The wind fared no better — and, in a sense, fared far worse, because the wind, unlike the chill, insisted on making a public spectacle of its own humiliation.
It came howling across the island's upper atmosphere with the self-important bluster of a minor deity convinced it still mattered, caught the hem of her crimson kimono — tonight's iteration, embroidered with cherry blossoms that pulsed faintly like dying embers — and lifted.
The silk fluttered, billowed, snapped and rippled against the night like a war banner planted in conquered territory by a conqueror who had already grown bored and wandered off.
The fabric climbed her thighs, exposing another deliberate inch of pale skin, another calculated centimetre of the curved, taut landscape the hemline had been engineered to suggest rather than reveal—
