Kinslayer (The Lotus War #2)

Ilyitch laughed and handed her the contraption, took another from the storage locker at the base of the lightning spire. Yukiko stared at the device he’d given her, stomach sinking toward her toes.

It was solid iron, slippery with rain and grease. Four grooved rubber wheels lined up along a cross-shaped bar, fixed at either side with what looked like crank handles. A leather harness was affixed to a clip at the bottom of the crossbar, and Ilyitch was already strapping himself in. Yukiko had a dreadful feeling she knew where this was going, buckling herself into her own harness as the storm raged about them. She leaned against the railing as the wind buffeted her like a plaything. Lightning struck a spire out on the ocean to the south, raced along the cables up to the building’s roof. Yukiko flinched, shielding her eyes against the blue-white burn seething through the vast machine behind them. Goosebumps trawled her skin.

Ilyitch looked to the sky, then scampered up the lightning spire, using the copper coils like a ladder. He slung the contraption onto the double lengths of cable, grooved rubber wheels fitting snugly around the circumference of each. In one smooth motion he kicked off the tower, the device whizzing along the cables, sending him thirty feet out into the gloom. He dangled from the harness beneath the crossbar, reached up to the hand cranks and began turning them. The contraption wheeled slowly back toward the tower. Ilyitch spun the cranks the other way as if to demonstrate, the contraption traveling in the opposite direction. He looked at her and smiled.

It’s a flying fox.

Yukiko yelled over the wind.

“What happens if lightning hits our cables?”

A raised eyebrow.

“Lightning!” She pointed at the sky, then along the iron, gave her best impression of an explosion.

Ilyitch held his finger aloft, then hooked it through a metal pin at the front of his harness. Without a sound, he yanked the pin free and fell down into darkness.

Yukiko screamed, reached out for the falling gaijin, knowing he was too far away to save. But five feet into the fall, a rubber thong in the harness snapped taut, and Ilyitch jerked to a sudden halt. He held out both hands and grinned, twisting in the storm like a wind chime.

“You bastard,” Yukiko muttered.

Ilyitch climbed the tether hand over fist, swung up and hooked his legs over the cables to give himself enough slack to reinsert the pin.

He beckoned with one hand, yelling over the wind.

Yukiko licked her lips, tasted fresh salt, clean rain. Her knuckles were white on the railing, heart pounding against her ribs, fear-born nausea slicking her insides. Lightning arced across the clouds above, and she made the mistake of looking down. The ocean was a black, thrashing snarl, roaring and crashing in towers twenty feet high. But in the split second before the lightning faded and the blanket of gloom fell again, she saw the glint of a long, serpentine tail cutting through the waves.

Sea dragons.

Reaching out with the Kenning, she felt them below. Smooth as polished steel, cold and sharp and hungry. Their shape was ancient, stirring a primal fear inside her, much deeper than the thought of lightning striking the cables or the journey to come. Her mind shied away instinctively; a child fleeing into the safety of a parent’s bed.

Her hands were shaking.

But then she pictured Buruu, alone and bleeding, somewhere out there in the dark. And she grit her teeth and snatched up the flying fox, climbed the lightning spire and slung the device over the cables without another thought.

Holding her breath, eyes wide, she kicked out into the windswept dark.





29


A TREMBLING EARTH





Sometimes Hiro could still feel his hand.

He would wake in the deep of night, troubled by some itch or spasm, reaching toward it and finding only an empty mattress, the slippery kiss of silken sheets. In the dark, he would search the place where his arm should have been, groping about until he found the nub of flesh they had left him with: the puckered suture scars, the gristle-twisted knot of meat studded with bayonet fixtures, not even half a bicep remaining below the swell of his shoulder. And in the quiet and the still, he would picture her face and dream of all the ways he could break it.

“Yukiko.”

He breathed her name as if it were a toxic fume. And every time he woke to that nub of flesh, every time his hand itched and he couldn’t scratch it, he was poisoned anew. She was inside him. A cell-deep sepsis. A wound refusing to heal. Like the scars of blackened ash drifting away below his feet, the thrum of motors settling like cancer in his bones.

Jay Kristoff's books