Now it was Michi’s turn to laugh. “Did Buruu take your eyes when he took your arm?”
Rage came then. Sudden and burning. He could feel the ashes on his skin cracking as he snarled, brought his sword down toward her head. Michi deflected the blow into the deck, his blade churning through the boards as she brought her wakizashi up toward his throat and kicked at the trapped blade. Hiro released his grip, bent backward as the blow clipped his chin, trimming his goatee. Tumbling away, he came up on his feet, drew his wakizashi and thumbed the ignition. Michi plucked his katana from the deck and tossed it over the railing.
Sloppy.
“Truth hurts, little Daimyo?” she smiled.
“Shut your mouth, bitch.”
StrikeParryLungeParrySparks.
“Gods, look at you.” Michi tossed the hair from her eyes, glancing at the carnage around them. “All this death—all because Yukiko chose to stand tall instead of kneeling in Yoritomo’s shadow. And you kneel there still.”
“Do not speak her name to me.”
“She loved you, you realize.”
Hiro drew back as if she were a jade adder, coiled and ready to strike.
“I could see it in her eyes when she spoke your name. Like a flower unfurling in the first light of spring…”
“Shut up!”
“You were her first, you know. And she yours, am I right?”
“SHUT YOUR FUCKING MOUTH!”
A tiny part of his brain screamed he was being played, manipulated into a clumsy, howling attack. But that voice drowned under the indignation, the fury, the blood flowing from the scabs this little Kagé bitch had so casually torn away. And so he charged, watching those beestung lips curl into a smile, the girl moving like water over river-smooth stones. Deflecting his strike, she brought her wakizashi down on his sword arm, crunching through the crossguard, cleaving fuel lines, the blades falling still. Spinning down into a crouch, kicking his ankles as he stumbled past, momentum sending him crashing to the deck, colliding face-first with the railing and rolling over onto his back, gasping as blood spewed from his broken nose.
Riding on his shoulders through the lotus fields. Reaching up to touch his swords, so heavy he could barely lift them, little eyes alight.
“Will I grow up to be like you, Father?”
Her foot came down atop his chainsword, her own growling in her hands. Wind in her hair, a tangled knot of raven black in her eyes, staring down at him with nothing close to pity.
“You don’t even know what you took from me, do you?” Michi hissed.
“Lord Izanagi give you the strength to die well…”
“Still you talk?” Hiro spat. “Finish it, for the love of the gods…”
Michi brought the katana’s buzzing teeth close to Hiro’s throat.
“A parting gift before you leave us,” the girl said. “To repay the kindness you showed my Mistress. You remember Lady Aisha, don’t you, Daimyo? Chained to a bed of machines for the sake of your glorious dynasty. Raped nightly by Guildsmen and their honorable inseminator tubes? And all the while, your dynasty was already assured. Growing in the belly of the girl you once professed to love.” She drummed her fingernails on her katana hilt. “Two of them.”
“What did you say?” Hiro’s eyes grew wide.
“Would that I could sing it, bastard.”
“Yukiko is . .?”
“You’ll never see their faces. Never hold them in your arms or hear them call you ‘father.’” A smile, as cold and empty as tombs. “And now … now you know the shape of loss.”
The girl raised her sword, steel teeth slicing the air as she drew it back to strike.
Licking his lips, tasting the ash of the funeral offerings. Eyes open wide.
A good end. A warrior’s end.
A father’s?
Gods …
“Wait,” he said.
“No,” she replied.
Everything in that final breath was hyper-real—every nerve singing, every sense alive. The wind on his skin. A black snowflake melting on his cheek. Men screaming. Swords clashing. Running footsteps. ’Throwers spitting. But amidst all that input, that storm of touch, sound, smell, all he could see was that falling blade.
Falling.
Tumbling.
Clattering on the deck.
Her hand at her throat, the spray of blood that bloomed there as the shuriken passed clean through. The report of the ’thrower, hanging in the air like smoke. Her eyes wide as she spun about, bringing her wakizashi to bear as the second marine opened fire, sparks dancing on her breastplate, crimson spraying from her forearm, shoulder, face. Features twisting, charging into the hail, but so frail now, so small, this little engine of death and deception who’d played him like a shamisen, unable here, at the last, to speak even a word.
She killed them both—brave men with the sense enough to look toward the pilot’s deck, rushing to their Daimyo’s defense when all others were concerned with their own lives. She cut them to pieces, not realizing she’d spent the last of herself doing so. And turning back to him, she fell to her knees, wakizashi clattering into the blood beneath her, one palm to her throat.