*
Seimi raised the blowtorch in front of Yoshi’s face, turned the fuel nozzle and sparked the flint, a burst of smoking heat flaring before their eyes. The boy was trying his best to hold his nerve, but Seimi could see it in the clenched jaw, the pupils dilated to pits, the way each breath made his whole body shake.
It was beautiful.
Seimi leaned close. “I’m the one who did your boyfriend, you know.”
Yoshi lashed out with his forehead, but Seimi flinched back, sidestepping the spit sprayed in his direction.
“He lasted a loooong time, considering.” Seimi grinned like the cat with the cream. “Must have really cared about you to stand tall that distance. The heart weeps.”
The few Scorpion Children who’d stayed to enjoy the show chuckled in the dark around him. Seimi was a master of the snip and clip; he’d once made an informer last six days in the shackles. Not out of any need, understand—the man had begun singing after thirty minutes. No, Seimi had done it just to see if he could.
He leaned close again, inhaling the fear, savoring it on teeth and tongue. And then he sat cross-legged at the boy’s feet and lifted the blowtorch like an orchestra conductor before the music swelled.
“They’re going to tell stories about you, boy. Stories to frighten their children.”
Seimi heard scuffling at his back. One of the brothers shouting a warning. And then there was only blinding pain, a knife of burning ice thrust into his neck. He turned with a cry and she stabbed him again, long-nosed pliers ripping his carotid wide, painting the air bright red.
Blood was smeared over her features, spilling from the ruined socket where her left eye had been. But she’d torn away the leather patch covering the other side of her face, and beneath the scarred brow, above the cheek bisected by a long, broken-bottle scar, burned a round, beautiful eye—luminous, glittering like rose-colored quartz.
“Don’t you touch my brother,” she said.
*
“It’s in you,” her father was saying. “You gaijin trash. The white devils are in you. But I can see them. I can get them out…”
He leaned in close, holding the broken bottle up to her right eye, jagged edge reflected in that gentle, glowing pink.
“Da, no!” She shook her head, eyes closed tight. “No, no!”
“I can get them out,” he said.
She felt the bottle sink into her skin, broken glass scraping bone, and she screwed her eyes shut tighter and screamed as loud as she could. And then she heard him gasp, and something wet was falling on her face, and he was reeling off her and staggering to his feet, clutching the chopsticks protruding from his neck. And as he turned, Yoshi thrust another one like a dagger, burying it deep in his eye.
Da lurched forward and swung the bottle at Yoshi’s face, ripping a four-inch tear through the brim of his new hat and missing his cheek by a hair’s breadth. And then he fell, face forward onto the floor, amidst the ruin of their dinner and the ruin of their lives.
Yoshi stood above him, clenched and bloody fists, dragging in each broken gasp through gritted teeth. Staring down at the monster, the devil, the demon he’d finally conquered.
“Don’t you touch my sister,” he said.
*
She’d learned to hide it, since the Worst Day of Her Life. The pale skin they could explain away with the fox blood that lay far back in their family tree. The blond hair was easier still; just a coat of black cotton dye every few weeks to hide their golden roots.
But her eye?
Green was an oddity, but rose was an impossibility; a legacy of the gaijin blood flowing in her veins, impossible to deny. They had no idea why it had changed—whether it was trauma, age, something else entirely, and they had nobody to ask about it. In a Downside saké bar, Yoshi overheard a drunken soldier returned fresh from the war, slurring a tale about gaijin witches striding amongst the round-eye hordes, right eyes aglow with the hue of watered blood. The man spoke of them with horror and awe. And if Shima’s people looked down on Burakumin trash, they looked with utter hatred on the eastern barbarians; the enemy that had butchered their colonies, fought their armies to a standstill these last twenty years.
Life for a clanless dog on Kigen’s streets would have been hard enough.
But a half-breed gaijin witch-girl?
And so she hid it, even from poor Jurou, sleeping with her patch on, forgetting it herself as best she could; her brother alone knowing the secret behind the leather tied around her face.
Until now …
Hana lurched toward the tools on the table, snatching up a hammer as the yakuza closed in around her. She swung wildly, caught one across an outstretched hand, the man cursing and reeling back. But they circled behind, four of them now, closing in like thin and starving wolves, eyes narrowed, teeth bared.
“Hana, run!” Yoshi roared. “Get out!”
His eyes on hers. Begging. Pleading.