“Will that not get you in trouble?”
“They said you weren’t to leave the cell. You’re not.”
“Kin-san, I do not wish to cause you grief…”
Kin was already selecting tools from his belt. He gave her a small smile, held up a screwdriver. “Turn around. Let’s see what we can see.”
They sat together, her within the bars, him without, the hushed metallic tones of the tools and metal between them. As his fingers flitted over intricate clockwork, he realized how much he’d missed it—the language of the machine. The poetry of it. The absoluteness of it. A world governed by laws, immutable, unchangeable. A world of mass and force, equations and calibrations. So much simpler than a world of flesh, with all its chaos and complexity.
He murmured around the four screws pursed in his lips. “It feels good to be working with my hands again.”
“I am surprised they are not worked to the bone.”
“What do you mean?”
“… Forgiveness.” The girl shook her head. “I speak out of turn. It is not my place.”
Kin pulled the screws from his mouth, frowning. “No, Ayane. Say what you think.”
“It is just … your knowledge could make life up here so much easier…” The girl shivered, shook her head. “But no. I am a guest here. I do not understand their ways. I will be silent.”
Kin’s frown deepened. “Ayane, the Guild can’t hurt you here. There are no Inquisitors waiting in the shadows, no Kyodai to punish you, no Blooms to answer to. You’re your own person. Your choices are your own, too.”
“Then it is my right to choose to remain silent, is it not?”
“But why? You’re free now. What’s to be afraid of?”
Ayane glanced over her shoulder, spider limbs rippling.
“The girl all Guildsmen fear.”
*
Kaori’s glare was the color of water on polished steel, sharp at the edges.
“I cannot believe you brought it here.”
Four figures knelt in a semicircle around the fire pit in Daichi’s dwelling, lit by crackling flame. The assembled faces belonged to the Kagé military council; hard eyes, cool expressions, sword-grip calluses on every hand. There was Kaori, of course, fringe draped over her face, clad in simple clothing of dappled green. Maro and Ryusaki sat together—broad, flat faces, nut-brown skin, deeply lidded eyes that seemed almost closed even when they were fully awake. Ryusaki had a shaved head, a long plaited moustache, his occasional smiles revealing gums bereft of most of his front teeth. Maro’s hair was bound in warrior’s braids and he was missing an eye, the left lens on the goggles slung about his neck painted black. The brothers were former samurai who’d served under Daichi’s command, following him from Kigen city into the wilderness. Maro usually led the arson crew attacks on the southern lotus fields, and seemed perpetually wreathed in smoke. Ryusaki was a swordmaster, Michi’s sensei, and the man had been teaching Yukiko some bladework in the few moments she found spare.
Daichi himself knelt in the center, a cup of tea before him, fists on his knees. He ran his hand down through his long faded moustache, eyes the same blue-gray as his daughter’s. His old-fashioned katana rested in an alcove at his back, sibling to the wakizashi Kaori carried—a scabbard of black enamel, embossed with golden cranes.
Yukiko put her palm to her brow, headache digging its boots into the back of her eyeballs. Sickness swelled in her stomach, the floor of Daichi’s house rolling like the deck of a sky-ship in a storm. She’d tried to close off the Kenning, but could still feel Buruu waiting on the landing outside—a pale inferno burning in her mind’s eye.
“It was either bring her with us or kill her, Kaori.”
“So kill her,” the woman snapped. “Where is the issue?”
“I don’t kill helpless girls with their hands bound at their sides.”
“She’s not a girl,” Kaori growled. “She’s a godsdamn Guildsman.”
Peppermint tea. Burning cedar. Old leather, sword oil and dry flowers. A perfume filling Daichi’s sitting room, filling her lungs and head, too much input, sharp and pointed inside her skull. She fancied she could still smell charring meat, hear the sizzle of her skin as Daichi pressed the burning blade to her tattoo.
Yukiko stood and walked to the window. The laughing fire spread awful warmth into every corner, snapping blackened logs between its fingers and breathing smoke up through a beaten brass flue. She pushed the shutters aside, gulping down lungfuls of fresh, rain-sweet air.
Daichi watched Yukiko carefully, faint concern in his eyes.
“Nobody in this room has more reason to hate the Guild than me, Kaori.” Yukiko turned from the window, stared at the council. “But I’m not certain I want to be a butcher.”
“The crews of those ironclads you destroyed might say otherwise,” Kaori said.
“Oh, you fuc—”