Life is hard in Rainshadow City, a place where poverty and corruption are rife and where inhabitants are terrorized by an underground criminal organization known as the Lucky Crows.

Toshiko, Jun and Mei Kawakami are family, bonded through loyalty if not by blood. They live outside the city’s increasingly corrupt law, and are seeking revenge on the Lucky Crows for the murder of their beloved ‘aunt’ Reiko. Haru is the son of the Emperor, destined to one day rule over the whole Rainshadow Archipelago and uphold his mother’s ignoble legacy. Currently however, he seems more interested in making friends with magical Sun Spirits that only he can see. Theo, forced to leave his homeland, is a reluctant foot-soldier for the Lucky Crows. He doesn’t want to be a gangster, but as an illegal immigrant to the city, his choices are severely limited.

When Toshiko steals a dragon pearl from the leader of the Crows, she begins a daring adventure that will put them all on a thrilling path to determine the future of Rainshadow City.

Tightly set across two days and peopled with unforgettable characters, The Rainshadow Orphans draws on the charm of anime like Pokémon and the works of Studio Ghibli, as well as on the gripping, fast-paced fantasy plots of series like The Legend of Korra, to explore what it means to stand up to corruption and take charge of destiny.

The Rainshadow Orphans is due for publication on 26th May – you can pre-order your copy on Bookshop.org

From Chapter One

Like most of her citizens, Emperor Asayo Soramoto made the most of summer’s lingering heat to celebrate the Turning Leaf Festival – Rainshadow City’s official first night of autumn, when the leaves were just beginning to change their colours – with a lavish outdoor banquet. As Toshiko shimmied forwards along her branch to peer through the leaves, she was rewarded with her first clear view of the banquet table below, not twenty feet in front of her, set out beneath the avenue of trees. She also got her first glimpse of the Emperor herself.

It was almost a surprise to discover that Emperor Asayo looked, in person, almost exactly as she did in the daily telecasts. Sitting towards the centre of the long, laden table, she was dressed to perfection as usual in a sharply tailored trouser suit, its material the burnt-orange colour of an autumn forest.

Toshiko had just begun to shift further along her branch, hoping to see who the Emperor was talking to across the table, when her foot caught on an unexpected knot in the wood and then slipped against the tree’s ridged bark.

She managed to recover her balance, but the movement set the many paper lanterns that were suspended from the tree swinging gently back and forth, the whole cluster of them moving like a cloud of outsize fireflies. Toshiko held her breath, certain she must have revealed her presence to the whole gathering.

Everyone sitting at the table below, though, still seemed too intent on each other and on the spread of festival food before them to even think of looking up into the branches. The stewards serving them also appeared far too focused on carrying out their duties to the Emperor’s satisfaction to expect anything more than a gentle breeze at work in the treetops above – thank the Gods. Toshiko let her breath out, slowly, feeling her heartbeat settle.

The sound of Mei popping her gum came crisp and clear again over the earpiece. ‘Well?’ she asked Toshiko.

Toshiko looked back down through the ginkgo leaves, and considered how she might describe the scene to Mei. There were perhaps as many as fifty people seated at the long table below, being waited on by a mixture of stewards in Imperial livery and simple Service-bots on wheels. The table itself was laid out a magnificent spread of different types of food, and set with more gleaming cups, plates and glasses than Toshiko would have known what to do with.

Many of Emperor Asayo’s guests seemed to be high-ranking ministers or advisors: the kind of people responsible for delivering her agenda in running day-to-day life in this island city state of Rainshadow City, as well as for managing the city’s relationship with the other islands that made up its wider Empire of the Rainshadow Archipelago. These were all people in nondescript middle age, looking elegantly professional in well-cut suits and dresses, which were all of subtly rich shades of dark blue, grey and black. Scattered amidst these guests were others dressed in the colourful reds, oranges and golds that were more typical of the Turning Leaf Festival. Toshiko guessed these might be members of the Emperor’s extended family.

With a start, then, she registered that the Emperor’s young son was here, sitting next to his mother on her left-hand side. Like his mother, the Crown Prince, a boy of ten, looked just as he did in the telecasts. He wasn’t the only child at this banquet, either. There were a couple of small girls sitting a few seats further down from him, who Toshiko thought might be his cousins, and a small cluster of even younger children at the table’s far end.

Tearing her eyes away from all the beautiful clothes, raden-worked rice bowls, lacquered chopsticks and platters of sushi, tempura, golden sweet potato tartlets and huge grilled matsutake mushrooms, Toshiko made herself remember the real reason she’d come here tonight, and began studying the guests at the table with more intention. To begin with, she thought that maybe he wasn’t here and Jun’s information had been faulty. Then, finally, she clocked him: Ken Saito of the Lucky Crows, sitting next to the Crown Prince, just one place away from the Emperor herself on her left-hand side.

The Lucky Crows were the biggest, most formidable, and officially the only organized crime syndicate on the island, controlling the whole of Rainshadow City’s underground economy. Mei was certain, too, that they also pulled the strings of all sorts of elements within the island city state’s ruling elite. Back when the Kawakamis had still lived in the Keeper’s Crescent – the fenced-off arc of shanty towns that ran along the southern section of the island’s coast, and a place that none of the city’s legal citizens liked to think about – Ken Saito had served as the gang’s head of operations there. Known as ‘the Captain’, he’d managed the exploitation of the Crescent’s residents as cheap labour for Rainshadow City proper. He’d also been responsible for the collection of the ‘taxes’ that the Lucky Crows demanded from everyone who lived within the Crescent’s confines, as well as for the gang’s brisk trade in kakogan dust.

At first, Toshiko was amazed she hadn’t recognized Saito immediately. Then again, it had been a full five years now since Auntie Reiko had done the unthinkable and defied him, refusing to let him take her adopted children into the city for a job in the granitarium mines so dangerous there would have been a good chance of them not coming back. 

Toshiko took a moment now to simply watch Saito, taking in all the details of this man who had killed the closest person to a parent she’d ever known, studying him in a way she hadn’t been able to back in the half-light and horror of the last time she’d seen him.

‘I’ve found him. He’s here,’ was all Toshiko said to Mei. ‘You’re absolutely sure it’s him?’ Mei was still trying to put on a bored voice, but Toshiko knew her well enough to detect a new agitation in her tone. ‘Is he wearing the ring?’

Toshiko could hear in her sister’s voice just how much she wanted that ring. According to Jun’s investigations, this apparently simple piece of jewellery contained a chip that held access codes to almost every closed network in Rainshadow City, as well as to the Lucky Crows’ private accounts, including bank accounts. There was no copy, and Saito never let it leave his person. For a hacker like Mei, that ring was the key to whole new realms of possibility, reaching even beyond the next stage in their current scheme of skimming credits from the gang’s reserves. After everything they’d suffered at the Lucky Crows’ hands, the Kawakamis were only too happy to steal as much as they needed from the gang in order to fund the life they’d managed to grasp for themselves beyond the Keeper’s Crescent in the years following Reiko’s death.

She took just a moment to check that everyone at the table was still fully immersed in their various conversations before dropping, catlike, onto the paving below without so much as rustling a leaf. A grin spread over her face in spite of her nerves. Mei might have all the talent for computing, but Toshiko could climb like it was a skill that had been gifted to her by the Gods. ‘And they don’t teach that at high school,’ she whispered, triumphant, at exactly the same moment that the Crown Prince looked up from his place at the table and caught her eye. 

The Rainshadow Orphans is due for publication on 26th May – you can pre-order your copy on Bookshop.org