as soon as she opened herself up, the headache flared, the heat of the human bodies around her crackling, flame-bright and brittle. Beneath her feet, she felt those things waiting for her, cold and ancient and reptilian. And so she shut it off, locked inside her skull and leaving herself utterly alone.
Her face felt tender where the scarred man had slapped her, tongue probing her split lip. She tasted salt. Blood.
Closing her eyes, she remembered the smaller warmth she’d felt close by. Reaching out with a tiny, narrowed sliver of herself, she found it not far away. Curled up beside a heating duct, just a few doors down. An old blanket beneath him, tail wagging as he worried a strip of rawhide clamped between his front paws.
A dog.
Hello?
Head tilted to one side, tail falling still, one ear standing to attention.
who that!?
I’m Yukiko.
who?
Yukiko.
She could feel the shape of the hound’s mind, at once strange and familiar, like an old coat belonging to a stranger, yet fitting like it had been tailored for her. He was warm and soft, all curiosity and energy, tail beginning to wag again as she felt around his mind.
food!?
I don’t have any food. I’m sorry. What’s your name?
red!
Hello, Red.
where you? can’t see!?
I’m in a locked room down the hall.
play!?
Maybe later.
<whine>
Can you tell me what this place is, Red?
… is?
What do the men do here?
catching the sky!
Catching the sky?
so silly!
She frowned, trying to puzzle out what he meant, how she could frame the question in terms he’d understand. It had been years since she’d spent time swimming in the thoughts of a real dog; the last she’d Kenned was Aisha’s puppy, but she’d known him only briefly. Hounds could be intelligent, but they didn’t understand human concepts, focused instead on the immediate, the primary. As if on cue, she could feel the cold, wet nose of his thoughts snooping around the sliver she’d lodged inside his head.
food!?
She seized upon an idea, decided to see where it led.
I think there was food outside.
The dog snapped to his feet, tail a blur.
really!?
I think so.
let’s find we share!
I’m going to use your eyes, if you don’t mind.
The dog was already scampering away, and Yukiko only caught a glimpse of his room as she slipped behind his pupils. Gray walls. Metal cot and desk. A strange, crooked machine studded with glass vacuum tubes and buttons beside a stack of too-white paper. A banner on the wall; a black field set with a circle of twelve red stars.
Red nosed a rubber flap open and belted out into a long corridor of gray concrete, wind howling through the ducts overhead. They could smell the sea; the bite of salt, a hint of rust. But there was no rot entwined with it, no refuse like the waters of Kigen Bay. It was fresh and wonderful; a bright, caustic smell clinging to all around them.
They scampered past rows of closed doors, two large gaijin with hedge-thick beards and grubby yellow rainskins chatting beside stairs leading up and down. They could hear engines, a klaxon wailing in the building’s bowels, a sharp burst of laughter. Storm rumbling overhead, the structure murmuring in sympathy.
Out of the stairwell, into what looked to be a storage bay, crates stacked to the ceiling, static electricity standing their fur on end. Strange writing, wet bootprints, finally nosing their way through a rubber flap in towering doors. And at last, out into the wind and dark of night.
A gantry of wet, iron-gray stretched out before them, ending at a sturdy railing and a sudden drop into darkness. Forty feet below, black ocean swelled, towering waves crashing into the iron legs holding them aloft, hissing in fury as they were dashed to pieces, again and again. A soup-thick mist hung in the air, lightning whipping the gloom, illuminating long stretches of twin iron cables spilling out from overhead and off into the darkness. Thunder cracked so close they shrunk down against the floor, tail between their legs.
can’t smell food you sure!?
Up. Look up.
They turned their eyes to the sky, to the building towering at their back. Square windows watched the sea, lit from within like empty, hollow eyes. Three stories tall, flat walls of gray brick, crawling with piping and cable. Odd, conical structures rose from its roof like the points of a lopsided crown, still more dotting the fangs of rock in the ocean around them; metal rods, twelve feet high, topped with broad, flattened spheres. Each rod had a thinner pipe wound around it, circumference growing wider as it spiraled from tip to base. Orange metal, crusted with bright green oxide, scuffed by the kiss of a thousand scrubbing brushes.