“Aisha showed me how to hide it. ‘Let it burn slow,’ she said. ‘Keep it hidden until the day it will truly matter, when risking all will actually be worth the blood you wager. The day we can win.’” Michi shrugged. “This is the day we can win, Kaori. But not without Yukiko.”
Kaori took one long, measured breath, exhaling poison. “You godsdamned traitor.”
Michi stepped back as if Kaori had struck her.
“I brought you in here!” Kaori shouted. “I treated you as blood! I taught you everything, and this is how you repay me? You leave us now? Now, Michi?”
“There’s something wrong in you, sister.” Tears welled in Michi’s eyes. “Something broken. I don’t think you see the same world I do at the end of this. I see blue skies, and green fields and children dancing in clean rain. And I don’t pretend it comes from someplace good and pure. It comes from hate, same as you. I want them to suffer, same as you. For my uncle. For my village. But I want something better afterward too. And all you want is to breathe the smoke. You don’t even care if there is an afterward, as long as you can watch everything burn.”
Tears spilled freely down Michi’s face now, reaching out to touch Kaori’s hand.
“And I want to fix you, and I don’t know how…”
Kaori slapped Michi’s hand aside, features contorted with fury.
“Don’t touch me.”
“Come with us.”
“No. I will not stand beside the Guild. Not now. Not ever.”
“Please, Kaori…”
“Begging? You shame yourself, sister.”
The false smile dropped from her lips as Michi dried her tears, staring for what seemed an eon. But at last the girl turned, stalking from Daichi’s ruined home. Kaori stood and stared, biting wind blowing the fringe back from her skin.
Everywhere she looked, she was reminded of her father. The chess set he’d brought with him from Kigen. The leather glove hanging on the wall, soaked with screams and scorched flesh stink, the memory of the day she’d asked him to burn off her tattoo still crystal clear in her mind. A handkerchief, soiled with black stains.
Gods, where was he? Already dead?
He’d been all she had left.
She sank to her knees, trying to breathe.
Gods, help me …
She heard footsteps on the decking outside, too heavy for Michi, too clumsy for one of her warriors—the tread of a man with a limp. She turned expecting to see Akihito, instead found herself looking into an eye of sapphire blue, another as white as sun-polished bone. Short dark hair and a pointed beard, a wisp of honey-and-cinnamon-scented smoke on his lips.
Yukiko’s gaijin. The one called Piotr.
She stood, faced the round-eye, pushing the grief down into her feet.
Breathe.
She folded her arms, stared cold.
Just breathe.
“What do you want?”
“Yukiko,” the gaijin said.
“She’s not here.”
“Da,” he nodded. “Am knowing. But she wrong.”
“Wrong?”
“Da.”
“You surprise me, round-eye. I thought you a faithful dog. Is there no room on her lap for both you and the bastards in her belly?”
Sometimes the words just fell from her lips, cold and cruel.
Sometimes she didn’t know where they came from.
Piotr shook his head. “No, on Guild, Yukiko is speaking true, and this is Kaori knowing, I am think. But Yukiko is wrong of saying Kaori ugly.”
Kaori caught her breath. Whispered. “What did you say?”
He motioned to her face.
“Beautiful,” he smiled.
Piotr turned to stare out at the village, the Iishi forest, the rolling storm clouds overhead. He seemed to be burning the picture in his mind, the sea of dead and evergreen leaves, the ancient trees, the jagged spires reaching toward the booming heavens overhead.
Finally, he turned to look at her again, honey-and-cinnamon smoke drifting from his smile. He clomped across the boards toward her, reaching down to take her hand. And staring into her eyes as she frowned in confusion, he brought her knuckles up to his lips.
“Good-bye, beautiful lady,” he said. “Hoping I will see her near.”
With a grimace, he turned and limped away, pistons at his broken knee hissing, heavy boot dragging across unfinished boards. She watched him go, not breathing a word. The wind danced amidst the trees, a gust pushing her fringe away from her face, cold and laden with rain. She reached toward it with outstretched fingers—the same fingers he’d just pressed to his lips.
It would have been a simple thing then, to tuck the hair behind her ears, to let the wind and the world see the scar he’d left her with. It would have been a simple thing, to exhale the vile inside, to accept and breathe and be. A simple thing. And the hardest thing in the world.
Her fingers clawed her fringe back down over her face.
And she sat alone in the dark, staring at the empty pit where the fire once burned.
5
WAKING