Chapter Thirteen Sen
This time, Sen drew her sword before she opened the door.
The spirit looked so infuriatingly smug. Sen relished the way the light left his eyes when she pressed her blade to his throat.
He scrambled away, but she used her blade to force him onto his back like a beetle. She stepped halfway into his side of the
house, her shadow falling over him.
“ What have you done? ” she said.
The spirit swallowed, the motion shifting the blade at his throat. “You saw the fire, didn’t you?” he said.
“The fire that you caused,” Sen said. She wasn’t naive to the ways of evil spirits. Of course they could foretell tragedy that they caused themselves.
Sen shouldn’t have spoken to him, tempting him to act. The blood was on her hands now.
Her father hadn’t allowed her into town to see the carnage, but the sky was still dark with smoke, and the smell of burnt
human flesh still coated her throat. She couldn’t go outside to train because the scent made her sick.
“I didn’t cause the fire,” the spirit said, frowning. “I only read that it happened.”
“Liar.”
Sen pressed the blade down harder, and a thin line of blood bloomed across the spirit’s throat, a scarlet bead rolling onto the floor.
His breaths quickened and his pupils yawned wider, darkness devouring his bright green irises.
He should have looked scared—any normal person would with a blade at their throat—but instead, his eyes glinted and a smile tugged at one corner of his mouth. He didn’t even try to fight her off.
“Do you really think I’m a liar?” he said. “Or are you angry that I might be right?”
Sen imagined pressing her blade down just a little more, the way his skin would split and the wound would scream open. He
wouldn’t have a chance to make a sound before Sen pressed through his throat, his vocal cords, his spine.
“I’ll destroy you,” she said, “and no more tragedy will come to Chiran.”
“No, you won’t,” he said, his words infuriatingly calm, “because I have something you want.”
Do you want to know how you die?
The memory of his question echoed as if shouted into the dark cave of her mind. I’m not dead , she thought, but the words wilted before she could voice them.
“If I were powerful enough to cause a forest fire over a hundred years in the past,” the spirit said, his words light and
unbothered, “then I wouldn’t be here, with a blade above my throat, begging for help from a girl who would sooner kill me
than listen to me. If I were that powerful, I wouldn’t ask for your help. I would demand it. In my own time, I have no power at all. The only thing I’m good at is unearthing truths that no one else wants to hear.
But I am very, very good at it. And maybe that makes me evil, but I’m no spirit. Spirits are what I want to find.”
The rage left Sen like a cold wave pulled back out to sea. This man’s words felt too raw to be untrue. Besides, he was not asking her for loyalty, or love, or vengeance, or anything that an evil spirit might want. If he were truly a spirit, he wouldn’t need her help to find others.
Still, Sen had to be sure.
She sheathed her blade, then stepped over the man and into his side of the house. The man rose to his feet, a sound of protest
on his lips, but it was hard to argue with someone holding a sword.
His room was darker, as he’d said—the tatami mats had faded to a dirty yellow. But other than that, the space looked hardly
lived in. There was a futon on the floor and a few scattered cushions, a bag with many pockets by the bed and what looked
like a trunk in the corner. It did not look like somewhere a ghost had moved in, but somewhere he’d stolen.
“I’ve only been here a few days,” the man said, and Sen hated how he seemed to sense her doubts before she could voice them.
She turned to the wall above the bed, and froze at what she saw.
Holes.
Small, round holes the size of nails, evenly spaced in long rows.
In Sen’s room, this wall had hooks where she placed her katanas. But here, it looked as if the hooks had been removed. The
wall was lighter where the katanas had blocked direct sunlight. She reached forward and touched the holes, as if to assure
herself they were real.
The man stood in the corner and watched as Sen turned and knelt by the door, running her fingers across the doorframe in the
dark until she found it.
There—a notch in the wood, thin as a splinter. Seijiro had come into her room on the first day they’d moved here, and she’d
thrown one of her indoor shoes at his head, denting the wood.
There was only one more thing to check.
She knelt beside the futon, feeling around for the loose floorboard. The wood was warped with age and stuck in its frame,
but she managed to pop it up and cast it to the side, then reached into the darkness below.
Her hand closed around something small and cold.
She pulled out her sword guard, now tarnished to a deep green and dark brown, as if it had spent many years in wet earth.
There was the same crack along the left side, just below the carved turtles. And there, on the back, was the engraving.
The way of the samurai is found in death
Sen closed her fist around the sword guard and clutched it tight to her chest, against her heart, which beat far too fast.
The man hadn’t seen her hide the sword guard. She supposed he might have eyes on her even when the door was closed, but all
her excuses felt so flimsy compared to the facts before her. This sword guard had been left underground for a very long time.
“It’s the same house,” she whispered, even though the words felt like a betrayal of her own heart.
Because if it was the same house, then this man wasn’t the ghost—Sen was.
There was no such thing as a ghost who died peacefully in their old age after a long and fulfilling life. If Sen was haunting
this house, then she had died filled with rage and sorrow and shame. It wasn’t hard to guess how that might happen.
The royal army had made her cousins’ heads explode with bullets, had cut off their arms and crushed them beneath their horses
and then dragged them behind their wagons. Some of them had been close to Seijiro’s age. After what her father had done, there
was no way the government would let any of her family live.
Sen was going to die in this house. Even worse—she was going to fail her father.
The weathered sword guard cracked in her grip, falling to the floor in pieces and cutting her father’s motto in two.
The way of the samurai—
—is found in death
It was a good thing her father wasn’t here to witness the way her hands shook, the way she could barely breathe. He would
have struck her for cowering in the face of death. This was what she had trained for her whole life—to see life and death
as two sides of the same blade, to walk unflinchingly toward it as easily as she opened the porch door and strode out to the
forest.
But Sen was failing him even now as she imagined her body ravaged by bullets, drowning in her own blood, her rib cage blasted
to pieces, skull shattered and brains spilled all over the ground, eyes on thin tethers rolling around in the dirt, teeth
scattered in the garden. Would she be able to see through eyes that had popped out of her skull and oozed white jelly into
the ground? Would she be able to speak when she no longer had any lips or tongue?
“I’m sorry,” the man said behind her.
Sen blinked away the images of death, sitting up straight and smoothing out her expression. Even if she was going to die,
she couldn’t cry about it in front of this man.
“I don’t want your pity,” she said, replacing the floorboard and rising to her feet.
“Good,” the man said, “because I want us to exchange information, not pity.”
Sen turned around. The man was standing a careful distance away from her, watching her like a vulture trying to ascertain
if its prey was truly dead.
“What kind of information?” she said.
The man glanced at the door to Sen’s room. “I want to figure out why I can see you. I’ve tried to reach out to the dead before, but so far, you’re the only one who’s been able to cross the threshold. I intend to find out why.”
Sen didn’t miss the weight of his words, the way he seemed to carve them into the air like a promise. I intend to find out why.
“And how would I know that?” Sen said with a glare.
“You don’t need to figure out the reason,” the man said. “You only need to give me enough information about you and your world
so that I can find the reason. If you answer my questions truthfully, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know about the future.”
Sen clutched the hems of her sleeves as she considered his offer. There was really only one thing she wanted to know, only
one truth that mattered.
“Could you tell me when the soldiers will come for me?” she asked. Maybe if she knew the date, she could convince her father
to leave the house. Maybe this man hadn’t come to herald her death, but to save her from it.
“Yes,” the man said. “Though, to find that information, I would need your name.”
Sen swallowed. Even though she was fairly certain he wasn’t an evil spirit, something about speaking her true name in front
of him felt inexplicably dangerous.
“Sen,” she whispered at last. “Sen of Shimazu.”
The man waited, his gaze prickling across her skin. “Is that your surname?” he said, as if he already knew the answer.
“It’s the only name that matters,” Sen said stiffly.
“...All right,” the man said, though it was clear from the firm pinch of his lips that he knew she was withholding something.
“I’m Lee Turner,” he said.
Sen whispered the foreign name under her breath, tasting the shape of it.
Lee Turner pulled the black box from his pocket and touched it again, his face ghostly under its blue-white light.
“Well, Sen of Shimazu,” he said, “it seems that your name isn’t enough information for me to tell you much of anything.”
Sen scowled. “That’s it, then? You won’t answer my only question?”