Hesitantly, Kin stepped behind it, twisting each bolt dotting its spine, working several clasps under the False-Lifer’s direction. Yukiko heard a faint series of popping sounds, all over the grease-slick, gleaming body, followed by the wet sucking of air rushing into vacuum. The skin slackened, as if it were now a size too big. The thing tugged a zip cord running up to the base of its skull, another down to the small of its back. As Atsushi and Isao watched, revolted and fascinated, the False-Lifer bent double, and like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, chrysalis to imago, sloughed off its outer shell.
She was clad in a membrane of pale webbing beneath. Skin so pallid it was almost translucent. Her head utterly hairless; no eyelashes, eyebrows, nothing. Long slender limbs and tapered fingers, smooth curves studded with bayonet fixtures of black, gleaming metal. Seventeen, perhaps eighteen years old at most. Her lips were full and pouting, as if she’d been stung by something venomous, her features fragile and perfect; a porcelain doll on its first day in the sun. She narrowed her eyes, held one hand up against the light.
Inexplicably, Yukiko felt her heart sink.
She’s beautiful.
Kin scowled at the gawping boys and removed his uwagi, slipped it around the pale girl’s shoulders. Yukiko could see the same bayonet fixtures in his flesh, ruining smooth lines of lean muscle, fixed in the exact same location: wrists, shoulders, chest, collarbone, spine. The silver orb sat affixed to the girl’s back, spider limbs rippling, still making that horrid, inhuman noise. Yukiko pointed.
“Take those off too.”
“I cannot.” The girl’s voice sounded soft and sweet now that she was outside her skin, underscored with a thin, trembling fear. “They are part of me. Rooted in my spinal column.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“Please, I am not lying.” The girl wrung her hands, still squinting. Her eyes were a rich, earthen brown, pupils contracting to pinpricks. “I could just as easily take off my legs.”
ONE WITH THE MACHINE. SUCH MADNESS.
Yukiko scowled at the rippling silver fingers, needle-sharp, swollen-knuckled and gleaming with rain. She looked down at the False-Lifer’s toes, pressed into dark, wet earth, sick to her stomach. The headache slipped toward her temples, tightening at the base of her skull. A whisper. A promise.
“Bind her arms.” She glanced at Atsushi. “All of them.”
Kin looked vaguely hurt by the suggestion. “Yukiko, you don’t need to do that.”
“Please don’t tell me what I need, Kin.”
The girl folded her metallic arms at her back; functional limbs curling up like the legs of a dying spider, the broken one hanging near her shin, limp as a dead fish. Atsushi bound her with rope, wrapping it around her torso and pinning all her arms. Drawing a deep breath, steeling herself, the girl raised her eyes and looked at Yukiko for the first time. Her voice was almost lost beneath the whispering rain.
“Thank you for trusting me,” she said.
“I don’t trust you.”
“Then … thank you for not killing me.”
“Let’s get her back.” Yukiko motioned to the boys. “Isao, bury the skin deep as you can. Atsushi, come with us. I need to speak to Daichi.”
Isao nodded, started clearing a space of dead leaves. Atsushi poked the girl in the back with his nagamaki, hard enough for her to stumble. Kin reached out, caught her before she fell.
“Move,” Atsushi growled.
Yukiko moved off into the undergrowth with Buruu, skin prickling, head throbbing. Looking back, she saw Kin had placed a steadying hand on the knots at Ayane’s back, helping her navigate the uneven ground. Atsushi tromped along behind, a dark scowl on his face.
Ayane kept her eyes downcast, voice low. But she was speaking. Furtive and clearly afraid. Stretching out into the minds of the forest around them, inundating herself in a cascading pain, Yukiko could hear every word the False-Lifer spoke. See her through a hundred pairs of eyes, feel the pulse of a hundred heartbeats.
Blood began dripping from her nose.
“Thank you, Kin-san,” Ayane was whispering.
“You have nothing to thank me for.” The boy shook his head. “We do what’s right up here. Yukiko’s a good person. She’s just suspicious of the Guild. She lost a lot because of them and the government. Most people here have.”
“Her father.”
“Friends too.”
“Are they going to hate me? The Kagé, I mean?”
“Probably.” Kin glanced back at Atsushi and his nagamaki. “They don’t trust our kind … I mean, the kind we used to be.”
“Then why do you stay?”
It was a long time before Kin answered; a wordless space filled by faint rain drumming on the canopy, as if a distant army were pounding earth with hollow bamboo. Yukiko could see him watching her, walking there in front of him, Buruu beside her. He looked at the forest, slowly turning the color of rust, cupped in the palms of autumn’s chill. And finally, he shrugged.
“Because there are things here I love. Because I’m part of this world, and I’ve sat by and watched it falling away for far too long, hoping someone else will save it.”
“So now you will save it, Kin-san? All by yourself?”