My gaze flicked from the coin to the woman’s eyes. They gave nothing away. They never blinked. Not once that I recalled since I had entered this room. Not even now, after all this time.
Something mystical shrouded her, something that drew me in even as every instinct screamed to look away.
The silence stretched again.
My vision swam.
Every instinct I possessed was screaming a single word when I looked at the woman:predator.
And I was her prey.
I knew it with the certainty of a priest and his faith.
One wrong move and her blades would sing. I would die before I even registered the movement.
The pressure in my chest built and built and built until I thought I might shatter—
Until . . . she spoke aloud.
“I come to offer you a new path.”
Her voice made me flinch. It was low and controlled, wrong somehow, as if it came from somewhere other than her throat. The air around her seemed to shimmer. Or perhaps it was my vision. Either way, I feltsomething—a pressure or a presence—that had nothing to do with her physical form, something that made the hairs on my arms stand, that whispered of a power I did not understand and could not name.
Mahou.
The word rose unbidden, butmagicwas the purview of monks and priests, not whatever this woman was. Yet I could feel it, taste it on my tongue like copper and smoke.
“You live in shadows already, Hiromi Kaneko-san,” she said, using my full name. “Hidden behind silk and paint, trained to slip into the desires of others, to become what they need, to see without being seen.”
She gestured to the coin, to me, then to the space between us. The air rippled again, like heat rising from stones. But the room was cold. So cold.
“Let your life serve a greater purpose,” she said. “Let it serve the Son of Heaven.”
Chapter 14
Kazashita
Ilost count of the days somewhere around my third month on the mainland, when the last of my coin ran out and I had to choose between food and my cramped room at the Harbor’s Rest. I chose food and began sleeping in doorways, in alleys, anywhere the city guard would not immediately move me along.
Eventually, I found work at the docks loading cargo, hauling crates, and whatever backbreaking labor might earn a fewmon. My hands, already callused, became raw and bled. My back developed a persistent ache as the rest of my body grew lean and hard in ways that spoke of hunger rather than health.
But the work gave me enough to eat. Enough to survive. And survival was all I could manage.
In what little free time I had—those brief hours between collapsing and waking before dawn to begin again—I searched. I asked questions in taverns, spending precious coin on sake to loosen tongues. I bribed petty officials who took my money and gave me nothing. I visited the red district more times thanI could count, watching women and men display themselves in windows, wondering if Kaneko might be among them.
He never was.
The city had swallowed him, erased him, as if he had never existed at all.
At night, when I finally found somewhere to lay my head, I dreamed of him. It was always the same dream—Kaneko on the slave ship, chains on his wrists, looking at me with eyes that pleaded for rescue. I reached for him, always reached for him, but the distance never closed. He receded farther and farther until I woke with my hand outstretched toward the ceiling and my chest hollow.
I loved him. Desperately. Hopelessly. In a way that made no sense given how little we had spoken, how brief our connection had been, but Irie had been right when she’d said, “The heart does not answer to good sense. It simply feels.”
And mine felt like it was being carved out piece by piece.
Sometimes, in my lowest moments, I wondered if I had gone mad, if my search was the vain stupidity of a man with a boyish crush. I had abandoned everything: my position on Kichi’s ship, reliable pay, the life Irie and I had built on thewakoisland, however modest.
I had thrown it all away to chase a boy I barely knew.
