Sen said nothing at all as she walked beside Lee into town, afraid her words would give away her traitorous fear. Together, they walked the narrow path from the house that led to a wider road lined with low stone walls and yuzu trees. A flock of cranes fluttered past the burning white sun overhead, their forms jagged black shadows sweeping across the path.
Sen had seen little of the town in her own world, so she could only make vague comparisons. Her family had come to the house behind the sword ferns in the dead of night, and Sen and her siblings hadn’t been allowed out since then, in case the imperial soldiers recognized them. The servants went into town for errands, and her father went out on occasion to receive messages, but Sen’s entire world in this town had been inside that house.
Lee seemed much taller as he walked beside her, no longer hunched beneath the low ceilings of the house. He squinted in the harsh sunlight, scratching the inside of his wrist as if his pale skin couldn’t bear the touch of daylight. Even though this was his world and not hers, he did not look like he belonged here at all. He seemed like a creature of the deep sea dragged up to the surface.
After a few silent minutes, he spoke.
“I’m sorry about Hina,” he said.
Sen swallowed before she spoke, ensuring her voice didn’t sound pale and weak. “She dislikes me,” she said.
Lee grimaced but didn’t deny it. “I don’t know why,” he said. “She’s not usually like that.”
Thewhydidn’t matter much to Sen. The imperial soldiers also disliked her, and she didn’t care for their reasons.
What mattered much more were Hina’s eyes.
Sen had looked in the eyes of warriors and soldiers, dying men begging for mercy and the men who cut them down anyway, and yet she had never seen a gaze so sharp as Hina’s. The moment she looked at Sen, it was like a blade had pierced through her eye—a quick, killing strike.
Even worse, Sen couldn’t read her at all. Sen prided herself on being able to read the stories people told in the way they breathed, the way their gazes drifted around a room, the way they folded their hands in their lap. But somehow, Hina was a thousand blank pages. She might have been Lee’s family, but Sen knew an enemy when she saw one.
“It doesn’t matter if she dislikes me,” Sen said at last. “She wouldn’t be the first.”
Lee pressed his lips together and Sen sensed that he hadn’t liked her answer, but she didn’t care. As long as Hina didn’t get in Sen’s way, she didn’t matter.
As they turned a corner and Sen glimpsed the town center in the distance, they passed an older couple in blue and purple robes on the other side of the street, helping each other off the curb.
“People still wear kimonos here?” Sen said, trying to keep her voice light. Western clothing had already started creeping into her country by 1877, and she was sure that so far in the future, nothing of Japan would be left. Lee himself didn’t wear Japanese clothes, after all.
“Some people do, but it’s not very common,” Lee said quietly. He watched her like she was a needle that might prick him if he got too close. “This is a historic samurai district, so it looks a bit older than major cities. Most people don’t wear kimonos anymore, except for special occasions.”
“Historic samurai district?” Sen said, frowning and shielding her face from the sun as she looked up at him.
Lee shrugged. “They let tourists dress up in kimonos and chop up watermelons with dull katanas,” he said. “They teach them how samurai lived.”
“How samurai lived,” Sen said incredulously. “Very little of my time is spent chopping up watermelons.”
Lee laughed, but it sounded forced. Laughter should have transcended language, but for some reason, Lee’s laughter sounded like something he had learned in a classroom, like it had never truly belonged to him. Still, Sen couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard laughter. Even her brothers knew better than to let such a sound carry through the house.
They squeezed through a market where Sen could taste the grease in the air but couldn’t smell the food at all, and then the road widened once more. Sen had known a world made of wood, but this world was made of bricks and cement, tall wooden poles and black wires that sliced across the sky, blaring signs in vivid colors that hummed like wasps as they passed.
In the crowded streets, Sen had taken to walking behind Lee rather than beside him so that people could pass by. She was afraid of anyone touching her, afraid it would anchor her in this strange time. She turned her face once more toward the sky, the mirrored sun, the world that was not her world yet felt so real.
The ground disappeared beneath her.
One moment, she was walking behind Lee. The next, her foot slipped and she was falling forward.
Lee turned, as if he’d heard the sound she hadn’t made, and gripped her forearm to steady her. She balanced precariously onthe edge of the earth, looking down at the drainage ditch she’d nearly fallen into, the wet soil and muddy water and steep fall that she should have noticed.
Lee had frozen, and Sen half expected him to reproach her like her father, but he wasn’t even looking at her. Sen followed his gaze over her shoulder.
The town behind them was gone.
Where there had once been many stores and people wandering the streets, now there was nothing but white sand whispering as the wind stirred it into the air. The sky had darkened to an ominous gray, and Sen could taste a storm on the wind. The earth rumbled beneath them as a dark wave crested the horizon.
It looked just like the ocean that Sen saw when she meditated. But this time, Lee could see it too.
The ocean roared in the distance, its cry echoing a thousand times across the empty world. Dark waters filled the horizon and began rolling forward.
