The dream began with a soft sigh, a whispering sound in the distance like the swell of the ocean. I’d seen glimpses of the edge of the sea that lapped against Japan, once in Miyajima with Yuki, and once looking over Suruga Bay with Tomo. But long ago, Mom and I had visited the shore of the Atlantic when we’d traveled to see friends in Maine. The sun had beamed down on the water, glistening so brightly that I’d had to squeeze my eyes shut, to make the scene almost vanish completely in order to see it at all.
“Look at that, Katie,” she’d said with a smile. “Stretching on like it has no end. Sparkling and full of life.” It had looked limitless and inspiring, warm and vibrant and blue.
This ocean was nothing like that one. It was dull and opaque, gray-tinged as the shore came into view. It looked as if it bordered on nothing—limitless—but the idea was frightening, like the whole world had drowned. There was nothing left but this earthy coast I stood upon, the sand gritty and sharp against my bare feet.
I was dreaming, I realized. The vague feeling that something wasn’t quite right overwhelmed me, like I was squinting to see the whole picture.
Everything was pallor and faded. The shore behind me seemed to stretch on for miles, but I knew it was the last refuge of earth—the seas were empty and void. The land was gone.
I began to walk along the shore. The sighs carried across the waves toward me, whispering in discord, some voices carrying so that I could almost make out the sound of them. Almost, but never quite.
Wreckage lay along the shore, pieces of bent wood that once curved around the bow of a ship, nails stuck into them that no longer attached to anything but air. A cracked turtle shell, belly-up, with kanji carved into it. The waves lapped through it like a tunnel, spilling through the other side like a fountain. Pieces from a distant storm, scraps that had lost meaning.
A bright orange torii appeared from the shadow, the Shinto gateway towering above as though the grayness had just lifted away and left color in its place. The sighs were louder now, except they sounded mournful, like wailing.
I wasn’t alone in this strange place. Someone was crying.
I fought the urge to run. Fear prickled down my spine; I didn’t want to disturb whoever it was. I didn’t want to be involved.
I turned my head to look back at the shore I’d walked along.
A beast stood in the shadows, his angular ears pressed tightly against his head. His eyes gleamed with a ghostly green.
A wolf. No, an inugami, the vengeful wolf demons that hunted Tomo, that had mauled his friend Koji and nearly cost him his eye. The inugami crouched, watching me, a challenge in his eyes.
I couldn’t go back, so I turned once again to the bright orange torii. The grains of sand stuck to my soles as I walked, miniature daggers that pricked me with their warnings.
“Machinasai,” a voice said, ordering me to wait. I stopped.
I heard the sound of fabric scraping over sand, and looked to my right. She wore a kimono of gold embroidered with elaborate phoenixes, an obi red as blood wrapped tightly around her waist.
Amaterasu, the kami of the sun. She looked like she had in the clearing with Tomo and Jun, but different somehow. Larger, more real. She exuded power about her. She smiled, and yet somehow it was terrifying.
Her headdress of beads jingled as she tilted her head, speaking in a haunting voice that seemed to echo in the vast and empty space. It sounded like Japanese, but I couldn’t make sense of it. Her speech was too formal, too ancient.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t understand.”
“I have tried to speak to you for so long,” she said, “that my voice is dry from effort.” She was speaking modern Japanese now, graciously but with a subtle distaste, like someone who pretends to be glad to accept a gift they already have.
“Who’s crying?” I asked, looking toward the gateway.
“The kami have need of tears,” she said. “We have cried so long that we have drowned the world.”
I tried to grasp the questions I’d had when I was awake. It was my chance to ask, but my head was hazy from sleep, barely able to remember the real world or the fact that I was dreaming.
“Tsukiyomi,” I managed. Was that it? It didn’t sound quite right asleep. “How can I stop him?”
“Tomohiro is the heir of calamity.”
“What can I do?”
“There is no hope for you,” she said, like she had said over and over to him. “There is nothing to be done.”
I looked over toward the torii, toward the back of a figure on her knees in the sand. She wore a kimono of white, the black obi draped in an elaborate bow across her back, and her body shook with the quiet sobs.
I hesitated, watching for a moment.
“But Tsukiyomi,” I said. “Tsukiyomi is trying to take control of Tomo.”
Amaterasu tilted her head to the side, her eyes deep pools of blackness. “Tsukiyomi is dead. Long ago he left this world.”
I saw another figure beside the crying girl—a boy on the ground in front of her, slumped with a leg bent strangely to the side.
“The mirror has seen it,” Amaterasu said. “It cannot be undone.”
I stepped toward the girl and the boy, walking slowly as my bare feet slipped in the sharp sand.
The girl wore a furisode kimono, with long sleeves that draped over the body of the boy and into the sand, the ends of the soft white fabric stained with ink. The girl had tucked her arm under the boy’s neck, and his head lolled back unnaturally, his copper spikes speckled with sand.
My stomach twisted as I looked down at the familiar face.
“Tomo,” I breathed, falling to my knees in the sand. Trails of ink carved down his face and across the elaborate silver robes he wore, collecting in the fabric like pools of dark blood. His eyes were closed, his face expressionless as he rested in her arms.
The girl looked down as she wept. Her long black hair had come out of the coils she’d tied them in at the base of her neck, and they tumbled in a tangle over her face. She looked up to take a breath and I realized she, too, was Amaterasu. There were two of them. I looked past her to see the Amaterasu in gold, and she stood there, watching, as she clasped her hands on the rim of a huge bronze mirror that stretched from her hips to her feet. I’d seen that mirror before, the one she’d held up to Jun in the clearing to show him the truth of who he really was.
The girl let out another sob, and black tears ran down her cheeks. Tears made of ink. I reached a hand toward her.
“Katie!” a voice shouted. I jumped, frightened to be recognized in this strange world. I wanted to wake up. I pinched my arm, twisting the skin back and forth. I didn’t want to know any more. “Katie,” the voice said again, and the shadowy fog pulled back.
It was Jun, hunched over on one knee and adorned in broken armor, his face streaked with ink. He wore a helmet on his head with golden horns, but one had broken off in a jagged cut and lay in the sand and tangle of brush grass at his feet.
No, that wasn’t the horn in the sand. It was the wrong shape, too...too sharp.
It was a sword, stained dark on the blade.
My blood turned to ice. My world turned black.
“Katie,” Jun said quietly. “Gomen.” I’m sorry.