The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(24)

“I don’t think we’re blending in very well, Ren.”

I sighed and stood up, wiping my hands on my skirt. “As if we ever stood a chance in these clothes.”

I looked longingly at the kimonos that all the women wore. I wanted their floral fabrics and wooden sandals and paper parasols instead of the barely tied corset and heavy skirts I was wearing. Just like in England, I was a spectacle.

“We should find a cemetery quickly,” Neven said, standing protectively over me, nearly backing me into the water again. He was right. If there was anywhere to find Death—and hopefully, Yomi—in Japan, it would be where the dead rested.

I pounded a fist into his shoulder blade until he took a step forward and let me step away from the ledge.

“I don’t feel Death pulling anywhere, do you?” I said.

Neven shook his head. “You could ask someone?”

I looked around at the crowd flowing down the street, picking up pieces of conversations in accents I’d never heard, words I’d never studied. My tongue suddenly felt like lead in my mouth.

“Let’s head farther inland,” I said, turning away. “Humans don’t tend to bury their dead on beaches. The bodies resurface too quickly.”

“All right,” Neven said, his gaze tracing a great horned ox hauling a carriage of carved stones down the street.

A gong rang somewhere far away, the vibrations humming under our feet.

I had no idea what such a sound meant in Japan, but everyone else seemed to know with certainty.

All at once, people began to walk faster. The street became a current dragging us forward. I grabbed a fistful of Neven’s coat so we wouldn’t be separated as people pushed to get past us. Someone stepped on my skirt, the fabric ripping behind me. I gathered up my skirts in one hand and reached for my clock with the other, but then someone crashed into Neven’s back and sent us both spilling forward.

My right foot slipped off the ledge, the world slid upside down, and I hit the water below. Neven tumbled down with me because I hadn’t let go of his coat, his weight compacting me into the sand.

I slid out from under Neven and got to my feet in the shallow water, then grabbed up my skirts and wrung them out. Ever since the ship incident, I hated being submerged. I kicked off my shoes and emptied them of water while Neven groaned and got to his knees.

“My glasses,” he said, feeling around underwater.

Above us, the people continued to rush down the street. The gong rang again, the sound pealing across the shore.

“Ren, my glasses!”

I looked down and spotted Neven’s glasses in the sand beneath the rippling water just in front of my toes.

“Stand up,” I said, picking up his glasses and shaking off some of the salt water before waving them in front of his face. He grabbed them and scrubbed the brine from his eyes.

“Where are they going?” I said to myself.

Neven shook the water off his glasses a bit more, then put them on and squinted through the dirty lenses. “I think they’re going...inside?”

He seemed to be right. The crowd had thinned out from the panicked mob that drove us into the water. The sound of doors sliding shut repeated endlessly down the streets. Only shopkeepers remained outside, packing up their wares.

I sank my hands into the dirt road and climbed back up onto the path, clothes heavy with water. Neven hopped up behind me as I turned to follow the main road, now easily able to dodge the few lingering humans.

The town suddenly seemed so much larger, the streets vast when empty. White lanterns with painted red dots hung in a garland running all the way down the street, eerily resembling a thousand bloodshot eyes. The sky beyond had begun to dim, pure white to gray ashes, the blood orange sun sinking toward the mountains beyond the curtain of clouds.

I walked toward a group of women hurriedly folding the silk scarves that they’d been selling, packing them into boxes and rushing the boxes indoors. The third toll of the gong made them all jump like a pack of startled pigeons, and they gave up on folding and simply crumpled their silk into balls and crammed them into their boxes.

We needed to know what was going on, and sooner or later I would need to speak to someone in Japanese. I took a deep breath and stepped closer.

“Excuse me?” I said.

But none of the women looked at me, too busy trying to pack up their silk, even when the slippery surface eluded their fingers. Others were collapsing the tented arches and locking their shop doors.

“Go inside, dear,” one of the women said, kneeling on the ground and hurrying to pack up the last of her fabrics. It took me a moment to understand, for no one had ever spoken Japanese to me before. I’d studied the phonetic alphabet and memorized the sounds as best as I could from my books, but papers couldn’t mimic the intonation, the song of all the sounds melted together.

“Why?” I asked, kneeling beside her. “Why is everyone leaving?”

The woman paused, fingers hovering over green silk. She looked behind her at the other women carrying their wares away.

“Omagatoki,” she whispered. She spoke the word like a curse, as if the syllables cut her tongue. Her fingers trembled as she folded her fabric. I didn’t know what the word meant but felt too embarrassed to ask. “It wasn’t always this way,” the woman said, “but every year since the new Emperor ascended, it’s gotten worse.”