The thunder tigers banked left and cut through a small swarm of corpse-hawks, buffeted by blasts from worm-riddled wings. Thunder rolled about them, ruined bodies falling from the sky as they wove between the snapping beaks and slashing claws. Yoshi’s iron-thrower roared, blasting the face off a snarling monstrosity swooping toward Yukiko’s back. Hana circled high, burning bright in Yukiko’s mind, overcome with the battle around her, the fury of the arashitora she rode. The girl was laughing, if one could believe it—laughing as she and Kaiah split half a dozen corpse-hawks into ribbons, black blood falling like rain. A brutal symbiosis, a oneness Yukiko couldn’t help but find beautiful, reaching out to Buruu and feeling the same, the pack tearing away over the bottomless black, the clouds above lit by blinding blue-white.
She heard an explosion behind her, a rush of boiling air around her, as if she walked on the face of the sun after days of freezing cold. A roar of rage and agony, a glance over her shoulder to see the giant shadow aflame, wings smoldering as it screamed. The air about her awash with black and teeth and talons, bursts of iron-thrower fire, roaring chainswords, writing a poem in blood across a canvas of smoking cloud. Buruu inside her, around her, above and between her, so close she felt she wore his skin, saw the world through his eyes, focused now on the rippling darkness before them, growing wider, colder, deeper, the song scratching at her eyeballs, rising above the wall between her and the Lifesong, seeping through the cracks she allowed herself to have. She could hear the tuneless song, twisting the vertebrae up her spine one by one by one until it lodged like a splinter in the back of her skull. And in the midst of that awful, soulless dirge, she heard a voice calling from the dark.
“Ichigo…”
She knew it. That voice. Still graveled from a lotus pipe kiss, the countless days spent in sunless bars. The pet name he’d called her since she was a little girl, running with her brother through the bamboo valley, sitting on his shoulders and feeling as tall as the clouds.
“Ichigo, I’m here…”
Tears in her eyes. The word lodging in her throat like a splinter of black glass.
“Father…”
52
THE ART OF RUIN
It loomed out of the black before him, bringing the darkness with it.
A horror from the muddy mists of childhood, dragged kicking and screaming from beneath his bed into sullen light. Real as he’d always known it to be. Bearing down on his ship, blotting out the lightning’s glow with the maggot-clad breadth of its impossible wings.
Hiro glanced past the ironclads to his port, the arrow-sleek flight of Phoenix corvettes beyond, at last finding the thunder tiger pack. Yukiko had taken her chance, cutting her way through smaller flights of demons, around this looming horror fresh from the world’s ruptured womb. He stared for a moment at all that could have been, gradually growing smaller. And smaller. And then he tore his gaze away. No time for regrets, for good-byes, for dreams of paths untrodden. This is what it came to. All that was left.
Here.
Now.
The few remaining members of his Elite stood around him, eyes locked on the foe. Their presence was a comfort, here at the last—his brothers, ready to die for something real. Not a dream of Shōguns or dynasties. Not the dream of a father drowning in regret, embroidered with faded tigers. For a future unborn. For something to be proud of, if not remembered for. Here at the ending of the world, standing before the edge and saying “No.”
Saying “Never.”
And so he roared it. Raised his chainkatana and screamed it, staring into the swelling eyes of the monstrosity before him, its beak splitting open to reveal a pit as black as the rift below. The Honorable Death and all her crew would scarcely be a mouthful, the sword in his hand no more than a humming splinter on its tongue. But still he roared, lips peeled back from his teeth, face twisted in a maddened, howling smile. The beast seemed not to notice, blotting out all sight and sound, a perfect dark intent on swallowing them utterly.
And there, as the black swelled and the chill shivered his bones, he pictured his mother’s letter. Her tears at their parting. Her final, desperate plea.
“Open your eyes, my son.”
He turned to the pilot, gave his signal. An Artificer belowdecks cranked an oil-slick handle. The winged abomination opened its maw.
“Wake up.”
The Honorable Death’s engines coughed once, spat flame, the chi within her belly igniting as the thing’s beak closed on her inflatable. A dull roar filled the sky, the Death’s hull splitting apart in a superheated ball of flame, a savage kiss to the lips of escaping hydrogen, right into the mouth of the monstrosity closing all about them.
A brief burst of blinding, beautiful daylight.
A second of dawning’s dazzling beauty.
Awake at last.
*
Kin shielded his eyes against the burst of flame, watching the shadow above the hellgate burned away in the flare of the Honorable Death’s demise. But he had no time to stare, the Earthcrusher rocking back as a tentacled fist slammed into its head, the iron around him reverberating with tortured groans. Hydraulics were blown, the ’Crusher’s left arm torn almost completely from its socket, its other chainblade jammed elbow-deep in the chest cavity of some towering, skinless monstrosity.
The Earthcrusher’s innards echoed with the bass-thick report of explosions. Distant screams. Kin stabbed at the intercom, roared into the microphone.
“Engine Bay, this is the bridge! Shinji, report!”