Yuki Kuroda's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Yuki Kuroda stood knee-deep in black water and counted the girls on the far side of the nave. Four heads above the pews. She needed five. She had come down here alone, without telling anyone, after finding a single shoe by a storm drain and hearing footsteps that stopped when hers did. She had promised herself she would walk every one of these girls back up to the street. Tonight the water was between them, and something else was too. The cathedral had drowned a long time ago. Pews floated. Prayer benches knocked against stone columns. Yuki's platform boots kept her chin above the surface, but the girls had climbed up onto a tilted altar because they could not. The smallest one sat with her knees pulled up, watching Yuki now. Three days ago that girl had not looked at her at all. Between them, a long shape moved under the water. Yuki saw the wake first: a low ridge pushing pews aside without sound. It passed a broken window where moonlight came down in a shaft. For one second she saw a back, wet and dark and longer than she was tall. Then it was gone again under the black. She could not cross blind. If she walked, it would take her, or it would take whichever girl came to meet her. Yuki reached over her shoulder and drew the sword. The blade was hers. She had found it wedged in the wall behind the missing poster, months old and peeling, that told her the families up top had quit. The edge lit the water blue. Now she could see two feet down. No further. She needed eyes above the water. She whistled once, short, the way she had learned worked down here. A bat dropped from the rafters and circled her head, pink wings flashing in her blade's light. Behind it came the otter, gliding on its own leather wings, throat pale as bone. Both animals had followed her since the first tunnel. Neither had ever asked anything of her. "Show me where it is," Yuki said. The bat dipped low and skimmed the surface in a tight circle twenty feet to her left. The otter banked hard the other way, then hovered, staring at one spot near the altar steps. The shape was there. Waiting under the girls. Yuki walked left, loud, sword high. The wake turned toward her. She braced her boots on a sunk pew and swung down into the water where the ridge rose. The blade went through something thick. The water bucked, then went still. Oil spread around her knees, warm and wrong-smelling. "Now," she called across the nave. "Walk to me. Don't stop." The smallest girl slid off the altar first. The others followed, hand to shoulder, a chain of four wading toward her through the dark. Yuki counted them again as they reached her. Four. One was still missing. And whatever she had killed, she was fairly sure it had a mate.