His strange skills and the aura about him quenched any thoughts of humiliation and revenge. The fierceness of the assault and the pleasures that followed left her in a state of acquiescence.
He piggybacked her along at terrific speed. The wind whistled in her ears. The red eyes peering out from the ruins quickly vanished behind them. This must have been the same creature that bore the midwife to the estate of Setsura’s father.
And now she was on a mountain of dirt in a large manmade cave, face to face with the young man who must be running whatever this operation was. Setsura’s enemy. The guy in charge of the men who’d assaulted her.
Even knowing all that, she couldn’t bring herself to begrudge him. A bizarre state of mind for a tough, no-nonsense broad packing a .44 Magnum.
Within the curtains of gray gloom surrounding them, the faint light illuminated the dirt mound and the man beside it.
“Lie down,” he said again.
He spoke in a rather gentle voice, not irritated or commanding. Azusa looked at him and did as he said.
The top of the mound was cramped and narrow. Her head and back barely covered the peak. Her legs rested against the downward slope. The pleasant chill of the soft, raw dirt seeped into her exposed shoulder. It must come from deep within the earth.
It wasn’t damp or moldy. Though the underground room was dry, this came as a surprise to her. Azusa let out a long, slow sigh.
“Beginning today, we have let in the light of the moon. Do you understand?”
The faint light brushing aside the darkness was moonlight then. Peeling her eyes, she had seen nothing on the way here. The illumination in the room flowed in from above. Azusa couldn’t help thinking that it was most befitting the young man as well.
Gento looked into her eyes and said, “Hyota tells me often, but strange things are happening around and to me.”
A peaceful face, Azusa thought. Strange things—strange that she could feel so calm around him. He must have her under his spell.
This was Demon City, after all.
“What you do after this is no concern of mine. Simply answer my questions. And I would beg a bit of your heart.”
Azusa blinked. Gento’s request made no sense to her. A bit of her heart?
“Where is Setsura?”
The words suffused into her blood like the fragrant pollen from a bouquet.
“Um, but first,” Azusa said at length, “there’s one thing I need to know.”
“What is that?” said Gento, not at all taken aback.
“You and Setsura-san—what are you intending to do with this city? What is this seal thing?”
“Hoh. You know more than you let on. But I will answer your question. We are, for all intents and purposes, struggling for hegemony of this city. Put in more simple terms, the promise is whoever dies first, the other automatically takes control.”
“Take control of the city? Then what do you do with it?”
“I have no idea,” Gento said readily.
“You have no idea?”
“I do not. Nor was the end game clear from the start. Since Setsura and I were very young, we heard the tale told over and over. But which one of us would rise to preeminence, and afterwards, what astounding things would then take place, is anybody’s guess. Even now it remains little more than conjecture.”
“When you were very young,” Azusa echoed blankly. “So you’re telling me this was all set in stone that long ago?”
One city had no need of two genies. Supposing that Shinjuku itself was being offered up as the instrument by which the one could extinguish the other, some great mystery or miracle must be in the offing. But what did it mean to seize control of Demon City? And what would happen next?
“And yet despite all that, you two are fighting it out without actually knowing for sure?”
“That is what soldiers do. We are nothing more than the pawns being played on the chess board. Setsura and I have had this conversation before.”
“Gento Roran and Setsura Aki—” Azusa muttered in something of a daze.
When—in what era—were the cruel wheels of fate binding these two young and beautiful genies set in motion? And when would they come to rest—and in what shape and form?
Like the wan blue light around them, knowing about an unknowable war and its unforgiving conclusion wrapped Azusa more in sadness than in fear. When all was said and done, what then?
“Stop trying to figure us out or empathize. Simply answer the questions.” Gento’s voice seeped into her heart like the cool dirt. “Feel the ground beneath you. Do not answer me. Answer the earth. It mingled with my abode for fifteen years. Obstructed by the boorish concrete, it touched the earth directly. I will listen to the earth as well, and extract fiction from fact.”
Azusa thought back to her junior high school days, when one of her teachers taught them about Gaia and the Mother of All Creation. All that she was fused into the chill of the soil, became that something else whispering to her blood.
Of other memories, other individuals. The darkness covering them within those cramped confines. And inside, the writhing tentacles of the teaching machine.
Floating white against the curtain of the night, black thread-like lines raked across its face: eyes, a nose and mouth. The face of a man beneath a tousled head of hair—that seemed to disappear into the shroud of darkness. In fact, Azusa soon understood, it had been cleanly severed.
The head of an old man, as easily sixty as a hundred years old. Gento’s father.
“The earth is your ally,” said the pale lips, “holding fast to the history and knowledge of the Gento clan down to the last drop. You must wear that knowledge like your own clothing. Fifteen years before, you bid farewell to the sound of the wind and the rain, the warmth of the sun, and grasped hold of victory instead. You are no longer the man you once were, capable of destroying the Aki clan in ways I never could. I know. And so it must be. Because—”
“Because—”
By the time Azusa’s interrogative and the old man’s voice overlapped each other, the darkness had suffused the young woman’s body.