Buruu rose from his shelter, padded out into the open. The island they’d crashed on was perhaps three hundred feet across, crooked sheets of black glass slanting up toward the north. The copper lightning catcher rose on the southernmost tip, seven or eight feet from the ocean’s surface. The northern shore stood perhaps forty feet above sea level, a bluff dropping into the teeth of the sea. It was from here the male approached.
Buruu answered the roar, all thunder and spittle, the stones beneath him quavering. He saw a shadow slink across the tumbledown stone on the bluff, saw the play of faint lightning across his wings. He didn’t recognize the scent, doubted any of his former pack would have flown this far south anyway.
A NOMAD, THEN.
He roared again, asking who it was that challenged.
The nomad shrieked its name.
The arashitora prowled closer, and a flash of lightning overhead gave Buruu a good look at his foe. Smaller. Younger. Barely past his blooding by the looks, the stripes on his haunches indistinct, claws still smoke-gray. The feathers at his neck were matted with gore, and he favored his right side. Buruu could see the nomad’s wings were intact, but long gashes trailed from his shoulder into the muscle across his spine. The nomad had avoided flight with the wound still fresh, but territoriality and the female’s failing scent had forced him to challenge as soon as he felt strong enough to win.
Buruu remembered what it was like to be a slave to that instinct, the monster within. He’d thought himself beyond it, that his bond with Yukiko had laid that demon to rest and washed the taste of his own from his tongue. But how easily he’d fallen back inside. How quickly he’d taken up the mantle of who he used to be.
He deserved what they’d done to him. What they’d taken from him.
Buruu roared warning that he would give no quarter. That this was not a ritual fight for mate or pride of place in a pack. That there was no Khan’s law here. That this would end in death.
Yours, came the reply.
Yours.
*
Yukiko had taken the lead, energized by the knowledge that Buruu was close. The agony in her muscles, sweat burning the raw blisters on her hands, all of it faded beneath an electrifying rush of adrenaline. She pushed herself across three more cables, barely stopping to rest between them. Ilyitch was lagging behind, and she would stop occasionally to look back and scream over the storm, begging him to hurry in words she knew he couldn’t comprehend.
Nothing mattered. Not the pain. Not the sorrow. Not thoughts of her father, or of Hiro or Kin or the Guild. She was an engine, a machine, cranking along iron cables one desperate foot at a time. Wind in her face, pushing her back, howling she was too small, too weak. Her flesh trembled and her fingers bled, weak and human and threatening to break at every hard-won foot.
But something inside wouldn’t let her stop; a fire burning within her chest that made her grit her teeth, suck down one more desperate lungful, force her arms to move one more foot when everything inside her screamed to stop, to rest, to buckle. And she saw it for what it was, saw that within it lay a strength far deeper than the watered promise found in hatred or fear or even anger. Saw in it a light that left no substance to the shadows she’d filled herself with after her father died. Saw it as the strength behind the wall she’d built in her mind, the bulwark to keep the Kenning’s fury at bay. And she saw it was all that mattered.
Love.
Inch by inch. Foot by foot. The flailing, grasping hands of the wind, the rain pounding like a nail-thrower upon her skin. Lightning struck a tower to the west, cascaded down the cables back the way they’d come. Too far away to remember now. Too much effort to think what lay behind. Worse backward than forward. Standing still meant lying down.
And then she saw it through the spray and hissing downpour. A hulking fang of obsidian shale, rising like an upraised fist out of the ocean ahead. She reached out with the Kenning, flinching away from the serpents beneath her feet, sensing three bright sources of heat to the north. The dimly remembered shape of the arashitora who had struck them, rippling with challenge. The blade-smooth lines of the female overhead, tinged with curiosity, drawn to the conflict despite herself. And the shape of her friend. Her brother. Her one constant in a world that had shifted and spun so violently over the last few months, she’d lost any and all sense of direction. She’d lost herself—in anger, in liquor and guilt. She had lost her way completely.
Forward, she realized.
The way is forward.
Buruu, I’m here.
*
The pair touched the way black powder touches naked flame.