The Keeper of Night (The Keeper of Night #1)(35)

Hiro smiled. “What makes you think they’re alive?”

We followed him through the grove. The ground sloped gently upward, leading us away from sea level and closer to the blurred voices of the city. Light burned through the spaces between the blossoms, the petals star-bright in the darkness.

Hiro reached forward and parted the branches, and suddenly we stood at the gates of the city.

Yomi was an oasis of light in the infinite darkness, garlands of red lanterns strung between the awnings of every building. The houses wore their roofs like extravagant hats, massive slopes of black clay tiles with gently curved brims. Just like in Yokohama, the city was stark unpainted wood and paper doors and shadows. But unlike Yokohama’s spacious roads, the houses in Yomi crowded together too tightly to breathe. People moved in a rushing torrent in both directions, filtering into the fish shops and bookstores and tea stands that lined the road.

All the dead wore white kimonos, silky and pale as the moon. The fabric was translucent at the sleeves and hem, as if the dead were slowly dissolving into Yomi’s darkness. I looked down at my pink kimono with trepidation, but Hiro—dressed unashamedly in ocean blue—didn’t seem concerned.

He led us from the soft soil of the grove to the paved ground of the city, under the painted vermillion archway that marked the entrance to Yomi. The throng of dead souls pulled us in, sweeping us through the barrage of sounds and colors. Everything in the streets tried futilely to combat the crushing darkness—the red lanterns strung in zigzags back and forth overhead like a sky of ruby stars, the open-air restaurants with archways revealing the elaborate chandeliers inside, the pastry cases backlit with white and green lights. But darkness fell like heavy rain, and all the lights cast only small and ghostly circles of brightness around themselves—their light could not combine to cast an artificial daytime across the street. They could barely break through the darkness at all.

The sum effect was a kaleidoscopic assault on the eyes. It hurt to stare in any one spot for too long, so my eyes jumped from image to image without truly processing any of them.

Hiro pressed through the crowd, Neven and I stumbling along behind him. I’d never truly seen the dead before, as the souls in England all went Beyond, where Reapers couldn’t trespass. The dead in Yomi looked much like the humans I’d seen in Yokohama, but with an eerily dim presence. Rather than actual humans, they looked like memories of humans pieced together from a thousand hazy images. Their eyes and noses and smiles seemed real enough in passing, but the longer you looked, the stranger their features became, as if their faces weren’t real but painted onto their blank skin. Many of them turned to stare at us in our colored clothes, their gazes lingering long after we’d passed them.

“Hey, fish boy!” a woman’s voice called in Japanese.

Hiro stopped in front of a mask maker’s store, where a woman in a red-and-white cat mask leaned against a banister. Her masks decorated the outside walls and the pillars holding up the awning, the open door revealing a thousand more faces wallpapering the store inside.

Neven and I stopped close behind Hiro, the crowd parting seamlessly around us. The masks covering the windows leered down at us, white-faced geishas and blue devils, old men with stringy beards and horned dragons.

“Hayashi!” Hiro said, reaching into his basket and tossing the woman a fish.

She caught it with one hand, then removed her mask and took a vicious, juicy bite. She turned to look at me as she chewed, juices running down the long line of her neck. She looked young, her eyes a bit hollow with Death, but exquisite in the way that ageless things always were, like insects cased in amber.

“Interesting souvenirs you’ve brought back,” she said, speaking to Hiro, but staring at me and Neven.

Hiro laughed, though I didn’t find it funny. “I made some friends over by Datsue-ba’s tree.”

“Friends,” she said, eyes scanning up and down Neven’s frame. “This one’s in a costume.”

“It’s not a costume,” I said in Japanese. “It’s what humans wear in England.”

The woman stared at me for a long moment, so long in fact that I started to wonder if I’d accidentally stopped time. My eyes flickered to Hiro, who watched Hayashi like one might watch a tiger outside of its cage.

“You’re a long way from England,” she said, “and you speak Japanese like your mouth is full of sand. Who taught you?”

Hiro let out a sound like a strangled bird, though I thought it might have been an attempt at a laugh. “Hayashi, they don’t know your sense of humor yet,” he said. “She’s joking,” he said, turning to me.

I glared at the woman but said nothing, because saying anything else in Japanese would only prove her point. She had no idea how many decades I’d spent studying Japanese just to reach the fluency of a child. My studies had been my dark and precious secret, my Japanese books hidden in the floorboards so Corliss wouldn’t burn them again. I’d practiced kanji by painting the letters onto my skin and washing away the evidence by nightfall. But none of that mattered because Hayashi wasn’t wrong—I knew she wasn’t, and perhaps that was why her words cut so deeply. My fingertips burned white-hot from my anger, but I hid them in my pocket, even as it felt like I’d dipped my hands in lava.

“Ah, yes,” the woman said. “I tend to joke a lot.”