The Burning God (The Poppy War Book 3)

Rin followed the girls along a winding path deep into the heart of the forest. Moonlight did not penetrate the upper canopy; the trees seemed packed with threats that hissed, buzzed, and lurked hidden within the shadows. Rin kept a small flame burning in her hand to serve as a lamp, but the trees loomed so thick she was afraid to grow her fire any larger lest they catch ablaze.

She willed her racing heart to slow. She wasn’t some scared little girl. She wasn’t afraid of the dark.

But she couldn’t quell her dread of what lay within.

“This way,” said the woman.

Rin ducked beneath a cluster of leaves and pushed through the underbrush, wincing as thorny branches scraped at her knees.

What am I doing?

If Kitay were here, he’d call her an idiot. He’d suggest she set the whole forest on fire and be done with it, Trifecta be damned. Instead, Rin was walking straight into Daji’s lair like dazed, entranced prey. Was stumbling right up to the woman who, for the better part of the last year, had spared no effort trying to torture, capture, or manipulate her.

But Daji didn’t want to kill her. She hadn’t ever before, and she didn’t now. Rin was sure of that. If Daji had wanted Rin dead, she would have killed her at the base of the Red Cliffs. She would have pressed a shard of shrapnel deep into Rin’s arteries and watched, smiling, as Rin bled out on the sand at her feet.

Rin had survived the Red Cliffs only because of Daji’s design. The Vipress still needed something from her, and Rin had to at least find out what it was.

“We’re here,” said the woman.

Cautiously, Rin expanded her flame to illuminate their surroundings. They had stopped before a tiny hut constructed with tree branches, vines, and deer hides. The interior couldn’t possibly fit more than two people.

The woman called toward the hut, “My lady, we’ve returned.”

“I hear four pairs of footsteps.” A feeble, trembling voice drifted from within. “What have you brought me?”

“A visitor,” Rin said.

A short pause. “Come alone.”

Rin dropped to her knees and crawled into the hut.

The former Empress of Nikan sat shrouded in darkness. Gone were her robes and jewelry. She was rank and filthy, wrapped in tattered clothes caked so thoroughly with dirt that Rin couldn’t tell their original color. Her hair had lost its luster; the tantalizing gleam had disappeared from her eyes. She looked like she had aged twenty years in the span of months. This wasn’t just the toll of war, wasn’t the stress of scraping for survival while a nation fell apart. Something supernatural had gnawed at Daji’s visage, had torn viciously at her beauty in a way time and hardship could not.

For a moment Rin stared in shock, wondering if she’d been wrong after all; if this was not the Vipress before her but just some old hag in the woods.

But then Daji locked her good eye onto Rin, and her cracked lips curved into an all-too-familiar smile. “Took you long enough.”

Blood rushed to Rin’s head, pounded in her ears. She glanced back to the entrance of the hut, outside of which the girls stood waiting.

“Leave us,” she ordered.

The girls didn’t budge. They looked to Daji, awaiting her command.

“Go,” Daji told them. “Go back to the village. Run.”

They scattered.

The moment they were gone, Rin yanked a knife from her belt and jammed the edge at the soft flesh beneath Daji’s chin. “Break the Seal.”

Daji only laughed, white throat pulsing against the blade’s tip. “You’re not going to kill me.”

“I swear to the gods—”

“You would have done it already.” Daji batted at the knife the way a kitten might swat a fly. “Enough with the histrionics. You need me alive.”

Rin held the knife firm. “Break the Seal.”

Her vision pulsed red. She had to focus to keep her hand from slipping, from accidentally slicing skin. She had spent so many hours fantasizing about what she’d do if she ever found Daji at her mercy. If she could force Daji to remove the block on her mind, she’d never have to rely on Kitay again. She’d never again wake up in the middle of the night, mouth dry from nightmares, head swimming with visions of his death. She’d never have to see the evidence of how much she hurt him—the ghost-white pallor of his face, the crescent marks dug into his palm—every single time she called the fire.

“It’s killing you, isn’t it?” Daji tilted her head back, studying her with a lazy, amused smile. “Does he suffer?”

“Break the Seal. I won’t ask again.”

“What, the Sorqan Sira couldn’t do it?”

“You know she couldn’t,” Rin snarled. “You’re the one who put it on, it’s your mark, and you’re the only one who can take it off.”

Daji shrugged. “Pity.”

Rin pressed the blade harder into Daji’s skin. How hard would she have to push to draw blood? Perhaps she shouldn’t aim at the neck—it would be too easy to hit an artery, and then Daji would bleed out before she did anything useful. She moved the sharp, gleaming tip down to Daji’s collarbone. “Perhaps some decorations will persuade. Which side do you favor?”

Daji feigned a yawn. “Torture won’t help you.”

“Don’t think I won’t do it.”

“I know you won’t. You’re not Altan.”

“Don’t fucking test me.” Rin sent a rivulet of fire arcing down the edge of the blade, just hot enough to singe. “I’m not living my whole life like a beast on a leash.”

Daji watched her for a long moment. The glowing metal sizzled against her collarbone, burning dark marks into her flesh, yet Daji didn’t even flinch. At last she lifted her hands in supplication. “I don’t know how.”

“You’re lying.”

“Dear child, I swear to you I can’t.”

“But you—” Rin couldn’t stop her voice from catching. “Why not?”

“Oh, Runin.” Daji gave her a pitying look. “Don’t you think I’ve tried? You think I haven’t been trying since you were born?”

She wasn’t mocking Rin then. There wasn’t a trace of condescension in her voice. This was an honest admission—that sorrow in her voice belied genuine vulnerability.

Rin wished so badly that Daji were mocking her.

“I’d do anything to break that Seal,” Daji whispered. “I’ve been trying to break it for decades.”

She didn’t mean the Seal she’d put on Rin. She was speaking about her own.

Rin lowered the knife. Her flames receded. “Then why did you do it?”

“You were trying to kill me, darling.”

“Not to me. To them.”

“I didn’t want to. But I thought that they were going to kill each other. And I didn’t want to die.” Daji met her eyes. “Surely you understand.”

Rin understood.

She didn’t know the full story—no one but Jiang and Daji knew the full story, and they’d both concealed it from her for reasons she might never know—but she knew enough. Once upon a time Daji had cursed the other two members of the Trifecta, the Dragon Emperor and the Gatekeeper, with a Seal that inhibited them all. And she hadn’t been able to take it off. One fight, one mysterious fight two decades ago over reasons no one in the Empire understood, and the Trifecta had been reduced to nothing, because Daji couldn’t take it off.

One will die, the Ketreyid girl Tseveri had said, just before the Trifecta tore her heart out of her chest. One will rule, and one will sleep for eternity.

In the end, Tseveri had gotten her revenge.

Rin sank back against her heels. All the fight had suddenly drained from her body. She should have been angry. She wanted to be angry, wanted to simply take Daji’s head off in an unthinking rage. But all she could feel, looking at this old and desperate creature, was bitter, exhausted pity.

“I should kill you.” The knife dropped from her hand. “Why can’t I kill you?”

“Because you still need me,” Daji said softly.

“Why did you come here?”

“To wait for you. Of course.” Daji reached out and touched two fingers to Rin’s cheek. Rin didn’t flinch. The gesture wasn’t cruel, wasn’t condescending. It felt, bizarrely, like some attempt at comfort. “I meant what I said in Lusan. I wish you’d let me help you. There are so few of us left.”

“But how did you—”

“How did I know you’d come to Tikany?” Daji sighed, chuckling. “Because you Speerlies are all the same. You’re bound to your roots, they’re what define you. You thought you could utterly reinvent yourself at Sinegard and kill the girl you used to be. But you can’t help drifting back to the place you came from. Speerlies are like that. You belong to the tribe.”

“My tribe is dead,” Rin said. “This isn’t my tribe.”

“Oh, you know that’s not true.” Daji’s mouth twisted into a pitying smile. “You are the south now. Rooster Province is part of your founding myth. You need it to be. You have nothing else left.”

“This is insane,” Kitay said.

“Well, we can’t put her anywhere else,” Rin said.

“So you’re keeping her here?” Kitay flung his hands up, gesturing wildly around the general’s office. “We sleep here!”

“So she’ll sleep in another room—”

“You know that’s not what I fucking meant. Are you going to tell Souji? Zhuden?”

“Obviously not, and neither should you—”

“Is this the anchor?” Daji asked from the doorway. Her eyes darted over Kitay, drinking in the sight of him as if he were some particularly juicy morsel of prey. “Are you sleeping with him?”

Kitay visibly flinched. Rin stared at Daji, momentarily too stunned to respond. “I—what?”

“You should try it sometime. The bond makes it something quite special.” Daji stepped forward, lip curling as she continued to examine Kitay. “Ah, I remember you. From the Academy. Irjah’s student. You’re a smart boy.”

Kitay’s hand moved to his belt for his knife. “Take one step closer and I’ll kill you.”

“She’s not our enemy,” Rin said hastily. “She wants to help us—”

He barked out a laugh. “Have you gone mad?”

“She won’t hurt us. If she wanted to hurt me she would have done it at the Red Cliffs. The balance of power has shifted now, she’s got no reason to—”

“That bitch,” Kitay said slowly, “is the reason why my father is dead.”

Rin faltered.

“I am so sorry,” Daji said. Oddly enough, she looked it—her eyes were solemn, and the mocking curl had disappeared from her lips. “Minister Chen was a faithful servant. I wish the war had not taken him.”

Kitay looked astonished that she had even dared to address him. “You are a monster.”

“I spent three years living with the Ketreyids and I know infinitely more about the Pantheon than either of you do,” Daji said. “I’m the only one who’s ever fought a war against the Hesperians, or against Yin Vaisra, for that matter. You need me if you want any chance of surviving what’s coming, so you’d best stop making threats, little boy. Is this the best intelligence you have?”

Daji turned abruptly toward Kitay’s desk and started riffling through his carefully marked maps. Kitay moved to stop her, but Rin blocked his way.

“Just hear her out,” she muttered.

“Hear her out? We’re better off taking off her head!”

“Just listen,” Rin insisted. “And if she’s full of shit, we’ll tell the villagers who she is and let them carry out their justice. You can take the first blow.”

“I’d rather take it now.”

Daji glanced up from the desk. “You’re going to lose.”

“Did anyone ask you?” Kitay snapped.

Daji tapped her fingernails against the maps. “It is so obvious how this will go. You might beat the Mugenese. You’re not finished with this campaign yet, you know—you need to chase them south to prevent a regrouping. But you have momentum now. Train that little peasant army well, and you’ll likely win. But the moment the Republic turns south, Vaisra will grind you into dust.”

Daji’s tone changed drastically as she spoke. The feeble, grandmotherly tremor disappeared, and her pitch deepened. Her words rang out clear, crisp, and assured. She sounded how she used to. She sounded like a ruler.

“We’ve been doing well enough on our own,” Kitay said.

Daji snorted. “You barely survived on a single front. You didn’t liberate Tikany, you occupied a graveyard. And you’ve no defenses against the Republic whatsoever. Did you think they’d forgotten you? Once you’ve cleaned the Federation out for them, they will strike, hard and fast, and you won’t know what hit you.”

“Our army is thousands strong and growing,” Kitay said.

“Aren’t you supposed to be the smart one? Against dirigibles and arquebuses, you’ll need five times your current numbers.” Daji arched an eyebrow. “Or you need shamans.”

Kitay rolled his eyes. “We have a shaman.”

“Little Runin is a single soldier with a limited battlefield range and a rather obvious vulnerability.” Daji flicked her hand dismissively at Kitay. “And you can’t hide out every battle, darling. Unless Rin unleashes a catastrophe on the scale of what she did to the Federation, then you are no match for Yin Vaisra and his army.”

“I’ve buried a god,” Rin said. “I can handle dirigibles.”

Daji laughed. “I assure you, you cannot. You’ve never seen a full fleet of dirigibles in action. I have. Their combat craft are light and agile as birds. They may as well be calling gods of their own. You might call the fire, but they will bury you in missiles.” She smacked her palm against the maps. “You are dreadfully outnumbered and overpowered and you need to take steps to correct that now.”

Rin could see Kitay’s expression morphing from indignant to curious. He understood Daji’s logic—angry as he was, he was too smart to refuse the truth when he saw it. And he’d realized just as she had that Daji, unfortunately, had a point.

The question was what to do about it.

Rin knew her answer. She saw Daji watching her expectantly, waiting for her to voice her conclusion.

“We need more shamans,” she said.

“Correct, dear. You need an army of them.”

This statement was so absurd that for a moment Rin and Kitay could only gape at her. But at the same time Kitay was coming up with objections—and Rin knew he would only have objections, she could already tell from his expression—Rin was trying to imagine a world where this might succeed.

“That’s what Altan wanted,” Rin murmured. “Altan always wanted to release the Chuluu Korikh, he wanted an army of madmen—”

“Altan was an idiot,” Daji said dismissively. “You can’t bring back someone who’s gone to the stone mountain. Their minds are shattered.”

“Then how—”

“Come on, Runin. This is easy. You simply train new ones.”

“But we don’t have the time,” Rin said lamely, because this, of all the possible objections, seemed the easiest to explain.

Daji shrugged. “Then how much time do you need?”

“This conversation isn’t happening,” Kitay said haplessly to the wall. “This isn’t really happening.”

“It took me years to recognize that the Pantheon existed,” Rin said. “And we barely have weeks, we can’t—”

“It would have taken you weeks if Jiang hadn’t been so determined to drive the Phoenix from your mind,” Daji said. “And half of your problem was eroding your preconceived notions of the world. Your mind didn’t allow the possibility of shamanism. Those assumptions are broken now. The Nikara realize that this is a world where gods walk in men. They’ve seen you burn. They’re already true believers.” Daji reached out with a thin, pale finger and tapped Rin on the forehead. “And all you need to do is give them access.”

“You want us to raise an army of people just like me.” Rin knew she sounded idiotic, repeating a point that had been made clear over and over again, but she had to say it out loud for it to ring true.

She understood Kitay’s incredulity. This solution was horrific. This was so inhumane, so atrociously irresponsible that in all the months she’d been on the run from the Hesperians, she had never once seriously considered it. It had crossed her mind, certainly, but she’d always dismissed it within seconds, because—

Because what?

Because it was dangerous? Every option on the table was dangerous. They’d opened the floodgates now; the entire country was at open war between three factions, one of which ruled the skies and possessed the power to reduce the terrain to ash in seconds, and if Rin didn’t correct their power asymmetry somehow, soon, then she might as well deliver herself to Nezha in a coffin.

Because this was monstrous? But they were at the stage of war where every choice would be monstrous, and the only question now was which choice kept them alive.

“This is so simple, children,” Daji said. “Bring religion back to this country. Show the Hesperians the truth about the gods.”

She wasn’t talking to Kitay anymore. Kitay might as well have not been in the room; neither of them had acknowledged a single one of his objections. Daji spoke directly to Rin, one shaman to another.

“Do you know what your problem is?” Daji asked. “You’ve been fighting this entire war on the defensive. You’re still thinking like someone on the run. But it’s time you started thinking like a ruler.”

“You’re not seriously considering this,” Kitay said.

Daji was gone, banished to a corner room of the complex with a coterie of guards. This precaution was largely a bluff—Rin had no doubt Daji could take down an entire squadron if she wanted to—but the guards were equipped with signal horns. If anything happened, at least they could raise an alarm.

Rin remained in the office with Kitay. Her head felt dizzy, swimming with possibilities she’d never even considered. Several minutes passed in silence. Kitay had sunk into some kind of furious, speechless daze; Rin watched him warily, afraid he might explode.

“You’re not even thinking about it?” she asked.

“You’re joking,” he said.

“Daji might be right. It would balance things out—”

“Are you shitting me? Seriously, Rin? She’s manipulating you, that’s what she does, and you’re just eating shit straight out of her hand.”

Rin supposed that was possible. Daji could be trying to orchestrate her ruin, and this would be the most sadistic way to do it. But she’d seen the look on Daji’s face when she spoke about the Hesperians. She’d seen a glimpse of a girl not so much older than she was, a girl with more power than she knew what to do with, a girl who had just won her country back and was terrified it might be ripped away again.

“The stakes have changed,” Rin said. “She’s not the Empress anymore. She needs us just as much as we need her.”

Kitay folded his arms over his chest. “I think you’re entranced.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“I mean that the Vipress has some weird effect on you—no, Rin, don’t deny it, you know it’s true. You don’t behave rationally around her, you never do. You always overreact, do the opposite of what’s prudent—”

“What? No, I don’t—”

“What about at Lusan? The Red Cliffs? Twice now you’ve had the opportunity to kill her and you haven’t. Why, Rin?”

“I would have! But she overpowered me—”

“Did she? Or did you let her?” Kitay’s voice had gone furiously, dangerously quiet. Rin hated this; she would have preferred that he scream. “The Vipress makes you do shit that makes no sense, and I don’t know if it’s because she’s still hypnotizing you, or if it’s something else, but you’ve got to get your mind straight. You’re thinking exactly what Daji wants you to think. She’s seduced you, and I know you’re not too stupid to realize that.”

Rin blinked. Was he right? Had Daji left some taint of poison on her mind? Was she hypnotizing Rin through the Seal?

She stood silent for a moment, trying to think through this calmly. Objectively. Yes—if she was being honest with herself, Daji did have a strange, outsize effect on her psyche. When she was around the Vipress she found it hard to breathe. Her limbs shook, her flames seared, and she trembled from the desire to choke her, to kill her, or—

Or to be her.

That was it. Rin wanted what Daji had. She wanted her easy confidence, her calm authority. She wanted her power.

“You can’t deny Daji’s right about one thing,” she said. “The southern front is a distraction. Our biggest problem now is how we’re going to deal with Nezha.”

Kitay sighed. “By creating an army of people like you?”

“Is that so wrong?” Rin was finding it harder and harder to come up with a good objection. Daji had presented the idea like a glittering gem and now she couldn’t stop turning it over and over in her mind, ruminating on the possibilities.

Imagine an army of shamans, whispered a quiet voice in her mind. Altan’s voice. Imagine the sheer firepower. Imagine having the Cike back. Imagine getting a second chance.

“We should at least talk this through,” she said.

“No,” Kitay said firmly. “We are ruling it out, now and forever.”

“But why—”

“Because you can’t do this to people,” he snapped. “Ignore the realistic chances of global apocalypse for a moment—which I’m shocked you haven’t considered, by the way. You know what it does to a person’s mind. This isn’t something you can inflict on anyone.”

“I think I turned out all right.”

“All right is not a term anyone would use to describe you.”

“I’m functional,” she said. “Which is all you need.”

“Barely,” he said, in the cruelest tone he could muster. “And you had training. But Jiang’s gone, and the Sorqan Sira’s dead. If you do this to anyone else, it’s a death sentence.”

“The Cike went through it,” Rin pointed out.

“And you’re willing to inflict the Cike’s fate on anyone?”

Rin winced. There were, and only ever had been, two possible fates for the Cike—death or the Chuluu Korikh. Rin had heard this warning repeated countless times from the moment she joined the Bizarre Children, and she’d watched it play out, inevitably and brutally, over and over again. She’d seen Altan engulfed in flame. She’d seen Baji torn apart by bullets. She’d seen Suni and Feylen imprisoned in their own minds by demons that they couldn’t exorcise. She’d almost succumbed to that fate herself.

Could she force it on someone else?

Yes. If that was their only hope against a fleet of dirigibles, then absolutely yes. For the future of the Nikara south, for the sake of their survival—yes.

“It’s been done before,” she said.

“But not by us. Never by us. We can’t do this to other people.” Kitay’s voice trembled. “I won’t be complicit in that.”

She had to laugh. “This is the moral line you won’t cross? Come on, Kitay.”

“Do you not understand how that feels? Look at what happened to Nezha. You forced him to call his god and—”

“I never forced him to do shit,” she snapped.

“Don’t lie to yourself. You pushed him past his limits when you knew it was torture to him and look what that got you, a scar in your back the size of Mount Tianshan.”

She recoiled. “Fuck you.”

That was a low blow. Kitay knew that; he knew exactly where she hurt the most, and still he’d stabbed and twisted the blade.

He didn’t apologize. Instead, he raised his voice. “If you’d put aside your wild dreams of conquest for a fucking second, if you’d stop getting drunk off the Vipress’s very presence, you’d realize this is one of the worst things you could do to someone.”

“Oh, like you’d fucking know.”

“You think I don’t know?” His eyes widened, incredulous. “Rin, I was at Golyn Niis, and the Phoenix ripping through my mind is still the cruelest torture I’ve ever felt.”

That shut her up.

She wanted to kick herself for forgetting that she could call the fire only because he let her, because every day he let a vicious god claw through his mind into the material world. He’d borne it all in silence because he didn’t want her to worry. He’d borne it so well that she’d stopped thinking about it entirely.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She reached for his shoulder. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think—”

“No, Rin.” Kitay brushed her hand away. He wouldn’t be appeased; he was finished talking. They weren’t moving past this, at least not now. “You never do.”

Rin walked through Tikany alone. Kitay had stormed off somewhere inside the general’s complex, and she didn’t bother trying to find him.

They had fought like this before. Not so frequently after the Battle of the Red Cliffs, but every few weeks the same argument bubbled up between them, a chasm they couldn’t bridge. It always boiled down to the same fundamental impasse, with a hundred different manifestations. Kitay found her callous. Astonishingly careless with human life, he’d once put it. And she found him weak, too hesitant to take decisive action. She’d always been convinced that he didn’t quite grasp the stakes at hand, that he clung still to some bizarre, pacifist hope of diplomacy. Yet somehow their fights always left her feeling guilty and strangely embarrassed, like a child who had acted out in the classroom.

Fuck this, she thought. Forget Kitay. Forget his morals. She needed to remind herself of the stakes.

Her troops had constructed a public kitchen in the town square. Soldiers doled out bowls of rice gruel and steamed shanyu to long lines of waiting civilians. Camp aides walked along the lines reminding the civilians not to eat too quickly; if their stomachs began to hurt, they should stop immediately. After prolonged periods of starvation, ruptured stomachs from overeating could prove fatal.

Rin cut the line and grabbed two bowls piled high with shanyu root, balancing one nimbly in the crook of her right elbow.

The tent complex in Tikany’s northern quarter couldn’t be properly called an infirmary. It was more like an emergency triage center, constructed from the wreckage of what used to be the town hall. Cloth-covered bamboo mats had been laid out in neat lines outside the surgery room, through which harried-looking assistants ferried antiseptics and painkillers to peasants whose wounds had been festering for months.

Rin approached the nearest physician and asked for the boy from the killing fields.

“Over there in the corner,” he told her. “See if you can get him to eat. He hasn’t touched a thing.”

The boy’s torso was wrapped in bandages, and he looked just as pale and wan as when they’d found him in the graves. But he was sitting up, alert and conscious.

Rin sat down on the dirt beside him. “Hello.”

He blinked owlishly at her.

“I’m Runin,” she prompted. “Rin. I pulled you from the grave.”

His voice was a breathy rasp. “I know who you are.”

“And what’s your name?” she asked softly.

“Zhen,” he started, and then coughed. He pressed a hand against his chest and winced. “Zhen Dulin.”

“Looks like you got lucky, Dulin.”

He snorted at that.

She placed one bowl on the ground and held out the other. “Are you hungry?”

He shook his head.

“If you starve yourself to death, then you’re just letting them win.”

He shrugged.

She tried something else. “It’s got salt.”

“Bullshit,” Dulin said.

She couldn’t help but grin. Nobody south of Monkey Province had tasted salt in months. It was easy to take such a common condiment for granted during peacetime, but after months of bland vegetables, salt became as valuable as gold.

“I’m not lying.” She waved the bowl under his nose. “Try it.”

Dulin hesitated, then nodded. She passed the bowl carefully into his trembling fingers.

He brought a spoonful of steamed shanyu to his mouth and nibbled at the edge. Then his eyes widened and he stopped bothering with the spoon, gulping the rest down like Rin might snatch it away from him at any moment.

“Take it slow,” she cautioned. “There’s plenty more. Stop if your stomach starts to cramp.”

He didn’t speak again until he’d nearly finished the bowl. He paused and sucked in a deep breath, eyelids fluttering. “I’d forgotten how salt tasted.”

“Me too.”

“You know how desperate we got?” He lowered the bowl. “We scraped the white deposits off tombstones and boiled it down because it resembled the taste. Tombs.” His hands trembled. “My father’s tomb.”

“Don’t think about that,” Rin said quietly. “Just enjoy this.”

She let him eat in silence for a while. At last he placed his empty bowl on the ground and sighed, both hands clutching his stomach. Then he twisted around to face her. “Why are you here?”

“I want you to tell me what happened,” she said.

He seemed to shrink. “You mean at the—”

“Yes. Please. If you remember. As much as you can.”

“Why?”

“Because I have to hear it.”

He was silent for a long time, his gaze fixed on something far away.

“I thought I had died,” he said at last. “When they struck me it hurt so much that everything turned black, and I thought that’s what death was. I remember feeling glad that at least it was over. I didn’t have to be scared anymore. But then I—”

He broke off. His entire body was shaking.

“You can stop,” Rin said, suddenly ashamed. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have made you.”

But Dulin shook his head and kept going. “But then I woke up in the field, and I saw the sun shining over me, and I realized I’d survived. But they were piling the bodies on top of me then, and I didn’t want them to realize I was alive. So I lay still. They kept stacking the bodies, one after the other, until I could barely breathe. And then they packed on the dirt.”

A pang of pain shot through Rin’s palm, and she realized her fingernails had dug grooves into her skin. She forced them to relax before they drew blood.

“They never saw you?” she asked.

“They weren’t looking. They’re not thorough. They don’t care. They just wanted it over with.”

The unspoken implication, of course, was that Dulin might not have been the only one. Rather, it was more likely there had been other victims, injured but not dead, who toppled into an early grave and were slowly suffocated by dirt and the weight of bodies.

Rin exhaled slowly.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, Altan was appeased. This was her answer. This justified everything she’d done. This was the face of her enemy.

Kitay could spout on and on about ethics. She didn’t care. She needed revenge. She wanted her army.

Dulin’s shoulders started to heave. He was sobbing.

Rin reached out and patted him awkwardly on the shoulder. “Hey. You’re all right—it’s all right.”

“It’s not. I shouldn’t be the only one, I should be dead—”

“Don’t say that.”

His face contorted. “But it shouldn’t have been me.”

“I used to hate myself for living, too,” she said. “I didn’t think it was fair that I’d survived. That others had died in my place.”

“It’s not fair,” Dulin whispered. “I should be in the ground with them.”

“And there will be days you’ll wish you were.” Rin didn’t understand why she needed so urgently to comfort this boy, this stranger, only that she wished someone had told her the same thing months before. “It doesn’t go away. It never will. But when it hurts, lean into it. It’s so much harder to stay alive. That doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to live. It means you’re brave.”

Life returned to Tikany that night.

Rin had retreated early to the general’s complex, intent on falling asleep the moment her face hit her mattress. But then a knock came at the door, and she opened it to find not the sentry or messenger she’d expected but a circle of women, eyes tilted sheepishly down, nudging one another as if daring someone else to be the first to speak.

“What is it?” Rin asked warily.

“Come with us,” said the woman at the front.

Rin blinked at them, puzzled. “Where?”

The woman’s face broke into a smile. “To dance.”

Then Rin remembered that despite everything, this day had been a liberation, and liberations deserved to be celebrated.

So she followed them into the town center, where a crowd of hundreds had formed, holding bamboo torches and floating lanterns up against the moonless night. Drums beat incessantly, accompanying lilting flute melodies that seemed to come from everywhere, while firecrackers went off every few seconds like musical punctuation.

Dancers whirled in the center of the square. There were dozens of them, mostly young girls, all moving without choreography or order. None of this had been rehearsed. It couldn’t possibly have been. Each dancer moved from memory, pulling together fragments of performances from earlier times, moving for the sheer joy of being alive and free.

It should have been an utter mess. It was the most beautiful thing Rin had ever seen.

The women entreated Rin to join. But she refused, preferring to sit down on an overturned barrel and watch. She’d never joined the dances when she’d lived here. Those dances were for rich girls, joyful girls, girls whose marriages were events to be celebrated and not feared. They weren’t for war orphans. Rin had only ever watched. She wanted desperately to join them now, but she was afraid she wouldn’t know how to move.

The drums sped up. The dancers became a hypnotic vision, ankles and arms moving faster and faster until they seemed a blur in the firelight, moving to a tempo that felt in tune with Rin’s own pulse. She blinked, and for a moment she saw a different dance, heard a different song. She saw brown bodies dancing by the campfire, singing words that she’d heard a long time ago in a language that she couldn’t speak but could almost remember.

She’d been seeing this vision since the first time she’d met the Phoenix. She knew this vision ended in death.

But this time the dancing bodies did not turn into skeletons, but instead remained furiously, resolutely, alive. Here we are, they said. Watch us thrive. We’ve escaped the past, and we own the future.

“Hey.”

Rin blinked, and the vision disappeared. Souji stood before her, holding two mugs of millet wine. He held one out to her. “Mind if I sit?”

She shifted to make room for him. They clinked their mugs and drank. Rin sloshed the millet wine around her tongue, savoring the heady, sour tang.

“I’m surprised you haven’t disappeared into an alley with one of them.” Rin nodded to the dancers. Women seemed attracted to Souji like moths to a flame; Rin had seen him disappear into his tent with at least eight different companions since they’d left Ruijin.

“Still trying to pick,” Souji said. “Where’s your better half?”

“I’m not sure.” She’d been scanning the crowd for Kitay since she arrived, but hadn’t found him. “He might be asleep.”

She didn’t tell Souji that they’d fought. She and Kitay were a pair against the world; no one else should know about their rifts.

“He’s missing out.” Souji leaned back, watching the dancers with an amused, half-lidded expression. Rin could tell he was already quite drunk; his movements were slow and careless, and a cloud of sour fumes wafted toward her every time he spoke. “This is it, Princess. This is as good as it gets. Enjoy this while it lasts.”

She gazed at the bonfire and tried to take Souji’s advice, to lose herself in the music, the laughing, and the drums. But an uneasy darkness lingered in the pit of her stomach, a hard knot of fear that wouldn’t dissipate no matter how hard she smiled.

She couldn’t derive any joy from this.

Was this what liberation felt like? This couldn’t be it. Freedom was supposed to feel like safety. She was supposed to feel like no one could ever harm her again.

No, it was more than that.

She wanted to go back. She couldn’t remember a moment in the last two years that she had ever felt safe closing her eyes. If she chased that memory down, it would have last been when she was at the Academy, when the world seemed contained in books and exams, when war was a game mirroring something that might never come to pass.

And she knew she could never get that back again.

But she could get something close. Safety. Security. And that demanded total victory.

It didn’t matter whether she wanted war. The Republic would bring war to her, would hunt her down until she was dead or it was. And the only way to be safe was to strike first.

Your life is not your own, Vaisra had once told her, and he had elaborated many times in the weeks that followed. You do not have a right to happiness when you hold this much power in your hands.

When you hear screaming, run toward it. His precise words. He’d only been trying to manipulate her; she knew that now. Still, the words rang true.

But where was the screaming now?

“What’s wrong?” Souji asked.

She blinked and straightened up. “Hmm?”

“You look like someone’s shat all over your ancestors’ graves.”

“I don’t know, I just . . .” She struggled to name her discomfort. “This isn’t right.”

Souji snorted. “What, the dancing, or the music? Didn’t know you were so picky.”

“They’re happy. Everyone’s too happy.” Her words spilled out faster and faster, spurred on by the millet wine burning in her gut. “They’re dancing because they don’t know what’s coming, they can’t see the entire world’s about to end because this isn’t the end of one war, it’s the start, and—”

Souji’s hand closed over hers. Rin glanced down, startled. His palm was rough and callused but warm; it felt surprisingly good. She didn’t pull away.

“Learn to relax, Princess.” His thumb stroked the top of her hand. “This life you’ve chosen, you won’t get many moments like this again. But it’s the nights like this that keep you alive. All you think about is who you’re fighting against. But that?” He swung his mug toward the dancers. “That’s what you’re fighting for.”

Several hours later Souji was so drunk that Rin didn’t trust him to find the general’s complex on his own. They walked up the dark, rocky path together, his arm draped heavily over her shoulders. Halfway up the hill his foot snagged on a rock and he pitched forward, looping his arm around her waist for balance.

The ploy was quite transparent. Rin rolled her eyes and extricated herself from his grasp. He fumbled for her breasts. She smacked his hand away. “Don’t try that shit with me. I’ll burn your balls off, I’ve done that before.”

“Come on, Princess,” he said. He wrapped his arm back around her shoulders, pulling her in close. His skin felt terribly hot.

Despite herself, Rin found herself curving into that heat.

“No one’s here.” His lips brushed her ear. “Why don’t we have some fun?”

The embarrassing thing was that she did feel some interest, a faint, unfamiliar stirring in the pit of her stomach. She quashed it. Don’t be a fucking idiot.

Souji didn’t want her. Souji was the last man in the world to find her beautiful. He had his pick of willing conquests among the camp, all likely prettier and easier to deal with in the morning than Rin would be.

This wasn’t about lust, this was about power. This was about possession. He wanted to dominate her just so that later he could crow that he had.

And Rin, admittedly, was tempted. Souji was undeniably handsome, and certainly experienced. He’d know what to do with their bodies even if she hadn’t the faintest clue. He could show her how to do all the things she’d only heard of, had only imagined.

But she’d be stupid to go to bed with him. Once the word spread, no one would look at her the same way again. She’d been around soldiers long enough to know how this worked. The man got bragging rights. The woman, already likely the only female soldier in her squadron, became the camp whore.

“Let’s get you back to your bed,” she said.

“It’d be good for you.” Souji didn’t remove his arm from her shoulder. “You’re too tense. All that pent-up anger. It’d do you good to let loose once in a while, Princess. Have some fun.”

He caressed her collarbone. She shuddered. “Souji, stop.”

“What’s the matter? Are you a virgin?”

He asked this so bluntly that for a moment all Rin could do was stare.

His eyebrows shot up. “No. Really, Princess?

She shoved his arm away. “It’s none of your business.”

But he’d found her weak spot. He knew it—he grinned, teeth glinting in the moonlight. “Is it true you have no womb?”

“What?”

“Heard a rumor around camp. Said you burned your womb out back at Sinegard. Doesn’t surprise me. Smart, really. Pity about the Speerlies, though. Now you’re the last. Do you ever regret it?”

She hissed through clenched teeth. “I’ve never regretted it.”

“Pity.” He put a hand on her stomach. “We could have made some nice brown babies. My brains, your abilities. Kings of the south.”

That was enough. She jerked away from him, fist raised and knees crouched. “Touch me again and I’ll kill you.”

He just scoffed. His eyes roved up and down her body, as if evaluating how much force it would take to pin her to the ground.

Rin’s breath caught in her throat.

What was wrong with her? She’d started and ended wars. She’d buried a god. She’d incinerated a country. There wasn’t an entity on the planet that could face her in a fair fight and win. She was certain of her own strength; she’d sacrificed everything to make sure she never felt powerless again.

So why was she so afraid?

At last, he raised his hands in a gesture of surrender. “Just offering. No need to be like that.”

“Get away from me.” Her voice rang through the dark, louder than she’d intended. Someone might overhear. Perhaps that was what she should want—for someone, anyone, to come running. “Now, Souji.”

“Are you always like this? Great Tortoise, that explains why—”

She cut him off. “Do you hear that?”

She thought she heard a faint whining drone—a sound like a faraway swarm of bees, growing louder and louder with every passing second.

Souji fell silent, brows furrowed. “What are you—”

“Shut up,” Rin hissed. “Just listen.”

Yes—the droning was distinct now. The noise wasn’t just in her head. She wasn’t panicking over nothing. This was real.

Souji’s eyes widened. He’d heard it, too.

“Get down,” he gasped, and lunged at her just before the first bombs exploded.