She wept.
She wept until her voice was splinters and her throat was chalk. Until Yoshi’s uwagi was soaked through, her face pressed to his chest, his arms around her shoulders.
They sat on her bed. The same bed where she and Akihito had lain the night before, now cold and empty, ten miles wide, the thought clawing the inside of her chest, leaving her hollow.
Yoshi said not a word. Didn’t breathe platitudes or sympathies or promises everything would be all right. He simply held her, his warmth keeping the predawn chill away. And after an hour of emptying herself, she found it all too much to hold on to, and he laid her down with a pillow beneath her, pulling up her blankets, still touched by Akihito’s scent.
He knelt beside her, whispering in the gloom.
“Dark now. Blacker than black, I know it. And words are tiny things in the face of all that dark and all that cold. But hear these words, little sister. Hear and know. Tomorrow is coming, just as fast as the turning of the sky. And as sure as it’s black now, the sun will rise. Always. No matter how faint the glow.” He leaned in and kissed her brow. “I love you, Hana.”
“I love you too, Yoshi,” she whispered. “Don’t ever leave me again.”
“I’ll try my best.”
“You promise?”
“Doubtless.”
He kissed her brow again, gentle as feathers.
“Go to sleep.”
And into the dark, she fell.
*
Smooth, polished pine beneath her feet, singing in time with her tread. Drowning in the crushing dark before the dawn, sleep a thousand miles away, wandering aimless through the halls. Buruu’s thoughts echoing in her own.
I KNOW WHAT YOU ARE THINKING.
Do you.
YOU CANNOT THINK I WOULD HELP YOU.
No. But I can make you. Whether you want to or not.
YOU CAN. BUT YOU WON’T.
What choice do I have, Buruu? Can I ask Yoshi or Hana to give up their lives?
YOU DO NOT HAVE TO ASK. BOTH WOULD BE WILLING.
Yoshi doesn’t seem the heroic sort.
THOSE HEROES ARE THE GREATEST KIND.
Hana has lost too much. We can’t take her brother away too.
SHE WOULD GLADLY GIVE HERSELF.
She’s heartsick over Akihito. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.
AND YOU DO?
I started this war. I should finish it.
AND WHAT OF YOUR CHILDREN? THE ONES INSIDE YOU?
What of the thousands of children who will die if the Endsinger rises?
YOU WILL FIND NOT ONE THUNDER TIGER TO BEAR YOU TO THE HELLGATE.
Sukaa would carry me gladly.
HIS KHAN WILL FORBID IT.
We must close the gate. One of us must die, or this whole country dies instead.
IT WILL NOT BE YOU.
Buruu, I—
IT WILL NOT BE YOU.
Yukiko winced, hand to brow, the force of Buruu’s thoughts overcoming her wall. Thunder rolled inside her mind, the fury and heat of a lightning barrage, strobing bright as he shut himself off; a sullen, seething fury pushing her out into the cold.
She closed it off, everything, stepping out of the Kenning and into herself. And there she stood in the empty hallway, struggling just to breathe.
Gods, how did it come to this?
A servant shuffled past carrying an apology and an armful of bloodstained linen. Looking up, she realized she’d wandered to the makeshift infirmary. It stretched the entire western wing of the palace, filled with the wounded and dying. Gaijin. Guildsmen. Kitsune. And reaching out into the Kenning, feeling room to room through the hundreds of pain-stricken lives, she found him, stirring in fitful sleep, his mind haunted by a familiar, terrifying dream.
Lashes fluttering against her cheeks, she walked toward the sound of his thoughts.
*
He held his arms wide, fingertips spread, the lights of their eyes glinting on the edges of his skin. The gunmetal gray filigree embossed upon his fingertips, the cuffs of his gauntlets, the edges of his spaulders. A new skin for his flesh; the skin of rank, of privilege and authority. Everything they had promised, everything he had feared had come to pass. It was True.
This was Truth.
They called his name, the assembled Shatei, holding their hands aloft. And even as he drew breath to speak, the words rang in his head like a funeral song, and he felt whatever was left of his soul slipping up and away into the dark.
“Do not call me Kin. That is not my name.”
In the dream, he felt his lips curl into a smile.
“Call me First Bloom.”
Kin awoke with a start, eyes wide, groaning as the pain took hold. He considered calling out to the guards on his door, demanding more opiates to numb it. But the drugs made him sleep, and sleep meant the dream, louder and more insistent than ever before.
“That’s what you see every night…”