Total pages in book: 93
Estimated words: 92392 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 462(@200wpm)___ 370(@250wpm)___ 308(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 92392 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 462(@200wpm)___ 370(@250wpm)___ 308(@300wpm)
What happened?
I’d just been voicing that to myself, but to my surprise, Goryū answered. One of the planes fired at the antiaircraft gun.
No.
Yes. The gun is gone now.
Another boom followed. Then another, walking across the island in a line. Then the sound of more planes.
The few antiaircraft guns remaining answered. Their shells were long flat tearing roars. One after another.
I pressed the accelerator to the floor. How do I use you in this war?
Goryū's great head swung forward as he soared. I don't know.
Why not?
You have never been in control of me before.
Yes, but you know what you can do.
I know many things.
I pursed my lips. What you did to the trees back there. We can do that to the men?
We can. They will weaken, but they will not crack like the trees.
Good enough. Still following him, I took another bend and the headlights swept across a cluster of Scales in the brush—seven men crouched behind a fallen log with rifles laid across the bark, faces turning toward the cart's light and away again.
Their masks caught the beam. Solid red and black. Eyes carved deep. They were still as the trunks behind them. What can you do to the planes?
I don't know. Let's see.
Hunger moved through the smoke of his body. The wings stretched wider. The trailing wisps reached across a gap between the trees, and I felt that same hunger echo in my own chest and recognized it as mine too.
Good. We are both ready.
We are.
How far can you go from me and still hear me?
I am you and you are me. He banked left.
I turned the wheel to follow without deciding to, as if the answer had been in my hands before it reached my head.
Distance is not the limit. You are.
What does that mean?
I can go far.
Far enough to go after my father?
Goryū’s body shimmered gold. Our father.
The correction sliced into me.
Yes. . .our father.
He is on the way here. He is in the air.
My hands tightened on the wheel. How do you know that?
He carries a darkness I can see many miles away. Goryū's head turned slowly toward the northwest, beyond the island's edge where Akiro's planes had come from and would keep coming. And it is in the air right now. Darker than the sky. He’s scared.
"Good." The word came out cold and clean. "So. . .the Fox is coming to the island?"
He is. Goryū turned right. His tail swept through the canopy and a shower of leaves and broken branches fell across the path ahead. This way.
I wrenched the wheel.
The warmth in my chest flared again—more rage from my Tiger.
What is wrong? Who is bothering her?
She is bothering someone else.
What do you mean?
Our Tiger’s rage smells like another’s death.
What? I don’t understand.
She is safe.
I pulled my right hand off the wheel and pressed it flat against my sternum. Her rage was still there—hotter now, tighter, aimed with a precision that told me she had found her target. Whatever she had walked toward in that basement, she had arrived.
I wanted to turn the cart around.
Every animal part of me wanted to point the headlights east and drive until I found her. I wanted to feel the heat of her in my arms instead of at a distance through my chest. I wanted to hold her. I wanted to kiss her fury away, let it burn against me, so she understood she was facing nothing alone.
She is safe.
I know but—
War.
Yes.
Our men are here.
I stopped the cart, grabbed my mask, and headed off. Show me.
Chapter twelve
Pieces on a Board
Kenji
I smelled my men before I saw them. Gun oil. Fresh sweat. The sharp mineral bite of recently fired casings. Then the forest thinned by degrees—trunks spacing wider, canopy pulling back, moonlight falling through in larger pieces.
Goryū dropped low, folded his wings, and coiled into the dark above a ridge of high brush.
There, I saw silhouettes of many men off in the distance.
I walked on.
The noise of war sounded louder here. The crack and stammer of sustained rifle fire pressed close enough that I felt each shot in my sternum. Men shouted. Metal scraped across metal. A voice screamed a name, and then was cut short.
Then more gunfire, continuous, overlapping, a tearing roar that filled the whole sky and pressed down through the canopy like a second darkness.
The ground shook again.
An explosion came from the south.
Leaves trembled on every branch around me.
I moved through the brush toward the sound and saw dozens of Scales crouched in the undergrowth, pressed against trunks, or prone in the leaf-litter with rifles at their shoulders. They wore their plain masks—solid red, black, or gray. In the broken moonlight, they had stopped looking like men and more like demons with horns, hollow eyes, and open mouths. Row after row. Absolutely still and watching the open ground ahead.