The Burning God (The Poppy War Book 3)

She was so small.

Nezha couldn’t register the choking gurgles in her throat, the glassy panic in her eyes, or the warmth of her blood as it spilled down his hands. He couldn’t, or he would shatter. As Rin bled out over the sand, the only thought running through his mind was that she was so small, so light, so fragile in his arms.

Then the twitching stopped, and she was gone.

Kitay lay still beside him. He knew Kitay was gone, too—that Kitay had died a bloodless death the moment he plunged the blade into Rin’s heart, because Rin and Kitay were bonded in a way that he could never understand, and there was no world where Rin died and Kitay remained alive. Because Kitay—the third party, the in-between, the weight that tipped the scale—had chosen to follow Rin into the afterlife and to leave Nezha behind. Alone.

Alone, and shouldering the immense burden of their legacy.

He couldn’t move. He could hardly breathe. As he stared down at the tiny body in his arms—so limp and lifeless, so utterly unlike the vicious human hurricane he knew as Fang Runin—all he could do was tremble.

You bitch, he thought. You fucking bitch.

He realized dimly that he ought to be glad she was dead. He should have been fucking delighted. And rationally, intellectually, he was. Rin was a monster, a murderer, a destroyer of worlds. Nothing but blood and ashes ever trailed in her wake. The world was a better, safer, and more peaceful place without her in it. He believed that. He had to believe that.

And yet.

And yet, when he looked at that broken body, all he wanted to do was howl.

Why? He wanted to scream at her. He wanted to shake her, throttle her, until she answered. Rin, what the fuck?

But he knew why.

He knew exactly what choice she’d made and what she’d intended. And that made everything—hating her, loving her, surviving her—so much harder.

Fix this.

He tilted his head back. His knees shook from a wave of exhaustion washing over his limbs, and he took a deep, rattling breath as he contemplated the monumental task before him.

Fix this? Fix this? What did he have left to work with? She’d broken everything.

But theirs had always been a broken country. It had never been unified, not truly; it had only ever been held tightly together by steel and blood, a facade of internal unity, while factions always threatened to split from within. Rin had forced those tensions to the surface, and then to their breaking point. She’d forced the Nikara to confront the greatest lie it had ever told about itself—that there had ever been a united Nikara Empire at all.

And yet, she’d laid a foundation for him. She’d burned away all that was rotten and corrupt. He didn’t have to reform the Warlord system because she’d destroyed it for him. He didn’t have to face backlash from the crumpling system of feudal aristocracy, because she’d already wrecked it. She’d wiped clear the maps of the past. She’d hurled the pieces off the board.

She was a goddess. She was a monster. She’d nearly destroyed this country.

And then she’d given it one last, gasping chance to live.

He knew she hadn’t done this for him. No, she’d done him no great mercy. She’d known that his future—the future she’d just assigned him—was full of horrors. They both knew that Nikan’s only path forward was through Hesperia—through a cruel, supercilious, exploitative entity that would certainly try to remold and reshape them, until the only vestiges of Nikara culture that remained lay buried in the past.

But Nikan had survived occupation before. If Nezha played his cards right—if he bent where he needed to, if he lashed back at just the right time—then they might survive occupation again.

He didn’t know how he’d weather what came next, but he had to try.

He owed it to her to try.

Nezha lowered Rin’s body to the ground, stood up, squared his shoulders, and awaited the coming of the fleet.