“What are you doing?”
Yukiko’s eyes were wide with disbelief. Piotr dragging her away.
“No, why would you kill him? Stop! Stop it!”
BURUU, WAKE UP!
“Kak zal,” Danyk said, watching the soldier raise the blade above his head.
“NO! NO!”
Yukiko reached toward Piotr, slammed into his mind with everything she was. The round-eye released his grip on her arms, fell to the ground, senseless and mute, nose and ears gushing. Turning on the axeman, she seized hold of his mind and squeezed as hard as she could, two bloody handfuls, tearing side to side like a wolf worrying a piece of meat. The gaijin made an odd, strangled sound and staggered as if she’d struck him, dropping the axe and clutching his temples. She screamed, lips peeling back from her teeth as she felt it rise up inside her, the heat of a collapsing star, the roar of a thousand hurricanes. And with blood pouring from his ears, nose and eyes, the gaijin crumpled to the stone.
She whirled on a third, smashing into his skull with everything inside her own, his head flopping about as if she’d broken his neck. And with a roar, Danyk seized her by a handful of sodden hair, pulled her back as she screamed and cursed and kicked and spat, nails and teeth and fists, mouth agape, eyes rolling in her head. Madness had taken her, a rage so deep it was suffocating, stealing away everything she was and leaving a shell behind; a burning, shrieking thing wearing her skin. She bucked in his hands, tore lose from his grip, a handful of hair clutched in his fist as she reached out to crush his mind like eggshells.
He punched her; a hook to her jaw that rocked her sideways, lit a fire at the base of her skull. And then, with almost casual brutality, he hauled back and buried his fist deep in her belly.
Pain.
Awful. Wet and tearing.
PAIN.
A scream, somewhere in the back of her mind, a voice that sounded like her own. A burst of light in her head, flaring bright as the world fell perfectly still.
She could feel it. All of it. The men gathered around her, each a tangled thread, a thousand knots thick—so intricate it hurt just to look at them. Buruu at her feet, a shape she knew as well as her own, a distant pulse still struggling toward consciousness, flickering with the taste of stolen lightning. Skraai’s shell, just a shadow of lingering heat in his bones as all he was escaped into the ether. The dragons in the snarling ocean around them, swaying with the current, cold as the lightless depths of the sea. High above, the female, circling in the blood-scent, the knowledge she should protect her kin burning bright in her mind, overshadowed with a rage born of heart-deep grief; a severing so terrible it hurt her to even begin remembering.
What she had lost.
What he had taken from her.
And in Yukiko’s belly, where the knuckles had been buried in her flesh, nothing but pain.
She slumped to her knees, gasping, screams growing louder in her ears, feeling the pulse of the world and knowing something was terribly, terribly wrong.
What’s happening to me?
Danyk placed his boot on her chest and shoved. She fell backward, curled up, fetal and tiny beneath the storm. Blood spilled from her ears, her nose, filmed her eyes with scarlet. She reached for Buruu with bound hands, groping along the gleaming black glass to find his claws, fingertips barely touching. Danyk drew Yofun from his belt with a gleaming, silver sound, folded steel glittering with sea spray, rain skirting the katana’s razored edge.
It can’t end like this.
The gaijin raised the blade above his head, took aim at her throat.
Buruu, I love you.
The sword began to fall.
Buruu …
A white shape, plummeting from the sky.
A scream of outrage, the sound of thunder and lightning and a tempest unleashed.
Danyk looked up toward the sound, jaw slackening. And then he simply wasn’t there anymore. A pale blur, a moment of impact, shattering bone. The katana spun end over end as it descended, ringing bright as it hit the stone beside Yukiko’s head.
Tearing sounds from above.
Red rain.
The gaijin cursed, fumbling weapons from their belts, swords and lightning-throwers, eyes upon the sky. She fell on them like a shadow, swooping from behind, silent beneath the roar of the storm. Wet crunching sounds, screams of pain, one man’s torso falling away from his legs, another clutching the bloody stump where his head used to be as his body toppled backward and spilled on the stone. Flashing blades touched snow-white fur and the female screamed in pain, bounding into the air as the space between her and prey became blue-white, bright arcs spitting from the mouths of their lightning-throwers.
But the little monkey-children and their silly toys didn’t know her for what she was; a daughter of thunder, Everstorm-born, swimming in bolts of brilliant blue-white since first she took to the wing. Without earth beneath her feet to ground her, the current spilling from their trinkets was a cooling shower, a delightful prickle over feathers stained blood-red. They screamed as she swooped low, running for the cover of their crooked metal dragonfly. And she in her rage, drunk with the taste of them, alighted atop the flimsy tin can and peeled it open like ripe fruit, disassembling them as they screamed, one by one by one.
Except the one she’d missed.
Ilyitch had ducked low as she swooped for the kill, pressed against the butchered nomad, drenched in his blood. And she, so intoxicated with her fury, had failed to see him, his scent lost in the male’s ruins. Now he rose from the cover of bloody wings, reaching out with his stolen lightning and blasting her from the flying machine with a shriek of superheated vapor.
She crashed earthward, steam rising from her feathers, dazed and senseless.
Ilyitch lowered the lightning-thrower, its charge spent, dropped it on the ground with the brittle sound of smashing glass. With a hissed curse, he drew the butcher’s knife from his belt, still wet with arashitora blood, and knelt behind Yukiko’s head.
She blinked, eyes rolling, the ache in her belly receding to a dull ebb.
He grabbed a handful of hair, pressed the knife to her throat, spitting a curse.
The katana slipped out through his chest with barely a sound. Just a hollow clip of breath and a tiny metallic rasp as it disappeared back through the hole it had made. Ilyitch’s eyes grew wide as the pain registered inside his skull. The blade punched out through his chest again, blood bubbling on his lips, oxygen slurping through the hole between his ribs, emerging from his mouth as a sodden cough. And with a gurgling whimper, the boy slumped onto the stone, as dead as the thunder tiger beside him.
Piotr stood over him, blind eye gleaming white, wiping his bloody nose on his sleeve, katana clutched in both hands.
“Promise,” he wheezed. “Promised.”
39
FRAGILE
Each raindrop was a whisper.
Not the gentle whisper of a lover in Kin’s ear, she in his arms, he entwined with her hair’s perfume. He didn’t know what that whisper might sound like. And not the whisper of father to son, looking upon a world of metal and rivets and iron teeth as he leaned down and said, “All this, I give to you.” That lay too far back in his life to even remember now. Not the whisper of the earth, the breath of this great thing beneath our feet that holds us close from cradle to grave, opening at the last to keep us in her arms as we forever sleep.
No, it was the whisper of the machine.