He stumbled toward the back of the inn, leaving the younger sailor stricken, only to return to find the conversation hadshifted to safer topics—ships and cargo and complaints about harbor fees.
I nursed my sake and tried to look interested, but my mind was racing. I had learned nothing about Kaneko. These men knew nothing—and cared even less—about individual slaves or where specific people might have been sold. But I had learned about the city itself—its tensions, its power structures, its dangers. And I had learned to be more careful.
I pressed my fingers against my temples. The headache was getting worse.
“You all right, friend?” Gento asked, his words slurred now.
“Just tired. Long journey.”
“Aren’t we all?” He laughed. “Tired of runnin’, tired of fightin’, tired of pretendin’ things are fine when everything’s going to shit.” He raised his cup. “To exhaustion! May it claim us all before the rebellion does!”
A few men drank. Others looked away.
I stood, my legs unsteady. “Thank you for the drink.”
Gento waved me off. “Don’t thank me. Just . . . be careful. Bara eats people like you. Chews them up and shits them out.” His eyes focused on me with sudden clarity. “If you’re smart, you’ll leave. Tomorrow. First ship out.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Then you’re a fool.” He turned back to his cup. “But at least you’re a pretty fool. That’s worth somethin’, I suppose.”
The others grumbled a chuckle. Drunken slurs drew drunken laughter. They quickly lost interest, so I climbed the stairs back to my tiny room. Each step felt like lifting stones.
My body was exhausted, but my mind would not stop racing. I lay on the thin mat and stared at the ceiling. Somewhere above, footsteps creaked. Somewhere below, more muffled laughter. The city hummed outside my window, never sleeping, neverquiet, a constant reminder of how vast it was, how impossible my task.
One man. In a city of hundreds of thousands. In an empire tearing itself apart.
I closed my eyes against the sting of tears I would not let fall.
Outside, Bara hummed and buzzed. It was the pulse of a dying empire, still beating, still pretending it would live forever.
But I could hear the cracks spreading.
And I wondered if any of us would survive what came next.
Chapter 11
Kaneko
Time had always felt strange to me, but here, trapped within walls of lace and silk, it felt even more so. Days blurred into weeks, then months. There were no seasons in the House of Petals, no changing weather to mark the turning of the hourglass, only the endless repetition of lessons and practice and sleep. I could no longer recognize the passage of time in the world beyond.
And I walked differently now.
My stride wasn’t quite the demure or the feminine glide of the women who moved through the corridors with the grace of clouds drifting across the sky, but it had become something refined. Elegant, even. Hana said it would appeal to wealthy customers—those who sought refinement without losing a sense of masculinity, those who fantasized about sailors or fishermen or soldiers but preferred them polished and educated, if such insane fantasies could exist.
My hands still bore calluses, though they were softer now. Hana rubbed oil into them every evening, but the marks of rope and nets would not entirely fade. She said some would like that, too, would want to feel they were with someone real, someone who had worked with their hands, even if everything else about me was refined.
I had learned poetry and music, at least the shape of them, and I mastered sitting and standing and kneeling with grace. Perhaps most importantly, I learned how to better read a person’s mood from their slightest gestures.
I had become something else—someone else—and I still could not decide which I preferred, my former self or this new imitation of the man I once was.
“Again,” Hana said, her voice gentle but firm.
I lifted the iron kettle, tilting it with careful precision. Water poured into a ceramic cup in a smooth arc, steam rising in delicate spirals. I set the kettle down without a sound, picked up the bamboo whisk, and began to mix the matcha powder with the exact number of strokes she had taught me.
Eighteen. Always eighteen. No more, no less.
I set the whisk aside and turned the cup—one rotation clockwise, presenting the decorated side toward where an imaginary customer would sit.
