Page 97 of Dragon 7

I looked at Kenji. “Your dragon-shadow is over there?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“I think I can feel it.”

“Good, but I’m not surprised. You are a man of many powers.”

“Many powers?” I blinked, unsure of how to accept that compliment.

Then, the baby returned.

I tensed.

Now she was on my brother's back with one chubby arm looped loose around his neck and her cheek pressed against the back of his muscular shoulder. She had her thumb tucked between her lips. She was a child sucking herself toward a nap she trusted would come.

And then her scent reached me.

Baby powder.

Soft.

Clean.

Warm.

The kind of powder that lived on a changing table in a peaceful nursery and got patted onto a small body after a bath. And there was the scent of blood. My heart ached to have those smells collide. It almost cracked my chest wide open. Almost made me moan in sadness so loud that everyone could hear it.

And those pretty, peaceful eyes watched me from over Kenji's shoulder.

I frowned. “Powers or not. I’m not okay.”

Kenji did not feel the ghost baby on his back. “You are okay, brother.”

"I see things." My voice came out lower than I wanted. "Wrong things that don't exist."

"I know."

"I don't want to. I don't know how much longer I can live this way."

Kenji went still beside me, and the worst part of it was that I knew he could see the true me more than anyone else. He had seen me my whole life. He had seen me as the screaming five-year-old in the cold mansion with the wrong neck man in the cellar and the wrist-open woman on the landing.

He had seen me as the boy who learned to kill before he learned to write.

He had seen me as the man who slept with a blade because his body could not believe a quiet room was safe.

But he had never paused like this.

The war was here. The plane would be landing in front of us soon. Surely, his dragon-shadow waited above us in the dark.

And my brother had stopped the entire night to look at me. "You carry things I will never have to carry, Hiro."

I swallowed.

"You see what the rest of us refuse to look at. You hear what the rest of us pretend is wind. You feel the weight of every person we lose and you do not put it down. You have never put it down. Not once in all the years of your life."

My eyes burned behind my mask.

"These are the truths kings hold."