Maro’s spit hissed upon the embers. “You lie.”
“I’m not lying.” Anger flared in Kin’s chest, bright and hot. “I saw the plans years ago. I could destroy it from the inside, but attacking this thing frontally is suicide.” He turned to Daichi. “They’re building it at the proving grounds in Jukai province, right? The Stain?”
Daichi nodded, shifting with a wince. “Hai.”
“The place is a fortress, surrounded by deadlands.” Kin shook his head. “It’s probably the most tightly guarded Guild facility on the islands next to First House. They have more firepower than any chapterhouse in Shima. We’ll never get in there.”
Kaori glared at him across the blaze. “Who is ‘we,’ Guildsman?”
“There is still Aisha,” Daichi said. “Hiro’s wedding.”
“Aisha be damned,” Maro spat. “There’s more at stake now than the virtue of—”
“She sacrificed everything for us, Maro-san.” Kaori’s eyes flashed. “Do not dare dishonor her name.”
“I mean no disrespect, but this army will spell the death of the Kagé!”
“We can’t leave her to be raped for a throne!”
“We cannot risk all for one! Not with this Earthcrusher threatening everything. What can we do against an army of shreddermen, let alone a machine like this?”
“This is not just about one! What do you think will happen if the dynasty is reforged? If Hiro is given legitimacy? Everything we’ve done will be in vain!”
Kin watched them go back and forth, saying nothing. His head swam with the noise, the smoke, the ache in his stomach and chest. And as wretched as he felt, he was glad he hadn’t brought up Isao and the others to Daichi. If he’d done so, he would have felt pitiful now. A child crying over a skinned knee. Instead he felt utterly alone. Detached and swimming in lightless black. The outsider. The other.
“Who is ‘we,’ Guildsman?”
Stepping to the doorway, he slipped outside.
The others were too engrossed in their rage to mark his passing.
*
He walked quietly, hands in his sleeves, shadow to shadow on bare feet. Father Moon’s light was weak and choked, piercing the canopy with thin spears of muted gray. The night sang around him, a thousand lives calling and hunting and fleeing out in the dark. He moved through the forest, no more than a murmur amidst the whispering trees and falling leaves, until at last he stood before the towering silhouette of one of his shuriken-throwers.
The machine looked mournful, slumped and listing to one side, as if ashamed it had failed in their hour of need. Kin climbed up the ladder into the controller’s seat, the pain in his ribs and gut like someone had replaced his intestines with bundles of razor wire.
A bird screeched somewhere out in the dark.
The wind whispered to the trees.
Secrets.
Warnings.
Kin peered around in the dark, and seeing no one, struck a match against the pump’s flank. Orange light and sulfur heat, flaring bright. He lit the paper lantern he’d brought with him, too frightened for a moment to breathe. He imagined Isao and his cohort stumbling upon him here in the dark, the easy accusations that would spill from clenched teeth. The bloodshed that would follow, easier still.
The ’thrower groaned beneath him.
He leaned close, uncoupled a hatch and peeled it back from the machine’s skin. Taking a wrench from his belt, he lost himself in the work, minutes slipping past like thieves. Remembering countless days in the chapterhouse belly, the patient voice of his sensei, his father’s gentle hands, the warming praise as he excelled. He was gifted, and he’d known it; even before the Chamber of Smoke, even before he was promised a destiny greater than most Guildsmen could ever dream.
He remembered Second Bloom Kensai, his father’s close friend; a man he might have called uncle if they were normal people with normal lives. He remembered the grief in Kensai’s voice as he told Kin his father was dead, clumsy metal hands on his shoulders. He remembered crying inside his skin, tears flowing down cheeks he couldn’t touch, watching as they consigned his father’s corpse to the Inochi vats, words of the Purifiers ringing in his ears.
“The prelude was Void,
And unto Void we return.
Black as mother’s womb.”
But even in grief, there had been the warm sunlight of burning solder, the shelter of housings and transistors and gears, the scripture of interlocking iron teeth. A language he knew as well as his own. It whispered to him, all those long and lonely nights. Telling him he belonged. That he was home.
Had being in the Guild really been so bad?
He shook his head at the thought. It had been worse than bad. It had been slavery, and he a prisoner within a cage of brass. Captive of predetermination, of the Inquisition and their What Will Be and their black metal smiles in the Chamber of Smoke, their whispers of a future so terrifying it woke him sweating every night of his life.