“Looks like.” Yoshi smiled crooked, aimed the iron-thrower between the talkative one’s eyes. “If you’d do me the honor of tossing those satchels, my little sponge cakes, you can all be on your way back home to mother. Kiss her on the mouth for me, hear?”
Jurou stepped around the corner, same alley’s mouth the yakuza had entered by. He upended a sack with a flourish, contents ringing brightly upon broken concrete. They were “crow’s-feet”; two lengths of sharpened wire, braided together and bent so that one of the four points always faced upward. A hundred of them now covered the deck between the yakuza and retreat. Yoshi and his iron-thrower hovered above their advance.
Jurou stepped back with his roofing-nail war club, watching the gangsters close. He didn’t bother minding the street: Yoshi had other eyes in play.
What you seeing, Daken?
… no guards down. moving riverside to look up …
“Don’t be mistaking me for the type who asks twice, Scorpion Children.” Yoshi waved the iron-thrower. “The iron. Count of five.”
“You know who we are then?”
The lead yakuza pulled his kerchief down, tipped back his bowl-shaped hat. He was a wide, red-faced fellow, freshly shaved and sweaty, his ugly smile missing four front teeth.
Yoshi’s hands were stone. “Four…”
“We’re gonna get you, you know.”
“Three…”
“A little shit with big coin isn’t hard to find in streets this narrow.”
“Two…”
The yakuza relented, aimed his gap-toothed grin in Yoshi’s direction, hefted his satchel with fat, stubby fingers. And then a frown crossed his face, one eyebrow creeping skyward as he looked around in alarm.
The roof beneath Yoshi began to vibrate, a subtle tremor at first, increasing in intensity. He thought for a moment the house might be collapsing, brickwork giving way beneath his weight. But then he realized the yakuza were feeling it too; a shivering rumble reaching up through the earth, as if the whole island were moving beneath their feet.
“What the hells?” Jurou called out in alarm.
… what is that?…
Yoshi crouched low, one hand on the eave to steady himself. He watched mortar dust drifting from the walls, listened to the fragile tune of splintering glass.
Another earthquake.
Just as suddenly as it had begun, the tremor subsided. Stillness fell over Kigen, angry voices and wailing babies splitting the still of the predawn dark. Yoshi collected his wits, turned back to the yakuza. Still, it happened so quickly, he almost didn’t catch it.
A glimpse of movement. Just a flash of pale light on steel, speeding from the gangster’s hand toward Yoshi’s heart. Jurou cried out as Yoshi rolled, quake forgotten, just fast enough, knife slipping past and opening him up rib-deep. Yoshi twisted sideways, hissing in the spray of heat and wet. And without thinking, he bit down and pulled the trigger.
The iron-thrower roared.
The shot caught the yakuza in the chest, just above his heart, blooming at his back like lotus blossoms in the first light of spring. The fat man clutched the eyeball-sized hole, dark red spilling down his uwagi, coughing once as he dropped like bricks onto the alley floor. The three other gangsters bolted, sprinting away from Jurou’s crow’s-feet toward the other end of the alley. Yoshi fired again as they ran beneath, another gangster falling, gasping, big body skidding to a damp halt on the gravel. The remaining two were ghosts, already gone, feet pounding the street as confused residents spilled from their tenements, pale and shaken in the quake’s aftermath.
Yoshi lay against the tiles, hand pressed to gashed ribs, sticky and red. His ears still rang with the iron-thrower’s roar. He hissed, rolled off the roof and landed in a crouch, stuffing the still-warm ’thrower back into his obi. The red-faced fellow was laid out, motionless, eyes like clouded glass. The other gangster was moaning, flopping onto his belly and drawing his legs up underneath him, ground painted scarlet.
“Yoshi!” Jurou shuffled carefully through the crow’s-feet and ran to his side. “Izanagi’s balls, are you all right?”
Jurou cradled his head, pale with fear, pulling Yoshi’s uwagi off to inspect the wound. His eyes widened at the blood, so much of it, soaking into the bandage over the new tattoo, spattered on the bare flesh of Yoshi’s right arm.
The gangster groaned again, pink froth on his lips.
“Yoshi, is it?” he bubbled, grinning like a drunkard, teeth slicked and gleaming dark. His eyes were fixed on the place where Yoshi’s clan tattoo should have been. “You’re fucking dead, Burakumin Yoshi…”
… coming …
Daken’s voice rang out clear in Yoshi’s mind.
… heard shots. iron men coming …
The gangster rolled over onto his back, his uwagi soaked through, a hole in his chest the size of a fist, coughing thick and red. Yoshi climbed to his feet, wincing, one hand pressed against his bleeding side, the other scrabbling for purchase on a chunk of broken cobblestone.
Bushimen were on their way.
The yakuza might be dead before they arrived.
But he might not.
And he knows my name.