Unreasonable Hope
Chapter eleven
Kenji
My dragon-shadow had roared, “WAR!”
He had torn the word from his chest and thrown it at the sky.
One syllable.
And I sat in the dirt of my mother's island with the sound vibrating through my ribs like a bell that had just been struck.
I felt pride.
Hot.
Animalistic.
Unreasonable pride.
The kind that arrived before sense could stop it. The kind that made men walk into fire believing the fire would respect them, instead of burn their flesh away.
Was it dangerous, feeling victory before Akiro and the Fox fell?
Probably.
Yet, hope followed that unreasonable pride the way fire followed a fuse.
And my hope was just as unreasonable as my pride. This was the sort of hope history warned men against. The sort that had walked great armies into the mouths of mountains and called it destiny.
Yet. . .I let that hope come anyway because in the end. . .a man fighting without hope was already half a corpse, and I intended to be very much alive by morning.
“War is right.” I rose from the dirt like a man buried alive who refused to stay down.
Soil covered my palms. I dusted it off and still saw the black lines the ritual had burned into my skin.
Will those lines ever leave?
The dragon-shadow leaned his large wispy head to the side, and his dark voice filled my ears. “No, but our Tiger will not mind them.”
Our Tiger. Not your Tiger. It appears my dragon-shadow is claiming her too.
The dragon-shadow widened his glowing eyes.
I claimed her before you. His voice arrived in my head from everywhere at once, pressing through the skull and settling in the soft corners of my brain.
I am going to have to get used to this.
I swallowed. “When did you claim her?”
In our office and on the first day we ever saw her.
“Hmmm.”
I liked her scent.
“Me too.”
We are the same.
“I see.” I looked around.
The clearing had emptied—red capes gone, torchlights guttering down to coals, smoke rising thin and white where the flames had been. The forest had swallowed the Death Guardian and the Silent Ones the same way the sea swallowed Akiro's scout plane earlier.
Then, warmth arrived in the center of my chest.
That’s Nyomi?
We feel her now. . .because of the bond.
“We. . .do. . .it’s odd but. . .it’s like she is.
. .inside of me.” I pressed my hand flat against my sternum and held still.
That sensation spread outward through my ribs.
It was a compass needle swinging toward a fixed point somewhere behind me, east, below the ground.
“She’s in the Bamboo Garden’s building.”
She is.
“Safe.”
Yes.
“But. . .” The emotion traveling through the bond was hot, expanding, and aimed at a target I could not see. “Rage.”
Pure.
Total.
Ferocious.
My jaw locked. “We must go to her.”
She is angry, but she is safe.
I wanted to put myself between her and whatever had lit that fury. And even more, I wanted to hold my Tiger, press my mouth to her forehead, and let her burn against me so she knew she would never have to face anything alone.
She is angry, but she is not afraid.
My dragon-shadow was correct. There was confidence in the rage. In fact, it landed in my chest harder than the warmth had. My Tiger, alone in a basement with a war on the island, had discarded fear entirely and was victorious in her own battle.
The heat of her rage moved through the bond the way wanting her did—low, insistent, impossible to separate from my own pulse.
I frowned. “She’s. . .different, but. . .I don’t know how to explain it.”
It was not only rage.
I had felt rage before. My own. Other men's. The sort that lived in the chest like a coal that never went fully dark. I knew its texture. Its temperature. The particular way it moved through the blood with intention.
This was not only that.
Beneath the rage there was a quiet that was soft and collapsing.
What is that?
I closed my eyes and sat in the emotion.
Grief.
It pressed against the inside of my sternum the way a hand pressed against a door it did not want to open.
Nyomi's grief.
Inside of me.
I opened my eyes.
Grief for Hiroko? Grief for those whom we may lose tonight?
The forest continued around me—wind through the high branches, the distant percussion of the war finding the island's eastern edge, smoke drifting thin and pale through the dark between the trunks.
I pressed both hands flat against my chest and held them there.
I had drunk from a bowl, bled onto a blade, and she had put her mouth to my palm. And our souls had crossed between us. And I could feel her deeply even though I did not have the language for all of these feelings yet.
The ritual had a name.
The Death Guardian had given it a name.
But names were containers, and what moved through me now was too large for the container.
Her soul was not a thing I could hold in cupped hands.
It was a weather system.
It moved through me like a storm front moved through a city, changing the temperature of everything it touched. Her rage, yes. Hot, aimed, and savage in the most feminine way was threaded with this dark river of grief.
And somehow I understood within this great sadness that she had given more than anyone would ever know tonight, but I just didn’t know what.
And that question was killing me.
I looked at my dragon-shadow.
Do you know what the sacrifice was? Or why she is so sad?
His eyes glowed. War. That is the only answer right now.
He was right. My only focus should be protecting her, my family, and my empire. But. . .this ritual had changed me and was still changing me.
I was not the same man who had entered this forest. New emotions had realigned themselves within my soul.
The bond had cracked me wider than I knew a man could open, and the city came in through the crack.
I had not let myself think of the Lion’s bombing of Tokyo since the screens went black in the war room.
I had buried it away. I could not afford to feel too much emotion during war.
But the ritual had unburied things. The boy who would not wake up in his father's arms arrived first. Then the woman with the blood streaking her cheek. Then the wedding hall with its face blown out, and the bodies under it, and the crosswalk, and the car alarm.
I had done that.
Not the Lion.
Me.
The Lion was the weapon. I had picked him up, aimed him at my father, and fired him through a city full of innocent people whose only mistake was being near the wrong old hotel.
I gazed at the black lines on my hands.
We all will be different after tonight.
I looked up at my dragon-shadow.
He hovered above the clearing in churning black smoke.
His massive serpentine body coiled up through the canopy.
His great horned skull cut across the face of the moon before the branches swallowed him again.
Those gold-fire eyes remained on me. And then he opened his large mouth and roared again, “WAR!”
“Yes.” I made sure my guns were in their holsters. "We have to get to my men."
I know where they are.
"Then let's go. Can you carry me?”
He gave me the oddest look. No.
“It would have been nice if I could ride you.”
One enormous eye slid sideways to regard me the way a person might regard shit tracked in on a boot heel. Then, the smoke around him thickened briefly, curling inward as if even his own shadow found the suggestion offensive. “Ride. . .me?”
“Sorry.” I ran forward. My legs were a bit unsteady, but after several feet I found my balance.
Thankfully, the golf cart remained with my mask on the seat right where Yoichi had abandoned it earlier. I threw myself into the seat, turned the engine over, pulled the wheel hard, and got back onto the path.
Above the tree line, my dragon-shadow moved. This way.
I caught him in pieces through the canopy—a ridge of his spine crossing a gap in the leaves, the trailing edge of a wing cutting through the dark above the highest branches, the brief bloom of gold where his eyes turned back toward me.
He was faster than the cart. A few times, he soared ahead and waited, then soared again. He threaded through trees wider around than both my arms could reach and left no mark on anything he passed through.
One of Akiro’s planes screamed low over the forest. The canopy shook. Leaves tore loose and rained across the windshield.
“Goddamn it.” I leaned forward over the wheel and drove harder.
The tires bit into the dirt and threw it up behind me.
"Should I give you a name?"
He turned his great head toward me from above the trees. The gold eyes caught the moonlight. I have one.
You do?
It is older than you.
What is it?
Goryū.
The name rose within my chest, swirling around my Tiger’s rage.
“I've heard that name before." I turned a bend at high speed. The cart leaned. The tires screamed against a root. "But I don’t know where I’ve heard the name."
I whispered it to you in your dreams. . .many times.
The trees rushed past on both sides. Black trunks strobed through the headlights, close enough to shatter the cart if I drifted a foot in either direction.
Branches clawed at my arms. The smell of the forest floor came up thick and wet—crushed leaves, turned soil, pine resin—all of it laced with gun smoke drifting in from the west, south, and north.
Goddamn it. I wish I had more time.
The ground shook.
An explosion sounded somewhere on the far side of the island and sent its force up through the earth.
Into the tires.
Into my hands on the wheel.
Into my back teeth.
The trees trembled. A branch cracked in the dark, fell through the canopy, and hit the ground.
What happened?
I’d just been voicing that to myself, but to my surprise, Goryū answered. One of the planes fired at the antiaircraft gun.
No.
Yes. The gun is gone now.
Another boom followed. Then another, walking across the island in a line. Then the sound of more planes.
The few antiaircraft guns remaining answered. Their shells were long flat tearing roars. One after another.
I pressed the accelerator to the floor. How do I use you in this war?
Goryū's great head swung forward as he soared. I don't know.
Why not?
You have never been in control of me before.
Yes, but you know what you can do.
I know many things.
I pursed my lips. What you did to the trees back there. We can do that to the men?
We can. They will weaken, but they will not crack like the trees.
Good enough. Still following him, I took another bend and the headlights swept across a cluster of Scales in the brush—seven men crouched behind a fallen log with rifles laid across the bark, faces turning toward the cart's light and away again.
Their masks caught the beam. Solid red and black. Eyes carved deep. They were still as the trunks behind them. What can you do to the planes?
I don't know. Let's see.
Hunger moved through the smoke of his body. The wings stretched wider. The trailing wisps reached across a gap between the trees, and I felt that same hunger echo in my own chest and recognized it as mine too.
Good. We are both ready.
We are.
How far can you go from me and still hear me?
I am you and you are me. He banked left.
I turned the wheel to follow without deciding to, as if the answer had been in my hands before it reached my head.
Distance is not the limit. You are.
What does that mean?
I can go far.
Far enough to go after my father?
Goryū’s body shimmered gold. Our father.
The correction sliced into me.
Yes. . .our father.
He is on the way here. He is in the air.
My hands tightened on the wheel. How do you know that?
He carries a darkness I can see many miles away. Goryū's head turned slowly toward the northwest, beyond the island's edge where Akiro's planes had come from and would keep coming. And it is in the air right now. Darker than the sky. He’s scared.
"Good." The word came out cold and clean. "So. . .the Fox is coming to the island?"
He is. Goryū turned right. His tail swept through the canopy and a shower of leaves and broken branches fell across the path ahead. This way.
I wrenched the wheel.
The warmth in my chest flared again—more rage from my Tiger.
What is wrong? Who is bothering her?
She is bothering someone else.
What do you mean?
Our Tiger’s rage smells like another’s death.
What? I don’t understand.
She is safe.
I pulled my right hand off the wheel and pressed it flat against my sternum. Her rage was still there—hotter now, tighter, aimed with a precision that told me she had found her target. Whatever she had walked toward in that basement, she had arrived.
I wanted to turn the cart around.
Every animal part of me wanted to point the headlights east and drive until I found her.
I wanted to feel the heat of her in my arms instead of at a distance through my chest. I wanted to hold her.
I wanted to kiss her fury away, let it burn against me, so she understood she was facing nothing alone.
She is safe.
I know but—
War.
Yes.
Our men are here.
I stopped the cart, grabbed my mask, and headed off. Show me.