His blade made a clean, metallic sound as he dragged the whetstone across its length. The polished, flat side reflected theflickering candlelight, as if flames burned from within the pure iron.
“I’m going into town,” he said, as if Sen hadn’t spoken. “Guard the house while I’m gone.”
“Into town?” Sen echoed weakly. Her father had always forbidden them from going into town, for fear of being recognized. He was the most recognizable of them all... and he planned to go out with his sword?
“I’ve found the spy,” he said, setting the sharpening stone down and sheathing his blade.
Sen went very still. Ever since Maeda had disappeared, her father had been trying to find the man responsible. Yesterday, he’d captured a man lingering at the edges of the forest and managed to get his employer’s name out of him before killing him. It seemed he’d now located the employer.
Her father wanted blood. It was the worst possible time to upset him, but this couldn’t wait.
“Chichiue,” she said, kneeling in front of him, “if there are spies, should we not leave Chiran and hide somewhere else?”
She held her breath as he turned, his gaze searing into her.
“We cannot run forever,” he said. “There is no other safe house.”
This was the point where Sen was supposed to drop the subject. She was lucky her father hadn’t punished her for asking in the first place. But she could still see the date of death written beside his name. She imagined the man before her cut to pieces, exploded with bullet holes, unable to hold a sword because there was nothing left of his arms or hands.
Her father was her whole world.
No matter how cruel he’d been, she was always destined to bend like a flower toward his light. She could not imagine a life without him and didn’t want to try. What else could she do, when her mother had already given her away?
“Chichiue,” she said, pressing her forehead into the ground in a deep bow. “Forgive me, but I only worry for your safety. I would be lost without you, and so would my brothers. If there are spies here, then it won’t be long until the military—”
A hand closed around her hair, yanking her up. Sen let out a startled cry and gripped her father’s hand to relieve the searing tug on her scalp. He tossed her easily into the wall, where a low shelf smacked the back of her head. When she looked up, her father’s shadow had painted the ceiling, as if the roof had been ripped out and there was nothing but starless night overhead.
“Have you learnednothing?” he said, his voice like thunder above her. “You fear death. I can see it in your eyes. I can smell it on you like rot.”
“I’m sorry,” Sen said, trying with all her heart not to flinch away, to prove her father right. “I just... I have a bad feeling about this house. I think we need to leave.”
Her father’s eyes darkened. He drew his blade, holding it under her chin. She couldn’t so much as breathe or it would split her skin.
“Samurai do not make decisions with their feelings,” her father said. “They take orders. You are not a mind. You are a weapon. You have no soul, no heart, nothing to forfeit to death. You are already dead.”
If only he knew how true that is, Sen thought, tears stinging her eyes.
At last, he sheathed his blade. Sen let out a sharp breath, hand flying to her throat, though his blade hadn’t even scored her skin—his control was flawless.
“Do not ask this of me again,” her father said, rising and shoving the door aside. “It will be the last question you ever ask.”
He stepped into the hallway and slammed the door behind him, extinguishing the sole candle on the table and leaving Sen alone in the dark.
Chapter Sixteen
Lee
That morning, Lee conducted an experiment.
When Sen had stumbled out of the archive, he’d seized the opportunity to cut off a small lock of her hair with Hina’s nail scissors. He’d intended to keep it to look at later, to compare it to the hair of someone who wasn’t a ghost.
But the moment he’d cut it, the lock had turned to ashes in his hand.
Lee thought of the windswept gray world that had appeared when he touched Sen, the ashes in that expanse of nothingness that had burned his eyes, the taste of ashes in his mouth whenever he ate. That world, the food, and Sen were all one and the same. It was an interesting enough development that he almost hadn’t minded when Sen ran off. She would return, he was certain. She still owed him her help.
Lee could have written it off as just another trait of being a ghost. Maybe souls rotted just like bodies, and anything not physically connected to her would decay. Maybe her decay was contagious, and that was why it broke down the world around them.
But the problem was that now, when Lee reached into his pocket to get rid of the ashes, his pocket was full of hair.
