A Mortal Song (11 page)

“I’m fine,” I said. “It just startled me.”

I expected control to take a lot of trial and error, and braced myself as Chiyo and I linked hands again. But her mistake seemed to have made her determined to avoid any others. She sent me a shaky image of her gorgeous flower. Then she shared the taste of her favorite ice cream, the jangling harmonies and sweep of lights at a stadium concert, the rush she got on the school track just before she crossed the finish line. With each attempt, the impressions became clearer, until I was almost there with her in her memory.

“You’re a runner?” I asked, letting the last sensation linger. The exhilaration of it felt almost like dancing.

“Sprinter for the track team since my first year of junior high,” Chiyo said, giving me a thumbs up. “So the next time we’ve got a pack of ghosts chasing us, as long as I don’t have some crazy magic burning me up, you can be sure they won’t catch me.”

“You may have inherited that talent from your mother,” Takeo remarked. “Her affinities to air and water make her the swiftest of any on her feet.”

“So you two know my... my kami parents?” Chiyo said. She looked down at her hands, clenching and relaxing her fingers. “I guess everyone does, if they’re the leaders of all the kami. Is everyone going to be okay about me just showing up out of nowhere?”

“You’ll have saved them,” I said. “And they would welcome you anyway, once they hear the story.”

“What else do they do?” Chiyo asked, raising her head, her expression avid now. “My parents. Other than whatever rulership things, I mean. Do they—”

My chest tightened so sharply for a second I couldn’t breathe. “We can talk about that later,” I said, cutting her off. “Right now we have to focus on the training—to make sure they’re still alive for you to save.”

The glint in Chiyo’s eyes wavered. “Oh,” she said. “Yes, of course.” She set her hands on her hips. “What’s next?”

I paused, willing my scattered emotions aside. “Why don’t we try sending without touching?” I said. With a thread of thanks to Midori, I held out my hand and let a thin, silvery ribbon rise from it into the air. It swayed gently to a melody I felt more than heard.

“You send your energy out, just like you sent it to me,” I said. “But because there isn’t a place right there for it to go, you have to concentrate on shaping it and holding it in that shape. If you stop paying attention...” I let my mind go blank, and the ribbon disintegrated.

Chiyo stared down at her hands, her brow knitting. Then she laughed. A tiny, swirling ball of ki danced in her grasp. She drew her palms apart, stretching the ball larger, and tossed it up in the air. “This isn’t so hard. It feels like—like I could have done it all along, but I forgot I knew how. Hey, I bet you I could—”

The edges of her body glimmered. “Chiyo!” I said, but my alarm was unnecessary. Her body faded into a gleaming afterimage of itself. She blinked, and then grinned at me, even more luminescent than usual in her ethereal state.

My mouth had dropped open. It had taken me
hours
to learn how to do that, with Mother and Father explaining and demonstrating patiently, after I’d spent months mastering other more basic skills. And they’d told me I’d picked it up faster than most did. Chiyo had managed it in a matter of minutes.

“Most of the ghosts were like this when they attacked us, weren’t they?” Chiyo said. “How do you fight people you can’t really touch? Can
they
hurt
you
?” She waved her ethereal arm through a stone lantern.

“Ki can touch ki, just as matter can touch matter,” Takeo said. “Whether you keep your physical body or shift to fight with energy only, you can direct your ki to affect them, and they can twist yours with theirs. You have to concentrate more, and it feels a little different, but many of the techniques are the same. The ghosts prefer to stay in their natural state because it requires a great deal of energy for them to form physical bodies. But their ki is more limited than ours, so even if we’re fighting them on their own plane, we usually have the advantage.”

“That makes sense,” Chiyo said. She jabbed at the air with a crackle of ki. “Can we try that now?”

“Why don’t you take over for a bit?” I said to Takeo. “Combat is more your area than mine.”

He was a good teacher—I’d learned most of what I knew of martial arts from him. And if Chiyo touched me again, our energy mingling, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to keep her from seeing the mess of emotions now churning inside me.

She was born for this, I reminded myself as I climbed onto the shrine building’s platform. She had nearly two decades of suppressed ki clamoring to be put to use. We’d have no chance at all of saving Mt. Fuji if she couldn’t handle it so well. And no matter how strong she was, I could still help, as long as I had Midori with me.

I knew all of that, but my stubborn human feelings wouldn’t settle. They whipped around inside me like branches in a storm. I leaned against the worn wooden railing, wrestling with myself as I watched Takeo teach Chiyo how to fight.

She was picking that up quickly too, maybe because she was already an athlete. She moved easily and precisely, and when Takeo demonstrated how to angle her hand or position her stance, she always did it just as he’d shown her from then on. She was still grinning, but there was an intensity in her expression that made her beautiful.

They looked right together, I realized as Takeo cupped her elbow and explained how to use ki to more effectively escape an attacker’s grasp. The smile he flashed at her when she successfully broke from his hold, as warm as those I’d seen so often directed at me, made my gut clench.

He wasn’t frustrated with her now. He was impressed. Wouldn’t that make the perfect story: the palace guard falling in love with the girl he’d been tasked to bring home?

Footsteps tapped across the platform toward me. Keiji threw his arms over the railing and looked into the courtyard. After a minute, he rolled his gaze toward me.

“Are you just lost in thought, or is something actually happening down there?”

“They’re sparring,” I said. How strange it must be to see only the empty yard. As I would have, if not for Midori.

“Do you want to watch?” I asked, offering my hand. Keiji glanced at it, at me, and then took it.

His skin was smooth and dry against mine. I sent him a wisp of ki so light I doubted he’d even feel it, but enough to give him a hint of kami sight. My own vision shivered, and the forms in the courtyard dimmed slightly, but I resisted the urge to draw more energy from my dragonfly friend. She was giving me so much of herself already.

Keiji’s grip tightened. “Hey!” he said. “That’s amazing. They really are there.”

Like all living things, he had his own ki. It whispered against my palm. He didn’t have enough to use it for anything more than staying alive, unless he trained like the human warriors and monks Ayame had told me stories of. But it was there, as my own must have been even when Midori left me.

I caught the quiver of his awe, a mix of pride and fear at finding himself here, and underneath the rest, a pang of sadness. A sort of sadness I recognized too well: loss, and desperately missing what was gone. It made me want to curl my fingers between his, as if I could somehow ease the pain. I looked over at him, wondering where
his
sadness came from.

“How can you do this?” he said, turning to me in the same moment. “If you’re not even—”

His gaze shifted to the back of my head.

“Ah ha! The dragonfly’s a kami, isn’t it? It’s helping you.”

I had the urge to rip back every shred of ki I’d shared with him. The closest I could manage was to pull away my hand.

“I told you before, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

His smile went crooked. “Ack, sorry. I wasn’t trying to upset you.”

When I didn’t answer, he dropped to his knees, as easily as if it were something he did every day. “Please forgive me,” he said, holding out his hand beseechingly. “I meant no offense.”

“Does that usually work?” I asked, keeping my eyes fixed on the courtyard. From the corner of my vision, I saw Keiji shrug.

“I haven’t tried it enough to draw a clear conclusion. Should I kowtow to the floor? Would that help?”

He started to without waiting for a response, and I found myself grabbing his shoulder before his forehead touched the ground. “Stop it,” I hissed. “You look ridiculous. Chiyo can still see
you
, you know.”

He glanced up at me, his expression fraught but a mischievous gleam in his eyes. “I’ll stop if you smile.”

My lips twitched of their own accord. “Okay, that’ll do,” he said. He pulled himself to his feet and leaned back against the railing.

“Anyway,” he said, “I already told you I’m not after Chiyo. So I can make a fool of myself for you if I want.”

My pulse skipped in an oddly giddy way. “Well,
I
don’t want you to,” I said, ignoring it. “We’re trying to save the world’s most sacred mountain from an invasion of demons and yakuza ghosts and who knows what else—I don’t think foolishness is going to do us any good.”

Keiji’s head jerked around. “Yakuza ghosts?” he said. “What does that mean?”

“It seems the demon who’s leading the ghosts, he used to be a man, a man who was murdered.”
Kenta Omori.
“And he was a criminal when he was alive. Chiyo and I did some research on the computer—she called him
yakuza
. From what she said, some of the other ghosts might be too.” I paused. Curiosity itched at me despite myself. “If you don’t care about impressing her, then why was it so important to you to come with us?”

“I don’t want to see the world taken over by some demon any more than you do,” he said, and hesitated, tweaking his glasses. Suddenly he looked almost as vulnerable as when he’d been sleeping on the shrine floor. “And I was kind of hoping, if I do help... Do you think maybe afterward the kami would do something for
me
?”

“I—I don’t know,” I said. I’d been thinking the exact same thing for the last day, but hearing the idea come out of his mouth caught me off guard.

“It’s not even for me,” Keiji said hastily. “I mean—it’s my brother— A couple years ago he had this, ah, accident, and now he can’t do most of the things he used to. He always looked out for me, you know? But now it’s so much harder for us to even hang out, and he’d just like things to go back to more like they were before. And I would too. If they could.”

The loss I’d felt in him. He lowered his eyes, as if embarrassed to have said so much, but his wish was so much less selfish than mine.

“I’d imagine Chiyo’s parents would do what they could,” I said. “They did heal Mr. Ikeda’s sister. And of course they’d want to repay you for helping Chiyo.”

“You really think so?” he said.

“I’m sure of it.”

He gave me that slow grin that made my heart thump, as if we were conspirators together, and held out his hand on the railing.

“Let me see again?” he asked, tilting his head toward the courtyard.

I’d almost forgotten about Chiyo’s training. My emotions seemed to have scrambled into a completely different but no less tangled jumble. Maybe it wasn’t fair to blame Keiji for that, though. I laid my fingers over his. He kept watching me for a moment longer before turning to the yard. It hurt a little, for no reason I could explain, to lose his gaze.

Takeo and Chiyo were standing side by side near the edge of the courtyard, using one of the stone lanterns as a target. At first it looked as though they were simply staring at it. Then the lantern rocked and tumbled over, and Chiyo raised her hands with a cheer.

He was teaching her how to send out ki without moving. Shifting your energy was ten times harder when you didn’t use your limbs to direct it. And she had just toppled a stone figure that had to weigh more than she did.

Maybe we could leave for Sage Rin’s valley as early as this afternoon. That was something to be glad for.

“I’m starting to think it’s the ghosts who should be scared, not me,” Keiji said with a laugh, but a tremor of anxiety echoed through his palm into mine. “When we go to get the Imperial treasures—is it going to be like last night? That was pretty freaky.”

“There’d be no reason for the demon to send ghosts to protect the treasures unless he knows about the prophecy,” I said, “and I can’t see how he could. My— Chiyo’s parents would never give that information up, and none of the other kami know.”

“Good to hear,” he said. “Oh!” He dug into his pocket with his free hand. “I had some convenience store sweet breads in my bag. Figured you might be hungry too. You want one?”

At the sight of the doughy circle in its plastic wrapper, my stomach growled. My hand twitched, and I caught myself just before I reached out.

He was offering because he assumed that, like him, I needed food. Because of his guess that I was human, not kami. If I took it, I’d be proving him right.

Suddenly the thought of keeping up the charade any longer exhausted me. What did it matter? He’d figured out the truth; he didn’t believe my evasions. He didn’t seem to have any intention of giving away my secret to Chiyo. And I
was
hungry.

“Thank you,” I said.

Even though he couldn’t see anything there while my hands were otherwise occupied, Keiji surveyed the courtyard as I unwrapped and wolfed down the sugary bun. When I’d finished eating, my mouth sticky but my stomach satisfied, he turned back to me.

“Did they tell you?” he said. “When you were growing up on the mountain—did you know you’d been switched?”

There was a relief in being able to admit it. “No,” I said. “I found out three days ago.”

He winced. “That’s got to suck. You think you’re the star of the show, and it turns out you’re only the understudy.”

“Understudy?” I said.

“Like in theater.” When my confusion didn’t fade, he went on. “I was in drama club one year. When you put on a play, you have all the actors, and then you have understudies for the biggest roles. People who learn all the lines and cues just in case the real actor gets sick or something. But they don’t usually end up doing anything more than prompting lines from the side of the stage. I had to do that a few times.”