Teshi slipped her little cold fingers into Komako’s. “It’s okay, Ko,” she whispered.
Just exactly as if she knew.
But she couldn’t know, there was no way she could know. Komako searched her face, feeling as she did so as if she were being dragged forward, dragged toward a brightness that must hurt her and her sister, dragged toward the two strange men and whatever truth they’d brought with them, and though she swallowed and closed her eyes and tried not to think about it she could not stop herself, she couldn’t, and then it was as if she were falling into a light that was like dying.
Oh, Teshi, she thought suddenly, fiercely, as she fell. Oh, Teshi, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—
Something loosened inside her then, some hard knot of tension all at once was dissolving, and Komako felt an awful sickening in her stomach, and she gasped back a sob and opened her eyes, looking wildly about in the glow of the brazier. Teshi’s head was in her lap, eyes closed, like she was sleeping, exactly like she was sleeping. But it wasn’t sleeping.
16
THE DRUGHR
Years later, long after he’d ceased being what he was, after he’d stood in the gray rooms beyond the orsine with his skin steaming, and the apparitions with their mournful eyes had gathered to meet him; after he’d become, yes, what he’d always been fated to become, an extension of the drughr, the dust rising inside him like a smoldering darkness until he no longer remembered even his own name; after he’d killed those two children at the river crossing and been changed by it, changed utterly, the many betrayals and lies of the institute coming clear in that moment, and above all, after he’d gone hunting for the baby, the child at Cairndale, the shining boy—still, in a small locked room in his heart, Jacob would remember this day, this departure, and the voyage that was to come. For this was his second beginning.
They sailed out of Tokyo bay under the flat backlit white of a sunless sky, four passengers on board the Swede’s smuggler’s bark: himself and Coulton, Komako in her grief, and that strange stowaway, the invisible girl, Ribs.
As they cleared the bar, and the sails crackled and filled with wind, Jacob watched Komako at the railing. Her eyes were fixed on the receding rooftops of her city, her face was open and sad. She’d hardly spoken, had said nothing about her little sister, nothing at all, and he knew by her silence what she’d done and what must be in her. He thought of Bertolt as he’d been in the alley, all those years ago, his arms and legs loose and streaked with soot, and he wondered if he could have done the same and knew in that instant that he couldn’t have done it, his love for his brother wasn’t vast enough, or selfless enough, and he lowered his eyes, ashamed. He’d never known who he was in the world, without Bertolt there to anchor him.
After a time, he joined Komako at the stern. Gripping the railing hard in both fists as if to strangle it and staring out with her at the strange and beautiful city in its passing.
“You will not see it again, not for a long time,” he said softly.
“I hate it,” she replied.
And walked away.
Jacob watched her go, then lifted his gaze. The shadow woman, that creature of smoke and darkness, lurked silent and brooding in her black skirts beside the smooth trunk of the foremast. A sailor crouched next to her, picking oakum from a coil of rope, unaware. Jacob didn’t even know her name. It was strange, not knowing what to call her. The drughr, of course. He’d figured that much out. But not evil, maybe. Was it possible? She was with him often now, not only in sleep but also on waking, like an eerie second shadow of what might yet be. She loomed behind Coulton at the captain’s table in the evenings, while his gruff friend tore a bread roll with his thumbs. She stood unswaying on the sunlit deck while the bowsprit heaved and sank in the spray, weightless, the wind never in her skirts. In the dim cramped cabin he shared with Coulton, she often hung in the open doorway, as if not quite touching the floor, the smoke obscuring her eyes. Sometimes seeing her frightened him. Mostly, though, it just left him feeling unaccountably old, and sad.
He didn’t speak much in those first days. He’d stare in the evening lantern light at Coulton’s red face, his auburn sideburns, the way he sucked deeply on his cigar and held the smoke in his lungs with his eyes closed like a man profoundly satisfied with his lot. His friend was often in conversation with the girl Ribs, that skinny wastrel with her thatched red hair. She was always eating and she chewed with her mouth open and that gap in her teeth visible.