“Help me, Yoshi,” she gasped.
He swallowed, winced, nodded. Together, entwined, reaching out and calling, pulling, pleading. The flood began with one black droplet, streaking past them with dirty fangs bared. A handful more followed, then a dozen, heeding the call scritch-scratching at the backs of their minds, ringing in the empty behind their eyes, swelling, rising, all mangy fur and tails like lengths of old knotted rope, filth-encrusted claws and mouths bathed in death. Hana heard a soldier cry out, the clang of steel striking stone, more of the mongrel, gutter-born flood flowing past them as they ran on and on and on.
More shouts behind. Screams of pain. No time to stop and listen, to press or to fight. Just to run, to run when every new step seemed an impossibility, when the vomit rose scalding and boiling in the back of her throat to the edge of her teeth, when every muscle wept and screamed, drawn taut and tight and stretched to snapping. Turning blind at every junction, straight, left, left, right, the black stabbed through by occasional blinding light from the drain grilles overhead. Akihito finally gasped, fell against the wall and collapsed into the filth, hands pressed to the weeping wound at his thigh. Yoshi skidded to his knees, blood spilling thick and red and hot from his side down his fingers. Hana on all fours, retching, gasping, weeping, tears on her cheeks as the reek scored her throat.
And as her heartbeat pounded in her temples, as her breath seethed in her chest, she stretched out to the children of the grave around her—the scabrous, worm-ridden horde—and found no other men in their eyes. No soldiers in their fears. Only them. Only her. Licking scabby jowls with flat gray tongues, and wondering if she fell facedown into the murk right now, spent her last throes inhaling that soup into her lungs, what her pretty, pretty eye might taste like.
“They’re gone…” she gasped, coughing. “… We … lost them…”
Jurou leaned against the concave wall, chest rising and falling like sparrows’ wings. “Izanagi’s balls…”
Akihito reached out, groping for her hand in the dark. “Are you … all right?”
“Worry about yourself, whoreson!” Yoshi snarled, jamming the iron-thrower up under Akihito’s chin and forcing him back against the wall.
“Yoshi, stop it!” Hana cried.
Though he outweighed the boy by eighty pounds and stood half a foot taller, Akihito allowed himself to be pressed against the slimy brick, the ’thrower’s barrel jammed against his larynx. He raised his hands slowly, scarlet-slicked, eyes fixed on Yoshi’s.
“Calm down, son…”
“You fixing to be my da, old man? Because I promise that’ll end less than pretty.” Yoshi leaned closer, pressing harder on the ’thrower, his tone a boiling cocktail of incredulity and rage. “You’re a godsdamned rebel hiding out in my home? Dragging my sister into your shit? The bushi’ through our front door? I should end you!” Spittle flying. “I should feed you to the fucking rats!”
“He didn’t drag me into anything, Yoshi!” Hana shouted. “Stop it!”
“Izanagi’s balls, Hana, he’s in the fucking Kagé!”
“I’m in the Kagé!”
A hollow silence, lined with teeth, Yoshi turning and peering at her in the dark with bewildered eyes. “Tell me you’re joking…”
“I joined weeks ago. After the Stormdancer came back to—”
“Have you lost your godsdamned mind?” Eyes narrowed to knife cuts. Voice rising to a roar. “I said have you lost—”
“I heard you the first time!” Hana shouted.
“What the hells were you thinking?”
“I told you! They stand for something, Yoshi! They stand and they fight. The Guild, the lotus, inochi, all of this shit. I swim up to my eyeballs in it every single day and it makes me want to puke. There are people out there fighting and dying for this! For us! And you want me to sit back and do nothing? Hope someone else fixes it for me?”
“You know what we are.” Yoshi turned on her, pointing to the streets above their heads. “You know those bastards up there wouldn’t give one speck of lotusfly shit for you or me if they really knew. We don’t owe them a thing. Not a godsdamned drop!”
“Yoshi,” Jurou pleaded, touching his arm. “Calm down.”
Akihito’s voice was soft. “Listen to your—”
Yoshi whirled, aimed the ’thrower between Akihito’s eyes.
“You wanna stay handsome, best stay quiet,” he spat. “This is family talk now.”
He turned back to Hana, voice growing cold and hard as ice.
“This little dance is over, sister-mine. You ran with heroes and had your fun and now it’s done. We’re ghosting, right now, and leaving this fellow to his tricks. We don’t see or speak to him again. We’re walking away. And we’re not looking back.”
Hana shook her head, scowled. “You don’t tell me what to do, brother-mine.”