She climbed to her feet, brushing the sodden hair away from her face. Her dark eyes surveyed the surroundings, glittering with the occasional faint burst of lightning across the hidden clouds above.
Trees with trunks as thick as houses stretched up to blot out the sky. Rain dripped through the knotted canopy, drumming upon leaves in a thousand discordant beats. The trees were ancient and gnarled: bent old men, their skin crawling with fingers of thick moss, mushrooms clustered about their feet in multicolored growths. Her stomach growled and she picked several of the safer-looking fungi, stuffing a few into her obi for later. Panic bloomed as she groped at the small of her back, and she breathed a sigh of relief when her fingers brushed the polished lacquer hilt of her tantō.
She blinked about the darkness, each direction looking no worse or better than the rest. So, with a shrug, she set off down the slope in the direction the arashitora had flown.
“Ungrateful shit,” she muttered.
Her father would have scolded her for the unladylike language. She looked around the darkness, and realizing that there were no adults nearby to chastise her, she began shouting every bad word she could think of. A rainbow of profanity rolled between the trees, gutter-talk bouncing among walls of wood and fern, beneath a ceiling of shadowed green. Spirits slightly buoyed by her tiny rebellion, Yukiko tromped off into the gloom.
Her thin sandals were soon sodden and torn, and she slipped and stumbled across the forest floor. The storm raged above, its volume muted by the lush canopy over her head, the great trees reaching out to entwine their branches like the hands of old, dear friends. There was a strange scent on the air, a smell that lay so far back in her childhood that she took a while to recall what it was.
The absence of lotus.
Everything in Kigen was polluted by it, lending its acrid tang to the food she ate, the water she drank, the very sweat on her skin. But here in the deep Iishi Mountains, there was almost no trace. The fields encroached closer every year, but she sensed there was still a purity here; the last stretch of true wilderness in all of Shima. She wondered how long it would take before the shreddermen set their sights on these ancient trees, this fertile soil, and put their blades to work. The motto of the Guild rang unbidden in her head, and she whispered it once into the darkness, fingers to her lips.
“The lotus must bloom.”
Dawn had spread its gloomy pall across the forest before Yukiko stumbled across the arashitora’s trail: fresh gouges in the earth marking the broken gait of a creature unused to spending much time on the ground. She found no blood, and took solace that the beast wasn’t injured beyond the suffering it had already endured.
She followed the trail for hours down the crumbling mountainside, stopping occasionally to rest and eat, to lick rain off the broad green leaves. Sandals torn, feet bleeding, dripping with the humidity trapped beneath the ceiling of overhanging leaves. She lost the trail several times on stony ground; she wasn’t half the tracker her father was. If only he were here . . .
The memory of her final words to him echoed in her head. She could still feel the sting of his slap on her cheek, hear the anger and hurt in his rebuke. But beneath it all lurked the fear that he might have died in the crash, that the life raft and everyone aboard had lost the way in the storm and plowed right into a mountainside. Hot tears welled in her eyes, and she pawed them away with the heels of her hands.
He’s all right. You’re worrying for nothing. Everyone will be all right. Hours passed, the mushrooms in her belt disappearing one mouthful at a time. She lost the trail again as the forest grew darker, cursing herself and stumbling over the uneven ground. Stopping beneath a towering maple, she re-tied her braid, damp wisps of hair clinging to her forehead. The forest had grown noisy as the sun rose, alive with chattering birds, spattering rain, small scuttling feet. She had felt their tiny pulses with the Kenning, searching for the fear that might linger in the arashitora’s wake. But now, as dusk fell, she reached out and felt no sparks, no clusters of warm, furry bodies or sleek feathered heartbeats. Silence had descended: a sweaty hush that fell heavy as a mouldy blanket.
Something’s wrong.
Creeping through the undergrowth, she crouched low, her footfalls barely a whisper. Eyes darting about the gloom, pulse quickening at every snapping twig or shifting shadow. Steam rose up from the rain-soaked earth, cloaking the forest in mist. She could sense the faint glow of the setting sun through the canopy above, the chill of night creeping with slow, measured tread through the wildwood. No bird calls. No wind. Just the heavy patter of fat raindrops and the faint scrape of her heels on dead leaves.
Predator?