We continued the lesson. This time, when she corrected me, I tried to follow her instructions. There was no perfection in my movements, in the way I sat or stood or walked. My body still wanted to rebel, still wanted to return to familiar patterns.
But I tried.
And after a while, the trying became almost bearable.
“Do you have eyes in the back of your head?” I asked after the twentieth correction.
“No,” she said, warmth in her voice. “But I know every way a body tries to cheat proper posture.”
The admission hung in the air for a moment. I looked at her—reallylooked at her—at the perfect grace of her movements, the flawless way she carried herself.
“You?” I said softly. “You were . . . ?”
“I learned.” She said simply.
Her smile was different now, not just patient or amused, but something genuine, something offered freely. “And you will, too, Kaneko-san. I promise.”
In that moment, something shifted. I realized that her smiles—the small ones, the genuine ones—were for me, to help me. Beneath the training and correction and endless patience, she actually wanted to be not just my teacher, but my friend, perhaps.
Despite everything. Like I imagined a sister might be, if I had ever had a sister.
The thought of siblings made my chest ache, and my mind drifted.
To Yoshi.
Where was he? Was he safe? Was he learning things as strange and impossible as I was?
“Your shoulders tensed,” Hana said gently. “You are thinking of something painful.”
I forced myself to breathe. To relax.
“My . . . brother. I wonder if he is well.”
Hana nodded slowly. “Then we must make sure you become skilled enough to thrive here, so perhaps, one day, you might find a way to discover his fate.” She adjusted my shoulders with gentle hands. “But first, you must learn to sit without looking like a sack of rice.”
Despite everything, I laughed.
Chapter 10
Kazashita
The reek slammed into me before I stepped off the ship.
Bara.
The jewel of the Empire.
The beating heart of civilization.
It reeked of sweat and unwashed bodies pressed too close together. Human waste ran in open channels along the dock, as smoke from a thousand cooking fires mixed with incense from temples I could not see. Beneath it all, strong enough to taste if I breathed too deeply, was something metallic and wrong that I recognized immediately as blood.
I shouldered my pack and pushed into the crowd. The docks were chaos. Sailors shouted in languages I did not know. Merchants haggled over prices for cargo still dripping with seawater. Children begged and cried and darted between legs, quick as rats, hands reaching for anything not secured. I caught one boy’s wrist as his fingers brushed my coin purse. He lookedup at me with ancient eyes on a youth-filled face, then twisted free and vanished into the press of bodies.
As many times as I visited the capital, helped Kichi offload his cargo and celebrate his scores, I had never become accustomed to the blur of humanity that was the capital. It was a living organism made of flesh and noise and desperation. The sheer number of people made my head spin.
I pushed through the crowd, moving away from the docks and deeper into the city. Beggars lined the streets. Not just a few, but dozens. Hundreds, perhaps. They were everywhere, impossible to count. They sat against walls with bowls extended, their faces hollow with hunger. Some were missing limbs—casualties of war, most likely—while others bore the marks of disease.
One man had no eyes, just empty sockets that wept constant tears. He called out to passersby in a voice worn thin by pleading. No one gave him coin. No one spared him a glance. I passed him by as well. I had so little myself. The guilt of it sat heavy in my chest.
