Prologue

“Why does this keep happening?” I screech, my fingernails digging so hard into my scalp that I could literally tear it out of my head. “WHY?”

Yes, why? How many times have I watched this unfold? Watched my mother die, relived the day I killed my closest friend, gone through the same terrible words I was called by the people who were supposed to protect me? All of this still in my head, every single day, from the day it happened, and never less horrible.

My lips, cracked and bruised from thirst and biting, choose this moment to begin aching again. My vision, hazy from lack of sleep, barely follows my fingers as they use the blood to trace the single kanji of my given name on my arm.

剣, read as “Tsurugi”, means “sword”. My parents had explained to me that I was given this name because my mother, the day before labor, had seen in a dream a sword that fought on its own, without a warrior to wield it. Sometimes I would doubt the reason, but this story always stuck to my mind like glue.

I was a sword.

In all senses of the phrase.

“Tsuru-chan!”

My stomach gives a violent jump and my blood turns icy. Why now?

“Tsuru-chan, come on!”

For a moment, I swear I see a wisp of snowy hair before my body starts falling toward the ground.

I scream, gasp, and curse as I move to the window just in time to vomit as my throat gives in, bile falling down seven stories to crash on the sidewalk. Dang it.

“Stop,” I croak, to no one in particular. “Please, stop, you all. I just wanna live…”

But nothing happens, except the sound of loud cursing from someone on the ground who’s just stepped into a puddle of my rage on the ground.

And I faint, losing consciousness before I even hit the ground.

The ghosts’ voices sing me to sleep.