Killer.
It’s what you are.
Then she was on the ground. On the dirt. Curled into a ball. She was floating in the air above herself, looking down on herself: that cursed, killer girl. There were tears on her cheeks, but she couldn’t feel them, couldn’t feel the dirt on her hands and on her fingernails.
She blinked.
She gasped, facing the bodies of the killers she had killed.
The Hososhi was gone.
What have I done?she thought, reeling, as the pain and nausea swelled.
What have I done?
Now the flames were getting worse. “I got you,” Rui said, staggering with her friend’s weight, nearly falling.
You were so strong, she thought,but you don’t have to be strong for ever. It doesn’t make you less. You can be vulnerable,you can feel the weight.That’s what truth is, Sen, she wanted to say.You don’t have to hide your tears. It doesn’t mean you’re lost.You can let go. I can be strong now too. I can be strong for both of us. I can do anything I have to do, because I need you to survive.
She helped Sen limp to the side of the muddy paddy.
She heard the ringing of a bell.
“Rui,” Sen said, pointing. “Look.”
Ahead of them, the woman in white was waiting on the road.
“You,” she said.
Something came whistling at them from the trees. Shadows, like a thousand tiny birds, bursting from the foliage, black against the lighter black of night. A piercing sound, a thousand tiny gods, screaming…
Shikigami.
Summoned spirits.
Rui shouted. “No!”
The shadows came flying at them, ghostly, unbearably loud, aural shapes with paper faces, each with a symbol in ink. Rui cut some in half – felt the others raze past her, slicing her arms, her hands, like paper-cuts. “Back!” she shouted, striking one on its paper face, its mask. It split in two; the other conjured spirits vanished.
But the woman in white was still there.
“You,” she said.
Ten paces away, at the top of the road where it loped gently over the hill, the woman stood tall, framed in ghostly light from the fires. She wore white mourning robes. Her eyes gleamed. Her face, devoid of expression.
“Who are you?” she asked.
Rui didn’t wait. She struck at the woman, swinging her sword in an arc that licked the side of her face and snapped her head back. She glimpsed a flash of anger in those pale, piercing eyes, white pupils somehow reflecting light.
But as the woman turned, feeling the cut on her cheek, beneath her eye, she looked at Rui. And she smiled.
And the cut that Rui had given her vanished.
When it did, a cut appeared on Rui’s face, exactly where she had cut the woman. Dripping blood, Rui staggered back, in shock and pain, holding her face. The injury she had inflicted on the woman had been somehow sent back to her. Her heart thudded in her chest. Bright fear flared through her, from the back of her throat to her fingertips. She called out: “What do you want?”
“Him,” the woman – the demon – said.
And leaped toward Sen, who was trying to stand.
