Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The first shell landed somewhere upriver, too far to see and close enough to feel.

The street shivered under Léopold’s boots, dust leaping from the brickwork. Dogs howled. A cart horse reared and crashed sideways into a stall of drying fish. Then the sound reached them—late, monstrous—a rolling crack that flattened the noise of the market and left only a ringing in his ears.

“Move,” his Mentor said.

Léopold moved.

They ran shoulder to shoulder down the narrow Canton lane, sleeves brushing damp walls, ducking under laundry and hanging cages. Above the city, a dark smear was already spreading over the Pearl River, thickening the pale morning haze.

Another volley. This one they heard first: the deep, mechanical coughs of naval guns, layered one over another, followed by distant, hollow impacts along the waterfront. Through the gap between houses, Léopold caught a glimpse of masts—tall and neat and foreign—drawn against the sky like pen strokes.

“Left,” his Mentor snapped.

They veered into a courtyard where women were already grabbing children and bundles. A girl of maybe eight clutched a cage with a songbird and stared at the trembling tiles as if the ground might open.

“Shelter,” the Mentor said in Cantonese, his accent square but understandable. He stabbed a finger toward the temple down the slope, its roof tiles bright and curved. “Go. Stones. Thick walls.”

His hand brushed Léopold’s shoulder as he pointed, two quick taps—an old habit from training yards half a world away, the signal for keep your head, there’s time.

An old woman began to protest. Another cannon spoke, closer. A gust of heat slid down the alley, carrying the bitter, sugar-sweet stink of burning opium.

The girl flinched. Her bird threw itself against the cage, wings rattling.

Léopold dropped to one knee so his eyes were level with hers.

“Take your grandmother,” he said, in halting Cantonese. He pointed at the temple, then mimed a door closing, bracing his shoulder against it. “Hide until the drums stop.”

Her eyes flicked to his face, to the hidden blade’s bracer under his frayed cuff, to the foreign cut of his coat. She saw something she trusted, or simply feared more shellfire than him. She nodded once, jerkily. He took the cage from her, pressed it back when her hands found his, and then the whole family was moving, hurrying downhill with bundles banging against their backs.

His fingers twitched as they went, wanting to reach after them and count again. Instead he wiped the dust from his palms and forced himself upright. One family, still on their feet.

It never felt like enough.

The haze above the rooftops darkened. The Mentor watched until the group reached the temple steps, then turned on his heel.

“Warehouse first,” he said. “Then the docks.”

“The guns—”

“They’re not here for guns.” His voice had the rasp of someone who’d been shouting orders all morning. “They’re here for stock.”

He didn’t look at Léopold when he said it. He didn’t have to. The reek in the air made it obvious. It clung to the back of the throat like syrup and rot: opium burning in cracked warehouses, fortunes and lungs going up together.

They cut through another alley. The noise shifted as they neared the river—more screaming, more English. Above the rumble and crash came the sharp, ordered calls of British officers: “Reload, damn you! Steady! By the left—march!”

The opium house sat square at the bend of the canal, three stories high, shutters closed. It might have passed for any other merchant’s warehouse, if not for the guards. These wore foreign-cut coats, though they’d stripped off their jackets in the humid air, muskets slung close. One squinted up at the gunships in the harbor. Another wiped sweat from his brow with a handkerchief that had started white and ended a dun, dirty gray.

Between them and the front doors, a thin man in a British officer’s coat was pacing, boots crisp even on cracked cobbles. His epaulettes were damp but straight. A silver ring glinted on his right hand as he gestured—impatiently—to a Chinese clerk holding a ledger.

“Three manifests,” the officer was saying, in accented Mandarin, as Léopold and the Mentor paused in the shelter of a balcony’s shadow. “The crates on the left go to my men. The right-hand stack goes back upriver. The middle stack…” He smiled without warmth. “The middle stack goes nowhere without my signature.”

The clerk swallowed. “The commissioner—”

“The commissioner,” the officer cut in, “is under house arrest and hearing an excellent sermon about treaties even as we speak.”

Templar, the Mentor signed, fingers flicking quickly at his thigh. The ring was enough. The way the guards watched him: backs not quite straight, wary like men who owe and resent.

Léopold shifted his weight. The hidden blade’s mechanism pressed cool and ready against his wrist.

“Wait,” the Mentor murmured.

He waited.

A formation of redcoats turned the far corner at a quick march, boots drumming in unison. At their head, a man whose uniform was more mud than scarlet now, powder marks smudged around his eyes like bruises. His jaw was tight. He carried his sword sheathed at his side instead of drawn, though the sound of his men’s muskets and the ships’ guns thundered overhead.

Ashford.

Léopold had met him two days earlier outside a shattered tea house, over the bodies of three deserters and one Templar smuggler. The British officer had held his nose at the smell of the alley and flicked his eyes up to the smoke blooming over the river.

“So this is China,” he’d said then, quietly. “God help us if this is how we introduce ourselves.”

Now, his gaze took in the warehouse, the guards, the thin officer with the ring. His lip curled for a heartbeat, there and gone.

“Captain Ashford.” The Templar smiled too broadly. “You’re just in time. I was worried the navy would reduce my inventory before we could move it to safety.”

Ashford stopped in front of him. Close, Léopold could see how his knuckles had gone white where his hand gripped the sword hilt.

“Your… inventory,” Ashford repeated. “You mean the opium we confiscated under orders.”

“And which we will now protect under the same flag, hmm?” The officer lifted his ringed hand, as if his authority lay in the bit of metal. “It would be a shame if it were to go to waste. China will pay better tomorrow than today, thanks to your navy’s… persuasive methods.”

A shell landed somewhere along the quay. The shockwave kissed their boots, showering grit. A woman screamed down by the docks, high and raw. The Templar didn’t even flinch.

Ashford did.

He closed his eyes for half a breath, as if warding off a headache. When he opened them, they had hardened.

“This warehouse sits between our lines and the city,” he said. “It’s going to draw fire whether you hide your stock or not. Move the civilians. Then move your crates.”

“Civilians?” The Templar laughed. “My dear Captain, there are no civilians here. There are only obstacles, assets—”

He broke off, because Ashford’s hand had left the sword and gone instead to the pistol at his hip.

“Move them,” Ashford said, and there was no polite veneer left.

The guards shifted, watching. The clerk swallowed again, eyes flicking from ring to pistol. Overhead, the guns barked another broadside. The warehouse shutters trembled in their frames.

The Mentor leaned in, breath touching Léopold’s ear. “We can use this.”

“How?” Léopold whispered.

The Mentor’s hand settled on his shoulder for an instant, those same two taps. “Let the English fight each other. We take the maps, then disappear.”

Léopold’s gaze slid to the cart at the side of the street—a careless pile of rolled charts in leather cases, half-covered with tarpaulin. The clerk had set them aside as he juggled the ledger. No one was watching the cart.

“I’ll circle,” Léopold murmured.

The Mentor nodded once. “Don’t be brave. Be quick.”

He slipped back into the alley, then out along the next street, following the smell of the river and the rhythm of the gunfire. The city around him was a maze of shouted orders and slopping buckets. Men ran carrying pails of water that looked pitifully small against the rising flames. A donkey lay on its side in the middle of the lane, harness straps cut, legs twitching.

By the time he approached the cart from the opposite side, the argument had become a standoff. From behind the stacked crates, Léopold caught snatches:

“…under direct commission—”

“…profiting from contraband in a war zone—”

“…you don’t understand the larger picture, Captain…”

He kept his eyes on the cart, not the men. Fingers deft, he lifted one bundle of maps, then another, slipping them into the canvas satchel beneath his coat. Each case thumped softly against his ribs, each one another point on some web stretching beyond this city.

A child burst from a side door, eyes wide, clothes half-on. She ran straight toward the soldiers, wailing. A shell fragment had torn a neat groove across her shoulder. Blood slicked her arm.

The nearest guard started, raising his musket as if she were some kind of threat. The Templar officer didn’t move.

Ashford did. His hand shot out, fingers catching the girl’s collar, hauling her sideways out of the line of fire. His cigarette fell, forgotten, onto the cobbles.

“Back,” he snapped at the guard. “She’s not the enemy.”

He switched to rough Cantonese. “House. Go.” He pointed with his pistol toward a stairwell, then physically turned her that way and gave her a push. She ran, sobbing, vanishing into the haze.

Léopold slid the last map into his satchel and stepped back into shadow. The moment for a clean kill on the Templar officer was gone; Ashford’s men had halved the distance, bayonets glinting. Léopold watched Ashford for one heartbeat longer than he needed, filing away the outline of a man trying to hold a line in the middle of this.

The Mentor appeared at his side, soundless, eyes on the column of redcoats.

“Enough,” he said. “We have what we came for. Let them eat their own.”

They slipped away as the voices escalated. The last thing Léopold heard before the next volley drowned everything was Ashford saying, coldly, “You will return that stock to the commissary, or I will put you in chains next to it.”

The Black Cross came later, when the smoke had thinned to a gray veil over the city and the gunships’ fire slackened to occasional, distant booms.

The British camp sprawled along a strip of relatively unburned riverbank. Men sat cleaning their muskets or staring at nothing, faces streaked with soot and salt. A few played cards with hands that shook too much to hide their tells. The smell of boiled beef and black powder lay heavy over the tents.

Ashford stood at the edge of the encampment, just beyond the line of stacked ammunition crates, staring toward the burned-out district. From here, Canton looked like a hundred chimneys with no houses attached.

The opium warehouse had taken a hit after all. The roof had gone in. Crates lay scattered like broken teeth. Somewhere in the rubble, that officer with the ring was either dead or very far away.

Ashford’s jaw worked. His hands were empty. His sword leaned, forgotten, against a crate.

“You look disappointed, Captain.”

The voice came from behind him, low and precise. Ashford turned.

The man who had spoken wore no uniform Léopold recognized when he watched from the shadow of a water wagon. Plain dark coat, good cloth. No rank insignia. No ostentatious jewelry. Only a small pin at his throat, black metal in the shape of a cross pattée, dull against the fabric.

Even at this distance, Léopold felt his stomach tighten. That emblem meant a particular kind of Templar—one they whispered about in safehouses, the ones sent to cut rot out of their own.

The stranger’s eyes flicked over Ashford once, as if appraising a horse.

“Not at the destruction, I hope,” he added.

“I’m not disappointed,” Ashford said. His voice rasped a little, raw from shouting over gunfire all day. “Just taking stock.”

“Of what you see,” the stranger said. His gaze slid back to the city. “The shells. The smoke. The men loading what they shouldn’t under cover of both.”

Ashford’s shoulders tightened. “We took their ships. We burned their warehouses. We arrested their commissioner. And still some of our own officers were loading confiscated opium onto private barges even as the bombardment began. Stirring a riot to take advantage of the confusion. Selling maps to both sides.” His mouth twisted. “If this is order, it’s a poor one.”

“That bothers you.”

Ashford held his stare. “Shouldn’t it bother you?”

“It does.” The man’s eyes warmed by a single degree. “That’s why I am here.”

He stepped closer, into the thin triangle of light from a nearby lantern. Up close, his face was unremarkable: the kind that disappeared in a crowd. His hands were gloved. When he extended one, the leather creaked softly.

“We try to prevent that kind of rot,” he said. “But we are not everywhere. Men slip. Temptations… arise.”

Ashford did not take the hand yet. “You’re with the Council?”

“Something like that.” The man’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. “When the Empire’s colors cover theft, someone has to notice. Someone has to correct it.”

He reached into his coat and drew out a small object: a pin, twin to the one at his own throat. He didn’t offer it—not quite—but let it rest on his open palm between them.

“You seized that warehouse’s contents from a man who called himself our brother,” he said. “You did so at personal risk, for no gain, because it offended your sense of what this campaign should be.”

“Because it was theft,” Ashford said. “Dressed in uniform.”

“And you dislike thieves,” the man said. “So do we.”

Ashford’s gaze dropped to the pin. The black metal seemed to drink the lantern light.

“What are you offering?” he said.

“A way to put that distaste to use.” The man closed his fingers around the pin, then reached for Ashford’s hand and turned it palm-up, surprising him with the firmness of the grip. “When you are tired of watching your own officers turn victory into private profit, when you are tired of chaos wearing your colors, come find us.”

He pressed the pin into Ashford’s palm and folded the fingers over it, a priest giving communion.

“We are the Black Cross,” he said quietly. “We are sent when our Order decides it has been looking the other way for too long.”

Ashford’s throat bobbed once. His fingers closed around the pin, the metal biting into his skin.

The man stepped back, already half-shadow.

“You fought to keep today from being worse than it was,” he added. “Next time, Captain, you could help choose how it begins.”

Then he was gone, swallowed by the rows of tents and the movement of tired men. Léopold watched the space where he had been. Ashford stared at his hand for a long moment, then slipped the pin into the inner pocket of his coat.

Guns boomed again on the river, farther away now. The siege was easing. The city still smoldered.

The counterstrike came at dusk two days later, in a street that had not yet decided whether it would recover.

The bombardment had moved on, but fire lingered in damp piles of wreckage. Roof beams jutted out like broken ribs. Someone had set up a makeshift stall where the market used to be, selling stale bread and boiled eggs to anyone with coin and teeth.

Léopold and his Mentor walked in plain sight now, their foreignness masked by cheap local coats and the drag of exhaustion. The maps they’d taken had led them through opium dens, merchant guild houses, backrooms where Templar coins changed hands. They’d toppled one ring, scattered another.

It had been just enough to be noticed.

He saw the ambush in the reflection of a shattered shop window before he saw the men themselves: a flash of red cloth in an alley, the gleam of a bayonet too clean for this district. The Mentor saw it too. Léopold felt the subtle tightening of the older man’s hand on his arm, the way he shifted his weight.

“Left,” the Mentor murmured, as if commenting on the weather.

They turned into a narrower lane, between collapsed walls. The air smelled of wet brick and char, with the sour overlay of unwashed bodies in cramped rooms nearby. Their boots crunched glass.

Behind them, footsteps quickened.

“Too late to avoid it,” the Mentor said softly, in French. “Old friend couldn’t leave us alone.”

The “friend” stepped into view at the other end of the alley a heartbeat later: the Templar officer with the ring, coat cleaner than any honest man’s in this part of the city. He had traded his ledger for a pistol. Two soldiers flanked him, bayonets fixed.

“Issue with the commissary?” the Mentor called, in English.

The Templar smiled that same thin smile. “Issue with thieves, actually. Someone has been intercepting shipments. Killing buyers. Interfering in matters that do not concern them.”

“War profiteering is everyone’s concern,” the Mentor said. “Though perhaps the Black Cross didn’t explain that clearly enough when they left you behind.”

The officer’s face twitched at the name. His ringed hand tightened on the pistol.

“Black Cross,” he spat. “Fanatics playing at purity. You don’t understand the game. None of you do.”

He jerked his chin. The soldiers raised their muskets.

Movement to their right: a door opening, a woman peering out, eyes going wide at the sightlines. Léopold’s mind tracked the angles automatically. If the soldiers fired here, the shots would punch through thin wooden walls, into the rooms beyond.

He stepped slightly ahead of the Mentor, drawing the soldiers’ aim. His hand flexed. The hidden blade answered with a soft, hungry click.

The Mentor’s breath brushed his ear. “On my mark.”

The mark came as the crack of the first musket. The Mentor shoved him sideways, into a roll. Splinters stung Léopold’s neck as the bullet tore into the doorframe where the woman’s head had been a moment before. She slammed the door shut, screaming.

Léopold came up hard and fast, blade lancing out, catching the nearest soldier under the jaw. The man gurgled, dropped. The second fumbled his reload, hands shaking. The Mentor crossed the distance in three steps, steel flashing. The soldier folded.

The officer had already leveled his pistol again. He fired at the Mentor, not Léopold. The report cracked the alley in half. The Mentor staggered, breath leaving him in a harsh grunt, and went to one knee.

For a split second, everything slowed: ash drifting from a broken beam, smoke twisting above the lane, the officer’s ring catching light as he reached for his sword.

Léopold moved.

He closed the gap with the blur that came only when training and fear met. His shoulder hit the officer’s chest, driving him back. The pistol clattered away. They slammed into the opposite wall. The officer’s sword scraped free, nicking Léopold’s coat.

He caught the man’s wrist with his off hand, twisting. Bone cracked. The sword fell. The hidden blade found the space between ribs and slid home.

The officer’s eyes went wide. He tried to say something clever and died with nothing but a wet sigh.

Léopold wrenched the blade free and turned back.

His Mentor sat against the wall, a smear of blood sliding down the bricks behind him. His hand pressed the left side of his chest, fingers slick and red. Each breath sounded like air leaving a cracked bellows.

“Too slow,” he said, but there was no heat in it. His fingers twitched once on his knee, as if searching for a shoulder that wasn’t there to tap.

Léopold dropped to his knees in front of him, hands already searching for an exit wound, some way the shot might have missed anything vital. There was a lot of blood. Too much.

“Hold on,” he said, in French. Or maybe in English. Or maybe it was only a sound. The languages tangled.

“We don’t have time,” the Mentor rasped.

He shifted, grimacing, and fumbled at his coat. For a moment Léopold thought he was reaching for a weapon. Instead, he pulled out a folded scrap of thick paper, edges sweat-softened from being handled too often.

He caught Léopold’s wrist and slapped the paper into his palm, fingers closing over it with surprising strength.

“Listen,” he said. His pupils had blown wide, but his gaze was fixed, sharp. “They’re already looking beyond this. Beyond China. The maps we took—”

“I know,” Léopold said. “Ports, routes, forts—”

“Not just ports.” The Mentor’s breath hitched. Blood bubbled at the corner of his mouth, dark and sticky. “They want a foothold where the old order’s stiff and afraid. A country you can pry open with treaties and steel.”

His hand squeezed again, forcing the paper more firmly into Léopold’s.

“Get to Japan,” he said. Each word came on a shallow, stolen breath. “Get there before they do.”

On the paper, the ink had bled from sweat, but he could still make out the characters: a place name, underlined twice.

日本

Japan.

Another boom shook the air, distant now. Somewhere, someone cheered, thinking this victory meant something clean.

Léopold’s throat closed. He wanted to say something—refusal, promise, curse—but nothing made it past the tightness in his chest. The smell of burned opium and wet brick pressed in, suddenly unbearable.

“Don’t… argue,” the Mentor managed, a ghost of his usual wryness. His hand lifted a fraction, as if reaching for Léopold’s shoulder in that old, reassuring tap, then fell short.

His fingers loosened. The weight of his hand slid from Léopold’s and thumped dully against his own leg. His eyes stayed open, but whatever had driven them went out like a candle in a gust.

For a time, there was no war—no guns, no shouting—just the soft patter of ash settling on stone and cloth. Léopold sat there, knuckles white around the note, his other hand pressed uselessly against the spreading red. Heat radiated from the body into his palm, then slowly began to fade. The whole city seemed to hold its breath with him and then move on.

Footsteps sounded at the end of the alley. Voices—English and Cantonese both. Soldiers, scavengers, it didn’t matter. He wiped his bloody hand on his coat, stood, and left the body where it was. The absence at his side felt heavier than any load he’d carried.

He didn’t look back.

At the alley’s mouth, he paused just long enough to unfold the note with his thumb. The ink blurred, but the word remained. Japan. The lines beneath it: a route through Macau, a ship’s name, a contact he dimly recognized.

On the river, the gunships reloaded. Heat shimmered above the blackened foundations, and ash drifted down like gray snow, settling on uniforms, on market stalls, on the small black pin hidden in Ashford’s inner pocket somewhere in the camp.

Léopold closed his fist around the paper until his nails bit his palm, turned his back on the ruined warehouses, and went to find a way east.

Chapter Text

The second city burned differently.

Shanghai didn’t go up like Canton; it smoldered, slow and oily, along the Bund. The river there carried more than ash. Rumors drifted down from the interior, silver slid up from the sea, and Léopold learned to read the current the way his Mentor read men: by what clung to the surface.

“Watch their hands, not their faces,” the older man said, nudging Léopold’s boot with the tip of his own to adjust his stance on the rooftop. “You can fake a smile. It’s harder to fake what you reach for when the knife comes out.”

Below them, on the wharf, a Templar broker in a good coat shook hands with a British officer. Their smiles were flawless. Their fingers rested, just for a heartbeat, on the same leather folio instead of on each other.

“There,” the Mentor said. “See?”

Léopold shifted his weight, studying the angle, the distance, the timing. Rain from the previous night dulled the tiles beneath him; the damp had seeped through his boots into his socks. His legs ached, but he held the pose, feeling the way his weight traveled from heel to ball.

The Mentor reached out without looking and tapped his ankle with two fingers.

“Too much on your toes,” he murmured. “You’ll slip when you land. You’re not dancing. You’re killing.”

Léopold eased back half an inch. The adjustment felt small and enormous at once. Below, the Templar and the officer disappeared into a warehouse with the folio. The river kept moving.

Later, in a rented room over a tea shop, they spread the stolen papers over the floor. Ink scribbles in English, Portuguese, Chinese; stamps from companies in Macao and Calcutta; the same symbols they’d seen behind the opium house in Canton hidden in margins and flourishes.

The Mentor sat cross-legged, spectacles low on his nose, quill between his fingers. A chipped porcelain cup of coffee steamed at his side, smelling like burnt bread.

“This one,” he said, tapping a line of neat Dutch along the bottom of a contract. “Read.”

Léopold squinted. “Levering van kanonnen… dertig ponders… via Nagasaki.”

“Good.” The Mentor underlined the word with the scratch of dry nib on dry paper. The ink bottle had tipped in the night; he’d scooped it back together, but what came out now was sluggish, clotted.

He shifted to English, for his own benefit more than Léopold’s. “Delivery of thirty-pounder cannons via Nagasaki. Lovely. We give them treaties, they give us gun ports. Everyone loves a fair exchange.”

He switched languages again with the ease of someone chewing on a bad taste. “And here… Japanese. Your turn. You wanted practice.”

Léopold bent closer. The characters were messy, written by a clerk not used to the script.

“奉行所…” He fumbled, then looked up. The Mentor’s eyebrow rose, patient and edged.

“You know this,” he said. “We went through it on the ship.”

“Bugyōsho,” Léopold said, correcting himself. “Magistrate’s office. Something about… coastal defenses.”

“‘Plans will be sent to Edo for review,’” the Mentor supplied. “Then back. Then forth. Then back again.” He rubbed the bridge of his nose, smearing ink. “Paperwork in three damned languages and none of them mine. They’ll drown themselves in stamps before the first stone is laid.”

“You speak four,” Léopold said. “Five.”

“Six,” the Mentor muttered. “Seven on a good day, if no one checks my grammar.” He reached for the coffee, realized it had gone cold, and drank it anyway, face twisting. “Come. Mark the place. Nagasaki. That’s one of your doors.”

He pushed a neat square of map toward Léopold: the southern islands of Japan, inked from some sailor’s memory. He tapped the harbor with the quill’s feathered end.

“Here,” he said. “If the Order wants to move heavy guns in quietly, they’ll do it through a port that already knows how to deal with foreigners. Before they start opening the others.”

He said “the Order” like a toothache.

The months that followed did not blur so much as stack: port on port, ledger on ledger.

In Fuzhou, they smashed a Templar scheme that turned famine grain into profit by redirecting shipments through a single private granary. Léopold remembered the way the manager had screamed when they pushed him into his own bin, his voice muffled by wheat.

In Ningbo, they swapped out a stack of naval charts in a shipping office, replacing them with ones that sent imperial patrols to sandbars instead of smugglers. The Mentor stood in the doorway, watching the clerk’s pen move, and murmured under his breath, “One day I will die buried under someone else’s paperwork.”

Between strikes, the world shrank into small, stubborn ordinary moments. The Mentor forcing open a dented tin and producing a gray chunk of coffee, triumph in his eyes. Léopold gagging theatrically at the taste and earning a cuff to the back of his head. The two of them hunched over a table, the older man correcting characters on Léopold’s Japanese practice sheet with a blunt thumbnail, muttering about stroke order.

They argued about nonsense, sometimes. About songs. About whether a man could serve an idea without becoming its servant. The Mentor always stopped short of saying what idea he had served before the Brotherhood.

Rain came and went. Wars smoldered along the horizon. Their path ran east.

The warehouse where everything finally snapped could have been in any of those cities. By the time they found it, the flags on the harbor mattered less than the mark carved into the crates.

It was raining that night, properly raining, the sky poured straight onto the roofs as if someone had knocked over a basin. Lamps in the harbor hung halos of yellow in the downpour. Cobbles gleamed black. Water whispered in all the alley gutters at once.

Léopold’s coat had soaked through by the time they reached the warehouse. He didn’t feel it much. His fingers had gone past wet, past cold, to a dull tingle that made his hands look like someone else’s when he flexed them.

“One door at the front,” the Mentor said, voice barely audible under the drum of rain on tile. They crouched on a balcony across the narrow alley, watching the dark rectangle below. “Two on the river side. Guard rotations loose. They’re not expecting company.”

“They should,” Léopold said.

“They should,” the Mentor echoed. “But arrogance keeps us in work.”

He peered through the wet gloom, eyes narrowing. A line of carts sat under an awning, piled with covered crates. The symbol carved into the nearest plank was subtle, almost elegant: a cross’s shadow, stylized into something that could be mistaken for a merchant’s mark.

“How many?” Léopold asked.

“Enough.” The Mentor frowned. “Look at the size of those crates. Those aren’t opium bricks. That’s metal. Guns. Machines.” He ticked items off on his fingers. “Spin up furnaces near the coast, route in foreign engineers, swap out silver for factory shares. All under the guise of ‘advisers.’”

He glanced sideways. “Your Japanese reading better by now?”

“Better than the coffee,” Léopold said.

“Not difficult.” The Mentor slapped his shoulder lightly. “We’ll see what they’re sending and to whom. Then we decide whether it’s enough to warrant our necks.”

They crossed low over the alley, hands and feet finding purchase in the wet bricks. The rain covered the small noises they made; it also turned every surface treacherous. Twice, the Mentor’s hand shot out, fingers closing around Léopold’s sleeve to steady him. Each time, he said nothing, only grunted softly and moved on.

At the warehouse’s river side, a door sat half-open to let in air and let out the reek of oiled wood and damp rope. Voices carried from inside: men complaining about the weather, dice clattering on a crate, the slosh of someone shifting a barrel.

The Mentor touched Léopold’s wrist and traced a pattern onto his skin with a fingertip: five guards on this side. Two more in the loft. One supervisor. The last stroke ended with a hook.

Unknown. Watch for it.

They went in together.

The first two guards fell before their dice hit the floor. Hidden blades whispered in and out under ribs, catching breath mid-curse. A third man turned at the sound and got a knife in the throat. The fourth reached for a whistle that never made it to his lips. The fifth backed away, hand flailing for the wall, and Léopold caught him by the collar, slammed him down among the spilled dice, and ended it cleanly.

Up above, a man in the loft swore and grabbed for a musket. The Mentor snapped his wrist, sent a throwing knife spinning through the lamplight. Wood splintered. The musket fired into the beams. Sparks spat down.

“Up,” the Mentor said. Léopold ran, boots slipping on the damp ramp, momentum and training carrying him through a clumsy lunge from the last guard. The blade slid home. The man groaned once and sagged.

By the time Léopold reached the top, the loft was clear. Below, the warehouse shivered with the aftertaste of violence and rain.

They moved to the crates.

“Kanji first,” the Mentor said. He wiped his knife on a scrap of canvas and leaned close to the nearest crate, squinting at the brush strokes in the flickering light. “投石器… no. 鉄砲… there we are.” His finger tapped. “Firearms. Calibers listed. Destination…”

He broke off.

“Edo,” he said. The word hung there, heavy. “Specifically… coastal works. Something called Odaiba.”

He didn’t have to explain the shape of that. Léopold saw it: artificial islands squatting in a bay, guns bristling toward the open sea. Foreign designs, Japanese labor. Control pivoting silently on who supplied the cannon and the powder.

“More here,” Léopold said, tugging another crate’s lid up. Inside, beneath a layer of straw, sat iron rings and bolts, thick and heavy. A rolled sheet of paper lay along the side. He grabbed it, unfurling it carefully.

Lines and numbers. A cross-section of a furnace built into a hillside, with notes in Dutch along the margin. Reverberatory. He recognized the term from a failed investment in Montréal, when someone had tried to convince his father to back a foundry.

The Mentor leaned over his shoulder.

“Nirayama,” he read. “They’re already digging.”

A faint scrape of boots on stone sounded under the rain. Not from the river door. From the front.

“Later,” he said. “We’ve seen enough. Take the plans; we burn the rest if we have time. Out the river door and—”

The front doors slammed open.

“Inside!” a voice barked, in the crisp cadence of someone used to being obeyed. “All of you!”

Templar.

The men who flooded in wore a mix of uniforms and civilian coats, but they moved together. Muskets leveled as one. Pistols. Lantern light glinted off a familiar kind of ring on more than one hand.

They must have been waiting outside, listening to the dice and the laughter stop, letting the Brotherhood clear their corrupt guards for them.

The Mentor swore under his breath, a word in a language Léopold didn’t know yet. Then he shoved the furnace plans into Léopold’s hands and turned his back to the loft edge.

“New plan,” he said. “You leave.”

Léopold stared at him, stupid for a moment. “We both—”

“Stairs are choked,” the Mentor snapped. He pointed with his chin. The ramp they’d come up on thrummed under the boots of men climbing fast. “You go out there.” He jerked his head toward the far side, where shutters sat above the river, cracked for air. “You can make that jump.”

Rain lashed through the gaps, turning the rope coils into dark snakes. The river glimmered below, black and hungry.

“And you?” Léopold said.

The Mentor smiled, briefly, as if the question were endearing.

“I’ll be right behind you,” he said. “Someone has to make sure they’re looking the wrong way when you go.”

He stepped around Léopold then, putting his body between his student and the men surging up the ramp. His shoulders looked very broad in that moment, braced and squared, as if he could hold back all of Europe.

“Go,” he said.

He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t need to. The tone took Léopold by the spine and turned him toward the shutters.

Boots thudded on the ramp. The first of the Templars appeared over the edge, eyes going wide at the sight of the two figures in the loft.

“Fire!” someone shouted.

The Mentor moved.

He dropped into the stairwell like a falling beam. Blade flashed, then another, then the solid, meaty sound of bodies hitting wood and stone. The musket that had been leveling toward Léopold jolted aside and went off into the rafters, showering splinters. A pistol discharged, scorching the air, the bullet whining past Léopold’s ear close enough that he felt it.

He hesitated anyway. His feet stayed rooted.

The Mentor’s hand, bloody now, snapped up and caught his eye. He jerked his chin toward the shutters again.

“Go,” he panted. “This is not negotiable.”

The words were the same ones he used when Léopold argued about practice times, about targets. Familiar. Infuriating. For a heartbeat Léopold wanted to disobey him on principle, just to keep him alive.

Léopold turned and ran.

He sprinted across the loft, boots skidding on damp planks, shoulder slamming into stacks of crates. He shoved one sideways, letting it topple into the alley below as a makeshift distraction. Shouts rose from outside.

At the shutters, he kicked one open wider. The hinges shrieked protest. Rain hit him in the face like a thrown bucket. The river lay ten, maybe twelve feet below. Far enough to break an ankle if he landed badly. Close enough.

Behind him, the fight sounded wrong. The sharp, deliberate rhythm of training had dissolved into something harsher—short, ugly impacts, the crack of wood on bone, a man choking.

He looked back once.

In that glimpse, he saw his Mentor standing midway down the ramp, breath coming hard. Blood drenched his side, glistening in the lamplight, darkening the fabric from ribs to thigh. Three bodies lay at his feet; a fourth hung half-over the rail. More men pushed up behind them.

The Mentor met his gaze.

For a heartbeat, the noise dropped away. Rain, breath, the river’s rush. Léopold thought of the rooftop in Shanghai, of a boot nudging his ankle, of a voice saying You’re not dancing. You’re killing.

The older man’s expression didn’t ask. It ordered.

Léopold jumped.

The cold hit him like a fist. The river took him in, slammed the air out of his chest. For a second he was all limb and flailing, the world reduced to black water and the roar of it in his ears. Then training cut through panic. He twisted, kicked, found the surface.

He broke through into rain and gunfire.

From somewhere above, muffled by storm and wood, came one more pistol shot. Then nothing but the hammering of rain on the warehouse roof.

He treaded water, teeth chattering, satchel pulled close to his chest with one arm. The furnace plans inside felt like a stone. Lantern light flickered at the warehouse windows, then swung away as men moved elsewhere.

No one leaned out to see if the foreigner had fallen into the river. No alarm raised about a body in water. The docks were full of debris tonight.

He let the current take him around the bend before he dragged himself onto a half-submerged barge and lay there, coughing river out of his lungs. The wet wood bruised his ribs. His fingers cramped around the satchel straps and didn’t want to let go.

He stared back the way he’d come. The warehouse roof hunched against the night, an unremarkable shape among others. No flame burst from it. No silhouette appeared at the loft window.

The Mentor had said “I’ll be right behind you” with the tone he used when he promised to check Léopold’s form later. He had meant it in the same way: as comfort, not prediction.

Léopold knew it then, even as his mind scrabbled for other possibilities. The knowing sat under his ribs, sharp and immovable.

He pressed his forehead against the barge’s slick planks and let the river carry him away.

Nagasaki smelled different from the Chinese ports. Less spices, more fish. Less smoke, more seaweed and damp stone. The rain there was finer, too, like needles instead of buckets, needling through his coat and into his bones.

He arrived under a name the Mentor had used once before in another country. The syllables sat awkwardly in his mouth the first time he said them to the magistrate’s clerk; by the third repetition, they had begun to feel like a shirt he might grow into.

The clerk took his papers with the same impersonal efficiency he’d seen in Shanghai and Fuzhou. English letters on one line, Dutch on the next, Chinese below. The stamp that came down at the bottom of the page left a column of Japanese characters he couldn’t yet read without tracing them with his finger.

“Dejima,” the man said, not bothering to hide the faint disapproval at yet another foreigner. He pointed down the slope toward the harbor, where the little fan-shaped artificial island sat tethered to the shore by a bridge. “You stay there. You want anything else, you pay the right people.”

Léopold inclined his head, accepting the rules. His fingers brushed the inside of his coat, where the folded note lay against his ribs, edges curling from being taken out too often.

Get to Japan before they do.

He stepped back from the counter. As he turned, his eye caught a piece of paper pinned to the wall behind the clerk: a rough, ink-heavy sketch of a coastal battery. The kanji in the corner blurred at this distance, but he recognized one from the crates in that rainy warehouse.

台場

Daiba. A fort on an island. Odaiba.

On the street outside, under the disagreeable drizzle, men in Edo livery haggled with Dutch factors near barrels stamped with foreign marks. A local smith examined a foreign cannon barrel like a farmer evaluating a plow. Two sailors argued over pay, their words a mess of languages stitched together by gesture.

Dejima sat like a key in the harbor’s lock. Somewhere beyond, in Edo, someone was already drawing up blueprints based on the furnace plans in his satchel. Somewhere along the coast, laborers swung pickaxes into earth that didn’t know yet it was supposed to bear guns.

Léopold pulled his coat tighter and descended toward the water.

He had lost the man who had taught him how to move and kill and read. His world had narrowed, for now, to one simple line of ink on a note and the shape of a country he had only glimpsed through other people’s charts.

He walked across the bridge to Dejima with his head down against the wind, the sound of the sea against the pilings like breath in his ears, and started listening for other whispers: of “advisers,” of forts, of furnaces built into hillsides.

Whatever crossed that threshold next, he intended to see it coming.

Chapter Text

By 1858, Edo breathed like a man with a hand on his throat.

The streets still crowded, the markets still shouted, but there were gaps you could feel when you walked them—empty stalls where a fishmonger had stood last month, shutters that never rolled up in the morning, a laundry line that no longer sagged between two second-floor balconies because no one lived on one side anymore.

Léopold turned off the main avenue and into a narrower lane where the mud was packed down by wooden sandals and bare feet. Evening light stretched the shadows long. The paper lanterns outside the tenements had already been lit, their red and white skins trembling faintly in the breeze.

He passed a notice board halfway down the lane. A fresh sheet of paper had been pasted over older proclamations, the ink still shiny-black where the brushstrokes thickened. Names marched down the page in neat columns; a few had been crossed out so aggressively that the paper had torn.

Someone had shoved a wilted chrysanthemum into the crack at the edge of the board. Its petals browned at the tips.

He didn’t stop. You didn’t stand and read lists aloud here unless you were the one posting them.

At the end of the lane, a narrow house leaned into its neighbors like a man eavesdropping. Its sliding door was fitted poorly; light leaked around the edges in crooked lines. Books had colonized the window ledges—bundles tied with string, loose volumes stacked three deep, a Dutch spine beside a Chinese one beside a Japanese one as if nothing were easier than making three scripts share the same narrow plank.

From inside came the sound of a child reciting numbers in halting Dutch, and an adult voice correcting gently, laughing.

Léopold slid the door open without knocking and ducked his head to step through.

“Andersom,” the adult voice was saying. “Eerst…?”

“Zon,” a smaller voice answered, triumphant.

“Ja. Dan?”

“Mercurius, Venus, Aarde, Mars, Jupiter, Saturnus, Uranus, Neptunus.” The child rattled the last three out in a rush, proud of knowing the foreign-sounding names.

“Goed zo.” A man chuckled. “Now in Japanese before your mother accuses me of turning your tongue entirely European.”

The room was a chaos that somehow worked. Shelves sagged under the weight of books, scrolls, and odd bits of brass—lenses, a cracked astrolabe, a pair of compasses with one bent arm. A low table in the center had disappeared under papers and brushes, except for one corner where someone had cleared just enough space for two teacups and a plate of pickled radish.

Ando Takahiro sat cross-legged by that corner, hair pulled back into a loose knot that had half-escaped, wisps falling into his eyes. Ink stained the side of his thumb in a permanent gray crescent. He was currently using that thumb to scrub at a streak of charcoal on his youngest daughter’s cheek.

“Hold still,” he said in Japanese, catching her chin as she squirmed. “You look like a raccoon.”

“I was a comet,” she said, muffled, flailing an arm that still held a stub of charcoal. A smear appeared on his sleeve. He sighed.

“Now we are both comets.” He let her go with a theatrical groan and reached for a cloth.

When he saw Léopold in the doorway, his face brightened, then flickered quickly through something more guarded before settling on welcome.

“Ah,” he switched to Dutch. “Our foreign star-watcher. Right on time.”

The older child—a boy of perhaps ten—looked up from the scrap of paper where he’d been drawing circles around dots. His eyes were serious in a face still round with baby fat.

“Go on,” Ando told him. “Show him.”

The boy held out the paper. An uneven line of circles spiraled around a larger one, each labeled with careful kana. Tiny ink dots marked their positions.

“He insisted,” Ando said, lowering his voice as if sharing a scandal. “He heard somewhere that the foreigners have decided we go around the sun instead of the other way, and now he refuses to let his poor father rest until every orbit is drawn.”

Léopold crouched to the child’s height, studying the drawing.

“You’ve put Saturn too close,” he said, tapping the outer circle with a fingertip. “It’s farther out.”

The boy frowned. “But then the paper will not be big enough.”

“Then you need a bigger sky,” Léopold said.

The boy considered this, then nodded solemnly, as if his future had just been decided.

For a moment, everything felt small and contained—ink, charcoal, children, and arguments about stars, held inside four thin walls.

“See?” Ando said. “Saving the future, one star at a time.” He stood, wiping his hands on his hakama. “In fifty years, someone will swear about the man who dragged the planets across the paper. That man will be me.”

His wife appeared then from the back room, carrying a tray that smelled of rice and grilled mackerel. She had a towel slung over one shoulder and a pencil tucked behind one ear, as if she’d been pulled from her own work mid-thought. She took in the scene in a single sweep: ink on children, wet hem on Léopold’s coat, the dried fish on the tray.

“Takahiro-san,” she said, in the tone of someone who expected trouble and was rarely disappointed. “You invited him without warning again.”

“It is more efficient,” Ando said. “He always arrives hungry and we never have a chance to forget him.”

She made a small exasperated sound that was only half real and set the tray down. Her bow to Léopold was shallow but not unfriendly.

“There is enough,” she said. “Sit.”

He sat. The children arranged themselves around the table in practiced chaos. Ando took a spot where he could reach both the food and the scattered papers, picking up a brush the moment his chopsticks were empty to add notes in the margin of a Dutch text that already looked like it had been argued with for years.

“Henrik is late,” he said, glancing at the window where the sky had gone from gray to charcoal. “Or early, depending on whether he has actually learned to read a Japanese hour.”

“He is Dutch,” his wife said. “He will arrive when the cheese tells him to.”

The children snickered. Even Léopold smiled.

They ate.

The mackerel was over-salted, probably on purpose so it would keep longer. The rice came in slightly smaller bowls than last month. No one mentioned it. Outside, a patrol clattered past, the faint jangle of armor and the heavier thump of boots on the lane. The youngest child’s chopsticks paused in mid-air until the sound faded. Léopold’s hand drifted toward his coat by habit, then stilled.

When the plates were empty and the children had been shooed to the back, Ando reached over and slid a stack of books aside, revealing another layer of table: one with no ink stains, where the wood had been sanded smooth.

“Now,” he said quietly. “We work.”

He flipped the top book open to hide the bare surface again. To anyone glancing through the window, they would look like three men arguing over a treatise.

Henrik arrived in a rush of damp air and apologies, almost tripping over the threshold because he forgot again he needed to duck.

“Sumi masen,” he said, bowing too deeply, the syllables mashed together like rice in a mortar. “Sumi massen. Sumimas—ah, you know what I mean.” He laughed at himself, a short, self-deprecating huff that made his shoulders shake.

“You’re improving,” Ando lied politely, sliding the door shut behind him.

Henrik shook rain from his hat, managing to scatter droplets onto three different open books. Ando made a strangled noise and reached for a cloth. Henrik winced and began dabbing clumsily, only making the smears worse.

“Leave it,” Ando said at last, snatching the cloth back. “You attack paper more brutally than Ii-sama attacks his enemies.”

Henrik’s smile faded just a fraction at the mention of the Regent. He set his hat down between his feet carefully, as if afraid he might break that too.

Nakamura arrived a moment later, as silently as if he had been there all along. The partition door from the back room slid open just enough to admit him, then closed without a rattle.

“Konban wa,” he said, bowing. His eyes flicked once around the room, then settled on the far wall, where there was no window, no decoration—only a door. He sat with his back to that wall, legs folded under him, facing the entrance.

It was the same seat he always took.

Up close, Nakamura looked younger than his manner suggested. No gray yet in his hair, but lines had begun to etch themselves between his brows like someone had drawn them there with a fine brush. His hands, resting on his knees, were calloused in odd places—not the smooth pads of a laborer, but small ridges where a blade’s hilt would sit.

Léopold had never seen him without at least one knife within reach. Tonight, the hilt tucked into his belt looked like ordinary wood. It probably wasn’t.

“Neighbor’s house is dark again,” Nakamura said, by way of greeting. His gaze flicked briefly toward the wall that bordered the next plot. “No smoke from the hearth. No laundry for three days.”

“They moved?” Henrik asked, in Japanese good enough to make up for his greeting. “Or…?”

“Magistrate’s men came yesterday at dawn,” Ando said, pouring tea into small cups, hands steady. “Two witnesses, one scribe, four swords. They left with ledgers and lanterns. They did not come back.”

His thumb left a faint half-moon of ink on the porcelain. He didn’t seem to notice.

Henrik’s mouth tightened. He accepted his cup with a nod, careful not to drip this time.

On the street outside, someone nailed another piece of paper to a post. The hammer blows sounded like a slow heartbeat. Conversation dipped for a breath, then resumed.

Nakamura’s eyes tracked the sound without turning his head.

“Names?” he asked.

“I did not get close enough,” Ando said. “The ink was still wet when I passed. But the neighbors say the family sold rice without recording all the tax. A great offense.” His mouth pulled sideways. “Perhaps their books were heavier than the Regent likes.”

“Purge is still sweeping,” Henrik murmured. “Every week, more names. Philosophers, merchants… anyone who talks too loudly.”

He switched to Dutch on the last sentence, as if the language could make the observation less dangerous. Ando’s eyebrows rose; he followed easily.

“You complain as if you are surprised,” Ando said. “You didn’t see the crowds howling at the gates when the first treaties were signed. If Ii-sama does not tighten, the city will tear itself apart with its bare hands. He prefers to do the tearing himself.”

“Comforting,” Henrik said. He took a swallow of tea that was probably hotter than he realized. His eyes watered. He didn’t cough.

Léopold let their words flow past him for a moment, listening for the currents underneath.

Henrik’s knee jiggled—not enough to rattle the cups, but enough to send a faint tremor through the table. His fingers drummed once on his own thigh before he stilled them deliberately, catching Léopold’s eye and rolling his own in silent apology.

Nakamura sat perfectly still. Only his eyes moved, flicking now and then to the door, to the window’s thin paper, to the shadow under the shelf where someone could conceivably hide. Every time the wind pushed against the house and the wood creaked, his hand tightened briefly on his kneecap, the muscles in his forearm jumping.

Ando’s restlessness went elsewhere. He couldn’t sit without reaching for something—a brush, a book, a child that wasn’t there. He flipped open a volume with a page marked and, while the others talked, absentmindedly corrected a misprinted character in the margin, tongue poking out at the corner of his mouth.

“Business,” Nakamura said at last, cutting through the murmurs. He reached into his sleeve and produced a folded paper, edges worn. He laid it on the table and tapped it. “You first.”

Henrik unfolded the sheet, scanning the neat lines of characters. He nodded slowly.

“Shipments through Yokohama,” he said, summarizing for Léopold’s benefit. “Foreign cannons, foreign powder. Officially for the forts under the Regent’s authority.”

“And unofficially?” Léopold asked.

Henrik smiled without humor. “Let us say some of those crates find their way to domains that shout ‘expel the barbarians’ by day and buy their guns from them at night.”

Ando snorted softly. “Patriots with excellent aim. At their own feet.”

Nakamura’s expression didn’t change. “Templars in which houses?”

Henrik’s eyes stayed on the paper. “Several. Van der Vliet. Schuyler. Amagi–Thames.”

He did not mention the smaller flag-and-mast symbol that meant “contact” in their own shorthand. Léopold recognized the omission. So did Nakamura. No one pointed it out.

“Routes?” Nakamura asked.

“Three that matter,” Henrik said. He had a second sheet tucked inside his coat. He did not take it out. “Up the Tōkaidō, obviously. Overland from Osaka. And a quieter one through a chain of village granaries I won’t bore you with.”

He glanced at Léopold as he said the last part, the hint so slight it might have been an accident.

Nakamura’s gaze drifted, almost lazily, to Henrik’s face and back to his cup.

“And your side?” Henrik asked him. “Magistrates? Temple gossip? Anything the paper pasters forgot?”

Nakamura reached into his own sleeve and produced a smaller scrap. The characters here were less formal, written in a quick, tight hand.

“Three scholars arrested last week,” he said. “Two in Kanda, one in Shinagawa. Officially for sedition. Unofficially…” His lips thinned. “They had been meeting with certain domain emissaries to discuss a charter that would limit the shogun’s power in favor of a council of lords.”

Henrik whistled softly. “A paper shogun. That would go over well.”

“They never got past the first draft,” Nakamura said. “The men who carried their inkstones are being watched. So are their wives. So are the servants who fetched their tea.”

He folded the scrap again, sharp and precise, and slid it back into his sleeve.

“And…?” Henrik prompted.

“And that is all you need from that thread,” Nakamura said.

Henrik’s brows went up at the word “thread.” His hands did not move toward the inside of his coat, where Léopold knew he kept a list of names every bit as long as the magistrate’s.

“Compartmentalization,” he said lightly. “My favorite. I share, you share, but not too much, yes?”

“Yes,” Nakamura said. “You have your fields. I have mine. If one of us is cut down, the other lives to be annoying another day.”

“We could be more efficient,” Henrik said, the argument well-worn. “If we link more lines—”

“We could die more efficiently,” Nakamura said, just as worn. “All at once.”

He sipped his tea. His eyes never left the door.

Ando watched them both, a smile playing at the corner of his mouth as if he found the exchange darkly funny. His thumb left another faint print of ink on the table when he set his cup down.

“What about you?” he asked Léopold, switching back to Dutch to toss the question like a ball. “You sit there looking like a crow on a roof. Any stars fallen into your lap this week?”

Léopold set his own cup down, feeling its warmth slip away quickly in the air.

“Only whispers,” he said. “A Dutch factor here complaining that the shogunate wants more guns than they can deliver. A French clerk there annoyed that an American envoy is being allowed closer to the castle than his own master. And one Englishman at the Yokohama tavern who kept his hand on his pocket whenever someone said ‘advisor.’”

Henrik’s mouth twitched. Ando leaned forward, interested.

“Which pocket?” he asked.

“The one on the inside of his coat,” Léopold said. “Where you keep letters you don’t want opened by anyone but you.”

“Ah.” Ando sat back, satisfied. “Then Edo is the same as ever. Too many letters, not enough eyes to read them all.”

The rain started again outside, steady and light. It beat on the roof and rattled the paper in the window. Somewhere down the lane, a baby cried, the sound rising and falling like someone pulling a saw through a log.

The notice board’s hammering had stopped. The ink on the new list would be dry by now.

“Next meeting?” Henrik asked, already reaching for his hat.

“Same night, different place,” Nakamura said. “Do not come here again until the chrysanthemum falls.”

Henrik blinked. “Which chrysanthemum?”

“The one on the notice board,” Ando said, with a half-shrug. “My wife does not waste flowers.”

His wife, listening just beyond the partition, snorted softly.

Nakamura rose in one smooth motion, sleeves falling back into place. He adjusted the angle of his knife in his belt by a hair’s breadth. His eyes flicked once more to door and window, the line of his shoulders easing only when he had them both in view again.

Henrik bowed, almost knocking his hat over and catching it at the last second. “Sumimas—… mai,” he corrected himself, laughter bubbling up again. “One day I will get it right.”

Ando clapped him on the shoulder with his ink-stained hand, leaving a smudge on the foreign cloth.

“By the time you do,” he said, “they will have changed the word.”

They slipped out one by one, timed between patrols by habit more than thought.

When Léopold reached the lane, he glanced back once. The house looked like any other, its books just shadows behind the paper. The chrysanthemum at the notice board sagged further under the renewed drizzle, petals drooping, stem bent.

A gust of wind lifted the fresh proclamation at the edges, trying to peel it back and reveal the names beneath. The paste held. One of the older, half-covered lists showed a single crossed-out name where the brush had torn the paper. Ink had seeped into the tear and dried there, dark and hard.

He tugged his coat tighter and walked on, another shadow among many, while the city added more names to the walls and pretended it had lost nothing at all.

Chapter Text

They’d built the square for performances, not for killing.

The stage sat in front of the magistrate’s office, a low platform of joined planks meant for festival dancers and puppet shows. Today, a man knelt in the middle, hands bound behind his back, hair coming loose from its tie.

Ando Takahiro’s neck looked very thin with his head bowed like that.

Léopold lay flat on the tiled roof of a sake shop, belly pressed to warm clay, the ridge digging into his ribs. The afternoon sun slanted across the square, catching on helmets, on spear tips, on the whetstone the executioner dragged along his blade with slow, deliberate strokes.

Schhh—schhh—schhh.

The sound set everyone’s teeth on edge. Even from above he could feel the crowd flinch each time.

“By order of the Shogunate,” the herald shouted, voice cracking just a little. “Ando Takahiro, resident of Kanda ward. Convicted of disturbing public order through dissemination of subversive writings and unlicensed instruction in foreign doctrines.”

Wind caught the edge of the proclamation in his hand and tried to flip it out of his grasp. He clamped it tighter, knuckles white.

Down on the packed dirt, people shifted as one organism. Some tried to peer around taller neighbors. Others kept their eyes on their own feet, shoulders hunched against both sun and sound. A mother near the back dragged her little boy closer to her hip by the sleeve every time he leaned forward, fingers digging into his arm hard enough to leave marks. When he protested, she hissed something sharp into his ear and pointed at the magistrate’s men along the perimeter.

The guards had formed a neat ring around the platform, spears planted but not at rest. Their grips were too tight. The wood flexed faintly under their hands each time the herald paused for breath.

Schhh—schhh—schhh.

Ando’s wife stood near the front, just inside the cordon, as was permitted for immediate family. Her hands were empty. She didn’t seem to know what to do with them. They hovered—clasped, unclasped, fingers twisting her sleeves. The children were nowhere in sight; maybe that was mercy, maybe it was a different cruelty.

Ando himself knelt straight, back a little too stiff, as if he’d braced it consciously. His kimono had been stripped of any sign of status; plain hemp, plain color. The only stain was a faint crescent of ink on his thumb where the wash hadn’t quite scrubbed it out.

Léopold’s fingers curled against the tiles. This was what the Mentor had warned him about: attach yourself to locals and you’d end up watching them die on other people’s schedules.

Beside him, under the ridge, a coil of rope waited. He’d anchored it earlier to a crossbeam inside the sake shop attic, testing the knot twice. The throw had almost been too flashy for his taste. Today, he couldn’t afford taste.

He tracked the positions again, because that’s what training did when fear tried to empty his head. Two spear-men at the steps. Four more along the front. Three musketeers at the back, pointed toward the crowd, not the condemned. One archer on the magistrate’s balcony, bow unstrung in this heat but within reach.

The executioner finished with the whetstone and held the blade up to the light. The edge caught the sun, a thin line of white.

The herald folded the proclamation with fussy care and tucked it into his sleeve. He turned to Ando.

“Do you have any last words?” he asked, loudly enough for the square.

Ando looked up at that, just enough that Léopold could see his face. His glasses had been taken from him. Without them, his eyes seemed too large, blinking against the glare.

He opened his mouth, then closed it again. His tongue ran along the inside of his teeth as if searching for something he’d forgotten.

When he spoke, his voice was hoarse but steady.

“Check… your sums,” he said, to the magistrate’s window, to the air, to whoever kept today’s ledgers. “Sometimes you… forget to count the cost.”

A murmur ran through the crowd—confusion, nerves, the half-laugh that comes when someone says something not quite right at a funeral. A guard near the steps swallowed hard. The butt of his spear dug deeper into the dirt.

The executioner sighed, annoyed by the delay. He stepped up onto the platform, blade resting across his shoulder, eyes already measuring the angle of the swing. His bare forearms shone with sweat.

Léopold took one more breath, belly flattening against tile. Let him die and the Purge’s story stays clean, he thought. Save him and you put ink all over the page.

His mind flashed, unbidden, to a boy counting planets on a cramped sheet of paper, to a girl with charcoal on her cheek, to ink on a thumb that even prison washrooms hadn’t erased.

Schhh—schhh—schhh.

Then he moved.

He rolled, caught the rope, and went over the edge in a controlled fall. The world flipped: sky, wall, crowd. Wind tore at his sleeves. For a heartbeat he hung in air above the square, a foreign shadow dropping between tiled roofs and paper banners.

Someone shouted. A baby wailed.

He hit the platform behind the executioner in a crouch. The wood jarred his knees, but the landing held. Before the man could turn fully, the hidden blade was already thrusting. It slid between ribs at an upward angle, finding the space anatomy had left.

The executioner gasped. The sword tumbled from his hands, clattering across the boards. His knees buckled. Léopold eased him down enough that his body didn’t topple into Ando.

For an instant, there was silence. The crowd’s breath caught as one. Even the herald froze, mouth open around a syllable.

Then a spear-man screamed, “Assassin!”

The ring tightened. Spears snapped up, points like a collar of teeth.

Léopold stepped sideways, placing the executioner’s body between himself and the nearest thrust. Wood struck limp flesh with a wet thud. A guard gagged, face going gray.

Ando twisted around, blinking as if his eyes couldn’t quite keep up with events.

“Stay down,” Léopold said, in Japanese clipped by urgency. He dropped to one knee, the hidden blade flicking out in a short arc. The rope at Ando’s wrists parted with a frayed sigh.

The first spear came in low, aimed clumsily at his ribs. Léopold pivoted, letting it slide past his hip. His hand shot out, grabbing the haft just behind the iron head. A twist, a yank; the guard stumbled forward, overbalanced. Léopold let the motion carry him, shoulder crashing into the man’s chest. They tumbled off the platform together, hitting the dirt hard.

The spear flew from both their hands. Léopold rolled with the impact, coming up in a crouch. The guard lay curled, wheezing, clutching his stomach.

Other spears jabbed toward him, tentative, as if their wielders weren’t entirely convinced the foreigner was solid.

He didn’t have time to kill them all. He didn’t want to. Every corpse gave someone an easy line about foreign chaos.

He went for joints instead.

The next thrust he dodged by inches, feeling the wind of it brush his sleeve. As the guard recovered, Léopold stepped in, heel stamping down on the man’s instep. Bone and sandal leather crunched. The guard cried out, weight collapsing. Léopold’s elbow drove into his ribs, stealing his breath.

He hooked the haft with his forearm, wrenched it sideways, and shoved, sending the man sprawling into the legs of another. They went down together in a tangle of armor and limbs.

Up on the platform, Ando staggered to his feet, hands still half-bound with the remnants of rope. For a heartbeat he looked like he might freeze—like the table with its papers, the children’s drawings, his wife’s face had glued him to the spot.

Then he jumped down, landing clumsily but upright, and bolted toward the edge of the square where the crowd had already begun to scatter.

They did not cheer. They did not reach out to help. They parted instead, like water forced aside by a rock—eyes averted, mouths tight, bodies leaning away as he passed. No one wanted to be seen touching a man the magistrate had called guilty.

A woman grabbed her son by the back of his kimono just as he reached toward Ando, yanking him so hard he fell onto his backside. She hauled him up and dragged him away, scolding under her breath, glancing over her shoulder with every other step.

“Stop them!” the herald shrieked, his voice cracking. “Stop them!”

A musket barked from the rear of the square. The shot went wild, kicking up dirt near Ando’s feet. He stumbled, slid, kept running.

Léopold swore under his breath. The archer on the balcony had his bow half-strung now, fingers fumbling with the cord. A second musket was being raised.

He sprinted, cutting through the chaos of falling spearmen and fleeing civilians, using the bodies as cover. A spear point grazed his sleeve, snagging a thread. He twisted away from another, shoulder clipping a stall and sending a cascade of pickled radish barrels rolling.

The square dissolved into shouts and slipping feet.

He caught up with Ando just as the scholar reached the alley’s mouth.

“In here,” Léopold hissed, grabbing his arm and shoving him sideways into a narrow lane that cut between two warehouses.

Fog had started to creep in from the river, a low, white breath that hugged the ground. It thickened in the alley, swallowing sound, muffling the view of the square behind them. The air smelled of damp stone and the faint, metallic tang of the bay.

They ran.

Ando’s sandals slapped the uneven cobbles. His breath came in harsh gasps. Bits of rope still dangled from his wrists, swinging with each stride.

Behind them, bootsteps clattered, distorted by echo and mist. A guard shouted, the sound stretched and flattened by the fog until it was impossible to tell how far away he was.

“Left,” Léopold said, recognizing the next intersection by the leaning lantern post. He grabbed Ando’s sleeve and yanked him around the corner just as a spear jabbed blindly through the space where they’d been.

The spear stopped mid-stab.

The guard holding it had halted, knees bent, eyes suddenly wide.

There was a head floating in front of his face.

It hung in the air like a lantern someone had forgotten to attach strings to. Red hair fell in a jagged curtain to a sharp chin. A blue cap perched atop the hair at a careless angle. A wide, neat collar framed a neck that ended, abruptly, in nothing at all.

The head smiled, showing small, pointed teeth.

“Boo,” it said.

The guard’s mouth dropped open. His spear slipped from his hands and clattered to the stones. For a heartbeat he just stood there, frozen, pupils shrunk to pinpoints.

Then he screamed. It was a high, tearing sound, much more frightened than anything he’d made facing the man who’d just killed his executioner.

More heads drifted out of the fog behind the first, like fish emerging from murky water. Three, four, five—each identical, sharing the same wicked grin, the same red hair, the same cap tilted just so. They spread out, forming a loose circle around the cluster of guards who’d followed into the alley.

One dropped low, so close to a man’s face that he could have counted her eyelashes if he’d had the courage to look. Another rose high, peering down from just under the eaves. A third spun slowly, hair fanning out in a lazy orbit.

Necks trailed behind some of them, long and sinuous like ropes, vanishing back into the mist. Others had nothing beneath them at all, simply hanging there like severed things that somehow refused to fall.

“Y-youkai,” one guard stammered. His hands shook so violently that the sword he was trying to draw clanged against its own sheath. “Rokuro… nukekubi…”

“Make up your mind,” one of the heads said dryly. Her voice echoed among the copies, coming from three mouths at once, making it impossible to tell which had spoken.

Another guard tried to shove past her, shoulder down. The nearest head slid sideways in midair, neck stretching and twisting like a length of red rope. She bumped his forehead with hers—a light, almost playful tap.

His eyes rolled back. He collapsed bonelessly into the arms of the man behind him. That one yelped, feet slipping in the damp, and went down too. The alley floor swallowed them with a squelch.

The remaining guards broke.

They scattered backward, tripping over one another, boots skidding on the wet cobbles. One lost his helmet entirely; it rattled away into the fog like a runaway bowl. Another swung his spear wildly at empty air as a head zipped past his shoulder, laughing.

The heads followed them for a few paces, bobbing at shoulder height, whispering nonsense, blowing cold breath against ears. One of them shrieked suddenly, a sound that cut sideways through the brain like a blade. The men clapped hands to their heads and ran faster.

Then, as quickly as they’d appeared, the heads drifted back into the fog and vanished. The echo of their laughter lingered a heartbeat longer, then thinned into the ordinary damp silence of the alley.

Ando had flattened himself against the wall when the first head appeared, eyes huge, all the breath knocked out of him for an entirely new reason. Now he stared at the spot where the last guards had disappeared.

Léopold watched the mist, every sense strung tight. He’d heard stories already—whispered over cheap sake, muttered at shrines—about the Grassroots Youkai Network. Small monsters. Local terrors. Kind enough, most of the time, if left alone. No one had mentioned that their heads separated quite so cleanly.

He could feel it in the air now: fear bending away from the magistrate’s stage and toward the alley instead, giving the city a different story to tell.

“Move,” he said, when his heartbeat had dropped below a hammering gallop. “They’ll grow courage back in a minute.”

He pushed off from the wall and guided Ando deeper into the winding lane, away from the square, three turns and a low gate and a clutter of laundry lines between them and the killing stage.

A shadow stepped out from behind a stack of barrels just ahead, human-shaped. Léopold’s hand flew to his blade before his mind finished registering that the woman’s shoulders were attached to a body.

Her head, at least.

Cap, red hair, capelet hiding her neck. Eyes sharp. The same face he’d just seen hovering in mid-air as a handful of copies.

“Relax,” she said, in a tone that suggested she fully expected him not to. “If I wanted you dead, I would have let him swing.” She jerked her chin back toward the square.

Ando exhaled shakily, the sound half-laugh, half-sob.

“Your timing is…” He groped for a word and found it, barely. “Memorable.”

“Good,” she said. “Fear sticks better that way.”

She walked past them without asking, slipping into the space between them and the alley mouth as if she owned it. The fog curled around her ankles like a cat.

“Next time,” she added, glancing back over her shoulder at Léopold, “try not to make such a mess. Blood gets people’s attention.” Her mouth quirked. “Floating heads just get blamed on bad sake.”

One of the detached heads drifted lazily into view beside her, neck vanishing under the capelet. It yawned, revealing a small pink tongue and very sharp teeth, then winked at Ando before thinning back into mist.

Ando made a strangled noise.

Léopold found himself almost smiling despite the adrenaline still clawing at his chest.

“Who do I thank?” he asked.

“Sekibanki,” she said. “Grassroots Youkai Network. We keep small monsters like you from getting stepped on by big ones.” Her gaze flicked over him, weighing, measuring, as Ashford’s had done years ago—but where Ashford had assessed, she appraised. “And sometimes we do charity work. Consider this… a recruitment pitch.”

Bootsteps echoed faintly at the far end of the lane. Men’s voices, shouting questions, fear already being hammered into outrage.

Sekibanki rolled her eyes.

“Humans,” she muttered. “Too scared in the wrong places, not scared enough in the right ones.” She pointed down a narrower side passage, little more than space between two leaning walls.

“That way,” she said. “Third door on the left. Knock twice, then once. Don’t bleed on the threshold. The woman who lives there hates stains.”

Then she stepped backward into the fog. Her body faded, outline going soft, until only her grin remained for a heartbeat, disembodied in the mist. It, too, dissolved.

The alley seemed suddenly colder.

Ando sagged against the wall, knees finally giving in. Léopold caught his arm to keep him upright.

“Can you walk?” he asked.

Ando nodded, once, jerkily. His hands were shaking. The ink-stain on his thumb smeared as he wiped at his face and left a streak of gray on his cheek, like a comet’s tail.

“They’ll… they’ll come to the house,” he said, voice raw. “My wife, the children—”

“We’ll get you hidden first,” Léopold said. “Then we plan for that.”

They moved, feet quiet on the slick stone. Behind them, the square slowly reclaimed its shape. The stage waited for the next name. The guards’ spears settled back into their grips, hands a little tighter now. The crowd would go home and talk in low voices about the foreign shadow and the flying heads, about the sound of a blade that never fell.

By night, the notice boards would have another fresh sheet pasted over the old ones. And somewhere between the lines of ink, fear would decide which part of the story it liked best.

Chapter Text

By morning, the charcoal man’s plank had a new crack.

It hadn’t been there yesterday. Léopold could see it as he approached the stall: a splintered line near the back edge of the board where the merchant laid out his sacks, darkened with old ash and new fingerprints.

“Charcoal, sir?” the man called, voice rough from shouting the same two syllables for years. “Good wood. Dry.”

He was missing two teeth and had a habit of nodding as if his own words needed his approval.

Léopold gave the plank a passing glance, the way a housewife might when judging wood. His eyes never lingered on the crack. His hand did.

He pressed two fingers along the split as if testing for damp. The wood gave a fraction under his touch and tilted, betraying the weight hidden beneath. A folded scrap of paper, envelope-thin, slid from the gap to land in the weave of the straw mat at his feet.

He shifted his heel, covering it as he pretended to inspect the charcoal.

“Too soft,” he said, frowning. “Won’t last in a good brazier.”

The vendor looked personally offended. “Soft? You insult me. This wood has more backbone than half the men in Edo. Look—”

He stomped on one of the sacks. The coal inside clinked dully.

Léopold let himself be bullied into taking a small bundle, haggling just enough to make it look real. As he stooped to pick it up, his fingers found the paper under his heel and palmed it. The charcoal dust camouflaged any stray ink.

He walked away under the weight of blackened wood and words.

Only when he turned the second corner did he work the scrap open with one hand inside his sleeve. Three lines of cramped characters, written in a nervous hurry.

Schuyler ship arrived three days early. Unscheduled freight off-loaded at night. Crates heavier than rice, marked only with “adviser” seal. Guard rotation doubled at Narutaki warehouse.

No names. No sender. The street itself could have written it.

He burned the scrap later in a brazier behind a bathhouse, feeding it in after a handful of rice husks. The flame took it eagerly, ink curling, paper turning to lace and then to nothing.

The shrine sat where the ward ended and the hill began, half-swallowed by cedar shade. Its torii gate leaned a little but held. The afternoon light that filtered through the branches dappled the stone steps, dusty and worn by generations of feet that had come to ask for things: health, fortune, safe childbirth, an exam passed, a merchant’s ledger balanced.

The ema board out front sagged under the weight of wooden plaques. Prayer after prayer, hung on strings: children’s scrawls, careful calligraphy, drawings of horses and coins and chrysanthemums.

Léopold moved among them with his hands behind his back, head tilted as if he were admiring the art. His eyes slid over the words without trying to read. This wasn’t his language, not really. It belonged to the people who had written “please cure my mother’s cough” and “let my son survive his conscription.”

He was looking for edges, not content.

There—in the corner, just above the point where the rain had stained the board. A plaque hung slightly wrong, twisting its string. The hole drilled through the top had been chipped on one side, not worn smooth like the others.

He reached up and steadied it with two fingers. The prayer on the front read, in neat but shaky characters: “Let the storms pass us by.”

On the back, where only the god was supposed to see, there was no wish. Someone had hollowed a small shallow into the wood, just deep enough for a rolled sliver of paper. He slipped it out with his thumb and pressed the plaque back flat.

“Storms always come,” a woman sweeping the gravel muttered, not looking at him. Her broom scratched in steady strokes. “They just change direction.”

He bowed slightly in her vague direction, as if in pious agreement, and wandered off to light a stick of incense. The paper waited in his sleeve, light as rain.

Later, he weighed the words in a quiet corner of a tea house.

Adviser from Holland complained at Dejima of “shortfall” in metal. Told magistrate “your Regent demands a shield but cuts his own arm.” Said also “Templar overseer impatient.” Overseer traveling to Edo within the month.

The characters for “Templar” were their own small joke—nothing more than the word for “iron tower” written with a particular flourish only a few eyes would recognize.

He smiled without humor, folded the paper twice, then tucked it under his saucer. When he stood to leave, the waitress came to collect the dishes. Her thumb lingered on the saucer’s edge just long enough to feel the extra thickness.

The network shifted, unseen.

The lion’s mouth held vinegar this week.

The guardian pair flanked the entrance to a prosperous merchant’s compound: one with its jaw open, one closed. Their stone fangs had been smoothed by curious children’s fingers over the years. Today, an offering dish had been placed between their paws: sticky rice triangles dusted with salt and a small dish of pickled radish.

Léopold paused, ostensibly to admire the carving. The open-mouthed lion stared past him, mid-roar. The hollow behind its teeth—just large enough for a folded scrap—smelled sharply sour.

He slipped two fingers into the stone mouth, ostensibly checking for rain damage. His fingertips brushed wet paper. Vinegar seeped through it, tacky.

“Careful, sir,” the gate guard said lazily from his post. “Lion bites foreigners who don’t bow properly.”

Léopold smiled with appropriate awkwardness, bowed over-deep, and used the movement to cup the softened paper out of the hollow. When he straightened, his hand was empty; the scrap sat now pressed flat against his palm beneath his sleeve.

He took one rice triangle and one piece of radish from the offering as if appeasing the stone beast, popped the radish into his own mouth, and walked on, chewing thoughtfully. The vinegar made his eyes sting.

In an alley, he peeled the paper apart as gently as if he were unfolding someone else’s skin.

Suspected informant at lotus shop confirmed. Selling names to both sides. Has contact at magistrate’s office who wants more than salary. Templar coin seen. Suggest cutting thread before it binds.

He licked the vinegar from his fingertips, grimacing. The taste lingered even as he crumpled the paper and pushed it deep into the muck at the base of a fence, where no one would look.

Henrik’s rooms smelled of tobacco and ink and the faint salt tang that never seemed to leave men who’d grown up staring at flat northern seas.

He’d chosen a second-floor space over a cooper’s shop, on a street that always had barrels rolling in and out, masking the thumps of his own visitors. The tatami mats had been replaced once, judging by the fresher straw scent in one corner. The low table in the center bore scars from old knife slips and the ring marks of too many teacups.

When Léopold slid the door open, Henrik was hunched over that table, tongue caught between his teeth, trying to copy a line of kanji from a borrowed document onto a clean sheet. His brushwork looked like a drunk spider had stumbled through an ink puddle.

“Ah,” Henrik said, relief evident, dropping the brush immediately. “Save me from conjugations.”

“They’re not verbs,” Léopold said.

“If it has that many strokes, it’s conjugating something,” Henrik grumbled. He wiped his hands on his hakama and reached for the pipe in the ashtray, only to find it empty. He sighed, as if this too were the shogunate’s fault.

On the table lay a map of Edo, hand-drawn but precise, spread flat and held at the corners by small stones. Dockside, castle, key wards—each labeled in Dutch and Japanese. Tiny marks dotted the streets: circles, squares, triangles. Some were inked in; others penciled lightly.

Henrik picked up a charcoal stick and tapped it on different parts of the map as he spoke.

“Charcoal man. Shrine. Lion.” Each tap corresponded to where Léopold had walked that morning. He added a small circle at each point, solid. “Those lines held. No sign of rot—yet.”

He drew a faint, dotted line connecting them: a path through the city that left no straight route to any one door.

“What about the lotus shop?” he asked.

“Coin’s dirty,” Léopold said. “We cut him off. If he screams, we know whose ears hurt.”

Henrik grunted, rubbing his jaw with ink-stained fingers. He made no move to write that part down.

Instead, he sketched another mark near the lotus shop and placed a neat X through it.

“Templars?” he asked.

“Or just greedy,” Léopold said. “Greedy is enough.”

Henrik sat back, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Greedy feeds them,” he said. “They plant their flags in empty stomachs and half-paid ledgers.”

He lifted the charcoal again and drew a new line from the docks to a district near the castle, leaving long, empty gaps.

“And there?” Léopold asked, pointing to the blank spaces.

Henrik shook his head. “Needs to be there,” he said. “But isn’t yet.”

“Why?” Léopold asked, already knowing the answer.

Henrik gave him a look. “Because Nakamura has his own map. And his own gaps. And his own stubborn spine.”

He jabbed the charcoal down a bit too hard, snapping the tip. He stared at the broken piece, then laughed, short and tired.

“Compartmentalization,” he said, the foreign word awkward in his mouth. “You have your boxes, I have mine. We both pretend that makes us safe.”

“It kept us alive in Canton,” Léopold said.

Henrik’s expression flickered. “Canton isn’t Edo,” he said. “Here, everyone spies on everyone else for sport. They don’t even need the money.”

He picked up the broken charcoal and put it aside carefully, as if saving it out of habit even though it was nearly useless now.

“Anyway,” he said, shaking off the mood. “My side will keep watching the foreign quarter, the shipping offices, the smugglers. Your side”—he pointed the pipe stem at Léopold—“keeps walking your little circles and listening to merchants complain. And we both trust Nakamura to keep his magistrates from chopping our heads off if we trip.”

“He’ll share what we need,” Léopold said. “When sharing hurts less than silence.”

Henrik snorted. “Exactly.”

He leaned over the map again, squinting. With slow deliberation, he shaded in the area around one of the circles until it looked like a dark smudge rather than a clear point.

“I don’t put your name anywhere,” he said, not looking up. “Or mine. Or his. If they take this map, all they get are shapes.”

“And if they take you?” Léopold asked quietly.

Henrik shrugged one shoulder. “Then I hope they keep good records and that Nakamura knows how to read between lines,” he said. “And that you remember where the charcoal man stands.”

He smiled, tired but genuine.

“We’re not a tree,” he added. “We’re cuttings. If they burn one field, someone else plants another.”

Nakamura’s office didn’t look like an office.

On paper, he was a low-ranking clerk in a minor magistrate’s household. In practice, his work happened in doorways and on street corners, in the pauses between the clatter of armor and the scratch of brushes. Tonight, he had chosen a tea stall overlooking a side canal where lantern light painted trembling coins on the water.

He sat with his back to the canal wall, facing the street. The bench gave him a view of everyone coming and going: samurai, merchants, a pair of courtesans sharing a joke. His teacup sat untouched, steam curling up and dissolving into the night.

When Léopold approached, Nakamura’s gaze flicked once, acknowledging, then returned to the flow of traffic.

“Busy?” Léopold asked, sliding onto the bench.

“Always,” Nakamura said. “Not always with the right things.”

He pulled a folded paper from his sleeve and spread it on the low table between them. Another map of Edo, this one more abstract—blocks and lines and small circles marking intersections, gates, guard posts. No labels, just dots.

He took a piece of chalk from his sleeve and marked three of the dots with neat crosses.

“Three more arrests yesterday,” he said. “Two in Kanda, one near Nihonbashi. Scholars, mostly. One bookseller. All on suspicion of consorting with dangerous ideas.”

He drew a thin line connecting the crosses.

“The men who delivered their rice have been questioned. Their wives are watched. The messenger boy who carried their notes has vanished. The magistrate says it is all coincidence.”

“And you?” Léopold asked.

Nakamura’s mouth twitched. “I do not believe in coincidences,” he said. “I believe in patterns.”

He added another line, this one running from the cross near Nihonbashi toward the castle. He stopped halfway and lifted the chalk.

“Here is where I stop believing in maps,” he said. “Inside the walls, my eyes are not as welcome as yours.”

He folded the paper once, then again, as if folding the city down to a more manageable size.

“And the foreign quarter?” Léopold asked.

Nakamura tilted his head slightly. “What about it?”

“Henrik says shipments increase,” Léopold said. “He sees more guns, more barrels. He doesn’t know where all of them go.”

“Henrik sees what foreigners allow him to see,” Nakamura said. “Just as I see what the magistrates forget to hide. Our visions overlap here and there.” He tapped the table with two fingers. “Not enough to make a full picture. Just enough to make us think we might.”

He unfolded the map halfway, exposing only the districts on their side of the river. With two sharp motions, he tore it down the middle, separating the foreign quarter and the castle from the rest.

Half the city lay in his left hand, half in his right.

“This half,” he said, raising the one with the castle, “you let Henrik worry about. And your Dutch friends. This half”—he lifted the other, full of tight streets and crowded wards—“is mine.”

He put the foreign half back in his sleeve. The other he slid across the table to Léopold.

“For tonight,” he said. “Tomorrow, I burn it and draw it again.”

“You could share the full map,” Léopold said, thumb resting on the torn edge. “Make it easier. Fewer blind spots.”

Nakamura’s eyes cut to him, unreadable in the lantern glow.

“Easier for whom?” he asked. “If they take my house, they get your routes. If they take Henrik’s, they get my magistrates. If they take yours, they get both. We are already too connected. We are not the only ones drawing maps.”

He nodded toward the castle’s distant outline, its eaves jagged against the night sky.

“The Regent has his own,” he said. “So do the Templars. So do the sonnō jōi. Everyone wants a picture where they are in the center.”

He took his untouched tea at last, sipped, and grimaced. It had gone cold.

“Humans love boxes,” a voice said from somewhere above.

Nakamura’s shoulders tightened a fraction. Léopold’s hand slid closer to his blade. Both men looked up.

A head peered down at them from the underside of the eave. Just the head: red hair spilling over the edge, blue cap askew, eyes amused. It hung there upside-down like a bat.

“I leave you alone for one Purge,” Sekibanki said, “and you multiply hiding places like mushrooms.”

The meeting on the rooftops was later, when the city’s noise had thinned to the distant clack of geta and the occasional drunk song.

They gathered on the tiled ridge of a warehouse overlooking the river, where the wind carried away loose words and the fog from the water softened outlines. Lanterns below turned the surface into a shifting patchwork of gold and black.

Léopold sat with his boots hooked against the eave, one hand resting on the tile to steady himself. Nakamura had declined to come up; he did not like heights he hadn’t chosen, and someone needed to remain among the earthbound eyes. Henrik, equally absent, had complained about his knees and the indignity of being a crow on a roof.

The youkai had no such reservations.

Sekibanki stood upright on the ridge as if it were a straight bit of street, balance effortless, capelet fluttering in the breeze. Her head, presently attached, sat at a challenging tilt.

On her left, Kagerou rested on her haunches, arms draped over her knees, eyes reflecting what little light there was in a way no human’s could. Her dark hair swayed with the wind; wolf ears twitched at each new sound. Bare feet gripped the tile. Claws clicked softly.

On Sekibanki’s other side, Wakasagihime had settled on a rain barrel someone had dragged up from who knew where, tail coiled under her like a cushion. A small pool of water sloshed in the barrel, catching her fins and casting a greenish glow on her face. She trailed her fingers through it, drawing circles, watching the ripples as if they were more interesting than anything the city did.

“The humans are restless,” Wakasagihime said, voice soft. “The fear tastes… different lately.”

“Sharper,” Kagerou agreed. “Less about monsters under the floorboards, more about magistrates and foreigners and whose blood is going to be on whose doorstep tomorrow.” She wrinkled her nose. “I preferred it when they worried about wolves in the forest. That at least was accurate.”

Sekibanki sat, finally, folding her legs under her. Once settled, her head popped off with a small, practiced jerk, rising a handspan above her neck before bobbing there. The exposed neck was hidden by her capelet, but the separation was obvious in the way her body stayed perfectly still while her head drifted, eyes narrowing as it studied Léopold.

“You run a lot,” she said. “Up, down, left, right. Always with your little bits of paper.”

“It’s how humans talk when we’re not allowed to,” Léopold said.

“No,” she said. “It’s how humans feel clever when they’re being watched. You love boxes. Maps. Compartments.”

Her detached head floated sideways, positioning itself between him and the moon. “You think if you put your secrets in different rooms, the monster can only eat one at a time.”

“It slows the monster down,” he said. “Sometimes that’s enough.”

“Sometimes,” she conceded.

Her other heads emerged from the shadows, three copies lifting from behind chimneys and stacks of tiles. They arranged themselves in a loose ring, encircling the rooftop in a way that had more to do with habit than threat.

Wakasagihime watched them, eyes half-lidded. “Humans like stories too,” she said. “They think they’re choosing them. They’re not.”

She flicked her fingers in the water. Ripples spread, intersected, cancelled each other in some places and built into small waves in others.

“The stories are choosing them,” she said. “Lately, most of those stories end with ‘expel the barbarians’ and ‘revere the Emperor.’ Very popular phrases. Easy to remember. Easy to chant while you’re sharpening something.”

Kagerou scratched idly at a tile with one claw, leaving a thin white line.

“Fear is cheap right now,” she said. “Any fool with a brush and some slogans can stir up a mob. They don’t need shadows in the woods when they have foreigners in the streets.”

“And you?” Léopold asked. “Where do you fit in those stories?”

Wakasagihime smiled, small and sad. “We don’t,” she said. “They forget us when they have bigger things to scream at.”

Sekibanki’s central head floated closer, until her eyes were level with his.

“We’d like not to be forgotten,” she said. “It’s bad for health.”

Her other heads nodded in unison, like a row of lanterns swaying in a breeze.

“We have our own network,” Kagerou said. “Rivers, rooftops, forest paths. We hear little things. A farmer whispering about the thing that watched him from the field. A sailor telling his friend that the reason his ship didn’t sink was the mermaid under the keel. A child boasting about seeing a floating head in an alley.”

She glanced at Sekibanki, amused. Sekibanki pretended not to notice and failed.

“These stories feed us,” Wakasagihime said. “Fear with our names on it. Respect, sometimes. Offerings.” She flicked a droplet at Léopold’s boot, where it clung stubbornly. “But lately, the fear has new names. Ii. Sonnō jōi. Black Ships. Treaties. Less rice at dinner.”

“Your Purge is very efficient,” Sekibanki said, dry. “It’s purging us by accident. When the humans stop leaving rice at the shrine and start leaving names with clerks instead, we grow thin.”

Léopold listened. The wind tugged at his sleeves, bringing with it the distant sound of a song from a riverside tavern—off-key, too loud, desperate.

“If you’re here to ask me to stop the Purge,” he said, “you’re wasting your time.”

“We’re not idiots,” Sekibanki said. “We’ve been watching humans longer than you’ve been dropping off little love letters in lion mouths. We know you can’t steer the whole city.”

Her head drifted back a little, giving him space. The others followed, forming a loose constellation above the roof.

“We’re here to aim,” she said.

“Aim?” he echoed.

“Aim the fear,” Wakasagihime said. “Right now, it sloshes everywhere. Magistrate. Foreigners. Neighbor who said the wrong thing at the wrong time. Youkai. Emperor. Shogun. No shape. Just a big, ugly wave.”

She cupped her hands and lifted a double handful of water from the barrel, letting it trickle out between her fingers in thin streams.

“If we nudge it,” she said, “we can make smaller waves. Direct them down certain channels. Tell certain stories louder than others.”

Kagerou’s claws clicked again. “The butcher in Nihonbashi who beats his wife? We can make the alley whisper about the thing in his ceiling that hates the sound of crying. The rice broker who cheats his neighbors? A wolf prowls his dreams until he stops—or until someone takes a knife to him.”

Sekibanki grinned, feral.

“And the Templar factor in Narutaki who thinks no one sees him selling guns out the back?” she said. “We make sure every child on his street knows there’s a ghost in his warehouse that eats men who count silver at night. Fear does the rest. Guards quit. Porters make mistakes. People watch his door. You do your sneaky little climbs. We all go home fed.”

“And the sonnō jōi?” Léopold asked. “The ones already sharpening blades for foreigners and ‘traitors’? You aim them too?”

Wakasagihime’s hands stilled. The water in her palms trembled.

“Some of them are easy to nudge,” she said. “A whisper here, a black dog’s shadow there. We can make them late to a riot. Or too scared to go down a particular alley.”

“But their fear is… different,” Kagerou said, searching for the word. “It curls inward. It’s about purity. About lines in the dirt. You can’t redirect all of that without snapping something important.”

“And if you snap it, it cuts you,” Sekibanki finished. “We’re brave. We’re not stupid.”

She floated higher, crossing one ankle over the other in mid-air as if she were sitting in an invisible chair.

“So here’s the offer,” she said. “You keep doing your dead drops and your map-tearing and your box-building. You give us names, places, faces that matter. People whose fear, if… adjusted, helps your little creed and keeps us from starving.”

“In return,” Wakasagihime said, “we steer stories away from you where we can. ‘The foreign shadow who broke Ando out of the square’ becomes ‘the floating head that terrified the guards.’ The human eye sees what it already believes in. You stay rumor. We stay horror. Everyone wins.”

“Except the men on the lists,” Kagerou said, flashing teeth. “But you were going to cut them anyway.”

Wind tugged at Léopold’s coat again. The city below breathed in restless sleep. Somewhere, a patrol rattled by, spears clinking, boots drumming.

He thought of Henrik’s map, of Nakamura tearing the city in half with one sharp movement. Of the gaps between their knowledge, the places where Templars could set up shop unnoticed. Of Ando on his knees in the square, ink on his thumb.

Fear moved, whether they directed it or not.

“You want targets,” he said. “You get them through me. Not Henrik, not Nakamura. Their lines are brittle enough already.”

Sekibanki’s main head bobbed in a nod. “Fine by me,” she said. “Humans always taste better when they don’t know who’s cooking them.”

Wakasagihime winced. “You’re going to scare him off,” she said.

“He’s still here,” Kagerou pointed out. “Foreigners have stubborn teeth.”

Léopold exhaled, a slow breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

“You stay away from Ando’s house,” he said. “And Henrik’s, and Nakamura’s. Their families are not… practice.”

“Obviously,” Sekibanki said, rolling her eyes. “We’re not the Templars.”

Wakasagihime tipped her water back into the barrel. The ripples settled.

“We have our own lines we don’t cross,” she said. “We like this world messy, not empty.”

Kagerou sniffed the air, ears twitching. “Patrol,” she said. “Two streets over. They’re bored. One of them is thinking about the execution he almost saw.”

Sekibanki’s heads turned in unison, eyes narrowing.

“Let’s go remind him who stole his story,” she said, baring sharp little teeth in a grin. “Before the magistrate rewrites it with nicer handwriting.”

The heads lifted, rising into the fog. Her body blurred, then dissolved, neck stretching out into the night. Wakasagihime slid from the barrel in one smooth motion, tail sending a small wave slapping against the wood, and slipped over the edge of the roof toward the canal with barely a whisper. Kagerou yawned, showing a mouth full of wolf, and bounded away, claws clicking on tile, vanishing into the labyrinth of roofs.

Léopold was left alone on the ridge, listening to the city.

Below, fear moved in familiar channels: magistrates, hunger, foreigners. Above, it had begun to grow new shapes—floating heads, river women, wolves in alleys.

He reached into his coat and touched the folded map Nakamura had given him—the half-city, the gaps. The paper crinkled softly under his fingertips.

If someone was going to turn them into monsters in the stories that would be told later, he thought, they might as well decide where the teeth bit down.

Chapter Text

The castle walls looked like a sleeping animal from this side of the moat.

Not dead—never dead—just breathing slow, stone ribs rising and falling under moonlight. The lanterns along the parapets were half-lidded eyes, pools of yellow that left plenty of darkness between them.

Léopold slid into that darkness.

The water in the moat lapped softly at the base of the wall, black as ink. He lay flat on the low skiff Wakasagihime’s cousins had “borrowed” from a fisherman, fingers hooked over the side, letting the current carry him along the shadowed stretch where the patrol boats never bothered to go. The crayfish under the hull clicked and scuttled, tiny ghost claws against wood.

From the water, the stone above seemed impossibly smooth. Up close, it had seams.

He found them with his fingertips: slight misalignments between blocks, chips worn by rain and centuries, the edge of a climbing plant that had stubbornly rooted itself in a crack. His boots found toeholds where his eyes had seen none.

Halfway up, he pressed flat against the cold stone as a lantern bobbed past on the opposite bank. The guard carrying it yawned, the sound carried as a thin, tired sigh across the water. His spear point drooped a little.

Something small and pale flickered at the edge of Léopold’s vision: a head peeking over the parapet ten paces to the right, red hair dull in the lantern haze. Sekibanki’s eyes met his, upside-down.

She jerked her chin toward the guard, then traced a lazy circle in the air. Sleepy. Safe.

Her head vanished again.

Léopold climbed the last distance in three quick movements and rolled over the parapet, hugging the inner edge of the wall. The nearest lantern was far enough that he was just another lump in the stone for anyone glancing down.

Inside the first courtyard, storehouses crouched like bulky animals: thick walls, heavy doors, the faint smell of rice and gunpowder and mice. A pair of guards leaned against one, talking in low voices about bad fish at supper and the latest rumor from Kyoto. One scratched under his helmet with the butt of his spear.

Léopold crossed above them, fingers and toes on roof beams.

The castle roofs rose layer upon layer, eaves overlapping like scales. He moved along their spine, weight low, breath measured. Tiles shifted minutely under his boots. The wind tugged at his coat, flapping the hem just enough to make him flatten himself when a gust threatened to lift it.

Below, courtyards opened and closed in his peripheral vision: a practice yard with sand smoothed over the day’s footprints; a small garden pond with one lantern burning at its edge, casting a trembling bar of light across still water.

On the far side of that pond, in the shadow under a cypress, something moved. Two eyes caught the lantern-glow and reflected it back, amber. Kagerou sat with her back to the tree, human-shaped for now, chin on her knees. Her nose lifted, testing the air.

She curled her fingers, claws flexing, and pointed toward a narrow corridor between two wings—no guards, no servants. Then she scratched once at her own ear: one patrol, predictable, bored. The sound would carry along stone at a certain pace.

He nodded, though she might not see, and took the route she’d indicated, dropping to a lower roof, letting the garden’s trees hide his silhouette from the lit windows.

He passed near one such window and caught a slice of interior: a clerk bent over a ledger, brush moving in tired strokes, a small mountain of paper stacked beside him. A kettle sat on a brazier at his elbow, long boiled dry. He dipped his brush automatically into an empty inkstone, frowned, and re-inked without really waking up.

The castle was full of men like that—ink and habit, keeping the machine moving.

He moved above them.

A covered walkway bridged one courtyard to another. A guard sat at the near end on a low stool, head nodding, chin jerking up every time it drooped too far.

A shadow slid along the underside of the bridge: a head, just the head, hair flattening against the boards as it moved. Sekibanki’s face peered up through the gaps between planks, eye level with the guard’s dangling sandal.

She stuck out her tongue.

The guard twitched, shivered, and pulled his feet up onto the stool, muttering about drafts. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, then reached for his canteen.

While he tilted his head back to drink, Léopold swung himself up and around, catching the outer beam, flattening against the outer edge of the walkway where only the moat below could see him. The guard’s soles were a handspan from his face.

He held his breath, waited for the water to swallow the sound of the man’s swallow, then moved on, a ghost pressed against wood.

The castle’s inner keep loomed ahead, a darker shape against the sky. Lamps burned in a few upper windows, pale squares. One of those squares, higher and slightly apart, belonged to the Regent.

Ii Naosuke did not sleep early.

The approach to that wing was less forgiving. More posted men, straighter backs, the subtle tightening of security that came with being closer to someone who mattered. Léopold chose the servants’ route instead: a narrow, covered passage that smelled of boiled rice and old smoke, the paper walls patched with cheaper scraps. The floorboards creaked in known places.

He stepped only on the beams, weight spread, listening for the smallest protest from the wood.

At one corner, he paused, shoulder against the frame. Through a thin crack in the paper, he could see down into a veranda below.

A man in his thirties sat on the railing, legs dangling, a pipe smoldering between his fingers. He wore the Regent’s crest on his sleeve, not on his face. His eyes stayed on the dark sky, not the papers by his side.

Beside him, on a low table, steam curled from a cup. It had almost lost its heat.

He sighed, set the pipe aside, and reached for a brush instead, drawing four careful strokes on a scrap of paper. 治. Rule. Govern. Heal.

The hand that wrote them had calluses from sword and brush both.

He stacked the paper on a pile where the top sheets bore the same word, ink still damp. Then he swallowed the last mouthful of tea and stood.

Not Ii. A shadow of the man Léopold was here to kill.

The real one waited further in.

He slipped past.

The Regent’s quarters were quieter than the rest of the wing, not because fewer men were awake, but because the noise had changed quality. Footsteps softened. Voices, when they existed, never rose above a murmur. Somewhere nearby, someone cleared his throat and then thought better of it.

At the end of the passage, a pair of sliding doors stood closed, light seeping around their edges—a thin, steady glow, the kind a single lamp gives when a man works later than he should.

Léopold halted in the small alcove just before them. His pulse picked up, a drum against his ribs. He flexed his fingers once, making sure the glove seams wouldn’t catch, the blade would slide clean.

A guard’s shadow crossed the paper for an instant, pausing. The man shifted his weight, then moved on. The floorboard outside creaked and fell quiet.

Léopold slid the door open without sound.

Ii Naosuke sat alone at a low desk, back straight, shoulders squared as if invisible armor still hung there. His hair was gathered neatly; no one in the castle would see him with it down. The lamp at his side was trimmed low, flame small, casting long shadows over the paper and inkstone.

He was not the caricature from the street whispers—the butcher, the tyrant. He looked, in that moment, like a tired clerk who had never been allowed to put the brush down.

In front of him, a sheet of paper lay half-filled with the same character over and over: 治. Each one slightly different. Some angled a fraction sharper, some ended a hair early, some bled more where the brush had hesitated.

His sleeve had an ink smear near the wrist, a gray swipe where he’d brushed against a wet stroke and not noticed. A cup of tea sat beside the lamp, untouched long enough to have formed a thin film on top.

He did not look surprised when Léopold stepped into the room.

His gaze lifted, steady, moving first to the foreigner’s face, then to the set of his shoulders, then to the glint of metal on his wrist. He took in details the way a swordsman takes in a field: obstacles, openings, angles.

“I had hoped,” Ii said quietly, “that if they sent someone, he would at least use the door.”

His voice was roughened by hours of disuse.

Léopold froze just inside the threshold, blade half-raised. Training screamed to close the distance and end it cleanly. Something else—Ando kneeling in the square, the whetstone’s rasp, his Mentor’s ink-stained thumb closing over a scrap of paper—made him hesitate.

“They?” he asked, because he had apparently decided to speak before killing.

Ii’s mouth twisted faintly.

“Whichever of my enemies finds it convenient,” he said. “I have lost track of how many there are this season. Foreign merchants angry I signed the treaties too late. Domains angry I signed them at all. Young samurai angry I did not ask their permission before I tried to keep the country from being carved up like a fish.”

He set the brush down carefully, bristles inward so they wouldn’t dry crooked.

He gestured at the room with his ink-stained hand.

“You may come closer,” he said. “I promise not to shout.”

Léopold stepped forward until he was two paces from the desk, blade still half-extended. From here, he could see the fine lines at the corners of Ii’s eyes, the hollowed cheeks, the gray in his hair that the lamp turned to frost. The calligraphy sheets fluttered faintly in the draft from the open door.

“Order,” Ii said, noticing his glance. “治. Simpler on paper than in practice.”

“You practice it alone,” Léopold said. “At this hour.”

“Who else would I trust with the brush?” Ii asked. The question had bite and self-mockery in equal parts.

He folded his hands atop the desk, ink smears and all, and studied Léopold properly now.

“You are not one of ours,” he said. “Not a sonnō jōi zealot. Not a Satsuma peacock. And not one of the foreign advisers.”

He let the last word hang.

“Your feet make no sound on the floor,” he went on. “Your knife is in the sleeve, not at the belt. And you smell of river water and charcoal.”

His eyes narrowed, something like recognition flickering there.

“Assassin,” he said, trying the foreign word. His pronunciation was better than Henrik’s.

Léopold’s fingers tightened on the bracer.

“You know of us,” he said.

“I know enough to be occasionally grateful when certain men fall from rooftops instead of being arrested and causing me paperwork,” Ii said. “I also know enough to expect that one day, you would decide I belong on the list.”

He met Léopold’s gaze without flinching.

“Do I?” he asked.

The question punched through the script Léopold had brought. The prepared accusations—Purge, names on boards, ships and guns—tangled in his throat.

“You sign notices that hang in streets,” he said instead. “You send men with spears to take scholars from their beds. You sell your own people to treaties written in languages they cannot read.”

Ii’s jaw tightened. “I sign notices because someone must,” he said. “If I leave it to the factions, they will sign more. With less restraint.”

“And the Purge?” Léopold asked. “Is that restraint?”

Ii’s gaze dropped briefly to the stack of calligraphy sheets. His thumb brushed the top edge, leaving a faint new smear of ink.

“When I took this post,” he said slowly, “the Shogunate was soft. Everyone tugged at it. The court in Kyoto. The daimyō. The merchants. The foreigners.” He lifted his eyes again. “You have seen how quickly your countrymen carve up a land when they find it unprepared.”

He did not say “Canton.” He didn’t need to.

“Your Black Ships forced the door open,” he went on. “If we had slammed it shut, there would have been more guns. More dead. Instead, I pulled power inward. I made enemies. I cut some branches so the tree would not fall.”

“The men you cut had families,” Léopold said. Ando’s hoarse voice in the square, the woman’s white knuckles on her son’s sleeve. “Students. The Purge doesn’t stop at the branch.”

Ii closed his eyes briefly, as if something behind them ached.

“Yes,” he said. “Believe it or not, I am aware.”

He opened them again, sharper now.

“You think I enjoy it?” he asked. “That I wake up and say, ‘Ah, good, more heads for the square’?”

He picked up the tea cup, sniffed it, grimaced when he found it cold. He drank anyway.

“The shōgun is ill,” he said, almost casually. “He coughs blood. When he dies, there will be… disagreements. Some would prefer that happen sooner. While the foreigners are still fumbling for position. While I am occupied putting out fires.”

He set the cup down too hard. The leftover tea sloshed, darkening his sleeve further.

“The men you call Templars,” he said, tasting the unfamiliar term, “are among those who find opportunity in such chaos.”

Léopold’s heart skipped.

“You know them,” he said.

“I know their type,” Ii said. “They come with excellent gifts. Cannons, maps, convenient loans. They speak of ‘order’ and ‘progress’ and the need to sweep away old structures that no longer function.”

He gestured at his practice sheets.

“They do not like that I insist on a central ledger,” he said. “They prefer many books in many hands, each with its own numbers, all of them owing.”

He smiled, thin as a blade.

“Your friend Ashford,” he added, and the name landed like a stone, “is polite enough to hide his hunger behind manners. Others are less subtle. They encourage the sonnō jōi boys in Kyoto to shout about the Emperor, while quietly ensuring that foreign guns find their way into certain domains’ storerooms. They will happily see Edo burn if it means rebuilding something more profitable on the ashes.”

Ashford’s face flared in Léopold’s mind: mud-smeared in Canton, pin in his palm; later, clean in Yokohama, talking about “preventing another war by managing this one properly.”

“If I kill you,” Léopold said slowly, following the line whether he wanted to or not, “the shouting boys have one less obstacle. The foreign ‘advisers’ have one less official demanding records. The factions tear at each other while men like Ashford sell them weapons.”

Ii dipped his brush in the inkstone, swirled it, watching the black cloud bloom.

“If you kill me,” he agreed, “you make space. For someone better than I.” A faint shrug. “Or worse. I will not be here to argue either way.”

Silence settled, thick as ink.

The hidden blade felt suddenly heavy against Léopold’s wrist. He could see, clearly, the path his arm would take: two steps, a lunge, metal between ribs. Ii would have no chance to cry out. The Purge would convulse, then resume with a new head.

He also saw the execution square. The way the crowd had not dared to cheer when Ando escaped. The wilting chrysanthemum at the notice board. The hungry light in Ashford’s eyes when he’d spoken of “controlling this opening.”

“You expect me to spare you,” Léopold said.

Ii set the brush down, bristles proper, handle straight.

“I expect you to do your work,” he said. “Whatever that is.”

He held out his right hand, palm up, as if offering his wrist.

“If you have decided I am worse than the men who would pull this country apart,” he added, “then kill me. It will be cleaner than what they have in mind.”

His hand shook, once, before he stilled it against the desk.

Beyond the door, footsteps passed, then slowed. A guard cleared his throat, lingered. The shadow on the paper paused just long enough to prick sweat along Léopold’s spine before moving on.

Léopold stared at that ink-smeared hand.

“When the shōgun coughs,” Ii said softly, “everyone around him listens for the pause. Some pray it will be the last breath. Some pray it will not. Most wonder how much gold his funeral will cost.”

He exhaled, thin.

“I am tired of being the only one in the room who counts the bodies as well as the coins.”

Léopold’s arm dropped. The blade slid back into its sheath with a soft, final click.

“If I leave you alive,” he said, “I will have to argue with you again.”

Ii’s mouth quirked. “Good,” he said. “I hate agreeing with myself.”

He withdrew his offered hand, flexed the fingers, and reached for another blank sheet.

“This does not make us allies,” he added. “You and your Brotherhood have your own ledger. Your own creed.”

“And you have yours,” Léopold said.

Ii dipped the brush, shook off excess ink. A droplet splashed onto his sleeve. He did not notice.

“Then let us be clear,” Ii said, eyes on the paper as he began another 治. “If, in your judgment, I become worse than the men who would turn Japan into a market stall and a battlefield… if I begin to see only columns and not faces…”

He looked up again, pinning Léopold.

“You must kill me,” he said. No drama. Just a statement, like signing a document.

The words settled in Léopold’s chest like a weight.

He held Ii’s stare.

“If you ever decide Japan is a ledger instead of people,” he said, “I will.”

The brush paused mid-stroke, leaving a small hook in the character that had not been there before. Ii looked down at it, then nodded once.

“Fair,” he said.

The footsteps in the corridor came back, closer. A guard’s shadow crossed the thin paper of the door again, hesitated as if listening, then moved away.

Ii’s gaze flicked toward it and back.

“You should go,” he said. “If they find you here, I will have to decide whether to shout or lie. I dislike both.”

Léopold stepped back toward the door, then paused at the threshold.

“There is a man,” he said, “who will come to you as a friend. English. Speaks about preventing chaos. About ‘learning from Canton.’ Wears a black pin he rarely shows and makes corruption sound like remedy.”

Ii’s eyes sharpened.

“Ashford,” he said. “Yes. He has already knocked.”

“Do not let him in,” Léopold said. “Not even to argue.”

Ii huffed a small, humorless breath.

“If I slammed the door on every foreigner who wished to argue,” he said, “Edo would be short four forts and a very expensive pile of ships.”

His expression hardened.

“But I will weigh your warning,” he said. “And if I find him wanting, I will add his name to a list.”

“Make sure it’s the right list,” Léopold said.

Ii’s hand twitched in something too small to be a wave.

“Go,” he repeated. “There are too many ghosts in this castle already.”

Léopold slipped out, closing the door behind him with the same silence he’d opened it. The lamplight thinned to a sliver, then to nothing.

As he retraced his path over beams and roofs and walls, the castle seemed to breathe differently. The sleeping animal stirred, uneasy.

On the outer wall, Sekibanki’s head floated up beside him, hair damp from the moat’s mist.

“Well?” she whispered. “Monster or man?”

“Both,” he said.

She grinned, teeth small and sharp. “My favorite kind.”

At the moat’s edge, he dropped back into the skiff. The wood rocked under his weight. The current took him away from stone and lanterns and ink.

Above, in that small room, a man sat with a brush, writing “order” until the strokes blurred.

In the water, Léopold watched the reflection of the keep tremble, shatter, and reform with each ripple.

Chapter Text

The first thing he noticed was the rice.

It sat in neat bowls on the low table, white mounds shaped with care. They were a little lower than they’d been last month. Not enough for a hungry man to complain without shame, but enough that a careful eye could see the curve.

Ando’s wife set the last bowl down and smoothed her apron as if that could hide the difference. Her fingers lingered a fraction longer on her children’s bowls, nudging the grains higher, stealing from her own hill and her husband’s.

“Nakamura-san sends his regrets,” she said, more to fill the air than to inform. “He is working late.”

“Of course he is,” Ando muttered, pulling his sleeves back. “The Purge makes more paper than prisoners.”

He caught himself, glanced at the children, and swallowed whatever else he’d been about to say.

“Sit, sit,” he told Léopold in Dutch, as if changing languages might change the subject. “Before my wife decides you are a ghost and you vanish from her house forever.”

“I would haunt the bookshelf,” Léopold said, lowering himself to the cushion. “It has better company.”

The boy—ten now, serious as a little old man—hid a smile behind his hand. The girl, younger and entirely unconcerned with adult worries, flopped onto her cushion sideways and immediately leaned across the table to peer into Léopold’s bowl.

“Foreigner gets more,” she declared.

“That is because foreigners are hollow,” Ando said. “Built around empty spaces for storing words.”

His wife gave him a look. “Foreigners bring their own trouble,” she said. “They do not need us to feed them extra.”

She sat opposite Léopold, knees tucked neatly. When she reached for her chopsticks, her sleeves slipped back just enough to show faint crescent marks where her own nails had pressed into her skin while stirring the pot.

“Eat,” she said.

They did.

The fish was small, grilled to the edge of burning to make it feel richer. The miso had been stretched with more water than paste. The rice was… enough. The children ate quickly at first, then slowed when they saw no one was counting their mouthfuls.

Conversation found its way around the gaps on the table.

“How are the stars?” the boy asked, eyes flicking to the corner where a rolled chart leaned against the wall.

“They’re still where you left them,” Léopold said. “Very reliable things.”

“And the black ships?” the girl asked, her chopsticks hovering in mid-air. “Do they move? Or stay still and make everyone come to them?”

Her brother made a face. “They sail. That’s the point. They came from very far away. You know this.”

She squinted at Léopold instead.

“They have smokestacks,” she said, lowering her voice. “Like chimneys. There was a drawing at the shrine.”

Léopold had seen the same crude woodblock: looming hulls, smoke belching like dragon breath. Children gathered there often, half to shiver, half to brag.

“They float,” he said. “The smoke makes people nervous because it smells of coal instead of incense.”

“Do the black ships have monsters?” she pressed. “Like in the night stories? Papa says black ships are scarier than floating heads.”

“Did he?” Léopold said, glancing at Ando.

Ando suddenly found his rice fascinating. “I said they make people more foolish,” he corrected. “Foolish people are dangerous. Monsters at least have rules.”

“But which is worse?” she insisted. “Black ships or night monsters?”

Her mother’s chopsticks paused in the miso for a heartbeat too long, then resumed.

“Monsters,” Ando said finally, lifting his tea like a shield. “At least the ships go away eventually.”

“The ships are still in Uraga,” the boy said. “And Yokohama. Nakamura-san says they have their own village now.”

“You listen too much,” Ando said.

“That is better than not listening at all,” his wife murmured.

Outside, the last of the sunset bled out behind the roofs. The street lanterns swayed as someone passed. The first chill of evening slipped under the door.

Near the eaves, a shadow detached itself from the roof and drifted closer to the window lattice.

Sekibanki’s head hovered just above the paper, careful not to touch it. Her neck, long and pale, trailed back into the darkness under the eaves. From the street, she was another lump in the night sky. From here, she saw everything.

The room glowed warm around the edges, lamplight making the paper wall a thin slice of sunrise. Silhouettes moved across it: chopsticks, shoulders, the bell of a sleeve.

Voices leaked through, dampened but clear enough.

“—have rules.”

Of course monsters had rules. That was the point. She resisted the urge to butt her forehead against the paper and correct him.

Instead, she edged sideways until she found a tiny gap where the frame didn’t quite meet. Cold air seeped out, carrying fish, miso, candle wax, rice.

Her stomach tightened—not with hunger. With something restless she usually associated with standing too close when Wakasagihime sang.

She watched the shapes bend toward each other.

After the bowls were mostly empty and the children had scraped the last grains of rice, Ando’s wife began stacking dishes with efficient hands.

“Books are not going to read themselves,” she told her son. “And your sister needs to practice her syllables.”

The girl groaned, flopping flat across the table. “They never change,” she complained. “Always the same.”

“That is what makes them useful,” Ando said. “Imagine if ‘a’ were sometimes ‘fish’ and sometimes ‘dragon.’ How would you ask for dinner?”

“With my mouth,” she said, grinning.

She scrambled up before her mother could tap her head and scampered to the corner where the star chart waited, dragging it back with both arms.

“Show me again,” she demanded, unrolling the paper with more enthusiasm than care. Constellations spilled onto the tatami, dots and lines in Ando’s hand, Dutch notes marching along the margins.

Her brother settled beside them, already yawning but refusing to admit it.

“You have seen this twice,” Ando said, feigning outrage. “You know more stars than I did at your age.”

She crawled into Léopold’s lap without asking, warm and bony, smelling faintly of ink and smoke. She grabbed his hand and pressed his palm flat against the chart.

“Here,” she said. “Draw them. So I can find them when we’re outside.”

He hesitated, then curved his fingers slightly so her small hand could trace more easily.

“The Big Dipper,” he said in halting Japanese, tapping each knuckle. “Seven stars. Like this.”

She frowned in concentration, her tongue poking out, finger mapping the pattern on his skin. When she miscounted, he caught her hand gently and redirected.

“And that one?” she asked, vague zigzag up his forearm now.

“Orion,” he said. “A hunter.”

“Like Kagerou-san?” she asked. “She hunts.”

“Kagerou-san is… a different kind of hunter,” he said. “These stars are too far for even her.”

Her brother leaned over, squinting at Léopold’s palm as if it really held the sky.

“If you sail far enough,” the boy asked, “do the stars change?”

“Yes,” Léopold said.

“Do they get better?” he blurted, as if hoping distance could fix everything.

“They get… different,” Léopold said. “You miss the old ones, even when the new ones are beautiful.”

The boy considered that, then nodded, as if it matched something he already knew.

Three yawns later, he was listing sideways, cheek landing on the page of a battered Dutch volume engraved with a comet. He didn’t stir.

Ando’s wife tugged gently at the book. The boy murmured and clutched it tighter.

“Leave it,” Ando said. “He’ll wake when his nose starts to hurt.”

She sighed but let go. With practiced ease, she slid a folded cloth under his cheek so the edge of the paper wouldn’t mark his skin, adjusted his sleeve, brushed a strand of hair from his forehead. Her fingers lingered a heartbeat.

The daughter, having drawn half the constellations into Léopold’s palm and half into the air, finally sagged back against his chest. Her head lolled against his shoulder, a damp rice-scented breath warming his neck.

“She’s asleep,” he said softly.

“She’ll deny it,” Ando’s wife replied. “Let her.”

Ando watched from across the table, chopsticks still in his hand, forgotten. Ink stained his thumb again; he must have picked up a book without drying his fingers.

“You look offended,” Léopold said in Dutch.

“I am calculating,” Ando said. “Trying to decide whether to be jealous that my daughter is stealing my star lessons, or grateful someone else is drawing circles on her hand for a change.”

“Both,” his wife said in Japanese. She didn’t need the translation.

Outside, Sekibanki’s head hovered closer to the lattice.

The light inside softened the foreigner’s shoulders, made the ink on Ando’s thumb look almost like calligraphy. The girl sprawled with total trust. The boy’s slow breathing fogged the lamplight every time his nose drifted too near the flame.

The not-quite-monster part of her—which she refused to admit existed—noted the small things: the way the wife checked the boy’s blanket twice; the way Ando’s gaze bounced from face to face, counting; the way his lips moved sometimes when the room was loud—names, worries, scraps of verse.

Her own body crouched under the eaves, legs prickling. She didn’t move. The tiles pressed their familiar pattern into her knees.

A drop of melted wax rolled down the inside of the paper, paused at the wooden frame, then slid on. She followed its path with her eyes, the way she would track a falling head.

This sort of warmth was loud in its own way. It soaked into the street, made the darkness around it feel less solid. For a heartbeat, she imagined stepping through the door as an aunt or a neighbor, sitting with her back against that wall, arguing about whether black ships or monsters were worse.

Then a patrol’s shout echoed faintly from three streets over, and the picture snapped. She floated back a handspan.

When the dishes were stacked and the lamp trimmed lower, the house felt both smaller and larger. The children were fully asleep now—the boy drooling onto his comet, the girl limp against Léopold’s side, fingers still curled as if holding a brush.

Ando’s wife tended the hearth, stirring the embers into a more economical glow. The fire cracked softly, the only sharp sound.

“You work with Nakamura-san tomorrow?” she asked without turning.

“Yes,” Ando said. “He wants me to look at a charter draft. The one the scholars didn’t finish before they were… invited to the magistrate’s hospitality.”

His voice flattened around the last phrase.

She set the poker down carefully. “Be careful what you write,” she said. “Ink is heavy these days.”

He watched her wrap a cloth around the rice pot, tucking in the corners.

“I know,” he said. “Believe it or not, I’ve noticed.”

She glanced up then, eyes meeting Léopold’s. No accusation, just tired awareness. Monsters of the day, monsters of the night; foreigner at her table, youkai on the roof; lines blurred when you were simply trying to keep your children fed.

“I’ll put them to bed,” she said.

She lifted the girl from Léopold’s lap with care. The tiny hand that had been tracing stars dragged across his sleeve, leaving an invisible constellation. The girl made a small protesting sound and then sagged into her mother’s arms.

The boy was heavier, clinging instinctively to his book. Ando had to pry it from his fingers.

“You can read about comets in the morning,” he murmured. “Tonight, you dream them.”

He slung the boy over his shoulder and followed his wife to the back room, their figures silhouettes against the lamplight for a moment before the partition slid shut.

Silence settled.

Léopold sat alone at the table, star chart at his knees, ink stains on his palm. The lamp flickered, stretching his shadow long on the paper walls.

He flexed his hand, watching the memory of the girl’s mapped lines fade as his skin warmed.

Outside, something scraped softly at the window.

He didn’t reach for his blade. The angle was wrong for a burglar. Right for a head.

“You’re going to get stiff necks,” he said quietly.

The paper bulged inward as if someone leaned against it. A red fringe of hair pressed into the fibers, then withdrew.

“Occupational hazard,” Sekibanki murmured. “You’re surprisingly domestic for someone who jumps off roofs.”

“I eat,” he said. “I listen. It’s allowed.”

Inside, the floor creaked as Ando’s wife settled blankets, whispered something to her children. A soft thump suggested a book finally being surrendered.

“You care,” Sekibanki said. Not accusing—just naming it. “Makes your kind slower.”

“It also makes us stay,” he said.

He thought of Ii at his desk, ink on his sleeve, muttering “order” into the night. Of Ashford with his polite pin. Of Henrik’s broken charcoal and Nakamura’s torn maps.

“I’ve seen what happens when no one is rooted in anything,” he added. “In Canton, they burned whole streets without knowing any of the shopkeepers’ names.”

“And here?” she asked. “You think knowing the name will make it easier when their heads roll?”

The question hung between them, caught in the paper.

He didn’t answer immediately.

On the other side of the partition, Ando’s voice rumbled softly, too low to catch words, just cadence: a small story to chase away bigger ones. Foxes stealing oil, perhaps, or a clever tanuki fooling a greedy landlord. Monsters with rules.

Sekibanki’s head floated closer to the sound. Her breath left a brief fog circle on the paper.

“Fear tastes different in there,” she said at last. “Smaller. Closer. Burnt fish, ink, bad dreams. Not like the square.”

“It’s the same fear,” Léopold said. “Just aimed at different things.”

“At losing their father,” she said.

“At losing dinner,” he said. “At losing both.”

She made a quiet, irritated sound. “Humans,” she muttered. “Always stacking your fears like bowls.”

He almost smiled.

“You could leave,” he said. “Find another city.”

“And miss this catastrophe?” she said. “We don’t get this kind of entertainment every century.”

The partition slid open. Ando stepped back into the room. Sekibanki’s shadow snapped away from the paper, retreating into the eaves.

His hair was mussed from prying books out of sleepy hands. A single rice grain clung to his cheek. He hadn’t noticed.

“Sorry,” he said. “They insist on cranes and foxes every night, as if the city weren’t full enough of strange creatures already.”

He sat, old-man tired for a moment despite his age, rubbing his eyes with ink-smudged fingers.

“They sleep?” Léopold asked.

“For now,” Ando said. “They dream of stars and wolves, probably. Better than dreaming of notice boards.”

He poured what remained of the tea into two cups. It had gone lukewarm; neither remarked on it.

“They asked me today,” he said after a sip, staring into the cup. “At the market. Some young samurai with new slogans in his mouth. If I stand with the Regent or with the Emperor.”

He laughed once, without humor.

“As if those were the only directions a man can look,” he said. “Upward, always. Never sideways, at the people standing next to you.”

“What did you say?” Léopold asked.

“I said I stand with my ledger,” Ando said. “He called me a coward. Said men like me are why the country is weak. That if we had more ‘resolve,’ we wouldn’t need foreigners to guard our harbors.”

He tilted the cup, watching the tea swirl.

“I wanted to ask if his resolve could feed his little sister when the rice shipment is light,” he went on. “Or if his slogans can scare off cholera.”

He looked up, eyes sharp.

“I hate Ii’s Purge,” he said, blunt now in his own walls. “I hate counting which neighbors are still here every week. I hate that he cuts so deep to make a point.”

He tapped the table once. The ink on his thumb left a small black crescent.

“But I fear those boys in Kyoto more,” he added. “The ones shouting ‘revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians’ with their fathers’ swords and no idea what hunger smells like. They’d burn Edo to prove a poem.”

He leaned back, cushion creaking.

“I look at Ii,” he said, softer, “and I see a knife I might grab by the wrong end. I look at them, and I see a fire that won’t stop at the castle.”

He spread his hands, briefly helpless.

“What ledger do I use for that?” he asked.

Léopold thought of the condition he’d set in the castle: kill Ii if Japan became a ledger instead of people.

“You teach your children stars,” he said. “You keep your head below any list. And you hope the fire burns where it hurts least.”

Ando’s mouth twisted. “You sound like a merchant,” he said.

“I am my father’s son,” Léopold replied.

Silence settled again, easier this time.

Outside, a patrol’s clatter passed the end of the lane and faded. The notice board at the corner creaked as the night air dried its newest sheet.

Under the eaves, Sekibanki stayed where she was, long neck coiled, chin resting on her own shoulder, eyes half-lidded. She listened to the rhythms inside: two men breathing, the soft flare of the lamp, the murmur of one more small story behind the partition.

This was a different kind of fear. Smaller. Stickier. Harder to feed on without getting it under your own nails.

She stayed anyway.

When the lamp was pinched out and the house sank into full dark, she finally pulled herself back along the tiles, neck shortening, body unfolding from shadow with a shiver.

“Humans,” she muttered to the empty roof. “Always making it complicated.”

But when she leapt to the next house, she kept a precise sense of where this one was—the pitch of its roof, the angle of its lantern, the sound of its laughter.

Fear still moved through squares and castles.

Tonight, a piece of it had sat at a low table and traced stars on a foreigner’s hand.

Chapter Text

On clear days, the guns at Odaiba looked almost pretty.

They gleamed along the seawall like a row of brass teeth, polished to a false innocence. Waves slapped the stone below, throwing up bursts of white that never quite reached the gun ports. Seagulls perched on the barrels when the crews were gone, watching the foreign masts in the distance with the blank, greedy patience of birds who didn’t care who owned the harbor.

Léopold stood on the landward side in a crowd of curious Edo townsfolk and visiting samurai, just another pair of eyes pretending to admire the engineering. Salt, tar, iron, and the faint sour tang of sweat from the men hauling powder crates tangled in the air.

A guard barked at a group of children who’d gotten too close to the embrasures. They scattered, giggling. One boy stopped long enough to slap a hand against a barrel. His palm left a brief, greasy print on the foreign brass bolted into Japanese stone.

“Dutch make good guns,” a samurai near Léopold said to his companion, loud enough for everyone to hear and for the foreigner in their midst to overhear on purpose. “Better than English, they say. Less misfire.”

“It is not the guns I worry about,” the other replied, voice lower. “It is who points them.”

He nodded toward a small knot of men conferring in the shadow of a cart: one Japanese officer with the Regent’s crest on his sleeve, two Dutch factors in modest coats, and a third foreigner in slightly better cloth whose eyes moved less than his ears.

The better-dressed man—Van der Vliet, if Dejima’s ledgers were honest for once—stood just behind the officer, head inclined, hands folded over a notebook. He let the factors do the talking. Every now and then, his thumb tapped the notebook’s edge, one-two-three, as if counting mortar barrels rather than words.

“You see?” the first samurai said. “They stand behind and whisper. That is where the real guns are.”

A wave hit harder than the last, sending spray against the seawall. It beaded on the brass like sweat.

For a moment, Léopold saw a different harbor, a different line of guns: British ships anchored off Canton, muzzles dark; the air thick with the sugar-sweet reek of opium and the acrid bite of spent powder; warehouses burning, reflections of flame in the Black River.

The memory came with sound: the deep boom of a cannon, the crack of beams giving way, the cough of a man whose lungs had taken too much salt and smoke.

He turned away from the seawall. The guns wouldn’t move today. They were props, for now, in someone else’s parade.

In Nihonbashi, the day’s weapons were chalk and numbers.

The rice broker’s stall near the bridge had a board set on two barrels, its black surface streaked with old prices rubbed out. This morning’s figures still ghosted under the chalk dust: yesterday’s columns, hastily erased.

A small crowd had gathered, pretending not to be anxious. A woman with a baby on her hip. A craftsman with sawdust still clinging to his sleeves. An old man in a faded kimono, hands tucked away to hide the tremor.

Behind the board, the broker scowled at his own handwriting.

“New rate from Osaka,” he muttered, not really to the crowd. “Shipping costs. Taxes. Floods. Always something.”

His assistant, a skinny youth with ink on his nose, slid a new ledger onto the table. The coin totals at the bottom of the last page didn’t quite line up with the grain columns above.

The broker hesitated, rubbed out one number on the board, wrote another higher. Chalk squeaked.

A low groan rippled through the watching faces, quickly swallowed.

The woman with the baby tightened her grip on the cloth purse at her waist. When her turn came, she measured rice with grim care, watching each scoop as if afraid the broker might sneak an extra grain back into the sack. She took half what she’d taken last month. At home, she would add water.

Not far away, in an alley off the main street, a pot was already half full of boiling water and thin air. A mother stirred, listening to the hollow sound of liquid against iron. She reached for the rice jar, weighed it, and put it back without opening it. Steam fogged the small window, blurring the view of the new chalk numbers outside.

When she finally added a handful of rice, it vanished into the water with barely a change in sound.

The broker wiped chalk dust on his apron, leaving pale streaks like ghosts of past prices.

Across the street, a small plaque outside a counting house read, in neat Dutch letters and smaller Japanese characters: Schuyler & Sons, Import-Export. The door hinges were new and oiled. Inside, a man sat at a high desk, writing in a ledger bound in foreign leather.

He didn’t need chalk. His ink figures only ever went up.

Léopold watched from the shade of a lantern post, unseen, the word Narutaki floating at the back of his mind like smoke.

Guns in. Gold out. Rice thinned.

The lines between them were getting harder to ignore.

Nirayama smelled like the inside of a forge and someone’s burned tongue.

The reverberatory furnace loomed over the clearing like a brick deity that had grown where a shrine should have been. Four tall chimneys reached for the sky, spitting out a constant gray breath. When the draft doors opened, heat rolled out in a wave that made the air shimmer, carrying iron and soot and coal on its back.

Workers moved around the base, faces streaked black, shirts plastered to their backs. Next to the furnace, they looked like ants feeding a red-bellied beast.

Egawa Hidetatsu stood close enough that the hair on his forearms curled from the heat. His sleeves were rolled up, revealing arms thickened by practical work. A rolled blueprint was tucked under one arm, its edge singed from being held too near the fire too often.

He ran a calloused hand along the furnace wall, fingers reading the brick the way a reader feels for misprints.

“This line is wrong,” he said, tapping where the mortar had spider-cracked. “Feel that? The heat is escaping. It will warp the casting.”

The artisan beside him half-extended his own hand, then pulled it back, palm already reddening. “The clay from Mishima was short,” he said. “We mixed more sand. The official in charge of procurement said it would be sufficient.”

“The official does not pour iron,” Egawa snapped. He crouched, squinted, then straightened with a wince. His knees complained in the language of scaffolding and long days.

Under a canvas awning, a foreigner in a plain but well-cut coat watched the exchange, a polite smile nailed to his face. His Japanese was good enough to catch tone, if not every word.

“Is there a problem?” he asked, stepping closer. His accent had a river-soft English lilt rather than a Dutch flatness.

Egawa inclined his head just enough. “The bricks are not what they should be,” he said. “If we rush, we waste iron and time. If we wait, the Regent will ask why his cannons take so long to be born.”

The foreigner’s smile widened a fraction, without warmth.

“The Regent is very invested in these cannons,” he said. “As are my employers. They have advanced considerable funds. They prefer not to see them… crumble.”

His gaze flicked to the cracked mortar, then away. He didn’t touch the brick. The heat might blister his soft fingers.

“We brought experts from Nagasaki to advise on the mixture,” he went on. “Perhaps your craftsmen could listen more closely.”

Egawa’s jaw tightened. He unrolled the blueprint on a nearby crate and smoothed it. Japanese characters in thick brushstrokes marched alongside precise foreign letters in thin ink.

“If the foundation is wrong,” he said, more to the paper than the man, “the whole thing fails. Gun, furnace, man beside it. They do not care whose signature is on the order.”

The foreigner adjusted a cuff. “Then we shall pray,” he said, “that the Regent’s faith in your skill is well placed.”

He turned back toward the awning, where a wooden case sat half-open. Nestled in straw lay a small brass plate engraved with the crest of Amagi–Thames Trading. It would be bolted somewhere discreet, a nameplate on someone else’s work.

Léopold watched from the shadow of a woodpile, heat licking even there. Soot settled on his eyelashes.

When the furnace doors opened, the roar inside drowned all conversation. Molten metal poured out in a blazing ribbon, lighting Egawa’s face from below. His eyes narrowed, measuring the flow, seeing flaws and promises the way other men saw faces.

The foreign factor stepped back, hand shielding his eyes. For a second, his smile dropped. Something hungry and calculating peered out.

Fire reflected in his pupils.

It had reflected in Ashford’s once, too, before he learned how to look past it.

Canton, 1842.

The bombardment had ended days ago, but the riverside was still a blackened line of snapped timbers and half-collapsed warehouses. The air tasted of burned tea and opium, a sickly stew that clung under the tongue.

Ashford walked through the ruins with his collar open and his sleeves rolled, stepping over rubble and bodies with the careful balance of a man who remembered what it felt like to slip in blood.

Beside him, an older man in a dark coat moved with lighter tread, as if the ground didn’t quite own him. Gray threaded his hair; his posture was easy. Only his eyes were hard. On his lapel, barely visible under the fold of the coat, was a small black cross-shaped pin.

“You’re certain?” the older man asked.

They stopped at the mouth of a warehouse that had somehow survived the worst of the shells. One door hung blown inward, the other canted outward. Inside, the opium reek grew thicker, heavy and sweet.

“Yes,” Ashford said. Smoke had roughened his voice. “He rerouted shipments. Kept some in private storage. Sold it back to the same men who lost it yesterday.”

Léopold had only heard this part in fragments, later, over cheap wine and maps. He could fill in the missing images now with too much clarity.

Ashford stepped in over the shattered threshold.

Bales of opium lay in careful piles, untouched by fire, each wrapped in oilcloth, each marked with a symbol that had never appeared on official manifests. On a crate near the back, a ledger lay open, figures marching down the page in neat columns. The last line had been written hours before the bombardment.

The corrupt Templar officer knelt beside it, hands tied behind his back, uniform muddied and stained. The cross on his coat was tilted but visible.

“This is a misunderstanding,” he started. “In the chaos—records lost—”

Ashford picked up the ledger. Numbers didn’t care about chaos. Ship tonnage, expected losses, actual losses, private gains: they lined up obediently under his eyes.

“You diverted shipments meant for the Order’s use,” Ashford said, keeping his tone level. “You sold them. To whomever would pay. Even”—he flipped a page—“to men who spoke very fluent Chinese about pushing back the British devils.”

“We needed leverage,” the officer said. “Influence. A foothold. You don’t understand the—”

“The Inner Sanctum understands,” the older man cut in quietly. His accent held hints of places Ashford had only read about. “They understand all too well.”

He stepped between the officer and the door and nodded once to Ashford.

“Show me,” he said. “How you would do it.”

Ashford had imagined tribunals. Hearings. Names inked in a record and crossed out. Not this.

But there was ink here, too. And bodies. And the reek of opium that had bought British guns and Chinese deaths.

“This is what you asked for,” the older man reminded him. “To scour corruption. To ensure the Creed is more than a banner over rot.”

Ashford’s jaw clenched. His hands were steady as he handed the ledger back and reached inside his coat. Fingers brushed the cool metal of his own pin, feeling the carved edges of the cross. It was newer, less worn than the older man’s.

He let go of it and drew the small, slender blade that hung there instead—a Black Cross tool. Two poisons, they said. One for the flesh. One for the reputation.

The officer saw the blade and went pale.

“I followed orders,” he said. “We needed funds—”

“The Order demanded sacrifice for a larger purpose,” the older man said, still almost gentle. “It did not demand that you carve yourself a throne from the corpses.”

He looked at Ashford, not at the man kneeling.

“If we had done this earlier,” Ashford heard himself say, voice low, “fewer would be dead now.”

The older man’s mouth twitched in the suggestion of a smile.

“Precisely,” he said. “If no one is ruthless on purpose, everyone is ruthless by accident.”

He stepped back.

Ashford looked at the officer: the shared uniform, the tilted cross, the ledger; the river outside, full of bodies that had never had a choice between cannon fire and addiction.

His hand moved.

The blade slid in under the ribs, quick and precise. The officer jerked, eyes wide, then sagged. His last breath bubbled through blood at the corner of his mouth.

Ashford steadied him down to the floor. It felt like setting down a sack of grain. Heavy.

Necessary, he told himself. Early, this time.

Later, he would scrub the blood from his sleeve. The stain on the ledger would stay.

Years later, in Edo, he still wore the pin under his coat. Léopold had caught the glint in a Yokohama tavern once, a flicker of black metal as Ashford adjusted his cuff in a room full of foreign smoke and Japanese curiosity. The easy warmth in his eyes had cooled into something more controlled. He spoke calmly about “preventing chaos” and “guiding progress” with men who had never seen a city shelled.

Back at Nirayama, the first test casting for a cannon cooled slowly, a dull-red cylinder on a bed of sand. Egawa paced around it, fingers itching to tap, to search for faults. The Amagi–Thames factor watched too, smile back in place, thinking of contracts and interest.

In Nihonbashi, the rice broker wiped chalk from his fingers and closed his ledger for the day, his drawer heavier with coins whose value meant less with each shipment of silver and gold fleeing the country.

In a cramped house in Kanda, a mother added water to the evening pot, humming a lullaby just loud enough to cover her stomach’s complaint.

At Odaiba, the brass guns sat in their emplacements, their manufacture already a sunk cost, their eventual firing a question of policy and opportunity.

And in Léopold’s memory, Canton burned again, warehouses collapsing in on themselves, smoke turning the sun into a dirty coin in the sky.

Guns. Gold. Furnaces.

Lines on maps. Lines in ledgers. Lines men crossed.

He watched Egawa’s hand run along the blueprint, calloused fingers tracing the curve of a cannon’s bore, while the foreign factor’s neat nails tapped a column of projected profits. Somewhere behind both of them, Van der Vliet and Schuyler and Narutaki were already forming their own quiet triangle.

He tucked that shape away: Odaiba, Nihonbashi, Nirayama. Narutaki.

Not just stories. Points on a route.

Some men wore pins. Some wore ink stains. Some wore the worry for their children like another layer of clothes. All of them stood close to the same heat.

And some—if they were lucky or ruthless enough—might still decide where the next volley landed.

Chapter Text

They called it the Chimney because you could see its stack from the river.

From Henrik’s attic, it rose against the evening sky like a finger telling the harbor what to do: brick, straight, useless for showing smoke these days but a perfect landmark for men who didn’t want to say “that Templar warehouse by Narutaki.”

Henrik’s knees popped when he knelt to spread the map.

“Listen,” he said, wincing as his joints complained. “When this is over, I retire to a farm. Chickens. Cheese. No stairs.”

The low-rank kid sitting across from him—Riku, still more dockhand than Assassin—snorted. “You’d die of boredom.”

“I’d die warm,” Henrik retorted. “And not in some Edo gutter wondering if the man stabbing me knows my name.”

He dug around in his coat and came up with a small, battered tin. When he flipped it open, a rich, sweet smell unfurled into the cramped attic—good pipe tobacco, the kind sailors hoarded and smugglers lied for.

Léopold raised an eyebrow. “Saving that for your farm?”

Henrik hesitated, thumb rubbing the edge of the tin, then held it out with a grimace, as if offering a slice of his own skin.

“One pinch,” he said. “Each. If you waste it coughing, I throw you back into the bay.”

Riku’s eyes widened. “This is the good stuff. My uncle sold some once. A whole cask went missing from—”

Henrik snapped the tin shut in his face, then reopened it, grudging. “After,” he said. “When we’re back. Superstition.”

“Since when are you superstitious?” Léopold asked.

“Since Canton,” Henrik said, voice flattening for a heartbeat. Then he shook it off and jabbed a finger at the map.

The paper was a patchwork of scraps, corners from other charts, bits of old manifests. In the middle, he’d sketched the foreign quarter and the docks in sure strokes. The Chimney warehouse was a dark rectangle with the tower beside it, labeled only with a small symbol that meant, in their code, vent/exit/if desperate.

“Three entrances we know,” Henrik said. “Main doors here and here.” Tap, tap. “Water-side loading hatch. And the chimney, for madmen or rats.”

Riku leaned forward, hair falling into his eyes. “And us?”

“Roof,” Henrik said. “Always roof. We cut in where they don’t expect it. Léopold goes first, because he enjoys terrifying tiles. You follow. Miho and I”—he jerked his head toward the other low-rank, a quiet girl in a dock porter’s robe who’d barely spoken all evening—“mind the rope and watch the street.”

“Miho?” Riku echoed. “I thought she worked with the Kanda line.”

Miho gave him a level look and said nothing.

Henrik’s mouth quirked. “Lines cross sometimes,” he said. “Then they uncross. Best you forget you saw her if you’re ever arrested, eh?”

Riku flushed, chastened.

Henrik rummaged in his sleeve and pulled out a folded scrap of thicker paper. This one wasn’t city lines. When he smoothed it on the floor, Léopold saw a clumsy drawing of a river, low houses with steep roofs, and a windmill scribbled in at the edge like an afterthought.

“What’s this?” Léopold asked.

“My retirement plan,” Henrik said. “Where I grew up. If you squint and are very drunk, it almost looks accurate.”

The little houses leaned at odd angles. The river went the wrong direction. The windmill had too many sails.

“Does it really look like that?” Riku asked, fascinated.

“No,” Henrik said. “It’s flatter. Wetter. But the smell of herring is correct.” He tapped the windmill with a nail stained with ink. “My father broke his back on that. I broke my head trying to get away from it. Here we are.”

He glanced at Léopold. “And Montréal? Windmills there? Or just churches and snow, like the sailors say?”

“Snow,” Léopold said. “Churches. Rivers that actually freeze. If you retire there, your knees will hate you more.”

Henrik grunted. “Then I stay here and let the shōgun’s damp finish me. Enough chatter. Chimney first. Farm later.”

He folded the drawing of home carefully and slipped it back into his inner pocket, behind the city map. One over the heart, one over the stomach.

The foreign quarter smelled different at night. Less fish and sweat, more tar and lamp oil, the sweet rot of spilled beer, the faint pepper of foreign cooking behind shuttered tavern doors.

They moved along the edge of it, shadows in the narrow lanes between warehouses, letting the taller buildings hide them from watchmen. The Chimney’s brick stack cut a dark line against the sky, guiding them like a crooked finger.

Henrik’s breathing turned audible first. The stairs down from the attic and the wall scramble had stolen more from him than he’d admit.

“Next time,” he muttered as he hauled himself over a crate, “I run a line that operates on ground level. Sane markets. Sane heights.”

Léopold reached back without looking and caught his elbow for the last step, steadying him. Henrik grunted thanks instead of saying it.

Riku darted ahead and then back, restless, fingertips brushing the wall as if reassuring himself it was solid.

“Foreigners really live in these?” he whispered once, nodding at the tall brick fronts with their glass windows and painted signs.

“Some do,” Léopold said. “Some live in boats. Some live in ledgers. Tonight, the ones we care about live behind that chimney.”

They reached the alley along the warehouse’s side. The Chimney rooted itself in the corner where the building met the ground, bricks darker with old soot. No smoke now; the forge fires had been moved upriver months ago.

Léopold and Riku went up first, hands and feet finding narrow mortar edges, bodies hugging the rough surface. Below, Henrik and Miho stayed in the alley’s mouth, half in shadow, listening for boots.

Riku’s foot slipped once. A brick flaked. Dust sprinkled down, soft as ash. Léopold’s hand shot out, fingers catching the boy’s wrist before he could scrape his knuckles bloody.

“Slow,” he breathed.

Riku nodded, Adam’s apple bobbing, and climbed more carefully.

They reached the eaves and rolled over in one practiced motion, tiles cool under their palms. The city’s noise dulled up here; even the clink of rigging from the harbor seemed far away.

Léopold flattened along the ridge and slid forward until he found the soft give in the roof where boards had been weakened—someone’s old work, since reinforced. The Chimney team’s usual entry.

He tested the seam. It opened with only a small groan of wood, just wide enough to slip a body through.

Air rose from the gap. It was… wrong.

It didn’t carry the expected warehouse smells: oil, damp wood, rat droppings, the must of cloth or grain. It smelled sharp, dry, like ground shell and stone.

Lime.

“Too clean,” he whispered.

Riku wrinkled his nose. “They scrubbed? Foreigners like things neat.”

Léopold thought of other warehouses: dust in corners, the scuttle of unseen mice, sticky patches where something had spilled months ago and never quite dried. This air had no memory.

He slid through anyway.

The drop wasn’t far. His boots hit the floor with a soft thud. He rolled, then froze, listening.

Silence, except for the faint creak of beams. No rats. No drip. His own breathing sounded too loud.

He straightened slowly. The warehouse interior stretched around him, lit only by the thin stripe of moonlight from the roof crack. Stacks of crates lined the walls in too-perfect rows, labels neat. The aisle between them was bare. No straw, no dropped nails.

His hand brushed the floor. It came up white. When he rubbed thumb against forefinger, it felt powdery, biting.

Lime.

Riku dropped down beside him, landing less gracefully.

“Wow,” the boy breathed. “You could eat off this.”

“Don’t,” Léopold said.

He eased the lid of the nearest crate up with the tip of his hidden blade. The nail gave too easily; someone had hammered it in just enough to look secure.

Inside, instead of rifles or powder, a neat stack of bricks stared back, dead weight.

He slid the lid back. On the far side of the warehouse, a small office door stood open a handspan. Light leaked around its edges, faint, as if someone had covered a lamp.

Too-clean floor. Too-quiet air. A door already waiting.

He caught Riku’s sleeve before the boy could take a step.

“Wait.”

“Henrik said we had to be fast,” Riku whispered. “Before the next shipment—”

The door slammed shut.

Not from a hand. From mechanism: a heavy, final thud with the clank of metal sliding into place. At the same instant, the rope they’d left dangling from the roof jerked, then went slack.

Above, the gap in the tiles darkened as something slid over it.

Gun shutters.

“Henrik,” Léopold hissed, already moving.

At floor level, metal grated. Panels dropped over the small windows, cutting off even the faint street glow. The warehouse plunged into thick, hot dark.

Then the smell changed.

The lime in the air mingled with something else: the sharp sting of freshly lit oil-soaked rags, the first cough of smoke.

From outside, distant but too regular to be coincidence, came boots. Not just one patrol. Many. Formed.

Inside, smoke crawled along the ceiling in a dark ribbon, gathering in the rafters before fanning out. The office door flickered underneath: a line of orange as someone lit something on the other side. A tongue of flame licked into the main room, tasting the lime dust.

Fire caught greedily. Whatever they’d spread on the floor—oil, pitch, something nastier—flashed along the grain. Heat rolled across the space in a wave. The neat rows of crates became pillars in a forest of tinder.

“Up,” Léopold snapped, throat already burning.

Riku scrambled onto the first rung of the Chimney ladder, then the next. The bricks were hot.

At the base, Léopold hesitated for half a heartbeat.

If he went up now, Henrik and Miho had to find their own way. If he stayed, they all burned.

A crate near the office exploded, boards popping, showering the aisle with splinters and a rush of hotter air. Flames licked up the Chimney’s inner wall, below the ladder, chasing their feet.

He climbed.

The Chimney was narrower than it looked from outside. His shoulders scraped brick. Soot smeared his cheek. His breath bounced back at him, hot, tasting of his own fear and the rising smoke.

Above, Riku’s boots thudded on the rungs, faster now. Chips of mortar rained down on Léopold’s face. He squinted, blinking grit from his eyes.

Below, the fire roared louder. Heat licked at his calves.

“Faster,” he grunted.

Riku wheezed a laugh that turned into a cough. “They blocked the top,” he hissed down. “There’s something—”

His words dissolved into a grunt of effort. A scrape. The stubborn rattle of a stuck board. The dull thump of a shoulder driven against wood.

Below, in the alley, Henrik heard the first clunk of shutters.

He swore violently in Dutch.

Miho’s head snapped up. “What—”

“Back door,” Henrik said, already moving. “Now.”

They sprinted to the river-side hatch, half hidden under a tarp. Henrik yanked the tarp away and hooked the latch.

It didn’t budge.

He pulled harder. Wood groaned, but not from his effort—from reinforcement. Fresh iron had been bolted over the inside. The hatch was now just a line on his map.

Miho pressed her ear to the wood. Outside, overlapping orders: not just constables barking, but a cooler voice giving polite direction in accented Japanese. A foreign factor, playing at cooperation.

“They’re already here,” she said.

Henrik’s jaw clenched. “We cut the map,” he muttered. “They still drew their own.”

Inside the Chimney, Riku braced his back against one side and his feet against the other and shoved. The board above him groaned, then suddenly snapped. Cold night air knifed in, sweet and harsh at once. A thin slice of stars appeared overhead.

“Go,” Riku gasped. He wriggled upward, shoulders scraping, and squeezed through the gap, vanishing into the night.

He turned back immediately, reaching down. His hand groped for Léopold’s.

Their fingers locked.

Below, a support beam gave way with a crack like a gunshot. The Chimney wall lurched. A flare of flame shot up the shaft, kissing the soles of Léopold’s boots.

He pushed up with everything he had, aided by Riku’s grip. Brick scored his back. The edge of the opening caught his belt, threatening to wrench him backward. For a sick moment, he hung there, half in fire, half in air.

Riku grunted and hauled, tendons standing out in his neck.

Léopold popped free like a cork, rolling onto the roof and sucking in lungfuls of cold air that burned differently. Smoke chased them out of the Chimney, a dark column.

“Henrik,” Riku coughed, eyes streaming. “Miho—”

Léopold crawled to the roof’s edge. The street below was a blur: constables, shouted orders, the polite foreign observer. Flames licked from boarded windows, reaching for the night.

He couldn’t see Henrik or Miho.

“Back side,” he said. “They’ll go for the river.”

They ran along the ridge, keeping low, tiles slick with dew and soot. The Chimney belched smoke behind them, an angry signal.

At the rear corner, they found it: a section of wall where planks had been pried loose from the inside, shoved outward just enough to let a body squeeze through.

Miho was halfway out, shoulders and head already in the alley, legs still in the hell behind her. Henrik crouched behind, pushing, face red, sweat cutting tracks through soot.

“Move,” Léopold called softly.

Miho wriggled free and flopped into the alley, coughing. Henrik rolled after her, landing hard, breath whooshing out.

For a second, relief flooded the narrow space. All four of them, alive, in the same air. The fire roared behind the wall, frustrated.

Then a shout went up from the street end of the alley.

A constable had seen the movement. Lanternlight swung their way, bright and sudden.

“Go!” Henrik barked, shoving Miho toward the river. “Cut through the fish market. I’ll—”

He didn’t finish. Riku had already bolted, feet slapping packed dirt, turning left instead of right, drawing the eyes and the light with him.

“Idiot!” Henrik snarled, instinctively taking a step after him.

Two constables blocked Riku’s path almost immediately, stepping out from behind the conveniently placed cart. Their reaction was too fast for surprise; they had been waiting.

Riku skidded, tried to dart between them. One caught his arm; the other swung a short baton. It cracked across his temple with a sick sound. His legs went out.

He hit the ground on hands and knees, then collapsed fully.

“Henrik,” Léopold said, muscles already coiling to drop from the roof, to vault the half-wall, to do something.

Henrik grabbed his wrist with a grip like iron.

“No,” he said.

His voice wasn’t loud, but it was absolute.

“He’s still breathing,” Léopold snapped. “We can—”

“Look.” Henrik jerked his chin toward the street.

More constables poured in, rifles forming a line behind those with batons. The foreign factor turned, fully attentive now, eyes on the boy crumpled on the ground. One of the Bakufu officials looked up at the Chimney, expression satisfied.

“Leave one alive,” the foreigner said in English too fast for the constables but clear enough for Léopold. “We’ll learn more that way.”

Two men in plainer clothes stepped forward with rope. They moved with the efficient, impersonal rhythm of men who had tied many prisoners.

Riku stirred once as they rolled him over. His eyes were unfocused. His mouth worked around a word that didn’t make it out.

“Henrik,” Léopold said again, lower.

Henrik’s fingers dug into his wrist.

“You go for him now,” Henrik said, “we lose everyone. You, me, Miho. My entire line. All the mouths we feed, all the eyes we have left.”

Something raw and furious flashed in his eyes.

“I will not give them my whole map for one pin,” he forced out. “He knew the risk when he climbed that wall.”

“You told him the risk like it was a joke,” Léopold said, before he could swallow it.

Henrik flinched as if struck. His grip didn’t loosen.

“Then I’ll live with that,” he said. “Let him curse me in whatever gods’ ears he reaches. But we move. Now.”

Miho had already edged deeper into shadow, one arm pressed to her ribs where smoke had clawed. She watched Riku being bound with eyes that seemed to swallow the lanternlight, then turned away sharply, as if the angle cut.

The fire chose that moment to burst through the warehouse roof. Flames punched up, sending a column of sparks into the sky. The crowd outside the cordon gasped as one.

The Chimney had become a beacon, but not for the men who’d named it.

Under cover of the fresh chaos, Henrik tugged Léopold back. They retreated along the alley, kept low, then up a narrow rear stair and onto a neighboring roof. The glow of the burning warehouse painted the underside of the clouds an ugly orange.

They didn’t stop until the quarter’s sounds had shifted back to tavern noise and the smell of smoke thinned.

On a quiet rooftop overlooking a less important street, Henrik finally sank down onto a tile, chest heaving. His hands shook when he fumbled for his pipe tin.

He opened it, stared at the dark tobacco inside, then snapped it shut without taking any.

Miho sat a short distance away, knees drawn up, arms locked around them. She pressed her forehead against her sleeves. From this close, Léopold could see little crescents of blood in her palms where splinters had driven in.

Below, through a gap between roofs, they could just see the edge of the constable line escorting a stumbling figure away. Riku’s head hung forward. Rope bit into his wrists.

No one in the crowd shouted his name. No one knew it.

Henrik dug into his coat and pulled out his folded map of the Chimney district. Soot smudged the corners; the line marking the warehouse was darker, as if someone had pressed harder there.

He stared at it, then tore it in half.

The portion with the Chimney and its connecting routes, he ripped again and again until it was confetti. He let the scraps fall from his fingers, carried off by the breeze.

The rest—other warehouses, other contacts, streets not yet burned—he folded once more and tucked away.

“Line’s dead,” he said. His voice sounded older than his face. “Everyone who used the Chimney forgets they ever did. We don’t go near any of its cousins. If I say ‘Narutaki’ again, you hit me.”

He looked up at Léopold, eyes red from smoke and something else.

“They knew our timing,” he said. “Our entry. They salted the air and waited with shutters and rope. That’s not luck. Someone somewhere remembered too much under the wrong questions.”

“Riku?” Miho asked hoarsely.

“Maybe,” Henrik said. “Maybe someone before him. Doesn’t matter which. The line’s gone.”

He pressed thumb and forefinger together again, as if feeling chalk. They were clean. Too clean.

He reached for his pipe tin a second time, slower. This time he opened it, pinched out a small amount of tobacco, and tamped it into the bowl with unfamiliar care.

He lit it, cupping the match. The first draw came shaky, but he held the smoke in his lungs as if it were the only thing keeping his ribs from collapsing.

He exhaled slowly. The faint, sweet smell drifted up into the night, almost lost against the harsher stink of the burning warehouse downwind.

Léopold sat beside him, the tiles still warm under their legs. The feeling of Riku’s grip slipping from his own lingered in his muscles. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he heard Ii’s voice saying you must kill me and Ando’s hoarse check your sums and wondered how you ever kept the columns straight.

Henrik stared at the pipe for a moment, then extended it, almost angrily, toward him.

“Take it,” he said. “Before I decide to drown in it.”

Léopold accepted, the stem warm, the bitterness of the tobacco grounding.

“You still have your farm,” Léopold said quietly.

Henrik barked a laugh with no humor in it.

“My farm just lost its chimney,” he said. “And one of the boys who might have helped me build it.”

Below them, the Chimney spat sparks until its roof collapsed inward with a roar. The crowd’s murmur rose, then ebbed.

On the rooftop, Henrik watched the glow until his eyes watered.

“New routes,” he said at last. “New boxes. Smaller. Meaner.”

He tapped ash over the edge.

“And next time we walk into one of theirs,” he added, voice low, “I won’t trust a floor that clean.”

Chapter Text

The rain made the city sound hushed and far away.

It drummed softly on the tiles above the fallback rooms, ran in thin streams down the alley wall outside, beaded on the paper window until the lanternlight inside turned each drop into a little orange eye.

Henrik poked one of those eyes with his finger.

“This place leaks,” he complained. “You’d think for a house no one’s supposed to know about, they could at least patch the roof.”

“You can move your line to my attic,” Léopold said, folding a scrap of code thinner. “It leaks too, but the neighbors sing off-key instead of arguing.”

“Tempting.” Henrik shifted on the cushion, stretching his legs under the low table. His left knee popped. He grimaced and rubbed it through the cloth. “Maybe when I retire. Chickens in the back, smugglers in the front.”

He fished in his coat and produced the familiar battered tin, rapping its lid once on the table.

“Tonight,” he said, “we actually get the superstition right.”

Riku should have been there to roll his eyes. The empty place at the edge of the table said enough.

Henrik opened the tin with a snap and pinched out a small curl of tobacco. He hesitated, then slid it across the wood to Léopold first.

“One proper breath,” he said. “In case we don’t get another.”

The stuff smelled like signal fires in another life—rich, a little sweet. Léopold tamped it into the pipe, lit it from the lamp, drew once. Smoke filled his lungs, solid as wood under his feet.

He passed it back.

Henrik took his own draw, eyes closing briefly. Some of the lines in his face softened.

“What’s it like?” he asked suddenly. “Montréal in the rain.”

“Colder,” Léopold said. “Quieter. People go inside faster. Streets turn to glass.”

Henrik huffed. “So, here with worse knees.”

He reached across and flicked a droplet off Léopold’s sleeve. “Your accent gets thicker when you talk about it,” he said. “You know that?”

Before Léopold could answer, the door made a small, wrong sound.

Not the usual polite scrape of wood. A heavy shove that tore the latch out of its groove. The paper panel buckled, then crashed inward, letting in rain, cold air—

—and steel.

The first man through wore a constable’s jacket and foreign boots. Baton in one hand, short curved blade in the other, eyes already cutting toward the corners where anyone might hide.

Henrik was on his feet before the baton cleared the frame.

He kicked the low table sideways into the man’s shins. The constable stumbled. Léopold stepped into the opening and drove an elbow into his throat. The man went down in a heap, weapons clattering, knocking over the lamp.

Oil splashed. The wick sputtered, then caught again, light flickering wildly.

More boots thundered on the stairs. Shadows moved in the hallway.

“Out?” Henrik snapped.

“Roof,” Léopold said.

They moved as if rehearsed: Henrik toward the door, Léopold toward the far wall where the ceiling dipped low. The second man through caught Henrik’s shoulder with a wild slash, cloth tearing. Henrik turned with it, grabbed the man’s wrist, and slammed his forearm against the doorframe. Bone hit wood with a crack. The blade fell. Henrik drove his forehead into the man’s nose—short, ugly, efficient.

Blood burst. The constable sagged, screaming through broken cartilage.

Léopold planted one foot on the wall beam, the other on the shelf, and hauled himself into the crawlspace above the ceiling. The old boards groaned under his weight.

“Go!” he shouted down.

Henrik hooked a hand on the beam and dragged himself up after, teeth gritted, left knee complaining with every inch. A thrown baton glanced off the underside of the shelf, making the whole structure shudder.

Hands grabbed at Henrik’s boot. Léopold reached down, seized the back of his collar, and yanked, adding leverage. A knife flashed past where his calf had been a heartbeat before and buried itself in the wood.

Henrik kicked backward blindly. His heel caught someone’s jaw with a dull thud. The grip loosened.

They squirmed into the dark dust of the crawlspace.

Below, a voice cut through the chaos—sharp, precise Japanese with English edges.

“Up. They’re going up. Cover the rear roofs.”

Henrik’s hand tightened on Léopold’s sleeve.

“That one’s yours,” he muttered.

“Not yet,” Léopold said.

They crawled along the beams, wood rough under their palms, plaster crumbling into their hair. The house’s bones creaked as more men poured into the room beneath, overturning what the fight hadn’t already upset: cushions, table, the half-eaten rice in the pot.

At the far wall, a small hatch led to the roof. They pushed through into rain and open air.

The night felt wider out here, but full of watching eyes they couldn’t see. The tiles were slick; rainwater made each step a lie.

They ran low, bodies near the roofline, breaths clouding. Behind them, the hatch slammed open again.

A man emerged with a fluid ease that didn’t match the constables’ clumsy climb. His boots found handholds like old friends. He cleared the edge in one motion, landing cat-light on the tiles.

Lanternlight from below caught silver at his hip: a slightly curved sword, more used to salt air than tatami.

“Hello, Léopold,” Ashford said.

He hadn’t even drawn the blade yet.

Henrik risked a glance back and swore under his breath. “Him?”

“Him,” Léopold said.

They hit the first gap between roofs—a narrow alley webbed with washing lines. Léopold didn’t slow. He planted a foot at the edge, pushed off, flew.

His hands slapped tile on the far side. For a breath, his chest scraped the lip, ribs protesting, then he rolled over, landing hard. Henrik followed, less graceful, catching the edge with both hands and hauling himself up with a grunt that tore something in his shoulder.

Behind them, Ashford sprinted. He didn’t take the gap straight. He angled toward a jutting beam, placed a foot on it mid-stride, and kicked off sideways, turning the alley into a triangle he bounced through. He landed without breaking pace.

“Your knees are still too honest, Henrik,” he called in English, almost conversational. “They say everything before you do.”

Henrik spat rainwater. “And your mouth’s still too busy,” he shot back.

Léopold’s wrist twitched. Steel whispered from under the leather of his gauntlet, the slender blade sliding along his forearm. The weight changed his balance. He angled toward a higher roofline where the street below widened.

They dropped onto the next building, then another, gaining elevation. Below, the city shifted from narrow lanes to a broader avenue: late-night porters, a pair of samurai under umbrellas, a drunk half-dragged home.

Constables spilled into that avenue from side streets, whistles shrilling, bodies already in a pattern that turned the moving crowd into a wall. People didn’t know why they shifted, only that uniforms were shouting; they parted, funneling toward the edges, leaving a clear strip in the middle.

“Neat,” Henrik muttered. “He’s herding them.”

On the opposite roofs, more of Ashford’s men appeared, climbing, spreading out. Ashford himself slowed slightly, letting the net tighten.

“We jump to the street,” Henrik said. “Disappear.”

“They’re ready for that,” Léopold said. The constables’ shoulders, the foreign factor on the corner pointing, all of it sketched lines in his head.

Ashford drew his blade at last. No flourish, just a smooth, economical motion. Steel left the scabbard with a soft hiss. He flicked water off it with a small shake of his wrist.

“Keep him busy,” Henrik said. “I’ll cut us a path.”

He veered left toward a narrower roof where the tiles didn’t lie straight—an older building, easier to crack. Léopold went right, drawing Ashford.

Ashford obliged.

He closed the distance in a rush, feet sure on slick tile. His free hand brushed chimneys and ridges, using them to pivot, to change direction mid-stride. Once, his boot skidded on moss, but he adjusted so quickly it might as well have been planned.

Steel met steel in a burst.

Léopold caught the first cut on the middle of his hidden blade, the impact jolting up his arm. Ashford pressed in, sliding metal along metal, trying to get inside the guard.

They were close enough now that Léopold could see the raindrops on Ashford’s lashes, the way his pupils narrowed—not from fear, but from focus.

“You still lead with your right,” Ashford said between breaths. “Should’ve broken that habit by now.”

He twisted, ducked under a counter-swing, and drove his shoulder into Léopold’s chest, pushing him toward the edge. They skidded together, boots throwing up spray.

Léopold stamped down, heel finding a crack, anchoring. His free hand snapped forward, knuckles driving into Ashford’s ribs. Ashford grunted—but his sword arm never wavered, and he answered with a clipped blow to Léopold’s jaw that turned the world white for a heartbeat.

They broke apart, breath steaming.

Rain streaked Ashford’s face. It washed away nothing.

“You should have left with the others after Guangzhou,” he said. “You were good at getting people out. You could have been useful.”

“Your definition of ‘out’ and mine differ,” Léopold said.

On the other roof, Henrik had reached the edge over the avenue. He dropped down, caught the eave, swung to a lower balcony. A shopkeeper yelped and ducked back inside. Henrik shouted something vaguely official in rough Japanese, gesturing down the street.

“Fire!” he barked. “Warehouse fire at Narutaki! Move!”

The crowd reacted like a single nervous animal. People craned necks, then surged in the direction he indicated, away from the Chimney district. For a moment, the line of constables trying to form a neat wall was overwhelmed—shoved, jostled, their clean formation broken by mothers clutching children and porters shouting over dropped loads.

Henrik used that moment to drop fully into the crush, shoulders hunched, pipe tin and map pressed tight to his chest. He let the current carry him a dozen steps, then slipped into a side alley, using a burly fishmonger as a moving shield.

One of Ashford’s men spotted him and tried to follow, shoving through the crowd with his weapon drawn. People screamed, scattering. The soldier raised his blade over an old man who hadn’t moved fast enough, strike wild.

Henrik’s hand shot out. He grabbed the man’s wrist from behind and yanked, sending the blade slashing into empty air. The old man toppled backward, untouched.

“Watch where you swing,” Henrik snapped in Dutch, then drove his fist into the soldier’s kidney. The man doubled over. Henrik shoved him into a vegetable stall; carrots and daikon exploded around them.

From the roof, Ashford glanced down. He took in the wild strike, the endangered civilian, the broken line.

He clicked his tongue, annoyed.

“Edward!” he barked in English. “Blade close. Shoulders. We’re not killing half the ward to catch three.”

He didn’t break eye contact with Léopold as he shouted; his sword hand remained steady.

Below, the chastened soldier scrambled up, red-faced, and moved to block an alley instead of charging.

Ashford stepped in again.

Léopold feinted left, then cut right, boot slipping only enough to sell the move. His blade flicked toward Ashford’s thigh. Ashford turned it aside with a small twist, metal kissing metal at a different angle.

He lunged, finally committing the blade. Léopold dropped his weight; the sword whistled past his ear close enough to stir his hair. He stepped in under the cut and drove his palm into Ashford’s elbow, trying to break the line.

The joint bent but didn’t go. Ashford rolled with it, letting the force carry him into a turn that brought his boot low, sweeping for Léopold’s ankle.

Léopold jumped, but slick tile stole an inch. They clipped each other and went down in a tangle, rolling.

They broke near the roof’s edge. One more misstep and the street’s lanterns waited below.

A shape burst onto the roof from the far side, panting—Henrik, having climbed back up via a signboard and a series of handholds no sane man used twice.

His breaths were ragged. A smear of someone else’s blood streaked his jaw. His knee shook but held.

“Move,” he rasped to Léopold, taking a place half a step behind and to the side, the way they’d fought in tight alleys before—one high, one low.

Ashford’s eyes flicked to him, then back, calculating the new geometry.

“Henrik,” he said, acknowledgment and something like regret folded into the single word.

“Still here,” Henrik said. “Much to your disappointment.”

Ashford’s men were fanning out along adjoining roofs, forming a loose semicircle. None came too close. They knew the space their commander needed.

Ashford stepped forward, blade making a small circle in the air, testing them. Léopold tracked it with his wrist blade; Henrik shifted his weight, ready.

One of the younger constables misread the pause as opportunity.

He lunged from Ashford’s left, trying to come in at an angle, sword raised high. His lead foot slipped; the blade came down too wide, arm overextended, side open.

Ashford’s expression tightened—not at the attack on himself, but at the form.

His off hand snapped out, closing around the boy’s wrist mid-swing. He yanked the blade back toward safety.

“Here,” he snapped, sliding his grip to adjust the man’s hand. “Close to the body. Short arcs, not windmills. You want to live long enough to curse me.”

He shoved the subordinate backward, out of the circle, without taking his eyes off Léopold.

“Stay back,” he said. “Watch.”

Then he moved.

He feinted at Léopold, drawing the hidden blade high, and in the same breath stepped sideways, toward Henrik, using Léopold’s guard as cover.

Henrik saw the shift an instant too late.

He stepped in anyway.

Their blades met—Henrik’s short sword parrying Ashford’s, a scrape of metal. The impact ran down Henrik’s already abused shoulder. His arm sagged.

“Don’t,” Léopold heard himself say.

Ashford’s grip adjusted. His sword dipped, then came up in a tight, measured thrust.

The point slipped between Henrik’s ribs, under the angle of his arm, exactly where the old coat’s seams gaped. Henrik’s breath hitched. For a fraction of a second, his eyes went wide, more surprised than afraid—as if the math had betrayed him.

Ashford stepped in close, one hand braced on Henrik’s shoulder, the other firm on the hilt. He drove the blade through cleanly, no sawing, no flourish.

Henrik’s fingers clawed at Ashford’s sleeve, then at air.

Léopold moved, but the space between thought and muscle had never felt so vast.

Ashford withdrew the sword with a short, controlled pull. The sound was lost in the rain.

Henrik folded. His knees finally surrendered. He hit the tiles on his side, breath leaving him in a surprised half-laugh that turned to nothing.

The rain made a dark halo as it soaked into the spreading stain.

Ashford flicked his wrist, sending the worst of the blood off the blade. He didn’t look at Henrik. His gaze stayed on Léopold, steady.

“You remember Canton,” he said quietly. “What happens when no one holds the reins.”

His chest rose and fell, breath controlled. Rain plastered hair to his forehead.

“I’m not watching that happen twice.”

Léopold’s world narrowed: the man in front of him, the man cooling on the tiles behind, the taste of tobacco still ghosting his tongue. For a heartbeat, he saw Henrik’s crooked river sketch in his mind’s eye, the little windmill, Riku’s empty seat at the table.

His hand clenched on the gauntlet. The hidden blade flashed.

Ashford saw it; his eyes had never left it. He stepped back—not out of fear, but to a safer angle. He glanced once at the distant glow where the Chimney district burned, then at the constables massing near the street corner, some looking up uneasily.

“Enough,” he called to his men. “We have what we came for.”

A couple of subordinates shifted, itching to press the advantage, to finish the two foreigners and claim the credit. Ashford’s head turned slightly. The look he gave them stopped them cold.

“We’re not here to collect trophies,” he said, voice low enough for the rooftop alone. “We’re here to keep this place from tearing itself apart.”

The old name followed, almost as an afterthought.

“Think about that, Lafèche.”

It hit like its own kind of blade. Léopold’s jaw tightened. No one in Edo called him that. The sound dragged half-buried snow and church bells onto a wet Japanese roof.

Ashford stepped back another pace, then another, never fully turning his back, sword still ready. When he reached a safer span of roof, surrounded by his men, he gave a small gesture.

They began to peel away, dropping into darker alleys in ones and twos, melting into the city’s veins.

On the roof, the rain kept falling.

Henrik lay where he’d dropped, pipe tin still in his inner pocket, map folded beside it. His eyes were half-open, fixed on some patch of sky beyond the rain.

Léopold sank to his knees beside him. The tiles were slick, treacherous. His fingers smeared the blood the rain hadn’t yet claimed.

Henrik’s mouth moved once. No sound came. Then his chest stilled.

Down in the streets, the constables’ shouts shifted back to ordinary business: keeping people away from a burned warehouse, muttering about paperwork, counting heads that weren’t his.

Ashford’s unit vanished into that sound.

Léopold stayed in the rain until the cold edged past his anger and settled in his bones. Only when the roof started to feel like the deck of a ship in a storm did he move, fingers lingering a last moment on Henrik’s ink-scarred hand.

Somewhere beneath the tiles, under the city’s skin, another line had been cut.

Chapter Text

The cooper’s loft smelled of damp wood and iron hoops.

By dawn, the rain had slowed to a drip, each drop finding its way through the roof and landing with small, irregular ticks in the pans set out to catch them. The sound stitched the silence together.

Henrik lay on a spread of burlap between two rows of sleeping barrels. Someone had covered him with his own coat. The water on the floor shivered with each cart that passed outside in the alley.

Léopold knelt and pushed the coat back.

The wound was small for what it had taken. The blood had already darkened, the fabric around it stiff. Henrik’s face was slack, jaw slightly crooked where a fist from earlier had caught him. His hair was plastered to his forehead, the gray strands standing out more now that the rain had no reason to hide them.

Léopold’s fingers hovered a moment over the lapel before settling on the buttons. He undid them slowly, one at a time, thumb resting on each as if testing for a pulse there. When the coat opened, the familiar pipe tin bulged against the inner lining.

He slid his hand into the pocket. The tin came out warm from the body’s last heat, cold already at the edges. He turned it over once in his palm, the small dent exactly where Henrik had banged it against a table in Nagasaki.

He didn’t open it. Not yet.

Behind it, something rustled. His fingers found a folded piece of thicker paper, creased so many times the corners had gone soft. Foreign stationery from the trading houses; he could feel it without looking.

He pulled it free.

On the outside: no address, no seal. Just a name in Henrik’s uneven, practical hand—Marta—and beneath it a town Léopold couldn’t pronounce properly even in his head.

He didn’t unfold it yet either.

Henrik’s belt came next. Léopold unbuckled it with careful fingers, laying the coil of leather beside the body. The small knife Henrik used for rope and cheese slid loose; Léopold wiped the blade on the burlap before setting it next to the belt, handle toward where Henrik’s hand would have been.

A floorboard creaked behind him.

Miho stood at the top of the ladder, one hand on the rung, the other gripping the side so tightly her knuckles had gone bloodless. Her clothes still smelled faintly of smoke. A boy from another cell leaned on the opposite beam, eyes red-rimmed, jaw clenched. They kept a respectful distance from the burlap.

“Magistrate’s men are already asking questions down the street,” Miho said. Her voice was rough. “About ‘foreigners on the roofs.’ They’ll come to the cooper to make sure no one saw anything.”

“Then they must not see this,” Léopold said.

He checked Henrik’s coat seam by seam, thumb finding hidden pockets by habit. A few coins clinked onto the burlap; he scooped them up and dropped them into his own pouch without counting. Flint and steel in a small kit. A scrap of charcoal in waxed paper. No ciphers. No maps. Just the letter.

He held the coat up by the shoulders. It sagged, suddenly just cloth.

Instead of tossing it aside, he laid it over one of the barrels and smoothed the wrinkles with both hands, brushing down the lapels the way a man does for himself before going out. His thumb caught on a loose thread at the cuff. He pinched it off and rolled it between finger and forefinger until it disappeared.

The pipe tin sat on the floor by his knee, a silent circle of metal.

He reached for it without looking and opened the lid.

The smell that rose was unmistakable: rich, earthy, the last of the good tobacco Henrik had hoarded. For a moment it was wrong that the next breath didn’t include it.

Léopold closed the tin again and set it on top of the folded coat, as if saving it for a man who was only out walking.

Miho shifted her weight. The floor creaked again.

“What… what do we do with him?” she asked.

There should have been a protocol—some rule from someone higher up. Instead, the loft held only the drip of rain into pans and the distant shout of a carter in the street.

Léopold looked at Henrik’s face. The eyes that had always flicked from route to route now stared at the rafters with a dull, glassy interest. He reached up and gently pushed the lids down with his fingertips.

“Coopers move barrels at first light,” he said slowly. “They’ll come up for hoops. They can’t find him here.”

“Outside?” the boy suggested. “Let the magistrates think he was just… another foreigner caught in someone else’s fight?”

“And his things?” Miho nodded toward the little pile: belt, knife, coat, tin, letter.

“They come with us,” Léopold said.

He picked up the letter at last and unfolded it.

The ink had smudged in places, as if written on a moving ship or at a table that wouldn’t stay still. The Dutch was simple, awkward in a way that made it more personal: weather back home; a complaint about Edo food; a description of “small trees they call plum that bloom in winter,” a man trying to explain color to someone who’d only seen gray.

Halfway down the page, Henrik had drawn a little windmill in the margin. This one had fewer sails, better proportion than the sketch he’d shown on the Chimney map. Under it, in smaller, crowded letters:

When this is over I will come back and help you fix the roof

The sentence ended there. No dot. No signature.

Léopold’s thumb rested on the last unfinished word for a long moment. The paper creased under the pressure. In his mind, the bad Chimney sketch and this tidier windmill blurred together: the farm Henrik had been walking toward one rooftop at a time.

“Who is it for?” Miho asked.

“A sister,” he said. “Back home.”

“Will you send it?” the boy asked.

Outside, a magistrate’s bell clanged farther down the street—once, twice. Voices answered.

“Yes,” Léopold said. “When it’s safe.”

He folded the letter again along the old creases, then once more, making it small enough to disappear without vanishing. He tucked it into his own inner pocket, in the place his mentor’s note about Japan had once lived.

“Help me,” he added, nodding at Henrik’s body.

They wrapped him in the burlap, careful not to smear more blood on the boards than they could scrub later. Coopers always had rope; today it became carrying handles. Henrik’s weight was both more and less than Léopold remembered from hauling him onto rooftops.

At the ladder, they paused.

“He hated stairs,” Miho said suddenly.

A laugh caught in the boy’s throat and refused to come out. He lowered his head and gripped the rope tighter.

They eased Henrik down between them, step by slow step.

By the time the magistrate’s men reached the cooper’s shop, the loft held only empty hoops and the smell of sawdust.

Henrik’s body lay in a narrow alley by the river, half-hidden behind stacked casks, arranged in the careless way drunks arranged themselves when they ran out of road. Someone had taken his coat. That was common enough.

A constable prodded him with a pole, frowned at the foreign features, shrugged, and scribbled on his tally.

“Another one,” he told the scribe. “Write ‘brawl, night rain, no witnesses.’”

The river slid past, indifferent.

Back in the loft, the surviving Assassins sat in a tight circle on upturned barrels, soaked clothes steaming slowly in the dim warmth from a brazier the cooper’s wife had grudgingly allowed them.

Miho. The boy. An older woman from another line who’d come when the news spread. Three faces, plus his own. Too few.

They watched Léopold as if he were another brazier.

“Henrik’s line is gone,” the boy said. “The Chimney is ash. If they knew that warehouse, what else do they know?”

“Enough to hurt us,” the older woman said. Her scarred hands, wrapped around a cup, looked more rope than skin. “Not enough to finish us, or we’d be having this conversation in chains.”

The boy’s eyes went back to Léopold. “What now? Who takes his routes? Dejima, Nagasaki… we don’t even know all the names he worked with. He said it was safer that way.”

“It is,” Léopold said.

The words tasted like dry wood.

He sat on a low stool near the brazier, elbows on his knees, the pipe tin resting between his hands. He turned it end over end, thumb passing again and again over the dent.

“We draw new routes,” he said. “Smaller. We change signs, dead drops, times. Anyone Henrik vouched for, we watch from a distance until we know if they broke… or broke out.”

“And if they broke?” Miho asked.

“Then we close their doors,” he said.

His gaze drifted up, tracing the beams like familiar streets. He saw Henrik crawling along them, muttering about splinters and retirement farms, and forced his eyes back down.

“And the Black Cross?” the older woman asked. “This Ashford.”

“He’s what they send when they think they’re rotting,” Léopold said. “Cuts out their own bad flesh so the rest can grow back thicker.”

The boy swallowed. “Can we kill him?”

“Yes,” Léopold said. That came easily enough. “He bleeds. Tonight he showed off in front of his men. Some of them won’t like that. Pride is a crack too.”

“And until we do?” Miho pressed.

Léopold looked at their faces: fear, anger, and under both a small, stubborn expectation that he’d name something worth living for.

He lifted the tin as if to take a breath from it, remembered it was empty, and set it back down.

“Until then,” he said, “we cut his eyes and ears. His coin. We keep the youkai lines listening. We keep Ando’s family off any list. We make sure Egawa gets the clay he asked for, not the clay his ‘advisers’ prefer.”

With each name, he felt them lean in a little—not much, just enough to stay sitting.

“And we stay alive,” he added. “Long enough to be annoying.”

The boy let out a short, brittle laugh and held onto it.

Miho stared into the brazier’s coals. Orange light licked her cheeks, making her look younger and older at once.

“We don’t even know how many of us are left,” she said. “I only know my own line. Henrik was the only one who talked across.”

“That’s the point,” the older woman said gently. “If they take one of us, they don’t take all.”

“Doesn’t feel like enough,” Miho muttered.

“It never does,” Léopold said.

The coals shifted, collapsing inward. A brief flare of sparks jumped, then settled.

He reached into his pocket and brought Henrik’s letter out again. It had warmed against his ribs. He didn’t open it. He didn’t need to.

He slid it under one of the loose floorboards near the wall, where the cooper hid spare staves and no magistrate ever thought to look. For now, it would stay in Edo—a piece of another life pinned to this one. Later, when ships sailed at safer tides, it might cross the world.

He pressed the board back into place with his palm.

“Henrik wanted that roof fixed,” he said. “We can still make that true.”

The others nodded, some more firmly than others.

Outside, a magistrate’s bell rang again, farther away. The city was already folding the previous night’s violence into its ordinary noise.

In the loft, Léopold picked up the pipe tin one more time, thumb finding the dent without looking. He held it as if it were full, then set it carefully on the beam above the brazier, where the thin smoke from the coals curled around it.

No incense. No prayers. Just an unlit pipe and a folded coat waiting where their owner couldn’t see them.

The rain began again, soft, tapping its own slow count on the roof.

Chapter Text

The second time he entered Edo Castle, the guards knew his name.

They didn’t shout it. They didn’t bow. They checked the wooden tag he presented against a list, exchanged a glance, and stepped aside.

His feet left damp prints on the stone from the drizzle outside. The corridor smelled of old tatami, paper, incense—layers of intent pressed into the same walls for centuries. Somewhere farther in, someone was rehearsing a court song; the high notes floated along the beams and thinned before they reached him.

A young attendant in plain but spotless robes waited where the outer hall angled inward. He bowed, eyes flicking over Léopold’s foreign coat and the sword at his hip.

“Hakone interpreter,” he said carefully in Dutch-inflected Japanese, as if testing that the fiction still held. “This way.”

They walked in silence. The castle swallowed sound well. The deeper they went, the more the city faded, replaced by smaller noises: a clerk coughing; a brush scritching over paper; the tight, angry whisper of a courtier behind a screen.

At one turn, Léopold caught a glimpse through an open panel: notice boards laid on the floor, covered in fresh sheets listing names. A scribe knelt above them, lips moving as he checked characters. A magistrate nodded occasionally, pointing at a stroke, correcting it; the right name mattered, even if its bearer would be faceless in the end.

The attendant slid the panel shut with an apologetic smile, as if he’d exposed something indecent.

They stopped before a simple door with a narrow transom. No gilded audience hall—just a small chamber near the inner garden, close enough that a faint smell of wet pine and gravel crept in through unseen gaps.

The attendant knelt and slid the door open.

Ii Naosuke sat on a cushion at a low table, alone.

His outer kimono was a deep, unremarkable brown. The only hints of rank were the crest on his sleeve and the absolute stillness of the guards at the far wall, spears grounded, eyes forward.

On the table: a pot of tea gone slightly cloudy from cooling steam, two cups, a brush stand choked with overworked bristles, and a long sheet of paper where the same character had been written in varying shades of black—line after line of 治, “order,” repeating like an incantation.

Ii’s hand rested on the paper’s edge, fingers stained gray. His other hand rubbed absently at his left shoulder, kneading the muscle under the cloth as if confirming it still belonged to him.

He looked up as Léopold entered. His gaze took in the damp coat, the foreign boots left neatly by the door, the way Léopold’s hand hovered near his belt out of habit before he let it fall.

“You came,” Ii said. His voice sounded as if he’d been using it too much on people who pretended not to hear.

“You invited,” Léopold replied, settling onto the opposite cushion. He set his knees at the proper angle. One learned these things quickly in Edo.

Ii poured tea himself, not letting a servant touch the pot. His hand shook only slightly as he lifted it. The liquid sloshed against the glaze, leaving a tide line around the cup before settling.

“Forgive the temperature,” he said. “It seems no one outruns time. Not even kettle water.”

He slid a cup toward Léopold. A faint ring of damp marked where it had sat abandoned earlier.

Léopold lifted it and inhaled the faint, grassy scent. Lukewarm. The bitterness was louder than the fragrance. He set it down and noticed the small stack of folded papers at the table’s far edge, near Ii’s knee. Not the thick scrolls of policy—cheaper paper, thinner, as if hurried hands and anxious coin had bought it. String held them in bundles. Some had been opened and retied. Others still bore cracked seals.

Ii’s fingers brushed them occasionally, the way a hand wanders to a sore tooth.

“You have been busy,” Léopold said.

“The world has been busy,” Ii replied. “I am just the one people blame for arranging the noise.”

He shifted on his cushion, winced, and pressed his palm more firmly into his shoulder. The motion was small, almost automatic, but it deepened the lines around his mouth.

“The doctors tell me to rest,” he went on. “They say everything collects here.” He kneaded once, as if trying to smooth it out. “As if the petitions would stop coming if I lay down.”

He glanced at the sheet of repeated characters and dipped his brush again. He started another 治—stroke strong at first, then tapering. Halfway through, his hand faltered. The line wavered, leaving a tiny tremor in the ink.

He set the brush down with a soft clack.

“You wanted to speak about the arrests,” he said. “About my cruelty.”

The word settled between them like another cup.

“You call them arrests,” Léopold said. “Your enemies call them the Purge.”

Ii’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile.

“My friends call them something worse,” he said. “They call them necessary.”

Outside, a rake scraped over gravel in the garden, drawing careful circles. The pattern rubbed away yesterday’s footprints.

“You think they’re necessary?” Léopold asked.

Ii picked up his cup, rolled it between his palms, feeling the last of its warmth.

“You’ve walked the streets,” he said. “You’ve seen the slogans on the walls. You’ve heard the boys in Kyoto shout ‘revere’ and ‘expel’ as if shouting were enough to feed anyone.”

He tapped the rim of his cup once.

“They are not wrong about everything,” he continued. “The treaties are humiliating. The exchange rates bleed us. The Emperor has been a painting on the wall for too long.”

He looked up, gaze sharpening.

“But anger without discipline is fire in a paper house,” he said. “If I let it burn where it pleases, we have guns in these streets. Like yours had in Canton.”

The name hit the table harder than the cup.

Léopold’s fingers tightened. The tea shivered. For an instant he smelled coal smoke and opium instead of green leaves; saw a different harbor under a dirty coin of a sun.

“Canton burned because your friends pointed cannons at warehouses full of civilians and called it collateral,” he said. “Not because they failed to arrest enough poets.”

“And because men like your friend Ashford cut late,” Ii said. “After the rot had spread. Cannons instead of knives.”

He plucked one of the folded papers from the string-bound bundle and held it up.

“Do you know what these are?” he asked.

“Petitions,” Léopold said.

“Begging letters,” Ii corrected. He untied the string and let the bundle fan out. The top sheet bore dense characters, the name of the sender circled in a clerk’s smaller hand.

“Here is a scholar from Mito,” Ii said, tapping one. “He says he was merely in the wrong room when his friends spoke too loudly about ‘barbarian ships’ and ‘traitors in Edo.’ Here is a merchant whose son attended a meeting in a tea house that no longer exists. Here is a minor samurai who wrote a poem about the Emperor and forgot that walls have ears.”

He pushed the small pile slightly toward Léopold. Paper rasped on wood.

“These men beg for mercy I cannot give,” he said quietly. “I have already signed the orders. The machine is moving. Magistrates have their lists. Guards have their instructions. If I pluck one name out now, I make that life worth more than the man whose petition I have not read yet.”

He nudged the papers closer.

“Take a few,” he said. “Choose who lives.”

The words were mild. The weight was not.

Léopold stared at the top sheet. The ink crawled across it in a hand that tried to be respectful and ended up cramped. A father, three daughters, a sickly son good with numbers. A promise to sever ties with a wayward cousin. An apology for an overheard chant.

His hand moved. His fingers stopped an inch above the paper.

He imagined circling one name. An old scholar. A young idealist. A man who’d shouted too loudly once. He imagined a clerk scratching out that name on the execution list, ink still wet.

He imagined the others, unmarked.

The square. The block. Heads bowing.

His fingers curled back.

“No,” he said.

Ii’s eyebrow climbed a fraction. “No mercy?” he asked. “Or no choice?”

“You ask me to pick which strangers keep their necks,” Léopold said. “That’s not mercy. That’s gambling.”

Ii let out a short breath, almost a laugh, with no amusement in it.

“You kill quietly for your creed,” he said. “I sign warrants with my name. Which of us is more honest?”

A guard at the wall shifted; his armor creaked once, then stilled.

“I do not write the names myself,” Ii went on. “If I did, perhaps my shoulder would hurt less.”

He dug his fingers into the muscle again, as if trying to reach the ink that lived there.

“You think I enjoy sending men to their deaths?” he asked.

“You enjoy the order it brings,” Léopold said.

Ii studied him for a long beat, then nodded once.

“Yes,” he said. “Because I have seen what happens without it. You have, too. That is why I asked you here.”

He gestured faintly toward the papers.

“These boys, these scholars—some truly conspire with your Ashford’s patrons. Some just like the taste of danger in their mouths. The line between them is thinner than this.”

He held a sheet up. Light from the garden showed the fibers, the places where the brush had pressed harder.

“If I do not cut broadly now,” he said, “what happens when one of them puts a torch to a powder store for purity’s sake? When one of them stabs a foreign merchant in a tea house and the black ships answer with something more than painted cannons?”

He laid the petition back among its brothers, aligning the corners.

“You say I am breeding resentment,” he went on. “You’re not wrong. Every brother of a man I arrest dreams of my head on a pike. Every son of a dismissed official curses my name between his teeth.”

He shrugged, then flinched at his shoulder’s protest.

“But if I do nothing,” he said, “those same boys follow fools with slogans into a war we cannot win. Then their resentment is for foreign soldiers in this hall instead of for me.”

He poured more tea, though neither of them had finished their cups. The pot was nearly empty now; what came out was thin and pale.

“You want me to cut only the guilty,” he said. “So do I. But guilt doesn’t sit nicely on one man and wait to be identified. It leaks. Through families. Through poems. Through dinners and shared rice.”

He picked up his brush and wrote 治 again, larger this time, strokes slow and deliberate, as if carving the character into the paper.

“You have your creed,” he said. “It tells you who must die for your future. Mine is uglier. It tells me who I must take so others can eat in ten years.”

He set the brush down. Ink pooled and fattened at the tip.

Léopold’s thumb rubbed the edge of his cup. There was a tiny chip; his nail caught in it.

“Your broad cuts make new men for Ashford,” he said. “Sons who see their fathers taken in the night don’t become loyal clerks. They become men with slogans and knives.”

“Sons whose fathers starve because traders have emptied the rice warehouses don’t grow gentle either,” Ii countered. “They become men who sell their sisters to buy grain.”

He straightened the petitions again, hands careful, as if they might bruise.

“You came because you believe in a precise cut,” he said. “Remove the corruption, leave the healthy flesh. Your friend in the black coat believes that too. He’s cutting his own Order clean as we speak.”

Ii slid the bundle back to his side of the table.

“Perhaps you are right,” he said. “Perhaps I am clumsy and you two are surgeons. But until your knives sit in every village meeting and every shrine, I use the tools I have.”

Silence settled. The rake’s rasp in the garden sounded louder for it.

Léopold took another sip. The tea was cold now. It tasted like boiled paper.

“You know Ashford wants you dead,” he said.

Ii’s mouth turned down briefly, as if Léopold had pointed out a familiar pain.

“I assumed,” Ii said. “Men who like clean maps don’t enjoy regents who redraw them.”

He flexed the fingers of his left hand, then pressed them back into his shoulder. The knuckles looked slightly swollen.

“He’s spoken to men in this castle,” Léopold said. “Officers. Merchants. Some wear your crest and his.”

“I am not surprised,” Ii said. “If I were an Order that preferred many small ledgers to one central one, I would whisper in ears that resent discipline.”

He looked at Léopold over the rim of his cup.

“And you?” he asked. “Do you still stand behind me, knowing my ink kills as surely as your blade?”

Léopold’s hand drifted toward his wrist, then stilled.

“I stand in front of the black ships,” he said. “Whether you’re there too depends on the day.”

Ii snorted softly. “Honest enough,” he said.

He gathered the petitions in both hands, feeling their weight, then set them inside a lacquered box. The lid closed with a small, final click.

“Your youkai friends,” he said after a moment, almost offhand. “Do they hate me, too?”

“They hate anyone who makes people too calm,” Léopold said. “Fear feeds them. Order starves them. But your Purges give them ghosts to whisper about. They’re… undecided.”

“Like you,” Ii said.

Like me, Léopold didn’t answer.

Ii’s posture sagged a fraction, fatigue showing at the edges again. His fingers had drifted back to his shoulder without him noticing.

“You will not take names from my hand,” he said. “Perhaps that is wise. The moment you do, you share my burden. Then your creed starts to look suspiciously like mine.”

He reached for the brush.

“Go,” he said. “Tell your network the Regent is still the man you almost killed and did not. Tell them if they want fewer Purges, they should keep fools from shouting in tea houses.”

He dipped the brush, shook off excess ink.

“And tell your Ashford,” he added, “that if he wants my head, he had better hurry. The doctors say this shoulder will give out before his patience does.”

The thin smile that followed didn’t touch his eyes.

Léopold rose, bowed as deeply as protocol demanded, and turned toward the door. The guards stepped aside in perfect unison.

In the corridor, the castle’s quiet closed around him again. As he walked back toward the outer halls, he passed the room with the notice boards. The scribe was gone. The sheets lay drying, names in neat lines, ink dark and final.

He didn’t stop. His eyes slid over them, catching fragments—commoners, minor samurai, a merchant’s son whose crest he recognized from Ando’s street. He could have stepped in. Asked questions. Waved his foreign tag.

He kept walking.

Outside the castle, the air felt heavier, not freer. The drizzle had become a fine, persistent mist that settled on his lashes and the backs of his hands.

He reached into his coat out of habit, fingers brushing Henrik’s folded letter, the rough edge of a youkai charm, the empty space where a petition might have been.

By the time he reached the hill’s foot, the taste of lukewarm tea and dried ink still clung to his tongue, and he was no closer to deciding which stain would be harder to scrub off: the one on paper, or the one under his own sleeve.

Chapter Text

The abandoned shrine sat just beyond the last rice paddies, where the town’s lantern light thinned and the trees began to gossip.

Its roof tiles sagged. Moss had eaten the stone steps in patches, leaving damp green teeth. The offering box at the entrance stood open-mouthed and empty, spiders’ threads stretched where coins used to fall. Old paper charms flapped in the night breeze, ink washed to ghosts.

Sekibanki’s head drifted up first, a pale oval emerging over the top of the offertory like a lantern someone had forgotten to hang properly. Her body leaned against the side of the shrine, arms folded, capelet pulled tight around her neck.

“Still nothing,” she muttered, eyes flicking to the box. “Not even a broken comb or a rotten persimmon. I remember when people would at least apologize to us with cheap fruit.”

Her head bobbed higher, detached fully, and hovered under the torii, red eyes catching what little moonlight made it through the clouds. For a moment, it looked solid. Then a breeze came, carrying the distant clatter of wheels on the new road and the smell of coal smoke from Edo, and her edges fuzzed, like ink bleeding on cheap paper.

A ripple moved through the pond beyond the shrine. The water, dark as spilled ink, pushed up in a small, deliberate swell. Wakasagihime rose through it until her arms rested on the stone edge, hair slicked back, fins where ears should be glistening.

She pressed her palm flat against the surface. For a few heartbeats she stayed like that, eyes closed, listening with her skin.

A single twig brushed her fingers. A leaf. The faint taste of ash from someone’s burned trash upstream.

No rice. No sake. No coins.

She opened her eyes.

“Nothing?” Sekibanki asked, already knowing.

“Yesterday I thought I felt a grain,” Wakasagihime said softly. “But it was just sand caught in the weed.”

She let her hand sink back under, fingers spreading in the chill. “The last real offering was three weeks ago. A girl’s hairpin. She wished her brother home safe from the city.” Her mouth quirked. “I nearly swallowed it by mistake.”

“And?” Sekibanki prompted.

“And the brother’s letters say he’s learning bookkeeping,” Wakasagihime said. “For a foreign firm with a very long name.” She looked toward Edo, where the sky glowed faintly with the reflection of a hundred lamps and a thousand ledgers. “He tells her not to be superstitious anymore. ‘Accounts, not altars,’ he wrote.”

Sekibanki snorted. “Of course he did.”

Boots padded softly up the overgrown path.

Kagerou emerged from the trees, cloak damp, ears flattened against the drizzle. Her dress was flecked with burrs and old leaves. She shook herself once, sending a spray of water into the air.

“Careful,” Sekibanki’s head said, drifting aside. “Some of us don’t like being washed.”

“Some of us smell like old incense and wet dog,” Kagerou countered, then wrinkled her nose. “Mostly wet dog.”

She stepped onto the first cracked stone of the shrine’s approach and paused, eyes narrowing. Her nostrils flared, sorting scents the others couldn’t.

“They painted more words on the road,” she said. “New ones. Over the old.”

Sekibanki’s body straightened, boots scuffing moss. “Where?”

“Bridge. Temple wall. Even on a grain store,” Kagerou said. “Big brushstrokes. Someone stole the good ink for it.”

She raised a hand and traced characters in the air with a clawed fingertip, not quite touching the damp. “Respect the Emperor,” she said. “Throw out the barbarians.”

“Sonnō jōi,” Sekibanki said, making a face. “They always liked that phrase. Short. Sharp. Easy to shout.”

“Easy to fear,” Wakasagihime added.

Kagerou padded closer to the steps, bare feet silent. “In the mountain villages, the children don’t whisper about wolves anymore,” she said. “They whisper about ‘foreign devils’ with red hair and iron teeth. They point toward the roads instead of the woods when the wind howls.”

She scratched lightly at one of the old pillars with a nail. “The last time I went near a farmhouse, the grandmother didn’t tell them ‘Don’t go out or the wolf will come.’ She said, ‘Don’t talk to the men from Yokohama. They’ll take you away on their ships.’”

Her voice held no anger, only a tired amusement.

“So,” Sekibanki said, head tilting. “We are being replaced. First by guns, now by angry slogans.”

Wakasagihime reached up and touched the stone fox statue that guarded what used to be the innermost altar. Moss had blurred its features; the once-fierce snout looked tired.

“Maybe they will paint over us next,” she said. “New charms. New stories. No room for old ones.”

Sekibanki’s head drifted down to hover above the offering box. She peered in, seeing only dust and a dead beetle.

“When people stop leaving rice and start leaving names with clerks,” she murmured, “we get thin.”

Her body flicked a pebble into the box. It rattled, embarrassingly loud in the quiet shrine.

Kagerou watched it settle. Her ears twitched at a distant shout—a man’s voice, full of wine and slogans, carried from the town by the damp air.

“There was a meeting tonight,” she said. “At the sake shop near the gate. Full of young samurai and students. They drank cheap liquor and shouted about loyalty. You could smell the fear like sweat.”

“Fear of what?” Wakasagihime asked.

“Of losing the country,” Kagerou said. “Of foreigners. Of the Shogun’s men. Of being seen as cowards by their friends.” She smiled without showing teeth. “They took turns being afraid and pretending they weren’t.”

Sekibanki’s head turned toward the town, as if she could still see the meeting house through the trees.

“And how did it taste?” she asked.

Kagerou’s pupils widened at the memory.

“Thick,” she said slowly. “Spicy. The kind that prickles all along your skin. You could lap at it from the doorway without even showing your ears. I haven’t felt that much in one room since…” She flicked her fingers. “Since the last time the Regent had three men beheaded at once.”

Wakasagihime shivered, water rippling out from her elbows.

“At the river,” she said, “the fear that drifts down with the offerings used to be… small. Personal. ‘Please spare my baby.’ ‘Please let my harvest grow.’ Soft things. Now when coins come, they’re thrown hard and fast, like the river did something wrong. ‘Kill the traitors.’ ‘Protect the Emperor.’”

She dipped her face suddenly, submerging to her nose, inhaling underwater. Tiny currents brushed her cheeks. She came up again, eyes brighter, a faint flush in her lips.

“It’s stronger,” she admitted. “But it stings.”

Sekibanki gave a small, humorless laugh. Her body leaned back against the wall; her head floated free, eyes half-lidded.

“Children fearing wolves, peasants fearing drought, samurai fearing disgrace,” she said. “We’ve never been picky. The problem isn’t the recipe. It’s the portions.”

She lifted one hand and flexed her fingers. For a moment, her nails sharpened, shadows around them stretching a little longer than the angle of the lanternless night should allow.

“With all this foreign ‘order’…” She mimed writing columns in the air. “Ledgers. Schedules. Men with pocket clocks and maps that explain everything. People tell themselves they are too clever to fear floating heads.”

Her detached head darted forward suddenly, stopping an inch from Kagerou’s nose. “But they still fear each other,” she said, voice low. “They fear the man next to them who might be a ‘traitor.’ They fear saying the wrong phrase. They fear being the first to stop shouting when everyone else is shouting.”

Kagerou didn’t flinch. She held Sekibanki’s gaze, then raised a hand and pushed the floating head back gently by the forehead.

“Exactly,” she said. “They’ve made a new kind of night.”

Wakasagihime looked between them, fingers drumming lightly on stone. Droplets fell from her hair into the pond, each one sending ringed ripples out.

“If we stay here,” she said quietly, “waiting for old prayers and old monsters, we dry up.”

Sekibanki’s head drifted back toward her body, settling into place with a soft, private click. She tugged her capelet straight.

“So we stop waiting,” she said. “We go where the fear is. If the stories humans tell now are about ‘foreign devils’ and ‘traitors,’ then we knock on those stories’ doors.”

Kagerou tilted her head. “Haunting patriotic meetings?” she said. “You think they’ll notice us over their own shouting?”

“They’ll notice when you howl behind their ears while they plan whom to target next,” Sekibanki said. “When Wakasagihime pulls at their ankles from the riverbank as they wash blood off their hands. When heads appear over their shoulders while they whisper names to informers.”

Her smile thinned. “We don’t have to add to their kill lists. They’re doing that fine without us. We just make sure they talk about it at night. In detail.”

Wakasagihime’s tail flicked once under the water. “If they tell stories about us punishing traitors,” she murmured, “their children will learn our names again. They’ll leave offerings again. But the reasons will be… different.”

“Fear is still attention,” Sekibanki said, shrugging. “If the tide changes, you learn to swim in it. Or you sink with the old tales.”

Kagerou looked toward the black line of trees, where the mountain path began.

“In the villages, they already say spirits walk with those who shout the Emperor’s name too loudly,” she said. “Women whisper that if you accuse someone falsely, a wolf will sit at your door. They’re inventing us again without our help.”

She paused, ears twitching at another faint sound from the town—a crowd’s uneven roar, rising and falling like rowdy surf.

“If we step into that,” she said, “we can nudge it. A little.”

“And if we don’t?” Sekibanki asked.

“Then the stories still grow,” Kagerou said. “Just with other names.”

Silence stretched under the roof, filled only by the drip of rain and the small, restless movements animals make when they smell the weather changing.

A footstep sounded on the path.

This one was careful, weight spread to avoid the loudest stones. No human could erase himself completely, though. Sekibanki’s head turned first, then Kagerou’s ears.

Wakasagihime slipped lower until only her eyes and the tops of her hair showed.

Léopold emerged at the edge of the clearing, coat damp, the smell of Edo’s coal and ink still clinging to him.

He paused when he saw them: the empty offering box, the floating head under the torii, the mermaid half-raised in the pond, the werewolf on the steps.

“A council?” he said softly.

“An autopsy,” Sekibanki replied. “We’re examining a dead shrine.”

He stepped onto the first stone. The moss squished under his boot. As he moved closer, he caught sight of fresh ink on the torii’s side: the same four characters he’d seen on city walls—revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians—scribbled over an older, faded charm.

“Your new friends have long brushes,” he said.

“We were just talking about them,” Kagerou said.

“Behind their backs,” Sekibanki added. “The safest way.”

Léopold set down the wrapped parcel he’d brought—rice, dried fish, simple things that counted as both food and courtesy—and offered a small nod.

“You can call it a bribe,” he said. “I need your ears.”

Wakasagihime eyed the parcel. “Ears eat,” she said. “Talk.”

They settled in a loose circle: Léopold on a worn step, Kagerou crouched with her cloak around her knees, Sekibanki leaning against a pillar with her head floating lazily above, Wakasagihime’s arms resting on the pond’s edge.

He told them about the latest purge lists, the tension in Ii’s shoulder, the petitions he’d refused to choose between. They told him about the slogans, the meetings, the new flavor of fear.

“Wait,” Léopold said when Sekibanki described her idea. “You want to… haunt them into talking more? Into fearing more?”

“‘Encourage’ is such a polite word,” Sekibanki said. “We want to haunt. Different verb. Same result.”

“You’d feed on their rallies,” he said. “On their lynch mobs.”

Wakasagihime’s fingers tightened on the stone; a thin crack crept through the moss.

“We already feed on someone’s fear wherever we stand,” she said quietly. “A mother fearing a sick child. A sailor fearing the deep. A farmer fearing a hungry winter. This isn’t new. Only… concentrated.”

“In those meetings,” Kagerou said, “they’re afraid and proud at the same time. It’s… noisy. But we can sip from the edges without touching the blade.”

“And when the blade lands on a boy with the wrong opinion in an alley?” Léopold asked.

The question hung between them like fog.

Sekibanki’s head drifted closer, eyes narrowing.

“You expect us to starve while the world reorganizes itself,” she said. “Fade into corners because your map is cleaner without us. Is that why your Creed writes pages about Templars and cannons and gold, but never a line about shrines going empty?”

Léopold opened his mouth, then shut it. He thought of the codices in Assassin safehouses, neat columns of tyrants and plots. No margin note: meanwhile, three river spirits vanished for lack of prayers.

“You help us sometimes,” Wakasagihime said, gentler. “You bring offerings. You warn us when hunters plan a sweep. You introduced us to Ando’s children with names instead of stones.”

She looked down at the water, where her reflection was thinner than it had been in years past.

“But when you talk about the future you want,” she said, “we are not in it. Not really.”

Kagerou’s ears flattened briefly, then rose again.

“In those meetings, when they shout about foreign devils,” she said, “the fear they make is not all bitter to us. Attention is survival. If we stand in the doorway and let the story lean on us, we become part of the new house.”

Her lips twisted. “Better a shadow they curse when they’re drunk on slogans than a name no one remembers at all.”

“You’ve seen what mobs do,” Léopold said. “Canton. Shanghai.” He looked at Wakasagihime. “You remember the river full of bodies.”

Her shoulders curled, as if a cold current ran past.

“If you start whispering in their ears when they choose targets,” he said, “you’re not just drinking what they spill. You’re tipping the cup.”

Sekibanki rolled her eyes.

“Easy words from someone whose food comes in little packages with labels,” she said. “‘This one is a Templar. This one is corrupt.’ Very tidy. We work with weather.”

Her head floated until it was level with his, eyes sharp.

“If we starve politely,” she asked, “will your Creed even notice?”

Léopold’s hand found his gauntlet, not to draw, just to feel the metal.

“In Canton,” he said slowly, “I saw what happens when fear becomes everyone’s excuse. Smoke and stories, then cannon fire. Men said the Chinese ‘needed’ to fear their thunder, and that was good. It fed… something. But when it was over there was nothing left to protect.”

“We are not cannons,” Kagerou said. “We are… drafts.”

She blew softly toward the torii. The old parchment charm fluttered, but did not tear.

“We make people look over their shoulder,” she said. “We don’t fire.”

“Not yet,” Léopold said.

Wakasagihime watched his face. The pond reflected him in broken lines—foreign coat, foreign jaw, foreign doubt.

“We’re already fading,” she said. “Every new road, every new warehouse makes it harder to hear us. Children in port towns fall asleep to factory bells, not to stories about lake spirits.”

She lifted one wet hand from the water, palm up, empty.

“If our choice is between feeding on ugly fear and not feeding at all,” she said, “it isn’t really a choice. Your era made it for us.”

Sekibanki settled her head back onto her shoulders again, capelet hiding the seam.

“You do what you do best,” she told Léopold. “Stab men in coats who draw the wrong maps. We do what we do best. Make sure the dark stays… crowded.”

He looked toward Edo. Even from here, he could see the faint glow of fires—some controlled, some not. He imagined a sonnō jōi meeting house: walls stained with sake and ink, boys with too-thin swords shouting phrases they only half understood. He imagined Sekibanki’s heads floating unseen above them, Kagerou’s shadow flickering against the paper screens, Wakasagihime tugging at the legs that later washed blood off in the river.

“If you push them too far,” he said, “they’ll come for you too. Call you ‘foreign sorcery’ and add you to their lists.”

Sekibanki shrugged one shoulder.

“Then at least we die because someone knew we were there,” she said. “Not because we were forgotten between two lines of a treaty.”

A wind picked up, carrying the sound of a distant chant:

“Revere the Emperor! Expel the barbarians!”

The words came in waves, overlapping, thick with drink and conviction.

The three youkai lifted their heads together, listening. The hair on Léopold’s arms rose.

Wakasagihime’s eyes half closed. “Hear that?” she whispered. “They’re already feeding something.”

Kagerou smiled, a slow, sharp curve.

“Better it be us,” she said, “than the men with factories and flags.”

Léopold had no quick answer. The Creed’s lines about balance and freedom felt thin in his mouth, like tea steeped too many times.

He untied the parcel of food and pushed it toward them.

“Eat this first,” he said. “Then decide how much of that you want.”

Wakasagihime reached for a dried fish, fingers lingering on the cloth. Kagerou took a rice ball and bit into it, grains sticking to her lip. Sekibanki plucked a pickled plum between thumb and forefinger, examining its wrinkled skin before popping it into her mouth.

“You bring us mortal food,” Sekibanki said. “How thoughtful.”

“It doesn’t replace the other kind,” Kagerou murmured.

“No,” Léopold agreed.

The chant from the town swelled, hit a ragged peak, then broke apart into scattered shouts and laughter. The fear in it didn’t vanish; it thinned, slipped into alleys and doorways and uneasy dreams.

Around the abandoned shrine, the night pressed in a little closer, listening.

The Grassroots Youkai Network ate in silence for a time, chewing slowly, each measuring hunger against risk.

When they spoke again, it was in lower voices, outlining plans the way humans did—where to stand, when to appear, how loud to whisper.

Léopold listened, realizing he was hearing the cost of fear tallied in a language his Creed had never bothered to count.

Chapter Text

The night the paper fell, Edo Castle was almost quiet.

Wind pushed at the eaves, making the old beams creak and the lanterns sway in their boxes. Somewhere in the inner garden, a night watchman coughed, paced three steps, turned, and paced back. The pond in the courtyard barely rippled.

In the pond, Wakasagihime listened.

Her body lay stretched along the drowned stones near the bottom, hair floating like weed. Above, the surface showed her a crooked reflection of the moon and the ragged outline of the castle roof. She pressed her palm to the water, feeling the way vibrations came and went.

Usually it was simple: the slow, heavy thump of a guard’s walk; the light, quick patter of a messenger boy in straw sandals. Tonight, another pattern intruded—too many feet at once, trying too hard to be quiet. The rhythm was wrong. Not drills. Not changing of posts.

She felt the faint shudder as someone pushed a boat against the moat wall, ignoring the usual landing. The water there churned, then stilled.

Her fingers curled around a small stone. She pushed off the bottom, rising toward the surface. In the shadow of a bridge, she whispered a name into the water.

Sekibanki’s head slipped through the half-open window before her body did.

It slid between the slats like a red-haired lantern, eyes wide, cloak trailing a heartbeat behind. Léopold looked up from the low table where he’d been sorting maps and lists, one hand instinctively going to the knife at his belt.

“Bad time for a visit,” he said.

“Yes,” her head said, hovering near his face. “Perfect time, actually.”

Her body hauled itself the rest of the way in, landing on silent boots. She kicked the window shut with a heel.

“They’re in the moat,” she said. “Not your kind. Not mine. The shouty kind.”

“Sonno-jōi?” he asked.

She mimed swinging a sword wildly and yelling. “The ‘revere and expel’ club. They brought friends. And toys.”

“Toys?”

“Long iron sticks with foreign letters,” she said. “They smell like your world.”

Guns. Smuggled through some gate Ashford’s people had opened.

“How many?” he asked, already rolling up the maps.

“More than a handful, less than a parade,” she said. “Enough that the Regent’s night might get very short.”

She didn’t have to say which Regent.

Léopold slid the bundle of papers into his satchel and checked the weight at his belt: gauntlet snug on his wrist, hidden blade resting against his forearm; a row of slender knives in a sheath along his ribs; small clay spheres in an inner pocket that clinked faintly—smoke and flash, carefully mixed by a nervous explosives man in Nagasaki; a pouch at his back for the heavier surprise that stank of saltpeter and oil; the cool, familiar heft of the Colt under his coat, each chamber full.

“Can you keep eyes on them?” he asked.

She smiled without humor. Her head lifted off her shoulders like a tethered balloon.

“Always,” the head said. “Try not to die before I get back with details. That would be rude.”

She shot out the window again. Her body stayed, leaning on the sill, eyes gone distant, watching something only she could see.

Léopold stepped into his boots and slid the panel just far enough open to squeeze through. Outside, the roof tiles glistened with earlier rain, the night air cool against his face.

He moved.

The castle’s rooflines were a broken sea of angles and shadows. He ran low, feet finding purchase where the tiles overlapped, hands brushing them only when he needed to turn or steady. He skimmed the crest of one wing, then dropped to grasp a beam and swing himself onto a lower corridor roof, soles landing with a muted thud.

Below, torchlight flared where no torch should have been.

Sekibanki’s head floated above a side gate, hair blown back by the draft of a door swinging open from within. Dark shapes slipped through—men in plain kimono, swords at their sides, some with rifles wrapped in cloth. A guard at the gate lay slumped against the wall, his spear angled uselessly, his blood already drying dark.

One of the intruders pushed the corpse deeper into the shadows with his foot. He whispered something about the Emperor’s justice and no turning back.

Léopold’s fingers found two small spheres on his belt. He rolled them once between his palms.

“Banki,” he murmured.

Her head drifted up to his height, grinning.

“Try the paper doors,” she said. “They look fragile tonight.”

The first warning the nearest guard post got was smoke leaking under the door.

It flowed in thin threads at floor level, then lifted, finding every crack. A heartbeat later, the door itself burst open as a figure crashed through it, coughing. He wore a samurai’s swords and a shabby crest, eyes streaming from the smoke already filling the corridor behind him.

Léopold met him halfway.

His fist sank into the man’s stomach, just below the ribs. Air blasted out of the attacker in a grunt. As he doubled, Léopold’s other hand drove the hilt of a knife into the side of his neck—not deep, but hard enough to drop him.

Behind, voices shouted in confusion. “Fire?” “No, smoke!” “Who lit—”

Léopold flicked a second sphere back into the haze and turned his face away, eyes shut.

The hall flashed white. A crack like sudden thunder punched the air. The shouts turned to panicked cries as men stumbled, blinded, grabbing for walls that weren’t where they thought.

He stepped into the chaos.

He moved close, where rifles were clumsy. A hand groped toward him. He caught the wrist, twisted, and used the man’s own surprise to pull him forward, shoulder-first into a pillar. Bone thudded against wood. The rifle went loose in the moment between falling and being caught.

He caught it by the barrel and swung its stock into another man’s jaw. Teeth cracked, blood sprayed. The rifle was foreign-made—the metal too clean, too regular, a tiny stamp near the trigger guard. He dropped it before he had time to appreciate the craftsmanship.

A figure in darker clothes than the rest ducked under the swinging butt and came up with a sword already half-drawn. The blade caught what little light remained, aimed for the space under Léopold’s ribs.

He let himself fall backward.

His hand shot to the wall, fingers catching the edge of a scroll rack. He yanked, dragging it sideways. Shelves of neatly rolled documents toppled between them. The sword cut through paper and wood, slowing just enough that when it emerged, its point only scraped his coat instead of his skin.

Scrolls cascaded around them, funding orders and land deeds unfurling as they fell, characters smearing under boots and blood.

He rolled, came up on one knee, and fired.

The Colt kicked in his hand. The bullet took the swordsman in the shoulder and spun him against the wall. He slid down, fingers scrabbling against plaster, leaving a bright streak.

More men poured out of the smoky corridor, some still half-blind, others with wet cloth tied around their faces. A few fired rifles wildly in his direction. Bullets tore through shōji paper in white bursts, spilling lantern light from rooms beyond. Paper squares fluttered down like startled birds.

Sekibanki’s head whirled above them, weaving between beams, counting aloud for his benefit.

“Four there—no, three, that one’s done. Two coming from your right with the fancy ties. One at the back holding his gun like a broom—”

A shot cracked from the right. Léopold flung himself sideways. The bullet ripped through his sleeve and stabbed hot along his upper arm. He hit the floor on his opposite side and slid until his shoulder slammed into a doorframe.

Pain came in a bright wave. He rode it long enough to yank another smoke sphere from his belt and roll it toward the two “fancy ties.” It burst in their faces with a hiss. They cursed, waving hands in front of their eyes.

He used the frame to haul himself upright and kicked the nearest shōji panel. The paper tore, the wooden slats cracking enough to give. He squeezed through into a side room.

Ink and paper everywhere—scribes’ benches, low tables stacked with petitions, calligraphy drying on strings stretched from wall to wall. No guards. Only a very old clerk under a pile of knocked-over brushes, staring at him with round, stunned eyes.

“Stay down,” Léopold said.

He ran along the benches, boots scattering papers, then leaped for the far wall. His foot hit a support beam; he pushed off it, sending himself upward and sideways. His fingers caught the lintel. He swung back into the corridor through another panel, above the level where blinded samurai were hacking at phantom enemies.

For a heartbeat he hung there, weight on his fingers, watching the pattern below—the arcs of swords; the panicked backs; the one steady man at the rear, cloth over his nose, eyes narrowed, rifle held correctly.

Templar-trained.

Léopold let go.

He dropped feet-first onto the rifleman’s back. The man crashed forward, rifle barking once into the floor. Sparks flew from stone. Léopold’s boots dug into his spine. He rode him down, then stepped off and brought his elbow down on the back of the man’s head with a crack.

“Three left,” Sekibanki called. “Two angry, one reconsidering his life choices.”

The “reconsidering” one bolted toward the stairs that led deeper into the castle. Léopold snatched a knife from his belt and flicked his wrist. The blade spun end over end and buried itself in the man’s calf. He screamed, pitched forward, and slid down the first few steps on his chest.

The angry two charged.

They came from opposite sides, swords up, trying to box him in. He stepped toward the nearer one, closing before the swing finished. His shoulder hit the attacker’s chest; he shoved hard, driving him back into his partner. Their blades clanged together. Léopold slammed his forehead into the nearer man’s face. Bone crunched, warm blood splashed his brow. He grabbed a sleeve and flung the man sideways into the wall.

The last slashed wildly. Steel traced a shallow line along Léopold’s ribs, hot and immediate. He grunted, caught the man’s wrist and his own belt, then twisted his hips. The sonnō jōi’s weight went over his shoulder and down onto the floor with a sickening thud.

He didn’t get up.

For a moment, the corridor held its breath.

Smoke curled in widening bands, mixing with lantern oil. Paper drifted down from broken panels and shelves—petitions, orders, poems sticking to blood-slick floorboards, footprints stamping across names.

Sekibanki’s head hovered near his shoulder, hair singed at one end.

“Inner rooms,” she said. “They’re not all dead. Some took another staircase. Kagerou’s keeping them busy near the garden, but she doesn’t have thumbs.”

As if to prove her point, a howl echoed faintly from deeper in the complex—long, low, enough to make every human in earshot flinch.

“The Regent?” Léopold asked.

“Still breathing when I looked through his ceiling,” she said. “Annoyed. Writing something. Hurry, or your work tonight becomes very redundant.”

He wiped his bloody hand on a fallen petition without reading it and ran.

The path to Ii’s private chambers was a maze of dim corridors and paper walls, built to impress visitors and confuse attackers. Tonight, it mostly funneled sound in misleading ways.

He followed the smell instead: gunpowder, fresh and acrid; sweat gone sour; the sharp, metallic tang of fear hanging in the air like mist. At every turn he saw the outskirts of the attack—a guard sprawled across a threshold, eyes frozen in surprise; a toppled candelabrum guttering on its side, wax pooling like melted bone.

At one corner, a shōji panel ahead jerked. A blade thrust through the paper from the other side, then carved downward, turning the delicate grid into a torn mouth.

Léopold ducked low and slid along the floor, shoulder and hip scraping tatami. The sword whistled over his back, cutting a lock of hair. As he passed the ragged slit, he drove his hidden blade up through the gap. It met soft resistance, then bone. A man on the other side groaned once and fell away, dragging the blade for a heartbeat before it came free.

He didn’t slow.

He burst into the hallway leading to Ii’s room just as two sonnō jōi samurai reached its far end. One carried a lamp, the other a rifle with foreign marks. The lamplight hit him like another attack, giving away both his position and theirs.

The rifle came up, too fast.

He threw himself sideways, hitting the wall. The shot blew a hole through the paper at his shoulder, showering him with splinters. A lantern in the side room beyond exploded, oil splashing, fire blooming against a calligraphy scroll.

The man with the lamp cursed and dropped it. Flame licked at spilled oil on the tatami, racing toward him. He stamped on it frantically, buying Léopold a heartbeat.

Léopold drew the Colt and fired twice.

The rifleman jerked and went down, first bullet punching into his chest, second taking him under the jaw as he fell. The other man flinched as the shots cracked down the corridor. In that flinch, the lamp slipped from his grasp entirely.

It crashed, shattered, and the oil finally caught properly.

Fire surged across the mats in a bright, hungry sheet.

“Wonderful,” Sekibanki muttered from somewhere above.

Léopold ran through the rising heat, coat catching an ember that began to chew at the hem. He slapped at it, the smell of scorched cloth and hair stinging his nose.

Ii’s door waited at the corridor’s end. Two guards already lay slumped against it, both cut down, both still clutching weapons. From inside came the dull thud of bodies hitting walls, the bark of another foreign shot, and a shouted slogan about the Emperor’s will.

He reached for the latch.

It moved under his hand before he could pull. The door slid aside in a sudden, violent motion.

A young samurai in blood-spattered robes stood in the gap, eyes wild, sword dripping. Behind him, Léopold glimpsed shredded screens, overturned inkstones, Ii’s writing table shoved onto its side.

“Out of the way,” the young man snarled, swinging in a crude arc toward Léopold’s neck.

Léopold stepped in, not back.

He jammed his forearm under the man’s sword arm, catching muscle and bone, stopping the swing with raw force. Pain flared along his own cut ribs. He ignored it and drove his forehead into the attacker’s nose. Bone crunched. Blood spattered them both.

The samurai reeled. Léopold twisted, using their locked arms as a lever, and slammed him into the doorframe. His hidden blade found the gap under the ribs and punched in. The samurai gasped, eyes flaring, then went limp.

Léopold let him slide to the floor and stepped over him into Ii’s room.

The Regent’s study had become a storm of paper and splinters.

Shōji panels hung in tatters, torn by blades and bullets, their white fragments drifting down like slow snow. The long sheet where Ii had been practicing “order” lay crumpled against the far wall, ink smeared into black bruises. Fallen petitions and reports littered the floor, some already stamped with footprints, some soaked dark with blood.

Two bodies lay near the writing table—attackers, by their clothes. One had a clean cut across his throat, the other a stab wound in the gut. Ii Naosuke knelt behind the overturned table, short sword in hand, robes spattered red.

A third sonnō jōi staggered toward him, clutching a pistol with both hands—the foreign kind, clumsy in unfamiliar fingers. His thumb fumbled at the hammer.

Léopold fired first.

The Colt’s report punched the room. The bullet took the attacker in the side of the neck. He sagged, dropping the pistol as his hands flew to his throat. Blood pumped between his fingers.

He fell across the calligraphy paper, smearing the character for “order” with a full-body stain.

Silence dropped in after the echo, heavy and absurd.

Sekibanki’s head peeked through a torn panel near the ceiling, eyes wide.

Kagerou’s howl sounded again, farther away now, fading as the last of the attackers realized their surprise had failed and began to scatter into the dark.

Léopold lowered the Colt slowly. His ears rang. His side throbbed where the sword had grazed him, his shirt sticking wetly to his skin. He felt one warm drop roll down his flank, under his belt, then fall, quiet, to the tatami.

Ii rose, breathing hard, sword still in hand.

He looked smaller without his desk between them, but not weaker. His hair had come loose from its careful binding; a gray lock clung to his sweaty temple. His left hand, the one gripping the sword, trembled. His right hand went to his shoulder, digging instinctively into the aching muscle.

His gaze fell on the dead men first, counting, sorting. Then it moved to the Colt in Léopold’s hand.

“Foreign thunder,” he said. “Inside the Regent’s room.”

He said it like an entry in a ledger.

Léopold flicked open the revolver’s cylinder with his thumb, checked the remaining rounds by touch, then snapped it shut.

“If they had reached you,” he said, voice rough, “the whole castle would have heard a very different kind.”

Ii’s eyes slid over the torn panels, the footprints tracing the path of the attackers, the marks on the floor where they had fired blind.

He stepped carefully around the bodies and crouched by the nearest shōji panel that still clung to its frame. With his free hand, he brushed away a hanging strip. Paper fell, joining the rest on the floor.

“On the walls,” he said, almost to himself, “they write slogans. ‘Revere the Emperor. Expel the barbarians.’”

He turned his head, looking at Léopold over his shoulder.

“Tonight they brought foreign guns to kill the Regent in the name of purity,” he said. “Guns your enemies supplied.”

Léopold felt another drop of blood slide down his side and fall.

“No,” he said. “You didn’t miss anything.”

Ii stood, sheathing his sword with a slow motion. He winced as his shoulder protested, then straightened, forcing the joint to bear his weight.

“If I fall now,” he said, “these sonnō jōi children and your Templars will tear this country apart. The hotheads will claim heaven, the foreign traders will claim harbors, and men like Ashford will stand between them and sell them both bullets.”

He stepped closer, stopping near enough that Léopold could see the fine cracks in his nails from too many hours holding brushes.

“Would that please your Mentor?” Ii asked.

The name landed like another shot.

Canton crowded in—burning warehouses, civilians coughing in smoke, Ashford’s young face turned away from a crying child because someone in a clean coat had told him to. His Mentor’s hand, bloody, pressing a crumpled note into his palm: Get to Japan before they do.

Léopold looked down.

His blood had left a small constellation on the tatami between them, dark on pale straw. One droplet had fallen on the edge of a petition. The ink there blurred, the characters bleeding into his red.

He holstered the Colt.

“In Canton,” he said slowly, “my Mentor tried to keep children from being crushed between your ‘order’ and their chaos. He failed.”

He lifted his gaze to Ii.

“If I stand aside here,” he said, “it happens again. With your head on a spike and Ashford writing the new rules.”

Ii’s mouth twitched.

“Some of my own men would cheer that,” he said. “They would say, ‘Good. The foreign regent is gone. Now we can be pure again.’”

He gestured with his chin at the dead attackers.

“These boys believed killing me tonight would save their country,” he said. “They’ll go to whatever afterlife they imagined quite sure they were heroes.”

He looked down at the droplet of Léopold’s blood soaking into his floor.

“And you?” he asked quietly. “What do you call yourself when you shoot your own ‘heroes’ to keep your enemy alive?”

Gunpowder and old ink sat thick on Léopold’s tongue.

“Complicit,” he said.

The word hung between them like smoke.

He stepped closer, until his shadow overlapped Ii’s in the dim light.

“You wanted a foreign adviser,” he said. “My maps, my warnings, my neat labels for men like Ashford. I’ve been giving you all that while pretending I could stay… clean.”

His hand drifted, almost unconsciously, toward the hidden blade under his gauntlet.

“No more pretending,” he said. “I’ll keep you alive. I’ll pull your Templars out by the roots—the ones whispering to your enemies and the ones in your own halls. I’ll drag your sonnō jōi boys out of their meetings, or put them in the ground when I can’t.”

He glanced at the torn sheet on the floor, the smeared character for order.

“But I won’t pretend I’m only saving my own creed,” he added. “If I defend you, I defend your Purges too. Your signatures. Your ink on necks.”

Ii’s jaw muscle jumped once.

“You’ll be hated,” he said. “By both sides. By my enemies for keeping me breathing. By my own people for making me need you.”

“They already hate me,” Léopold said. “I’m just adjusting the reasons.”

A slow, bitter smile tugged at Ii’s mouth.

“And what are you, then?” he asked. “Guardian spirit? Mercenary? Contractor?”

Léopold glanced at the blood between them, at the foreign iron on his hip and the Japanese steel at Ii’s.

“I’ll be the foreign knife you pretend you don’t use,” he said.

Ii inhaled sharply, the sound halfway between a laugh and a cough.

“Honest,” he said. “More than most.”

He looked around the room—the fallen paper, the dead men, the broken calligraphy.

“Very well,” he said. “You will guard the door of order while I write the names that offend your creed.”

He met Léopold’s eyes.

“And when you decide that I too belong on one of your lists,” he said, “you will do your duty.”

Léopold didn’t answer at once. He pictured his hidden blade slipping between ribs, as it had for so many others. He pictured the petitions, the sons of executed men shouting in alleys, Ashford watching all of it with cool interest.

“If that day comes,” he said at last, “I won’t send boys with slogans.”

He touched the gauntlet on his wrist.

“I’ll come myself,” he said.

Ii nodded once, as if satisfied with the terms of an ugly contract.

Outside, in the corridors, guards began shouting questions. Alarms that had come too late now fanned out through the castle. Flames crackled faintly in a side room where calligraphy burned.

Sekibanki’s head drifted lower, taking in the two men, the blood, the ruined room.

She said nothing this time.

They just stood there, surrounded by falling paper, while Léopold’s blood and Ii Naosuke’s policies soaked slowly into the same tatami.

Chapter Text

The Ando house always smelled faintly of ink.

Even with the shutters closed against the chill, you could tell what kind of day it had been by the strength of it. Tonight it rode over the usual stew of miso and fish like a ghost—sharp, metallic, the way it got when Ando had worked late, dipping the brush too often, forgetting to clean it properly between characters.

Léopold slipped his shoes off at the threshold and stepped into the narrow hall. The floorboards knew his weight by now; they barely creaked. From the main room came the scrape of a low table being shifted and the murmur of a woman’s voice telling someone to wash their hands.

“Ando-san,” he called softly.

“In here,” Ando answered. There was a clatter, something dropped, a quick apology in a girl’s voice, and then Ando appeared in the doorway, wiping ink off his thumb with a cloth that already looked like a night sky.

“You’re late,” Ando said, smiling. “I was afraid a certain Regent had decided to keep you for himself.”

“His tea is terrible,” Léopold said. “I’m not that loyal.”

Ando’s wife, Keiko, appeared behind her husband, bowing with a politeness that had softened over months into something warmer. “You’ll eat?”

He started to protest, then smelled rice and simmering daikon and something salty and rich that might have been fish if you were generous.

“Yes,” he said.

They sat around the low table. The kids wedged themselves wherever there was space: eight-year-old Yui between her father and Léopold, younger Kenji cross-legged opposite, chin barely above the tabletop. Both had ink smudges on their cheeks like clumsy war paint.

The bowls were not as full as they had been in spring. Keiko had become adept at making steam look like substance; she ladled extra broth over the rice, stirring it with her chopsticks until it seemed to swell.

“Two scoops,” Yui told herself quietly as she watched. “For good luck.”

Kenji lifted his bowl, sniffed, and made a face.

“It smells like the fish died twice,” he said.

Keiko flicked a grain of rice at him. “Careful or I’ll make you eat it three times.”

Léopold hid a smile behind his cup as he drank his tea. He’d had worse. Canton had taught him that you could get used to anything if you were hungry enough.

They ate. Chopsticks clicked softly. Outside, a seller with a creaking cart shouted about sweet potatoes in a voice going hoarse. Farther down the alley, men were arguing about exchange rates loud enough that their words carried through the thin walls: “silver… gold… thieves in Yokohama…”

“Ando-san,” Yui said suddenly, mouth half-full. “At school today they taught us a song.”

“A dangerous introduction,” Ando said. “What kind of song?”

Kenji puffed out his chest. “About chasing out the barbarians,” he said proudly. He set his bowl down and grabbed his chopsticks like tiny swords. “Sonnō jōi!” he cried, then winced as his mother’s hand tapped the back of his head.

“Not at the table,” Keiko said sharply. “And not that loud.”

“But the other boys—”

Yui chimed in, clapping a rhythm she’d heard in the street. “‘Revere the Emperor, expel the—’”

Keiko’s second tap came faster. “I said not at the table.”

The children subsided, chastened but still humming under their breath, the words reshaped into nonsense syllables. Kenji’s chopsticks dueled invisible enemies in the small space between his bowl and the table.

Ando’s eyes had gone distant for a moment as his children sang. He blinked and refilled Léopold’s cup.

“The walking notices came by again,” he said, as if commenting on the weather.

“The what?” Léopold asked.

He gestured with his chin toward the street. “Young men with banners,” he said. “Too proud to stick their slogans on walls like criminals, so they carry them on poles and call it virtue.”

Keiko made a soft disapproving sound and leaned forward. “Takahiro,” she murmured, warning in her tone.

“What did they want?” Léopold asked.

He didn’t have to ask. He’d seen the same type at other doors: sons of lower samurai families, restless and underpaid, faces flushed with cheap sake and righteousness.

“They say Edo needs more courage,” Ando said lightly. “More voices willing to shout the right phrases at the right moments.” He picked a piece of daikon out of his bowl and inspected it as if it had offended him. “They say a man who reads Dutch and stares at the stars must see how sick the country is.”

“And?” Léopold said.

“And I told them that a man who reads Dutch sees how big the world is and how small their slogans are,” Ando replied.

Yui giggled. Kenji’s eyes went wide.

“What did they say?” Kenji whispered.

“They said I was a coward who hides behind foreign words,” Ando said, chewing the daikon as if he imagined someone’s face there. “I told them bravery and shouting are not always the same thing.”

Keiko’s hand tightened around her chopsticks. They creaked faintly.

“They can cause trouble, Takahiro,” she said. “If they remember your face.”

“They remember everyone’s face,” Ando said. “That is their hobby.”

He looked at Léopold.

“They used your Regent’s favorite word,” he added. “Order. They want to ‘restore’ it by cutting away the corruption.”

Léopold watched the children out of the corner of his eye. Kenji had resumed his chopstick battles, but now his targets were invisible traitors, not monsters. Yui had taken a scrap of charcoal from somewhere and was drawing on a scrap of paper, tongue caught between her teeth.

“What did you say?” Léopold asked.

“I told them I was already helping your order,” Ando said. “Just not the one with banners.”

He smiled, but there was strain at the corners.

“They don’t understand that you can hate the Purge and still not want the streets full of boys with guns,” he said quietly.

Yui finished her drawing with a flourish and banged her fist on the table.

“Look!” she said, shoving the paper toward Léopold.

He took it carefully. The lines were thick, wildly enthusiastic. A rectangle with a crooked mast, angry smoke pouring from little circles along its sides. The sea was a mass of vertical strokes. On the deck, stick figures with exaggerated noses and mouths shouted little black dots that were supposed to be words.

“It’s you,” Yui said, beaming. “On a black ship.”

“Ah,” he said gravely. “You captured my noble chin perfectly.”

She giggled. Kenji leaned over to inspect.

“Your ship is too small,” he told her. “The real ones are like castles.”

“Castles don’t float,” Yui said.

“Some do,” Léopold said. “I’ve seen a castle float. Once.”

They stared at him, eyes huge.

“Tell us!” Kenji demanded.

Keiko opened her mouth to say something about bedtime. Ando touched her wrist. “Let him,” he murmured.

So Léopold told them, in edited pieces, about a cannon barge in Canton painted like a palace, lanterns glowing along its rail as it shelled warehouses full of grain. He turned the explosions into thunder farther away than they had been, softened the screams into “loud noises.”

By the time he finished, Yui’s drawing had acquired little stars above the ship where cannon smoke had been. Kenji’s chopsticks lay forgotten, stuck upright in his empty bowl until Keiko gently took them out and laid them flat.

Later, when the pots had been cleaned and the children’s protests about bedtime had been half-heartedly fought and lost, Ando and Léopold climbed up to the roof.

The tiles were cold under their thighs. The house leaned against its neighbors in a way that created a shallow, hidden nest just below the peak, sheltered from most of the street’s view. They had discovered it months ago: a place to drink and talk where the sky felt closer.

Ando carried a small bottle of sake and two chipped cups. He set them between them, careful not to let anything roll too far. From up here, the alley was a dark slit, lanterns on either end turning it into a tunnel of soft gold. Voices rose in fragments, stripped of words by distance—laughter, exasperation, the occasional slurred chant.

He poured.

“Cold,” Léopold noted as he sipped.

“Everything is,” Ando said. “Even the stars.”

He lay back on the tiles, one hand behind his head, the other balancing the cup on his chest. Léopold hesitated a heartbeat, then copied him. The sky opened above them, a scattering of pale points in the hazy winter air, their pattern half-hidden by the city’s smoke.

Ando pointed upward with the hand holding his cup, tracing imaginary lines.

“There,” he said. “See those three? That crooked line like a bent spear?”

Léopold squinted. “I see four,” he said.

“The fourth is your foreign eye inventing things,” Ando said. “We call that one the Ladle. Some of the Dutch books say it is a bear’s tail.” He chuckled. “Who decided a bear looks like that?”

“Probably someone who had never seen one,” Léopold said.

Ando’s finger moved.

“And that cluster,” he went on. “Like a handful of rice thrown on black lacquer. The Dutch charts number them. To me, they’re children arguing over who owns the sky.”

Léopold snorted, an unguarded sound. The sake warmed his throat. For the first time that day, his shoulders eased away from his ears.

“You think everything is children arguing,” he said.

“Often it is,” Ando said. “Look at our politics.”

He made connecting shapes between distant stars, letting his hand hover as if dragging invisible string.

“Here,” he said. “One possible future. We follow your Regent. We cut away the loudest tongues, build forts with foreign cannons, print tariffs in two languages. We become a neat constellation the Dutch can recognize. Straight lines. Predictable angles.”

His finger bent toward another cluster.

“Here: we follow the boys with banners,” he said. “We shout purity until our throats bleed, slam the doors, break the windows. Bright for a moment, then burned out. Nobody in Holland names that one. They just scribble, ‘unfortunate events.’”

He shifted. A tile under his shoulder gave a small groan. Léopold heard it and, for a second, his old reflex twitched—an instinctive turn to check the roof edge, the alley, the door. He forced himself to stay on his back, eyes on the sky.

“And here,” Ando said softly, his hand settling between the first two, drawing a small, uncertain triangle. “We take your machines and clocks when they come, but we don’t worship them. We keep most necks attached to most shoulders. We argue in ink instead of alleys.”

“That sounds very peaceful,” Léopold said.

“It sounds difficult,” Ando said. “More work than cutting one loud head or shouting at one flag.”

He took a long drink and grimaced at the chill.

“I criticise your Regent,” he said. “His sword is too wide. His ink too thick. He forgets that behind each name he signs, there is a family that isn’t on his paper.”

His hand lowered, resting on his chest again.

“But when the boys with banners came,” he added, “I still shut the door.”

“Because you’re afraid,” Léopold said.

“Because I’m afraid,” Ando agreed easily. “And because I like my head where it is. And because I have children who think barbarians are funny shapes on paper, not neighbors to be stabbed.”

They fell quiet. The sky breathed above them. Somewhere across the city, someone had started a slow chant; by the time it reached their alley it was a blurred wave of sound.

“Do you see cracks?” Ando asked suddenly.

“In what?” Léopold said.

“In the bowl. In the cup. In the sky,” Ando said.

He pointed toward a dark patch where no stars shone, a jagged bite out of the pattern.

“Sometimes I think we spend all our time drawing neat lines between lights and pretending the empty parts are not there,” he said. “We say, ‘This is the Ladle. This is order.’ And we ignore the places already starting to split.”

One of the tiles under Léopold’s shoulder made a small popping sound, as if agreeing. He shifted instinctively, then relaxed again.

“Ii sees cracks,” Léopold said quietly. “He’s just decided the best way to deal with them is to hammer them flat.”

“And you?” Ando asked.

The sake had reached Léopold’s limbs. His hands felt heavy, pleasantly so; his tongue looser than he usually allowed.

“I used to think I could stand on the roof and point,” he said. “Say, ‘This star is Templar. Cut it out. This one is Assassin. Keep it.’”

He made a clumsy gesture at the sky with his cup, nearly spilling it onto his face. Ando laughed.

“And now?” Ando said.

“Now I keep finding people under the stars,” Léopold said. “A Regent with ink on his hands. A friend with ink on his thumb. Children drawing ships.”

He thought of Henrik’s unposted letter, folded in his own coat. Of the petitions he had refused to choose between in Ii’s room. Of the youkai arguing about whether to feed on nationalist fear.

The alley below erupted briefly in laughter; someone cracked a joke about a magistrate’s wig. The tension snapped and then coiled again.

“I shot boys tonight,” he said, surprising himself with the bluntness of it.

Ando did not jerk or flinch. He only raised his head slightly, looking at Léopold’s profile in the thin starlight, then let it drop back.

“Did they have swords?” he asked.

“And rifles,” Léopold said. “And slogans.”

“Then you shot men,” Ando said. “Leaves the sky no less crowded.”

They lay side by side, sharing a quiet that was not quite comfortable but not hostile either.

After a while, Yui’s small face appeared in the attic window that opened onto the roof. She pressed her nose to the frame and peered out, hair a messy cloud around her.

“Otōsan,” she whispered. “Kenji is snoring like a cow.”

“Cows don’t snore,” Ando murmured. “They grumble.”

She squinted at the sky.

“Which one is our star?” she asked.

Ando and Léopold both pointed at once, in different directions. Their hands crossed in midair. Yui giggled.

“You have to pick the same one,” she declared. “Or we’ll get lost.”

“Your father likes triangles,” Léopold said. “I aim for something more interesting.”

“Interesting gets you killed,” Ando said. “Triangles get you promotions.”

Yui rolled her eyes. “Adults,” she said, shaking her head as if they were hopeless. Then she withdrew, the window sliding shut with a soft thunk.

Léopold watched where she had been, then turned his head toward Ando.

“You should leave,” he said quietly. “Take them. Before the banners come back with rifles. Before your name ends up on a list—on the Regent’s paper, or on the boys’.”

Ando’s eyes went back to the sky.

“And go where?” he asked. “To a Dutch island I’ve never seen? To Hakodate, where foreigners stroll and the winters bite harder than here? My rebellion is very small, my friend. It fits between these walls and this roof.”

He tapped his chest, just above where the cup rested.

“I write words some men are not ready to read,” he said. “I teach my children that shouting is not thinking. I feed strange men who bring foreign knives to my house. It is not fighting at Sakuradamon. But it is… something.”

Léopold felt the roof tile under his ribs again, the faint give that told him the house had seen many winters.

“Constellations and cracks,” Ando said softly. “Maybe that is all we have. Patterns we draw, and lines where they break.”

Down below, Kenji’s voice rose in a half-awake mumble, singing a fragment of the sonnō jōi rhyme out of tune. Keiko hushed him, the sound drifting up like a gentle wave washing over sharper stones.

Léopold listened, counting beats between the child’s words and the distant, harsher chant from somewhere deeper in the city. For a moment they lined up, two rhythms on the same drum. Then they slipped apart again.

He laughed once, low and real, at the absurdity of it—the black ships on children’s paper, the Regent’s ink on execution lists, the youkai arguing about feeding on patriotism, and Ando Takahiro lying on a cracked roof, drawing a future in the stars.

For the length of one cup of sake, under a sky full of thin constellations and widening cracks, he let himself stop watching the door.

Chapter Text

Morning in Edo began with the sound of rice.

Not the polite clink of bowls, but the dry roar of grain being poured from sack to sack, the hollow thump of wooden scoops, the slap of abacus beads. Nakamura stood at the edge of the market, hands tucked into his sleeves, listening.

He did not look like a man who held anything together. His kimono was plain and mended; his hair was just messy enough to be forgettable. A ledger was tucked under one arm, a charcoal stick behind his ear. He could have been any mid-level clerk checking prices for a lord who feared being cheated.

“Morning, Nakamura-dono,” called the rice broker at the third stall. “Today’s numbers will make you weep.”

“If they make you weep,” Nakamura said mildly, “they’ll make the townsfolk howl. Show me.”

The broker—Tanabe, thick-waisted, hands cracked from years of handling sacks—turned his board around. The numbers chalked on it were higher than yesterday. Higher than they should have been.

“New tax,” Tanabe said before Nakamura could ask. “New rules on how much can leave the city. And some merchant firms from the port suddenly buying more than they did last month. Strange, isn’t it?”

His eyes flicked sideways, toward the corner where two neat men in foreign-cut coats pretended to admire the grain.

“Strange,” Nakamura agreed.

He set his ledger on the low edge of the stall and made a show of jotting down the prices. As he wrote, he let the charcoal stray for a heartbeat, adding a tiny cross-stroke to one of the numbers that had not been there before.

Tanabe’s gaze dropped to the mark, then back up. The two men by the corner didn’t notice; they were too busy arguing in bad Japanese about moisture content.

“Third line?” Tanabe asked under his breath.

“Third line,” Nakamura said.

The third line on the board listed a price for rice shipped to Kawasaki—lower than the rest. No one sold that cheaply without making their profit somewhere else.

“Magistrate’s office?” Tanabe asked.

“Magistrate’s office,” Nakamura confirmed. “Send your boy with a complaint about ‘unfair competition.’ Make it loud. I’ll catch it when it falls.”

Tanabe grimaced. “You’ll owe me a drink if they double my tax instead.”

“I will owe you six,” Nakamura said. “And a new abacus.”

He closed the ledger, bowed, and drifted away as if the conversation had been about nothing more than numbers. As he passed the foreign-coated men, he stumbled just enough to bump one of them.

“Forgive me,” he murmured, steadying the man’s sleeve with both hands.

His fingers brushed the fabric. Fine wool, foreign weave. Beneath it, muscle not yet softened by office work. The faint jingle of coins in an inner pocket. On his wrist, a scent: tobacco and the oil used to clean rifles.

“Watch your feet,” the man said in clipped Japanese, pulling his arm back. “You’ll trip yourself into poverty.”

“Already there,” Nakamura said with a thin smile, bowing again before moving on.

Around the next corner, a boy waited, back pressed to the wall—a lanky teenager with a new sword that shone too brightly.

“Uncle,” he whispered. “Did you see them? They walk like they own the street.”

“I saw them,” Nakamura said. “Put your sword down before you scare chickens.”

The boy, Ryo, flushed but obeyed, letting his hand fall reluctantly from the hilt.

“They say we should drive them into the sea,” Ryo went on quickly. “The men at the sake shop. They say the Emperor’s will—”

Nakamura’s hand shot out faster than the boy’s words. Two fingers pressed into his nephew’s throat, not hard enough to hurt, just enough to stop the sentence.

“Chant later,” Nakamura said. “Listen now.”

Ryo swallowed around his uncle’s fingers. Nakamura removed his hand.

“You will take a message to the magistrate’s office,” Nakamura said. “Tanabe’s complaint. You will deliver it to Scribe Ishiba, not the others. You will complain that your master is being ruined by cheats. You will shout about how unfair it is until even the ink stones blush.”

Ryo’s face lit. “We can complain about the foreigners to the magistrate?” he asked.

“You can complain about prices to a clerk,” Nakamura said. “Do not say ‘foreigners.’ Do not say ‘Emperor.’ If you forget, I will personally break that pretty sword over your head.”

Ryo’s grin faltered, but didn’t vanish entirely.

“You never let me do anything,” he muttered.

“I am letting you deliver a message in daylight instead of your own head at night,” Nakamura said calmly. “Do it well and I may let you carry something heavier than paper next time.”

Ryo straightened, pride and resentment wrestling in his shoulders, then bowed sharply and ran off, clutching the folded complaint Nakamura had palmed to him.

Nakamura watched him go, eyes softening for just a moment. His fingers drifted to the inside of his sleeve, where calloused skin rubbed against a small hard shape—a wooden tablet, the kind placed on home shrines.

He did not take it out. Not here.

The magistrate’s office smelled of mold, ink, and boredom.

Scribes hunched over low desks, sleeves tucked up, brushes squeaking softly. A magistrate on a raised seat pretended to listen to two merchants arguing about a broken contract while actually watching a fly on the wall.

Nakamura slid along the back, another shadow with paperwork, until he reached the row of shelves where records were kept. He carried a stack of scrolls in his arms to justify his presence; none of the scribes bothered to check them.

At the far end, Scribe Ishiba scratched at his neck with the butt of his brush, expression sour. His inkstone was nearly dry; the water jug on his desk was empty.

“You’re dying,” Nakamura murmured, setting his own jug down beside him.

Ishiba grunted, not bothering to look up. “Died yesterday,” he said. “No one noticed.”

“Perhaps this will convince the ancestors to send you back,” Nakamura said, pouring water.

As he did, he unfolded a thin slip of paper hidden along the jug’s side and slid it under the corner of Ishiba’s ledger. The scribe’s eyes tracked the movement; his hand shifted to cover the new addition as he pretended to rearrange his brushes.

“Tanabe’s boy is at the door,” Nakamura said. “He’s very upset about someone selling below cost. You should write down exactly how upset he is.”

Ishiba snorted. “Tanabe is always upset.”

“He has reason this time,” Nakamura said. “The low prices are not real. They’re bait, wearing your office’s seals.”

Ishiba’s brush hovered. “Backed?” he asked under his breath.

“By men with rifles that smell like the docks,” Nakamura said. “Using your stamps to turn silver into their gold.”

Ishiba’s jaw clenched, the only sign he’d heard.

“I’m a clerk,” he muttered. “I sharpen pens.”

“You fight with where you put them,” Nakamura said. “Refuse the permits. Delay them. Lose their papers. Then write me how loud they howl.”

Ishiba sighed, dipped his brush, and scratched something new in the ledger.

“If I end up in the river in a sack,” he said, “I expect my name on one of your tablets.”

Nakamura’s fingers brushed his sleeve again.

“You have my word,” he said.

He left the way he had come.

By late afternoon, the light had turned the alleyways the color of old straw. Nakamura ducked under a laundry line, sidestepped a woman carrying a basket of fish, and turned into a narrow lane where the smell of soy and smoke lived permanently in the air.

At the end of it, a modest house leaned a little to one side, as if listening. Its wood was weathered but clean. The step had been scrubbed recently. The shoes lined up inside the entrance were small and worn.

He slipped in without knocking.

Inside, the front room was quiet. A kettle steamed gently over a small brazier. On the far wall, half-hidden behind a shelf of neatly folded bedding, a small household shrine sat in the alcove, its wooden doors slightly ajar.

Nakamura crossed the room with the automatic tread of someone who knew exactly where every board creaked. He knelt before the shrine and opened the doors the rest of the way.

Inside, a simple wooden tablet leaned against the back wall, the black characters on it worn faint by fingers and smoke. Next to it, a small inkstone and a folded scrap of blue cloth, the kind that had once been part of a child’s kimono.

He touched the cloth with one knuckle, then the tablet. His lips moved, forming a few silent words that did not need air.

A woman stepped into the doorway behind him. Her hair was streaked with gray at the temples, though she could not have been much past thirty. She wiped her hands on her apron.

“Talking to him again?” she asked softly.

“He listens better than most men in Edo,” Nakamura said.

She gave a small snort and moved to the kettle, pouring hot water over tea leaves. The smell filled the room.

“Ryo is late,” she said. “You sent him on another errand.”

“He’s learning to walk near fire without catching,” Nakamura said.

“He’s learning to like fire,” she said. “That’s the danger.”

He rose and accepted the cup she held out. Their fingers brushed; hers were rough from laundry, his from steel.

“You hum when you sharpen it,” she said suddenly.

He frowned. “What?”

“The sword,” she said. “You hum that lullaby when you sharpen it. The one my mother used to sing when the baby was sick.”

He hadn’t realized. Now he heard the echo in his mind: the low, repetitive tune, his own breath matching the rhythm as stone slid along steel in the back room at night.

“I was thinking of his face,” he said quietly, nodding toward the tablet. “And of Ryo’s.”

Her jaw tightened.

“Don’t make me put another name on that shelf,” she said.

“Then help me keep him on the street with messages instead of in alleys with banners,” Nakamura replied.

She did not answer. Her hands tightened around the teapot until her knuckles went white.

The door slid open again and Ryo burst in, cheeks flushed, hair mussed.

“They listened,” he said breathlessly. “The clerk with the dry inkstone wrote everything down. He even nodded.”

“Yes,” Nakamura said. “He’s very brave with his brush.”

Ryo barely heard. “The men at the shop asked me to stay,” he went on. “They wanted to talk about the Emperor. They said a young man with fire in his eyes—”

His aunt threw a dishcloth at his face. “You have soot in your eyes from running too fast,” she said. “Go wash. Then you can talk about emperors.”

Ryo pulled the cloth off, scowling, but went to wash as ordered. As he passed his uncle, Nakamura caught his sleeve lightly.

“Next time they ask you to stay,” he said, “you tell them your uncle beats you if you are late with the rice money. They’ll leave you alone. Men who love slogans don’t like complicated family stories.”

“But I want to—”

“Live long enough to shout something worth shouting,” Nakamura said. “Go.”

Ryo went, muttering.

The woman exhaled.

“You play with too many strings, Takao,” she said, using his given name. “One will snap and whip back in your face.”

“Then I will wear a thicker scarf,” he said, sipping his tea.

But when he set the cup down, his hand lingered another heartbeat on the shrine’s door before closing it.

They met that night above a soy warehouse near Nihonbashi, in a cramped loft that smelled of beans and old rope. The only light came from a single candle stuck in a chipped cup.

Léopold sat cross-legged on a coil of rope, coat off, sleeves rolled to the elbow. In the candlelight, the scars on his forearms looked like pale scratch marks under the leather of his gauntlets.

Below, through the thin floorboards, the warehousemen’s snores rose and fell. Cart wheels occasionally rattled past outside. Each sound made the flame shiver.

Nakamura sat opposite, back to the wall, the sword he “never carried” lying beside him, its scabbard wrapped in cloth.

He hummed under his breath as he sharpened a short knife with a whetstone. The tune was the same lullaby, only softer. Each pass of stone on metal matched the notes.

“You’re off key,” Léopold said.

Nakamura raised an eyebrow. “You know the song?”

“I’ve heard mothers in Nagasaki sing it when they thought no one was listening,” Léopold said. “It sounds less bitter from them.”

“Bitter keeps you awake,” Nakamura said. “What news from the Regent’s world?”

Léopold outlined the night attack in few words—fire, paper, blood, Ii’s shoulder stiff under his robe, the smell of foreign powder in Japanese halls. Nakamura listened without interrupting, the stone never pausing.

“Men with banners and men with ledgers, sharing guns,” he said when Léopold finished. “You always bring me such cheerful patterns.”

“I saw one of Ashford’s rifles,” Léopold said. “Stamped like the guns we intercepted at the docks. He’s feeding the sonnō jōi, then watching who bites. We need to cut the hand that holds the bowl.”

Nakamura set the whetstone down, the knife lying balanced across his knees.

“You want to burn his warehouses,” he said.

“I want to take his factors off the board,” Léopold said. “The firms that move the guns. The foremen who look away at the gates. We know which they are now. Tanabe’s complaint gave us the last piece.”

Nakamura picked up the knife again, flipped it in his palm, and slid it back into its sheath.

“And if you cut too fast?” he asked. “The city bleeds in places we didn’t plan.”

“If we wait,” Léopold said, “it rots. Your scribe ends up in the river. Tanabe is bankrupt. Ryo is handing out guns instead of complaints.”

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees.

“Henrik is dead,” he said. “Ashford killed him and walked away wiser. If we keep poking at the edges, Ashford adjusts faster than we do. We need to hurt him, not just annoy him.”

Nakamura’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly at the name. For a moment, the humming in his throat stopped.

“Henrik believed in… gestures,” he said.

“He believed in making sure men like Ashford remembered him when it hurt to breathe,” Léopold said. “Now he’s a note in my pocket and Ashford is teaching boys with slogans how to hold rifles.”

The candle burned low, wax creeping toward the chipped rim.

Nakamura reached behind him and, without looking, pulled a small folded paper from a crack in the wall. He tossed it to Léopold.

Inside, in cramped, precise handwriting, was a list of names. Not merchants this time, but young samurai, scribes, a junior officer in the city guard. Beside some of the names were tiny marks—a circle, a cross, a dot.

“Your web,” Léopold said.

“Our web,” Nakamura corrected. “Circles pass messages. Crosses will act, if given time to be convinced. Dots are listening, but not decided.”

“Slow seepage,” Léopold said.

“Water wears stone,” Nakamura replied. “A strike looks clean, but the cracks run further than you see.”

Léopold crumpled the paper lightly, then smoothed it out again.

“The stone is already full of cracks,” he said. “Ashford is pouring fire into them. Your water won’t get there in time.”

“And burning his warehouses will make him stop?” Nakamura asked. “Or give him another speech to feed the boys? ‘See how the foreign knives sabotage our trade. See how we must clamp down harder.’”

He mimed a magistrate stamping a decree.

“Every time you strike, Ii signs three more warrants to show he’s in control,” he said. “I see the paper.”

“You prefer to write them out of existence?” Léopold asked. “Change their minds with poems?”

Nakamura’s eyes flashed.

“You think the only tools that matter are the ones you can stab with,” he said. “I spend my days nudging men you’ll never meet half an inch away from whatever line they think they serve. A clerk misplaces a stamp. A young samurai ‘accidentally’ drills his unit in the Regent’s formation instead of Ashford’s. A rice broker clever enough not to sell on credit to boys with banners.”

He tapped the list of names.

“Those are the threads that keep the city from falling apart,” he said. “You cut too many at once, and your foreign friend gets his wish: chaos.”

Léopold’s mouth tightened.

“We don’t have time for everyone to grow consciences,” he said. “Ashford doesn’t need a majority. He needs a handful of men in the right rooms with the right guns.”

“Then we pull their chairs away,” Nakamura said. “Not burn down the house.”

His hands were less steady now as he picked up the whetstone. The lullaby returned, a little off.

Léopold saw again the shrine: the tablet; the blue cloth.

“You’ve lost someone,” he said quietly. “To another ‘cleaning.’”

Nakamura’s shoulders flinched.

“A son,” he said after a moment. “Wrong domain when the swords came. Wrong banner. I wasn’t here to pull him aside. Now he sits on a shelf and glares at me while I sharpen knives.”

He held up the blade. The edge caught the candlelight.

“I want Ashford’s blood as much as you do,” he said. “I just want the streets to still be here when it dries.”

The candle sputtered. A drop of wax ran down like a slow tear.

Léopold looked at the list again, at the circles and crosses and dots.

“Then we strand him,” he said slowly. “Pick off enough of his lines that when we finally cut—burn one warehouse, kill one factor—no one steps forward to replace them.”

“Exactly,” Nakamura said.

“But that means waiting,” Léopold said. “Risking more nights like the last.”

“And trusting that the lines I pull on down here reach the men you shoot up there,” Nakamura said. “Trust is a stranger for both of us.”

They sat with that, the warehouse breathing around them, the city thrumming faintly through thin walls.

Finally, Léopold folded the list and slipped it into his belt.

“We do it your way for now,” he said. “You move the water. I’ll keep the knife sharp for when you point at a rock and say, ‘Now.’”

Nakamura’s mouth twitched upward at one corner.

“Henrik would have argued longer,” he said.

“Henrik isn’t here,” Léopold said. “You are.”

Outside, a cart rolled past, iron-rimmed wheels clattering. Both men went still, listening.

When the sound faded, Nakamura picked up the whetstone again.

The lullaby resumed, low and stubborn.

In the cramped loft above the soy warehouse, between the scrape of stone on steel and the flicker of the candle, the web tightened—threads of ink and gossip and quiet, invisible choices, waiting for the moment someone finally dared to pull.

Chapter Text

Shinagawa smelled wrong long before the shouting started.

On good days the port reeked of tar and fish and coal smoke. Today there was too much cloth in the air—the dusty, astringent scent of banners freshly painted, of red ink drying on slogans. The wind off the bay pushed them inland: fabric slapping, voices testing the sharpness of new phrases.

“Son-nō—”

A boy’s voice, cracking on the second syllable.

“—jōi!”

The answer rolled back from a cluster of young men in worn hakama, shoulders squared as if the words themselves were armor. They carried poles with white cloth banners that snapped overhead, the black characters bleeding slightly where the ink had run: 尊王攘夷.

Revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians.

Léopold watched from the edge of a warehouse roof, coat buttoned against the wind. Below, the crowd thickened along the quay. Traders, laborers, townsfolk curious enough to risk a look. At the foot of a gangplank, a knot of foreign sailors from a British sloop tried to appear unimpressed, hands never far from the knives at their belts.

Between the knots of people moved men who weren’t quite either. No banners. Hair tied correctly, clothing expensive but not ostentatious. One checked his pocket watch too often; another clapped a younger man on the shoulder just as the chant started to lag, coaxing the rhythm back up. They shared glances instead of slogans.

The ring.

Léopold’s fingers tightened on the roof edge. One of those men was his target.

Sato Ken’ichi: clerk in a small firm that did very big business on paper. The ledgers that tied Ashford’s fronts to the guns vanishing from Odaiba and the rice that changed value between one end of the city and the other passed through his hands.

“If they don’t kill him,” Henrik had said once, “Ashford will take the ledger and kill him himself. Better we get there first, eh?”

Henrik was gone. The ledger was not.

“Tongues first,” Henrik’s voice said in memory. “You get the tongues that can explain the paper. Otherwise it’s just numbers.”

Below, Sato stood near the water’s edge, hat of cheap straw shading his face. He held a bundle of papers under his arm—too slim for ledgers, too neat to be anything but copies. His gaze flicked between banners and foreign uniforms with the unease of a man who knew how many of his debts were currently walking around on two legs.

On the far side of the quay, a woman tugged a small child along by the sleeve—a girl of maybe six, sandals slapping on the planks as she lagged to stare wide-eyed at the foreigners’ bright cloth and pale faces.

“Stay close,” the mother hissed.

The girl twisted, staring up at a banner instead. The black characters loomed like teeth.

High above them all, a red head floated on its own, hair fanning in the wind like a banner. Sekibanki’s body leaned against a chimney on the next warehouse over, hands in pockets, chin tipped up. From her neck, a thin shadow strand connected to the drifting head as it moved lazily over the crowd.

A second head peeled itself free, then a third, bobbing like grisly lanterns. Their eyes gleamed with reflected slogans.

“Did you hear?” one head’s voice whispered in no one’s ear and everyone’s at once. “They poisoned the wells near the English quarter. Whole families sick.”

“Foreign coins rust your rice bowls,” breathed another, just above a knot of young men bristling with swords.

A third hovered near the sailors, muttering in halting English: “They say you bring plague. They talk of burning your ship, yes?”

The sailors stiffened, hands going to knives. The young men saw only the change in stance, not the words. Sekibanki watched, lips quirking, as fear thickened like fog.

Near the pilings where the water slapped the quay, something shifted below the surface. A pale face with blue hair and fin-like ears broke the water for a moment, nostrils flaring. Wakasagihime tasted salt, coal, the iron tang starting to rise.

“Not yet,” she murmured to the fish circling her, voice swallowed by the bay. “Soon.”

At the alley mouth leading to the quay, a tall figure leaned against a post, arms folded. Kagerou’s ears twitched under her hair, catching every tremor in the rising chant. Her nails drummed on her sleeves. The hair along the back of her neck itched, wanting to lift.

She could smell them: anger, cheap sake, sweat. Fear like the undernote of an old song. Her gaze tracked the quiet men of the Templar ring, then Léopold’s silhouette on the roof.

“Morals later,” she muttered. “Right now, the stories are excellent.”

The chant rose.

“Son-nō—”

“—jōi!”

A stone flew. It arced clumsily, spinning, and struck one of the foreign sailors on the shoulder. He grunted, more surprised than hurt, and looked up. The crowd tensed as if a string had been pulled.

Léopold moved.

He dropped from the roof to the awning of a tea stall; the fabric sagged under his weight, then sprang back. From there he slid down the tiled slope, caught a hanging sign with one hand, and swung to land among a knot of porters. On any other day he would have looked like just another minor retainer running errands.

Today his pulse thudded in his throat. His eyes never left Sato or the child.

Another stone flew, then a third. Someone hurled a rotten cabbage for good measure. The first sailor started forward, jaw set.

“Hold,” barked the oldest of them, a man with a thick gray mustache and the faded marks of long service in his posture. “Do not break ranks. Orders are—”

A youth in a worn kimono and freshly tied headband lunged from the crowd, sword half drawn, eyes wide with something that might have been courage or terror.

His hand shook.

The gray-mustached sailor saw him at the last second. He brought up his forearm by reflex. The blade bit into muscle instead of where it was meant to go. Blood sprayed, a bright arc across the youth’s face. He froze, staring at the red on his knuckles.

For a heartbeat, no one moved.

Then the older sailor roared, staggering back, clutching his arm. The other foreigners surged to cover him. The youth bent double and vomited onto his own sandals.

“Revere the Emperor!” someone shouted behind him, using the words like a shield.

“Revere—”

The youth straightened, wiped his mouth, and screamed the last syllable as if trying to drown out the taste in his throat.

“—the Emperor!”

The Templar with the pocket watch watched all this with mild interest. His fingers flicked in a small, practiced gesture. A silver ring on his hand caught the light. One of his associates nodded and slipped sideways through the crowd, making sure the gap between sailors and samurai stayed narrow, not wide enough for the heat to bleed out.

On the warehouse roof, Sekibanki’s head smirked.

“They punched a boy for looking wrong the other day,” she whispered into three different ears at once. “Now he’s paying them back. Fair, isn’t it?”

The rumor skipped from head to head, voice to voice, shedding its source like a snakeskin.

Léopold pushed through a cluster of gawkers, muttering apologies, adjusting his posture to match theirs. Shoulders hunched, face half-turned away, stumbling in exactly the way a frightened dockworker might. He used their bodies as cover, slipping closer to Sato.

The clerk was trying to leave. His fingers dug into the bundle under his arm hard enough to bend the paper. Every time he took a step away from the water, someone surged in front of him, drawn by the shouting. The crowd congealed around him until he was part of it, trapped in the viscosity of fear.

“Move,” Léopold hissed in Dutch at a sailor who had blundered into his path. The man turned, startled, saw a fellow foreign face, and fell in beside him automatically. Together they shouldered their way through.

“Get your men back to the ship,” Léopold said without looking at him. “No shots. No heroics. Now.”

“You speak…?” the sailor began.

Léopold shot him a look sharp enough to cut.

“Go,” he said again, in English this time.

The sailor swallowed, grabbed his wounded comrade, and shouted something to the gray-mustached man. In a moment the sailors were peeling back toward the gangplank, forming a rough shield, knives out but pointed down—for now.

“Barbarians retreat!” someone crowed. “Look how they run!”

A merchant standing on a crate took up the cheer, face flushed, hands clutching a stack of ledgers to his chest as if they were a child.

“Revere the Emperor!” he bellowed. “Drive them from our shores!”

His knuckles whitened around his account books. Léopold could almost see the numbers there: debts owed by those same foreign ships, payments that would vanish if the harbor closed. The man’s voice cracked on the last shout, equal parts patriotism and panic.

Another rock flew, then a knife. The knife missed its intended target and hit a dockworker instead. The man howled, dropping his basket; crabs scuttled in all directions. People lurched, tripping over claws and spilled ropes.

In the sudden jerk of movement, a small hand tore free. The girl’s fingers slipped from her mother’s grasp. She spun in place, suddenly eye-level with knees, elbows, and the flashing arc of a sword being raised.

Her mother screamed her name. The sound vanished into the roar.

Léopold saw Sato falter. Saw the Templar associate close in, hand reaching for the papers, the other sliding a knife from his sleeve.

He saw the girl alone in a pocket of churned plank and feet, eyes huge, right in the path of a man swinging blindly in terror.

Two lines. Two futures. Both already moving.

His body made the choice for him.

He slammed his shoulder into the man with the sword, knocking the swing wide. The blade glanced off a post instead of the child’s neck, carving a long sliver of wood. The impact jarred his teeth.

He scooped the girl up with one arm, tucking her against his chest, turning his back to the nearest blades. His free hand pushed someone else aside, fingers finding joints and nerves without his mind catching up. He lowered his head and drove forward, a wedge of bone and leather.

A knife slid along the padding sewn into his coat instead of between his ribs. He grunted, felt the blow as a hot punch.

“Hold on,” he told the girl in halting Japanese.

She clamped tiny hands onto his collar like a drowning swimmer clutching driftwood, face pressed into his neck. Her breath fluttered against his skin.

Over her shoulder, through gaps in the heaving bodies, he saw Sato.

For a second their eyes met.

Then the Templar’s knife punched up under Sato’s ribs. Neat, economical. Léopold saw the flash of that same silver ring as the wrist turned. The papers spilled from Sato’s arm like white fish, fluttering down onto the planks, some snatched by the wind and whipped out over the water.

Sato’s mouth opened without sound. Blood soaked through his kimono in a spreading flower. The Templar caught his shoulder, said something low and close into his ear—too soft to hear over the shouting—and let him slide to the ground. Then he straightened, smoothed his sleeve, and stepped back into the crowd, already another anonymous back.

Léopold’s chest burned. It might have been the crush of bodies. It might have been the hollow thunk of Sato’s head hitting the planks.

The girl sobbed against him. His arms tightened automatically.

Above them, Sekibanki’s head dipped lower, eyes glittering.

“Oh, that one’s good,” she murmured. “Foreign knives snatching children while patriots cut each other.”

Another of her heads drifted near the fallen Sato, voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper over the nearest bannerman’s shoulder.

“Did you see?” it breathed. “He died with foreign papers in his arms. Traitors everywhere.”

On the edge of the quay, Kagerou’s lips pulled back, exposing teeth sharper than human. Her hands flexed, nails lengthening, digging into her own palms to keep from jumping in.

“Too many witnesses,” she muttered. “But gods, listen to them.”

The chant had dissolved into screams, sobbing, ragged cries of “revere the Emperor” from throats that no longer knew who they were aiming at. Men who had never touched a sword before swung in wild arcs, hoping the steel would explain their fear after the fact.

Wakasagihime’s face broke the surface again near a piling where something heavy had just splashed into the bay. Blood feathered out around her like ink. She closed her eyes, feeling it brush her skin.

“They won’t remember how this started,” she said to the fish and the dark water. “Only that they shouted the right words and someone bled.”

She smiled, small and bitter.

“But they’ll tell it around fires,” she added. “And leave more offerings when they’re afraid of the dark.”

On the quay, Léopold shoved through to the edge of the crowd, still cradling the girl. Her mother’s voice cut through the noise at last, raw and thin.

“Yuki!”

He turned toward it, twisting so the child’s head stayed tucked under his chin. A woman with loose hair and wild eyes slammed into him, fingers clawing.

“Give her—”

He let the girl slip from his grip. Yuki latched on to her mother, sobbing. The woman managed a jerky bow even as she staggered back.

“Thank you,” she gasped. “Thank—”

He nodded once, already angling away, and vanished sideways into a knot of fleeing merchants. One still clutched his ledgers with both hands, shouting “revere the Emperor” as if the words would keep his accounts safe from fire and foreign bankruptcy.

Sato’s body lay on the planks, half-trodden, one hand still reaching toward the water where his papers scattered like broken teeth.

From the warehouse roof, Sekibanki’s heads watched Léopold disappear into the churn, then drifted higher, mouths already forming new stories.

“Did you see?” they whispered. “A foreign devil stole a child. A foreign devil saved a child. A clerk died with strange papers. Wells gone bad. Guns in the alleys. The Emperor. The Regent. The monsters.”

The voices leapt from dock to street to sake stall, shedding details, keeping teeth.

By the time the shouting thinned and the bay wind began to clear the smoke and smell of blood, the riot at Shinagawa was already something else: not what had happened, but what people would swear they’d seen.

Far above it, gulls wheeled and shrieked, uncaring.

Chapter Text

The pigeon arrived with the mist.

It dropped out of the gray like a stone and caught itself at the last moment, wings flaring to land on the crooked pole they used for laundry. Its claws scraped wood. A thin tube at its leg knocked against the post with a tiny, urgent tap.

Henrik was at the window before the second tap.

He cupped the bird in his hands, murmuring something in Danish that made it stop struggling. Nakamura slid the paper tube off with careful fingers, lips already moving over the cipher marks before the scroll was fully unfurled.

Two strokes: the sign for Ando.

Three more: bridge, dawn.

He passed the strip to Léopold without comment.

By the time the light outside had shifted from ink-black to dull pewter, the room was full.

They came in by pairs and singles—faces Léopold had only seen as initials in reports. A scarred man from Osaka with his sword in plain sight and his posture saying “drunk” even though his hand never left the hilt. A quiet woman from a Kyoto cell, sleeves too wide to be practical, hiding a thin length of steel she never consciously touched. Two boys from a Satsuma contact list, eyes hard, hands empty, shoulders loose.

Henrik laid wooden tokens on the floor and moved them with the back of his knuckles, tracing lines of approach. Nakamura corrected him once with a quiet cough, nudging a token half a finger’s breadth to the left.

“Convoy crosses here,” Nakamura said, tapping the sketch of the bridge. “We strike when they change escorts.”

Someone in the back snorted.

“More men for them, fewer for us,” the Osaka man said. “Wonderful.”

A low chuckle went around the room. It died when the curtain near the ceiling shifted.

Léopold felt it first—a faint change in the air, like a draft sneaking in where there shouldn’t be one.

One, then two, then three heads slid through the gap between rafters and roof tiles.

They came in silently, hair falling straight down for a ridiculous heartbeat before gravity remembered its work and pulled it to hang properly. Red eyes blinked in the half-dark. Sekibanki’s body remained wedged somewhere out of sight; only her heads floated free, turning to peer at the gathering with open curiosity.

Conversation stopped.

The Satsuma boys stared. The Osaka man’s hand flew to his sword, then stopped halfway, fingers spasming in midair. The Kyoto woman’s sleeve shifted, steel whispering against fabric.

Nakamura actually took a step back, bumping into Henrik.

“What is that,” someone breathed.

Sekibanki’s nearest head tipped sideways.

“That,” she said, “is rude.”

Kagerou ducked in under the lintel a moment later, shoulders brushing the frame. Her ears were hidden under a scarf, but the shape of them pushed the cloth up in ways that weren’t human. Her nose wrinkled at the smell of too many people and too little air.

“Roof-man,” she said, eyes going straight to Léopold. “You didn’t tell them you had friends.”

Half a dozen stares swivelled to him at once.

Henrik’s eyebrows rose, just a fraction.

“You’ve been… holding back,” he muttered in Dutch.

Léopold didn’t answer. He watched the way Sekibanki’s heads drifted over the map, upside down, hair tickling the paper tokens without moving them.

“We heard someone important was being taken for a walk,” one said. “Lots of fear planned in one place. Very… economical.”

“We’ll thin the streets,” another added. “Whispers, wrong directions. People looking the wrong way at the right time.”

Kagerou leaned over Henrik’s shoulder to look at the sketch of the bridge.

“Fog there,” she said. “Good. Wolves like cover.”

The Kyoto woman’s gaze flicked between Kagerou’s too-sharp teeth and Léopold’s face, measuring something unspoken.

“You trust these… creatures?” she asked finally.

Sekibanki’s middle head grinned.

“Roof-man pays in coin and names,” she said. “We don’t need him to trust us. We just need him to keep being afraid.”

All the Japanese faces turned to Léopold again.

He swallowed.

“Tonight,” he said, forcing his voice steady, “we agree on one thing: Ando does not reach the scaffold.”

Silence held for a breath.

Then the Osaka man nodded once, short and sharp, as if the strangeness could be filed under “later.”

“Bridge, dawn,” he said. “We’ll be there.”

By the time dawn came, the world had narrowed to gray.

Fog clung to the river like a blanket someone had forgotten to shake out. It dragged its hem over the bridge, softening the lines of the stone, swallowing the banks. Lanterns on the posts burned as pale smudges, their light swallowed instead of cast.

From above, the bridge looked like a strip of paper laid across nothing.

Léopold crouched on the tiled roof of a riverside shop, the breach-loading rifle balanced along the ridge in front of him. The metal was slick with damp; his gloves squeaked softly against it when he adjusted his grip. At his hip, the revolver sat heavy. Smoke bombs clinked faintly in the pouch at his side every time he shifted his weight.

Below, in the fog, people moved.

Henrik strolled along the bridge like a bored sailor between ships, hands in his sleeves. A straw hat tilted low hid his hair. He hummed an aimless tune under his breath, the sound drifting up to where Léopold sat; the melody changed each time he passed a lamp.

Nakamura leaned against the railing halfway across, white scarf knotted loose at his throat. He looked like any other clerk taking a moment to watch the invisible water below, shoulders relaxed, fingers tapping out a pattern on the damp wood.

The Osaka man, now wearing a coarse porter’s jacket over his sword, hefted an empty crate and complained loudly about unfair wages to anyone who came near. The Kyoto woman knelt near the foot of the bridge, adjusting her sandal strap for the third time, sleeves pooling around her like fallen leaves.

On the far bank, the fog lodged thicker between the trees.

A sound wound through it—long, low, and not entirely human.

It started as a dog’s bay and slid into something else halfway through, picking up strange, keening harmonics that made the hairs at the back of the neck crawl. Birds burst out of the reeds at the river’s edge in a flurry, flapped frantically, and vanished into the white.

Heads turned on the bridge.

One of the town guards peered toward the sound, hand going to the hilt at his side even though whatever made that noise was still far away.

“What in—” he began.

“Wolf,” someone muttered. “Too big.”

Kagerou crouched behind a marker stone on the bank, scarf slipping back enough to bare one ear. Her mouth was still open from the howl, teeth long and glinting in the dim light. She met Léopold’s eye across the distance and made a small, satisfied motion with her head.

At the bridge’s near end, street talk changed.

Sekibanki’s heads bobbed through the fog at shoulder height, hair hidden under borrowed kerchiefs, voices pitched to be just heard and just doubted.

“Fire near the storehouses,” one murmured into a vendor’s ear. “My cousin saw the smoke.”

“They’ll close the street by the east gate any moment,” another told a group of coolies. “Better find another way while you can.”

“The patrol from the castle’s been pulled off this bridge,” a third confided to a guard, eyes wide with feigned relief. “They’re sending men to the docks. You’re free for once.”

The whispering spread faster than flame.

Pedestrians began to drift away from the bridge’s middle, some turning back, others hurrying across to “see for themselves.” Two enlisted men in light armor jogged off toward the imaginary fire, leaving their commander cursing softly in their wake.

The road cleared without anyone giving an order.

Léopold’s rifle sight found the bend in the street where the convoy would appear, and waited.

He heard them before he saw them—the creak of heavy wheels, the jingle of chains, the steady, measured pace of men walking because they had to, not because they wanted to. The fog bulged with their approach, lantern light condensed in its belly.

Then the first cart nosed onto the bridge.

Uniformed escorts flanked it, faces half-obscured by scarves against the chill. No one looked up; all eyes were on the stones, on their own breath, on the vague shapes ahead.

Ando rode in the second wagon.

Hands bound, ankles chained to the cart’s floor, he sat hunched against the slats. A guard shared the bench with him, coat drawn up, rifle across his knees. The white of Ando’s shirt had gone gray in the mist. His face was turned toward the river, but his eyes stared at nothing.

Nakamura’s fingers stopped tapping.

Henrik crossed his path once, twice, timing the gaps.

On the third pass, he stumbled.

He drew one foot up under him at the last moment and slammed his shoulder into the ox leading the first cart, cursing in sloppy Edo dialect about slick stones and rotten bridges. The animal bellowed and shied, the driver yanking on the reins.

The world jerked.

The second cart lurched as the first swerved. The guard on the bench grabbed for the rail. Chains rattled.

From beneath the bridge’s lip, a dark shape shot up and caught the underside of the cart with both hands.

One of the Satsuma boys, face smeared with ash, grunted with effort as he heaved. The cart’s wheel hit a rut and jumped. For a heartbeat, the whole wagon tilted, weight shifting.

The Kyoto woman moved.

Her sandal strap “finally broke” right under the lead guard’s foot; he pitched sideways as she grabbed his sleeve with an apology, using his imbalance to roll him onto the stones. Her hidden blade slipped between his ribs in the shelter of her sleeves. He gasped once, more in surprise than pain.

Nakamura’s white scarf flashed.

He stepped in behind the guard on Ando’s bench, hand clamping over the man’s mouth as his knee buckled the guard’s leg from under him. The other hand found the key ring at the man’s belt and tore it free.

Chains kissed metal.

Ando’s ankles came loose with two quick turns. His eyes snapped into focus as Nakamura grabbed his arm and hauled.

For a miraculous instant, it worked.

The driver of the second wagon was bent double over his reins, trying to control the jolting cart. The lead escort was down. The bystanders had scattered to the edges of the fog, leaving space in the middle where Ando’s feet hit the planks.

Henrik straightened from his “fall,” hand already inside his sleeve for a blade. Léopold’s rifle traced the line of the nearest guard’s hat brim, ready to shatter it if he raised a shout.

Then the mist moved.

Figures stood up from where there had been only bridge.

Men uncurled from the seated shapes of beggars, from the slack forms of fake drunkards slumped against the railing. Cloaks fell away. Coats parted. The red cross on black glowed dully through the fog where rain had darkened it.

One stood on the cart’s tailboard, as if he had grown out of the wood.

A mask hid the lower half of his face; his eyes were pale, empty as glass. In one hand, he held a short sword with a narrow, hungry blade. In the other, a pistol with a squat, ugly barrel gleamed.

Another Black Cross agent balanced on the railing, arms wide as if enjoying the view. When he dropped, he landed with the surety of someone who understood the bridge’s bones better than the stonecutters who’d laid them.

Every new shape brought more steel and more strange devices—metal tubes with fuses, hooked weights on cords, compact batons that could crack a forearm with one swing.

The air exploded into noise.

One of the metal tubes clanged onto the planks near Henrik’s feet, its fuse hissing. He kicked it on instinct, sending it skittering under the wagon where it erupted in a blast of dazzling white light. The fog went briefly to milk, then to nothing.

Smoke rolled out from both sides of the convoy.

Henrik vanished behind a blossoming gray cloud. Nakamura’s white scarf became the only certain point.

Léopold sighted on it.

Then the guard next to the scarf jerked as someone’s fist drove into his ribs, and Nakamura spun. The scarf whipped out of view behind a curtain of smoke.

On the far side, the Osaka man met a Black Cross agent shoulder to shoulder.

The Japanese Assassin slid inside the other man’s reach, grabbed a wrist, twisted, and sent the sword in his hand spinning. The Black Cross fighter took the pain as information, stepped into it, and buried his free fist in the Osaka man’s midsection. Something gave under the blow. The Assassin folded, air punched out of him, and the agent reclaimed his blade with a neat toe-hook and a swirling recovery that put steel back between them.

Near the cart, one of the Satsuma boys caught a baton with his forearm; bone cracked like a snapped chopstick. He didn’t drop. He rode the pain into a low sweep, dragging the agent’s legs out from under him. The Black Cross man hit the planks hard, but his fall turned halfway into a roll, hand flicking something small and hard into the boy’s face. A flash erupted; the boy’s scream went raw and high as he clawed at his eyes.

Nakamura tried to lead Ando toward the railing, ducking and weaving, pushing him ahead when bodies crowded close. He guided Ando’s arm under the chain guarding the bridge’s edge, reaching for the rope hidden below that would take them down to the waiting boat.

A shot went off somewhere in the murk.

Splinters burst from a railing post inches from Nakamura’s hand. Ando flinched back into the bridge’s center. The moment was enough.

A Black Cross agent appeared between them and the rope, cloak whipping, sword low. His boots slid, then planted. His point drove toward Nakamura’s chest in a straight, undeniable line.

Steel flashed.

Nakamura caught the arm, turned with it, and sent the man staggering into the side of the wagon. The sword scraped sparks off iron. Ando stumbled toward the far wheel.

Another pistol barked.

The wheel jerked as a bullet ate a chunk from its rim. The wagon rocked, almost tipping again, then settled with a groan.

Léopold fired once, then twice.

One Black Cross agent behind the wagon jerked as his shoulder blew out; another spun as a bullet carved a line across his thigh. They didn’t scream. They vanished into the smoke, pulling back, switching places with fresh bodies.

The world shrank to gasping lungs and the burned-powder sting in his nose.

He tried to track the white scarf again.

Shapes lunged through the haze. Japanese Assassins slid under wild swings, used the weight of armored men against them, sent them flying over hips and shoulders. Black Cross fighters answered with direct, brutal strikes—knuckles driving into throats, boots stomping knees sideways, blades thrust in straight, quick arcs.

Smoke bombs popped, thickening the fog. Flash charges burst, smearing afterimages across vision—three heads where there was one, two swords where there were none. People shouted, cursed, prayed.

A grapple hook soared past Léopold’s vantage point and bit into the bridge’s side. A Black Cross agent swung up from beneath like a spider, coat flaring.

More shots. More screams.

Then, as suddenly as it had thickened, the smoke began to shred.

The wind shifted just enough to tug at it, thinning the gray curtains into ragged strips. The shapes behind them sharpened.

Henrik lay on his back near the bridge’s center, hat gone.

His throat was open in a clean red smile that spilled onto the stones. One hand still clutched at air, fingers curled as if reaching for someone who’d just stepped out of reach. His eyes stared up at the pale sky, unseeing.

The Osaka man knelt beside him, palm pressed hard over the wound as if pressure could convince a throat to knit. Blood pulsed between his fingers anyway, bubbling, then slowing. His mouth moved soundlessly.

Near the far railing, Nakamura knelt.

His white scarf was now more red than cloth, plastered to his neck and shoulder. His hands were empty, palms resting on his thighs. Two guards held his arms, but their grip was almost respectful, as if they knew he wasn’t going anywhere.

Ashford stood behind him.

No cloak this time. Just a dark coat, open at the throat, Black Cross symbol dull against the fabric. His pistol rested easily in his hand, barrel pressed against the side of Nakamura’s head.

Ando’s cart had already reached the far end of the bridge.

Extra guards clustered around it now, rifles at the ready, heads swiveling. Someone had thrown a canvas over Ando; only his bound ankles showed where they stuck out from beneath the edge.

The wheels rattled against the stones as the wagon picked up speed, moving away, away, swallowed bit by bit by lingering fog.

Léopold scrambled down from the roof.

He hit the alley, crossed it in three strides, and burst out onto the bridge just as the last of the smoke lifted.

He stopped when Ashford’s pistol shifted.

Nakamura’s gaze found him over the barrel.

There was no accusation in it. No plea. Just recognition, and a strange, tired light.

His mouth twitched—the ghost of a smile, wry and small.

Ikka, that smile said. One.

Ashford pulled the trigger.

The sound cracked off the stone like the world splitting.

Blood sprayed in a red arc, bright even in the washed-out dawn. It spattered the nearest post, where someone had pasted a woodblock print of Ii Naosuke days ago—stern face, rigid shoulders, formal robes.

The red drops studded the regent’s printed cheek, dotted the inked lines of his collar, climbed one side of the character for his name.

The cart wheels clattered away. The bridge under Léopold’s feet might as well have given way.

Chapter Text

The second time they came for Ando, they didn’t bother with dawn.

They came in the gray middle of the afternoon, when the street outside his house smelled of fish and ink and children’s sweat. Léopold was on the roof, half-hidden behind a row of cold tiles, watching Ando’s eldest son trace a constellation on the ground with a broken bit of charcoal.

“That one,” the boy said, connecting crooked dots. “That’s the ship that carries Father’s stars to Edo.”

Ando, kneeling nearby with a tray of tea, laughed and nudged the drawing so the lines straightened.

“The ship is crooked because you are,” he told his son. “Watch the angle. Stars have discipline.”

Léopold smiled despite himself. The children’s voices blurred into the hum of the neighborhood—vendors calling, a dog barking, a neighbor woman scolding someone for knocking over her washline.

Then the city’s sound shifted.

It was small at first: a clatter out of rhythm, a shout that didn’t sound like market quarrels. Léopold’s head came up. Down the street, people peeled away from something approaching as if pushed by an invisible tide.

Sandals slapped in formation.

Three magistrate’s men appeared at the end of the lane, black-and-white jackets stark against weathered wood. Behind them marched two more in plain kimono with swords at their hips and the stiff carriage of men who answered to more than a local scribe.

The children saw the spears first. Their drawing hand stopped.

“Ando Takahiro!” the lead constable called. “By order of the Regent’s council, you will come at once to answer for seditious talk and sympathy with sonnō jōi elements.”

The words dropped into the lane like stones into water. Faces vanished from doorways. A woman pulled her child back inside by the collar. Laundry lines stopped moving.

Ando’s wife stepped out, wiping her hands on her apron, eyes flicking once to the roof where Léopold lay. She did not look up again.

“My husband serves the shogunate,” she said. “He teaches their language, copies their books. If there is seditious talk, it’s in foreign letters.”

The constable did not smile.

“He’s in the habit of speaking his mind,” said one of the plain-clothed men. His accent had a different tilt to it: Edo, but polished. An investigator used to hearing confessions. “We have records of such speech. ‘If the court keeps beheading its clever men, only fools will remain.’ ” He recited the words as if from a ledger. “You remember saying that, Ando-dono?”

Ando had not moved from his kneel. He poured a cup of tea with steady hands, steam coiling between them and the men at the gate.

“I remember many things,” he said. “That one sounds like I forgot to bite my tongue. My apologies.”

“Apologies are not in question.” The man produced a folded document and unrolled it with a snap. Ink shone fresh in the winter light. “The Regent requires order. You are accused of undermining it.”

The youngest child, still clutching the charcoal, looked from the constables to his father.

“Are they going to take you to the castle again?” he whispered.

Ando set the teapot down. For a heartbeat, his fingers lingered on the clay.

He did not look up at the roof.

“Yes,” he said, smiling at his son with the expression Léopold had learned meant the sky was cloudy. “I’ll have interesting stories when I return.”

The boy’s mouth twisted.

“You said that last time.”

Ando’s wife took the child’s shoulder.

“Enough,” she said softly. “Go draw us a straight ship.”

Two neighbors stepped out as if to speak and then stepped back when a constable shifted his spear. The lane shrank to the width of Ando’s gate and the path between there and the waiting palanquin.

Ando rose. His knees clicked faintly. He smoothed his worn kimono, then reached into his sleeve. For an instant, Léopold tensed.

Ando drew out a small folded paper charm and tucked it into his eldest daughter’s hand.

“For the fire,” he murmured. “Not from shrine. From me. If the stove smokes, hold it up and scold it, and it will behave.”

She clutched it like a lifeline.

Léopold’s fingers dug into the tiles. His breath came shallow.

He didn’t move.

There, on the street, under spears and eyes, anything he did would drag the whole family into the blast.

So he watched as they led Ando away between spearpoints, as neighbors pretended not to see, as boots smudged the children’s ship on the dirt into a dark smear.

He did not remember choosing to go to the castle.

One moment he was on the roof above the empty gate, hands gritty with tile dust. The next he was striding through Edo’s main thoroughfare with his collar open, hair tied back enough to pass for a harried interpreter, sleeves tucked, heels biting faster into the road than protocol allowed.

At the first inner gate, he did not stop to bow.

“Interpreter for the Dutch mission,” he snapped in near-perfect Edo dialect, flashing a folded slip with a seal that would survive only a cursory glance. “Urgent petition for the Regent. Foreign matter. If it waits, someone loses a treaty.”

The gate captain blinked, eyes flicking from slip to face to the certainty that this was a man already halfway past him.

“Foreign…” the man began.

“Yes. Those, remember? Ships. Guns. Gold.” Léopold’s tone sharpened. “The Regent will be angrier if I fail to deliver this than if you let me through. Decide who you fear more.”

That decided it. The captain stepped aside.

By the time Léopold reached the outer audience hall, his breath rasped and sweat pricked under his coat despite the winter bite. Servants turned to watch his passage, whispers stirring behind paper screens.

A page tried to intercept him in the corridor leading to Ii Naosuke’s private chambers.

“Sir, this wing is—”

Léopold brushed past hard enough to make the boy stumble.

“I bring word about the treaty ports,” he said, without breaking stride. “If the Regent wants to negotiate blind, you may explain that to him yourself.”

The page paled and did not try again.

The farther he went, the quieter the castle became. The murmur of officials, the clack of geta faded, replaced by the soft scratch of brushes and the occasional cough from behind closed doors.

Outside the Regent’s room, two guards stood with hands on their swords. They looked at Léopold the way men look at a dog that has run into a shrine.

“You have business?” one asked.

Léopold slid the door open.

Protocol shattered like thin ice.

Ii Naosuke sat alone at the low writing table. The stack of papers to his right was as tall as the height from his wrist to his elbow. The pile to his left was higher.

The air smelled of ink and tea gone cold. Scrolls lay unrolled along one wall, covered in neat columns of names. A fresh sheet before him bore three empty boxes along the bottom and a space above for his brush.

On the wall behind him, the single large character he had been practicing for months hung framed and dry: 治 — order.

He did not look up at once, even when Léopold crossed the tatami without kneeling. The scratch of his brush continued, precise and smooth.

Only when he finished the line did he set the brush aside, wipe the tip on the inkstone’s cloth, and lift his gaze.

His eyes were bloodshot, the skin beneath them puffed and gray. Out of ceremonial layers, he looked smaller, shoulders stooped under the thin weight of a plain kimono. His right hand, the one he wrote with, rested on paper; his left rubbed absently at his shoulder, kneading a knot that had been there for months.

“Lafèche,” he said quietly, using the name Léopold had given him for these walls. “You look like a man serious enough to be executed for breaking into a lord’s room.”

“Ando Takahiro,” Léopold said. “Where is he?”

Ii’s gaze did not flicker.

“Being questioned,” he said. “If he is wise, he will answer plainly. If he is unwise—”

“He is loyal,” Léopold cut in. “To you. To the idea that this country can stand without cutting its own legs off.”

Ii’s jaw tightened.

“If the country falls, there will be no legs,” he said. “Only corpses. Sit.”

Léopold did not sit.

“You sent for him because someone recited a line stripped out of a conversation in his kitchen,” he said. “You know how that conversation ended? With him refusing sonnō jōi recruitment. With him arguing against violence. He believes in you.”

Ii’s gaze lowered to the paper. The top sheet bore Ando’s name in careful strokes. Below, a clerk’s cramped notes marched down the page.

“Crime one,” Ii read, voice flat. “ ‘Having in his possession foreign texts describing the fall of the Middle Kingdom due to foreign pressure, and comparing them to our situation, in a manner that may inspire unrest.’ ”

His eyes moved down.

“Crime two. ‘Publicly criticizing the Regent’s policies as excessively severe, in the presence of young men of samurai status.’ ”

His finger slid to the next line.

“Crime three. ‘Hosting gatherings in which foreign astronomy and philosophy are discussed without official sanction.’ ”

He paused.

“These gatherings,” he said. “Did he hold them with you?”

Léopold thought of the roof, of Ando’s ink-smeared thumb tracing Orion. Of sake in chipped cups and laughter soft enough not to carry.

“Yes,” he said.

“I thought so,” Ii murmured. “The reports mentioned a foreigner with him.”

He reached sideways and pulled another document from the stack. Léopold recognized his own handwriting at a glance—careful, professional, betraying nothing of the way his hand had shaken at the time.

A report on “educational gatherings” in the city. Names reduced to initials. Cross-references to treatises and the circles in which they moved. Warnings about which minds were too bright to lose track of.

“You asked me to help you find the people who might matter,” Léopold said, throat dry. “So you could protect them.”

“So I could see them,” Ii said. “Protection is a luxury. Sight is mandatory.”

He set both documents side by side: the old report in Léopold’s hand and the new accusation distilled from it.

For a moment the ink lines blurred, rearranging themselves into something jagged.

“Your scribes have long memories,” Ii said softly. “Or perhaps yours do.”

“They twist what we said,” Léopold spat. “‘Seditious talk’—it was analysis. He was trying to keep you from making the same mistakes.”

Ii picked up a third document. The seal at the top marked it as a consolidated recommendation from the council of senior advisers.

“In addition to his words,” Ii read, “his house has been observed as a meeting place for men of uncertain loyalty. At the very moment we require unity, he complicates the ledger.”

He looked up.

“You know as well as I do this is… opportunistic,” he said. The pause before the last word was small but audible. “Certain men inside the castle would be pleased to see one of my sharper eyes closed. They dress that desire in proper language.”

“So say no,” Léopold said. “You are the Regent. Throw it back in their faces. Keep him where he can advise you instead of hanging him where he can’t.”

Ii’s gaze drifted to the wall scroll with the single character.

“You once told me,” he said, “about a city on the Yangtze that tried to keep its customs and its harbor closed. Did it succeed?”

Léopold’s teeth clicked together.

“No.”

“What happened?”

The stink of burning warehouses rose in his nose: sweet smoke and charred grain.

“They shelled it,” he said. “They forced it open. People starved, then signed papers they didn’t understand.”

Ii nodded once, as if ticking off a point.

“And you,” he said, “are here in part because your Mentor wants this country not to repeat that. You brought me information. You helped me see where the foreign knives approach. For that, I am grateful.”

He shifted his weight; a faint twitch of pain crossed his face. His hand returned to his shoulder.

“But this is not only about foreign ships,” he went on. “Inside these walls, men wield my name like a spear or a fan. If I refuse this recommendation—if I shield Ando—what story do they tell in the corridors?”

“That you honor loyalty,” Léopold said.

Ii’s lips curved faintly.

“They tell each other,” he said, “that anyone clever enough to argue with me can do so safely. Every petty lord with a grievance writes to Kyoto instead of to me. The sonnō jōi boys point to Ando and say, ‘See? He spoke, and lived. We should shout louder.’ The council murmurs that I favor critics. They withdraw their grudging support for my heavy hand.”

He gestured toward the scrolls.

“They stop signing these with me,” he said. “They sign them under a banner painted in Kyoto. Or they don’t sign at all. They start killing without paperwork.”

The stacks of paper seemed to lean in.

“You’re saying the only way to keep the killing in your hands,” Léopold said slowly, “is to kill the man trying to lessen it.”

Ii’s gaze rested on him.

“I am saying,” he replied, “that if I give way on Ando, I may lose what leverage I have to restrain worse. Their eyes are on him now. They want proof I will not shield even my own. If I refuse, they will find someone else to carry the seals. Perhaps someone who thinks sonnō jōi is a fine slogan for a purge going upward instead of outward.”

He picked up his brush. His fingers were steady as he dipped it into the ink. When he raised it, a bead of black hung at the tip, trembling.

Léopold stepped forward, hands flat on the table. Papers rustled under his palms.

“You asked me to help you,” he said. “You asked for eyes. Not for a knife to hold over your own neck.”

Ii’s eyes flicked to where Léopold’s hands touched the documents. The muscles at his jaw jumped.

“You think this is easy,” he said.

He moved the brush to the first warrant in the stack. The name at the top was not Ando’s. A samurai from Chōshū accused of sending letters to Kyoto. Ii’s wrist flowed without hesitation. His signature—firm, practiced—flowered at the bottom.

He set it aside, took the next. A merchant who had hidden rice while his neighbors sold at inflated prices. Another signature. Another sheet to the side.

With each, the brush moved as if his hand had forgotten how not to sign. The room filled with the soft scratch and the faint wet sound of ink entering fibers.

Then he came to Ando Takahiro.

For a moment his hand hovered above the name.

Léopold saw the tremor in the fingers—the first break in motion. Ii tightened his grip on the brush to still it. A drop of ink slid down, swelled at the tip, threatening to fall.

“You can still send him away,” Léopold said quietly. “Exile. A quiet post. Let him live.”

Ii’s mouth flattened.

“And teach the court that loud enough pleading wins mercy,” he said. “They will test that lesson on sharper men than Ando. And the sonnō jōi preachers will say, ‘See? The Regent fears us.’ ”

He exhaled. The breath scraped.

“And yet,” he added, almost to himself, “I do not want to sign this.”

The ink drop finally fell, landing just above Ando’s name, a small dark comet. It spread slowly, bleeding into the strokes like a bruise.

Léopold watched it, jaw clenched.

“You told me,” Ii said, “that if ever I became worse than the men I fight, you would kill me.”

“Yes,” Léopold said.

Ii dipped the brush again. This time, when he moved it to the bottom of the page, his hand shook enough that the first stroke of his name started crooked. He paused, corrected, finished the characters with meticulous care, as if precision could pay for the act.

The signature dried slowly. The ink bead near Ando’s name soaked in faster, its edges fuzzy, as if trying to creep upward and swallow the characters.

Ii set the brush down very gently.

He did not look at Léopold when he spoke.

“If you kill me now,” he said, “they will call it sonnō jōi and put my head on a spike for disobeying Kyoto. The treaties will be torn up, then rewritten worse. The sons of the men on those scrolls will shout louder and die younger.”

His fingers moved to the next warrant. They did not tremble now. Habit closed over hesitation.

“If you wait,” he went on, “I may yet steer this river a little, before it overruns its banks. Either way, Ando dies. That much is decided.”

Léopold’s hands curled into fists on the table. Parchment crinkled under his knuckles.

He had written that first report. Named the gatherings, the books, the minds too sharp in the wrong direction. Believed that pointing them out would help protect them.

Now their names sat in a pile of paper in front of a man whose brush turned observation into death.

He stared at the black sheen of Ando’s warrant. The ink seemed darker than the others, as if the paper understood the weight.

“You asked for my help to avoid another Canton,” he said. “You’re building one in ink.”

Ii’s gaze finally met his. There was no anger in it, only exhaustion that seemed to reach past bone.

“Perhaps,” he said. “The difference is that here, for now, I still choose where the shells fall.”

He closed his hand around the stack of signed warrants, lifting them carefully to avoid smearing. The top sheet wavered. For an instant it looked as if he might drop them all into the inkstone, ruin them, call it an accident.

He did not.

He turned and placed them on a tray waiting by the door. A clerk slid the door open at the exact moment his hand left the paper, as if the timing had been rehearsed. The clerk bowed so low his nose almost brushed the wood.

“See that they are carried out promptly,” Ii said.

The young man’s hands trembled as he took the tray. Whether from fear of the Regent or of the names on the paper was impossible to tell. He backed out, sliding the door closed with the care of someone handling something breakable.

The room was quiet again, save for the faint crackle of drying ink.

Léopold stared at the empty space on the table.

“You’ve left me with nothing clean,” he said.

“No,” Ii replied softly. “I have shown you what belongs to my hand.”

He poured fresh tea into his cup, though the pot had gone lukewarm. His hand was steady. The steam that rose was faint and thin.

He set the cup untouched before Léopold between them.

“You wanted principle,” he said. “You wanted people. Today you saw which one fits on paper.”

Léopold did not reach for the tea. The curl of steam vanished as he watched, leaving the surface flat and dark, reflecting his face back at him in a warped oval.

Somewhere in the castle, feet were already carrying that tray down polished corridors toward the magistrate’s office. Toward a courtyard with fresh straw laid to catch blood. Toward Ando, waiting with tongue and spine intact.

Léopold’s fingers loosened from the edge of the table. The paper beneath showed the creases his grip had left, the characters bent.

He had chosen to keep Ii in place, to shore up the center against outer chaos. He had told himself it would save lives in the long run.

The ink on Ando Takahiro’s warrant was the line where that argument ended.

He pushed himself back from the table. The legs of his stool scraped softly against tatami. The tea cup remained between them, cooling, unclaimed.

“Order keeps its own ledger,” Ii said quietly. “It never balances cleanly.”

Léopold turned toward the door without bowing.

Outside, the corridor smelled faintly of fresh ink and the metallic tang of the guards’ swords. Servants moved past with eyes lowered, each carrying something—laundry, scrolls, a tray of sweets—each unaware that one folded stack of papers held a stargazer’s last sunset.

As he stepped into the cold air of the outer courtyard, a gust of wind caught his coat. He tightened it, though the chill that ran through him had little to do with weather.

He had wanted to be a knife that cut only the hands reaching for tyranny.

Now he could feel a friend’s blood in the ink on his own.

Chapter Text

The square smelled of miso, river mud, and fear.

They had chosen the same place.

Léopold recognized the crooked line of stalls, the stone basin near the shrine with its dragon spout, the worn grooves in the wooden platform where blood had soaked and dried before. Last time, fog had crawled up from the canal, a pale ally. Today the sky was a hard, empty blue. Winter light flattened everything; there were no shadows to hide in.

He stood in the crowd as a tired clerk in a brown kimono, shoulders rounded, cap pulled low. The paper-wrapped bundle in his arms looked like account books. Inside were only his own clenched hands.

To his right, Ando’s wife clutched her youngest daughter so close the child’s cheek was mashed against her obi. The girl’s hair smelled faintly of rice smoke and ink. To his left, Ando’s eldest son craned his neck, trying to see past shoulders and hats and the flash of polished steel.

“Keep your eyes down,” she hissed, fingers digging into the boy’s sleeve.

“I want to see Father,” he whispered.

“You will hear him,” Léopold said, in a voice that wasn’t his, pitched like a neighbor trying to help. The words came out rough. “That is enough.”

She glanced at him once, her gaze sliding over the false beard and foreign nose, and moved on. Just another stranger pressed too close.

Around them, the square swelled and breathed. People jostled for space, then thought better of it and settled for the edges. Those who could have left didn’t. They lingered, eyes turned halfway toward the scaffold and halfway toward the gates, as if watching both the present and their chance to flee.

Near the front, a knot of young men in plain kimono stood shoulder to shoulder, swords tucked under their arms. Their hair was coiffed a little too carefully, hands a little too clean to be ordinary retainers. One wore a strip of cloth with hastily inked characters peeking from his sleeve. When the wind shifted, Léopold caught them: 尊王攘夷.

“Even our patriots,” one muttered, low enough for his friends, not for the guards. “He quoted the Emperor’s own scholars and they still drag him out like a thief.”

“Let them,” another said, jaw tight. “The more they swing the sword at their own, the more people remember who ordered it.”

None of them moved toward the platform. Their knuckles were white on their scabbards; their feet stayed rooted where the packed earth ended and the swept straw began.

A drum thudded once, twice, thick in the cold air. Conversations died in shreds, unfinished sentences hanging in the silence.

The magistrate’s men stepped out first, a file of black jackets and white crests forming a line at the base of the wooden steps. Behind them came the scribe with his inkstone and scrolls, face already pinched into official displeasure. The executioner followed, bare arms marked with old scars, sword held point-down, blade wrapped in oiled cloth that smelled like metal and sesame.

Ando came last.

They had not given him the usual white robe. He wore his everyday kimono, the sleeve stained where ink had splashed days—or hours—before. His hands were bound in front of him, cord biting into skin. His hair had come slightly loose; a strand fell across his forehead.

He walked without stumbling. His eyes moved over the crowd, searching. For a moment, Léopold thought he would look straight at him, find him even through the false beard and the dust. Instead Ando’s gaze found his family.

His wife’s fingers convulsed on her child’s shoulder. The youngest girl made a small strangled sound and bit it back, burying her face in her mother’s side.

Léopold shifted his bundle enough to wedge an elbow behind Ando’s wife’s back, steadying her as the crowd surged forward for a better look and then recoiled, leaving their little knot exposed. His arm brushed her sleeve. The fabric was rough with age, threads thin from washing. She was shaking through all the layers.

On the shrine roof, a red-haired head floated alone, eyes narrowed against the light. Sekibanki’s body sat on the roof ridge with its legs dangling, kicking the air. Her neck stretched in a lazy curve between, as if she were peering around a curtain.

From a human angle, she would be a glare-trick. To Léopold, she was as sharp as the crow on the temple gate.

The air above the crowd shimmered faintly. Fear rose from hundreds of chests like breath on a winter morning, threads drifting upward. Sekibanki’s detached head drifted through them, expression changing with each ribbon she passed: boredom, amusement, a brief closing of the eyes as if tasting.

At the canal’s edge, where the stone embankment sloped into the water, something moved under the surface. A pale shape, just discernible between ripples, circled lazily—like a fish following crumbs. When the first sob broke, thin and high from somewhere deep in the crowd, the shape’s pace quickened in the murk.

On the fringe of an alley, half-hidden in shadow, a woman with wolf ears under a hood leaned against a post. Kagerou’s eyes shone amber in the dark. Her nostrils flared; her shoulders rose and fell, breathing in sweat and panic.

The magistrate’s scribe unrolled his scroll with a snap. Parchment crackled. He cleared his throat.

“Ando Takahiro of the translator’s bureau,” he intoned. “Charged with disseminating seditious thought, hosting unsanctioned gatherings to corrupt loyal subjects, and aligning with elements sympathetic to ‘revere the Emperor, expel the barbarians.’ Further, with sowing doubt regarding the Regent’s benevolent order.”

The words rolled over the square like cold water. A murmur went up—disbelief here, bitter agreement there, muttered curses that could have been for the charges or for the men reading them.

Near the front, one of the sonnō jōi youths spat in the dirt.

“‘Benevolent,’” he sneered under his breath. “They call burning the clever ‘benevolent’ now.”

His friend’s hand shot out, gripping his sleeve.

“Shut up,” he hissed. “Do you want your name on the next scroll?”

Ando stood still, head slightly bowed.

When the scribe finished, he turned to Ando.

“Do you confess?” he asked.

Ando lifted his head.

He did not look at the magistrate, or the scribe, or the executioner. He looked out over the crowd, as if tracing patterns between faces.

“I confess,” he said, voice clear enough that even those at the back hushed, “that I believed this country might learn from others without becoming them. That I spoke too freely of that belief. That I forgot how frightening ideas are to men with swords.”

A ripple of uneasy laughter ran through the onlookers and died quickly when hands tightened on hilts.

Ando smiled, faint and crooked.

“As for ‘aligning’…” He shrugged as much as his bound hands allowed. “I align with my children’s future. If that is crime, I stand guilty.”

The scribe flinched, just a little, as if the words had brushed him. His gaze flicked up toward where the castle roof would be, beyond the city’s edge, where an absent man had signed a piece of paper.

Sweat ran down Léopold’s spine, prickling between his shoulder blades beneath the plain brown cloth. His fingers dug into the bundle until the paper wrapper crumpled. Every muscle hummed with readiness: there the platform, there the guards, there the executioner with his feet set just so. Routes drew themselves without asking—up the side of that stall, along that awning beam, off the shrine pillar. Smoke bombs, knives, a leap and a push, Sekibanki’s heads screaming panic on all sides—

His hand twitched toward the hidden pocket at his waist where the familiar shape of a capsule sat. The motion brushed Ando’s wife’s sleeve. The fabric rasped under his fingers.

She swayed. He shifted more firmly behind her.

“Don’t,” she whispered.

He thought she’d seen his movement. Then realized she was talking to herself.

“Don’t cry,” she murmured. “Not yet. Not in front of them.”

A sound bubbled in her throat and was swallowed by sheer will.

On the shrine roof, Sekibanki’s head tilted, watching Léopold’s hand. One brow arched, as if to say, Well?

He held still.

He had promised, in a room full of ink and cooling tea, that he would keep the center from shattering while trying to dull its edges. Today there was no edge to dull. The choice sat in his stillness.

The scribe stepped back. The magistrate’s officer raised his voice.

“Ando Takahiro,” he proclaimed, “by authority of the Regent’s council, your sentence is death by—”

Ando’s voice cut through.

“Wait,” he said.

The officer glared, but nodded once. It cost them nothing to give a dying man breath.

Ando turned his head, seeking the slice of crowd where his family stood. The sea of bodies parted just enough; a path opened between shoulders and hats.

His wife looked up. Her face had gone almost white. The youngest daughter had buried her face against her, fists knotted in her obi. The boy stared fixedly at the executioner’s sword, jaw clenched until it looked carved.

“Ando-san,” someone near Léopold muttered, “say nothing. They’ll only—”

But Ando was already speaking.

“Children,” he called, and the square quieted, because a man talking to his children in that place sounded wrong, and people strain to hear wrongness. “Listen. The men on that hill will stop my eyes. They will stop my hands.”

His bound fingers twitched as if reaching for a brush.

“They cannot stop the stars.”

A stir ran through the sonnō jōi youths, anger and something like pride tangling in their faces.

“The names we give the lights above us,” Ando went on, softer now but somehow clearer, “those belong to us. We can change them, argue over them, shout about them. The lights themselves do not care. They burn. They will go on burning whether we write them in Dutch or in Chinese or in some script we haven’t invented yet.”

He drew a breath. The rope creaked.

“Tell my children,” he said, eyes never leaving theirs, “that the stars keep burning whether we name them or not. And that some things are worth calling by their right names, even when the ledger disapproves.”

The magistrate’s officer snapped his fan shut.

“Enough,” he said, voice sharp. He jerked his chin at the executioner. “Do it.”

The executioner stepped forward, unwrapping the sword with practiced efficiency. The steel caught the winter sun in a flat, honest gleam.

A susurrus rolled through the crowd. Some turned away, sucking air through their teeth. Others leaned in, dragged by the same ugly gravity that had kept them there.

Léopold’s heartbeat thudded in his ears. He could feel every inch of space between himself and the platform as a map, each possible step marked. His fingers throbbed with the absence of a thrown knife.

Ando knelt. The movement was careful, almost ceremonial, like a bow before his students. He lowered his head.

Ando’s son lurched forward.

“Father!” he cried.

His mother’s hand clamped down on his shoulder, but not before the word flew, stark and raw, across the space.

Ando smiled without lifting his face.

“Watch the sky for me,” he said.

The executioner raised the sword.

A collective flinch shuddered through the crowd, bodies recoiling as one. Léopold felt it ripple along his spine, made of hope and horror both—as if stepping back a fraction could undo why they had come.

The blade fell.

The sound was not thunder or collapsing stone. It was a wet, final thump, muffled by straw and flesh and wood.

Ando’s wife’s knees buckled. She would have gone down if Léopold’s arm hadn’t already been there, firm behind her. Her body shook against him, sobs tearing loose now that the moment had passed. Her tears soaked into his sleeve.

The youngest daughter screamed.

It was high and thin and too long, a sound that sliced through murmurs, through the sonnō jōi curses, through the shuffle of magistrate’s men making a show of wiping their swords clean.

On the embankment, the pale shape in the water paused. Wakasagihime broke the surface just enough for her eyes to clear, blue hair blending with the river. The scream hit her like a physical blow. She flinched, hand gripping stone until her knuckles went white.

Fear rolled out from the crowd, rich and sharp. It brushed over her like warm current. She could have drunk it in, let it pool in the hollows of her chest.

She turned her face away instead, eyes squeezed shut, as if this particular taste was one she refused.

Above, Sekibanki’s head hovered in the rising haze of emotion. Her eyes half-lidded, a faint, guilty pleasure at the flood of stories born in a single strike. When the daughter’s scream peaked, she grimaced. Her boots scraped tile as her body shifted. One of her spare heads—pale copy trailing wisps of neck—peeled away and vanished up into the sky.

Kagerou in the alley exhaled slowly, fogging the cold air. Her ears flattened. She could smell metal and salt and terror, all the things that fed old tales. Part of her thrilled. Another part watched the boy whose voice had cracked calling for his father and thought of wolf packs scattering under rifles.

On the platform, a magistrate’s servant briefly lost his grip on the tray he carried. A splash of ink—brought, absurdly, to record details—spattered the straw. The stain spread, dark on dark.

“Another martyr,” one sonnō jōi youth muttered, fingers digging into his scabbard. “They cut down their own brightest man and expect us to bow.”

“Good,” another whispered savagely. “Let everyone see. Let them choke on their ‘order.’”

Neither moved to help the woman sobbing in the crowd.

Léopold’s throat felt raw, though he’d said almost nothing. Sweat had soaked the back of his under-kimono. He could feel the tremor in Ando’s wife’s shoulders. His other hand, hidden under the crumpled paper bundle, had pressed so hard into his palm he’d drawn blood; when he shifted, stickiness tugged at the skin.

He forced his fingers to unclench. The smoke capsule in his pocket sat unbroken, a cool, accusing weight.

On the platform, attendants were already moving with practiced efficiency, wrapping the body, cleaning the sword, straightening the straw. By afternoon the square would be something else again — a market, a meeting place, somewhere children ran around the basin. The river would take what it could, thin it, carry it away.

The sky above Edo stayed blank and bright, hiding its stars.

Léopold stood until the crowd began to thin, until the sonnō jōi youths turned away, muttering, plans hardening behind their eyes. Until the magistrate’s men relaxed their stance and the scribe rolled his scroll with aching fingers. Until Ando’s wife’s sobs emptied into a soft, constant trembling.

Only then did he ease his arm from her back, fingers brushing the rough cotton of her sleeve one last time. Her tears had left a faint patch on his borrowed garment. His blood left a faint smear on the fabric.

“Thank you,” she whispered hoarsely, not looking at him.

He didn’t know if she meant for holding her up, or for staying silent. He didn’t ask.

He turned and let the crowd swallow him, head bowed like everyone else’s. As he walked, words from another continent and another burning city echoed in his mind—his Mentor’s breath hitching on “Japan,” Canton’s smoke rising, Ashford’s eyes on him over a dying man between them.

In the river, Wakasagihime slipped back beneath the surface, leaving only a faint swirl to mark where she’d been. On the shrine roof, Sekibanki’s body drew its wayward head back down, neck coiling like rope as it reattached. Kagerou melted into deeper shadow, her outline dissolving into crates and hanging laundry.

The fear and grief of the square clung to the air, a taste the youkai couldn’t ignore and a story no human there would ever forget.

Léopold carried it with him as he left the second square, as inescapable as the scent of ink on his hands.

Chapter Text

The house felt smaller without Ando’s voice in it.

Léopold had to turn his shoulders sideways to clear the doorway. The lintel brushed his hat. Inside, the familiar room seemed to have shrunk around the low table and the stacked books, their neat towers leaning like exhausted men.

The brazier glowed a dull red. The air tasted of boiled greens and old ink.

Ando’s wife knelt by the hearth, sleeves rolled back. Her hands moved automatically—poking the coals, shifting the pot, wiping a drip from the rim with the corner of her sleeve and flicking it away. The motion had no urgency. It was the kind of movement you made when you needed to do anything that wasn’t thinking.

When she looked up and saw him, her mouth flattened.

“Lafèche-san,” she said. His alias came out slow, like a word she was testing for bitterness.

“Ando-dono’s letters,” Léopold answered, setting the wrapped bundle on the table before he sat. The floor creaked under his weight. “And… other things.”

He untied the string. A stack of folded papers came first, corners softened from handling. Beneath that, a smaller package of coins, their weight disproportionate to their size.

She wiped her hands on her apron and reached for the papers, not the money. Her fingers traced the topmost fold before she opened it, as if half-afraid it would crumble.

Ando’s handwriting stared back—firm strokes, a little hurried, dipped in the well between duties. Léopold caught phrases without meaning to: *I argued again today…* *The foreign officer insists…* *The stars here are the same as in Nagasaki, but…*

Her eyes moved quickly, then slowed. She didn’t cry. The muscle in her jaw jumped, grinding.

“You carried these?” she asked.

“He entrusted some to me,” Léopold said. “Others I took from his rooms when—”

“When they cleared his desk,” she finished, voice flat. “When they swept him into the same pile as their other inconveniences.”

Her gaze slid to the money. The cloth had fallen away enough to show dull glints of silver.

From the next room came the soft thump of a book closing. Ando’s eldest son appeared in the doorway, hair misbehaving in an echo of his father’s. Ink smudged his fingers. He stopped when he saw Léopold, shoulders stiffening.

“What is he doing here?” the boy asked.

“He brought your father’s letters,” his mother said.

“And money,” Léopold added quietly.

“From who?” the boy demanded. “From the men who signed the paper?”

Léopold met his eyes. They were Ando’s eyes, but harder now, polished by funeral smoke and neighbors’ whispers.

“From a… foreign friend,” he said. “Who owes your father a debt.”

“You saved him once,” the boy said, the words coming in a rush as if they’d been waiting behind his teeth. “In the square. We heard. Everyone knows. You pulled him from under their sword and hid him in the smoke.”

His hands balled into fists. Ink smeared across his palms.

“And then you brought him into their rooms,” the boy went on. “Sat with him and the Regent’s men. You helped them. You saved him once to feed him to them later.”

His mother’s breath caught.

“Yuuji,” she whispered, half warning, half plea.

Léopold’s fingers closed around the edge of the table. The wood dug into his skin.

“I argued for him,” he said simply. “It was not enough.”

The boy laughed—a short, broken sound.

“Argued,” he sneered. “With the man whose brush killed him. Did you bow when you argued, foreign friend? Did you pour his tea? Did you hold the paper straight so the Regent’s hand wouldn’t tremble?”

“Yuuji,” his mother said again, sharper.

“If he hadn’t interfered,” the boy pushed, words tumbling faster, “Father would have been executed the first time. He wouldn’t have believed he could change anything. He wouldn’t have—”

He bit the rest off so hard his teeth clicked. He was shaking.

Léopold let go of the table. His hand left a faint smear where his nails had dug into the grain.

“Ando believed he could change things long before he met me,” he said. “Your father was stubborn.” A breath that was almost a laugh escaped him. “You have that from him.”

Yuuji looked as if he might spit. Instead he spun on his heel and stormed back into the other room. A heartbeat later, the scratch of a brush on paper began—aggressive, heavy strokes that would tear through if he wasn’t careful.

The youngest daughter peered around the doorframe he’d just vacated. Her eyes darted from Léopold to the coins to the letters.

“Are those for us?” she whispered.

Her mother’s hand moved at last. She reached for the money bundle and lifted it, the cloth sagging between her fingers as if it were something unclean.

“We have rice,” she said stiffly.

“You have rice for now,” Léopold replied. “The bureau’s pay has stopped. The men who shared Ando’s lectures will not risk their posts to help his family. The neighbors will help for a week, for a month. Not for a year.”

He slid one more item from the bundle: a folded sheet bearing Ando’s neat column of numbers—a half-finished household budget. In the margin, a tiny crude drawing of a star, ink blotted where he’d laughed or coughed.

“Ando wanted this for you,” Léopold added. “From me, if not from him. Think of it as his handwriting turned into coins.”

For a heartbeat she just stared at the money in her hands. The knuckles whitened. Veins stood out on the backs of her fingers.

“If it were from him,” she said, “he would be the one knocking at the door.”

Her voice tore on the last word. The sound surprised even her.

She surged to her feet.

The bundle hit Léopold in the chest hard enough that one coin slipped free. It bounced off his collarbone, struck his jaw, and rang as it hit the floor.

“We don’t want *your* coins,” she snapped.

The shout was raw, scraped up from somewhere under all the days she’d held herself still. The youngest daughter flinched and started crying. In the other room, Yuuji’s brush froze midstroke.

“You sat with him,” she said, voice rising. “You went into that castle and came back alive. You walked past guards and paper and brush and you *walked out*, and now you bring us this—” she jabbed a finger at the spilled silver “—like it balances anything?”

She took a step toward him, close enough that he could see the redness around her eyes, the fine ink-specks on her skin that would never wash out.

“Do you think I don’t know your face?” she hissed. “They whisper it in the market. ‘The foreign friend. The Regent’s shadow.’ The boys with banners spit your name like poison and still come here asking what my husband taught them.”

Her hands were shaking so badly she gripped her own sleeves to still them.

“You bring me *their* money,” she went on. “Foreign silver. Regent’s paper. All of it passes through the same hands. Through yours. Through his. You watched them write his death and now you want to pay for his children like… like a broken tool?”

Her voice cracked on “children.” She swallowed and forced it back up into a scream.

“Keep it!” she cried. “Buy yourself another hat. Another pen. Another friend to drag into those rooms. We’ll eat dirt before we eat off that.”

The last word came out almost as a sob. She bit it down, chest heaving.

The little girl clutched her mother’s sleeve, wailing now, frightened more by the shout than the stranger. From the other room, paper tore—Yuuji’s brush pushing too hard.

Léopold bent slowly and picked up the fallen coin. His fingers closed around the cold metal until the edge cut his palm.

“It isn’t the Regent’s,” he said. “It’s mine.”

“I don’t care whose purse it came from,” she spat. “I know whose blood it smells like.”

He set the coin back on the bundle where it lay between them on the tatami.

“If you never touch it,” he said quietly, “then it will sit there and mock us both. But when the rice runs out, it will still be silver. And he would have wanted that.”

“Don’t tell me what he would have wanted,” she whispered. There was almost no air behind the words now, only shredded sound. “You weren’t here when they brought his head home.”

That image knifed through him—this room, this brazier, her hands doing this same automatic work with a bundle on the table that did not move or speak. He had been in the square and in the castle and in corridors full of ink. Not here.

The room felt as tight as a chest about to crack.

In the doorway, the youngest daughter’s sobs hitched. Yuuji appeared behind her, one hand on her shoulder, the other still clutching the brush. His eyes burned.

“This is *our* house,” he said. “Our dead. Take your money and leave.”

He did not shout it. That somehow made it harder.

Léopold went very still. Then he bowed—too shallow for a formal apology, too deep for indifference.

“I’m sorry,” he said. It was a small word against the weight in the room.

He gathered the bundle of coins from the tatami. For a moment it looked as if he might tuck it back into his coat. Instead, at the threshold, he stopped, turned, and set it down quietly beside the sandals by the door, where a guest might leave a gift of sake.

“You can throw it in the river if you like,” he said. “As long as it leaves this neighborhood by your choice, not theirs.”

She didn’t answer. Her shoulders had begun to shake in tiny, furious tremors. One hand covered her mouth; the other gripped the hearth so hard the skin blanched.

As he slid the door open, Yuuji’s voice came from behind him, aimed at the paper in his hand, not at Léopold.

“Tell him,” the boy said, brush scratching again. “Tell him I won’t let it end like this.”

“Who?” his mother asked, not quite hiding the fear in her tone.

“The Regent,” Yuuji said. “The foreigners. Whoever thinks they can write our names and cross them out.” The brush gouged the page. “All of them.”

Léopold stepped out and closed the door softly behind him.

The alley outside felt narrower than usual. Laundry sagged on lines overhead, damp cloth brushing his hat. Children’s chalk drawings of ships and monsters blurred where the last rain had run.

He hesitated, then turned, slid the door open just a finger’s width, and nudged the bundle of coins inside with the toe of his boot. It came to rest against the wall, half-hidden by a straw broom. Then he shut the door for good.

At the corner nearest the Ando house, two men in drab kimono leaned against a wall stacked with crates of dried fish. They looked like any porters resting. Their swords sat a little too comfortably at their hips.

One, younger, with a thin white scar across his nose, watched the doorway instead of the street.

“So that’s the foreigner?” he murmured when Léopold emerged again.

The older man followed his gaze. His eyes were hooded, his face calm.

“Looks soft,” he said, lips barely moving. “Soft ones make good kindling. They flare high when you finally push them.”

He stepped away from the wall as Léopold walked past, then fell into an easy, coincidental parallel path, close enough that their sleeves almost brushed, far enough not to draw attention.

“Hard times for scholars,” he said conversationally, as if discussing the weather. “Harder for their children. No one to pay the ink sellers now.”

Léopold kept his gaze ahead.

“Such children must find other patrons,” the man went on. “Men who remember what loyalty means. Men who honor those the Regent kills for speaking truth.”

“Is that so,” Léopold said in Japanese almost as smooth as theirs.

The man’s eyes flickered, surprised at the lack of accent.

“You knew Ando-dono,” he probed. “Many did. He was no traitor. He loved the Emperor more than those who claim to serve him. Don’t you agree?”

Léopold’s fingers brushed the inside of his sleeve where a throwing knife sat in its sheath. The sensation grounded him like a bead on a string.

“Ando loved his children,” he said. “I agree about that.”

The younger man snorted softly.

“A man who loves his children does not bow to foreigners,” he muttered.

“Nor does he send them to die in riots to avenge his name,” Léopold said.

The older man’s smile didn’t reach his eyes.

“Who spoke of riots?” he asked mildly. “We speak of study circles. Reading groups. Boys learning the true history of this land. Someone must explain to them why their father is gone.”

He tapped the wall lightly with his knuckles, as if knocking on a closed door.

“If the shogunate will not teach them, others will. Unless you plan to bring more silver and sermons, foreign friend.”

They stopped at the mouth of the next lane. The older man bowed just enough to be polite.

“We’ll call on the family soon,” he said. “To pay our respects.” His gaze slid back toward Ando’s house. “It would be a shame if the son felt… alone in his anger.”

Léopold watched them go until their shapes melted into the afternoon crowd.

Above the street, halfway hidden behind a fluttering quilt, Sekibanki’s head peered around a hanging sleeve. Her body lounged on a rooftop beam, neck looping lazily out of sight.

“That one smells like torches and slogans,” she said, drifting down to float at Léopold’s shoulder. To anyone else, she’d be a trick of the light. To him, she was crimson hair and sharp teeth worrying her lower lip. “You’re going to let him walk into that house?”

Léopold tilted his head as if studying the laundry.

“They’ll knock with poems about Ando,” he said. “Not swords. The boy will listen.”

“And then?” Sekibanki asked. “Then we get more boys with swords and poems about blood.”

From across the canal, a splash answered her. Wakasagihime hung just beneath the surface, fingers hooked over the stone so only her eyes cleared the water. Ripples licked at her cheeks when she spoke.

“More boys with swords means more stories told over fires,” the mermaid said. “Grandmothers warning about certain alleys. Children whispering about the place where the patriots vanished. Fear tastes the same whether the flag over the gate is old or new.”

In the mouth of a side alley, Kagerou leaned against a post, arms folded. Her ears twitched under her shawl.

“Fear of foreign devils is getting louder than fear of us,” the wolf-woman said. “Listen.”

They fell silent.

From a nearby courtyard came the rise and fall of a woman’s voice, scolding: “Don’t run around with sticks like that. Do you want people to think you’re some sonnō jōi punk? The guards will cut your head off and hang it on the wall.”

A child squealed in protest, then laughed nervously.

In another yard, a man muttered as he hammered a sign into place: “Foreigners bring bad coin, bad manners, bad gods.” The word *bad* lengthened with each strike.

“See?” Kagerou said. “They don’t threaten children with us anymore. They threaten them with ‘traitor’ and ‘foreigner.’ We’re… background. Old fear.”

Sekibanki floated backward until she was upside down, hair hanging like a red curtain.

“We can fix that,” she said. “Those patriotic meetings, the ones where they scream about revering the Emperor while hiding knives under their sleeves? Imagine if every time they gathered, they felt eyes in the dark. Heard their own slogans whisper back at them when they went home alone.”

Her lips curled.

“‘Purify the land,’” she mimicked in a whisper that slid along the bricks. “‘Yes, start with your own street. Start with your own door.’”

Wakasagihime’s fingers dug into the stone. Tiny chips flaked away.

“Terrifying children who already lost a father,” she said. “Is that what we’ve become?”

“Not the children,” Sekibanki said. “The ones who come to recruit them.”

“And they will bring boys with them,” Kagerou added quietly. “Boys with your Ando’s eyes, who hear voices in the bushes and see faces in the canal. Do we want their first thought of us to be—”

She bared her teeth automatically.

“—that?”

“Better feared than forgotten,” Sekibanki said, but her eyes flicked toward the Ando house. The memory of the daughter’s scream in the square still hung between them like steam.

Léopold rubbed his thumb along the callus on his forefinger, thinking of Yuuji’s brush strokes gouging the paper.

“If you stalk sonnō jōi meetings,” he said, “they’ll have visions to blame their violence on. ‘The spirits themselves support us,’ they’ll say. ‘Even heads and wolves and river ghosts hate the shogun and the foreign devils.’”

He looked up at Sekibanki’s dangling face.

“Can you live with them marching under your name?” he asked. “Shouting that the Grassroots Youkai blessed their knives?”

Sekibanki’s smirk faltered.

“We don’t have a name,” she protested. “That’s your word. We’re just… friends.”

“Stories will give you one,” Léopold said. “You feed them. They grow teeth.”

Silence settled, thick as fog.

On the far bank, Wakasagihime let go of the stone and sank until only ripples marked where she’d been.

“I’m tired,” she said from below. The words bubbled up with a soft gurgle. “Of hearing ‘expel the barbarians’ more than lullabies.”

Kagerou pushed off the post, melting deeper into the shadows.

“Maybe we should haunt the Regent’s dreams instead,” she muttered. “Or yours.”

She said it like a joke. The way her eyes slid away made it clear she’d thought about it.

Sekibanki turned right-side up again with a little twist.

“You’re all very moral for monsters,” she grumbled. “Fine. No eating patriots’ fear without thinking about it first.” She fixed Léopold with a look. “But don’t expect us to starve while you decide which humans are allowed to frighten each other.”

She drifted higher, disappearing behind a fluttering bedsheet. When the cloth settled, she was gone.

Léopold stood alone at the intersection, the taste of the argument lingering like smoke on his tongue.

From somewhere deeper in the district came the clatter of sandals, the barked cadence of Bakufu patrol drills. A pair of constables turned the corner at the far end of the street, eyes sweeping faces, weighing stances. One of them paused half a heartbeat longer on Léopold’s frame than politeness required before moving on.

On the rooftop above, a shadow shifted that wasn’t a youkai—just a man in a dark coat, watching with the stillness of someone trained to wait. The angle of his shoulders, the way his hand rested near his belt, told Léopold everything he needed to know. Ashford’s watchers had found this neighborhood too.

Behind him, in the house that suddenly seemed much too small, Ando’s boy finished a character with a slashing stroke and held the paper up to the light.

The ink gleamed wetly, spelling out words that belonged to a different future.

Léopold watched the constables, felt the unseen gaze from the roof, tasted the last echo of youkai presence in the air.

Templars. Bakufu. Sonnō jōi. Spirits.

He adjusted his hat and stepped into the flow of the street, letting it close over him.

Chapter Text

The junior never stopped sweating, even after he ran out of words.

He knelt in the middle of the storage room with his wrists bound in front of him, sleeves rolled back to keep the hemp from soaking through. The boards under his knees were splintered. A single oil lamp on a crate threw a crooked halo of light around them, leaving the corners in grainy shadow.

“I delivered packages,” he said, staring at the knot of the rope instead of at Léopold. “I didn’t read them.”

Léopold tapped the lacquered document case against his palm and said nothing.

The man—older than some recruits, younger than most officers—swallowed. Ink stained the beds of his nails, the deep shadow of someone used to copying ledgers until brush and muscle moved as one. His lips twitched like they were trying out excuses too fast to choose one.

“They said it was for stability,” he tried. “No more… China mistakes.”

He shivered on the last two words. Beneath the careful vowels of his Edo Japanese, the sibilants of the treaty ports clung like smoke.

“What mistakes?” Léopold asked.

The courier’s eyes flicked up, then away. He nodded toward the case instead of answering.

“It’s all there,” he said. “I can’t recite their language. I only copied it. Twice.” A humorless little laugh. “Good penmanship is treason now.”

Léopold set the case down on the crate. His fingers were cold on the metal latch. He pressed his thumb against the seal. The wax cracked with a soft, obscene sound.

The smell hit him first: sharp new ink, overlaying the room’s stew of lamp oil and sweat.

He unfolded the paper carefully, supporting the edges so as not to stress the creases. The characters marched down the page in stiff foreign style, precise and arrogant. Whoever dictated this had thought in another tongue and forced the clerk’s brush to keep up.

“…prevent destabilization of the Japanese theater from mirroring the Opium debacle by guiding a single apex rupture and subsequent consolidation…”

The brushstrokes around *apex rupture* had been rewritten. The first attempt was scratched out so hard the fibers had fuzzed. Someone had lingered on finding the right phrase.

In the margin, an English note had been squeezed between lines, the cramped hand more familiar than he liked:

 as in Canton — no drifting, no vacuum

Ashford’s voice lived in that margin, in the clipped contempt when he said words like *drifting*.

Léopold turned the page. Another sheet slid free: a map of Edo traced over a Japanese original. Red pencil circled the castle. Lines radiated out like cracks in fired clay.

Near the southern edge, a thicker ring marked a single point, labeled in both scripts:

Sakuradamon Gate – choke focus

Below that, ink neat and steady:

"Utilize existing extremist cells to effect removal of current Regent prior to imminent succession; intervene in ensuing chaos to supply disciplined order and advisory structure favorable to rational modernization.”

The junior licked dry lips.

“I didn’t understand those parts,” he said quickly. “I just wrote what they said. ‘Apex’ this, ‘consolidation’ that. They argued for an hour about the word before ‘rupture.’”

He gave another thin laugh.

“They quarrel more over ink than over lives.”

The words blurred. Somewhere under the fresh-smelling ink, another stench rose up—hot metal, decomposing fish, and the sweet-sour rot of too many bodies in too small a space.

Canton hadn’t smelled like this paper.

Ashford stood in a corridor lined with cots that were not quite beds and not quite pallets, their legs uneven on the damp floor. Paper screens had been taken down in haste to make space; now they leaned against the wall, splashed with stains no one had bothered to scrub.

On the nearest cot, a boy from somewhere upriver clutched his stomach and whimpered between his teeth. Flies gathered at the corners of his eyes. The surgeon pushed past Ashford with a muttered apology and a bowl of cloudy water. His apron had once been white.

Ashford’s hands moved before his mind did. He caught the boy’s shoulders as he thrashed, pinning him gently but firmly, boots slipping a little on the slick stone. The boy’s skin burned through the coarse cloth of his gown.

“It’s only water,” someone lied in guttural Cantonese.

The boy didn’t understand the words, only the tone. He sobbed once and bit down on it.

At the far end of the ward, a row of buckets waited, some full, some slopping. The smell from them fought the reek of the bodies and won.

“Hold him steady, Captain,” the surgeon grunted.

“I’m not—” Ashford began, then stopped. The argument meant less than nothing here.

He held the boy steadier.

When it was over—no miracle, just exhaustion and emptying—Ashford stepped back. Dark spots dotted his cuffs. Something had splashed his cheek. He wiped it with the back of his hand and stared at the smear as if it had personally insulted him.

No one had planned this.

No strategist had chosen these particular children, this alley, this warehouse to turn into a ward. No hand had guided the contamination into one well and not another. It was simply what happened when men poured poison into a river and walked away.

He stepped outside into hot grey daylight. The air was no cleaner. The harbor below lay choked with ships and wrecks, masts jutting like broken ribs.

An older man waited under the eaves, coat too dark and cut too plain to be a normal officer, posture too precise to be a civilian. His hair had gone mostly white above a face creased by smiles he wasn’t using today. He snapped his watch shut as Ashford appeared.

“You stayed in there longer than the others,” he observed. His English was clipped, with a faint Dutch music under it.

Ashford scrubbed his hands again on his handkerchief until the fabric scratched.

“The others had orders,” he said. “I had curiosity. I’ve seen battlefields. I wanted to see this.”

“And?” The man tilted his head.

Ashford glanced back at the ward’s doorway. A nurse passed through it carrying linen to be ruined.

“It’s worse,” he said. “The bombardment ends. Trade resumes. But this—”

He gestured helplessly, as if the stench were a cloud he could point to.

“This keeps spilling. No one… closes it. It just eats.”

The older man watched him a moment, then nodded as if confirming a result.

“Come,” he said. “There’s something else you should see before you decide whether to break.”

He led Ashford around the building, away from the groans, to a smaller side entrance. Two of Ashford’s own men stood guard, faces set in the hard blank lines of men told not to think. They straightened when the older man approached, almost saluting before they remembered themselves.

Inside, the air changed again. Not clean—nothing about this city was clean—but different. Paper. Wax. Money.

The room had been an office once, before the windows were boarded to keep out eyes and stray shot. Maps lay spread on a long table, corners pinned by brass compasses and stacks of coin. On the wall, colored pins marked shipping routes and warehouses. Neat notes ran under each in three languages.

Four men waited around the table. Their coats bore the same insignia as Ashford’s. Their hands and neckties did not: rich fabric, fat rings, one watch chain with diamonds where there should have been modest steel.

“The suppliers,” the older man said mildly. “The brothers who ensured our beloved Empire’s troops never lacked powder, shot, or medicinal shipments to sell twice.”

One of the officers bristled.

“Who is this?” he demanded. “What is the meaning of—”

Ashford recognized him. Major Fowler. He’d seen him laughing on the quay, weighing a crate of opium bricks like a farmer testing melons.

He looked from Fowler to the older man.

“What is the meaning?” he echoed.

The older man’s eyes glinted.

“It means,” he said, “that some of your superiors are inconvenient to men like me.”

He reached into his coat and laid a small, heavy object on the table. A ring, plain and dark, flat-faced. No ostentatious stone. Only a symbol engraved so shallowly it caught the light if you were really looking: a cross, not bright but black, its arms slightly flared.

“And men like you,” he added.

Fowler sneered.

“You think the boy is going to lecture us?” he scoffed. “He held a quill before he held a sword. You picked a poor showpiece, old man.”

The older man’s smile was almost kind.

“I didn’t pick him for a show,” he said. “I watched him hold a boy down so the doctor could save half a life. He didn’t flinch. And he didn’t lie to himself about why that boy was there.”

He turned his face fully to Ashford.

“You understand something most of them don’t,” he said. “Chaos is not an accident. It is what happens when no one is ruthless on purpose.”

Ashford’s jaw tightened.

“You saw the wards,” the older man went on. “You saw the river. The merchants behind this war never intended to fill those cots. They only intended to fill their ledgers. The difference between them and us is not that we are kinder, Captain Ashford.” His voice cooled. “It is that we are willing to know exactly what we are doing.”

He nudged the ring with one finger.

“I belong to an order that corrects our own mistakes,” he said. “We cut rot out of the body before it spreads. Even when the rot wears our colors.”

Fowler laughed, less certain now.

“This is absurd,” he said. “Ashford, you’re not going to stand there while this old vulture—”

Ashford moved.

Later, he would not remember the exact thought—only that one moment his hands were empty and the next his sword was halfway from its scabbard and Fowler was reaching for his own weapon too slowly, too predictably.

Metal met cloth and then something softer. The sound in the room shrank to the scrape of boots and the rasp of breath. The maps fluttered when Fowler crashed against the table, smearing ink.

The other officers froze.

Ashford set his blade down very carefully, hilt toward himself, edge away, as if afraid it might act again without him.

The older man never broke eye contact.

“We will take care of the rest,” he said quietly. “You’ve shown us what we needed to see.”

He picked up the ring between thumb and forefinger, held it out.

“Wear this,” he said. “Not for honor. For obligation. You will find no comfort in us. Only work.”

Ashford didn’t look at the symbol. He looked toward the ward corridor, where someone had begun to weep—a thin, keening sound that went straight through plaster.

“Nobody planned that,” he said, voice rough. “No one meant to give them cholera. No one meant to burn that quarter. The guns mis-aimed. The wind changed.”

He closed his hand around the ring.

“That,” he said, “is worse than men like Fowler.”

The metal was cold in his fist. He squeezed until the edges bit his skin.

“If there must be devils,” he said, “then they should at least know what they are doing.”

The older man’s smile no longer reached his eyes.

“Welcome to the Black Cross,” he said.

The warehouse in Edo was quieter than that Canton room, but the paper in Léopold’s hands felt just as heavy.

He spread the directive and map on the floorboards, weighting the corners with whatever came to hand: a pistol, the lamp, a chipped teacup, a small carved lion dog left by some previous tenant.

The captured courier sagged back against a post, head tipped up, throat working as he swallowed.

“They call it an ‘apex rupture,’” he muttered. “In their language it just means ‘we will choose the worst day and put our knife there.’”

Léopold traced the circle around Sakuradamon with his fingertip. The name blurred under his skin, then settled again.

Sakuradamon. The southern gate. He tasted cold air, crowd breath steaming, the creak of palanquin poles. The perfect place to make a hole in the world.

Another sheet from the pile. English cramped above, Japanese glossary beneath it, more fluid.

 “Do not prevent removal of current Regent. Instead, shape timing and actors to avoid unbounded collapse. Provide, post-event, a framework for rational governance and foreign liaison to forestall Chinese errors.”

In the margin, the same hand from Canton:

no amateur rebellions this time – controlled burn, not conflagration

Léopold’s hand clenched. The paper crackled.

Here, on a separate sheet, in that same ruthless script:

 You are authorized to excise Naosuke if & when his inflexibility threatens long-term stability. Ensure successor amenable to guidance. Avoid uncontrolled vacuum.

He had sat in that man’s rooms. Watched him rub at a sore shoulder, watched ink stain his sleeve, watched him sign names he hated. He had warned him about other predators circling.

All the while, one of those predators had already decided when and where to bite.

He set the pages aside and pushed to his feet. The roof beams overhead felt too low now.

On the opposite wall, his own map of Edo waited—less precise than the Templar version, but messier, scrawled in charcoal and chalk. Dead drops marked by little crosses. Safehouses circled, some now struck through. A square where Ando had knelt. Streets that smelled of smoke.

He picked up a stub of charcoal and circled Sakuradamon.

The black line came out thick and uneven, almost childish compared to the careful red on the stolen map. It smeared when his knuckle grazed it.

He stared at the circle until it stopped being ink and turned back into stone and crowd and breath in his mind.

Behind him, the courier shifted.

“What will you do?” he asked. The question was small. It didn’t feel small.

Léopold didn’t answer at once. He stepped closer to the map, thumb pressing into the charcoal until it broke. Black dust crumbled under his nail.

He remembered the Mentor’s scarred hand pressing that first note into his palm in a rank Canton warehouse: *Get to Japan before they do.*

Henrik’s pipe, still faintly scented with cold tobacco on a shelf. Nakamura’s kettle cooling on a stove. Ando’s daughter tracing constellations on his palm. Ashford’s face on a rooftop in Edo, impassive as he drew a blade up into a man’s ribs and commented on form.

Sakuradamon would be bloody whether he went or not. Ii had gathered every hatred into his person and stood in front of all of them. The knives were already halfway drawn. The Black Cross meant to nudge which hands held them and when they struck, then stand in rooms with maps and say it had been inevitable.

He went to the crate with his tools.

The revolver lay there, metal dull in lamplight. He opened the cylinder, checking each chamber with the same care he’d given the directives. Bundles of shot and powder. Knives nestled like sleeping snakes. A coil of fuse rope. He laid each piece on the crate’s lid in order.

On one corner of the crate lay a folded scrap of old paper, edges softened from travel, ink almost brown.

*Get to Japan before they do.*

He folded it smaller, along the old creases that already knew their path, until the letters almost vanished. He slid it back into its place inside his coat, next to his skin.

“Sakuradamon,” he said.

The word rang in the room like struck metal.

The courier flinched.

“You’re going to protect the Regent?” he asked. “Stop the assassination?”

The question skipped across deeper water.

“I am going to kill David Ashford,” Léopold said.

He spoke in French. The courier didn’t understand the words, but he heard the name and the way Léopold’s mouth shaped it. His eyes widened.

“For what he plans to do?” the man whispered. “For what he did?”

“For the story he wants to tell,” Léopold replied.

He snapped the revolver shut. The click was small and final.

“If Naosuke dies,” he went on in Japanese again, each word measured, “they will call it inevitable. They’ll say the country was always going to tear there. Ashford will stand in rooms with maps and say, ‘We guided them into stability. Without us, it would have been worse.’”

He holstered the pistol, feeling its weight settle against his side. Smoke bombs and blades followed—into belt, sleeves, hidden seams. He tightened each strap as if tightening a thought.

“I’m going to the gate,” he said. “Not to save a Regent who built his own gallows. Not to keep history clean for the scribes. I’m going to break their neat little diagram.”

The courier stared.

“Break it how?” he asked.

Léopold glanced back at the stolen directive, with its talk of apexes and consolidations.

“By tearing out the hand that holds the pen,” he said.

He turned back to his own map. The charcoal circle around Sakuradamon was already smudged where his thumb had pressed. He dipped a finger into the lamp’s warm wax and let a drop fall onto the line. It landed with a soft hiss, blurring the black into an ugly, swollen blot.

Order, Ashford believed, had to be ruthless on purpose.

Very well.

At Sakuradamon, someone else’s ruthlessness would meet his.

He pressed his wax-slick fingertip briefly against the pulse in his throat until the skin ached, then let his hand fall.

“History doesn’t get to be tidy,” he murmured, mostly to himself.

He blew out the lamp. The room plunged into the grainy blue of pre-dawn.

On the wall, the circle around Sakuradamon glowed faintly where the cooling wax caught what little light there was, a dull halo over a gate that had not yet soaked in blood.

He stepped toward the door.

Chapter Text

Snow came early that year, drifting down on slogans.

Sheets of paper clung to plastered walls and doorframes, some half-burned, some pasted over older proclamations. Ink bled where the flakes melted—black characters running like fresh bruises.

REVERENCE TO THE EMPEROR
CAST OUT THE BARBARIANS
DOWN WITH THE CRUEL REGENT

Someone had drawn a crude caricature of Ii Naosuke on one—jaw like a demon mask, eyes blank white, fingers tipped with impaled bodies instead of rings. Another poster showed black ships with mouths full of teeth, flags no real captain would have flown.

Léopold walked past them with his shoulders slightly hunched, straw raincoat dusted white. He kept the rhythm of a local porter: steady, unremarkable, feet falling where Edo expected them to. When a knot of apprentices hurried by, grumbling about curfews, he let their hurry pull him for a few paces, then bled away at the next corner as if he had simply reached his own door.

At a crossroads near the foreign quarter, the charred ribs of a shop clawed at the sky. The sign still swung above the ruin, cracked but legible: a tea dealer who had taken coin from both sides and trust from neither. Snow hissed on blackened beams; the smell of wet ash curled up, sour and tired.

Farther on, shutters in the treaty merchants’ district were nailed tight even in daylight. Foreign silhouettes glowed faintly behind thin curtains, moving in short, nervous arcs—men who knew how fast wooden walls took fire. A boy in a wool cap leaned his forehead against a pane, watching the street fog his breath. When he saw Léopold glance his way, he flinched back like a fish from a shadow.

Closer to the castle, the noise thinned. Lanterns hung at regular intervals, crests painted on their sides half-obscured by frost. Guards checked passersby more thoroughly now; the pauses they enforced in traffic left small fans of snow built up at the edges of sandals and clogs.

Léopold joined a line of officials and scribes heading toward the inner gate, shuffling forward with his papers cradled to his chest. The man in front of him coughed behind his scarf, breath blooming white. The guard stamping travel tokens did it with the same exhausted force each time, his knuckles red from cold.

When it was Léopold’s turn, he presented the folded permit he’d been using for months. The guard’s eyes moved from ink to face, lingered a heartbeat too long, then shrugged the doubt off his shoulders and waved him through.

Beyond the checkpoint, banners hung across the road, limp in the windless air. Snow collected on their edges and slid down in slow, reluctant shivers, leaving dark tracks that soaked into cloth. The usual clatter and call-and-response of the castle district felt muffled, wrapped in cotton.

The city felt like it had drawn a breath and forgotten how to let it out.

Ii’s clerk bowed Léopold into the Regent’s chamber with more ceremony than usual, as if impeccable manners might slow the calendar. The sliding door whispered shut behind him.

The room was warmer than the corridor, but only barely. A brazier glowed a dull red near Ii’s desk, charcoal banked low as if someone had been careful not to waste it. The warmth barely reached Léopold’s ankles.

Ii Naosuke sat where he always sat, back straight despite the fatigue pulling at his shoulders. A gray thread had found its way into his topknot since their last meeting. The brush in his hand hovered over a fresh sheet of paper, the character he had been writing—制, *control*—unfinished. The strokes that were there were thick, as if the brush had rested too long in one place.

Three cups of tea cooled on a tray between them. One was untouched. One had been sipped from twice and abandoned, a thin skin clouding its surface. The third sat nearer Léopold, already cold.

“You are late,” Ii said, without heat.

Léopold knelt opposite the desk, hands on his thighs.

“The streets are… thick,” he replied. His Japanese found the nearest polite word and hoped it fit.

Ii’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile.

“I see,” he said. “With posters?”

He nodded toward the window. A torn corner of a broadsheet had blown in and lodged under the lattice, fluttering faintly whenever the wind found a crack. From this angle, Léopold could just make out the brush-stroked barbarians.

Ii dipped his brush in ink with a gesture that spoke of long practice and fresh reluctance.

“They are no longer content to shout in sake houses,” he said. “They have discovered walls and pulp.”

His free hand strayed to his left shoulder, pressing fingers into the cloth as if kneading a knot that never left. The motion was casual, almost sleepy, but it lasted a fraction too long. When he noticed, he withdrew his hand and picked up the nearest teacup instead, though he did not drink.

“How bad is it?” he asked.

The question could have meant the snow. The posters. The city. The world.

Léopold thought of burned shops and nailed shutters and foreign boys flinching from glass. Of sonnō jōi ink scrawled on alley walls, half-washed away and written back darker. Of a red circle around Sakuradamon on a stolen map.

“Bad,” he said simply. “And not… simple.”

Ii breathed out through his nose, a thin, amused sound.

“It never is,” he said. “That is why we have ministers.”

He set the cup down with care, aligning it with the grain of the wood. His eyes dropped to the half-formed character in front of him.

“Tell me,” he said. “In your homeland, did your elders speak of legacy? Or only of profit?”

The word he chose for profit had a Dutch skeleton, softened by Japanese vowels. Léopold felt the old familiarity of it scrape against newer vows.

“Both,” he said. “Often in the same breath.”

Ii hmmed.

“I have no children,” he said, as if mentioning a ledger column that hadn’t been filled. “No one who will light incense at my tablet and curse me for leaving them a troublesome fortune.” His mouth tugged, dry. “My legacy will be… what, do you think?”

Outside, a crow called once, sharp and flat.

Léopold studied him across the desk. Ink smudged Ii’s sleeve near the wrist. His hands were those of a man who had held both swords and scrolls; veins raised, knuckles marked. There were faint grooves at the corners of his mouth, more from clenching than smiling.

“Roads,” Léopold said.

Ii’s eyes flicked back to him.

“Roads,” he echoed.

“You opened them,” Léopold went on. “To foreigners. To new guns. To… ideas. People will walk them even when they swear they hate where they lead.”

Ii’s gaze drifted toward the lattice, where snow pressed pale against paper.

“And the arrests?” he asked quietly. “The ledgers of names?”

His brush hovered, then descended. He finished the final stroke of 制, leaning just enough to leave a thick black tail.

“History will say I was cruel,” he said. The words were matter-of-fact. “History is not wrong, but it is seldom complete.”

He set the brush aside. A droplet of ink fell from its tip onto the blotter, blooming into a round stain.

“I tell myself,” he continued, fingers returning to his shoulder as if they lived there now, “that I am pruning a tree before it splits its own trunk. That the branches I cut prevent greater storm-break later.” His mouth thinned. “But the branches have faces.”

He flexed his hand as if the ache had spread.

“Men like your… adversaries,” he said, avoiding the word he didn’t want on the paper, “believe that if they draw the diagrams well enough, they can spare the tree altogether.”

A corner of his mouth lifted, dry and humorless.

“Optimists,” he added.

Léopold thought of Ashford’s tidy maps, neat circles around gates, the phrase *apex rupture* chosen and rewritten until it was right. Optimism was not the first word he would have chosen.

“What of you?” Ii asked. “Will your creed carve your name on my tablet as savior, traitor, or footnote?”

“My creed does not carve tablets,” Léopold said.

“No,” Ii agreed. “It carves… other things.”

The implication hung between them like steam that refused to rise.

“But you,” he said, leaning forward a little, eyes narrowing, “are flesh. You will outlive me, most likely. You will stand in some other city in some other year and decide how to describe this winter to someone who was not here.”

He glanced at the stacks on his desk. Petitions, warrants, reports. Some tied neatly with twine, others fanned out like fallen leaves.

“Legacy is just… who is allowed to speak,” he said. “I have had much practice in silencing others. I am curious how you will use your own tongue.”

The brazier ticked softly as charcoal settled. Léopold could feel his own pulse in the fingers resting on his knees. He thought of Ando in the second square, voice steady as the sword rose; of Nakamura on the broken stairs, blood soaking into wood. Of his own report that had become a death warrant.

He did not offer promises. Ii did not ask for them.

Instead, the Regent slid open a drawer and drew out a single folded sheet, edges worn from handling. He placed it on top of one of the piles without pushing it toward Léopold.

“I have written a memorandum,” he said, tone shifting back toward palace business. “On reorganizing the guard rotations around the southern gate. It will never pass before the council. They prefer to argue about whose cousin stands where.”

He tapped the page once with an ink-stained finger.

“Take it,” he said. “Or don’t. You will be there regardless, I think.”

Léopold did not ask how much Ii knew. He simply reached out and took the memorandum, feeling the dryness of the paper, the slight indentation where the brush had pressed harder on certain words—names of captains, directions of approach.

Ii watched him slide it into his sleeve.

“Do you sense it?” the Regent asked, almost conversational. “The way the air tastes?”

Léopold inhaled. Beneath ink and tea and medicinal bitterness, something else sat on the back of his tongue: the metallic tang of a storm, except the sky outside was just a white veil of falling flakes.

“The city is holding its breath,” Ii said. “Even you foreigners taste it, I see.”

His eyes had gone softer. Not blind—never that—but a little faraway, as if following a thought past the walls.

“When it exhales,” he said, “be somewhere useful.”

He picked up the cup he’d ignored, took a sip. The cooled tea had to be bitter; he did not flinch.

“That is all,” he said.

Léopold bowed, hands to the floor, then rose. Ii had already turned back to his stack of petitions, brush poised above another name.

As Léopold slid the door open, the Regent spoke one more time, without looking up.

“If the story you tell of me is incomplete,” he said, “that will at least be honest.”

The corridors outside felt narrower, as if the walls had taken a small step inward.

Servants moved more quickly now, heads bowed lower, trays clinking faintly as porcelain shook. A file of junior officials in dark robes passed, scrolls clamped tight under their arms, lips pressed into thin lines. Their sandals squeaked on the polished boards.

Léopold merged into their flow at a junction, letting their urgency mask his exit. He kept his eyes on the floor just ahead of his toes, the way an overworked scribe would. His fingers brushed the edge of the memorandum in his sleeve, feeling again where Ii’s brush had pressed hard on certain names. Positions. Blind spots.

A burst of laughter—too loud, too sharp—cut through the hush from a side hall.

“—says he has a foreign rat in his roof beams,” someone scoffed.

“Then why does he still sleep?” another voice replied.

Léopold’s shoulders stayed loose. Only his pace altered, half a beat slower.

Two young samurai lounged near a pillar, swords sheathed, hands resting a little too comfortably on the hilts. Minor crests on their sleeves—clans tugged toward sonnō jōi and now wondering how far they’d walked.

The scarred one, shorter, with a line along his jaw that hadn’t smoothed yet, gave Léopold a once-over as he approached with the officials’ file.

“That one,” he murmured, not quite softly enough, “walks like he knows more rooms than he’s allowed.”

His friend followed his gaze. For a moment, Léopold felt their eyes weigh his stride, the set of his shoulders, the foreign angles his months in Edo hadn’t quite erased.

He let his sandal catch on a raised board. The stumble was small, clumsy. One of the officials in front of him hissed and snapped something about carelessness over his shoulder.

Léopold ducked his head further, offering a murmured apology in the flattened, provincial accent he’d built for this face.

The taller samurai snorted.

“Just another clerk,” he said. “You see shadows in your own bathwater now.”

“Shadows are where knives live,” the scarred one replied, but his hand eased away from his sword as the file of officials passed.

As Léopold turned down the corridor toward the outer compound, he heard their voices drop:

“Lord so-and-so swears there’s a foreigner whispering in the Regent’s ear…”

“Then why do we not see him?”

“Perhaps he’s as invisible as the Emperor’s smile.”

The words slid over his back like cold water. The rumor had escaped the audience hall. The idea of a foreign shadow near Ii now walked the corridors on other tongues.

He stepped out into the courtyard.

Snow fell more thickly now, flakes fat and wet, clinging to tiles and sleeves. The banners along the inner walls sagged under their new weight, colors muted. Guards stood at their posts, shoulders dusted white, breath rising in little ghosts.

Beyond the inner wall, beyond another gate and checkpoint, Sakuradamon waited with its own banners and guards. From here he couldn’t see it, only the suggestion of mass through layered roofs and walls.

He could feel it the way a man feels a cliff ahead of him in the dark.

The “weather” Ii had talked around without naming.

Léopold paused under the eaves, brushing snow from his sleeves as if only avoiding wet cloth. In the courtyard, a lone crow had claimed a perch on one of the limp banners. It shook itself, sending down a small shower of white, then settled again to watch.

In his sleeve, the Regent’s memorandum crackled softly when he flexed his fingers.

He stepped out from under the roof and crossed the courtyard toward the outer gate, each footfall making a small, soft sound in the growing snow, as the castle and the city and whatever waited at Sakuradamon held their breath together.

Chapter Text

The snow at Sakuradamon glittered like spilled salt, trampled into gray by the time the procession appeared.

The sonnō jōi men arrived first, long before the palanquin.

They clustered in the lee of a storehouse near the gate, cloaks pulled tight, hands worrying at their sword hilts. Their breath hung in front of their faces, shallow and fast. Someone’s teeth clicked; someone else hissed “quiet” without turning his head.

One of them, barely older than a boy, traced the characters on the charm tied inside his sleeve with his thumb. Emperor. Justice. He mouthed the words without sound.

Among them stood a man who did not fidget. His hakama was cut just wrong for Edo, his hairline a little too straight. He wore a straw hat low, and his gloved hand rested lightly on a bamboo cane that was too heavy when it tapped the stones.

He didn’t bark orders. He only cleared his throat once when two of the samurai started arguing in whispers about who would strike first. The argument dissolved under the weight of that single sound.

“When the palanquin reaches the marker,” he murmured, almost to himself. “Remember. Not before. Not after. Do your duty. And then vanish.”

He adjusted the boy’s collar, a small, paternal gesture, then stepped back into the shadow of the storehouse as if fading from the scene he’d arranged.

Ii Naosuke felt the day in his bones before he saw the gate.

Inside the palanquin, the world reduced itself to sway and creak and the muffled crunch of bearers’ feet in snow. The curtain in front of him shivered with each step, letting in thin slivers of light and the occasional flake that melted on the tatami at his knees.

He held his hands folded on his lap. The right thumb kept pressing against the edge of a nail, stopping just short of breaking skin. His left hand, of its own accord, drifted toward his shoulder, fingers rubbing the familiar ache through layered cloth.

Somewhere ahead, a bell at the gate chimed, dull and distant.

“Cherry blossoms,” he murmured aloud to no one, remembering springs when the gate had lived up to its name. Today the branches above it were bare, thin black lines against a white sky.

The palanquin rocked as they turned. He felt more than heard the slight change in the bearers’ rhythm as the road widened near the gate.

He closed his eyes briefly. Behind his lids rose a corridor of dossiers, warrants, petitions; faces flickered where papers should be.

“History is never complete,” he said, and sighed once, soft enough not to disturb the men carrying him.

On the river side of the road, something watched from below.

Wakasagihime floated just under the icy skin of the moat, hair spread around her like dark ink in water. The wooden piles of the gate pressed down through the green gloom above her; the vibrations of footsteps on stone translated into faint shivers across her fingertips as she brushed them against the submerged foundation.

She tasted iron in the current before she saw blood. Not yet spilled—just the promise of it, in the way fear salted the water as crowds gathered on the banks.

On the rooftops, Kagerou crouched near the gate’s tiled corner, fingers hooked over the edge. The world came to her in smell and twitch and breath: sweat sour with anticipation, the oil on swords, horses restless and stamping. Her ears flicked once when a set of footsteps moved differently—more evenly—along a side street.

Higher still, tucked into the upper eaves of a tea stall, three red-haired faces peered out where only pigeons should have been. Sekibanki’s heads drifted, barely visible, mouths opening close to strangers’ ears.

“They say he signs in his own blood,” one head breathed, voice like wind through reeds.

“They say the Emperor weeps every night,” another added from the other side of the crowd, watching shoulders stiffen and spines straighten.

“We’ll see,” the third whispered, eyes following a lone figure moving just behind the line of guards.

Léopold walked with the specter of a clerk’s gait, carrying nothing but his own body as if it were a bundle of ledgers. His winter coat was damp at the hem from wading through slush, straw hat angled like everyone else’s against the fine, steady fall of flakes.

At his back, snug against leather, steel waited: the revolver’s weight under his coat, the saber at his side, the knives balanced where fingers could find them without looking. Under his wrist, beneath worn brown leather, a different blade lay asleep against his skin.

He reached the edge of the crowd just as the procession came into view.

The palanquin’s lacquered panels shone dully under the overcast sky, carried by a line of men whose breath came steady and controlled. Ahead, spearmen marched in pairs. Charms of paper and cloth fluttered from some of their shafts, stiff with frozen moisture.

A guard near Léopold muttered a curse about the cold. Léopold made a show of stamping his feet, joining in the complaint. It let him shift his stance, clearing space to move if he had to.

His eyes flicked once, quickly, across the street.

There—slipping along the flank of the road, where supply carts might roll and messengers might run—was Ashford.

No uniform. No obvious insignia. Just a foreigner who had learned to wear Edo’s layers correctly, the scarf around his neck dyed a conservative brown instead of any European color. He walked with a slight forward lean, as if impatient to arrive somewhere just ahead.

As he passed a knot of ronin pretending to be casual spectators, he brushed his glove against the back of one man’s coat. The man’s jaw clenched, knuckles whitening on his sword hilt. Another subtle gesture to someone further down the line, a lift of fingers as if adjusting his cuff, and that man shifted closer to the road.

Ashford never looked directly at the palanquin. He kept his gaze on the stones just ahead, like a man calculating distances.

Léopold edged sideways through the crush of bodies, murmuring apologies in bad Edo slang, angling to intercept.

He never reached him.

The bell at the gate chimed again as the palanquin crossed an invisible line on the road, where the stones were slightly more worn from wheels and footsteps.

The sonnō jōi men moved.

The first cut fell on a bearer.

A sword flashed, dull in the flat light, then gleamed red as it bit into the man’s shoulder. He cried out, legs folding, and the corner of the palanquin dropped with a thud that rattled its occupant.

Two more blades hacked at the carrying poles from the other side. Wood splintered. Shouts erupted—guards shouting, villagers screaming, ronin roaring.

The palanquin lurched, tipping. The curtain tore as armed hands ripped it aside.

Ii Naosuke saw the sky.

Snowflakes drifted above him, framed by steel and cloth and faces twisted by purpose and terror. For a heartbeat, the roar became muffled, distant, as if he were underwater. Then rough hands seized his sleeves, hauling him out onto the slush-darkened road.

He did not beg. His mouth moved; a guard close enough to hear would remember only a single word—“order”—before the bodies closed in.

Steel rose. The sword’s downward hiss cut through the noise, followed by a wet, decisive thump. Straw and flesh took the blow together. A spray of warmth struck the legs of the nearest men, spattering white socks red.

Blood splashed across stone. Geta slid, skidding out from under men who had never fought on anything but dry earth. A horse screamed, rearing, front hooves striking empty air; steam burst from its nostrils in frantic bursts, turning pink as it breathed in what the men spilled.

Paper charms ripped free and whirled into the air like torn white petals, plastering themselves against armor, faces, the palanquin’s shattered side.

Sekibanki’s heads shot higher, eyes wide, mouths open to the wordless sound rising from the gate. One of them laughed, not from joy but from the dizzy rush of so much fear at once; another fell silent, lips pressed tight.

On the roof, Kagerou’s nails dug into tile as the scent of fresh blood hit her like a wave. She swallowed, throat working, forcing herself to stay still as the scene below tilted toward full chaos.

Underwater, Wakasagihime curled her fingers tighter on the stone. The water above her went cloudy at the edges, stained by what ran down through the drains. The hum of panicked voices reached her as a pleading vibration.

Léopold did not see the exact stroke that took Ii’s head. He saw a flash of crimson against white, the palanquin’s insides turned out, a shape falling and not getting up. Men surged in to be part of history and to hide it at the same time.

He saw Ashford turn his head, just enough to confirm that the collapse at the center of the road matched the diagram he had drawn in his mind.

Then Ashford moved.

He slipped sideways, using the surge of the mob as cover. A constable, eyes wide, tried to push past him toward the palanquin; Ashford caught the man’s arm, spun him in front of him like a shield, and let another ronin’s sword bury itself in the constable’s side instead.

“Watch where you swing,” he snapped at the ronin in Japanese that had lost most of its foreign edges.

The man stammered an apology, blood dripping from his blade.

Ashford released the dying constable and stepped over him, already angling toward the side gate tower.

Léopold followed.

He pushed into the struggling mass, letting his shoulders hit others at just the right angles to squeeze through. A hand grabbed his sleeve; he twisted his wrist, leaving the cloth in the man’s grip while his arm slid loose, ducking under a wildly swung sword.

For a breath he was close enough to see a smear of red where Ii’s body lay surrounded by bodies and blades. The sight struck like a fist. *Too late for that ledger,* he thought, and forced himself not to look again.

He staggered into the open just as Ashford reached the base of the tower’s stairs.

“Ashford!” Léopold shouted.

The name cut through the din like another weapon.

Ashford stopped mid-step, one foot on the first stair, hand on the railing. He turned his head slowly, as if annoyed at being delayed rather than surprised.

“Lafèche,” he said. Snow had caught in his lashes; it melted in tiny droplets that ran into the corners of his eyes, but he did not blink them away.

They looked at each other across a scattering of dropped documents—the contents of a guard captain’s satchel spilled when someone fell. Warrants, maps, orders lay trampled into the slush, ink smearing beneath boots.

“We are done,” Léopold said. His breath steamed in short bursts. He could feel his heart hammering against the revolver at his ribs.

Ashford tilted his head, gaze dropping briefly to the saber at Léopold’s side, then to the shape of the gun under his coat.

“No,” he replied. “We’ve finally reached the important part.”

He tossed something small at Léopold’s feet.

For a heartbeat it looked like a dropped inkstone. Then it burst.

Light flared white-hot, stabbing through the gray day. The world became noise and brightness and flying grit. Léopold turned his head, too slow, bringing an arm up to shield his eyes. Pain stabbed through his temple as the flash burned afterimages into everything.

He heard, rather than saw, Ashford take the stairs in long, efficient strides.

Léopold blinked into the hazy glare, vision full of ghosts. The outline of the tower’s entrance swam in front of him. Figures rushed past, one clutching a bleeding arm, another shouting orders through a voice gone hoarse.

He swallowed the pounding in his skull, felt for the nearest solid shape, and pushed off it. His hand landed on a collapsed guard’s shoulder. The man groaned; Léopold muttered something that could pass for comfort and used the motion to launch himself toward the stairs.

His boots struck the soaked wood. He kept his weight on the balls of his feet, letting momentum carry him upward. His shoulder brushed the wall as he leaned into the tighter turns, fingers skimming rough plaster to steady himself.

Above, he heard the dull crack of a revolver.

A splinter of stone exploded from the wall beside his head, stinging his cheek. He dropped low, more by instinct than sight, and something sang over him close enough that he felt the air it carved.

He answered with his own shot, firing toward the muzzle-flash. The report hammered his ears in the stairwell.

A grunt told him he’d struck something. Footsteps scraped, shifted, then resumed with a hitch.

He took the last steps two at a time and burst out into the upper chamber, half-blind, at a stumble.

The room had once supervised comings and goings; now one wall was missing half its wood from some forgotten repair, open to the falling snow and the chaos below. Wind knifed through the gap, flinging paper charms and torn banners past like desperate birds.

Ashford stood near the opening, one hand clutching his side where dark was spreading under his coat. His other hand held the revolver, barrel leveled at where Léopold emerged.

The shot came the instant their eyes met.

Léopold threw himself sideways. The impact of the bullet tore fire through his upper arm, spinning him into a stack of old crates. Wood cracked, splinters biting into his back. His fingers went briefly numb.

He lay still for a heartbeat, letting the pain pin him instead of freeze him. Ashford’s footsteps approached, measured and unhurried, boots crisp against the boards.

“No more running,” Ashford said. His voice was slightly tight with his own wound, but his words were firm. “You’ve chased this far enough.”

Léopold’s left hand had fallen against one of the crates. His fingers brushed something round and familiar in his belt pouch. His right arm hung heavy and hot, blood seeping down to his wrist.

He let his right arm dangle, as if more damaged than it was, and pushed himself up with his left, face contorted in what could easily be read as panic.

Ashford moved closer, revolver steady.

“You always did overextend,” he continued. “Hong Kong. Canton. Edo. Never quite willing to accept the cost of—”

Léopold hurled the small object across the floor, not at Ashford, but at the empty space halfway between them.

Ashford’s eyes tracked it despite himself. It burst against the boards with a sharp pop.

Smoke boiled up, thick and stinging, curling from the floor like a living thing. It billowed between them, swallowing the open wall and the view of the gate below.

Ashford shifted without hesitation. He stepped around the spreading cloud, not into it, circling to flank where he knew men tried to escape choke points: a habit drilled into him since his Black Cross initiation.

“Trickery,” he called, voice edged with disdain. The revolver’s hammer clicked as he cocked it again. “You really have learned nothing.”

Léopold pushed off the crate, moving not away from the smoke but into it, counting his steps by feel. Two long strides took him to the edge of the cloud; he slowed, listening.

Floorboard creak, three paces to his right. The soft change in air where a man pivoted. Clothing rasp against scabbard leather.

In the stairwell years ago, Nakamura had opened his guard on purpose, inviting overconfidence. Ashford had read it, turned the blade aside, and slid his own into the gap before Nakamura even realized he’d misjudged.

Léopold remembered the way Nakamura’s body had folded, clean and swift. The neatness of it. The insult of how perfect the motion had been.

He let his left foot skid on the gritty floor, letting his wounded right arm swing out uselessly, exposing his ribs and throat in the fog.

The bait was obvious to anyone who had seen it before. That was the point.

Ashford saw it.

Through the thinning edge of the smoke, his eyes narrowed. He stepped in—fast, decisive—left hand releasing the gun now that the distance had closed, right bringing up his saber in a smooth, practiced arc aimed to catch Léopold’s exposed side and end this with one efficient cut.

His body remembered the stair, the trick, the victory. His muscles reached for the same rhythm.

Léopold broke it.

Instead of jerking away from the incoming blade, he dropped straight down.

His knees hit the planks, jarring his wounded arm. At the same instant, he snapped his left wrist downward inside the leather band.

Steel flicked out from under his sleeve with a muted whisper, shining once in the murk.

Ashford’s sword cut through the space where Léopold’s ribs had been an eyeblink earlier, momentum carrying him forward. He twisted his wrist to adjust, aiming to rake the blade down across Léopold’s back instead, but the angle was wrong. The familiar pattern had shifted under him.

Léopold drove upward.

His shoulder slammed into Ashford’s midsection, knocking the breath from the man’s lungs. The hidden blade in his left hand punched forward and up, finding the gap where coat and vest and ribs no longer aligned because Ashford had leaned in for the finishing stroke he thought he knew.

For a second there was only resistance. Then something gave.

Ashford’s eyes widened, the shock more of recognition than pain. His sword arm spasmed; the blade clattered from his fingers, skidding across the floor to ring against the far wall.

He grabbed at Léopold’s shoulder, more for balance than attack. His fingers dug into fabric, then slipped.

“You—” he started, voice catching. A faint, incredulous huff escaped him, almost a laugh. “You watched.”

Léopold’s breath brushed his cheek, harsh and close, tinged with iron.

“In the stairwell,” Léopold said. He could taste dust and smoke and blood. “This time it’s your pattern.”

For a heartbeat he wanted to say something else—about Nakamura, about Ando, about Kettles left warm and letters left half-finished. There wasn’t time, and Ashford did not deserve a sermon.

Ashford tried to speak again. A protest. A lesson. A warning. Whatever it was drowned in the wet rattle in his throat.

Léopold eased the blade free and stepped back, letting gravity take the rest.

Ashford stumbled. For a moment it seemed he might catch himself, hand reaching toward the wall. His fingers closed on one of the torn charms plastered there by wind and fear. The paper ripped as he slid down.

He ended sitting against the beam, legs outstretched, one hand lax at his side, the other still clutching the fragment of charm. His eyes tracked something beyond Léopold, through the broken wall, to where the gate and the bodies lay below.

“Someone has to hold the—” he managed, the word *reins* dying unspoken. His head tilted forward, chin resting on his chest, as if he’d simply fallen asleep after a long day’s work.

Outside, the snow kept falling.

Léopold stood over him, breathing hard. His arm burned; blood from the wound ran down to gather at his palm, dripping onto the floor in steady ticks. Each drop darkened the wood by Ashford’s boot.

Below, the crowd had already begun to shift, the first rumors germinating in the churned slush. Ii Naosuke’s body lay where history required. Men shouted, wrote, prayed, cursed.

Sekibanki’s heads drifted closer to the broken tower window, eyes reflecting both the gate below and the two men above. Kagerou’s silhouette crouched at the roofline, ears flat.

Underwater, Wakasagihime felt the shock of Ashford’s death ripple through the crowd’s fear like a stone dropped into her river. She closed her eyes, letting the new story sink and spread.

The Templars’ neat narrative died quietly in the half-ruined room, with no witnesses but an Assassin, some youkai, and the falling snow.

Léopold flexed his left hand. The hidden blade slid back into its leather sheath with a soft, final click.

Chapter Text

The room around them was already coming apart before Ashford’s body hit the floor.

The broken wall, the snow, the blood-slick boards—each detail shivered, lines of light running through them like cracks in old lacquer. The torn charms on the beam became thin strips of blue, then numbers, then nothing at all.

Léopold blinked once, hard.

When he opened his eyes, the world had become a corridor.

Floor, ceiling, walls—everything was a long vanishing tunnel of pale grids, stretching into a horizon that might have been infinity or twenty paces away. Memory fragments hung in the air on either side like panes of glass, edges glowing. Some were sharp: a Canton alley under monsoon rain, a tribunal hall lined with masked judges, the lantern-lit streets of Edo. Others flickered half-formed, collapsing back into wireframe.

Ashford stood in front of him, whole again.

No blood on his coat. No tear in his shirt. The wound Léopold had just opened was gone, replaced by the faint shimmer of desynchronization across his chest, as if the simulation couldn’t quite decide what version of him belonged here.

His eyes, though, were exactly as they’d been: tired, intent, measuring.

He looked down at his own hands, flexed his fingers once, then up at the corridor. A ghost of a smile touched his mouth.

“Still hate this place,” he muttered.

The sound didn’t echo. It folded in on itself, swallowed by the grids.

Léopold glanced back over his shoulder. The door to the tower room was just a flat blue outline behind him, hovering in midair with nothing on the other side. The gate below, the crowd, the youkai—gone.

He turned back to Ashford.

“You know what this is,” Ashford said. Not quite a question.

Léopold didn’t answer. He could feel the familiar weight at his wrist, but when he flicked his hand, nothing happened. The Animus gave him only his hands, his voice, his memories.

It would be enough.

A fragment drifted between them: Canton.

Rain hammered the stone street, bouncing in silver needles from puddles clogged with refuse and paper charms. Bodies lay under rough mats along the wall; the mats were soaked through, edges dark with more than water. People moved past without stopping, heads down, skirts hitched up from the filth.

Ashford reached up and touched the shard with two fingers. The scene sprang into full color around them, wrapping over the corridor like a shell.

The smell hit first. Human waste, rotting food, the sour-sweet stench of disease. A woman knelt in a doorway, hands pressed to her face. Her shoulders shook with soundless sobs, her hair loose and tangled.

Léopold remembered this street. He had come through later, on a different day, with a different handler. He’d taken one step into the muck and thought, just for a second, of Montréal snow.

Here, though, the Animus sharpened Ashford’s angle.

“The day I arrived,” Ashford said. He moved through the scene with the ease of someone walking inside a dream he’d had too often. People parted around him or simply failed to register his presence.

He stopped beside one of the mats.

The body under it was small. When he lifted the edge of the woven reed, a girl’s face stared up—eyes half-open, lips cracked, skin stretched tight over bones. Flies crawled at the corners of her mouth.

Ashford let the mat fall back.

“No plan made this,” he said quietly. “No design. No conspirator sat down and chose that girl for that doorway.”

He looked at Léopold, and the corridor bled through the rain for an instant—blue lines showing through the gray sky.

“They just…failed to plan anything else,” Ashford went on. “Merchants chasing profit, officials chasing position, soldiers chasing orders. No one holding the knife. Just hands pushing, and soft things caught in between.”

Léopold watched the woman at the threshold. In his memory, he had seen her days later, quieter, empty-eyed, standing in a line for rice that wasn’t enough for half the crowd.

“You want me to feel guilty for something I didn’t do,” he said.

Ashford’s mouth twitched.

“I want you to understand what I saw,” he replied.

The Canton scene broke apart into cubes and lines, raining down in a digital shower that dissolved before touching the floor.

A new memory snapped into place: a long room paneled in dark wood, lit by high windows and hanging lamps. Men sat on benches along the walls, faces hidden behind simple half-masks. A symbol hung above them: a cross, black and stark against a white circle.

In the center of the room, a man knelt, hands bound behind him. His coat was expensive, embroidery at his cuffs glinting. Sweat gleamed under his chin.

Ashford stood behind him, sword drawn.

Léopold had never been here. The corridor told him anyway: voices layered over one another, indistinct Latin phrases, the scrape of boots on stone.

“You profited personally from shipments meant to secure the Emperor’s peace,” one of the masked men intoned. “You diverted medicines and sold them back at tenfold price. You used our creed’s network to enrich yourself off dead Chinese.”

The kneeling man’s head jerked up.

“You sent us there,” he snarled. “You ordered—”

Ashford’s hand tightened on the hilt. His jaw clenched in a way Léopold recognized from a hundred briefings. He stepped forward at some unheard cue.

“No speeches,” he said.

He didn’t make a show of it. No flourish. No raised voice. The blade moved in a single, practiced arc. The man’s words cut off in a wet gasp. Red spread across the floor.

The masked judges did not rise. One of them nodded.

“We cannot be them,” another said. “We are not chaos. We are correction.”

Ashford wiped the blade with a careful flick, not letting the stain reach the hilt. His eyes stayed on the spreading pool at his feet, watching the edges creep.

The tribunal dissolved back into the corridor.

“In that room,” he murmured, “I realized there are only two kinds of knives in the world.”

Blue lines reasserted themselves, humming softly. Shards drifted like jellyfish in a current.

Léopold said nothing.

“A knife someone chooses to hold,” Ashford continued, “and a knife that’s just the shape of a thousand accidents. China was cut open and no one held the knife. Don’t you see?”

He looked up, the usual calm stripped back to something rawer.

“Japan will be cut open too. Treaty ports, unequal coins, powder, gods dragged down from their shrines to sit in foreign museums. Better a surgeon than a butcher.”

Another shard wobbled into view at that word, as if called by it.

Edo, this time.

A cramped tenement room. Tatami worn thin near the doorway. A crude charcoal sketch of a farm pinned to the wall with a single chopstick. Henrik’s tobacco tin on a low table, lid dented.

Henrik himself sat cross-legged, sleeves rolled up, laughing with his whole body. He held his pipe in two fingers, waving it as he spoke, a thin stream of smoke coiling from the bowl toward the beams.

Nakamura leaned against the wall, humming under his breath as he sharpened a knife with slow, precise strokes. A younger Assassin dozed in the corner, head tipping forward, jerking upright when he nearly fell over.

Léopold stood in the doorway, watching them.

He remembered this exactly: the weight of fatigue in his shoulders, the sudden lightness when Henrik shoved the tin across the table and said, “Go on, don’t look at me like that, I’m not taking it with me.”

The shard split.

In one version, Ashford stood outside the same room, across a narrow alley, pressed flat to the opposite wall. He listened to the murmur of voices through thin plaster, one hand resting on the hilt at his hip, mapping routes in his head.

“A cell,” Ashford’s voice said, overlaying the image. “Clever, disciplined men in the wrong place. You think I enjoy severing them? I mark them because if we don’t, they tear at the wound.”

The other version of the shard showed the same room days later. The door broken. The air filled with the metallic tang of blood and the bitter chalk-scent of smoke bombs long spent. Bodies laid out tidily on the tatami, hands folded, eyes closed.

Ashford’s aesthetic of clean surgery.

Léopold’s throat tightened. His fingers curled. He heard cloth ripping under his grip; only then did he realize he’d grabbed the hem of his own coat.

“You tell yourself you’re a surgeon,” Léopold said. His voice came out low, almost calm. “But you never asked if the patient wanted the operation.”

A faint glitch ran through the corridor, a ripple at the edges of the grids.

Ashford’s gaze sharpened.

“Ask?” he repeated. “Ask *who*, Lafèche? The merchant who wants lower tariffs? The daimyo who wants more cannon? The peasant who just wants enough rice? They see their own suffering and claw at it. They don’t see that every claw tears something else.”

He stepped closer. The air between them buzzed with static.

“I saw it,” he said. “I see it. You do too. You think your Mentor sends you here for individual lives? For Ando’s one clever head? For Henrik’s jokes?”

The names hit like physical things. Shards flickered in response.

For Henrik: the warehouse staircase, painted with fire and lime smoke. Henrik shoving Léopold through a back door, coughing, then turning to cover the rear with a hoarse, “Go, you stubborn bastard,” before the ceiling collapsed.

For Nakamura: the narrow stair, his shoulder braced against the wall, body already bleeding in three places as he held back Black Cross blades long enough for a messenger to slip past him. The way he’d hummed a lullaby between gritted teeth.

For Ando: the rooftop under cold stars, fingers stained with ink tracing imaginary constellations onto Léopold’s palm, naming futures that would never be.

For Ii: the quiet tea room, petitions stacked like gravestones, his hand trembling only once as it signed one name among many.

Faces flickered one after another, each in their own shard, drifting like lanterns down a dark river.

Ashford watched Léopold’s eyes move.

“There,” he said softly. “Your answer. You don’t have a plan. You have portraits. You love them,” he added, not unkindly. “So do I. That’s the problem.”

He tapped the shard of the Canton doorway again. The woman’s shoulders shook, endlessly, a loop the simulation couldn’t escape.

“The knife cuts either way,” he said. “If you refuse to hold it, it still cuts. You just don’t choose where.”

Léopold exhaled. It came out rough.

“So your answer was to become the hand that never stops cutting,” he said. “Until there’s nothing left but clean edges.”

Ashford’s jaw worked. For a heartbeat, the careful composure dropped, and Léopold saw the boy he’d trained beside: the one who used to stay up late over maps, arguing about possibilities with a pen tucked behind one ear.

A new shard intruded, unbidden.

A small room above a tea house in Macao. Two younger men hunched over a table, the lantern between them smoking badly. Ashford, hair shorter, digs a thumb into a map of the South China Sea.

“If they keep carving concessions, there’s nothing left,” he says, frustrated. “We need—God, we need someone to think bigger than a single port.”

Léopold, thinner, eyes sharper, grins.

“You volunteering?”

Ashford laughs, the sound surprised, self-mocking.

“As if they’d trust a dock rat with that,” he says. “No. But someone has to hold the reins. Or we all get dragged.”

The shard stuttered, rewound, played again with microscopic differences. Léopold remembered the night; Ashford remembered the pressure. Both versions layered, glitching.

In the corridor, Léopold took a step closer.

“I am not here to argue who is good,” he said. “Or whose losses are acceptable. You know what you’ve done. I know what I’ve done.”

He lifted his gaze to meet Ashford’s fully.

“I am here because every time you decide how much a country can bleed, you pick up the knife sooner next time. And the next. And there’s never a day you set it down.”

Ashford’s shoulders rose and fell in a breath that stirred nothing in the still air.

“Someone has to keep count,” he said. “If we don’t, others will, and they will do it worse.”

“Then let them,” Léopold said.

Ashford’s eyes widened—not in fear, but in genuine shock, as if the idea had never been allowed room in his mind.

“You’d trust them?” he demanded. “The Templar profiteers? The Bakufu fools? The emperors and merchants and warlords? You’d trust them with what you’ve seen?”

Léopold thought of Ando’s daughter screaming in the second square. Of Wakasagihime turning away. Of Sekibanki’s three faces watching execution after execution like a terrible, necessary harvest.

“No,” he said.

He thought of his own hands, folding Henrik’s coat. Of the ink soaking into Ando’s death warrant. Of the way he’d said to Ii, *Then I’ll be the foreign knife you pretend you don’t use.*

“I don’t trust you either,” he added.

Silence stretched between them, taut as a drawn bow.

The corridor around them flickered. Grids warped, straight lines bending like reeds in a current.

Somewhere, outside this construct, Ashford’s real body was cooling on tatami. Somewhere, files were being marked, synch indexes updated, watchers taking notes.

Here, it was just them.

Ashford lifted his chin a fraction.

“If you kill me,” he said, voice going very quiet, “there will be others. They won’t all remember Canton. They won’t all have stood in that tribunal hall. Some of them will be the man I executed. Some of them will be worse. You know that.”

“Yes,” Léopold said.

Ashford searched his face, as if looking for something salvageable.

“Then why?” he whispered.

Léopold could have tried to say *for justice* or *for freedom* or *for the Creed.* The words rose automatically, but they tasted wrong in his mouth, like lines read from someone else’s script.

Instead, he saw:

Henrik’s crude sketch of a farm pinned to that tenement wall.
Nakamura’s small hidden shrine in a corner, incense burned down to the last stick.
Ando’s children tracing constellations on his palm.
Ii’s hand hovering over Ando’s name before he signed.

“I am not your surgeon,” he said finally. “I am not your butcher. I am just the man who knows you too well to leave you with the knife.”

His right hand moved.

In the real world, the blade had already done its work. In the corridor, there was no steel, no blood. Only the motion, encoded: a step, a thrust, the closing of distance between two people who had once shared rain and maps and cigarettes on too many nights.

Ashford’s body jerked as the simulation caught up to the fact of his wound.

The crack across his chest flared bright, a white fracture line racing up his sternum, branching into his shoulders, his throat. For an instant, the Black Cross symbol flickered over his heart, then shattered into a swarm of light that dissolved into the grids.

He sagged.

The Animus did not give him the indignity of collapsing. He simply…dimmed, the edges of him going transparent. Through his chest, Léopold could see a shard of Edo nights—Odaiba’s half-built guns, the Nirayama furnace glowing, gold changing hands in back rooms.

Ashford looked at him one last time, and for just that moment, all the doctrine and rhetoric burned away. There was only hurt—hurt that it was Léopold standing here, delivering this end.

“You could have helped steer,” he said hoarsely. “We were supposed to…fix it, Lafèche.”

Léopold’s throat closed.

“I didn’t save this country,” he said. “I just took one hand off its neck.”

Ashford’s lips twitched, as if he almost argued again. Instead, he breathed out once, slowly. The sound dissolved into static.

“Try not to drown in your portraits,” he murmured. “They’re heavier than you think.”

Then he was gone.

No body. No fall. The place where he had stood was suddenly just more blue lines, humming softly.

The shards around them stuttered, then began to drift away, dissolving into the horizon.

Canton faded first. The tribunal hall winked out. Henrik’s room, Nakamura’s stair, Ando’s roof—all slipped from sight, leaving only the memory lodged in Léopold’s chest where no Animus could erase it.

The corridor contracted.

The vanishing point rushed toward him like a train.

For a heartbeat, Léopold stood alone in the narrowing tunnel, hand still half-raised, fingers curled around the absence of a hilt.

Then snow touched his face.

Cold, real and immediate, stung the skin under his right eye where the flash powder had burned him. The ache in his arm roared back. The smell of blood and burned powder and wet wood slammed into his senses.

He was in the broken gate tower again, standing over Ashford’s very still body.

Outside, at Sakuradamon, the crowd was already inventing stories.

Inside, in the quiet space between worlds, Léopold let his hand fall to his side and did not, for a long moment, move at all.

Chapter Text

Smoke came first.

It stained the winter sky over Edo and Yokohama in thin, uneven streaks—burned shutters here, a shopfront there, a charred patrol banner left half-hanging like a dead crow. On one corner a sign for a foreign chemist’s had been smashed, the glass swept away but the blood not yet fully washed from the stones. On another, the shutters of a pro-treaty tea house were nailed shut, inked threats still wet on the boards.

Léopold walked through it all with his collar up and his eyes lowered, listening to how the city had changed in the spaces between words.

“Another attack in Shinbashi,” a fishmonger muttered, gutting a carp with quick, angry strokes. “They say the patriots left a note on his door. Called him a dog of the barbarians.”

Behind her, the price board had been wiped clean so many times that ghosts of old numbers still showed beneath the new ones.

At the next stall over, a clerk in a neat but frayed haori leaned close to a customer, voice barely above the clink of weights on the scale.

“Yokohama warehouses, too. Foreigners have doubled the guards,” he said. “And the gold? Gone. Changed to silver and back again until no one remembers what a ryō is worth. But certain houses always come out ahead.”

His eyes flicked sideways—toward a polished storefront deeper in the street, its foreign sign freshly painted. Inside, a new factor in a dark coat laughed softly with a samurai retainer, their hands meeting briefly over a ledger that never left the counter.

Templars, Léopold thought, without giving the word a shape. Old network, new faces. The Black Cross brand that had once sat behind his eyes felt curiously absent, like phantom pain from a limb cut away.

Above the street, a red-haired woman in an ordinary worker’s dress paused with a bucket on her hip and looked down at him. For a heartbeat her eyes flashed a too-bright crimson. Then she looked past him, head tilting as if listening to another set of whispers entirely, and vanished into the crowd.

Sekibanki, keeping tally of fear.

The abandoned shrine that had once been a meeting place for the Grassroots Youkai Network still stood, but the offerings on its stone steps had changed.

Once, there had been sweets, coins, occasionally the head of a fox left with awkward reverence. Now, cracked cups of sake sat in front of crude brushwork: 尊王攘夷 scrawled in strokes that bled into the paper.

Kagerou crouched on the veranda rail, coat tails hanging loose, ears flicking at the distant roar of a crowd down in the town. Her claws tapped a restless rhythm on the beam.

“They’re louder every night,” she said. “Shout about purity till their throats go raw. Then go home and boil foreign sugar in their tea.”

Her nose wrinkled.

Sekibanki’s head hovered above the offertory box, body sitting cross-legged against a pillar below like a discarded doll. One of her other heads drifted out through a gap in the eaves, listening to slogans in a back alley; a third bobbed near the gate, watching the way passersby hurried past without looking up.

“Louder is good,” one of her mouths said. “Fear tastes better when it thinks it’s righteous.”

“You’re starting to sound like them,” Kagerou replied.

Down at the mossy foot of the steps, Wakasagihime rested with her upper body on the edge of the half-silted pond, tail swaying lazily in the dark water. She held a thin paper boat between her fingers—the sort children folded when they wanted to see if the shrine spirits were listening.

It sagged, waterlogged, ink running.

“I heard a girl at the river today,” Wakasagihime murmured, more to the boat than to anyone else. “She called us monsters and barbarians in the same breath, like she’d learned both words from the same story.”

She flicked the ruined boat back into the pond. It spun once and sank.

Sekibanki’s head by the gate drifted down, turning to face her.

“And?” one voice asked.

“And then she asked the river to take care of her father,” Wakasagihime said. “He sells lumber to the shipyards now. She’s afraid someone will call him a traitor and cut his throat while he sleeps.”

She let her palm skim the surface. Barely any offerings floated there anymore. No coins, no little carved fish. Just a few petals blown from someone else’s altar.

“I can breathe underwater,” she said. “But even I can’t drink smoke instead of stories.”

Sekibanki’s three faces considered that. The one by the gate rolled its eyes.

“So we choose,” it said. “Let the fear die, and we starve. Or follow the loudest mouths and eat well till someone hangs us up as cautionary tales.”

Kagerou’s claws bit into the rail.

“Or,” she said, “we pick our own targets.”

Her gaze slid toward the faint line of the coast, where Yokohama’s foreign masts pricked the horizon like new teeth.

Ando’s house did not look different from the street.

The same wash hung out to dry. The same chipped bucket leaned by the door. Only the sandals at the threshold had changed: one less pair of adult shoes, one smaller pair set carefully beside them, straw worn down at the heels.

Inside, the air was thicker.

Ando’s widow knelt by the brazier, stirring a pot that smelled of rice stretched too far with water and a scrap of fish. Her eyes were not red; they were the color of paper left in the sun too long. The youngest child sat beside her, clutching a wooden horse Ando had carved years ago, thumb moving over the smoothed-down ear again and again.

Near the far wall, the eldest stood with his shoulders squared as if answering roll call. The man in front of him wore good cotton and bad manners. His headband was tied just slightly too tight, pushing the veins at his temples to stand out. His voice was soft, but every phrase felt honed.

“Your father saw clearly,” the recruiter said. “He knew the shogun’s lackeys would turn on patriots in the end. They feared his mind. That is why they cut it from the body of the nation.”

He held out a folded banner. The characters for 尊王攘夷 were written in a practiced hand.

“Men like him,” the recruiter continued, “don’t truly die. Their resolve passes to their sons. Unless”—his gaze flicked to the bare shelf where Ando’s books used to stand—“they waste it.”

The boy’s fingers twitched.

By the door, half in shadow, Léopold stood with his hat in his hands, back pressed lightly against the frame. He had come earlier, pressing a pouch of coin and a letter into the widow’s hands. She had taken the letter and let the money fall to the floor.

“You saved him once to feed him to them later,” she had said, picking up the coins with stiff fingers. “I’ll accept this for the children. Not for you.”

Now he watched as the boy reached out and closed his hand around the banner’s wooden rod. The recruiter’s smile widened, but his eyes slid past the child to the table where the coin-pouch now sat. He was already measuring how much commitment a half-starved household could give to a cause.

Near the brazier, Ando’s middle child sat with her back to them all, needle moving in tight, careful stitches. She was mending an old haori, fabric thick with old ink stains. When her hand trembled, the needle pricked her finger. A bead of blood welled up.

She put the finger in her mouth, eyes fixed on the thread. She did not look at the banner. She did not look at Léopold.

He stepped back into the alley, letting the recruiter’s voice fade behind the thin wall.

Above him, the sky was a flat, oppressive gray.

He found himself tracing the pattern of the constellations Ando had once drawn on his palm, ghost lines only he could see.

They didn’t look any more orderly now.

The safe house smelled of ink and damp straw.

Four low-rank Assassins sat in the narrow room, each on their own square of tatami as if separated by invisible walls. None of them knew the others’ full names. They knew codenames, street corners, dead-drop marks carved into wood.

A girl barely older than sixteen, hair cut short like a nervous apprentice, held a rolled map in her lap. Next to her, a former porter flexed his hands, palms scarred from rope. Across from them, a monk in a worn brown robe watched the paper walls, lips moving silently.

The door slid open just enough to admit a single red head.

Literally.

Sekibanki’s detached head floated in, capelet trailing, eyes sweeping once around the room. Her body was elsewhere, walking the streets as an unremarkable woman.

“Message,” she said, voice dry. “From above above.”

The girl held up her hands. Sekibanki spat out a folded scrap of paper—carefully, so it did not burn—with an expression somewhere between distaste and amusement.

“Don’t say I never deliver anything,” she added.

The monk unfolded it, squinting at the small characters.

“Separate routes. New codes. No gatherings larger than three,” he read. “Trust only what comes through agreed channels. If a foreigner offers help, assume two knives behind his back.”

He hesitated on that line, glancing at the others.

“Do they mean—” the porter began.

“They mean everyone,” Sekibanki said before he finished. “Templars, sonnō jōi, foreign Assassins who think their creed makes them special. Fear doesn’t care which banner it eats under.”

She drifted backward, head tilting.

“And if you die,” she added, almost gently, “it’ll be in ones and twos now. No glorious last stands. No names in songs. That’s what compartments buy you.”

The girl’s fingers tightened on the map.

Under the floorboards, another copy of that same scrap sat folded under Léopold’s hand. He had set these precautions himself, after Henrik and Nakamura. Protection, isolation, loneliness—the same line drawn three ways.

Sekibanki’s head floated back out, leaving the room smaller than before.

The ambush found him in Yokohama.

It came, as he’d always known it would, not at some solemn council or grand assassination, but on an ordinary afternoon when the sea breeze carried coal smoke and gull-cries and the clatter of foreign tongues.

He walked a narrow lane between warehouses, the boards under his boots damp with brine and spilled oil. To his right, stacked crates stenciled with foreign letters. To his left, a slatted fence with cracks just wide enough to glimpse the masts in the next yard.

He knew he was not alone the moment the gulls went silent.

The first shout came from behind.

“There! The foreign shadow!”

The words snapped down the alley like a banner unfurling. Feet pounded on wood. A blade scraped free of a sheath—not polished court steel, but something cheaper and hungrier.

Léopold didn’t turn until the last heartbeat before impact.

When he did, it was only to shift his weight.

The sword came in low, aimed to gut. He stepped sideways, shoulder brushing the fence, splinters catching in his coat. Steel slid past where his ribs had been a breath before and bit into the slat instead, sending a jolt up the attacker’s arm.

He saw the young man’s face clearly: eyes blown wide, a band of white showing all the way around the iris. Sweat had made a dark V on the front of his shirt. He smelled of incense and fear.

For a fraction of a second, the boy’s expression faltered. This was supposed to be a righteous strike against a faceless enemy, not a near-miss against a tired foreigner with ink stains on his cuffs.

Another voice shouted from the lane’s mouth.

“Kill him! Kill the foreign shadow!”

More feet pounded closer.

Léopold could have drawn his revolver, but the lane was too tight, the angles bad. He moved instead—up, not back—planting one foot on a crate and pushing off, catching the edge of the fence with his fingers and swinging his weight, boots scuffing along the boards.

The boy wrenched his sword free of the wood with a spray of splinters, slashing upward at where Léopold’s legs had been; his blade met only air and a scrap of coat.

From the rooftops above, claws clicked.

Kagerou dropped into the lane like a shadow unhooked from the eaves, landing between Léopold and the second knot of attackers. Her eyes glowed a feral red, teeth bared in something that wasn’t quite a snarl.

“Boo,” she said.

For patriots who prided themselves on fearing nothing, they weren’t prepared for a woman whose ears twitched under her hair and whose fingers ended in honest claws. Two of them flinched backward, almost colliding. One made a warding gesture that belonged to old shrine tales, not modern politics.

Sekibanki’s head appeared above the fence behind them, capelet fluttering in the sea breeze. Her mouth curved in a cynical half-smile.

“Careful,” she said. “The foreign shadow has monsters on his side.”

Her voice carried just enough mockery to twist their righteous fury into something less clean. They hesitated. That breath was all Léopold needed.

He swung himself up, boots finding purchase on a crossbeam, and ran along the top of the fence, wood flexing under his weight. His hand brushed the butt of his revolver as if by habit—but he left it holstered. A shot would bring soldiers, Bakufu patrols, a different kind of death.

At the end of the lane, he dropped into an alley that smelled of fish and printer’s ink, landing in a spray of dust. Behind him, voices tangled—the patriots’ curses, Kagerou’s low laugh, Sekibanki’s sharp remarks. He did not wait to see how the balance of fear and bravado played out.

He ran toward the water.

Yokohama harbor spread before him, a forest of foreign masts and black iron hulls that looked like floating factories. Smoke poured from their stacks in slow, patient curls, smudging the sky into a dirty watercolor.

Closer to shore, Japanese boats bobbed restlessly, dwarfed by the larger ships. Men in mixed clothing loaded crates along gangplanks: some in kimono, some in patchwork Western jackets cut to the wrong pattern. Orders rang out in two languages. The sea did not bother to distinguish.

Léopold stepped up onto a low stone outcropping where he could see the whole curve of the harbor. The wind off the bay tasted of salt, coal, and something metallic that reminded him of the Nirayama furnace on its first firing.

In his left hand, he held a small, worn book.

The Mentor’s journal had never looked more fragile. Its leather was cracked along the spine; the page edges had taken on the soft, feathery texture of paper handled too often. Marginal notes crowded the margins—some of them his own, cramped between the Mentor’s steady hand and Ashford’s neat corrections.

One page near the back bore a name that had been carefully scratched out. The ink grooves still showed.

He let his thumb rest there for a moment.

Ships waited offshore that could have taken him away from all this. He knew which agents had the right seals, which captains could be bribed, how to vanish into another port with a new language and a different set of problems.

Behind him, in the city, sonnō jōi youths were shouting his death. In foreign counting-houses, his file lay on a desk with the Black Cross dossiers, marked with whatever color they used for assets gone rogue.

He thought of leaving.

He thought of Ando’s eldest child holding a banner too big for his hands. Of Ando’s daughter sewing with blood on her fingertip. Of Wakasagihime pushing a half-drowned dockworker toward a ladder in hidden water while no one on the wharf looked down. Of Sekibanki’s three heads hovering over a crowd, each listening to a different lie. Of Kagerou’s claws between him and a patriot’s blade.

He opened the journal to a blank space at the end of a page and, with a stub of a brush-pen borrowed from a printer, wrote a single line in French, the letters small and careful.

*Mission: tenir la ligne, pas fermer la porte.*

Hold the line, not close the door.

He looked at the words until the salt wind tried to lift the page.

“I didn’t save this country,” he said under his breath. “I just kept one hand off its throat.”

Then he closed the book, tapped it once against his chest like a vow, and slid it back into his coat.

Smoke from the ships drifted low over the water, blurring the line between sea and sky.

Somewhere beyond the horizon, other harbors waited. He turned his back on them.

Instead of walking toward the foreign quarter’s gates, he stepped down off the stone and into a side alley that led back into the tangle of Yokohama’s streets.

Halfway down that narrow way, the shout came again, from a different mouth.

“There! The foreign shadow!”

This time it came with a note of awe as well as hate, as if the story had grown in the retelling.

A blade flashed at the edge of his vision, bright against the gloom.

Léopold moved without thinking, shoulder brushing brick, coat snapping with the air of the blade’s passage as it missed him by the width of two fingers. Plaster dust rained down. Somewhere above, a gull cried, startled back into sound.

He did not stop.

Behind him, the cry rose, catching on other tongues, bending with other meanings.

“Kill the foreign shadow!”

“Find him!”

“Did you see him?”

The words chased him down the alley and out toward the harbor.

Overhead, the smoke from Yokohama’s ships curled up into the low clouds, slow and indifferent, as if the bay itself were exhaling a story no one had yet learned how to read.