“Hold up a minute,” he said. “I got to have a cry.”
She grinned again. “I won’t tell no one.”
He studied her freckled features, her sly green eyes. Then he nodded. “Right. There’s no way the drughr could be this goddamn annoying. But I just might shoot you anyway.”
Ribs seemed to find this funny. “Okay, right, listen,” she said, regaining her composure. “I ain’t never seen no one else can do what I can do. Or nothing like it. Then I seen Jacob one day with the dust. At the docks in Singapore. I wanted to see what you was. So I just climbed up on board an shipped out with you, I did. I never knowed you was comin to Japan.”
“How’d a bloody lass like yourself end up at the docks in Singapore, anyway?”
She grinned. “O now that there is a woeful tale. It is sure to rend your heart, Mr. Coulton, sir.”
“I damn near killed you, lass. I thought you was a drughr.”
“A what?”
“A dru—” Coulton shook his head. “Never mind it.”
“Oh! Here’s a broadsheet for you: I ain’t a unicorn neither.”
Coulton blew out his cheeks. He was wondering if a gunshot would bring the Tokyo constabulary down on him and if it did would this kid’s body be invisible or not and if it wasn’t would it be worth it anyway.
Ribs, though, just looked more and more at ease. She rubbed her hands together, glanced briskly around her. Scratched at her red hair. “Okay. So where’s Jacob at now, then? Is he talkin to that Komako girl?”
Coulton stopped. “You know about her?”
“Hard not to, the way you two carry on.”
“How much you overheard, then? You know what it is we do?”
“Yup.”
“You know where we come from?”
“Yup.”
“Brilliant,” he muttered. “Berghast is like to have me bloody hide.” He looked at her, shaking his head. “What am I going to do with you, then? I can’t just leave you wandering about.”
Ribs blinked up at him, her short hair standing wild on her head. “Jesus, you. I ain’t been hangin around here for me own edification. I mean to go with you, of course.”
“What, back to Cairndale?”
She winked. “But not in that bloody trunk, of course.”
* * *
The warm rain was coming down in sheets now, blurring the curved rooftops.
Outside the old theater, Komako left the Englishman in the deserted street. Around the corner, rickshaws were gathering in the torchlight, sheeted against the rain. She’d offered him nothing, no assurance, no thanks. Confused by what was in her heart. He’d saved her; he’d ruined her. She’d exposed her talent and there’d be no hiding now. She steered Teshi inside, up through the dark rooms, blessedly passing no one as she went, and in the little space they shared at the top of the theater she laid her sister down on a tatami. The brazier was still lit, pulsing with heat.
Last of all, she propped wide the wooden shutter, peered out. He was still there, Jacob, a dark figure in the rain, hatless, soaked, watching the door she’d gone through. In the night he seemed eerie again, unknowable, frightening. He would wait for her only so long, she knew.
She felt a presence beside her. It was Teshi, risen from her sickbed, hollow-eyed. She put a hand on Komako’s shoulder to steady herself and the cold of it went through her.
“What does he want, Ko?” whispered Teshi. “Why does he stand there?”
“He wants me,” she said simply.
She sat then, cross-legged, with her back to the wall, and Teshi crawled over and lay her little head down in her lap, like she used to do, when she was small, in those years before she got sick. Komako stroked her hair.
She was trembling, but not because of that. She was thinking of what Jacob had said, how it was her own will keeping her sister from finding peace, and how she must do it, she must let go, and she remembered the pale silhouette of her sister drawn to the dead in that alley and the unearthly sleepiness in her, even as the mob screamed, even as it attacked them. Her sister was so cold all the time. She never did sleep, and her teeth were, as Jacob had guessed, small and sharp, like a fish’s. And she thought then of the doctor at the clinic and the way he’d stared at Teshi, as if in horror, and of the witch’s cold distaste, and she saw all at once how she’d already known it, even before Jacob had told her, how she’d known for a long time now that what was wrong with Teshi wasn’t an illness and that what had to be done would be, for her sister, a sort of kindness.