The Burning God (The Poppy War Book 3)

“This is easy enough,” Jiang said. They stood huddled against the wall of a tea shop across the street, eyeing the church’s thick double doors. “We’ll just kill and impersonate one of those missionary fellows. Drag them into a corner, strip off their cassock—”

“You can’t do that,” Rin said. “You’re Nikara. All the Gray Company are Hesperians.”

“Hmm.” Jiang rubbed his chin. “A devastatingly good point.”

“Servant’s entrance, then?” Daji suggested. “They’ve always got some Nikara on hand to sweep their floors, and I can talk them down until you’ve found Kitay.”

“Too risky,” Jiang said. “We don’t know how many there are, and we need to buy more than five minutes to search.”

“So I’ll ask them what I need, then stick them with needles.”

Jiang reached out to tuck a lock of hair behind her ear. “Darling, people pay you less attention when you don’t leave a trail of bodies in your wake.”

Daji rolled her eyes.

Rin glanced back toward the church. Then the solution struck her—it was so blindingly obvious, she almost laughed.

“We don’t have to do any of that.” She pointed to the line of Nikara civilians stretching out the front of the building. As if on cue, the heavy double doors swung open, and a brother of the Gray Company stepped outside, hands stretched wide in welcome to the congregation. “We can just walk right in.”

They shuffled into the church with their heads bowed, following obediently behind the rest of the crowd in a single-file line. Rin tensed as they passed the gray-cassocked priest standing at the doors, but all he did was place a hand on her shoulder and murmur low words of greeting as he welcomed her inside, just as he had every person in line before her. He never even glanced at her face.

The church interior was a single wide room with high beams, crammed with low benches arranged in neat double columns. Sunlight streaming through the stained glass windows cast colorful, oddly beautiful splotches onto the smooth wooden floor. At the front stood a podium on a raised platform where half a dozen gray-robed Hesperians stood waiting, watching imperiously as the Nikara took their seats.

Rin glanced about the room, trying to find doors that might lead to hidden chambers or passageways.

“There.” Jiang nodded across to the other end of the hall, where Rin glimpsed a door tucked behind a curtain. A single priest stood in front of it; a circle of keys hung visibly from his belt.

“Wait here.” Daji broke from the line and strode confidently across the room. The priest’s eyes widened in confusion as she approached, but lost focus as Daji began to speak. Seconds later, the priest passed the keys into Daji’s hands, opened the door, and then walked off in the other direction.

Daji turned over her shoulder and waved impatiently for Rin to join her.

“Go.” She pushed the keys into Rin’s palm. “These open the cell doors. You should be clear for an hour and a half, and then you can join the crowd as they leave.”

“But aren’t you—”

“We’ll cover your exits from up here.” Daji pushed Rin toward the door. “Be quick.”

The Nikara had nearly finished filing into their seats; only a handful of people were still standing. Daji hurried back to Jiang’s side, and together they sat down in the very back row.

Rin almost laughed at the absurdity. She’d come to the New City with two of the most powerful shamans in Nikara history, beings from myths and legends, and here they were paying obeisance to a false god.

A great screech echoed through the hall as the double doors swung closed, trapping them inside. Heart pounding, Rin slipped through the door and hastened down the stairs.

Behind the door lay a winding staircase that emptied out into a dark hallway. Rin pulled a small flame in her hand and held it before her like a torch. They were right—this whole basement had been converted into a prison, cells lining either side of the passageway. Rin shielded her face as she walked, glancing to either side to check for Kitay. She needn’t have bothered. The prisoners were hardly alert. Most were slumped in the corners of their cells, either sleeping or staring into space. A few were moaning quietly, but none gave any indication they’d even noticed her.

How quaint, Rin thought. It made sense that the Hesperians would keep their sinners and believers under the same roof. The Gray Company liked their symmetry. The Divine Architect rallying against Chaos. Light against dark. Worshippers on the top, and sinners on the bottom, the unseen side of the ruthless, unsparing quest from barbarism toward a well-ordered civilization.

Kitay’s cell was at the end of the next corridor. She knew right as she turned the corner. All she saw by her faint flame was the curve of his shoulder and the silhouette of his head, turned away from the bars. But she knew. Her whole body thrummed with longing anticipation, like a magnet straining for its opposite. She knew.

She broke into a run.

He was asleep when she reached his cell, curled up on a cot with his knees drawn up to his chest. He looked so small. His left pant leg was soaked through with blood.

Rin fumbled clumsily with the keys, trying several before she found the one that fit the lock. She yanked hard at the door. It scraped open with a loud metallic screech that echoed down the corridor.

Kitay gave a start and jerked to a sitting position, fists up as if ready to fight.

“It’s me,” she whispered.

He blinked blearily, as if unsure whether or not he was dreaming. “Oh, hello.”

She rushed toward him.

They collided over his cot. He rose halfway to meet her, but she knocked him right back down, arms wrapped tightly around his skinny frame. She had to hold him, feel the weight of him, know that he was real and solid and there. The void in her chest, that aching sense of absence she’d felt since Tikany, finally melted away.

She felt like herself again. She felt whole.

“Took you long enough,” he murmured into her shoulder.

“Could you tell I was coming?”

“Sensed you yesterday.” He drew back, grinning. “I woke up, and it felt like I’d been doused with cold water. Never been happier.”

He looked better than she’d feared. He was thin, of course, but he’d been painfully thin since Ruijin, and his cheekbones protruded no more than they already had. His arms and legs were unbound save for an iron cuff around his left ankle, attached to a chain with enough slack to give him free movement around the cell. He didn’t look like he’d been tortured. There were no cuts, welts, or bruises on his pale skin. The only wounds he’d suffered recently were the gashes he’d opened in his shin.

His index finger was crusted over in dried blood. He’d done it with his nail.

She reached for his leg. “Are you—”

“It’s fine. It’s stopped bleeding, I’ll clean it up later.” Kitay stood up. “Who are you here with?”

“Two-thirds of the Trifecta.”

He didn’t miss a beat. “Which two?”

“The Vipress and the Gatekeeper.”

“Of course. And when are we meeting the Dragon Emperor?”

“We’ll discuss that later.” She jangled the keys at him. “Let’s get you out first. Padlocks?”

He shook his ankle at her, looking impressed. “How did you—”

“Daji is persuasive.” She held a flame up to the lock and began flipping through the keys to find one that looked like it matched. “No more bone smashing for us.”

He snorted. “Thank the gods.”

She’d just found a silver key that looked about the right size when she heard the unmistakable screech of a door sliding open, followed by a faint patter of footsteps echoing through the corridor. She froze. Daji had promised her more than an hour; she’d been planning to hide out downstairs until whatever ritual was going on in the main chamber had ended. Had something gone wrong upstairs?

“Hide,” Kitay hissed.

“Where?”

He pointed to his cot. Rin didn’t see how that could possibly work—it was a flimsy, narrow structure, barely two feet wide, with crossed wooden legs that wouldn’t conceal a rabbit.

“Get under this.” Kitay tugged at his blanket. The cotton sheet was thin but solidly opaque; hanging off the edge of the bed, it was just long enough to stretch to the floor.

Rin crawled underneath the cot and shrank in on herself, fighting to make her breathing inaudible. She heard the lock click back into place as Kitay pushed the cell door shut.

She poked her head out from the blankets, confused. “Wait, why don’t we just—”

“Shh,” he whispered. “I said hide.”

Footsteps grew louder and louder in the corridor, then stopped just outside the cell.

“Hello, Kitay.”

Rin dug her nails into her palm, madly clenching her teeth in an attempt to keep quiet. She knew only one person who could speak with that precise mixture of confidence, condescension, and feigned camaraderie.

“Good evening.” Kitay’s tone was all light, cheery indifference. “Good timing. I’ve just taken my nap.”

The door screeched open. Rin hardly dared to breathe.

If he made any moves toward the cot, she’d kill him. She held two advantages—the element of surprise and the fire. She wouldn’t hesitate this time. First a torrent of flame to his face to startle and blind him, then four white-hot fingers in a claw around his neck. She’d rip out his artery before he even realized what was happening.

“How have you been?” Nezha was standing right above her. “Accommodations still adequate?”

“I’d like some new books,” Kitay said. “And my reading lamps are running low.”

“I’ll see to that.”

“Thank you,” Kitay said stiffly. “And how is the lab rat life?”

“Don’t be a prick, Kitay.”

“My apologies,” Kitay drawled. “You were just so quick to send Rin to the same fate, I’m always stunned by the irony.”

“Listen, asshole—”

“Why do you let them do it?” Kitay asked. “I’m just curious. Certainly you don’t enjoy getting hurt.”

“It doesn’t hurt,” Nezha said quietly. “It’s the only time it doesn’t hurt.”

There was a pause, which stretched into a longer, more awkward silence.

“I take it the council’s still giving you grief?” Kitay finally asked.

She heard a shuffling noise. Nezha was sitting down. “They’re madmen. All of them.”

Kitay chuckled. “At least we agree about something.”

Rin was astonished by how quickly they settled into amiable chitchat. No—amiable wasn’t quite the right word; they sounded far from friendly. But they also didn’t sound like a prisoner and his interrogator. They sounded like second-year students at Sinegard complaining about Jima’s sentence-diagramming homework. They were old acquaintances taking their seats at a wikki board, resuming a game right where they’d left off.

But was this really so surprising? Nostalgia gnawed Rin’s chest at the mere sound of Nezha’s voice. She wanted this familiarity with him back, too. Never mind that thirty seconds ago she’d been ready to kill him. His voice, his very presence, made her heart ache—she wished desperately they could be caught in a stalemate, that for just one minute the wars surrounding them could be suspended, so that they might speak like friends again. Just once.

“Our northern allies won’t commit further troops to Arabak until they get relief,” Nezha said. “They think I’m rolling in silver, that I’m just withholding it—but damn it, Kitay, they don’t understand. The coffers are empty.”

“And where’s the money gone?” Kitay asked.

He said it lightly, but he’d clearly meant to strike a nerve. Nezha’s tone turned sharp. “Don’t you dare accuse—”

“You’re getting far too much aid from the Hesperians for your army to be so poorly outfitted. Someone’s bleeding you dry. Come on, Nezha, we’ve been over this already. Get your house in order.”

“You’re making baseless accusations—”

“I’m just telling you what’s right in front of you,” Kitay said. “You know I’m right. You wouldn’t keep coming here if you didn’t think I could be useful.”

“Say something useful, then.” Nezha sounded so nasally petty then, so much like how he’d sounded their first year at Sinegard, that Rin almost laughed.

“I’ve been telling you things so obvious a child could see them,” Kitay said. “Your generals are siphoning away funds meant for relief—probably squirreling them away to their summer palaces, so that’s the first place you’ll want to check. That’s the problem with all that Hesperian silver. Your entire base has gotten corrupted. You might start with cutting down on the bribes.”

“But you have to bribe them to keep them on your side,” Nezha said, frustrated. “Otherwise they won’t present a united front, and if we don’t have a united front then the Hesperians just run roughshod over us like our government doesn’t even exist.”

“Poor Nezha,” Kitay said. “They’ve tied your hands behind your back, haven’t they?”

“This is all so fucking stupid. I need unified army command. I need freedom to put absolute priority on the southern front, and I want to divert forces from the north to deal with Rin without making all these compromises. I just don’t know why—”

“I know why. You’re not the grand marshal, you’re the Young Marshal. That’s your nickname, right? The generals and the Hesperians both think you’re just a spoiled, stupid princeling who doesn’t know what he’s doing. They think you’re just like Jinzha. And they wouldn’t put you in charge of their dirigibles if you sank to your knees and begged.”

Rin didn’t know what surprised her most—Kitay’s frankness, that Nezha hadn’t yet punished him for it, or that anything Kitay was saying might be true.

None of this made sense. She had assumed Nezha was wallowing in power. That he had the entire dirigible fleet at his disposal. He’d seemed so dominant when he’d descended on Tikany, she’d thought he had the entire Republic at his back.

But this was her first indication that Nezha was not holding together as well as she’d thought. Here, alone in the basement with his old classmate and prisoner, perhaps the only person he could be honest with, Nezha just sounded scared.

“I’m guessing things haven’t gotten better with Tarcquet, either,” Kitay said.

“He’s a patronizing fuck,” Nezha snarled. “You know what he’s blamed the last campaign on? Our lack of fighting spirit. He said that the Nikara inherently don’t have fighting spirit.”

“A rather bold claim given our history, I think.”

Nezha didn’t laugh. “There’s nothing wrong with our troops. They’re incredibly well trained, they’re excellent on the field, but the problem is the restructuring and integrated forces—”

“The what now?”

“Another one of Tarcquet’s ideas.” Nezha spat the name like it was poison. “They want coordinated air and ground assault teams.”

“Interesting,” Kitay said. “I’d have thought they were too up their own asses for that.”

“It’s not real integration. It means they want us to lug their coal wagons for them wherever they decide to go. Means we’re just their fucking mules—”

“There are worse roles to play on the battlefront.”

“Not if we’re ever going to earn their respect.”

“I think we both know your chances of winning Hesperian respect sailed a long time ago,” Kitay said lightly. “So who are you dropping bombs on next? Has Boar Province capitulated?”

A tinge of exasperation crept into Nezha’s voice. “If you’d agree to help with planning, I could tell you.”

Kitay sighed. “Alas, I’m not that desperate to leave this cell.”

“No, you seem to like captivity.”

“I like knowing that the words out of my mouth won’t cause the deaths of people I’ve become quite fond of. It’s this thing called ethics. You might try it sometime.”

“No one has to die,” Nezha said. “No one ever had to die. But Rin’s suckered those fools into waging everything on an all-or-nothing outcome.”

Rin flinched at the sound of her name from his mouth this time. He said it with such violence.

“Rin’s not behind this,” Kitay said cautiously. “Rin’s dead.”

“Bullshit. The whole country would be talking if she were gone.”

“Oh, you think that your lovely airships managed to miss her?”

“She can’t be dead,” Nezha insisted. “She’s just in hiding, she has to be. They never found a body, and the south wouldn’t be fighting this hard if they knew she was gone. She’s the only thing they’re rallying around. Without her they have no hope. They would have surrendered.”

Rin heard a rustle of clothing. Kitay might have been shrugging.

“I suppose you know better than me.”

Another silence filled the cell. Rin lay utterly still, her heartbeat ringing so loudly she was amazed she had not been discovered.

“I didn’t want this war,” Nezha said at last. His voice sounded oddly brittle—defensive, even. Rin didn’t know what to make of it. “I never did. Why couldn’t she understand that?”

“Well, you did put a blade in her back.”

“I didn’t want things to be like this.”

“Oh, gods, let’s not go down this road again.”

“We’d let her have the south if she’d just come to the table. Gods know we’re grateful she got rid of the Mugenese for us. And she’s a good soldier. The very best. We’d happily have her back on our side; we’d make her a general in a heartbeat—”

“You seem to have mistaken me for a dullard,” Kitay said.

“It’s a tragedy we’re on different sides, Kitay. You know that. We would have been so good united, all three of us.”

“We were united. And we were good. Your father had other plans.”

“We can come back from this,” Nezha insisted. “Yes, we’ve messed up—I’ve messed up, I’ll admit that—but think about what the Republic could accomplish, if we really fought to make it work. You’re too smart to ignore its potential—”

“You’re still on about that shit? Please don’t patronize me, Nezha.”

“Help me,” Nezha begged. “Together we could end this whole thing in weeks, regardless of whether Rin is dead or alive. You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met. If you had access to our resources—”

“See, it’s hard to take you seriously when you do things like drop bombs on innocent children.”

“That ambush was a mistake—”

“Sleeping in past roll call is a mistake,” Kitay snapped. “Neglecting to deliver my meals on time was a mistake. What you did was cold-hearted murder. And Rin and I know that if we join you, it’ll happen again, because we and the south are utterly disposable to you. You and your father think we are tools to be traded or thrown away at your convenience, which is precisely what you did.”

“I didn’t have a choice—”

“You had a thousand choices. You drew the lines at Arlong. You started this war, and it’s not my fault if you haven’t got the balls to finish it. So tell Vaisra he might as well lop my head off, because then he could at least use it for decoration.”

Nezha said nothing. Rin heard a rustle of cloth as he stood. He was leaving; his footsteps sounded hard and angry against the stone. She wished she could see his face. She hoped he might give some rejoinder, any kind of reaction, just so she would know if Kitay had rattled him or not. But she heard only the screech as he pushed the door shut behind him, and then the click of the lock.

“Sorry I didn’t have time to warn you.” Kitay pulled the blanket off the cot and helped Rin to her feet. “Just thought you should hear.”

She passed him the keys. “How long has he been at it?”

“Every day since I got here. He was actually on pretty good behavior today; you didn’t get to see him at his worst. He’s tried a million different things to break me.” Kitay bent over to unlock his shackles. “But he should have remembered he never figured out how. Not at Sinegard, and certainly not now.”

Rin felt an aching burst of pride. She forgot sometimes how resilient Kitay could be. One would never have suspected it by looking at him—the archetypal reedy and anxious scholar—but he bore hardship with iron fortitude. Sinegard hadn’t worn him down. Even Golyn Niis hadn’t destroyed him. Nezha could never have broken him.

No, whispered the little voice in her head that sounded too much like Altan. The only person capable of breaking him is you.

“Behind you,” Kitay said suddenly.

Rin twisted around, expecting a soldier. But it was just one of the Gray Company—a young man in a cassock, carrying a meal tray in his hands.

His mouth fell open when he saw her. His eyes flitted, confused, between her and Kitay, as if he was trying to determine the appropriate number of people for one cell. “You—”

Kitay twisted the key and jerked the cell door open.

Too late, the missionary turned to run. Rin dug her heels into the ground and chased him down. His legs were much longer than hers, and he might have gotten away, but he tripped over his cassock just as he reached the corner. He stumbled—only for a split second, but that was enough. Rin grabbed his arm, yanked him further off balance, and kicked at the backs of his knees. He fell. She called the fire into her palm. It came back so quickly, so naturally, a well-worn glove slipping over waiting fingers.

She jammed her clawed hand onto his throat. Soft flesh gave way to her burning nails like tofu parting under steel. Easy. It was done in seconds. He went without so much as a whimper; she’d chosen his throat because she didn’t want him to scream.

She straightened up, exhaled, and wiped her hand on the wall. The magnitude of what she’d just done hadn’t hit her; it had happened so quickly, it didn’t even seem real. She hadn’t decided to kill the missionary; she hadn’t even thought about it. She’d simply needed to protect Kitay. The rest was an instinct.

She felt a sudden, bizarre urge to laugh.

She cocked her head, observing the crimson streaks shining wet and bright on marble. For some reason, it gave her a dizzying rush of delight, the same confusing ecstasy she’d felt when she poisoned Ma Lien.

It wasn’t about the violence.

It was about the power.

It wasn’t as good as killing Nezha, but it felt close. For a wild, untethered moment, she considered dragging her bloody finger along the wall and drawing him a flower.

No. No. Too indulgent. She didn’t have time. The wave of vertigo passed. She came back to her senses; she was in control.

Focus.

“Come here,” she called down the corridor. “Help me drag him into your cell. We’ll put him on the cot, cover him with a blanket—it’ll buy some time.”

Kitay wandered out two steps from his cell, keeled over, and vomited.

Their escape from the church proceeded with astonishing ease. Rin and Kitay waited by the door to the dungeons, listening against the wood to an ongoing Hesperian sermon, until they heard the Nikara civilians standing up from their pews. Then they opened it a crack and slid out to join the press of moving bodies, invisible in the crowd. Jiang and Daji rejoined them as they spilled out of the doors, but none of them spoke until they’d walked for several minutes down to the other end of the street.

“You’ve gotten taller,” Jiang told Kitay once they’d turned the corner. “Good to see you again.”

Kitay stared at him for a moment, as if unsure how to respond. “So you’re the Gatekeeper.”

“That’s me.”

“And you’ve been hiding in Sinegard all this time.”

“Lost my mind for a bit,” Jiang said. “Just starting to get it back now.”

“Makes sense,” Kitay said weakly.

All considered, Rin thought, he was taking this rather well.

“Questions later.” Daji tossed Kitay a brown tunic, which was far less conspicuous than the tattered rags he’d been wearing since Tikany. “Put this on and let’s go.”

They left the New City in a horse-drawn laundry wagon. Its original driver had carried a gate permit to take infirmary linens to the river for washing; Daji had charmed him into relinquishing the wagon and permit both. While Daji drove the wagon confidently through the streets, Rin, Kitay, and Jiang hid under piles of linen stacked so tall they could hardly breathe. Rin squirmed, hot and itchy, trying not to think about the brown stains surrounding her. She felt the wagon stop only once. Rin heard Daji answering a guardsman’s questions in very convincing pidgin Hesperian, and then they passed through the gates.

Daji kept driving. She didn’t let them emerge from the linen piles until over an hour later, when the New City was nothing but a tiny outline behind them, until the sound of dirigibles had faded away and the only noise around them was the constant hum of cicadas.

Rin was relieved when the New City faded out of her sight. If she could help it, she never wanted to set foot in that place again.

That night, over a meal of dried shanyu root and a stolen loaf of thick, chewy Hesperian bread, Daji and Jiang interrogated Kitay for every shred of information he’d gleaned about the Republic. He had no solid details on troop placements or campaign plans—Nezha had fed him only enough information to seek his advice without creating a liability—but the little he did know was tremendously useful.

“They’re in endgame now, but it’s taking longer than it needs to,” Kitay said. “Vaisra turned on the Southern Coalition the moment they failed to produce your body, as you would have expected. But the Monkey Warlord—well, really it’s probably Souji’s work—rallied a surprisingly strong defense. They learned pretty quickly to create decent bomb shelters. Once he realized the airships weren’t getting the job done, Vaisra sent in ground forces. The south have beaten a retreat back to the corner of Boar Province for now. They’ve holed up under the mountains and forced a standstill for weeks, hence why everyone’s centered in Arabak.”

“The New City,” Rin amended.

He shook his head. “It’s still Arabak. No one here calls it the New City but the Hesperians, or Nikara in Hesperian company.”

“So the holdup is just a consequence of the terrain?” Daji asked. “What about the Young Marshal? Word on the street is he’s falling apart.”

Rin shot her a surprised look. “Where’d you hear that?”

“A pair of old women were gossiping in the pew behind us,” Daji said. “They said if Yin Jinzha were in charge then all the southern rebels would have been exterminated months ago.”

“Jinzha?” Jiang frowned, digging his little finger into his ear. “The older Yin brat?”

“Yes,” Daji said.

“I think I taught him at Sinegard. Utter asshole. Whatever happened to him?”

“He got plucky,” Daji said. “I turned him to mincemeat and sent him back to Vaisra in a dumpling basket.”

Jiang arched an eyebrow. “Darling, fucking what?”

“Nezha’s exhausted.” Kitay quickly returned to the subject. “It’s not entirely his fault. His Hesperian advisers keep making insane demands that he can’t accommodate, and the Republican cabinet are pulling him in twenty different directions so that he doesn’t even know which way to shatter.”

“I don’t get it,” Rin said. “You’d still think he’d be faring better with his advantages.”

“It’s not so simple. This remains a war on multiple fronts. The Republic’s pretty much conquered the north—Jun’s dead, by the way; they flayed him alive on a dais a few weeks ago—but there are still a few provinces holding out.”

“Really?” Rin perked up. That was the first piece of good news she’d heard in a long time. “Any provinces that are armed?”

“Ox Province is putting up the best resistance for now, but they’ll all be dead in a few weeks,” Kitay said. “They’ve got no organization. They’re split into three factions that aren’t communicating—which was their advantage for a while, actually, because Nezha never knew what the individual battalions were going to do next. But that’s not a sustainable defense strategy. Nezha just needs to take care of them one by one.

“And then there’s Dog Province, which has always been so peripheral to the Empire that no one’s thought to care much about them. But that’s made them value their autonomy. And they’re even less likely to bow to Vaisra now that the Hesperians want to go in and turn the whole region into coal mines.”

“How many men do they have?” Daji asked.

“They haven’t needed men yet. The Republic hasn’t even sent a delegate to negotiate. For now, they’re not on Nezha’s map.” Kitay sighed. “But once they are, they’re finished. They’re too sparsely populated; they won’t have nearly enough troops to survive the first wave of attacks.”

“Then we should join them!” Rin exclaimed. “That’s perfect—we break our troops out past the blockade, send a sentry ahead and then rendezvous with the Dog Warlord—”

“It’s a bad guest that shows up unannounced,” Daji said.

“Not if a third guest is holding a knife to the host’s throat,” Rin said.

“This analogy has lost me,” Jiang said.

“It’s not the worst idea,” Kitay said. “Nezha was convinced that Souji and Gurubai intended to send to Dog Province for help. So it’s the predictable option, but it’s also our only option left. We need allies where we can get them. Divided, we’re carrion.”

Rin frowned at him. Something sounded off about Kitay’s tone, though she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. He didn’t sound as sharp and engaged as he usually did at strategy councils. Instead, the words came out in a flat monotone, as if he were half-heartedly reciting a memorized test answer.

What had happened to him in Arabak? He hadn’t been physically tortured, but he’d been alone with Nezha for weeks. Had he turned against her? Was he only pretending to be their ally now? The possibility made her shudder.

But Kitay couldn’t conceal a lie like that. Their souls were bound. She’d feel it. At least, she hoped she’d feel it.

Why, then, was he speaking like a man who had already lost?

“Dog Province, then. Interesting.” Jiang turned to Daji. “What do you say? The route to their capital takes us close to the Tianshan range, and it’d be nice to have ground cover for at least part of it.”

“Fine.” Daji shrugged. “But I don’t see why we need the Southern Coalition for that.”

“It’s thousands of warm bodies.”

“Thousands we have to drag along through the mountains. What’s more, they sold her out.” Daji jerked her chin toward Rin. “They deserve to be left behind.”

“That’s the leadership’s fault. The masses are malleable, you know that.”

“It’ll be messy.”

“I’ve just escaped from the stone mountain. Let me stretch a little, dear. Get some exercise. It’s good for the mind.”

“Fair enough.” Daji sighed. “Dog Province it is.”

“I’m sorry.” Kitay looked between them. “Did I miss something?”

Rin shared his confusion. The exchange between Daji and Jiang had passed so quickly that she’d barely followed what was happening. The two often spoke in a shorthand peppered with allusions to their shared past, a code that had made Rin feel constantly like an outsider on their journey to Arabak. It was a regular reminder that no matter how much power she wielded, the Trifecta had decades of history behind them that she knew only as stories. They’d seen so much more. Done so much more.

“It’s decided,” Daji said. “We’ll go get your army and take them north. Agreed?”

Kitay looked baffled. “But—what about the blockade?”

Jiang stretched his arms over his head, yawning. “Oh, we’ll break them out.”

Kitay blinked at him. “But how are you going to do that?”

Daji chuckled. Jiang gave him a bemused look, as if surprised that Kitay had even asked.

“I’m the Gatekeeper,” he said simply, as if that fact were answer enough.

The night was comfortably warm, so they doused the campfire after they’d eaten and slept on the wagon in shifts. Kitay volunteered to take first watch. Rin hadn’t rested since sunrise—she was bone-tired, temples still throbbing from the sensory shock of the New City—but she put off sleep for several minutes so she could sit beside him. She wanted these few minutes with him alone.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she said. Shallow words and a shallow sentiment that didn’t come close to expressing how she felt.

But Kitay just nodded. He understood.

She felt a spark of warmth from every point of contact between them—her hand lying against his, his arm curved around her waist, her head nestled between his chin and shoulder. She craved the feeling of his skin against hers. Every touch was a reassurance that he was real, he was alive, and he was here.

She shifted against him. “What’s on your mind?”

“Nothing.” He still spoke in that flat, wan tone. “I’m just tired.”

“Don’t lie to me.” She wanted everything laid out in the open. She couldn’t stand another moment of Kitay’s strange resignation; she couldn’t bear thinking there was a part of him that she didn’t understand. “What’s bothering you?”

He was silent for a long moment before he spoke. “It’s just . . . I don’t know, Rin. Arabak was—”

“It’s awful.”

“It’s not necessarily awful, it’s just strange. And I was there for so long, and now I’m out, I still can’t stop thinking about the Hesperians.”

“What about them?”

“I don’t know, I just . . .” His fingers fidgeted in his lap; he was clearly struggling with how much he wanted to tell her. Nothing could have prepared her for what he said next. “Do you think they might just be better than us?”

“Kitay.” She twisted around to stare at him. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“When Nezha first brought me into Arabak, he spent the first two days giving me a tour of the city,” he said. “Showing me everything that they’d built in just a few weeks. Do you remember how insufferable he was when we first got to Arlong? Couldn’t stop jabbering about this naval innovation and that. But this time, everything I saw really was a marvel. Everywhere I looked I saw things that I never dreamed could exist.”

She folded her arms against her chest. “So what?”

“So how did they build them? How did they create objects that defy every known law of the natural world? Their knowledge of so many fields—mathematics, physics, mechanics, engineering—eclipses ours to a terrifying degree. Everything we’re discovering at Yuelu Mountain, they must have known already for centuries.” His fingers twisted in his lap. “Why? What do they have that we don’t have?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But it doesn’t mean they’re just naturally better, whatever the fuck that means—”

“But could it? Every member of the Gray Company I’ve met believes that they are just innately, biologically superior to us. And they don’t say this to be cruel or condescending. They see it as fact. A scientific fact, as simple as the fact that the ocean is salty and that the sun rises every morning.” His fingers wouldn’t stop twisting. Rin had the sudden impulse to slap them. “They see human evolution as a ladder, and they’re at its top, or at least as far as it can reach for now. And we—the Nikara—are clinging on to the lower rungs. Closer to animals than human.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“Is it? They built dirigibles. Not only can they fly, they’ve been flying for decades, and here we are with only a rudimentary knowledge of seafaring because we bombed our own navies to bits in civil wars over nothing. Why?”

Dread twisted Rin’s stomach. She didn’t want to hear these words from Kitay’s mouth. This felt worse than betrayal. This felt like discovering her best friend was an utter stranger.

She would be lying if she said she’d never asked these questions herself. Of course she had. She’d asked them during all those weeks she’d spent undergoing examinations in Sister Petra’s cabin, putting her naked, helpless body at the Hesperian’s disposal, letting her take measurements and write them down while explaining in a cold, matter-of-fact tone that Rin’s brain was smaller, her stature was shorter, and her eyes saw less because of her race.

Of course she’d wondered, often, whether the Hesperians were right. But she hated how Kitay spoke as if he’d already decided they were.

“They could be horribly wrong about us,” he said. “But they’re right about almost everything else; they couldn’t have built all that if they weren’t. Look at a city they threw up in weeks. Compare that to the finest cities in the Empire. Can’t you at least see where I’m coming from?”

Rin thought of the New City’s spotless streets, its neat grid-like layout, and its quick, efficient modes of transportation. The Nikara had never built something like that. Even in Sinegard, the Red Emperor’s capital and the crown jewel of the Empire, sewage had rushed freely down the streets like rainwater.

“Maybe it’s their Maker.” She tried to inject some levity into her voice. He was tired, she was tired; perhaps by morning, after they’d slept, this entire conversation would seem like a joke. “Maybe those prayers are working.”

He didn’t smile. “It’s not their religion. Perhaps that’s related—the Divine Architect is certainly more friendly to scientific research than any of our gods are. But I don’t think they need deities at all. They have machines, and that’s perhaps more powerful than anything they could summon. They rewrite the script of the world, just like you do. And they don’t need to sacrifice their sanity to do it.”

Rin had no rebuttal to that.

Jiang would have an answer. Jiang, who was so sure that the Pantheon lay at the center of the universe, had warned her once against treating the material world like a thing to be mechanized, dominated, and militarized. He’d believed firmly that the Hesperian and Mugenese societies had long ago forgotten their essential oneness with universal being, and were spiritually lost as a result.

But Rin had never been interested in cosmology or theology. She’d only been interested in the gods for what power they could give her, and she couldn’t formulate what little she remembered of Jiang’s ramblings into any sort of valid objection.

“So what?” she asked finally. “So what does that mean for us?”

She already knew Kitay’s conclusion. She just wanted to hear him say it out loud, to see if he would dare. Because the logical conclusion was terrifying. If they were so deeply separated by race, if the Hesperians were innately more intelligent, more capable, and more powerful—then what was the point of resistance? Why shouldn’t the world be theirs?

He hesitated. “Rin, I just think—”

“You think we should just surrender,” she accused. “That we’d be better off under their rule.”

“I don’t,” he said. “But I do think it might be inevitable.”

“It’s not inevitable. Nothing ever is.” Rin pointed toward the wagon, where Jiang and Daji lay asleep. “They were children in the occupied north. They didn’t have arquebuses or airships, and they expelled the Hesperians and united the Empire—”

“And they lost it just two decades later. Our odds aren’t looking much better the second time around.”

“We’ll be stronger this time.”

“You know that’s not true, Rin. As a country, as a people, we’re weaker than we’ve ever been. If we beat them, it will be due to a massive stroke of good fortune, and it will come at a great cost to human life. So don’t blame me for wondering whether it’s worth the struggle.”

“Do you know what Sinegard was like for me?” she asked suddenly.

He frowned. “Why does that—”

“No, listen. Do you know what it was like to be the country idiot who everyone thought was barely literate because my tongue was flat, my skin was dark, and I didn’t know that you’re supposed to bow to the master at the end of every class?”

“I’m not saying—”

“I thought there was something inherently wrong with me,” she said. “That I was just born uglier, weaker, and less intelligent than everyone around me. I thought that, because that’s what everyone told me. And you’re arguing that means I had no right to defy them.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“But it’s analogous. If the Hesperians are so innately better, then the next rung on the ladder is pale-skinned northerners like you, and the Speerlies are sitting on the bottom.” She was burning a handprint into the grass they were sitting on; smoke wafted around them. “And then, by your logic, it’s fine that the Empire turned us into slaves. It’s fine that they wiped us off the map, and that the official histories mention us only in footnotes. It’s only natural.”

“You know I’d never argue that,” Kitay said.

“That’s the implication of your logic,” she said. “And I won’t accept that. I can’t.”

“But that doesn’t matter.” He drew his knees up to his chest. He looked so small then, a much diminished version of the Kitay she’d always known. “Don’t you get it? There is still no foreseeable path that leads to our victory. What do you think is going to happen after we get to Dog Province? You can hide from the airships for a little bit, but how the fuck are you going to defeat it?”

“Simple,” she said. “We’ve got a plan.”

He gave a shaky, helpless laugh. “Let’s hear it, then.”

“We’ve got a problem of power asymmetry now,” she said. “Which means we only win if this war occurs in three phases. The first is a strategic retreat. That’s what is happening now, intentionally or not. Second is the long stalemate. Then, at last, the counteroffensive.”

He sighed. “And how are you going to launch this counteroffensive? You have maybe a tenth of their ranged capabilities.”

“That’s fine. We have gods.”

“You can’t win this war with just a handful of shamans.”

“I beat the Federation on my own, didn’t I?”

“Well, barring genocide—”

“We can beat them with shamanism constrained to armed combatants on the battlefield,” she insisted. “The same way we’ve been hunting down the Mugenese now.”

“Maybe. But it’s just you and Jiang and the Vipress, that’s not nearly—”

“Enough?” She lifted her chin. “What if there were more?”

“Don’t you dare open the Chuluu Korikh,” Kitay said.

“No.” She shuddered at the thought of that place. “We won’t go back to that mountain. But Jiang and Daji want to march north. Up to Mount Tianshan.”

“So I heard.” He eyed her skeptically. “What’s in Mount Tianshan?”

“Come on, Kitay. You can figure this out.”

His gaze wandered over toward the Trifecta. She saw his eyes widen as the pieces clicked in his mind.

“You’re crazy,” he said.

“Probably.”

His mouth worked for several seconds before he got the words out. “But—the stories—I mean, the Dragon Emperor’s dead.”

“The Dragon Emperor’s sleeping,” Rin said. “And he’s been asleep for a very long time. But the Seal is eroding. Jiang’s remembering who he was, what he once could do, which means Riga is about to wake up. And once he does, once we’ve reunited the Trifecta, then we’ll show Hesperia what true divinity looks like.”