“I said against the wall, Kagé scum!”
Yoshi blinked. Looked back and forth between the bushi’ and Akihito as Hana’s stomach dropped into her toes.
“Kagé?” A darkening frown. “Wait … you’re here for him?”
Akihito released her hand, stepped forward, a blur of movement, wrapping his kusarigama chain around the bushiman’s spear and dragging the boy off balance. Teeth bared in a silent snarl, he swung his sickle blade upward, burying it beneath the soldier’s chin, punching straight out through the top of his head. More soldiers were rounding the corner as Akihito tore his blade loose, the bushi’s lower jaw with it, and with a howl, the big man waded into the mob.
He slung his chain across one soldier’s face, cleaved a naginata off at the haft. Hana whirled as she heard soldiers behind, three more charging down the alleyway at their backs. The roar of flame above, the girl shielding her eye against the blast-furnace sun as she looked up and saw two Lotusmen alight on the eaves overhead, red eyes aglow, pointing with brass-clad fingers.
“Alive!” one cried with a cicada voice. “Take him alive!”
The shot rang out, shattering the air, bouncing off the narrow walls and making her wince. A bushiman fell with half his face missing, screaming, bloody gauntlets clutching the gaping wound. His comrades ducked for cover back around the corner, cursing as Yoshi fired again, blasting a star-shaped hole through the back of a fleeing soldier and dropping him like a stone amidst a spray of fine red mist.
“He’s got an iron-thrower!”
The acrid stink of burning chemicals filled her nose. Yoshi whirled on the spot and leveled the weapon at the bushi’ behind them, the Lotusmen above them, figures scattering like autumn leaves in a storm wind. Jurou was yelling something, screaming, but the echo of the shots was filling Hana’s head, the sight of the blood, boys no older than she lying dead on the ground, puddles of bright and sticky red, water-thin yellow, howling voices, Yoshi’s face, bloodless and snarling. She was thirteen years old again, the weight on her chest, broken glass pressed to her cheek as she screamed and screamed and screamed.
“I can get them out…”
“Hana, move!” Yoshi roared, pushing her toward Jurou. The boy had peeled back the storm drain cover in the alley’s gutter, was already disappearing down into the dark. She blinked, pulled herself together, Daken’s voice a whisper in her mind—gogogo—as she fell to her knees and crawled into the drain, down into a stinking rush of dark, ankle-deep slush, a pipe of black stone, ten feet wide. She heard her brother snarl a warning to the other soldiers as Akihito dropped down beside her, Yoshi tumbling on top of them a second later. A burst of high-pressure flame rushed in through the drain, Jurou dragging her down into the filth as the fire scorched the air above their heads, Lotusmen shouting, faint and distorted.
Heavy tread.
Ringing steel.
Blurred sunlight spilled down the grubby stone walls, the reek of smoke and shit and old death filling her nose. Jurou had her by the hand and was up and running, splashing, stumbling in the dark, the echoes of their footprints amplified tenfold in the bottomless gloom. A pain-hoarse cry behind, the whistling song of Akihito’s kusarigama chain in the black. She reached out to the rats above and below, pulling Jurou left through a junction, straight at the next, footfalls and gasping and sweat in her eye, slick on her hands, stink making her gag. Running, running until her breath was fire and her legs shook, until her heart pumped oil and acid and her stomach rolled, cold and churning. Corpse-rats streaming about her, dark and sharp, shit-slicked, dead doll’s eyes piercing the murk ahead.
Footsteps behind them, dozens splashing through the filth, lantern light setting their shadows dancing on the moist black walls. Akihito’s heavy breath, limping tread, grunts of pain. Yoshi stumbling, hand pressed to his bloody ribs. The Lotusmen would have been too big in their suits to follow, but it sounded like half the Kigen army was still back there, metal-clad hounds running swift, fangs bared, tight tight tight on the rabbits’ trail.
She reached out into the Kenning, the tiny minds and tiny eyes and long yellow grins. Turning fear to anger, flooding them with it, the sleek broods and hulking rogues gathered in the quiet, lovely dark—their dark—now filled and fouled with the noise and the reek and the steel of these accursed men. Calling them to her, one by one, looking over her shoulder to her brother, his face pale and blood-spattered, eyes wide, loose tendrils of black hair scrawled like cracks upon his skin.