“You know nothing of what is right,” the boy spat. “Nor did Isao and his dogs.”
“And so you crawl back to your master’s feet? Because of the actions of a few? You’d give these monsters the location of our village? Where our children sleep? Our children, Kin?”
“Your children are rapists and murderers, Daichi. Pigs, all of them.” Kin leaned in close, the old man’s reflection snared in his single, glowing eye. “And pigs get put to slaughter.”
Daichi spit at him then. A spray of black saliva, right into the smooth brass that passed for the boy’s face. With a furious hiss, Kin snatched the iron-thrower from Kensai’s hand, the device heaving a tiny, breathless gasp as he aimed between Daichi’s eyes.
The old man looked down the barrel into bottomless black.
He nodded.
“Do it.”
And Kin pulled the trigger.
*
She should not be here.
Ayane stole up the access stairwell, silent and slow. A choir of machines sang in the chapterhouse belly, the mechabacus at her chest sang inside her mind, each false rhythm entwined with the other.
She stopped at the habitat level, pressed against the wall. Running her hands up her arms, she tried recalling the kiss of Iishi wind on bare flesh, the way it made the hair on her forearms stand tall and tingling. But she could barely feel anything now; encased once more in glossy earth-brown skin, hugging her tight and providing no warmth or comfort at all.
I should not be here.
These habitats were for the Shatei—the brothers. False-Lifers like her had their own quarters, far across the chapterhouse and two floors lower. Her business was with the nurseries, the surgical implants, the machines that emulated life within the chapterhouse. Male and female flesh did not mingle—even when it was time for a False-Lifer to bear a new Guildsman into the world, she met only with the Shatei’s seed and an inseminator tube. Most Guild women lived their entire lives without knowing a man’s touch.
But she had known. Had felt his breath upon her naked face, his lips pressed against hers, soft as strangled moonlight. She closed her eyes at the memory, pressed her thighs together, feeling goose bumps tingle across her flesh.
No, she thought. My skin.
She peeked through the stairwell exit, stole free when the way was clear. Silver arms curled against her back like a long-dead spider, she slipped along the corridor, searching the nameplates beside the habitat doors. At last, she found it—a thin brass slab, freshly engraved, the name he’d fought so long to keep and now had finally made his own.
Kin. Fifth Bloom. Artificer Sect.
She flexed the lever, watching the steel iris dilate and open into his suite. Fifth Blooms enjoyed accommodations only slightly less austere than the average Lotusman, but Kin’s promotion at least afforded him a touch more space. A small workbench. A bigger bed. Ayane turned and pulled the lever, the iris contracting with a grinding sigh, slowly strangling the light beyond. And there in the dark, lit only by the red glow of her eyes and the purity monitor above the ventilation duct, she stood and simply breathed.
She must be mad for doing this. She risked everything by coming here—all she’d done, the blood, the lies, the hurt. But he filled her mind with daydreams, her belly with tumbling moths. The thought of their time together, the way he’d made her feel …
The purity monitors smudged slowly from red to green as the air filters hissed, finally signaling the all-clear with a bright metallic chime.
She worked the clasps at her back, above and below the empty silver orb swelling on her spine. Pulling the zip cord down, she bent double and peeled herself out of the slick membrane, stepped naked to Kin’s bed and climbed inside. And there she lay in the dark, picturing him as he’d been in the Iishi, pale and perfect, lips against hers, electricity dancing on her skin. She ran her hands over her body, imagining they were his, waiting for the moment he’d open the door and find her there. Where she should not be.
What would he say?
Would he understand how badly she needed him?
She chewed her lip in the black.
I will make him.
She heard a clunk, a piston’s hiss, the iris portal dilating with the tune of blade on blade. Sitting up in the bed, sheet clutched around her, she smiled at the silhouette outlined in the doorway. Tall and lean, cut from black whispering cloth.
Smoke drifting from the grin-shaped breather at its lips.
“Oh, no…” she breathed.
The figure stepped inside, followed by another, clad head to toe in black silk. Their breathers weaved vapor puppets in the air. She smelled chi-smoke. Unfiltered. Overpowering. Their eyes were red, but not aglow—simply bloodshot from the smoke they breathed every moment of their lives. She knew them. The brethren who enforced Guild doctrine, oversaw the Awakening ceremonies across Shima, safeguarding the Guild from corruption in all its guises.