Frail Human Heart Read online

  A deep groaning noise echoed through the cavern, followed by a series of shuddering creaks. The powdered ice fell in fat flakes. We had stopped walking without me even noticing.

  Dad whispered. “What was your fault? What did you do, sweetheart?”

  I swallowed, my throat making a dry glunk as I let my hand fall away from my mouth. “I fought it so hard. I fought it with everything I had. But all my fighting only brought us there, backed up against the wall, trapped, with no choice. He begged me to do it. We knew – Ebisu had told us – that the only way to save everyone was to sacrifice him. So I…” I shuddered.

  “Go on.”

  “I killed him.”

  I’d said it now. Dad had made me say it. There was no going back. Out of the corner of my eyes, I saw the strange symbols carved into the walls begin to glow with a vivid blue light, but none of it really registered. My dad’s face was very still.

  When he stepped forward, I jerked back, unable to bear the thought that he would reach out, try to comfort me. It would break me, and I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.

  “I … drove the blade through his heart. I … watched him … fade away.” I raised the sword between us, like an offering. “He’s trapped in here. In the darkness. The cold. I don’t know if he’s even aware of me, if he can hear me, or if he’s completely lost. He’s as close to me as my own heartbeat, but I can never touch him again. I did that. I loved him – and I killed him.”

  Cracks shot through the ice walls, ringing like machine-gun fire. Ice crystals the size of my fist showered down on us, tinkling musically as they fell.

  “No,” my father said, shouting above the sounds of the glacier. “He was already bound to the blade – bound hundreds of years ago. You didn’t do this to him. You said that he begged you. He made his own choice, and it was the right choice. It’s not your fault!”

  “Yes, it is!” I screamed. The tortured groaning of the cavern was the sound of my pain and guilt. The floor shuddered underfoot. “I started this – me. There had to have been another way. I should have figured it out, I could have figured it out, but I didn’t. I—”

  “Izanagi started this! Our ancestors did! Your grandfather forced you into it when you were just a child. You are not to blame.”

  “My hand was on the sword. I drove the blade in. It was me. I killed him.”

  The floor quivered. A wide crack arrowed through the ice under my boots and disappeared beneath the wall. Before it had finished, another crack laddered the ice, running in the opposite direction. I stumbled and landed on one knee. My father fell back against the opposite wall. We stared at each other, shocked out of the emotional trance that had blocked us from seeing what was happening.

  The place was breaking apart around us.

  On top of us.

  My father’s face blanched. “Go left!”

  I didn’t stop to question him. I just flung myself to the side, as hard as I could. A thick shard of ice speared down into the place where I had knelt. Overhead, where the cavern narrowed, the walls were bristling with hundreds more enormous ice splinters. They vibrated and shuddered with the mourning howl of the cavern – just waiting to break free and fall.

  I staggered to my feet and darted across the fracturing floor to my father. “We have to get out of here!” I yelled, seizing his hand.

  He pushed away from the wall. A knife-sharp splinter forced itself free of the ice behind him and barely missed stabbing his arm. Our eyes met and his fingers tightened around mine like a vice.

  “Run!” he yelled.

  Together we ducked, wove and dodged, struggling to keep our balance on the floor as it heaved like a ship caught in a storm. Splinters of ice plunged down like swords amongst a thick powder of snow that nearly blinded me. The floor ahead exploded upwards into a jagged mound that cut across our path. My father’s hand was all that kept me on my feet as I skidded around the obstruction. He twirled me away from a trio of falling icicles that speared down to our left.

  Black fractures zigzagged across the walls as we bolted through the collapsing cavern. The low moans of the frozen water grew louder. And there was no sign of a way out.

  The floor tilted underfoot. We both slid helplessly towards a shuddering section of wall that looked ready to give way at any second. My father let go of my hand and gave me a mighty shove. I tumbled away from him as the floor rose up in the middle, parting like the cargo doors on a ship. I hit the opposite wall with a thud that shook my teeth.

  Terrifying whiplash cracks shook the cavern. The icy floor broke apart and disappeared, creating a yawning chasm between my father and me. Dad was stranded on a tiny ledge of ice – all that remained of the floor on that side of the cave. The gap was too wide for him to jump. And there was no water here to use to call Ebisu, if that would even work again. He was trapped.

  “Dad!” I screamed above the cacophony of shrieking ice.

  His mouth was moving, hands making frantic Go! motions.

  The wall behind my father began to slip. It would crush him, spear him, or brush him straight off the ledge into the chasm.

  I won’t let go.

  I reached back, seized the hilt of the katana and ripped the blade free. “Shinobu! Help us!”

  For an instant, I thought I heard laughter echoing through the falling rumble of the ice.

  Then everything went white.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE LAST RESORT

  W ith a quick, powerful tug of his hands, Hikaru pulled Jack forward and trapped her between his legs. Jack read the intention on his face and let out a little eep of protest, but before she could think of any way to extract herself painlessly, it was too late.

  Hikaru was kissing her again. And not a quick smacker this time, either. A proper, full-on, let’s-mack-on-the-bathroom-floor-baby kiss. He was surprisingly good at it. Or maybe it wasn’t surprising, because he was five years older than her, after all. He’d probably kissed more girls than she had. And he wasn’t aggressive about it, and he smelled nice, and his hands stayed in safe zones – one still gripping hers, and one on the small of her back. All in all, it could have been worse.

  She thought she might be sick.

  I should have told him, I should have said something, why didn’t I tell him, oh, HELL…

  It took Hikaru about ten seconds to realize that something was wrong and pull back – which was also to his credit. He hung onto her hand, though, and his face was sort of soft and happy in a way that made her stomach lurch.

  “What’s the matter? Am I going too fast?”

  There were a million gentle, tasteful, careful ways to break the news. Jack couldn’t think of any of them right then. Better to just get it over with.

  “I’m a lesbian.”

  “A what?” Hikaru asked. He looked genuinely puzzled.

  Well, that’s a first as far as reactions go.

  “Um. OK. I’m only attracted to people of the same gender as me. Girls. You know, romantically. I really like you − I do − I just don’t feel that way about you, and I should probably have told you before, but – but we can still be friends, right?”

  Hikaru’s eyes narrowed a little as he worked his way through it, and then his expression lightened. “Oh, I get it. This is one of those weird human sex hang-ups.”

  Jack extricated her hand from his none-too-gently. “I’m not weird.”

  “No, no, I didn’t mean it like that! It’s just, for Kitsune, gender is… It’s different. We don’t have, like, a fixed identity that way. It’s kind of hard for me to understand the way it works for humans.”

  “So … you guys are all bisexual?” That was kind of cool. Very cool, if it meant he hadn’t just called her a weirdo.

  “I don’t know what that word means,” Hikaru said doubtfully.

  Jack rumpled her hair thoughtfully. “It’s just the human word for… You’re into boys and girls, right?”

  “I suppose you could put it that way,” he said, even more confused.
/>   “But you’re still a boy, see? You identify as a male; you have the boy-equipment—” She froze, horrified, as she realized she might have just shoved her foot straight into her mouth. “Oh my God, is that what you’re talking about? Kitsune don’t have any equipment? But you said you can mate with humans!”

  Hikaru snorted with laughter. His shoulders shook so badly that he had to hang onto the edge of the toilet seat to keep from sliding off. Jack sat down on the floor with a thump and crossed her arms. This was not the way this sort of conversation usually went. This was not the way any conversation usually went.

  “You can stop laughing at any time now,” she said after a minute. “Any time.”

  “Sorry. Sorry. No, I really am. It’s just … er…” Hikaru shoved his hair back. “I’ll show you.”

  “Show me what?” she asked, scooting backwards. Her shoulders hit the wall. “You keep those pants on, Furball.”

  He barked with laughter again. “Just sit there for a minute, and don’t freak out.”

  “I can’t possibly get any more freaked out,” she muttered.

  Once again, Hikaru proved her wrong.

  A tornado of copper and white light enveloped his body, compressing his long form down into a much tinier one. Between one instant and the next, Hikaru had become a fox, a sleek and beautiful animal with shining metallic copper fur and a white blaze on his chest. His eyes glinted vivid green. He looked very out of place sitting on the olive toilet.

  “This is a Kitsune’s basic, original form,” he told her, his human voice edged with a faintly foxy growl. “We can alter it a little, for example to camouflage ourselves when we’re out in the mortal realm. But other than that, it’s fixed. And it’s non-sexual. We don’t … um … you know, in this form. That would be … euw.”

  “No jiggy-jiggy as a fox. Got it.”

  He yipped – fox laughter. “Pretty much. Now, when it comes to our human forms…”

  The vivid lights coalesced around his shape again, glittering and stretching him out. Human legs, clad in jeans, and a human torso, clad in a thin white tank top, unfolded out of it. Jack stared in silence for a long moment.

  Then she shrieked. “WHAT THE EFF?”

  “You said you wouldn’t freak out,” Hikaru reminded her, the voice altered again – a little higher, a little softer.

  “I made no such promise!” Jack scrambled to her feet, pointing an accusing finger. “What is this?”

  “This is me. It’s still me.”

  Hikaru stood up, palms raised in a calming gesture. It was still Hikaru. Still the same height, the same slender, athletic body type. The same long copper hair falling down to the waist, the same green, slanting eyes. Undeniably the same person.

  But this Hikaru was a girl.

  The face was slightly more delicate, the chin a bit more pointed, the nose finer and tip tilted, ever so faintly. The lips were fuller and the cheekbones rounder. The neck somehow seemed long and swan-like without an Adam’s apple bobbing in it. Hikaru’s thin tank top showed off the same muscular arms, but with a slimmer waist, and gently curving hips. The shoulders were a little less broad. And instead of a firm, flat chest, Hikaru had …

  … boobs.

  Extremely nice boobs, Jack couldn’t help noticing, before she ripped her gaze away.

  “Kitsune naturally switch between different bodies all the time,” Hikaru explained. “So we don’t really care about whether the body is biologically male or female. There’s no… It’s not a big deal for us, individually, or when we get together. You refer to a person as whatever pronoun they were the last time you saw them in their human form – that’s polite. Kitsune who are trying to have babies together obviously have to stay in one form. Other than that, some Kitsune do have a favourite, and they tend to show up as, say, a female in human form more often than not. Others go through phases. It’s – I suppose it’s kind of like deciding if you’ll wear a skirt or a pair of trousers today.”

  “Huh,” Jack said blankly. “What – what about you, then? You … I mean, you’ve never turned up … looking like this before now.”

  Hikaru nodded, tossing his – her – hair back over his – her – shoulder again. The gesture was one male Hikaru made all the time, but somehow now it seemed unbearably, even provocatively feminine. Jack twitched and folded her arms over her chest.

  “Honestly, I don’t have a strong preference,” Hikaru said. “But I was male the first time I met you and since you were a girl − and I’ve watched enough human TV and stuff to know that human girls mostly go for human guys – that was just how I thought you’d like me best.”

  Jack thought her eyes might literally fall out of her face. “You stayed in a boy body for me?” she squeaked.

  Hikaru shrugged. “It wasn’t a big sacrifice or anything. If I’d known you liked girls better, I’d have done that.”

  “Oh my God. No, no, no. That’s … that is so wrong. You – you can’t be changing your body, your gender, based on what I like.”

  “But it doesn’t matter,” Hikaru said patiently. “I’m me regardless, Jack. This is me. The fox is me. The version with boy-parts is me. It’s just how we are.”

  Hikaru’s voice had gone slightly throaty as she pleaded for understanding. Her face – still Hikaru’s face, and Hikaru had always been kind of pretty, even for a boy – suddenly struck Jack as beautiful. Jack felt herself twitch again as a painfully strong pang of affection for Hikaru went through her body, tugging on her heart. It tugged on some other stuff in there, too, and that stuff was responding like crazy.

  In theory, Jack thought that gender identity was a mostly cultural construct, and that no one needed to abide by binaries in the twenty-first century. But she had not been prepared for the issue to come up in her own life, and definitely not with Hikaru. It didn’t help that her body seemed to have jumped straight into Hot Chick Ahoy mode when she needed time to think this through. It was dizzying. Literally.

  Too much.

  Jack took a step sideways and sat down on the edge of the bath, putting her head in her hands. Instinct was flashing like red lights in the back of her skull. Hikaru had just proved very clearly how little Jack really knew him. Her. How little Jack knew her. And Jack liked and trusted Hikaru as a friend, but … as more than that? When they were different species and lived in different worlds? When Hikaru would live forever?

  When she would, inevitably, have to leave Jack and go back to her own people?

  She liked Hikaru so much already. Too much. Maybe more than she would have let herself like Hikaru if Hikaru hadn’t apparently been the wrong gender and … safe. This, now? This was dangerous. It could end up hurting a lot.

  It was better just to be friends.

  “I’m…” Jack began, eyes skittering away from the warm, hopeful look on Hikaru’s face. “I—”

  Ebisu’s voice calling from below made them both jump guiltily.

  “The mirror is working, children!” A short pause. “Oh, dear! That doesn’t look good…”

  “Crap,” Hikaru blurted. “What now?”

  Without another word they grabbed their damp clothes and shoes and ran for the stairs.

  When I opened my eyes again, the world was dim and quiet. My head ached with a slow, throbbing beat and my eyelids seemed to be glued together.

  Where am I? What happened? My breathing sped up as I remembered the tunnels under London, the iceberg palace. Dad and I were the only ones left. The cavern had been about to come down on top of us – on top of him. I’d pulled the katana from its sheath…

  “Save him, Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi! Save him, Shinobu!”

  The tunnel had exploded in a wave of flaring, prismatic flames. The blast slammed me into the ice again; my head had bounced off the wall with a dull thud. I saw, or thought I saw, the walls of the cavern begin to ripple away, like ice cubes attacked with a hairdryer. The very fabric of the dream world had warped under the blade’s power. Falling snow and deadly icicles were melting into
harmless water. The last thing I had seen was the pale blur of my father’s face against the opposite wall, his lips making the shape of my name.

  I forced my eyes open, blinking and squinting against a faint blue glow that seemed to come from all around me. Where was Dad? I pushed myself up into a sitting position – and looked straight into the empty eye sockets of a human skull.

  A cry of pure animal terror ripped out of my throat. No. It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be. No, no, not again, not again—

  Then I heard his voice, broken and ragged. “Mio! Oh my God, you’re alive.”

  I scrambled up and turned in a circle, scanning the space for any sign of my dad. Dry things like chunks of shattered safety glass slithered and scattered all around me. Crystals. Powdery, crushed-up crystal. I was standing on a pile of the stuff, higher than I was tall. The skeleton – a head, spine and ribcage, nothing else – was speared grotesquely on a glowing blue spike of crystal that protruded from the wall next to me. There were more of the faintly glowing stones everywhere, sticking out of the walls and floor and ceiling of the round chamber. In fact, they were the walls and ceiling. The walls were layered strata of white, blue, purple crystals. I was in some kind of giant geode.

  Holes had been hacked into the crystal walls – and in the holes were skeletons. Dozens of them, their ancient, dry bones riddled with reddish cracks. But the skeletons hadn’t been allowed to lie in peace. The crystals had kept growing around them, through them, forcing some of them out of their graves and caging others in diamond-sharp needles. There was a narrow opening in one of the walls, about a foot wide and a couple of feet high, and a clear turquoise stream ran out of it, pooling in the bottom and centre of the geode. The water was full of tangled ribs and finger bones and skulls.

  “Where are you? I don’t see you.” My words trembled pathetically.

  “I’m not in there, Midget,” my dad said. “I’m up here. Follow my voice. Just follow my voice.”