Storm. Amanda Sun

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СКАЧАТЬ rested a hand on my shoulder and attempted a smile. “I picked up some chestnut cakes from the depaato on the way home. Want to have one?”

      “Yeah,” I said, giving her a fake smile back. She nodded and hurried into the kitchen. I could hear the clink of plates and the fridge door opening, the little cardboard flaps on the cake box popping open. Food as a source of comfort—that was Diane’s specialty. But after today, it sounded like the best idea ever.

      I could bury the idea as soon as it had surfaced. I didn’t need to think about my dad right now; I could forget about it, erase it like it had never happened. If only I’d stayed with Tomo a little longer tonight. I would never have known about my dad being in Japan.

      It didn’t matter, though. Steven could be in the same room as me, and it would feel like the farthest corner of the world, a wall of emptiness between us that couldn’t be scaled.

      I sat down at the table, smelling the sweet cream on the chestnut cake as Diane hurried around the kitchen.

      She was all the family I needed now.

      * * *

      The water was black this time, oceans of ink lapping against the stained shore. There was no orange gateway, no rolling dunes of sand. Instead, the ink waters ebbed against an inlaid stone path that trailed upward, toward a towering jumble of angled rooftops reaching toward the sky. On the distant edge of the black ocean, the ink tipped over in a waterfall that encircled the whole island, the spray sending up a fog of clouds. Were we high up in the sky, or on some cliff? I’d have to wade deep into the waters to look, and I was scared the current would drag me over the edge.

      I looked back at the building—some sort of pagoda, maybe, or a fortress like Sunpu but as tall as Himeji Castle, layer upon layer of slanted tile rooftops and whitewashed walls, placed upon one another like tiers of a fancy wedding cake. Simple wooden steps led into the building; there was nowhere else to go on this tiny island surrounded by ink.

      I stepped forward, and saw the first victim.

      He lay at my feet, nearly buried in the grasses that sprung up around him. He wore armor, like some kind of samurai, but his eyes were empty, staring at a future that wasn’t there, his breastplate splashed with ink.

      I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound escaped my lips. A dream, I thought. Another Kami nightmare.

      I looked around the steps of the castle as I moved forward. Dozens of men lay slumped in horrible, lifeless heaps, ink soaking each of them as they lay beside their shattered weapons and snapped bowstrings. My feet moved toward the building against my own will. I didn’t want to see what was inside. I didn’t want to know what was responsible for this.

      The stairs creaked as I went up them. Inside, the room was musty and dark, the only light shining from the windows near the raised platform at the end of the room, where great white curtains billowed out with a wind I couldn’t feel. The bamboo tatami mats were cold and hard against my bare feet as I stepped forward. There were fallen soldiers here, too; what horrible battle had taken place?

      Wait, that one’s alive. I looked and saw him crouched in the corner, a dark shape hunched over his bended knee, a sword on the tatami beside him.

      His silver earring glinted as he tilted his head forward, his blond highlights slipping from behind his ears.

      “Jun,” I said, and he looked up at me. He lifted the sword; it almost looked as though it was made of stone. It was a deep black, like the inside of a cave, and the blade of it dripped with a darkness that must be ink. Or blood.

      “It’s over now,” said a woman’s voice.

      I turned to the raised platform in front of me, where the voice had come from. A woman knelt on the floor, the folds of her crimson kimono stretching in a pool of red around her. The sleeves of the kimono layered in a dozen different colors, all variations of black, red, gold and silver. An elaborate golden headdress rested on her head, the strings of golden beads tinkling against one another as she tilted her chin to the side.

      “Okami Amaterasu,” I said, stepping over a long smear of ink on the tatami. I glanced at the fallen soldiers in the throne room as I walked toward her. “Who did this?”

      “You did,” she said, and the world went cold with fear.

      I shook my head. “I could never do something like this. And I only just got here.”

      “There is only death,” she said. “There is no escape.”

      Tomo had said those words so many times. He heard them in his nightmares, too.

      “No escape from what?” I said. “Fate as a Kami?”

      Amaterasu smiled sadly. “No escape from the past.” She twisted her knees to the side, the fabric of her red kimono swishing as she moved away slowly, and I saw one more body beside her.

      “Tomo,” I whispered. I wanted to throw up; I wanted to wake up. I pinched my arm, hard, to remind myself this wasn’t real. It’s just a dream. But there was no comfort from seeing him there, lifeless, drenched in ink.

      “Tsukiyomi,” she answered, and I saw then that his hair wasn’t copper, but black. I’d thought it was ink staining his hair, but he looked different—older, more worn and...less human than he’d ever looked, an almost angelic beauty that left me feeling terrified. He looked like a trickster fairy, the kind that was too beautiful to trust.

      He was, and wasn’t, Tomo. I couldn’t explain it, except that dreams are strange and never quite right.

      “I don’t understand,” I said. Was this all meaningless nightmare stuff? Why was I seeing this?

      “I loved Tsukiyomi,” Amaterasu said. “And so I killed him.”

      Ikeda had mentioned the story to me before, that Amaterasu and Tsukiyomi had once been lovers, before Tsukiyomi lost his mind.

      “I had to stop him, before he destroyed everything the August Ones had made.”

      “The August Ones?”

      “And now he’s dead. But he lives in the shards of his soul that carry on.” She motioned at the ground, and I saw shattered pieces of glass in every color.

      “Like Tomo,” I said.

      “Taira no Kiyomori, Tokugawa Ieyasu, Yuu Tomohiro, all of them magatama of one soul,” she said.

      I tilted my head. “Magatama?”

      She motioned again to the broken glass. “Susanou shattered it,” she said. “Only the sword remains.” I looked to Jun and the stained sword at his side.

      “Listen to me, child,” Amaterasu said to me. “Green means an eternal circle. You will betray Yuu Tomohiro, just as I have betrayed Tsukiyomi.”

      The heat rose up in my cheeks. “I would never hurt him.”

      She leaned back, the golden beads jingling on her headdress.

      “You will kill him, before the end.”

      My СКАЧАТЬ