Chapter three
Lost in Translation
Kenji
I slid the door open and stepped onto the balcony. The stone was cold beneath my feet.
I pulled the door closed behind me with a soft click.
The balcony stretched wide around me with a stone railing that was barely waist-high and offered nothing between me and the drop.
From here, I could see everything the night had consumed—the villas reduced to silhouettes, the sea moving in slow dark waves.
The island slept, not one window was lit in the distant villas.
The sky, however, pulsed with restless energy. Stars burned in reckless clusters above, scattered like shattered glass across black velvet.
Too bright.
Too many.
Constantly sparkling as if death never occurred.
I should have turned to my visitor and spoken.
Instead, I walked over to the stone railing and lowered my gaze to where the pyre had stood days ago. There’d been a mountain of over a hundred burning bodies, fire consuming flesh, cloth, and bones. Rising smoke had whipped and twisted in columns, carrying human skin snowflakes.
Now only a flat, massive black circle remained, pressed into the ground like a wound that had closed over itself. The Scales had raked the dead’s ash and shoveled it under.
I looked at that dark circle for several silent minutes.
Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.
I gripped the railing and turned right.
What’s wrong with him tonight?
Rin sat on the railing with his legs hung over the edge like a kid sitting on a dock and watching the water below with zero concern for the drop.
His back was to me.
His long dark hair fell unbraided down his spine, rippling in the breeze, strand by strand. Moving the way water did and showing hints of the masterpiece etched on his back.
The tattoo was a crown that ran the full width of his shoulders and tapered at the base of his spine. The majority of the crown was done in black with blood red cracks splitting through it.
At the top of the crown, charcoal-black roses grew with thorned stems.
Rin had a joint between his fingers. The paper was gold.
Without turning my way, he brought it to his lips. The tip brightened and held for a long breath. Then he lowered his hand and exhaled slowly, releasing two thin columns of bluesmoke from his nostrils that the breeze immediately took and unraveled into nothing.
His hair rippled across his back. The roses disappeared beneath it for a second and then reappeared when the wind returned.
He stared out at the sleeping island like I wasn't there.
Rin had been appearing on my balconies since the night I met him. And the way he sat now—shoulders low, jaw tight, eyes fixed on something in the distance that didn't exist—was the same way he'd sat the first time I met him.
Long ago, Rin had fled the palace in the middle of the night with nothing but his expensive clothes and a few heirlooms wrapped in silk and stuffed in his pockets. Somehow, he’d been able to get past the royal guards and escorts.
