Rin had never gone into the Foreman's office for contract negotiations with any degree of trepidation. She'd never had anything to gain, or, for that matter, anything to lose. This time, though, she tucked Sen's letter inside her kimono, safe in the layers of cloth, and tried not to pay attention to the racing of her heart.
The Foreman was a housecat the size of a bear. Its head was level with Rin's shoulder, standing, and its paws were the size of plates, but its voice was female and it was always ma'am among the staff.
"Rin," she said, looking up from a document she was correcting with a writing brush held in her tail. "You're the last of Group Ten. Still no name? Good, fine, send in the—"
"Actually," Rin said, sitting on her heels on the tatami, her throat feeling oddly dry, "I found it."
The Foreman froze. "What?"
"My name," Rin repeated, pulling out Sen's message. She spread it on the desk in front of the Foreman.
The Foreman hissed when she saw Sen's name in the signature. "That girl child!" The Foreman had been responsible for the clean-up after No-face had destroyed half the bathhouse. It would take her longer than a few months to forget that grudge.
"Here," Rin said, laying a finger on the 'bell' character.
The Foreman gave a low growl. "So," she said. "You want to cancel your contract."
"Maybe," Rin said. It probably wasn't good to play her hand too soon. There was only one card in it.
"Maybe?" the Foreman said. "You're on a group leader salary – we could possibly add to that," she said, a new and thoughtful note in her voice. "A little."
"I want to see Yubaba," Rin said.
The Foreman acted as if Rin had dropped a rotten fish on her desk. Her ears drew back and she recoiled with a hiss. "You don't know what you're saying."
Rin pushed up her sleeves, a nervous habit. "I'm only discussing my contract with Yubaba." Yubaba never had a title in the bathhouse. Her name was the title.
"She'll turn you into soup," the Foreman growled. "She'll feed you to Bo. You're a fool."
Rin crossed her arms and said nothing.
The Foreman's tail lashed, inadvertently sending a spray of ink over her desk cushion. "Fine, then," she said. "I'll write you a pass. And then I'll start looking for a new leader for Group Ten, since you'll find it hard to carry out your duties when she's turned you into a slug."
"Tachi's a good choice," Rin said brightly. "Tends to forget he doesn't have a tail, though."
The Foreman only snarled and poked her tail in the document shelves to find a pass. She pressed her gold seal into the red wax and pushed it over to Rin with one claw.
"Thanks." Rin gave a shallow bow and tucked it into her kimono. "I'll try not to get turned into anything."
When she got up to the top floors, though, she wasn't feeling nearly so breezy. She slipped up the edges of plush staircases and through corridors lined with gilded screens. Several times she had to slip around a corner and stay there, frozen, while a magisterial guest floated or crawled down the corridor. A Group as low as Ten was supposed to be invisible on these floors. She took the service corridors wherever she could.
Yubaba's quarters were up the last flight of stairs and through an arch formed by a pair of gilded dragons. Their flaming heads roared at the apex. On either side there was a stone Guardian lion with a manic, distorted face, one snarling and one sneering. Rin bowed to them and held up her pass. They didn't move as she slipped through.
"Who is it?" Yubaba's voice shrieked. Rin held her breath as she crept into the cave of tapestries and gold leaf and deep carpets. Strange masks leered at her from the walls. Sen had done this. If a ten-year-old could, she had to be able to.
She could hear the skree of weather birds outside, which was almost comforting, but there was also a bouncing, glubbing noise from an inner room that Rin didn't recognise and a burbling that must be Bo. She didn't want to meet Bo. She gulped and stepped into the main study.
Yubaba was sitting behind a desk. Rin stood transfixed, staring behind her.
"Yes, what?" Yubaba snapped, looking up. Her writing brush didn't stop its spidery crawl over the scroll in front of her.
But Rin couldn't make herself speak, or bow, or even look away. She was staring at the ivory statue behind Yubaba's desk.
It was an exquisite statue of a shrine maiden holding a purification flute, her hair lifted as if by a sudden breeze. Her ash-white eyes were frozen in her face, frightened and achingly sad. Every feature was at once familiar and oddly different. She looked – too young. Rin shivered violently.
The painful crack of a stick across her face brought her back to her senses. She recoiled and put her hand to her cheek, tasting blood in her mouth. Yubaba was standing in front of her, stick raised. "Don't ignore me, girl!" she snapped. "What kind of contract worker are you?"
Rin took a couple more steps back and bowed, her face hard and blank. "Sorry," she said, because that was what you said.
Yubaba hobbled to a chair by one of the open veranda doors and sat in it. "Come and sit down here so I can look at you," she said. "Rin, isn't it?" She cackled. "Or not Rin, how would you know?"
Rin frowned but moved and sat on her heels on the open threshold of the veranda. A cool breeze came in from behind the wicker screen. The weather birds cawed just outside, spiralling up in a flock, but Rin clenched her fists and ignored them. Yubaba's stick bore up under her chin and forced her to look up.
"Aging nicely, aren't you?" Yubaba said, giving her face a scrutinizing look. "Two years in what, three centuries? Humans are so unpredictable. It could take thousands more for you to grow old." She snickered. "What is it, then? If you've come to waste my time- eurgh!"
Rin jumped at the shattering crash from behind her. She turned to see a dazed weather bird falling away from a collison with the screen. Yubaba shook her stick at it. "Away, you filthy bird!" she screeched. "I'll send the paper fliers after you!"
But Rin had caught sight of the black feathers on the bird's temples. "Don't, Yubaba!" she said. That was Kiku.
That had been a mistake. Yubaba was looking at her with narrowed eyes. "Making friends with weather birds? Dirty, flea-ridden things. I ought to have them all culled." She uncurled one knobbly finger and jabbed the lacquered nail at Rin. "I suppose you're here to beg for your friend to be turned human."
Rin jumped. Yubaba couldn't read minds. Someone would have told her. "I – I –" Pull yourself together, she told herself. "Yes," she said firmly.
Yubaba cast a look at Okiku's statue decorating her study. "You know the condition!" she said. "She kneels on this floor" – the finger jabbed at the ground – "and apologises, she turns back."
Rin's fists clenched. "She's a statue. She can't move."
Yubaba gave a screeching laugh. "Well, then, it looks like she'll stay a statue, won't she?"
There was no point arguing. Rin had tried arguing, back at the beginning. She'd just found herself with months of sewage duty and docked pay. "I found my name," Rin said instead.
"You what?" Yubaba snapped, her current-black eyes going back to Rin. "Impossible! Not two of you in a year."
Rin didn't take out Sen's letter because even the sight of Sen's name was likely to send Yubaba into a rage. Instead, she sketched the character in the air. "Rin," she said, throwing the word like a challenge. "Bell."
Yubaba stared at her, and then let out a snort of laughter. That hadn't been the reaction Rin was expecting. She kept her face blank and put her hands on her knees.
"And what do you want to do with that?" Yubaba said, her voice slipping into the sweetest of old-lady tones. Rin felt uneasiness knot her stomach tighter. She wished the weather birds would shut up. One of them was clinging to the roof and pecking at the screen, and the cawing was making it hard to concentrate.
"I want you to turn Okiku back," she said. "I'll trade my name back to you for it."
"Oh my dear," Yubaba said. The sugary tone grated down Rin's back. Yubaba sketched the same character in the air. As her finger nail traced the lines they glowed red, until the character was suspended in the air between them. "What makes you think you have the right name?"
"What?" Rin said.
Yubaba sneered and slashed a finger through the character. It turned black and shrivelled into a puff of smoke. "No, no, no!" she said. "Incorrect! Your contract was never made out to a Rin at all, girl!"
"But Sen said-"
"Sen!" Yubaba shrieked, climbing to her feet with the help of her stick. Her face was growing red. "That interfering little chit! I should have wrung her neck!"
Rin pulled out the message and thrust it desperately at Yubaba. "Look!"
"Rin isn't your name," Yubaba snapped. "It's worth nothing! You don't have your name to bargain with! You don't even have your friend's!"
"I know her name!" Rin snapped back. "Okiku! I haven't forgotten it!"
Abruptly Yubaba's mouth curled. "Okiku the little shrine maiden. What was her family name?"
Rin stopped.
Yubaba put her head on one side, her eyes bright and smug like a bird's. "Three hundred years is an awfully long time, my dear," she said. She curled her hand as if picking something out of the air. "I'll keep both of your names safe. Run on back to work."
At her dismissive gesture, Rin got automatically to her feet. It felt like her limbs were weighted with something heavy. She caught Okiku's anguished ivory stare and looked away, despair seeping into her like ice water. It hadn't been worth it. She had never had a name to bargain with in the first place.
The weather birds cawed behind her, one of them shaking the wicker screen again. "Filthy things," Yubaba muttered. "Girl, be a dear and drive them off."
Rin turned around to obey without thinking, glad for anything that would take Okiku's eyes off her.
But something was wrong. When had Yubaba got Okiku's name? Okiku wasn't on a contract. A statue couldn't write, let alone work.
Rin whirled back around and stared at the statue. Yubaba had been talking as if Okiku was on the same contract as Rin. But Rin had talked to everyone in the bathhouse by now. She would know if Okiku had ever worked there. Or surely Okiku would have found her—
"Get on with it!" Yubaba snapped.
White fire seemed to be filling Rin's head as she turned away from the statue. Could she have been that stupid? Could she have been worrying over a statue for three hundred years when Okiku wasn't even inside it?
She threw open the wicker screen. "KIKU!" she shouted. "KIKU, GET IN HERE!"
There was a skree like the sky ripping, and the runty weather bird dived into the room. It brought down a chunk of the screen, hit the wall and bowled over, thrashing in a tapestry it had torn from its hangings.
"What are you doing?" Yubaba shrieked, flailing at it with her stick.
"Get down, Kiku!" Rin said, grabbing at the bird. She managed to disentangle it – her – from the tapestry. The bird gave her a panicked look from one beady eye and ducked Yubaba's stick, flapping her wings.
"You have to apologise!" Rin said frantically. "Kneel and apologise! That's the condition, Okiku!"
The bird froze in her hands. It lay down awkwardly, resting its head on the ground, and croaked out something that didn't sound like a normal caw.
"Damn you!" Yubaba said.
Rin wasn't listening, because suddenly there was a pile of tattered robes and salt crusted hair and warm human body next to her. "Okiku!"
The face that turned up to hers wasn't perfect like the statue. Okiku was two years older, for a start, her features changed with time and sunburn and weathering on her cheeks. But she had exactly the same confused and outraged look on her face as whenever anything happened that she didn't understand. Her voice, when she spoke, was familiar and breathless. "You took your time!"
"Get out!" Yubaba shouted, cracking at both of them with her stick. "I still hold both your contracts! You don't have names! Get back to work!"
It was like being swatted at by a child. Rin tried to suppress a laugh as she hauled Okiku to her feet, but couldn't. She was probably going to be on sewage duty for years after this, and she didn't care at all. She grabbed Okiku's wrist and pulled. "Come on!"
Okiku half-fell after her in surprise. Rin yanked her mercilessly out of the rooms and down the steps. They couldn't risk getting caught up here; Rin didn't think Yubaba was in any mood to honour her pass. Okiku yelped and nearly fell down the first flight.
"Can't you go any faster?" Rin said, catching her.
"I'm used to flying," Okiku said, and for some reason that struck both of them as absurdly funny. They made it down the stairs, laughter spurting from both of them. It got worse and worse until they reached a service corridor on the first of Group Ten's floors and had to collapse in a heap, Rin sucking in great gulps of breath.
"We're hysterical," she said. "It's the relief. Breathe."
"Don't you – tell me – what to do, Suzu," Okiku said, but managed to get her breathing under control.
Rin choked. "Suzu?" she said.
"Yes?" Okiku said blankly.
Rin couldn't speak. Suzu. It was just the other way of reading bell.
She'd never been Rin at all. She could change her contract. She could go home. Only—
"Okiku," she said. "Do you remember your name as well?"
Okiku crossed her hands and held tight to her own wrists, her fingers pressing so hard they were leaving a white outline. "No," she said. "My family name's gone. Yubaba has it." She shook her head in a single, violent motion. That was new, Rin thought. It looked almost like a bird cocking its head.
"You'll be fine though," Okiku added. "You never had a family name. I wondered why you hadn't gone home already." Her hair was half-hiding her face. "I thought maybe – maybe you were waiting for me." Her voice was less certain than Rin ever remembered it. "I didn't realise you'd forgotten."
"Rin?" said a new voice.
Tachi was peering round the corner of the service corridor, shock written all over his face. "The Foreman said you'd found your name," he said. "She said you were going to tear up your contract – I don't want to be Group Leader, Rin!"
Rin looked at the expressions on Okiku's face. She was trying to hide the pleading by looking fierce – Rin had seen her do that before, but it looked different on her fifteen-year-old face. All her expressions were different.
It struck Rin that Okiku didn't remind her so much of her thirteen-year-old mistress, who she hadn't seen for three hundred years, but someone much more recent. Someone ten years old, who'd barely known which end of a mop was which.
"Why do I always get landed with the spoiled brats?" she said to the air at large.
"Suzu!" Okiku said, poking her in the arm. Rin grabbed her wrist.
"Don't do that," she said. "Are you going to work, Okiku? We can find out your name – it's not impossible – but I won't have anyone in my group who can't work. It's not just flying around seeding cloud or wandering around with a flute."
Okiku gave her a startled look, her black eyes wide in her now dark-tanned face. "I –" she said, then broke off, and gave Rin another look. "I can work," she said slowly.
Rin got to her feet, stretching. She rubbed her cheek where Yubaba's stick had connected and offered Okiku a hand. "You're off the hook," she told Tachi, who nearly collapsed in relief. "Find me a red coat. This is the newest member of Group Ten. Oh, also," she added, as Okiku took her hand, "My name's Rin."
"Rin," Okiku repeated, and held her hand tightly.