CHAPTER ELEVEN

Kawano, Tojo, and the black-suit boys left to find a minshuku hotel to stay overnight, after ridiculously overly-formal Kind speak promising no one would mysteriously disappear or mess with the Black Pearl. At one point Tojo seemed about to pull out a knife and demand a blood-promise. Not that he needed one in order to keep me away from the Black Pearl.

Yukiko and Dad would not be persuaded away from their endless cups of green tea at the table. Dad was half-comatose anyway, but Midori and Murase, and more importantly to me, Pon-suma, obviously trusted her enough that after the others left they didn’t hold back an explosion of heated arguing right in front of her.

Uncomfortable with any role The Eight Span Mirror was trying to force me into, I scooted away from the table toward where Pon-suma and Kwaskwi had abandoned Ken on a pile of zabuton. He lay there quietly. I thought him asleep, his chest rising in a slow even rhythm, his legs bulky from the splints underneath a knitted afghan. I slipped my hand down in my cardigan sleeve and put it to his forehead, relieved to find no evidence of fever. Ken’s eyes popped open.

“No, don’t,” he said when I pulled my hand away. “You smell so good.” Okay, now I know he is delirious. I was pretty sure I smelled like sweaty gym socks. I was starving, and so far beyond exhausted that gray static hovered at the corners of my vision. But Ken captured my hand and placed it over his heart, sighing peacefully, and closing his eyes again.

“Why did you bring me here?” I asked, softly.

Eyes still closed, Ken’s mouth, the generous lower lip looking even puffier than usual after his battering, pursed in thought. “To fix things. For your father. For you to learn about being Baku.”

Midori’s drugs were making him drop his guard. Was it taking advantage if I dug deeper to get to the truth? I thought of how he’d given my name to the Council, how he’d seemed so reserved since we came to Japan.

Fuck it. I was on shaky ground, and so far Kwaskwi was the only one who was still solidly Team America. I needed every advantage I could get. “No, Ken, that’s not the truth,” I said gently, brushing stray strands of the thick, slightly wavy hair through my knuckles he usually had moussed up into trendy spikes at the top of his head—not something I could ever do if he were all the way awake. Not only because I wasn’t touchy-feely, but because reaching out for Ken felt too much like an open admission of how much I enjoyed touching him. “Because the Council told you to?”

“The Council doesn’t know about you.” Okay, so maybe Ken’s brain is actually still caramelized. The Council definitely knew about me now.

“Why not just bring Dad, why me, too?”

Ken turned his head away from me, the pressure on my hand lighter. He was going to sleep. “Because,” he said in barely audible English, “I can’t let you go. You can make everything better.” He went limp, and something fluttered from his other hand. A small scrap of paper. A white mountain with a crudely drawn fish and the word Herai. Ken had found my stupid rest-stop clue after all and carried it all the way here.

God damn it. I swallowed back a torrent of confused words stewing in the back of my dry throat. This boy! His chest was warm against my palm, and though the pressure of those octave-spanning, strong fingers no longer bound it there, the force of that confession was a steel band.

Starry-eyed ingénue, I was not. Maladjusted, sometimes morbidly paranoid, yes, but also painfully self-aware. A side effect of growing up with no defenses against other people’s psyches invading your own through dreams. I distanced myself from anyone but Marlin and Mom, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t aware of what normal looked like. Now that comfy isolation was a fatal flaw—anyone who managed to get past my defenses loomed larger than life.

He’s using you, said Survivalist Koi.

But he doesn’t want to leave you, whispered the girl whose heart pumped fervent blood, growing too tender, too large for its flesh and bone cage.

Wanting to trust Ken, no aching to trust Ken, and being able to trust Ken were different things. Kissing him felt like a refuge, a safe, breathing place for me to touch and feel without guarding against invasive fragments. His forest fragment was so innocent, so familiar that it had refuge flags planted all around it in my head. But had Mangasar Hayk’s murder-dreams scared me into blindly trusting the first guy who came around with peaceful forest dreams, dreamy, moka-roast eyes, and an unbearably sly arched eyebrow?

Survivalist Koi spun Ken’s protection not as caring, but self-interest. Ken was keeping his assets close. We Herai Baku were obviously valuable to both The Eight and the Council—and I didn’t like how that made me a pawn.

Only Marlin gets to manipulate me. She’d earned the right by putting up with me all these years. I was definitely not going to melt into googly-eyed mush just because half-baked Ken said he couldn’t let me go. If he was super old like Dad, then maybe he’d used that line a hundred times.

I disengaged my hand from Ken’s chest and stretched out my aching legs. Sitting seiza was definitely painful on the knees, even with the zabuton cushion bunched up under my butt like Kwaskwi did.

A cold draft wafted down my spine and I looked up to find Yukiko sitting next to me, waiting patiently for me to meet her gaze. I flinched. Her eyes were the transparent blue of compressed glacial ice. “Oh, hello,” I said, blushing.

Outside distant thunder rumbled, and the hushed murmur of a spring rain shower gathered across the museum’s ceramic tiled roof.

Yukiko nodded slightly, raising both elegantly plucked albino eyebrows. Asking me what I am doing? She hadn’t ever spoken a word in my presence. Non-verbal communication wasn’t my strong suit.

“Ken seems fine. He’s a little foggy from the drugs, but resting peacefully,” I told her.

Yukiko shook her head, lips slightly pursed in disappointment. “Thank you for…for taking care of Dad. He seems peaceful, too.” The glacial eyes unwaveringly pinned me in place, making me uncomfortably aware I was missing something important.

“…we gave our word,” Murase was saying loudly at the table. “It can’t be Hafu that break the peace.”

“Why not?” Ben jumped up with fists clenched at her sides. “We’ve tried following the Council’s rules, and it’s only gotten us meaningless meetings. All the while the Black Pearl suffers. It’s not right.”

“It’s kept us alive.” Midori reached out, but Ben shook her off. With a determined glance my direction, she stalked off, muttering.

“Kids these days, what are ya gonna do?” said Kwaskwi in English.

I sighed. Yukiko’s motionless silence was more than I could bear. Her waiting tugged and pulled at me, like the nagging frustration of trying to recall a fabulous dream after being startled awake. I was desperately close to babbling nonsense out loud just to fill the void.

She stretched out her hand, palm up.

“I d-don’t think that’s a good idea, actually,” I stuttered. No way in hell. Frozen fragments are not on the menu today. Shivers whispered down my spine.

Yukiko looked down the line of her aquiline nose, daring me to touch her. I wasn’t going to fall for that. I had nothing to prove. I’d survived Hayk and Ullikemi and the Black Pearl. I just wasn’t in the mood for mental frostbite.

Thunder cracked directly overhead, startling me into a flinch. Kwaskwi spared me a sideways smirk, but Murase, Midori, and Pon-suma didn’t pause their intense argument.

“Excuse me, but I think I’m going to go interrupt the huddle over there. I’m literally starving and—”

Yukiko, quick as lightning, darted forward on her knees, capturing my head between two ice-cold hands and pressing her forehead to mine. She breathed out a chill mist that obscured the air, enshrouding us in a blanket of hushed cold.

My heart seized painfully like I’d jumped in the water at Cannon Beach in February. Then, with enormous effort, it began beating again, but slowly, ever so slowly. Sounds came through distorted, Murase’s voice impossibly deep like James Earl Jones, and the Sanrio Kerropi frog character clock on the wall ticking out the seconds at a sonorous, geriatric pace.

The transition to Yukiko’s dream was unlike any I’d experienced before. No, spinning, no jerk. Just a slow fade to white. The thunder, heartbeats and clock sounded further and further away as if I were moving through a long tunnel. Kind dreams were vivid, and the white was unbearably so, but there was no way to squint or close my eyes. Slowly, the quality of the white resolved into a million specks of frost, widening, spreading into the most beautiful, intricate laced patterns. Lace-frost spread into my peripheral vision, and I found I was able to turn my head. My exhalations left my body and became crystalline beauty, adding to the pattern.

Quiet. And still. Between one heartbeat and the next, everything stopped. No fear, no worry, just…silence. And beauty.

And then the frost cracked, ugly jagged breaks that felt like the edge of a knife trailed down my skin. The cracks widened, and yellow sun shone through, melting it further. My breath came in huffs, too fast, my hands uselessly clutching at melting patterns in the air.

A long, low moan rent the whiteness, catching it in a grip of pain, squeezing the air from my body, and smashing me down to the earth. I raised my head to find myself on my knees next to a mound of grass-covered dirt. No cross, no white picket fence, but this is the Black Pearl’s prison.

The moan came again, not heard, but a dark vibration felt through my knees and palms pressed to the earth. I lifted my head, long white hair swinging over my face, and stood. There was a door, I knew this, and a staircase, and at the bottom a creature in terrible agony—a wrongness that made my teeth ache—unraveling the pure beauty and stillness of the frost patterns in my boundless white.

I found the first door, opened it, glided down the stairs, and opened the door at the bottom. A horrible, awful stench assaulted me, but I surged forward. A clean-cut Baku in military uniform stood, arms in a wrestler’s grip around the neck of an old one, a dragon, born of earth and water far from the islands. Foreign. The dragon thrashed, but the Baku drained it, consuming its ambient magic, and it hurt.

This is Yukiko’s dream-memory. It was Dad, eating the Black Pearl’s waking dream—consuming the kernel-self power of the dragon. I didn’t want to experience this. Enough! I get it!

I was done being forced. Reaching for the Koi part of myself that still burned steadily deep within my belly, I coaxed the flame into a short-lived spurting flare. Burn. The flame eagerly consumed Yukiko’s dream. As soon as I felt the icy agony being drawn into me, the world spun on its axis, the white disappeared, and I was lying on tatami next to Ken, staring up into Midori’s worried face.

“Are you okay?”

No. Not okay. Very far from okay, thank you very much. I tried to sit up, and instantly wished I’d kept one of the airplane sick bags.

“What were you trying to do?” Midori demanded of Yukiko. She sat regally, hands on her folded knees, expression serene. Whether she meant to hurt or control me with that dream I didn’t know, but I suspected it wasn’t something she worried herself over. I’d gotten her message, though.

Yukiko was from the Council, but she pretty clearly felt the same way as The Eight about the Black Pearl. Her vision of Dad eating the Black Pearl’s dream was suffused with a dark, treacly wrongness, which left a burnt espresso grittiness on my tongue. And it had hurt, as if that wrongness was the force disrupting the chill, peaceful beauty Yukiko carried within her.

Oh Dad. What did you do?

It hadn’t really hit home yet that the Dad I knew from Portland when I was growing up was actually a reinvented man. I didn’t want him to be the man from Yukiko’s memory. It felt like betrayal. But how could I be angry at him for stuff he did before I was born? I had enough anger on my plate from him keeping me ignorant all these years, even if it was out of love.

“I think she’s on your side,” I said in a husky voice. Midori held out a glass of chilled mugi-cha, barley tea. I grimaced. Dirty dish water appealed to me more.

“She talked to you? You communicated with Yukiko-sama?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

Murase came over and folded himself into a mirror of Yukiko’s formal seiza. “You feel it, don’t you? The Black Pearl has turned dark. Despairing.”

Yukiko turned the glacial ice on Murase, and gave a long, slow nod.

“But what of Tojo and Kawano-san?”

Yukiko lazily blinked, and though I swore not a muscle moved in her face, when her eyes opened, her expression was of disdain.

“I don’t think she’s afraid of the Council,” said Kwaskwi from the table, propping up his head on one fist.

“How can you be sure?” Murase asked of me. “Maybe you misunderstood.”

“It tasted true,” I said. “I think it was a memory-dream. I’ve never encountered a false memory-dream before.”

“If you’re willing to help us, that changes quite a lot,” Murase said. Midori tried to urge the mugi-cha on me again, and I gave a little wave under my nose to signal no thanks.

“Isn’t it almost dinner time?” said Kwaskwi. His fingers tapped a thoughtful tattoo on his skull.

Dinner time? No wonder my tummy feels sloshy and empty. I guess we skipped lunch. I sat up, relieved when the room stayed firmly still and the bit of energy from Yukiko’s dream fizzed and popped along my limbs instead of creating a migraine.

Kwaskwi gave a slow grin. “Pon-suma should drive me into town to get some food for everyone. Then you’ll have time to scheme.”

Pon-suma did not look pleased by the idea, but Midori and Murase quickly gave instructions for a local supermarket that did dinner bento and handed him a sheaf of pink and blue yen notes from which dour bald men glowered.

After they left, Midori went to find Ben, leaving me with Murase, Yukiko, and my two comatose guys on the floor.

“Herai-san has to go back to Tokyo with the Council,” said Murase. “Kawano-san and Tojo-san will not agree to anything less. And I admit I didn’t realize the extent of Herai-san’s deterioration. There are facilities in Tokyo that can better care for him.”

Yukiko gave a slight dip of her chin.

“But if you could get them to leave Koi-chan here…” Murase trailed off.

Yukiko pointed her chin at Ken.

“The Bringer is a complication. Maybe we could keep him here as the Council’s eyes and ears?”

This time she responded with an arched eyebrow.

“No, he’s too weak, isn’t he? Tojo won’t allow it.”

This is the weirdest war council. One-sided conversation didn’t seem to faze Yukiko and Murase, but I was antsy. And tired. And hungry. “Look, I’m Hafu, but don’t automatically assume I’ll blindly follow your agenda. You kind of wrecked my goodwill by the kidnapping and tricking me into touching the Black Pearl.”

Murase stiffened. “Surely you see now why that was necessary? We are at odds with the Council—forced to keep an ancient one imprisoned solely for their own moribund, blind goals. They care solely that Japan has the Black Pearl’s power.”

“And I care solely for Dad!” Well, and Marlin. Maybe Ken. But Murase and Yukiko didn’t need to be all up in my romantic business. “You just said the Council can take better care of him!”

“You are one of us no matter what you feel, a mix of human and Kind. Growing up with that experience gives you the same empathy, the wider understanding of the beautiful diversity of the world and how it is changing, as Hafu born here.”

Wrong. I am not the same.

Coming to Japan, embracing the Baku part of myself like Ken urged; this was somehow magically supposed to make me belong, integrate into a group, a family, I’d always been missing. The Kind. But I was realizing that I’d been naïve on several levels. The more the Kind’s political cracks were revealed, the more I didn’t quite fit with either The Eight Span Mirror or the Council. I’d grown up believing myself entirely human. Whatever wider understanding Murase referred to, I’m sure it wasn’t this “I’m just a human girl with a side of psychotic break” thing I had going on.

“I’m not saying I won’t try to help, just that I’m unclear about everything. You can’t just pack Dad off to Tokyo with the Council. I will not be separated from him again.”

“You have to stay here.” Murase was getting quite agitated. Yukiko’s icy regard swiveled his direction. Pursing her lips, she gave him an obvious chillax, dude look.

Before I could try to explain my inner ball of tangled feelings again, Kwaskwi swept into the room with two plastic shopping bags bulging with square containers and a pouty expression I’d never seen before. “Come on, Koi, let’s ditch this Popsicle stand.”