Kinslayer (9 page)

Kin stared at the boy for an empty moment, then turned back to the thing in the pit.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Looking for you, Kioshi-san.”

Looking for him?

“My name is Kin.”

“You … no longer bear your father’s name?”

“His name is none of your business.” Yukiko spoke through clenched teeth. “I’d stop asking questions and start answering them if I were you.”

The False-Lifer averted its smooth, glass eyes. Yukiko could have sworn it cringed.

“Forgiveness, Stormdancer.”

“What the hells are you doing here? What do you want?”

A small, helpless gesture, silver arms rippling. “To join you.”

“Join us?” she scoffed.

“Kiosh—” A pause. “
Kin
-san is not the only one who dreamed of escaping the Guild’s control. There are many of us within chapterhouses all over Shima, harboring secret thoughts of rebellion. But none thought it was possible. None were brave enough to risk it.” The thing looked at Kin, admiration in its voice. “Until he did.”

“We should kill it, Stormdancer.” Atsushi pointed his spear into the pit, rain running down its razored edge. “We can’t trust it.”

“Please…” the False-Lifer whispered. “I’ve come so far…”

Kin glared at Atsushi. “When a Guildsman’s skin suffers catastrophic damage, the mechabacus sends a distress beacon. The Guild will know
exactly
where we are.”

“Can you disable the beacon?” Yukiko pointed to the brass tool belt slung about his waist.

“I could.” Kin frowned. “But you’re not going to—”

Yukiko turned to Isao.

“Get it out of the pit.”

They tossed a rope down, Yukiko watching in disgust as the Guildsman crawled twenty feet up into the light. The arms on its back made a skittering, clicking noise as they moved, as if a hive of scuttling insects were housed in each limb. Glowing eyes lent a blood-soaked tinge to its glistening shell. Though the skin looked moist, dirt or dust didn’t cling to it at all.

As the Guildsman reached the pit’s edge, Yukiko realized it was wearing a long, buckle-studded apron, making it difficult to clear the lip of the trap. Isao seized one of its humanoid arms, dragged it out and dumped it without ceremony on the ground. Atsushi leveled his naginata at the thing’s throat. Yukiko stood back, well out of reach of the spider limbs, but the Guildsman made no threatening gestures, merely raised all its arms amidst more of that horrid clicking and slowly rose to its feet. Eyes averted. Shivering. Its mechabacus was silent, implanted over the swell of its …

Gods above.

“It’s a girl.” Yukiko frowned at Kin. “She’s a girl.”

Kin shrugged. “All False-Lifers are.”

“I didn’t think there were any women in the Guild.”

“Where do you think little Guildsmen come from?” A small, embarrassed smile.

Yukiko’s scowl grew darker still, and she gestured toward the False-Lifer’s mechabacus. The device chattered, counting beads clicking back and forth across a surface of relays, heat-sinks and glowing transistors.

“Disable it.”

Kin stepped forward, uncertain, drawing a screwdriver and pliers from his work belt. Looking a little awkward, he placed his hands on the Guildswoman’s chest. It kept its eyes downturned as he loosened a handful of screws. Dozens of insulated wires spilled out as he peeled the faceplate away.

“Um.” He held up the covering. “Can you hold this, please?”

The False-Lifer mutely complied, spider arms shuddering as its real hands cupped the metal. Yukiko felt her stomach turn, swallowing hard, mouth tasting of vomit. Her legs were trembling. Eyes watering. Sparrows called in the distance, the sound closer to screaming than singing. Three monkeys gathered in the trees overhead, roaring and shaking the branches. Heat all around her. Hands in fists.

ARE YOU WELL, SISTER?

I’m fine.

“What’s your name?” Kin said.

“Kin, don’t talk to it,” Yukiko growled.

He glanced over his shoulder. “Isn’t that the point of this exercise?”

Yukiko glared, scraped rain-slicked hair from her eyes. Kin turned back to the False-Lifer, unspooled several leads from its mechabacus, began tinkering in the machine’s guts. He offered an apologetic glance as he touched its breast again.

“What’s your name?” he repeated.

“… My mother’s name was Kei. Gifted to me when she died, as custom bids.”

He paused, looked into featureless glass eyes. “But what’s
your
name?”

A long silence. Yukiko ground her teeth. She could hear the sounds of a thousand gaijin children, sobbing as they were marched to slaughter inside the greasy yellow innards of the chapterhouses. High-pitched screaming amidst the crackling pyres around the Burning Stones. People like her, people with the Kenning, put to the torch for the sake of the Guild’s ridiculous “Way of Purity.” The False-Lifer’s reply sounded like a nest of spitting vipers.

“Ayane.”

“What chapterhouse are you from?”

“Yama.”

“Fox lands are a long walk from here.” Kin raised an eyebrow and went to work with a pair of wire snips. “How did you make it all the way? False-Lifers can’t fly.”

“I stole aboard a Guild liner in Yama harbor and fired the escape pod.” The spider limbs flexed, a ripple of silver in the air around it. “I flew as far as I could. Then I walked.”

“How did you know our direction?” Kin looked up from the innards, eyes illuminated by a burst of sparks.

“The Guild has known the general location of the Kagé stronghold since they rescued the two of you from the
Thunder Child
’s ruins. Since then, they have set up triangulation towers around the Iishi. Every time the Kagé transmit a radio signal, they zero closer.”

“If they know that much, why haven’t they massed their fleet to burn this forest down?” Yukiko snapped.

The False-Lifer turned her gaze to the earth, steadfastly refusing to meet Yukiko’s eyes.

“Much of the fleet is still overseeing the retreat in Morcheba. But the Guildsman you spared made it back to Yama with your message, Arashi-no-odoriko. The loss of three heavy ships was enough to give the Upper Blooms pause. The captain you killed was a war hero, you know. Kigen’s Third Bloom. Master of their fleet.”

“So?”

“So they are afraid of you.” It swallowed. “You and your thunder tiger.”

Kin was staring at her, the memory of a hundred dead Guildsmen swimming unspoken in his eyes. Yukiko licked her lips, feeling her skin crawl as the False-Lifer’s limbs shivered. She ran one hand along Buruu’s neck, fingers deep in feathers’ warmth.

I don’t trust her.

SENSIBLE.

It’s too good to be true that there would be more like Kin.

IN ALL HONESTY, THAT PART OF HER TALE IS EASY TO BELIEVE.

A rebellion inside the Guild? No, they’re just telling us what we want to hear.

THOSE OF THE GUILD ARE BORN TO IT. NO CHOICE. NO CONTROL. NOT SO HARD TO IMAGINE SOME WOULD RESENT THAT YOKE.

I don’t believe one of them would just tiptoe out of a chapterhouse and come all this way to find Kin. It’s probably just a survivor from the fleet we burned. Lying to save its skin.

WE LEFT ONLY ONE ALIVE, YUKIKO. YOU KNOW THAT.

This doesn’t make any godsdamned sense. It’s lying.

YOU MEAN “SHE” IS LYING.

I mean “it.”

She eyed the False-Lifer up and down, lip curling.

“Is that why your leaders are backing Hiro? Because they’re too spineless to come here themselves now? They’d rather risk men with wives and children in the battle to bring me down, right? Better to see them die than more of their precious Shatei?”

“I am from Yama.” All nine of its functional arms rippled, and Yukiko was appalled to recognize the gesture as a shrug. “I do not know the politics of First House, or why the First Bloom bids Shateigashira Kensai to support the Tora boy. But I know seventy percent of our Munitions Sect were requisitioned by Kigen four weeks ago.”

Yukiko stared blankly.

“The Munitions Sect build machines that require human control,” Kin offered. “Motor-rickshaw, shreddermen, sky-ship engines and so on. Like I used to.”

Yukiko narrowed her eyes. “What are they working on?”

“I do not know, Stormdancer.” Another grotesque, multi-armed shrug.

“Don’t call her that.” Kin plucked three transistors from the mechabacus. “Her name is Yukiko.”

The boy snipped a final set of wires, gathered up the contraption’s guts and stuffed them back into its housing. Sealing the device closed with a few hasty screws, he stepped back.

“Done.”

The False-Lifer looked at Atsushi’s blade poised against its throat. The boy shifted his grip, one word from a bloodbath. Kin was watching her with pleading eyes. Yukiko stared for a pregnant moment, arms folded, eyes narrowed. The rain was falling harder, fat, clear droplets pounding the leaves around them and soaking everyone to the bones.

Everyone except the False-Lifer, of course.

“I have never seen rain that was not black before.” It turned its palms to the sky, droplets pattering upon its body, beading and running like quicksilver. “It is beautiful.”

Yukiko’s eyes were on the blade gleaming in Atsushi’s hand. The raindrops glittering on the steel like polished jewels.

We should just get everything we can from her, then bury her.

Buruu growled.

WHAT IF SHE SPEAKS TRUTH? WHAT IF SHE IS WHAT SHE SAYS?

No one leaves the Guild. Everyone knows that.

EXCEPT YOUR KIN.

Don’t call him that.

I DID NOT TRUST HIM EITHER, REMEMBER? YET WITHOUT HIM, NEITHER OF US WOULD BE HERE.

I know that.

THEN YOU KNOW WE CANNOT END THIS GIRL ON MERE SUSPICION.

Yukiko hissed, rubbed her eyes with balled fists. The Kenning headache was slinking forward on fox-light feet. The noise. The heat. Lurking in the back of her skull with leaden hands and bated breath.

“Take off your skin,” she said.

“What?” Kin raised an eyebrow. “What for?”

“If we’re taking it back, we’re not bringing a tracking device with us. It takes its skin and mechabacus off and we bury them here.”

“The mechabacus won’t work anym—”

“That’s the bargain, Kin. We bury its skin, or we bury
it
.”

“She’s not an ‘it.’” Kin frowned. “Her name is Ayane.”

Isao scowled, shook his head. Yukiko turned to the False-Lifer, eyes and voice cold.

“Your choice. And I don’t mean to sound cruel, but I could sleep either way.”

The False-Lifer glanced at Atsushi’s blade, then to Kin. Without a word, it began twisting the wing-nut bolts studding its suit. Reaching back with its humanoid arms, it tinkered with the silver orb on its spine; the melon-sized hub from which the spider limbs sprang. It fumbled around for a moment, hissing softly.

“Can you help please, Kin-san? It is difficult to do this alone.”

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.