The Burning God (The Poppy War Book 3)

From the wreckage of the dirigible, it was a quick three-mile march through the mountainside to the edge of the cliffs that sealed in Arlong like an oyster shell. When at last they pushed through the wall of thick forest, the great, wide Murui river lay on their horizon, stretching on without end as if it were the ocean. Before them lay Arlong’s famous Red Cliffs, glinting in the noon sun like freshly spilled blood.

Rin halted at the ledge, searching the opposite wall until she found a string of characters, carved at a slant into the rock face so that they were only visible when the light caught them just so.

Nothing lasts.

Those were the famous words, written in near-indecipherable Old Nikara, carved into the Red Cliffs by the last minister loyal to the Red Emperor just before his enemies stormed the capital and hung his flayed body above the palace doors.

Nothing lasts. The world does not exist. Nezha and Kitay had come up with those conflicting translations. They were both wrong, and they were both right. Their translations were two sides of the same truth—that the universe was a waking dream, a fragile and mutable thing, a blur of colors shaped by the unpredictable whims of divinity.

The last time Rin had been here, a year that felt like a lifetime ago, she’d been blinded by loyalty and love. She’d been soaring between these cliffs on wings borne by fire, fighting on Yin Vaisra’s behalf for a Republic founded on a lie. She’d been fighting to save Nezha’s life.

Past the narrow channel, she could just barely make out the silhouette of the capital city. She fished her spyglass from her pocket and examined the city perimeter for a moment, until she glimpsed movement near each of its gates—her squadrons, moving in like chess pieces falling neatly into formation. From what she could see, at least four of the decoys had made it past the Murui. Venka’s column, to her relief, was among them—as Rin watched, they marched steadily down the slopes from the northeast. She saw no sign of the last two squadrons, but she couldn’t worry about that now. In minutes, the ground invasion of Arlong would commence.

That part of the assault was just noise. The four columns encircling Arlong were armed with the flashiest projectiles in their arsenal—double-mounted missiles, massive short-range cannons, and repurposed firecrackers stuffed with shrapnel. These were meant to capture Nezha’s attention, to fool him into thinking the overground assault was a more significant effort than it was. Rin knew, based purely on the numbers, that she couldn’t win a sustained ground battle, nor a protracted siege. Not when Nezha had been laying his defenses for weeks; not when all the Republic’s last tricks and weapons lay hidden behind those walls.

But they didn’t have to win, they only had to make a racket.

“Good luck,” Kitay said. He would stay behind atop the Red Cliffs—close enough to witness everything through his spyglass, but far enough that he’d remain well out of harm’s way. He squeezed her wrist. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

“Stay safe,” Rin responded.

She forced her voice to remain casual. Brusque. No time to get emotional now. They already knew this might fail; they’d said their goodbyes last night.

Kitay gave her a mocking salute. “Give Nezha my regards.”

A round of cannon fire punctuated his words from across the channel. Venka’s smoke signals flared bright against the gray sky. The final invasion had begun. While Arlong erupted in explosions, Rin and her shamans descended the cliffside to finish things once and for all.

Rin had been worried that the grotto might be difficult to find. All she had to go on were fragments remembered from one of the most painful conversations she’d ever had, echoing through her mind in Nezha’s low, tortured voice. There’s a grotto about a mile out from the entrance to this channel, this underwater crystal cave.

But once she was down in the shadow of the Red Cliffs, wading through the same shallows where Nezha and his siblings had played so long ago, she realized the path to the Dragon was obvious. Only one side of the channel was lined with cave mouths. And if she wanted to find the Dragon’s lair, all she had to do was follow the jewels.

They lay embedded in the river floor, glinting and sparkling underneath the gentle waves. The treasures piled up higher the closer they drew to the caves—jade-studded goblets, gilded breastplates, sapphire necklaces, and golden circlets, littered against a dazzling array of silver ingots. Small wonder Nezha and his brother had once ventured foolhardily into the grotto. It wouldn’t have mattered how many times they’d been warned to stay away. What small child could resist this allure?

Rin could sense she was close. She could feel the power emanating from the grotto; the air felt thick with energy, laced with a constant, inaudible crackle, so very similar to the atmosphere she’d felt on Mount Tianshan.

The boundary between the mortals and the divine here was extraordinarily thin.

Rin paused for a moment, struck with the oddest sense that she’d been here before.

Right outside the grotto’s entrance, the jewels gave way to bones. They were startlingly pretty, lighting up the water with their own faintly green luminescence. This was no product of rot and erosion. Someone—something—had constructed this pathway, had lovingly peeled the flesh off its collected corpses and arranged the bones in a neat, glowing invitation.

“Great Tortoise,” Dulin muttered. “Let’s just blow this whole place out of the water.”

Rin shook her head. “We’re too far out.”

They hadn’t even seen the Dragon. They needed to draw much closer—if they lit their missiles now, they’d only alert Nezha’s sentries. “Hold your fire until we see it move.”

She strode boldly forward, trying to ignore the ridged bones beneath her boots. She opened her palm as she passed into the dark interior, but her flames only illuminated a few feet into the cave. The darkness beyond seemed to swallow it whole. Rin traced her fingers along the ridges in the wall for something to guide her, then yanked her hand back when she realized what they were. Her stomach churned.

The walls were lined with faces—beautiful, symmetrical faces of every size and shape; of grown men and little girls; faces without hair, without eyes, and without expression. Rot had not touched the pristine, bloodless skin. These heads hung in a space carved outside of time, now and forever.

Rin shuddered.

The ocean likes to keep its treasures. The ocean doesn’t destroy. The ocean collects.

Once upon a time, Nezha had walked hand-in-hand with his little brother toward this grotto. He’d ignored the countless warnings because Mingzha had begged so hard, and because Nezha could refuse Mingzha nothing. He hadn’t known the danger, and no one had stopped him. Of course no one had stopped him—because Vaisra had let him go, had deliberately sent him in, because he’d known that one day, he’d need the monster that Nezha would become.

Rin realized now why the grotto felt so familiar. This wasn’t like Mount Tianshan at all. The Heavenly Temple was a place of lightness, clarity, and air. This place bore a heavier history. This place was tainted with a mortal stain, was suffused with pain and sorrow, was a testament to what happened when mortals dared to wrestle with the gods.

She’d felt divinity like this only once before, an eternity ago, on the worst day of her life.

Right then, she could have been standing in the temple on Speer.

“General!”

A burst of shouts echoed from the cave mouth. Rin spun around. Her soldiers pointed across the river, where a small, sleek sampan flew over the water toward them. That speed couldn’t be achieved with sails or paddle wheels.

Nezha was on that boat.

“Now,” Rin ordered Dulin.

He knelt and pressed his hands against the grotto floor. Vibrations rolled under Rin’s feet, echoing down the cave’s unfathomable depths. Dust and water streamed from the cave roof, coating them all in dirt.

But the rumbling did not crescendo to an earth-shattering quake. The grotto’s interior did not collapse.

“What are you doing?” Rin hissed. “Bury that thing.”

A vein protruded from Dulin’s temple. “I can’t.”

The sampan was already halfway across the river; it’d reach them in seconds. Conventional means, then. Rin nodded to her troops.

“Fire.”

They obliged, hefting their rocket lances. They aimed; she sent a flame snaking out to light the fuses. Eight lances tipped with powerful explosives flew screeching into the cave mouth. She couldn’t see how far they went, but a moment later, she heard a muffled boom and, beneath that, a low, rumbling groan that sounded almost human.

Then the river surged, and Nezha was upon them.

Rin crouched, bracing for his opening strike. It didn’t come.

Nezha stepped off the side of the sampan, moving as casually as if he’d just arrived for teatime. He’d come alone. His feet didn’t sink when they touched the water, but trod flatly over the river’s surface as if it were marble.

He didn’t pull a shield around him as he drew closer. He didn’t need to. He was confident here in his domain, protected by endless water on all sides. He could ward off any attack she might attempt without trying.

She knew very well she remained standing only because he was curious.

“Hello, Rin,” he said. “What do you think you’re doing here?”

“Why don’t you ask yourself?” She nodded toward Arlong. “City’s burning.”

“I noticed. So why aren’t you there?”

“Thought they could manage without me.”

Her eyes flitted toward Pipaji, who stood hunched inconspicuously behind Dulin. Her eyes were closed, lips moving silently as she sank into a trance. A small black cloud formed around her ankles, gave a tentative pulse, then began to stretch toward Nezha like tendrils of smoke unfurling underwater.

Good girl. Rin just needed to buy her several seconds of time.

“Tell me,” Nezha said. “What did you think you’d do, once you found the grotto?”

“I’d think of something,” Rin said. “I always do.”

Nezha hadn’t even glanced at Pipaji. His eyes were locked on Rin’s. He approached slowly, fingers stroking the hilt of his sword. He’s gloating, Rin realized. He thought he’d blown her plan wide open. He thought he’d won.

He shouldn’t be so careless.

The inky tendrils reached the water under Nezha’s feet.

Rin sucked in a sharp breath.

Nezha flinched and stumbled backward. The poison followed him, racing up his legs and under his clothes. Black lines emerged from beneath his collars and sleeves. Where they touched his golden circlets, they hissed.

Pipaji made an inhuman growling noise. Her eyes shone dark violet, and her mouth was twisted into a cruel sneer that Rin had never seen on her face.

“Shatter,” she whispered.

But Nezha didn’t fall. He was clearly in great pain—he convulsed where he stood, the lines of poison writhing around his body like a horde of black snakes. But his skin didn’t wither; his limbs didn’t rot and corrode. Pipaji’s victims usually succumbed in seconds. But something under his skin repelled the dark streaks, repairing their corrosion.

Pipaji glanced down at her fingertips, puzzled, as if checking that they were still black.

Nezha stopped writhing. He straightened up, rubbing at his neck. The black had already faded from his skin.

“Ah, Rin.” He sighed theatrically. “That would have worked, too. But you showed your hand too early.”

He made a fist and brought it down in a savage slash. A column of water rose behind Pipaji and smashed her into the river. Pipaji, sputtering, tried to rise to her feet. But the water rose and fell, slamming her again and again to her knees.

Pipaji shrieked. The black in her fingers stretched up through her arms. More indigo clouds blossomed underwater, racing toward Nezha like sea creatures. Nezha made a cupping motion. The water beneath Pipaji’s feet shot up, flinging her several feet back. This time she lay still. The dark streaks disappeared.

“That’s the best you could come up with?” Nezha sneered. “You came after me with a little girl?”

Rin couldn’t speak. Panic fogged her mind. There was nothing she could say, nothing she could do—even the Phoenix was terrified, reluctant to lend its flames, already anticipating a losing battle.

Nezha stretched his fingers toward Pipaji. Rin thought the girl had died—part of her hoped she’d just died—but Pipaji was alive and conscious, and she screamed as a mass of water lifted her up, encircled her waist, then crept up her shoulders.

“Stop!” she shrilled. “Stop, please, mercy—”

The river closed over her face. Her screams cut to nothing. Nezha raised his arm to the sky. Pipaji hung high over the river, suspended inside a towering column of water. She thrashed wildly, trying to swim her way out, but the water just bulged to accommodate her flailing. Dulin drew his sword and hacked wildly at the pillar like one might a tree, but Nezha twisted his fingers, and the water wrenched Dulin’s blade from his grasp.

Pipaji’s mouth contorted in desperation. Rin could read her lips.

Help me.

Without another thought, Rin pulled fire into her hand and lunged.

Nezha flicked his wrist. A wave rose before her and crashed, knocking her flat on her back. Nezha sighed and shook his head.

“That’s all?”

Horror squeezed her chest as she rose. So easy. This was so easy for him.

“Now you.” Nezha directed a fist at the charging Dulin.

Dulin never stood a chance. Rin didn’t see what Nezha did. She was still clambering to her feet, blinking water from her eyes. All she felt was a hard tug, like a temporary current, then a crash of water. When she finally straightened up, Dulin was gone.

“Here’s the thing about the ocean.” Nezha turned back toward Pipaji. “If you swim down deep enough, the pressure can kill you.”

Ever so casually, he squeezed his fist. Pipaji’s eyes bulged. Nezha made a throwing motion. The water pillar flung Pipaji to the side like a rag doll. She landed facedown, limp, in the shallows. She floated, but did not stir.

Rin rolled onto her side and sent a jet of fire roaring at Nezha’s face. He waved a hand. Water shot up to diffuse the flames. But that bought Rin a few precious seconds, which she used to regain her footing, crouch, and leap.

She had to get him on the ground. Ranged attacks wouldn’t work; his shields were too strong. Once again, her only hope was a blow at close quarters. For the briefest moment, as she barreled into his side, the gods didn’t matter—it was only the two of them, mortal and human, rolling and twisting in the river. He kneed her in the thigh. She groped around his face, trying to gouge out his eyes. His hands found a grip around her neck and squeezed.

Water crashed over them and forced them down, holding them beneath the surface. Rin kicked and choked to no avail. Nezha’s fingers tightened on her neck, thumbs crushing her larynx.

Help me. Rin cast her thoughts wildly toward the Phoenix. Help me.

She heard the god’s reply like a muted, distant echo. The Dragon is too strong. We cannot—

She clung at their connection. Yanked at it. I don’t care.

Heat surged through her veins. She forced her mouth onto Nezha’s. Flames erupted underwater, and the river exploded around them. Nezha’s grip broke loose. She saw bubbles roiling over his skin, searing pink marks across his face.

Rin broke the surface, gasping. The world seemed swathed in black fog. She sucked in several hoarse, deep breaths. Her vision cleared, and from the corner of her eye she saw Nezha standing up.

She crouched, flames sparking around her, ready for a second round.

But Nezha wasn’t looking at her. He struggled upright, his clothes ripped and burned beneath his armor, his face shining red with quickly disappearing blisters. His eyes, wide with horror, were fixed on something behind her.

She turned.

Deep within the grotto, something moved.

Nezha gave a low moan of terror. “Rin, what have you done?”

She had no response. She was rooted to the floor with sheer terror, unable to do anything but watch in fascinated horror as the Dragon of Arlong emerged from its lair.

It moved slowly, ponderously. She struggled to take in its shape; it was so massive she couldn’t grasp its outline, only the scale of it. When it reared its head, it cast them all—Rin, Nezha, and her troops—in its mountainous shadow.

Dragons in Nikara myth were elegant creatures, wise, sophisticated lords of rivers and rain. But the Dragon was nothing like the sleek cerulean serpents that hung in paintings around the palace in Arlong. It looked vaguely like a snake, thick and undulating, its dark, bulbous body ending in a ridged, bumpy head. It was the underbelly of the ocean come alive.

The Dragon collects pretty things. Was it because the sea absorbed anything it touched? Because it was so vast and so unfathomably dark that it sought whatever ornament it could find to give it shape?

The Dragon tilted its massive head and roared—a sound felt rather than heard, a vibration that seemed capable of shattering the world.

“Hold your ground,” Rin told her troops, trying her best to keep her voice level. She wasn’t scared. She wasn’t scared—if she acknowledged she was scared, then she’d go to pieces. “Stay calm, aim for its eyes—”

The Dragon surged. To the troops’ great credit, they never faltered. They held their weapons high and useless until the very end.

It was over in seconds. There was a flash of movement, a split second of screams, and then a rapid retreat. Rin didn’t see its jaws move. All she saw were discarded weapons, red streaks spreading over the surface, and scraps of armor floating on the bobbing waves.

The Dragon reared back, its head cocked to the side, examining its remaining prey.

Nezha swept his arms up. The river surged into a barrier between him and the Dragon, a blue wall stretching nearly twenty feet into the sky. The Dragon moved like a flicking whip. Something huge and dark crashed through the water. The barrier dissolved, ripped through like a flimsy sheet of paper.

Let me, urged the Phoenix. Its voice rang louder in her mind than she’d ever heard it, momentarily drowning her own thoughts. Give me control.

Rin hesitated. An objection half formed. Kitay—

The boy will be no barrier, said the Phoenix. If you will it.

Rin’s eyes flickered toward the Dragon. What choice did she have?

I will it.

The Phoenix took full rein. Flames poured from her eyes, nose, and mouth. The world exploded into red; she could perceive nothing else. She couldn’t tell if Nezha was safe, or if he’d been burned alive by their mere proximity. She couldn’t have stopped it if he was. She had no agency now, no control—she was not calling the fire; she was merely its conduit—a ragged, unresisting gate through which it roared into the material realm.

The Phoenix, racing free, howled.

She reeled, overwhelmed by the double vision of the spiritual plane layered onto the material world. She saw pulsing divine energies, vermilion red against cerulean blue. The river bubbled and steamed. Scalded fish bobbed to the surface. Something flashed in her mind, then the river and grottoes disappeared from her sight.

All she could see now was a vast black plain, and two forces darting and dueling within it.

She couldn’t feel Kitay. In that moment, he seemed so distant that they might not have been anchored at all.

Hello again, little bird. The Dragon’s voice was a rumbling groan, deep, yawning, and suffocating. It sounded how drowning felt. You are persistent.

The Phoenix lunged. The Dragon reared back.

Rin struggled to make sense of the colliding gods. She couldn’t follow their duel; this battle was happening on planes far too complex for her mind to process. She could see only hints of it; great explosions of sound and color in unimaginable shades and registers as forces of fire and water tangled, two forces strong enough to bring down the world, each balanced only by the other.

How can you win? she thought frantically. The gods were not personalities; they were fundamental forces of creation, constituent elements of existence itself. What did it mean for one to conquer another?

Over the din, she thought she heard Nezha screaming.

Then the heat inside her crescendoed, burning so white-hot she was afraid she’d evaporated. The Phoenix seemed to have gained the upper hand—bursts of crimson dominated the spirit plane now, and Rin could vaguely make out a great funnel of fire surrounding the Dragon’s dark form.

Had they done it? Had they won? Surely nothing, no man or god, could survive that onslaught. But when it was over—when her flames died away, when the material world reappeared in her vision, when her body became hers and she staggered and tripped in the shallow water, struggling to breathe, she saw that she was still in the great beast’s shadow.

Her fire had done nothing to the Dragon at all.

The Phoenix was silent. Rin felt the god recede from her mind, a spot of heat fleeing like a dying star, growing colder and more distant until it was gone.

Then she was alone. Helpless.

The Dragon cocked its head, as if to ask, What now?

Rin tried to stand and failed. Her legs were logs in the water; they would not obey. She scooted back, numb fingers fighting to keep hold of her sword. But it was such a tiny, fragile thing. What scrap of metal could even scratch that creature?

The Dragon drew itself to its full height, darkening the entire river with its shadow. When it surged forth, all she could do was close her eyes.

She felt the impact later, an earth-shaking crash that left her ears ringing. But she wasn’t dead. She wasn’t even hurt. She opened her eyes, confused, then glanced up. A great shield of water stood above her. Beside her stood Nezha, hands stretched to the sky.

His mouth was moving. Several seconds passed before his shouts became audible through her ringing ears.

“—you fucking idiot—what were you—”

“I thought I could kill it,” she murmured, still dazed. “I thought . . . I really thought—”

“Do you know what you’ve done?”

He nodded toward the city. Rin followed his gaze. Then she understood that the only reason that either of them was still alive was because the Dragon was preoccupied with a far greater prize.

Massive waves rose ponderously from the river and surged, unnaturally high and unnaturally slowly, down the channel. The gray clouds darkened, thickening within seconds into an impending storm. From this distance, Arlong looked so flimsy. A tiny sand castle, so fragile, so temporary, in the shadow of the risen depths.

“Help me up,” Rin whispered. “I almost did it, I can try again—”

“You can’t. You’re too weak.” Nezha spoke without inflection or spite. It wasn’t an insult, it was simple fact. As he watched the dark form moving beneath the surface toward the city, his scarred face set in resolve. He dropped the water barrier—it was hardly necessary now—and began striding toward the Dragon.

Rin reached instinctively for his hand, then drew back, confused by herself. “What are you—”

“Keep down,” he said. “And when you get the chance, run.”

She was too stunned to do anything but nod. She couldn’t get past how bizarre this was; how they had suddenly stopped trying to kill each other; how they were, of all things, fighting again on the same side. She couldn’t fathom why Nezha had saved her. Nor could she understand the way her heart twisted as she watched him walk forth, arms spread and vulnerable, offering himself to the beast.

She remembered that stance. She remembered watching a long time ago as Altan walked toward a frothing Suni, unafraid and unarmed, speaking calmly as if chatting with an old friend. As if the god in Suni’s mind, strange and capricious, would not dare to break his neck.

Nezha wasn’t trying to fight the Dragon. He was trying to tame it.

“Mingzha.” He shouted the word over and over, waving his arms to get the Dragon’s attention.

It took Rin a moment to remember what that meant—Yin Mingzha, Nezha’s little brother, the fourth heir to the House of Yin, and the first of Vaisra’s sons to die.

The Dragon paused, then rose up out of the water, its head cocked back toward Nezha.

“Do you remember?” Nezha shouted. “You ate Mingzha. You were so hungry, you didn’t keep him for your cave. But you wanted me. You’ve always wanted me, haven’t you?”

Astonishingly, the Dragon lowered its head, dipping low until its eyes were level with Nezha’s. Nezha reached out as if to stroke its nose. The Dragon did not stir. Rin clamped her hand over her mouth, terrified beyond words.

He looked so small.

“I’ll go,” Nezha said. “We’ll go into that grotto. You don’t have to be alone anymore. But you have to stop. Leave this city alone.”

The Dragon remained very still. Then, ever so slowly, the waters began to recede.

The Dragon made a slight motion toward Nezha that seemed bizarrely affectionate. Rin stared, mouth agape, as Nezha pressed his hand against the Dragon’s side.

I’ll go.

With that one gesture, he’d prevented hundreds of thousands of deaths. He’d tamed a god that she’d woken, he’d prevented a massacre that would have been her fault, and he’d thrown her this victory.

“Nezha,” she whispered, “what the fuck?”

Too late, she heard a faint and distinctive drone.

The aircraft emerged over the side of the cliff and dove, fast and low, straight over the grotto. It was much smaller than the bomber dirigibles that had pursued Rin through the mountains; its cockpit seemed large enough for only one person. Stranger still was its underbelly—extending from the bottom of its basket where its cannon should have been was a long, glinting wire that branched into several curved points like a reaching claw.

Rin glanced to Nezha. He stood stock-still, eyes wide in horror.

But the Hesperians were his allies. What did he have to fear?

She pulled fire into her hand, deliberating whether to attack. Before, she wouldn’t have hesitated. But if the dirigible had come to fight the Dragon . . .

The dirigible veered sharply toward her. That answers that. She aimed her palm at the cockpit. But before she could pull her fire forth, a thin line of lightning, lovely and absurd, arced through the blue sky. A second later, she saw a blinding white light. Then nothing.

She wasn’t hurt. She felt no pain. She was still standing; she could hear and move and feel. Though her vision blurred for a moment, it returned after several blinks. But something had shifted about the world. It seemed, somehow, stripped of its life and luster—its colors were drained, blues and greens muted into shades of gray, and its sounds reduced to sandpapery scratches.

The Phoenix went quiet.

No—the Phoenix disappeared.

Rin strained in her mind, flailing desperately through the void to pull the god through Kitay’s mind into hers, but she grasped at nothing. There was no void. There was no gate. The Pantheon was not drifting beyond her reach, it simply wasn’t there.

Then she screamed.

She was in the Chuluu Korikh again. She was drowning in air, sealed and suffocating, imprisoned this time not in stone but in her own heavy, mortal body, pounding helplessly against the walls of her own mind, and that was such unbearable torture that she barely registered the lightning still coursing through her body, making her teeth chatter and singeing her hair.

You are nothing but an agent of Chaos. Sister Petra’s voice rose unbidden to her mind—that cold, clinical voice speaking with assured confidence that until today had never seemed justified. You are not shamans, you are the miserable and corrupted. And I will find a way to contain you.

She’d found it.

Child. Rin heard the Phoenix’s voice. Impossible. And yet the fire returned; a warm heat surged over her body, cradling her, protecting her.

The lightning now landed on Nezha.

He stood with his back to her, arms splayed out like he was being crucified, twitching and jerking as crackling brightness ricocheted across his body. Sparks arced back and forth from his golden circlets, which seemed to amplify the electricity before it burrowed deep into his flesh.

The bolts thickened, doubled, and intensified. Harsh, ragged sobs escaped Nezha’s throat. The Dragon, too, seemed racked with pain. It was performing the oddest dance, head jerking and body writhing, flailing back and forth through the air in a way that would have been funny if it weren’t so horrific.

Rin’s mouth filled with bile.

Focus, child, the Phoenix urged. Strike now.

Rin’s glance darted between the Dragon and the dirigible.

She knew she had one chance to attack—but which target? Nezha had saved her from the dirigible; the dirigible was saving her from the Dragon. Who was her enemy now?

She raised her left hand. The dirigible darted backward several yards, as if sensing her intentions. She opened her palm and aimed a thick stream of flame at its balloon, forcing it faster and higher, hoping desperately that she had the range.

A ripping noise shattered the sky. The dirigible balloon glowed orange for an instant, burst, then vanished. The basket hurtled toward the cliffs; the lightning disappeared.

Nezha crumpled.

Rin’s first instinct was to rush toward him. She took two steps, then caught herself, utterly bewildered. Why would she help him? Because he’d just saved her? But that was his mistake, not hers—she shouldn’t bother, she should just let him die—

Shouldn’t she?

The water turned icy cold around her knees. She felt a wave of exhausted dread.

But the Dragon did not attack. Incredibly, it seemed frightened into submission. It turned its head toward the grotto and slithered back into the dark. Suddenly the air was not so heavy. The gray clouds disappeared, and sunlight was again visible against the glinting waves. Gravity took hold over the river once again, and the suspended waters dropped with a resounding crash.

I must get to shore.

The thought ran like a mantra several times through Rin’s mind before it finally registered into action. Swaying and stumbling like a drunkard, she made her way to the riverbank. She felt detached, distant, as if someone else were clumsily controlling her body while her mind raced with questions.

What had just happened? What had Nezha just done? Was that a surrender?

Had she won?

But none of her dreams of victory had looked anything like this.

She heard a faint, pitiful gurgle. She turned. Pipaji lay farther down the sands, curled into a fetal position. Her face was barely above water; Rin didn’t know how she hadn’t drowned. But her narrow shoulders rose and fell, and her fingers scratched tiny, desperate patterns in the mud as she whimpered.

Rin hastened to her side.

“Oh, gods.” She propped Pipaji up in her arms and slammed her fist against the girl’s narrow back, trying to force the water from her lungs. “Pipaji? Can you hear me?”

Water dribbled from Pipaji’s mouth—just a little trickle at first, and then her shoulders heaved and a stinking torrent of river water and bile spewed from her mouth. Pipaji gagged and slumped weakly against Rin’s chest, breathing in shallow, desperate hitches.

“Hold on.” Rin slung Pipaji’s right arm around her shoulder and pulled her to her feet. The positioning was awkward, but Pipaji was so thin and light that Rin found it surprisingly easy to drag them both forward, one step at a time. “Just hold on, you’re going to be fine, we’ll just get you to Lianhua.”

They’d made it ten steps up the shore when Rin heard a vicious fit of coughing. She twisted her head over her shoulder. Nezha was doubled over on his knees in the shallows, shoulders heaving.

She halted.

He was only several yards away. He was so close she could make out every detail on his face—his chalk-white pallor, his red-rimmed eyes, the faded scars on porcelain-pale skin. She couldn’t remember the last time they’d stood so close without trying to kill each other.

For a moment, they merely looked at each other, taking stock of one another, staring as if they were strangers.

Rin’s gaze dropped to the golden circlets around his wrists. Her stomach twisted as she realized what they were. Not jewelry. Conductors. They hadn’t attracted the lightning by accident. They’d been designed for it.

Then it dawned on her, what Nezha must have gone through in the year since she’d left Arlong. After Rin escaped, Petra had needed a shaman upon whom to experiment.

After the Cike were killed, that left only one in the Republic.

The skin around his wrists and ankles was badly discolored, mottled shades of bruised purple and angry red. The sight made her chest tighten. She’d seen Nezha’s body stitch itself together from wounds that should have killed instantly. She’d seen his skin smooth itself over from burns that had turned it black. She’d thought the Dragon’s powers could heal anything. But they couldn’t heal this.

Rin had once been so absolutely sure the Pantheon constituted the whole of creation. That there was no higher power, and that the Hesperian religion, their Divine Architect, was nothing more than a convenient story.

Now she wasn’t so sure.

Slowly, miserably, Nezha stood and wiped the back of his mouth with his hand. It came away bloody. “Is she alive?”

Rin was so bewildered that his words didn’t process. Nezha nodded at Pipaji and repeated the question. “Is she alive?”

“I—I don’t know,” Rin said, startled into a response. “She—I’ll try.”

“I didn’t want to . . .” Nezha coughed again. His chin glistened red. “It wasn’t her fault.”

Rin opened her mouth to respond, but nothing came out.

The problem wasn’t that she had nothing to say. It was that she had too much, and she didn’t know where to begin, because everything that came to mind seemed so utterly inadequate.

“You should have killed me,” she said at last.

He gave her a long look. She couldn’t read his face; what she thought she saw confused her. “But I never wanted you dead.”

“Then why?”

Those two words weren’t enough. Nothing she could think to say was enough. The gulf between them was too vast now, and the thousand questions on her mind all seemed too shallow, too frivolous to have the slightest chance of bridging it.

“Duty,” he said. “You couldn’t understand.”

She had nothing to say to that.

He watched her in silence, his sword dangling uselessly at his side. His face spasmed, as if he, too, was struggling with thoughts he could never say out loud.

It would be so easy to kill him. He could barely stand. His god had just fled, shuddering from some greater power that she hadn’t even known existed. If she’d carved him open right then, the wounds likely wouldn’t heal.

But she couldn’t make the flame come. That required rage, and she couldn’t even summon the faintest memory of anger. She couldn’t curse, or shout, or do any of the million things she’d imagined she might do if she had the chance to confront him like this.

How many chances, asked Altan, are you going to throw away?

At least one more, she thought, and ignored his jeering laughter.

If she could remember how to hate Nezha, she would have killed him. But instead, she turned her back and let him make his retreat while she made hers.