Sen seized the blade from Torazo and tried to step back, but her feet slid in the mud. Torazo grabbed her for balance and fell forward, the blade crushing into his belly.
His stomach made a sound like a burst grape, and wetness seeped into Sen’s robes. Torazo let out a choked sound, his glassy eyes fixed on Sen, then blood welled up in his mouth and dribbled onto Sen’s face.
She shoved him to the ground and stood up, but she knew from the resistance of her blade, the slick sound it made when she pulled it back, that it had stabbed Torazo.
She dropped the blade into the mud, her hands trembling.
I didn’t mean to, she thought, looking to Kono Sensei, who was staring open-mouthed behind Torazo, his face white.
Killing a daughter with her father’s permission was one thing, but she couldn’t just kill someone else’s son. His parents could have her whole family executed. She turned to where her father had stood by the forest, but he was no longer there.
He was beside her now, bending to pick up his katana from the mud. He struck down across Torazo’s throat, the cleanwhooshof his blade slicing through the air.
Just like the hares, Torazo’s feet twitched, his throat gurgled, his eyes blinked quickly at the white sky. Then he went still and silent. The air tasted of salt, and a darkness settled over the clearing.
“This boy attacked my daughter with my sword,” Sen’s father said to Kono Sensei. “I defended her as is my right when thieves try to take my property.”
My daughter, Sen thought, warmth blooming in her chest,either from her father’s words or the hot blood splashed across her chest—it didn’t matter. Her father had taken credit for the kill because he could not be punished for it. He had done it for her.
Kono Sensei nodded quickly, then bowed and hurried out of the clearing, disappearing into the forest. It would be the last time Sen ever saw him.
At last, her father turned to her and looked her in the eye.
She wondered if he would have let her die, but she didn’t want to know the answer. She looked into the endless darkness of her father’s eyes, and at last she understood.
Her father was not trying to hurt her. He was trying to forge her into something better. The military academy could never teach her the searing anger that had made her faster, sharper, deadlier. In the moment when she’d attacked Torazo, she had not thought at all about death. She had thought only of rage, and revenge, and power.
“Samurai kill in one strike,” her father said simply. “Do better next time.” Then he turned and headed back into the forest.
It wasn’t until he gestured over his shoulder for her to follow that she realized, for the first time in her life, she had pleased him.
She stepped over the body of the boy, over the organs and blood of the hares, the wooden practice swords that she would never use again, and she vowed that this would be the last time she failed her father.
She would not be the hare. She would be the sword.
Chapter Ten
Lee
Lee’s father was keeping a secret.
It was the first thing Lee had noticed since flushing all his sedatives. The world that used to be a kaleidoscope of light, half a blurred dream, was now sharp and ugly. And he saw, laid bare, the ways that his father was not who he once thought.
First, he noticed that his father’s shoulders seized up whenever Lee appeared. This in and of itself wasn’t unusual—Lee had always unnerved his father, as if he was a troll his father had found under a bridge and been cursed to raise against his will. But when Lee asked if he was all right, his father always saidyes, and it was always a lie.
The tell was different for every person, but Lee knew that when his father lied, his eyes went dull and his voice got low and he suddenly sounded like he was reading from a book rather than pulling the words from the dark well of his mind. And that was how Lee realized that his father lied more often than not.
There was no reason to lie about liking the coffee Lee had made, or wanting to watch the news, or a thousand other mundane things he said every day. And yet his father kept lying.
Second, his father had started taking out the trash multipletimes a day, casting it out by the side of the road, even when the bag was near empty. Lee went outside once after dark and opened up the bags, not sure what he expected to find (illegal drugs? Body parts? Strange sex toys?) but all he found was a few scraps of food. His father was not taking the trash out for any logical reason. Perhaps it was some kind of compulsion? Or maybe he could smell something that Lee couldn’t, some intolerable stench that pervaded the house. But Hina hadn’t complained, so that probably wasn’t it either.
Third, his father was still wearing his broken watch. The time was stuck at 11:44, and Lee had pointed it out to him multiple times. At first because he thought his father hadn’t noticed. The second time because he thought his father had forgotten. But when another day passed and his father put the watch on again, checked the time and didn’t react at all, as if the broken, incorrect time actually made sense to him, Lee knew it was no mistake.
The second hand on the watch twitched up and down, kicking like a dying animal. It made an almost imperceptible ticking sound that was just slightly faster than the actual passing of one second. Something about that mechanical heartbeat made Lee feel like a wind-up toy, spinning tighter and tighter and tighter. The sound was so unrelenting that Lee had to wear headphones just to focus on anything else. He didn’t know how his father didn’t hear it, how it didn’t drive him insane.
Lastly, the look in his father’s eyes had been strangely flat since Lee’s second day in Japan, like someone had taken a paintbrush and smeared static green across his irises. Eye colors were supposed to move and shift with the sunlight, pupils shrinking and expanding to let in darkness and keep out light. But Lee’s father’s eyes looked like a photograph, unchanging, unseeing. One morning, his eyes passed over Lee without a hint of recognition, like he hadn’t noticed him at all.
His father had a study, where he locked the doors and paced back and forth for hours. Lee sometimes overheard him having online meetings with his colleagues or typing on his laptop. But Lee had never once entered the office. The door had been shut when Lee moved in, and his father was always careful to lock it behind him whenever he left—Lee could hear the keythunkin the lock, and he knew better than to ask.
