And then she thought of poor Kin, trapped in that half-body and half-life, plugged into his suit like an infant to its mother. Cables and wires and nutrients, never knowing the sun on his face or the breeze on his flesh, save through a few stolen moments in the dark and the quiet. What a price to pay, to be impervious. Never to be touched, all the days of your life.
She realized that she missed him. It had been nearly a month since their time in the Iishi. She wondered how he was, if his burns were better. She wondered how she might get a message to him. She knew now that he felt more for her that she did for him, that those long nights in the forest had made him see something in her that simply wasn’t real. But if she could speak to him, tell him the way she felt . . .
She looked down at Hiro again.
How do I feel?
Sick. Guilty. Nothing close to righteous.
Buruu was the victim here. The only real innocent. He hadn’t asked for any
of this. He’d trusted her, trusted that she would lead them through the storm and out the other side, wind beneath their wings as they left this stinking city behind. And now they were nowhere. Her father imprisoned. Buruu grounded until his winter moult. How would he make it through six more months trapped in that reeking pit? How would her father?
They won’t . They’re going to die in those holes.
She narrowed her eyes, clenched her fist inside the gauntlet, feeling the sickness swell inside her again. And then she saw it, glinting in the light of the setting sun on the bedside table: the tiny mechanical arashitora Kin had made for her. She placed it in the palm of the ō-yoroi gauntlet, held it up to her face.
It was beautiful, intricate, spools of wire and pistons and interlocking teeth. Deft fingers and a mind of machines had sculpted it out of thin brass and clockwork. An Artificer’s idle hands and idle mind, slumped on a sickbed while his flesh limped back to a half-remembered shape.
A small face had been etched in the metal; proud eyes and a razor-sharp beak. Yukiko smiled. Kin had always liked Buruu, even if the arashitora hadn’t liked him back. It was a good likeness, a tiny portrait of better days painted in metal and solder.
The wings were strong, light, lengths of rice-paper reinforced with a skeleton of brass. She ran her fingers along the paper feathers and caught her breath, lips parted, eyes growing wide. She wound the spring, and the tiger leaped from her hands, wings blurring, floating down onto the bedspread with a sound like cricket-song.
An Artificer’s hands . . .
“The answer,” she whispered. “Gods above, that’s it.”
31 Surprises
People didn’t have expressions there. Just faces. A hive. Pentagonal, honeycombed walls, illuminated by quartz halogen flickering in oily housings. The air was abuzz with the hymn of a thousand machines: a choir of gears, falsetto of pistons and hydraulics, baritone of iron on hollow brass and crackling voices. Slow interlaced choreography unfolded inside it, lubricated ball-joints and transmission fluid, glinting in the glow of blood-red eyes and swimming with the ever-present stench of chi.
His skin was supposed to filter it out. His purity screens were always green, blood untouched by the poison they’d filled their world with. But he swore he could taste it, clinging to the back of his throat and creeping across his gums. Ever since his thirteenth birthday, and the agony of the Awakening. Their gift to him, along with the metal shell for his flesh, the tubes plugged into his meat parts; the constant fear that what he’d seen, what they’d shown him that night, might one day come true.
“Skin is strong. Flesh is weak.” The words were a whisper in his head, a conditioned response to the presence of self-doubt, destructive thought, drilled into him since before he even knew their meaning. He remembered the days when they used to bring him comfort, silence the questions that had no answers. The days he used to believe.
Kin touched his fingers to his brow as he passed three Shatei—Guild brethren—in the hallway. He stepped back against the wall to make way for the squat servitor that trundled along after them. The thing paused to query him with a single glowing red eye, two of its fine motor claws fluttering like antennae. It resembled a faceless fat man with spider-legs for arms, cast in metal and set trundling on two broad rubber tank tracks. He sometimes had nightmares about them, hatching moist in some vast sweltering nursery deep in the bowels of the chapterhouse. Not made, but grown.
The thing chattered at him and rolled after his fellows.