“It’s here!” Tetsuo cried, the tremors forgotten. He slipped from Hikita’s embrace and dashed into the house, dirty heels beating the verandah like drums.
Hikita stood slowly, listening to the hungry wails from their newest mouth. He could hear his mother crying, the joy in her voice as she called for him to come meet his new sister. And the boy shook his head and licked the ashes from his lips, looking across the tall stalks of blood lotus to the desolation around the mountain’s feet.
He blinked. Squinted in the gloom.
Tiny lights. Blood-red. A pair, shining between the lotus fronds. The crunch of little feet in dead leaves and deader earth. Hikita peered into the dark, the wails of his new sibling filling his ears. The deadlands’ fumes were an oil-thick shadow, rippling like black water. The lotus stalks bent gently—something moving through the crop—and the tiny lights flickered out, once, twice, winking like the long-lost stars in the skies overhead.
No, not winking, he realized.
Blinking.
A figure shuffled from the stalks, covered in black earth and ashes. It stood two feet high, but its arms hung long and low, back bent as it shuffled forward and snuffled at the air. Its eyes were scarlet, casting a bloody light over heavy brows, hairless skull, swollen lips. It saw the boy, lips splitting into an idiot grin like a toddler who’d just found a new playmate. But its teeth were yellowed fangs, tusks protruding from its lower jaw, and Hikita realized beneath the mask of dirt and ash, its skin was midnight blue.
“Uh-uuhhhhhhhh,” it said, holding out its arms.
Hikita’s eyes were fixed on the talons set in those grasping fingers, sharp as katana.
“Gn-uhhhhh…”
“Oni,” he breathed. “Lord Izanagi save me.”
The demon flinched at the Maker God’s name, eyes growing bright and wide. It loped forward, knuckles dragging in the earth, a shriek of rage spilling from crooked fangs.
Hikita screamed. Screamed with his sister, here on her birthing day in the shadow of those broken peaks, amidst the rot creeping like a cancer across the island’s skin. Screamed as if it were his final breath. As if it were all he was, and all he ever would be.
As if the world itself was ending.
1
SCHISM
Lightning burned the skies to white, glinting on black glass all around her.
Buruu and Kaiah loomed over her, their thoughts a raging storm in her mind.
And in her head, in her belly, only pain.
YUKIKO …
What is she talking about?
- TELL HER. -
Tell me what? Who is “they”?
YUKIKO, YOU ARE WITH CHILD—
“Yukiko.”
The girl opened her eyes, the sweet scent of burning cedar in her lungs. It took a moment to remember where she was. Who she was. What had brought them to this.
She knelt beside a firepit in a simple house at the heart of a village in the trees. A bone-deep cold had slunk down from the mountains, hungry as ghosts, stealing through the Kagé stronghold and bringing the freezing promise of winter to come. Yukiko could smell it in the air, waiting at the edge of the stage. Storm clouds and white frost and black, black rain.
Six others sat around the flames. The bleeding remnants of a beheaded rebellion.
Soldiers without a captain?
Or sheep without a shepherd?
Kaori stared at Yukiko across the fire, steel-gray eyes bloodshot and circled with shadows. A long fringe was draped over the scar running forehead to chin, skin pale and drawn. She sat on Daichi’s cushion at the head of the circle—as his daughter, everyone assumed Kaori would take charge now the leader of the rebellion was gone.
No, not gone, Yukiko thought.
Taken.
Other Kagé sat beside Kaori: Maro, the only other remaining member of the original council, long hair bound in warrior’s braids, a leather patch over his missing eye. Beside him sat the Blackbird, the sky-ship captain who’d flown them from Kigen’s smoldering ruin. The man’s scowl was almost hidden beneath an enormous straw hat, his beard as thick as hedgerows. Then there was Michi of course, small and razor sharp, a chainkatana and wakizashi marked with the sigils of a noble Tiger household across her back. Little Tomo, the black and white pup she’d rescued from Aisha’s chambers, sat in her lap, gnawing a knotted rope.
Lightning arced across an angry horizon.
The forest’s pulse pounded inside Yukiko’s head, the Kenning as loud and bright as she could ever remember. She tried to dim it, filtering it against a wall of herself. She could feel every living thing around her: swooping owls and fleeing mice and every life between, and burning above them all, the minds of every man and woman and child in the treetop village. Her hand strayed to her belly, to the two sparks of impossibly knotted heat she could sense inside her.
Inside me.