Too raw.
Too real.
The bow dragged across the strings, drawing blood.
Flaying.
Severing us.
This is not okay.
My gaze found the horizon of flame first—a long unbroken line of candles burning along the base of a black silk wall. The tiny fires glowed within the haunting darkness of that space.
Then my gaze climbed.
Pictures.
Faces.
All dead.
Lit from behind.
Glowing in gold frames against black silk.
I recognized all of them, even the ones for the Claws. Because when Hiro first brought them to me with the idea for us to truly form an indestructible beast. . .I took the time to learn their wounds.
My eyes moved along the wall.
Kaede's dead grandfather smiled back at me. An old man in a charcoal haori, silver hair combed back. The photograph captured him mid-laugh. Kaede’s mother had left him with his grandfather before he could even form a memory of her face.
The grandfather had raised him alone in a house full of books and tea. He had taught Kaede to draw. To read three languages. To sit still long enough to let the world reveal itself. He had died in his sleep when Kaede was thirteen and Kaede had found his body in the morning. Tea still warmed on the stove. Kaede had burned the tea set that day and never touched tea again.
Where did she get this picture?
An odd thing happened, I began to smell tea brewing around me. The scent curled through the air in soft spirals—warm, floral, and sweet. The aroma deepened with each breath. Heat gathered low in my chest.
I shook my head and went to the next photo.
Daisuke's baby sister.
A little girl.
Three years old.
Round cheeks.
Two front teeth showing in a wide grin.
In the image, she held a stuffed rabbit by one ear, and the rabbit dangled against her white dress.
Daisuke had been five years old the night his father came home angry about a debt and beat his mother, him, and his sister.
They all took it like they usually did, but it was his little sister that would never rise again. The little girl had just remained on the floor with a purplish bruise on her forehead and the rabbit next to her feet.
The police took in the father the next day and his mother had never been the same. A year later she sold him to an illegal textile factory where he worked most of his childhood.
Hiro told me that later Daisuke had finally forgiven his mother and father.
