Captain

The paper walls catch fast.

The shōji screens flare white-orange, the rice paper vanishing so fast the frames are still standing when the paper is gone. The corridor ahead of us is already lit, the one behind us worse, and Seijiro's hand on mine is pulling me through the heat. His katana is in the other hand, the one I've never seen him carry before tonight. His pace is wrong: no hesitation. He turns left where I would've turned right and finds the exterior door that opens onto the lower terrace while the interior route I know is already burning.

My thighs are sore from the floor. I feel it with every step, the ache down the inside of each stride, and his hand is pulling mine and I keep moving.

My mother's silk screen. The east corridor. Cranes and cloud-pine on indigo silk, the one she finished the year she died. The east corridor is on fire and I can feel the heat through the stone wall as we pass it.

My feet keep moving. The screen is silk and the silk is burning and my mother has been dead for ten years and there is nothing to save.

We're through the terrace door and into the open air. The compound is chaos. Smoke everywhere, thick and acrid, the shōki-stink from the docks but sharper. The garrison guards are gone from the terrace posts. Beyond the stone balustrade, the island drops into cloud. I can hear fighting from the gate, the heavy percussion of clubs on armor, the concussive crack of something I've only heard from the harbor before, the roar of men who are losing.

Seijiro pulls me down the terrace steps and into the street. His coat is open, his chest bare underneath, and I have never seen him in daylight before. Two months of dark rooms and darker alleys and this is the first time I can actually see what my hands have been learning. The scars I traced with my fingers an hour ago have ridges I never felt. Old wounds, healed thick, running across muscle that moves under his skin when he pulls me forward. His shoulders are broader than I let myself notice in the dark. His forearm is flexed hard around my hand. He pulls me and his pace doesn't slow and I am running in sandals on uneven stone with my robe barely tied and smoke in my lungs. Something is wrong and it's not the fire. It's him.

The lower quarter opens ahead of us. Buildings burn on both sides, the timber frames collapsing inward, sending sparks into the dawn sky. Beyond the far row of roofs, there is nothing but open air and cloud. People running. Soldiers, some of them, but scattered. Fleeing. Armed men and women move in the opposite direction. They own this disaster. Oni, massive, iron-ringed clubs in hands bigger than my head. A Tengu on the rooftop to our left, wings folded in lacquered armor, watching the street below with perfect stillness.

They part for Seijiro. They see him and they step aside, and one of them, a scarred human with a fire-tube strapped to his back, nods as we pass.

Seijiro nods back. Then he shouts without slowing down: "Customs house is clear. Push the rest to the harbor and hold the dock. Nobody leaves on a ship that isn't ours."

The man salutes. Salutes. Like Seijiro is his commanding officer.

Seijiro navigates without hesitating. The alley behind the tea merchant, the one he shouldn't know about, the one I showed him three weeks ago when we were sneaking back to the lower quarter after midnight. He takes the turn without looking. He routes us left at the candlemakers' guildhall, which is burning, past the junction where the market stalls stood this morning, and every turning is a turning he shouldn't be this sure of unless he's walked these streets the way I walk the yakata corridors: obsessively, deliberately, memorizing.

An Oni comes around the corner with blood on his clubs and Seijiro doesn't flinch. "Gate squad, move up. Tell Brick the yard is soft, take it from the north side." The Oni grunts and goes and Seijiro's hand on mine hasn't loosened and his stride hasn't changed. He gives orders the way he breathes. His command goes through my stomach exactly as it did in the paper room. Heat answers now, with blood on the stones and a burning building at my back. My body has appalling timing. My pulse is hammering. My robe is sticking to my back with sweat and the fire on both sides is fierce and I am holding the hand of a man who is taking my city apart and I didn't know. I didn't know.

A crewman passes us going the other way. Moving fast, a sack over one shoulder, the organized urgency of a man completing a task. He glances at Seijiro and says it.

"Captain."

Two syllables. A rank.

I stop.

My feet stop moving and Seijiro's hand pulls against mine and he stops too, half a stride ahead, turning back to look at me. The street burns around us. An Oni passes on our left, clubs out, not looking at us. The smoke makes everything gray and orange.

Captain.

The crew parting for him. Every shortcut, every sightline. I noticed all of it. The fire-tubes on the ship in the harbor. The ship with blood-red sails I could see from my window this morning, that I've seen before.

Tielong's Daughter.

I look at him. The straw hat tipped back, the katana easy in his hand, his face lit by the fire on both sides. The scar along his jaw visible in the orange light. That jaw. I looked at it an hour ago in a different kind of light. His eyes are on me now, the same eyes, the same steadiness, and my body knows exactly who this is before my brain has finished the sentence. His hand is still holding mine, steady, not pulling, waiting.

"Captain," I say. Not a question.

He holds my hand. His eyes don't move from my face. No apology. No convenient lie that a smarter man would try in a burning street with his raid in progress.

"Yes."

One word. The way he says everything. Declarative, unapologetic. My teeth clench. My hand stays in his.

The street burns. The crew moves around us. My father's garrison is broken and the man I've been sleeping with for two months is the captain of the pirate ship that did all of it. The questions have been there since the third week: his pace through corridors, the answers he stepped around, the way he looked at the yakata walls and measured.

My thighs are still sore. My body still has the feel of him in it. The betrayal and the wanting hit at the same time and neither one wins.

My hand tightens on his.

"You could have told me."

"You could have asked."

He's right. I didn't ask. A question would have dragged the rented room into daylight. I chose him every night. The smoke only makes it harder to pretend I didn't.

Timber cracks behind us. The yakata is burning on the hill, the paper walls going room by room, and the smoke from my father's house rises in columns above the harbor.

Seijiro pulls a coil of rope from inside his coat and slings it over one shoulder. Then he shrugs out of the coat and drops it over mine. The lining is hot from his skin.

Seijiro's hand is in mine. The crew is clearing the street ahead. His ship is in the harbor.

I don't let go.