Free Kinslayer by Jay Kristoff Page B

the contraption’s guts and stuffed them back into its housing. Sealing the device closed with a few hasty screws, he stepped back.
    “Done.”
    The False-Lifer looked at Atsushi’s blade poised against its throat. The boy shifted his grip, one word from a bloodbath. Kin was watching her with pleading eyes. Yukiko stared for a pregnant moment, arms folded, eyes narrowed. The rain was falling harder, fat, clear droplets pounding the leaves around them and soaking everyone to the bones.
    Everyone except the False-Lifer, of course.
    “I have never seen rain that was not black before.” It turned its palms to the sky, droplets pattering upon its body, beading and running like quicksilver. “It is beautiful.”
    Yukiko’s eyes were on the blade gleaming in Atsushi’s hand. The raindrops glittering on the steel like polished jewels.
    We should just get everything we can from her, then bury her.
    Buruu growled.
    WHAT IF SHE SPEAKS TRUTH? WHAT IF SHE IS WHAT SHE SAYS?
    No one leaves the Guild. Everyone knows that.
    EXCEPT YOUR KIN.
    Don’t call him that.
    I DID NOT TRUST HIM EITHER, REMEMBER? YET WITHOUT HIM, NEITHER OF US WOULD BE HERE.
    I know that.
    THEN YOU KNOW WE CANNOT END THIS GIRL ON MERE SUSPICION.
    Yukiko hissed, rubbed her eyes with balled fists. The Kenning headache was slinking forward on fox-light feet. The noise. The heat. Lurking in the back of her skull with leaden hands and bated breath.
    “Take off your skin,” she said.
    “What?” Kin raised an eyebrow. “What for?”
    “If we’re taking it back, we’re not bringing a tracking device with us. It takes its skin and mechabacus off and we bury them here.”
    “The mechabacus won’t work anym—”
    “That’s the bargain, Kin. We bury its skin, or we bury it .”
    “She’s not an ‘it.’” Kin frowned. “Her name is Ayane.”
    Isao scowled, shook his head. Yukiko turned to the False-Lifer, eyes and voice cold.
    “Your choice. And I don’t mean to sound cruel, but I could sleep either way.”
    The False-Lifer glanced at Atsushi’s blade, then to Kin. Without a word, it began twisting the wing-nut bolts studding its suit. Reaching back with its humanoid arms, it tinkered with the silver orb on its spine; the melon-sized hub from which the spider limbs sprang. It fumbled around for a moment, hissing softly.
    “Can you help please, Kin-san? It is difficult to do this alone.”
    Hesitantly, Kin stepped behind it, twisting each bolt dotting its spine, working several clasps under the False-Lifer’s direction. Yukiko heard a faint series of popping sounds, all over the grease-slick, gleaming body, followed by the wet sucking of air rushing into vacuum. The skin slackened, as if it were now a size too big. The thing tugged a zip cord running up to the base of its skull, another down to the small of its back. As Atsushi and Isao watched, revolted and fascinated, the False-Lifer bent double, and like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon, chrysalis to imago, sloughed off its outer shell.
    She was clad in a membrane of pale webbing beneath. Skin so pallid it was almost translucent. Her head utterly hairless; no eyelashes, eyebrows, nothing. Long slender limbs and tapered fingers, smooth curves studded with bayonet fixtures of black, gleaming metal. Seventeen, perhaps eighteen years old at most. Her lips were full and pouting, as if she’d been stung by something venomous, her features fragile and perfect; a porcelain doll on its first day in the sun. She narrowed her eyes, held one hand up against the light.
    Inexplicably, Yukiko felt her heart sink.
    She’s beautiful.
    Kin scowled at the gawping boys and removed his uwagi, slipped it around the pale girl’s shoulders. Yukiko could see the same bayonet fixtures in his flesh, ruining smooth lines of lean muscle, fixed in the exact same location: wrists, shoulders, chest, collarbone, spine. The silver orb sat affixed to the girl’s back, spider limbs rippling, still making that horrid, inhuman