What then, boy?
A gutter-rat was what he was. This was his war. This city. This hole. This beautiful, ugly whore who’d suckled him when nowhere in the world felt like home. And if he was going to cash, it might as well be on home ground rather than some ash-choked battlefield. Might as well be for one of his own instead of a clan who would’ve gladly lit him up three months past.
Impure. Cursed. Tainted. Whatever. Something in this old man and Yoshi were the same. Something in the both of them, something the Guild wanted to eliminate. And whatever the reason, if the Guild wanted it gone, that meant it was worth fighting for.
Dying for?
Yoshi swallowed. He remembered the look in the woman’s eyes—the Gentleman’s wife screaming at the monster he’d almost become. He could still become. Even here. Even now.
MUCH CHANGES WITH THE SEASONS.
Buruu’s voice ringing in his skull, tinged with the taste of thunder.
THE SHAPE OF HEROES, CERTAINLY.
A sigh from the depths of his chest.
Fuck it, then.
He engaged the iron-thrower pressure.
Fuck it all.
Shoving through the mob, paper parasols and straw hats, black clothes and yellow grins. Feeling the sewer-children around him; a hundred eyes in back of his head. And he pushed out onto the mall’s edge, treading down the steps as the Purifier turned to glare with its glowing, blood-soaked eyes. Stare at this boy stepping lean and filthy toward him, bringing up his right hand, one little fistful of steel, and pulling gentle as a first kiss on the trigger.
The iron-thrower roared. A glass eye shattered, went dark. The Guildsmen spun in place and crumpled. The crowd roared. Panic. Outrage. Shock.
And then the world stopped making any kind of sense.
A burst of white light, spherical and blinding, right in the center of the Burning Stones. A soundless explosion, edges tinged with translucent, bloody red. A sudden stench of evaporating chi, the fuel lines in the Purifier’s atmos-suits splitting wide, spewing plumes of blue-black vapor. The Guildsmen spasmed, dropped to their knees beneath brass deadweight, the chattering mechabacii on their chests falling silent as shapes loomed out of the crowd.
Half a dozen in all. Three boys around Yoshi’s age—the first, sharp and quick with an angular face. The second, tall and swarthy, crooked features and a protruding lower jaw, as if someone had dropped him one too many times as a babe. A third, small and wiry—and none-too-hard on the eyes, if you’ll indulge for a moment—dark hair drawn back in braids.
The other three were a motley crew: a tall man with lean muscles and skin like a hungry ghost. A young boy, also pale as death fresh warmed. And the third, a woman—gods, an old woman—casting aside her cloak as eight long, chromed arms unfurled from her back.
But Yoshi’s eyes were on the three boys, raising their warclubs high. Each wore short-sleeved uwagi beneath their cloaks, heedless of the toxic rain, as if they wanted people to see the burn scars where their irezumi used to be.
No clan. No lord. No master.
Kagé.
The crowd rippled with panic, shock and dismay rising as the boys fell to with their warclubs, pounding up and down on the helpless Guildsmen until their helms split and the glowing eyes cracked black, and red, red, red seeped across the flagstones at their feet.
“We are the Kagé!” the first boy cried. “The clenched fist! The raised voice! The fire to burn away the Lotus Guild, and free Shima from the grip of their wretched weed!”
He pointed to the other three in his gang—the boy, the man, the woman and her razors.
“These folk were once Guild, now risen against the evil that breeds within that five-sided slave pit! If those born to the Guild and its lies have seen the truth of it, why can’t you?”
The boy looked amongst the crowd, narrowed stare finding the merchant who had turned the old man over, still clutching his barrels of chi.
“Why can’t you?”
Yoshi stumbled down the steps, ears ringing, eyes fixed on the iron boxes. As the crooked-faced boy unfastened the old man’s manacles, Yoshi pried the lid from one of the untouched vessels, peering inside. He ran his hand through it, dark particles rising off the surface and dancing like dust. Black and greasy, reeking of old blood and burning hair.
Ashes …
He looked at the box sundered by the Purifier’s testing ritual, split at the seams and spilling its guts over the benchtop. Scooping up a handful, he let it run from his fist, crumbling dry, turning to mud in his palm beneath the spattering black rain.
Dirt.
He blinked, giving an experimental sniff.
Just ordinary dirt.
What the bleeding hells …
“Bushimen.” The old woman’s warning to her comrades pulled Yoshi from his confusion. “More Guild. They’re coming.”