Chapter Nine Sen
Sen’s first mistake was looking in the ghost’s eyes.
His irises were the colors of the forest, the gold of sunrise and wheat and summer mornings and bright green sword ferns.
But beyond the startling shade was something much worse.
It was the darkness of the afternoon when the shadows grew too thin. The endless winter nights when she’d waited for her father
to return, wondering if the sun would ever rise again. The echoing depths of the well outside after weeks without rain.
He did not look like a monster come to devour her. He looked like someone who had already been devoured.
Maybe it was just that she had never seen a foreigner before. Maybe all their faces were this haunting, this vacant. Maybe
they were all ghosts of what her country could have been, had they never come.
She tore her gaze from his eyes and instead looked to the room behind him. The ghost did not sit in a closet, as she’d expected,
but in a room of his own.
It was dark behind him, but Sen had been trained to map out darkness.
He sat in a room as wide as hers, the same panels on the far wall, the same window spilling moonlight across the center.
As if the closet was a clear pond and the reflection of her own room had glinted back at her in its waters.
The closer Sen looked, the more certain she became—it was not just any room, but her room.
The spirit was mocking her, showing her all he would take—her country, her home, her life.
Her gaze dropped to the spirit’s throat, and she envisioned the clean cut she would make just beneath his Adam’s apple. His
lips would part in surprise and his eyes would go dark and his head would slide off the stump of his neck and thunk as it hit the floor.
Maybe a spirit could not be killed, but she would make sure he knew he was not welcome here. If she had to cut him down a
thousand times, then so be it.
But as she tightened her grip on the hilt of her sword, the ghost did something far more shocking than suddenly growing claws,
or horns, or fangs.
He bowed.
“Hajimemashite,” he said, and though he spoke like his mouth was full of paper, Sen understood his attempt at speaking her
language. Her grip went limp on her sword and she recoiled. Why was a spirit bowing to her?
Her fingers tightened on the handle of her katana, but she couldn’t make herself draw it. She felt the same as when her father
ordered her to kill rabbits or cats or mice just to prove that she could—it did not feel like an act of honor, but meaningless
slaughter.
The ghost watched her, waiting patiently for her response. She wet her dry lips and wondered if she could banish him not with
her blade, but with her words.
“You speak my language, spirit?” she said at last.
“Yes,” he said, his voice low and dark, a riptide that could pull her under if she wasn’t careful. “But I am no spirit.”
“Then you should know that I am a Shimazu retainer,” she said, sitting up as straight as she could, ignoring his last remark.
She could tell he was taller than her, but as her shadow fell over him, the world shifted in Sen’s direction—she was on top of a great mountain, looking down on him far below.
“Death is in my blood and my bones, and would be in my soul, if I had one,” she said.
“Whatever hell you intend to bring here is one I have already seen. You cannot frighten me, for I fear nothing. You cannot harm me, because my body is inconsequential. If you do not leave my house, I will cut your ragged scrap of a soul to pieces and burn them until nothing remains.”
By the time the echo of her words faded from the air, the spirit’s face had gone carefully blank, betraying no emotion.
At least, nothing an untrained eye would see.
But Sen had noticed the flash of interest in his eyes, the way he leaned just slightly closer. She had been trained to see
these moments clearly—the intake of breath that told you which way an opponent would move next, the way their gaze betrayed
their next strike, the tension in their knuckles that spoke more than their words ever could.
Whatever this creature was, it did not fear her.
A thin smile sparkled at the right corner of his mouth. “The year is somewhere between 1868 and 1878, isn’t it?” he said.
Sen went very still. She had the odd sensation that the world was suddenly tilting downward, shifting the balance in the spirit’s
favor. He had asked her a question that made no sense—of course he knew what year it was, so why ask her?—which meant his
game had begun.
“You don’t know what year it is?” she asked, rather than answer his question. She was certain that any answer she gave would
be her undoing.
“I know what year it is here ,” the spirit said, tilting his head toward the room behind him.
“But the tatami on your side is still green, which means it’s new, and the last occupants of this house were in the Meiji era.
I can also smell that you’ve burnt charcoal, maybe for a stove, since it’s too hot for an irori.
Even rural parts of Japan were industrialized in the early Meiji period, so you should have an electric or gas stove by now.
But your robes are un-dyed, so you’re probably poor and not the first to buy new appliances.
It’s most likely the beginnings of the Meiji era, between 1868 and 1878. ”
When he finished, his gaze flickered all over her, itching like spiders crawling across her skin. It lingered on her sword
hand, the frayed hem of her skirts, the mended socks on her feet. Sen could do nothing but sit perfectly still and let him
dissect her with his eyes and blind her with his words. She didn’t know what game he was playing, but she felt the distinct
sensation that she was losing.
“What year is it?” he asked when she didn’t respond, his voice tight with impatience.
Sen knew she shouldn’t have responded. But she turned the answer over in her mind and didn’t see how telling him such a fact
could lead to her demise. It wasn’t as if she’d told him her name, her hopes, her fears.
“1877,” she said at last. “As I’m sure you know.”
The spirit nodded as if she’d responded correctly. “Well, that’s unfortunate,” he said. “For you, I mean.”
Sen’s pulse echoed in her ears. “Excuse me?” she said, clenching her teeth and sliding her sword out an inch.
But his gaze didn’t even drift down to her sword, like he saw nothing at all except for her eyes. “I mean that if the year
is 1877, then I’m not the spirit. You are.”
For a moment, Sen felt as though she’d plunged into a cold, dark sea. It was not his words that scared her, but the unflinching
way he stared back at her, the ease in his posture, the way his words felt as light as a piece of silk carried away on a cool
wind—Sen could not detect a lie in his features.
But there it was at last, out in the open—his plan for unmaking her.
He was here to burrow into her brain like a maggot into the flesh of a corpse. Maybe he wanted to distract her from her training
and ensure that she failed when the soldiers came for her family. Maybe he wanted to drive her mad until she cut her own throat
with her sword. Or maybe he just wanted to watch her squirm the way sick children cut the bellies of rats and squirrels to
see how they twitched and cried and died in the dirt.
But Sen could not be toyed with so easily.
“ I am not a ghost ,” she said. She knew this was true from the way her pulse hammered through her body, the way sweat gathered beneath her palms,
the way her stomach burned with hunger.
But the spirit only blinked at her protest, like her words were nothing but dying petals torn away in the wind. “Today is
October twentieth, 2026,” he said. “You don’t look over a hundred and forty years old.”
Sen’s grip tightened on her sword. She shouldn’t have entertained his games. Already, his words had grown roots that were
trying to worm their way into her mind, to make her fear. “You expect me to believe that?” she said.
He tilted his head. “I’m just telling you the truth,” he said, his words light as dandelion parachutes, as if he was the singular
keeper of the truth, as if words could not cut flesh if they were true.
Sen shook her head. “I will not be undone so easily. If you wish to destroy me, you’ll have to try harder than that.”
A frown carved down the pale skin of the spirit’s brow. He drew back, as if this possibility surprised him. “Destroy you?”
he said. “I want to work with you, not destroy you.”
Sen let out a sharp laugh, shaking her head. “I don’t make deals with demons,” she said. “If that’s all you have to say, you might as well leave now.”
Something thumped in the hallway beyond her room, and she winced as she realized she’d been too loud. When she turned back
to the spirit, his expression had softened, his posture wilted and gray. Even his eyes, which had been a blazing green when
she opened the door, now seemed more like stormy sea glass.
“I’ve said all I came to say,” she said. “Do not show your face to me again, or I will be the last person you ever see.”
She reached for the door and began to pull it closed. That was easier than anticipated , she thought as the paper door covered up the spirit’s forlorn expression.
His hand shot out, stopping the door before it could finish closing.
With unexpected strength, he shoved the door back open. It thunked as it hit the end of its track. He leaned forward, crossing the invisible barrier into Sen’s side of the house, his eyes
blazing green, his starkly pale face lit by the moonlight through her window.
“Do you want to know how you die?” he whispered.
Sen flinched back before she could remember not to show fear. She grappled for the door and tried to yank it shut, but the
spirit had braced it open with one arm.
“What do you know of my death?” she said. She’d wanted it to sound like a threat, but it came out more like a plea.