“Call me First Bloom.”
Witness to the wholesale slaughter of innocents for the sake of more chi, more power, more fuel to drive the war machine. Never to feel the touch of another’s hand. Never to know true friendship. Never to know love.
But what friendship do you know now? In this hole you call freedom?
The voice in his head was his own, a metallic rasp within a mask of burnished brass, the hiss and swoosh of breather bellows, reeking of chi.
Whose love do you know now?
He blinked hard, elbow deep in the ’thrower’s innards.
… Yukiko.
Laughter in his mind, like the chatter of the mechabacus. Like the wings of a thousand lotusflies.
Love you? She doesn’t even know you.
His hands fell still, fingers resting upon smooth piping and greasy metal. The machine knew him. Knew everything. Its place. Its purpose. Its function. All it was, and all it would ever be. A simple matter of placing the right component in the correct sequence, engaging the proper force at the precise time. No unsolvable mysteries, no problems that simple intellect and experience couldn’t unravel.
If only it were that easy with people.
If only it were that easy with her.
Isao’s words surfaced unbidden in his mind; the memory of a knife twisting the input jack in his flesh, the metal that would always be a part of him, that he would never, ever be rid of.
“You and all your kind are poison.”
And there in the flickering lantern light, in the shadowed guts of that machine, he saw it. The answer that had been in front of him the entire time, coming upon him so suddenly it stole his breath away. A shuddering intake of cold air into bruised lungs, a picture so clear he could almost reach out and touch it. The awful truth, as hard and real as the metal in his hands.
Inescapable.
Undeniable.
They will never let me know a moment’s peace here.
The wrench fell from nerveless fingers, clattering upon iron a thousand miles away, the noise as distant as Father Moon and his feeble light.
They will never let me be.
And without a sound, he descended and shuffled back into the darkness.
*
He’d closed the door when he left her. And now it stood ajar.
A cold lump of fear in his throat, squeezing his windpipe shut as he hobbled onto the landing outside Yukiko’s room, close enough now to hear quiet sobbing. He pushed through the door and saw her curled up in the far corner, and the first thing he noticed wasn’t that her clothes were torn, how she flinched at his footsteps like some beaten dog, how she kicked at the floor with her heels in some vain attempt to push herself farther back into the corner. It was the way the blood on her skin, on her face, between her legs, looked so dark it was almost black.
“First Bloom…” he whispered. “What have they done?”
She wailed in fear as he stepped closer. Bruises on her face, those bee-stung lips swollen further still, ugly purple around her wrists, across her thighs. And blood.
So little, and yet so very much blood.
“Ayane.” One hand stretching into the space between them. “Ayane, it’s me.”
He knelt beside her, ignoring the pain in his gut and ribs. And at the sound of his voice she latched on to him like a child, like a broken porcelain doll, and the sobs that shook her whole body traveled down through the floor, into the earth at the roots of ancient trees, and sent the whole structure shaking.
Another wail of terror spilled over bloody lips, her fingers digging into his skin as the room shuddered, empty bottles rattling upon the sill. Kin realized this was actually happening; the room was shaking, the island trembling in the grip of yet another earthquake. Dust drifted from the ceiling, dead leaves falling outside like a flurry of dry and curling snow.
He held her tight, palms pressed to bare and bloodied flesh. The sobbing wracked her, shook her; a cutting, bone-deep sound he prayed he would never hear again. As suddenly as it had begun to tremble, the world fell still. Still and quiet as the space between seconds, the empty brink between one torment and the next.
“Who was it?” A hard whisper. “Who did this to you, Ayane?”
It was a long while before she caught her breath, faced pressed into his chest as her spider limbs closed around him like a flytrap plant, needle points dipped in blood.
“Isao…” A whispered curse. “Isao and … the others.”
He exhaled, vile and hateful. Her whole body shaking in silent sobs. Gasping through clenched teeth. Kin hung his head, closed his eyes.
How did it come to this?
“Let’s just go, Kin.” Her voice was cracked and broken, raw with tears, slurred behind swollen lips. “Let’s just leave, please. We don’t belong here. We should never have come here, oh, please Kin…”
“Where would we go?” he asked, already knowing what she would say.