PROLOGUE
When Himura was nine years old, his home town was attacked by a giant tortoise. Whenever he told this story, he made sure to emphasize the “giant” part. Tortoises don’t seem frightening until you are leaning out of your window, staring up at the craggy face of a reptile the size of a mountain.
Trees grew from the back of its shell. Its head was covered with moss. Its claws—eating up the ground at an alarming speed—were stained with mud and the remains of animals it had trampled beneath its feet. Roads buckled. The earth shook. Those who weren’t fast enough to escape were crushed beneath its body.
Himura remembered the way his fingers gripped the windowsill as the tortoise barreled through the village. He remembered staring up at its wrinkled face, as monstrous as the living earth. Beneath the layers of soil covering its shell, he could still see the yellowing folds of its body.
Paper. The tortoise was made of paper. A perfect construction of crimp folds and reverse pleats so beautiful Himura could only stare at it in wonder even as it thundered toward his house.
The tortoise’s foot swung over the roof of his home, but the snap of wooden beams and the crash of the collapsing ceiling never came. He could not remember the exact order of what happened next; only the sound and the heat. A whistle screamed above him as something struck the tortoise’s back, exploding into flames that licked up the creature’s body faster than wildfire.
When Himura looked up again, dark ships filled the sky.
Rearing its head back in agony, the tortoise burned and…
The ground moved beneath Himura’s feet, jolting him out of his memories. The airship’s deck bobbed like a boat on the open sea. Turbines hummed. Propellers churned through the warm summer air. The lights of the capital city twinkled across the ground below, but the night was fading and the first strings of dawn were about to sound.
It had been a long time since Himura had thought about his home town or the shikigami that had been burned down by the hunters. A fiery end befitting a paper beast. No normal person would cry over the death of a shikigami, especially not one as masterless and mad as the tortoise had been, and yet Himura had felt something like grief as he had watched it burn.
It had been such a waste.
“Are you still here?” An annoyed voice drew Himura’s attention away from his thoughts. He turned to find the airship’s navigator clambering out of the ship’s hatch and onto the deck.
As she pulled herself up, Himura noticed that the rings beneath her eyes had grown darker. Both her hair and her kimono were in disarray: one a tangle of knots, the other a wrinkled mess. Sleep did not come easy when one had an entire airship to keep on course.
Himura took a paper square from his pocket and balanced it on the tip of his finger. “I was thinking, Sayo”—without touching it, the piece of paper folded itself into an origami crane—“about a shikigami I met when I was younger. Even though it destroyed my home, it was such a magnificent beast. I wish it had lived.”
He flicked the crane into the air and caught it, crushing it in his fist. When he opened his palm, the origami bird was in pieces. With a puff of breath, he scattered the scraps into the air. They billowed over the deck like petals of snow.
Sayo snorted. “You only say that because you’re a Crafter. Most normal folk would be glad to see a shikigami burn.”
With a flick of his fingers, Himura made the scraps of paper dance around his feet.
Crafter. People had spat that word at him as though it were a curse. Others had whispered it in terror. But when Sayo said the word “Crafter,” it was with the scorn of someone who knew Himura and was deeply unimpressed by him.
“Speaking of Crafters”—Sayo’s gaze swept across the dawning sky—“you should get going. You’ll need to arrive at the Midori by sunrise. According
to the captain’s informant, the girl should be serving breakfast in the main banquet hall. Come back with her, or don’t come back at all.”
Himura turned his gaze toward the clouds. A single light glimmered against the plum-colored sky. Though from a distance it looked like a stranded star, he knew the light was coming from the Midori—the empire’s first and only airborne banqueting hall.
What’s a Crafter doing serving breakfast all the way out here? he wondered. What strange twist of fate had reduced someone who could control paper at command, whose blood ran thick with the power of their ancestors, to the life of a mere waitress?
Himura supposed it was a good thing he was saving the girl from such ignoble work. He longed for the company too. Traveling with Sayo and the rest of the airship’s crew was like being a wolf among sparrows. It was tiring to be surrounded by people who could never understand the buzz of power in his veins or how the rustle of paper tugged at his heart.
“Don’t make any trouble,” Sayo warned him. “Just get the girl and go. You’ll know who it is when you see her, right? You won’t bring back some random maid?”
“I always recognize my own kind.” Himura snapped his fingers and the pieces of paper fluttering around his feet swirled upward. With a flick of his hand, they knitted together into a white bracelet around his wrist.
Climbing onto the ship’s guardrail, Himura held his hands out like a tightrope walker for balance. His legs teetered between the deck and the open sky. The city lights swam below him like the lights of deep-sea fish luring prey to their doom.
It was a long way down. Swinging a leg out into the open air, he stepped forward and dropped.
At first there was nothing but the whistling wind. The summer air cut at his skin as he fell. Squinting through his watering eyes, Himura waited until he was a distance from the ship before pulling the bracelet off his wrist.
It broke into a thousand tiny squares of paper that spun in a furious cyclone. The pieces merged together to create a pair of wings, stretching down into tail feathers and folding into talons.
A giant, white falcon formed beneath him. Everything from the tip of its beak to the curve of its claws was as white as snow; even its pupils were invisible against the whites of its eyes.
“Show-off!” Himura heard Sayo shout as he landed on the bird.
Himura smirked. He made no apologies for talent. Holding tight to its feathers, he repositioned himself so that he was sitting astride the bird’s neck. It was not like riding an actual shikigami—there was no intelligence in this paper puppet—but the thrill of it was the same.
Carried by the falcon’s giant wings, he soared toward the Midori, where the banquet hall’s red arches and wide golden gates lay open in a salute to the sky.
Chapter 1
When Kurara awoke to the ear-splitting sound of morning bells, her first thought was: I would burn this whole place to the ground if it gave me ten more minutes of sleep.
Lights pierced her eyelids as they flickered on. The bells blared against the walls of her box room. Outside, an attendant marched down the servants’ hallway, bashing a gong and crying, “Up, up, everyone up! Give thanks to our great Emperor for this beautiful day!”
“Our great Emperor can go suck on a lemon!” Kurara rolled over with a groan. There were no windows in her room, but the glaring electric lights insisted that it was morning.
“Up! Up! Give thanks to our great Emperor that we may see another sunrise!” The attendant’s voice echoed through the paper-thin walls. “Give thanks to our great Emperor who protects us from the shikigami!”
Rubbing the sleep from her eyes, the world slowly came into focus: the walls of her quarters, the balls of crumpled paper scattered across the floor, the twin bed on the other side of the room and the person still sleeping in it. A shock of coal-black hair poked out from under the sheets.
“Haru,” she called. “Haru, time to get up!”
The lump on the opposite bed shifted.
“Look at the koi pond. The water…sparkles like gemstones…” Haru mumbled from inside the tight cocoon of sheets. He was talking in his sleep again.
It sounded pleasant. Kurara wondered if he was dreaming about their home, their village. She wished that she could have dreams like that, but all of her memories before the Midori were hazy at best: a village in the mountains, a hut by a small pond, blurred faces of villagers that left only a lingering feeling of emptiness like cold smoke after a fire.
“Nessai Harbor. Crab…big as…dinner plates…”
No matter how pleasant the dream, there was still work to be done. Kurara plucked a ball of crumpled paper from the floor and chucked it across the room. As it bounced off Haru’s bed, Kurara snapped her fingers and the ball froze in midair. A pleasant tingle ran through her body, the sensation both exhilarating and soothing. With a flick of her wrist, the ball began to spin, folding with each rotation—crimp, petal fold and pleat—into an origami rabbit.
She was not supposed to do this. The head cook had explicitly forbidden her from any activity that was not cooking or cleaning, but within the walls of her room she was safe from prying eyes. What other people didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them—and Haru liked her paper animals. At least, when he was awake enough to appreciate them.
At her command, the rabbit hopped across the bed and tugged at a lock of black hair poking out from the sheets.
“Sky cities…” A sleepy hand batted the rabbit to the floor.
Kurara gave an indignant squawk. She scooped the rabbit up, cradling it close before setting it on her pillow.
The attendant banged the gong. Doors along the corridor slammed open as the last sleep-addled servants scrambled down the hallway.
“Haru!” Kurara stalked over to his bed and gave him a firm shove.
At last, a pair of dark eyes peeked out from beneath the sheets.
“All right, all right…I’m up!” Haru groaned.
“Good! Come on!” Kurara tugged him to his feet. They might make it in time if they ran.
***
The Midori was a place built for giants, an immobile castle of feasting rooms and private residences hovering six thousand feet in the air. Its gleaming pearl-glass windows loomed above the clouds. Birds built their nests inside moss-covered cannons while sky fish slipped between the clockwork gears. Large rotor blades cut through the air in the shape of an upside-down halo, the golden rings growing smaller until they tapered to a drill-like point.
Kurara’s earliest memories were of those rings. Of the Midori’s towering walls and Haru’s hand clasped tight in her own as the round hoverpod transported them past the gates. Of a stern-faced man who told them that this would be their new home. At the time, Kurara had not realized that the Midori’s gleaming exterior hid a dark and chaotic heart.
“You’re late! This is coming out of your pay!” An attendant sneered at her as she arrived just as the breakfast gong sounded. Scrambling to her work station, she hurriedly tied the strings of her apron over her brown work dress.
Servants scurried past her, piling food onto silver trays. Another airship had just arrived and the demands for food and wine were already pouring in. These days, the docks were full of nothing but warships. The conflict in Estia had been dragging on for years—a war that would add another colony to Mikoshima’s growing empire—and the soldiers returning from abroad wanted nothing more than to wine, dine and forget about their battles beyond the sea.
Kurara hurried to her station, skidding past mountains of unwashed pots towering toward the ceiling. The fires turned the kitchens into one giant furnace. The stone pillars that held up the cavernous ceiling seemed to sweat beneath the heat. A hundred different smells assaulted her nose: mirin, tōgarashi root, soy sauce and burnt sugar. Bells rang, tea kettles screeched, pans sizzled and plates slipped and smashed against red-tiled floors as the servants dashed back and forth with generously stacked platters of food.
“KURARA!” a voice bellowed. An empty pot sailed through the air, hitting the far wall with a bang that startled the other servants. “For gods’ sakes, girl, where is the plum wine? You were supposed to prepare the plum wine!”
A portly woman marched across the kitchen, brandishing a ladle in one hand and an iron poker in the other. Kurara’s eyes widened, her feet snapped together and her limbs arranged themselves into what was commonly known in the kitchens as “Position B.” (Hands behind back, head bowed, eyes to the floor: the “I’m sorry, it won’t happen again” position.)
“My apologies, Madam Ito, I forgot.”
No one had told her anything about plum wine, but there was no point in telling Madam Ito that.
“I forgot?!” the woman squawked in a high-pitched imitation of Kurara’s voice. Madam Ito’s face was red, both from anger and from the heat of the fires. Her black hair, streaked with strands of silver, was pulled into a frizzy bun that wobbled at the top of her head every time she moved. As the head cook, she ruled over the kitchens of the Midori with an iron fist and an arsenal of iron pots, which she would often throw at whoever earned her displeasure. Maids jumped in her presence, serving girls fled from her scowls. Even the attendants would tread carefully when in the kitchens, knowing that this was Madam Ito’s domain.
Kurara averted her gaze, letting her eyes rest on the pot the cook had thrown as it rolled to a stop just inches from her foot. Its curved reflection revealed a suitably penitent girl, round-faced and pale, with a nose too round and ears too big, and hair that had been cut every few months using the very same pot that now lay in front of her.
“Kurara!”
“Yes, Madam Ito, I’m listening!” She had not been listening.
The head cook’s eyes narrowed. The veins on the side of her neck bulged.
“Girl.” Her voice trembled with menace. “Do you know who is in charge of these kitchens?”
Kurara said nothing. The price for insolence was fifteen lashes, and the head attendant had recently bought a new whip. She had seen him just yesterday morning with it tucked under one arm, his hand curling around its handle a little too affectionately.
“You, Madam Ito.”
“And who is it that provides for you, clothes and feeds you, while other much more deserving little girls waste away out in the fields or down in the levistone mines?”
“You, Madam Ito.”
“And who was the airheaded fool who forgot to fetch the plum wine today?”
“You, Madam–I–I mean—”
Madam Ito’s chest heaved like a ship’s bellows.
“I’ll go and fetch it right away!” Kurara bowed and hurried out of the kitchens before the cook could throw another pot at her. As she made her way to the door, one of the maids thrust a large, silver tray in front of her.
“Girl, if you’re going upstairs, deliver this to the Wisteria Room.”
“But the plum wine!” she cried.
The woman shoved the tray into her arms. “Madam Ito is already in a bad mood. What do you think she’ll do if this tray doesn’t get to the room in time?”
“Clean out the cannons and shoot us into the sunrise,” Kurara sighed. It was one of the cook’s favorite threats.
“Then go.”
Kurara knew a lost battle when she saw one. Taking the tray with her, she headed out of the kitchens, pausing only to reach into her apron pocket to check her crumpled list of chores. Someone had scribbled all over it, making it impossible to read. With a sigh, she stuffed the note back into her pocket.
One day, I’m going to get out of here. One day, I’m going to leave all this behind.
She just had to survive until then.
CHAPTER 3
WHENEVER Kurara climbed out of the kitchens, she had to pause and wait for her eyes to adjust to the sudden presence of sunlight. The reception hall blinked into focus. A semicircle of golden lattice windows gave a perfect one-hundred-and-eighty-degree view of the blue sky. A domed glass ceiling extended far above her head. When Kurara had been younger, it had felt like the sky itself, beautiful and distant. Now, it merely loomed like everything else inside the Midori, making her feel small.
Shadows of clouds floated across the tiled floor as Kurara crossed it. Real flowers bordered the foot of the marble walls: vibrant red and gold orchids, royal purple chrysanthemums and pink lotuses that bloomed as large as a person’s head. Mechanical parrots made of steel and stained glass beat their wings among the leafy plants, flying off whenever she approached. There was a coldness to the Midori’s splendor. It was a beautiful birdcage.
“Rara!” A voice shouted from the top of the curling grand staircase. Kurara looked up to see Haru making his way down the carpeted steps.
“Haru!” She rushed to meet him. “Did you make it to the banquet halls on time?”
“Fifteen minutes late!” The boy thumped his chest.
Such confidence could only come from the very brave or the very stupid, but Haru had a long history of getting away with things no one else could. Gap-toothed, crooked-nosed and with a pair of dark, mischievous eyes, he was awkward and coltish in a way that made others want to indulge him. Letting one’s guard down around Haru when he had some half-baked plan in his head was the perfect way to end up sneaking into the food stores at midnight or releasing sky fish into the Midori’s pipes—activities which always ended with a beating.
From the look in Haru’s eyes, he was in the mood for mischief, but Kurara knew him far too well to take part in his schemes.
“Well, since you’re here, do me a favor. I need to deliver this to the Wisteria Room, and you”—she snatched the tray out of range as he tried to swipe a sweet roll—“are going to help me get there in time.”
Servants were not supposed to use the elevators. The stern-faced attendants who operated them would shoo her away the moment they caught even a glimpse of Kurara’s brown work dress, but Haru was different. The other servants often said that he could talk a chicken into buying its own eggs. ...
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