Steel Crow Saga Page 4

  “Like Daito Arishima,” Lee finished, catching on.

  “Most Tomodanese highborns were good about destroying sensitive documents in anticipation of their capture. But the Li-Quan has located enough files that can be traced back to the Arishima household to conclude that he didn’t have time to properly dispose of them.”

  “Right, got it,” Lee said. “You don’t know what the guy looks like, and you’re looking for the photograph of him I found. That about cover it?”

  “You’re pleasingly shrewd, Lee Yeon-Ji.”

  For a second, Lee sized up her options. There was definitely a way to string this slumming princess along. But even as Lee started to form that plan, she hesitated. The earnest hunger on the princess’s face was exactly what she looked for in a potential mark. But this woman had also saved her life. And she’d talked about helping out Lee’s people, which was more than Lee had ever heard from any other Shang she’d met.

  And honestly, that earnestness was its own kind of charming.

  “I lost the photo,” she said. “Hard to keep ahold of things, with the way I live.” Xiulan’s entire body slumped with disappointment. “But that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten what the Iron Prince looks like.” The princess perked back up. “If you’re looking to go after him, I can help.”

  Just like that, Xiulan was practically bouncing in her seat again. “Truly excellent news!” she said, before her enthusiasm dimmed a degree. “But I imagine your help, without which I cannot proceed on my mission, will come at a steep cost, yes?”

  “A cost ain’t steep if it’s worth what you get back,” said Lee. “Now, that bit you said about helping the Jeongsonese people…that’s nice and all, but it’s a long-term investment. I’ve never had the luxury of a guaranteed long term, though. I help you do this thing, and what do I get out of it?”

  The light in Xiulan’s eye changed. Her pipe drooped in her mouth.

  “Disappointed, are you?” said Lee. “Hoping I’d be civic-minded and come along on this trip just for the virtue of the cause? You said you read my file, so let me ask: Did it ever say in there that virtue was what kept my stomach full? That patriotism ever kept my head out of the rain?”

  Xiulan’s shoulders slumped. Lee felt a twinge of sympathy for her, then immediately tamped it down. Easy, Lee, she thought. Don’t go soft just because she’s got good cheekbones.

  She didn’t need Lee’s sympathy. She was a princess. She already had everything.

  “Name it,” Xiulan said after a moment. “What is the price for your help? To the best of my ability, I’ll provide it.”

  Lee didn’t have to think about it, but for appearances’ sake she pretended to for a few moments before answering.

  “I want a fat government salary,” she said eventually. “Maybe a nice new dress, the blacker the better.”

  Xiulan raised an eyebrow, amused. “Is that all?”

  Lee shook her head, then leaned forward hungrily. “And I want me a shade.”

  The Marlin carved a wake across the ocean like chalk on a slate. The wooden ship bore no sails or engine, or even oars. Instead, just beneath the surface of the waves swam a massive shark-shade, pulling the ship by the thick cables spilling over the Marlin’s fore. Every so often, the creature would drift closer to the surface and its human-sized dorsal fin would stab up at the twilight sky before slipping back below the blue.

  The Marlin was as sturdy a vessel as any in the Sanbuna fleet, though Sergeant Tala had more than a few misgivings about the constant creaking of its floorboards. Unlike the steel ships of Tomoda or the ironclads of Shang and Dahal, the Marlin was made in the traditional Sanbuna way: entirely of wood. The ship was a majestic sight, the kind that would have inspired Tala’s seafaring ancestors to song and verse. But the wood construction wasn’t just about piety for the history of the Sanbu Islands. It was a necessary precaution, given the ship’s cargo.

  So all Tala could do was grip the wooden railing of the Marlin as she glowered at the horizon, and at the shades-forsaken isle that lay somewhere beyond it.

  Tala commanded the 13-52-2: the Second Platoon, Fifty-Second Company, Thirteenth Regiment of the army of the newly liberated Republic of Sanbu, though at the moment she and her platoon were technically marines. She was a woman of twenty hard-earned years, taller than most of the women under her command and shorter than most of the men. The neat dark-green uniform she wore had become standard issue only in the last two years of the war; before, the Army of the Republic had been a piecemeal rebel militia whose “uniform” had been “as much green shit as you can find.”

  Though she sometimes missed the old emerald motley she’d worn as a jungle-runner, she’d appreciated that when the time had come to take the fight to Tomoda itself, she’d landed on its beaches dressed as a real soldier. But despite the decisive victory the Garden Revolution’s forces had won against the steelhounds on their own blighted turf, and the snazzy uniform Tala had gotten out of the whole ordeal, the sergeant had left the island of Tomoda with zero desire to ever return.

  Her seaward scowl deepened.

  No griping, soldier, she chided herself. You volunteered.

  She turned her attention back to the deck. A few of her marines were helping the Marlin’s crew struggle to re-secure a huge, heavy bamboo crate. The crate held the one car that they hadn’t had room for in the hold, so it’d been stuck topside for the whole voyage. Normally, they could’ve chained it in place, but the no-metal rule meant they’d had to make do with thick rope.

  But that only accounted for four of her command. The majority of them stood in a circle, clearing a makeshift arena where Private Minip’s shade sparred with Private Kapona.

  Kapona was a tall woman with a brawler’s swagger and a blacksmith’s build. She’d stripped to her waist for this fight, and the dying sunlight glistened across her bare back. Her opponent, a monkey-shade, pranced around her. Pacting had gifted it with human size, a pair of long whiplike tails, and, on the white fur of its inner thigh, a pactmark—a yellow six-pointed star. When you saw that, it was easy to figure why Private Minip had named him Sunny.

  Kapona swung a fist, but Sunny easily dodged it. His tails threshed the air excitedly as he darted this way and that. All Kapona’s punches went wild, and Sunny let out a taunting whoop.

  “Hoy, Kapona,” Private Minip called. “He says he’s thrown shits that fight better than you.”

  Laughter rose from the onlookers. In the privacy of the sidelines, Tala allowed herself a small smile. As their sergeant, she preferred to play the aloof superior whenever possible. But she had to be fair: For Minip, that’d been a pretty good joke.

  Kapona’s hands curled into fists, but her mouth curled into a smile. “You tell him that he’s the one getting thrown next.”

  Minip rolled his eyes. “Tanga. He can hear you. He’s not—”

  Kapona gave up a growl and charged, an unstoppable mass of muscle and momentum. She didn’t have a shade of her own, but Tala had always assumed that if Kapona ever found the right animal to pact with, it would be a bull.

  Once again, Sunny easily leapt out of the way. But this time, instead of turning around to press the attack, Kapona just kept going. Her squadmates threw themselves clear as she plowed straight into Minip, tackling him to the deck.

  Safe from the eyes of her platoon, Tala chuckled softly to herself.

  Kapona emerged from the tussle with Minip in a headlock. “Call it!” she said. “Call it!”

  Minip’s round face turned red as he struggled futilely against Kapona. Then he groaned and extended a hand toward Sunny. The shade burst into a cloud of yellow energy, which sucked itself back into Minip’s body. Grinning, Kapona let him go, then hauled him to his feet. “You almost had me that time.” She patted him on the head.

  “You cheated,” Minip said sourly.

  A shrug rolled thro
ugh her huge shoulders. “I won. Hoy, Sarge!” she called to Tala. “Pretty good, eh?”

  Tala wiped her smile away before she looked up to respond. “Your footwork’s still shit, Private.”

  The onlookers laughed. Once again, Kapona met the dig with a wide grin. “You should take a step into the ring, sir. Show us pups how it’s done.”

  “Yeah,” said Private Radnan, a man with a wiry build and a sleepy face. He never lost those half-lidded eyes or that easy smile, even when Tala had seen him carving up oncoming steelhounds with his utility knife. “Take a turn, Sarge. You can fight my shade.”

  “No, mine,” offered up Private Ompaco. It was a tired joke; her shade was a large stingray who, like the other aquatic shades, had no place on deck.

  “Sarge has better things to do.” A broad, handsome man in a navy officer’s uniform emerged from the lower decks. His green coat hung lazily open, rippling in the breeze. He was Captain Maki, known to friend and foe alike as the Hammerhead. It was a nickname well earned: both for his ferocity at sea, and because his shade, Tivron, was a gigantic hammerhead shark whose teeth could puncture a steel hull. “It’s her turn down below.”

  In disciplined unison, the entire 13-52-2 turned toward him and bowed in salute. As a fellow officer, Tala only had to give him a shallow bow. And because he was Maki and she was Tala, she only ever had to do it when there were others watching.

  “Guess you’ll have to get along without me,” Tala called to her troops as she stepped past them. “Try not to light everything on fire while I’m gone.” And then her feet deposited her right in front of Maki, to whom she bowed again. “Sir.”

  Maki rolled his tawny eyes. “Am I ever gonna get you to stop calling me that?”

  “Not likely, sir,” she said, then smiled a tiny bit. Unless she was by herself, for Tala smiling was mostly something other people did. But Maki and Maki alone had a way of making her behave more like other people. “How is he today?”

  “In as fine a fucking mood as ever,” he replied. He fiddled with the pommel of his officer’s machete, like he always did when he was irritated. He indicated for her to follow him down belowdecks. “The closer he gets to home, the bigger a prick he becomes. He’s lucky the voyage was so short. Another day or two, and I’d have popped him on the jaw, right between the bars.”

  “That’s a pretty picture you’re painting, sir.”

  “Idiot should know better,” Maki grumbled as the two of them descended the wooden steps. “Talking back to a captain on his own ship…the princeling’s got a death wish. And if my orders didn’t hold me back, I’d grant it.”

  “You’d have to beat me to it,” Tala said darkly. “We’re too honest for our own good. Why else would the general sucker us into a mission like this one?” That wasn’t strictly true, or even kind of true; it had taken General Erega virtually no effort to convince Tala to volunteer.

  “Yeah.” Maki sighed as they reached the second deck: the galley, the mess, and the cramped bunks that accommodated both the 13-52-2 and Maki’s own crew. He’d invited Tala to share his cabin, but that was a door she didn’t want to reopen, in every sense. “Well, at least she put us together on one last job, neh?”

  “Neh,” Tala grunted. Certainly, she couldn’t think of any other person she trusted to sail her safely into Tomodanese waters.

  His smile faded. Captain Maki was the kind of man who spent his smiles like they were coin and the world was a card table, so when he got serious, she knew to listen up.

  “Tala,” he said, “what’re you going to do after the war’s over?”

  Tala eyed a few nearby crewmen and gave him a small shake of her head.

  Maki waved it aside. “You think I don’t know all the spots on my own ship where I can’t be overheard?”

  Tala’s mouth twisted. Of course she hadn’t thought that. She had, however, been thinking about this conversation. Specifically, about how it was one she didn’t ever want to have.

  “Haven’t figured that out just yet,” she said after a moment. She hoped her vagueness would end the conversation, but instead it just sparked a light behind Maki’s warm brown eyes.

  “I get it,” he said. “Spend enough time in uniform, and eventually you can’t even imagine wearing anything else. Why d’you think I signed up for this mission, same as you?”

  Not “same as,” Tala thought with a tiny pang of guilt as she listened on. Because of.

  “But once this mission’s done with, that’s it for us. You and me, we’ll both be decommissioned. And that means we’ll both be free to figure out what comes next. What I’m trying to say is, what do you say to making that a group project?”

  Inside, she reeled. Somewhere in another life, there was a Tala who had been waiting the whole war for him to ask that question. But that Tala wasn’t her, couldn’t be her.

  So she blinked at him and deadpanned, “You’re supposed to get down on one knee when you propose, sir.”

  Maki laughed. “I know better. All I’m saying is, it’s always been one thing or another between us—”

  “I seem to remember a whole war,” Tala continued to deadpan, while a spike of panic ran through the back of her head.

  “—but this time next week, there’ll be nothing left but you and me. So why not make a go of it, neh?” He reached for her, though he waited for her tacit permission before he put a hand on her shoulder. And of course, her heart chose that exact moment to flutter.

  She wanted to say yes. Shades take her, did she want to say yes.

  But with Tala, as long as she lived, there would always be a “but.”

  “Now’s not the time to be thinking about this,” Tala said. “Not when we still have a job to do.”

  Maki had the grace to look only gently crestfallen, but Tala saw his fingers toying with his machete’s pommel again. “You’re right, of course.” He sighed. “Mind on your duty. That’s why the general picked you for this.” His fingers picked up the pace. “I’m going to go…check some of the maps in my cabin.”

  “Yeah,” Tala said. “I know the way.”

  Maki flashed her a wobbly grin before he turned and left her. Tala watched him go, hating herself. Since she was a marine sergeant and Maki a navy captain, they’d crossed paths a few times in the war. And every time they did, it kicked up a lot of inconvenient questions in her head. She would’ve been lying to say she hadn’t entertained the thought a time or two. But anytime she felt tempted, she thought back to the faces of those she’d lost to Tomoda’s bullets and bombs. Her ina, who made the neighborhood’s best adobo. Her ama, who always sang while he cleaned the house. And Dimangan.

  Always, always him.

  That was all it took to remind herself that as long as she lived, her family would always have to come first.

  She pointed a finger at the floor next to her. “Beaky.”

  Purple energy erupted from her fingertip and a moment later coalesced into a fully formed shade. Hers had once been a crow, but he was larger than an eagle now, with a proud crest of black feathers atop his head. Their shadepact had painted three interlocking purple rings across his black breast feathers, a mirror of the pactmark emblazoned over Tala’s own sternum.

  He cocked his head to the side, and she felt his annoyance like it was a chill behind a closed door. As with most shades, Beaky didn’t communicate in words, but it was easy enough to suss out his meaning: What now?

  “Come on,” she said. “We’re going to go see your favorite person.”

  His annoyance intensified, but nonetheless Beaky followed her down the next flight of stairs, hopping just behind her the whole way.

  The lowest deck was stacked high with wooden crates lashed to the floor to prevent them from sliding. But the real precious cargo was at the very back, sitting on his cot in a cell specially made of wood, like the ship itself, so he couldn’t
work his country’s sorcery on its metal bars.

  He was short, and possibly as young as she. His skin was fair, his hair long and black and pulled into a tight round topknot revealing a severe widow’s peak. His thin face was adorned with a scraggly mustache and goatee, neither of which suited him well at all. He wore round spectacles and a nondescript blue yukata. Such was the only splendor left for Iron Prince Jimuro, heir to the Mountain Throne of Tomoda.

  Until she and her squad went and crowned the bastard, anyway.

  “Sergeant,” the prince said in flawless Sanbuna. It always grated on Tala how easily he turned her native tongue against her. Her grasp of Tomodanese was nowhere near as firm. “So nice of you to join me. I was just on the verge of getting bored, and we can’t have that, now can we?”

  Tala regarded him with cold eyes and said nothing. She couldn’t trust herself to. The Tomodanese people worshipped this sneering brat as a living god. Extinguishing his holy bloodline would have been a shot in the heart those monsters never could have recovered from, and no one was more deserving of the right to deliver that blow than the people of Sanbu. General Erega was a military genius, the head of their new republic, and a personal hero of Tala’s, but it was only out of respect for the woman that Tala had volunteered for this mission, and only out of respect for her orders that the Iron Prince still drew breath.

  Her fist clenched tight as her jaw. We should have delivered you home in pieces.

  She took up her usual position in front of his cell and stood at rigid attention. For the next four hours, this would be her job. Technically, as an officer she could have been exempt from this duty and pawned it off onto one of her marines. But when the general had pulled the 13-52-2 aside to offer them a chance to volunteer for this mission, it’d been Tala who had said yes, leaving her squad no real choice but to go with her. With that knowledge lying heavily across her shoulders, Tala had been determined to put herself through everything her troops went through…including time down in the brig.