The crowd gasped.
People physically stepped back, creating space around her as if she were radiating heat.
The auctioneer stared for a moment, then found his voice. “Twenty-fiveryo. Going once . . . twice . . .” The mallet came down. “Sold! To Yubi Momoko-sama.”
Murmurs rippled through the crowd. I caught fragments:
“—the mistress—”
“—House of Petals—”
“—must be something special if—”
Momoko. The House of Petals.
Something tickled at the back of my mind: a memory, faint and half forgotten—or a premonition. I couldn’t tell which. It felt so . . . familiar . . . so vibrant and real and . . . lived.
Had I heard her name spoken aboard Kichi’s ship?
Yes, that was it.
I had overheard sailors carousing as we docked on one of our many voyages to Bara. Despite Kichi’s iron fist, they were already drunk and boasting of their exploits with women who likely never existed.
But one of the men had been different, quieter, almost reverent.
He had spoken of a pleasure house in Bara, the House of Petals, he called it. He’d said it was unlike the brothels in the red district—refined, elegant, where only the finest courtesans worked.
“A piece of heaven itself,” he had said, his voice wistful. “If you have coin enough and status enough to enter, you’ll never forget it.”
The others had laughed and called him a romantic fool, but I remembered the look in his eyes. He remembered. He’d been telling the truth.
Momoko turned and walked away, her servants scrambling to follow. Her palanquin was being prepared. She stepped inside with practiced grace, and four bearers lifted it smoothly. The boy she had purchased was led down from the platform, looking dazed.
I had no time to make a decision. My body moved before my mind caught up. I flagged down a rickshaw driver hovering at the edge of the square.
“Follow that palanquin,” I said, pointing.
The driver—a thin man with tired eyes—looked at me skeptically. “That’ll cost you.”
“How much?”
“Threemon.”
Threemon? I had four to my name, the only coins I had earned that day. Without them, I wouldn’t eat tomorrow.
But if this led to Kaneko—
“Done,” I said, climbing into the rickshaw and handing the man the coins.
The driver grunted and lifted the handles. We lurched forward, threading through the crowd, following the crimson palanquin as it glided away from the market.
We moved through the merchant quarter, the buildings growing grander, better maintained, then into what looked like a wealthier district—tea houses with elaborate facades, establishments with guards at their doors.
The palanquin turned down a side street, and my driver followed at a discreet distance.
We crossed a boulevard. Then another.
Finally, Momoko’s palanquin turned toward what looked like a park—a sea of every color I could imagine. It was beautiful, almost obscenely so, given the squalor only a few streets away.
