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 Praying for Rain

The gulls are crying.

I am sitting on a wooden column at the end of the Number Eight pier, legs folded up beneath

me, listening to them call to each other across the bay. There are four of them today, drawing aim-

less circles in tar-spattered skies - more than I’ve seen in as long as I can remember. Greasy water

licks at the rotting stumps beneath me, and the blood-red air vibrates with the off-key songs of

engine and propeller and lotusfly hum, and all around me is the babble and clank and swish of gears

and metal and flesh. But I am sitting in the quiet places inside my head and listening to them speak.

Sometimes I speak back.

“Hello there.”

A boy’s voice. Soft and edged with a smile, as if he has just finished laughing. I turn and

look at him briefly, squinting behind the polarized goggles that cover my eyes, and the red sunset

that hangs like a stone in the sky behind him turns the world razor-bright, the boy just a shadow

within it.

He is too thin. Clad in grubby rags that stink of the same blue-black exhaust hanging over

the city in a pall, trapping in the scorching heat, slicking every surface with sweat. The boy pushes
his goggles up onto his brow to rub at his eyes, and I see the whites are scrawled with red like a

lotus addict’s, black grease congealing under broken fingernails. But there is something in the line

of his jaw, the high cheekbones and strong hands that sets butterflies tumbling across my stomach

without quite knowing why, and I feel myself staring as I try to find my voice.

Ah, there it is. At the bottom of my feet.

“Hello,” I manage.

“May I sit?” The boy points to the empty wood beside me, bleached pale grey by the blast-

furnace sun and the black rains that come in winter. He pulls his goggles back down, but before they

disappear behind the polished glass, I see his eyes are hazel. Heavy lidded. Shaped like the tips of

naginata spears.

“If you wish.” I shrug, turn my stare back to the gulls.

If were a courtly lady in the Shōgun’s palace, this is the part where I would flutter my fan

before my face to hide the flush in my cheeks. I would stare at him over the unfurled edge, eyes

rimmed with dark kohl and blue powder, and I would say something mysterious. But the Shōgun’s

palace looms far behind us, high on the hill overlooking the city, struggling to keep its nose above

the fumes thrown skyward by the engines and power generators and motor-rickshaw below, and my

eyes are rimmed not with kohl and blue powder, but with sweat and dust and ash.

And I cannot think of anything mysterious to say.

The boy sits beside me on the pier, lets his legs hang out over the edge and lifts the grubby

kerchief away from his face so he can spit into the tar-black waters below. I take in the shape of his

lips, the long unbroken line from chin to throat to shoulder. A sky-ship starts its engines behind us;

a stuttering, spluttering ignition followed by a bass-thick rumble like distant thunder, and we both

turn and watch it put out from the tall spires that line the edge of the bay like rusting teeth.

The ship is an ironclad, fat and slow and armed for war, propellers chopping at the choking

air as it drags its hull across the sky. Its inflatable is painted with the guardian spirit of the Tora clan
– a great prowling tiger, claws and teeth as sharp as the daishō blades of the Iron Samurai that line

her decks. They are headed east no doubt, east to Morcheba; more troops for the glorious war against

the gaijin barbarians who resist the spread of our Imperium. More grist for the mill. Stern-faced boys

in metal shells, recruited from the slums and shanty towns with the promise of three squares a day

and a place within the mighty Tora zaibatsu and a cause so glorious it is worth dying for.

Or so my father believed.

I turn away. The boy beside me watches them for a moment longer.

The sky-ship passes overhead, throwing a shadow across the sun. I steal a glance at the

simple Tiger tattoo wrapped around the boy’s bicep, the slender muscle, sculpted and hard, turning

away before he can catch me staring and concentrating furiously on not looking again. He is the

same clan as I. The same clan that rules this Imperium. The blood of Tigers in our veins.

His skin is pale beneath the grime. I thought he might be from the north – Phoenix lands,

or Dragon, perhaps even Fox. Kigen city is the capital of the great Shima Imperium, the heart of its

power, and folk from every zaibatsu clan can be found in its smoke dens and teahouses and alley-

ways. My father used to say sooner or later every man finds his feet on the road here. Before the

war took him away, left mother empty, staring out the windows of our estate with hollow eyes.

She never talks anymore. But some nights I still find her crying.

“May I ask your name?”

The boy is looking at me not looking at him. I am doing it very well.

“Tora Miho,” I say, citing the name of my clan before my own, as is customary. As is prop-

er. I am watching the gulls again, but I am no longer listening to their voices in my head.

“Miho-chan.” He covers his fist and gives a little bow. He adds the ‘chan’ to my name to let

me know he thinks I am endearing. I try to swallow and my mouth is dry. “I am Tora Rei.”

I already know he is of Tiger blood from the ink on his arm. But he cites the name of his

clan first, just as I do, for the sake of formality if nothing else. If we were at court, this is the part
where I would bow from the knees and flutter my fan again and say…

…but we are not at court, are we?

Rei reaches into the obi sash tied around his waist, produces two rice cakes wrapped in

rough cloth. With a sidelong glance, he takes in the elaborate tiger tattoo on my own arm, the wealth

it denotes. It is a beautiful piece; pushed into my skin with gleaming iron needles on my thirteenth

naming day, barely a year ago. My father was nobleborn; a man of means and stature before he set

off for duty and war, and the artist he commissioned for me was one of the most renowned in the

city. I sometimes wish he had not spent so much coin, that the tattoo was simpler. People assume

much in Kigen, looking at another person’s ink.

People always think I’m something that I’m not.

Though I can’t hear his thoughts, I know what the boy is thinking. Poor little rich girl. Slum-

ming down in Docktown for a few moments before disappearing back up the hillside to bowing

servants and clean water and fresh sheets. I do not belong here. I do not—

He holds out the rice cake in an open palm. I stare at it, stare at him, and he nods and waves

the cake in my face.

“Take it.”

My eyes drift again to the tattoo on his arm - the work of some backalley artiste with a rusty

blade and watered-down cuttlefish ink. “Are you certain you can spare it?”

“I can live on one for today,” he smiles.

As I take the rice cake from his hand, our fingers touch.

“What are you doing down here?” the boy asks around his mouthful, looking back out over

the water.

“…Listening.”

“To what?”

I am listening to the gulls. To their thoughts in my head. Reaching out into the minds of
the beasts that still remain in this city. Despite the poison roiling blue-black and viscous in the air.

Despite the red sun burning like a kiln-flame overhead.

So few. No cats. No dogs. No sheep or cows or snakes or mice. A few gulls with threadbare

feathers, hanging mournful in the sky. Corpse-rats in the squeezeways and alleys, tumbling and

snarling in new bones on broken cobbles. Sparrows in the Shōgun’s garden, wings kept clipped so

they cannot flee. Desperate and miserable.

These are the voices I can hear in the place I am not supposed to go, but I cannot tell him

that. The Burning Stones in the Market Square are scattered with the ashes of people foolish enough

to speak of the Kenning - for that is what it is called, when it is spoken of at all.

‘Tainted’, the Guild calls us. ‘Impure.’

And so I lie.

“I’m listening to the water. The ocean song.”

“It’s very pretty down here,” he nods.

But it isn’t. Kigen Bay is an open sore, weeping black and scummed with fuel sludge.

Guildsmen set the surface ablaze yesterday to burn off some of the accumulated pollutants, and

smoke rolls thick off the surface, daubing my skin with ash. I wonder for a moment if the boy is

blind. Or mad. And then I realize he’s trying to be pleasant.

“I suppose so,” I say.

He is watching the sky-ship full of soldiers as it performs a long, lazy turn over the city,

chugging east towards the Morcheban fronts. He covers his fist and gives them a small bow.

“Lord Izanagi watch over them,” he says.

“What are you doing down here?” I raise an eyebrow, though he won’t be able to see it be-

hind my goggles.

He shrugs, mumbling around another mouthful of rice. “My shift just finished.”

I point to the chi refinery, sitting like an old scab on the water’s edge. All towering chimneys
and coiling pipes, retching the sky three shades darker.

“You work there?”

“Hai.” A nod. “Until I turn seventeen at least.”

“And then?”

He takes another bite, points to the sky-ship full of soldiers, the fat snail trail of exhaust

uncoiling in their wake.

“Oh,” I say, as my heart sinks down to my toes.

We sit together not speaking after that, watching the sun sink lower. Behind us, Spire Row

is awash with flesh. Street urchins and beggars, geisha strolling beneath paper parasols, Iron Samu-

rai in their clanking, hissing suits of power armor. Neo-chōnin merchants haggling with Lotusmen,

traveling peddlers resting in the long shade of low rent saké houses. Eyes hidden from the burning

sun behind polarized glass, faces swathed in dirty cloth to keep out the ash and exhaust brimming

from every street. But here on the edge of the pier, as I steal another glance and feel the butterflies

beating in my stomach with copper wings, it feels like we are the only two people in the world.

We sit on the edge of the pier as our shadows grow longer, stretching out across the splin-

tered wood towards the lopsided warehouses with their empty, sightless windows. The Sun Goddess

leans down to press her lips to the ocean, and I wonder for a moment what it would be like if I were

her, and this boy beside me the edge of the sky.

Overhead the gulls are calling, one to another to another.

Only I know what they’re saying.

________

Summer has come in all its fury and the stink rolls in off the bay like morning fog and I am

sitting in the shade and I am waiting for my Rei.

 We meet every day now. Every day for two months, here on the pier. I have never even held

his hand. But as I sit and speak in the thoughts of the gulls (only three left now) and sunset draws

near, my ears strain for the sound of the refinery steam whistle, the blast of superheated air into

choking skies that signals the end of the day shift and tells me he will soon be here.

Listen…

There it is.

And I smile. Because I am young. And I am alive. And I think I am in love.

I see him soon enough, pushing his way through the crowds of sararīmen, his goggles

smeared with ash, the rag tied over his lips stained near to black. He stops before me finally, and I

can tell by the creases in his cheeks above his kerchief that he is smiling, and he covers his fist and

bows deep as if we were at court; he a noble lord and I a highborn lady and all the world at our feet.

The Guild don’t give the refinery workers any filters or breathers, and the pay isn’t enough

that Rei can afford to buy his own. So there he stands, the whites of his eyes scrawled blood red,

skin smudged grey, the rag tied across his mouth stained darker still. I am almost two years younger

than him, but you would never know it to look at us. He stands sixteen summers deep, but he al-

ready wheezes like an old man when pressed. The refinery is eating him alive. One day at a time.

The wealth my father left us means I will never have to work there. Never find myself

sunken to the eyeballs in exhaust fumes, slaving eighteen hours a day for a beggar’s salary while

my skin turns slowly grey. But Rei’s sister is only ten, and his mother has the blacklung now, and

the refinery is one of the few places hiring. I have tried to give him coin, but he refuses, and I worry

about what his pride will cost him. About what that place is doing to him.

He makes me real. He makes me laugh. And when I am near him, he lifts the weight from

my chest and makes me feel bright and unafraid, like I did when I was a child and the world was

still a mystery to me.

When I was a child?

 Gods, what am I now?

He sits beside me on the pier and lets his legs hang out over the edge and lifts the grubby

kerchief away from his face so he can spit into the black waters below. Like he always does. And

behind my own kerchief, I smile. Like I always do.

Foolish girl, cry the gulls. Soon he will be gone.

Soon all this will be gone.

A frown takes root on my brow, and I realize I do not wish to listen to them today. All they

speak of is death. Of the poison we fill our land and skies with. Of the endless fields of lotus flowers

choking the life from the soil, blood-red blooms torn from dying earth and refined into the fuel that

drives this engine, this war machine, this Imperium to which I belong.

But I do not belong. Have never belonged. And the fact that I can hear the voice of the gulls

at all should be testament enough to that.

Hush.

My thoughts speak to theirs and my lips are motionless.

Now is not the time.

Truth is, they are singing to the wrong person. I cannot move mountains. I cannot change a

thing. I am just one girl, as lonely as they, and this boy is the only moment of joy in my days. So I

close off their voices in my mind, step away from the Kenning and slam the door shut. I do not want

to be a freak today. I do not want to be different. I just want to be here. With him.

Rei reaches into his obi and produces two rice cakes, and he offers one to me as he always

does. Even though he knows I do not need it. Even though I know they are all he has to eat today.

And as I refuse it, as I smile and give thanks and gently push his hand away, our fingers touch for

just the briefest of moments, just a half-breath in this place where every breath you take can kill

you, and I feel so light that if I kicked off the pier I might simply sail away into the red sky above.

“Did you read the newssheets?” Rei asks. He always talks with his mouth full.
 I shake my head. I do not read the news, ever. Always war. War and glory and purity. Taint-

ed children burned at the stones. Tallies of dead round-eyes. Why would anyone read that?

“Tiger forces have almost crushed gaijin resistance at Fallow Pass.” Rei is looking east

across the water, eyes hidden by black, polarized glass. “The end of the war is in sight.”

“They have been saying that for years.”

“But it seems they mean it this time.” He curls his fists, jaw clenched. “They said so at the

Recruitment Centre. Gods, if it finishes before I get a chance to fight…”

I would never tell him, but I pray to Lord Izanagi every night that it will…

“Then you can win your glory another way.”

“Oh?” He turns to me, faint anger in his voice. “And how will I do that? Working in that

godsdamned refinery? Where is the glory there?”

“You will find a way.” I smile, even though he will not see it behind my kerchief. “I believe

in you.”

He shakes his head. “Bushido is the way a man makes his name in the Imperium. Loyalty.

Honor. Sacrifice. The Shōgun, the Guild, they speak the right of it. The round-eyes must be crushed.

The Imperium must endure. The lotus must bloom.”

He hears these words at the Recruitment Centre, repeating them now by rote. His new friends.

The officers with their fresh uniforms and gleaming swords that have never tasted another blade,

never speaking of the sons who return senseless or maimed, or the fathers who do not return at all.

I move closer to him. Just a fraction.

Just a breath.

“There are other ways to fight,” I say. “Other things to fight for.”

He looks at me then, and all I want is to pull down the glass that covers his eyes and stare

through those glittering hazel windows and find the truth of him. How to make him see. But the Sun

Goddess burns bright enough to leave you blind if you look at her with your naked eye. The layers
we have stripped from the sky have left us pale and frightened beneath her glare. I think perhaps she

is angry with us.

“Besides...” I try to keep my voice light. “I would miss you if you were gone.”

Ever so slowly, a gentle smile blooms on his lips. “I would miss you too.”

And he takes my hand, and I cannot feel my feet, and we sit together and watch the Sun

Goddess stoop to her rest. And as she touches the horizon, he moves closer, and he puts his arm

around me, and it seems for a moment that everything is perfect, everything is good, red sunlight

refracting knife-bright off the ocean’s surface and setting the whole world on fire.

The gulls begin crying again.

But I am not listening.

________

We are walking in the Market Square, hand in hand.

A vast space, choked with people, lined with every kind of store beneath the sun. Spice mer-

chants and flesh peddlers and textilemen. Bakers and clothiers and herbalists, temples and smoke

dens and geisha houses. Performers catching the eyes of the unwary while cutpurses ply their shad-

ow trade. Goggle vendors everywhere, beggars in the gutters, every face hidden behind dirty rags

or clockwork breathers coated in ash. City soldiers in red jin-haori tabards, Iron Samurai lumbering

amongst the crowd in their hissing suits of power armor, hands on the hilts of their chainsaw katana.

Kigen city’s beating heart, and at its center, Rei and I, all the world spinning around us.

We are standing at a noodle stall, eyeing off cracker bowls filled with fried cuttlefish and

rice when the cry goes up from the mob. A tumult echoing across the crowded square, my heart

sinking in my chest and my stomach turning to water. I know this tune. I have heard it before.

Rei stands on tip-toe as the noise builds, looking over the mob at four hulking shapes clad in
suits of gleaming, burnished brass.

“The Guild must have caught another one…”

I try to swallow the lump in my throat and fail.

“Let’s go watch,” he says, and grabs my hand and drags me forward. And my feet are made

of lead and my eyes are full of sand and all I can hear is a single word, spit from a dozen mouths,

rising into a cacophony that fills me with fear. Because they have caught another one. And the next

one they catch could be me.

Four Guildsmen are marching through the crowd, dragging a young boy dressed all in black.

The Guildsmen are clad head to foot in atmos-suits of brass and dark rubber, their helms smooth

and mantis-shaped, their eyes bulbous and glowing bloody red like the sky pressing in above my

head. They are pistons and ball joints and gauntleted fists. They are clockwork chests and plumes

of blue-black exhaust and heavy boots crunching on cracking cobbles with the cadence of a funeral

march. And the boy they are holding is pleading, screaming, but I cannot make out what he is say-

ing because all I can hear is the voice of the crowd, rising into a fever pitch, an accusation on the

tongues of the fanatics, an uneasy murmur on the lips of the remainder.

“Impure!” they cry.

Rei is still dragging me forward, towards the mall sunken a few feet into the surface of the

Square. Pierced at cardinal points by four towering stones, crusted in charcoal and old scorch, fresh

tinder piled at their feet. The manacles set in the stones clank and skitter in the ash-streaked wind

and it is all I can do not to be sick.

“Impure!”

The Guildsmen march the boy down to the pyres, push his back against the northernmost

stone and slap his wrists in black iron. And he is crying, begging, searching the crowd for someone,

anyone who will help him. A single friendly face.

Finding none.
 “Burn the Impure!” cries a man beside me, looking at me to see if I share his glee. Rei is

standing on his tip-toes again as the Guildsmen begin to recite their scripture in rasping voices,

tinged metallic beneath their masks. They speak of “Purity’s Way”. Of purging the taint of the

Kenning from our bloodstream. Of the Maker God, great Lord Izanagi, and the ritual cleansing that

gave birth to the sun and the moon and the storms.

I have heard it all before. A dozen times. And every time, it makes less and less sense.

Though I possess the gift, I cannot see how my existence harms the Imperium. I speak no ill against

the Shōgun or the Guild. I am so afraid, I hardly speak at all. But the people around me are drawn

like lotusflies to new corpseflesh, some curious, some revolted, some genuinely possessed of belief

in this awful spectacle. My Rei among them.

“I don’t want to see this,” I say.

He turns and looks at me, eyes hidden behind his goggles, face hidden behind his kerchief.

All of us hiding something.

“Why not?”

“I just don’t. Take me away, please.”

He turns back to the Stones. There is a flare of bright light, sunburnt orange.

“Please, Rei.”

“Alright,” he nods. “Let’s go.”

He holds my hand and we push away through the mob, and I try not to hear the sound of

the tinder catching. And I try to not to smell what that boy is becoming, or absorb the words that he

is screaming. I focus only on Rei’s hand in mine, wishing that I did not have to ask him to take me

away, wishing that I was not here, wishing for one moment that I could be like them – this mob with

the glow of the flames dancing on their eyes and the Guild’s dogma dripping from their lips – in-

stead of like the boy who even now flails and screams in the firelight.

I wish I was not here.

 I wish this was not real.

I wish I was not me.

Anything but this.

________

It is two months, twenty four days and three hours since we met.

Sixteen minutes and four seconds since he last kissed me.

A handful of heartbeats before all of it ends.

We are lying in the dark at the edge of the pier. Our place. I am resting my head on his chest

as listening to the tune of his pulse against his ribs. His hand is tangled in my hair, and I can still

taste his mouth on mine, and the night air is cool against the sweat on the back of my neck. His

breathing is soft as feathers, rhythmic as a sky-ship’s clockwork heart. My fingers are entwined with

his and nothing else in the world matters. Not the Guild. Not the war. Not this city, rotting from the

inside out.

If only.

“You’re beautiful,” he whispers.

It hangs between us. This thing that I am. This curse. This gift. Even now, reaching into the

Kenning and feeling the lives pulse around me, the few animals that remain in this world we have

made. I wonder what he will say if I speak it. I wonder how I can think he loves me, if he does not

know me. Or how I think I can love him, if I am not honest about who and what I am.

“I want to tell you something,” I breathe. “But I’m afraid.”

“You don’t have to be afraid.” I can hear the smile in his voice without looking at his face.

“You can tell me anything.”

But I am afraid. Afraid his new friends at the Recruitment Centre have filled him with too
much talk of glory and battle and pride. Of the Shōgun’s law and the Guild’s doctrine, and how in

the end, one does not matter, no matter who that one might be. Only the nation matters. Only the

Imperium.

I am afraid they are changing him.

And so I turn away from it. To the other wedge that lies between us, growing thicker by the day.

“What did I ever do before you?” I whisper. “What will I ever do without you?”

His breathing catches, his muscles tense. I feel his anger, even if he does not show it. We

have walked this road before.

“Miho, please don’t start this again.”

I prop myself up on one elbow and look into his eyes. It’s only when the sun goes down

that I can see them clearly. Only when that burning sphere has slunk to her rest and the goggles are

pushed down around his neck can I see those warm, sugar-sweet hazel eyes, framed by gently curl-

ing lashes. Only here. In the dark.

“I can’t stay in the refinery forever,” he says.

“You’re too young to go to war.”

“I’m seventeen in a week.”

“But I don’t want you to go.”

“Since when does want have anything to do with life?”

“Can’t we just go away? You and me? I have money. We could bring your sister. Your

mother, too. We could work on a farm, maybe. Grow lotus far away from here. Far from the Shōgun

and the war and the Guild—”

And then I hear them. In my head. In the place where I should not go. The place no-one

knows about but me, that I cannot speak of, even to this boy I think I love. The place I have visited

less and less since I met him, trying to be normal, trying to be clean. But I can hear them now, the

thoughts of the gulls somewhere off in the dark.

 And they are screaming.

The sound is awful, sharp as knives in my head. I am on my feet, running without thinking,

feeling for them in the dark. They are a different shape than the corpse-rats, a different texture in the

Kenning, easy for me to find. And Rei is running behind me, shouting at me to stop, asking where

I am going, but I can barely hear his voice over the screaming gulls, all fear and rage and ash grey

feathers in my head.

I round the corner of a tumbledown warehouse, broken eaves jutting out from the wall like

a crooked overbite, and in the shadowy place beneath I can see two street boys standing on a pile

of packing crates. Two gulls circle in the air above their heads, screaming outrage. The urchins are

grubby and thin and desperate, and their eyes are lit up like kindling wheels on Lord Izanagi’s feast

day as the taller of the pair reaches up beneath the eaves and finds it – a treasure, a little miracle of

twisted sticks and dark mud, filled with small white globes.

A nest.

And the gulls are screaming, screaming, and I cannot shut them out. And though I can see the

urchins are starving, stick-thin limbs clad in threadbare rags, I cannot help but think how selfish we

all are. How there are so many of us here, and so little remaining of anything else. No birds in the sky

or fish in the bay. No cats or cows or pigs or pigeons. Just people and the world we have destroyed,

stained blue-black by the machines we have created. And still, we think only of ourselves. No matter if

these are the last free birds left in the city. No matter if those eggs are the last they will ever lay.

“Stop!” I shout. “Put it back!”

The taller boy turns to me and his eyes grow dark and his smile fades.

“Go to the hells, girl,” he hisses. “We found it first.”

“I don’t want it for myself. Just leave it alone.”

“Or what?”

Rei rounds the corner, sweat-slick and breathless. The refinery has already left its mark on
his lungs. He’s right – he cannot stay there. Neither of us can stay here.

“…Miho?”

“Rei, make them stop. Make them put it back.”

The gulls are still screaming, cries sharp as broken glass splitting the night. And I reach into

the Kenning and tell them it will be alright. That Rei will make the boys put it back, that everything

will—

He is looking at me. And his eyes are narrowed and his frown is taking root between his

brows and growing darker by the moment.

“They’re just birds, Miho,” he says.

“Rei, please, make them put it back.”

“What does it matter?”

“It matters to me.”

He looks at the boys and they are smirking and already slinking away, nest in hand. And the

gulls are screaming, screaming inside my head, and though I could shut them out if I really tried, I

feel I should listen, I should hear them, because gods only know if anyone else ever will.

“Please!”

“Miho, let it go. Come on…”

“No. Stop them!”

“Miho—”

“STOP THEM!”

“What the hells is wrong with you?”

I turn away. I cannot look at him. Cannot bear to see he is becoming just like everyone else.

So blind to anything and everything. This city. The people in it. I find myself praying for rain. For

a storm so dark and fierce it flushes all of us away. The lotus and the Guild. The Shōgun and his

armies and this reeking hole at the heart of this rotten nation. We are stupid. We are eyeless.
 I call to the gulls in my mind and hold out my hands, and they descend to my palms and

hang their heads. They are simple, fragile things. They do not feel loss as we do. Already, the stolen

nest and the round white treasures within are fading from their memories. But I remember. I feel it

for them. And I gather them close and there is warmth and wet upon my cheeks, and salt upon my

lips, and I tell them it will be alright. That one day, all of this will be gone.

All of this will be gone.

Rei watches me, mute and unblinking. The birds are still and quiet in my arms now, my

thoughts a soothing lullaby in their heads. And I turn and look at this boy I think I love, this boy

who gives me food he cannot spare and speaks as if he has just finished laughing, who makes me

feel there is only he and I in all the world.

And he is backing away.

“Impure,” he breathes.

The word is a knife pushed into my chest. Saw-toothed and rusted.

A slow horror is dawning on his face, and I see in his eyes a stranger. Just another soldier for

the war. Just another sword in the Shōgun’s hand. Just another one of them.

“Impure…”

He turns and runs into the darkness.

The gulls spread their wings and take to the sky, calling mournfully to each other across the

dark spaces without quite knowing why.

And I sit in the cool, and I close my eyes, and I listen to them sing.

Because I know.

________

The gulls are crying.

 I am sitting on a wooden column at the end of the Number Eight pier, legs folded up beneath

me, listening to them call to each other across the bay. Only two of them left now, drawing aimless

circles in tar-spattered, blood-red skies, and soon I know there will be none at all. Greasy water

licks at the rotting stumps beneath me, and the blood-red air vibrates with the off-key songs of

engine and propeller and lotusfly hum, and all around me is the babble and clank and swish of gears

and metal and flesh. But I am sitting in the quiet places inside my head and listening to them speak.

“Citizen.”

It is a voice of metal and insect wings, a thousand cicada hum. I do not need to turn around

to know what they are. Who they are here for. Who told them.

Brass boots clomp along the desiccated wood, burning sunlight refracting on burning metal.

The Guildsman stops beside me, stoops down and takes hold of my arm in a grip of pistons and

gears and smoking blue-black exhaust. And the fear comes then. The fear of where they will take

me, and how I will end. That I am too young to die. That all of this is horribly wrong.

And I pray again for the rain.

The storm to wash it all away.

They pull me to my feet, and I try to hold back the tears. The sun is blinding in the sky, but

I can feel the gulls above me, circling, calling to each other mournfully without quite knowing why.

And I reach out to them, in the place I should not go, with the Gift I should not own, and I tell them

it will be alright. That nothing lasts forever. Not even this.

They do not understand. And as I am marched up the Spire Row towards the Burning

Stones, a crowd gathers around me, eyes alight with hunger behind polished black glass, that hateful

word upon their lips.

“Impure.”

I am holding back the tears, holding back the terror, holding on to the gull song. But it is

fading in my head as they drag me further away from the bay, and I know soon I will not be able to
hear it at all. And after that, I do not know.

I do not know.

I see him in the crowd. Just a glimpse. Clad in the red jin-haori tabard of a Tora soldier, a

shiny new naginata spear clutched in his hands. He is looking right at me and his face is pale, and I

wonder if he spoke then, what would he say. If it would sound like he had just finished laughing.

The Stones loom before me, black and high and charcoal clad.

The mob is circling, hungry as wolves, baying and howling.

But I am listening to the gulls.

I can only hear the gulls.

And they are crying.