The Burning God (The Poppy War Book 3)

Arlong had fallen immediately upon Nezha’s retreat. That morning, the Southern Army swept through the city streets just as the Hesperians and the Republic finished their final evacuations. They found a confused, uneven city—half its districts were still populated with Nikara civilians with nowhere else to go, and the other half had become hollow ghost towns. The barracks and residential complexes that once housed Hesperian soldiers had been abandoned. Inside the wrecked shipyards, large hangars that must have been used to house dirigibles now stood empty, their floors littered with spare tools and leftover parts.

“I’ll permit plunder to a reasonable extent,” Rin told her officers. “Take whatever you want. But be civilized—no brawling over spoils, and keep to the affluent neighborhoods. Leave the poorest districts alone. Target the Hesperian quarters first—they won’t have been able to take everything. Weapons, trinkets, and clothes are fair game. But food supplies come back to the palace for central redistribution.”

“How should we deal with armed resistance?” asked Commander Miragha.

“Avoid bloodshed if possible,” Kitay said. “Capture over kill—we want their intelligence. Bring all soldiers to the dungeons and keep the Hesperians and Republican soldiers apart.”

The Republican soldiers who hadn’t managed to escape on the ships were desperately trying to pass themselves off as civilians. The streets were strewn with discarded uniforms; an hour into the occupation, Rin received a report of an entire squadron of naked men begging for secondhand civilian clothes so that they might disguise their identities. She laughed for a good five minutes, then ordered the men to be rounded up in chains and made to stand naked on the dais outside the palace for the rest of the day.

“Good for morale,” she told Kitay when he protested.

“It’s excessive,” he said.

“It’s exactly the right amount of public humiliation. A secret underground resistance might have credibility with the civilians.” She pointed at the shivering men. “They certainly won’t.”

He didn’t have a rebuttal.

While her troops continued their takeover of the streets, Rin made her way to the Red Cliffs to watch the last of the evacuation ships hurrying out of the narrow channel.

She remembered the day, nearly a year ago now, when she first saw the Hesperian fleet arrive on Nikara shores. How relieved she’d been then. How grateful. The white sails had represented hope and survival. Divine intervention.

But they hadn’t come until the Republic had nearly bled itself out. They could have ended the whole civil war in minutes from the very beginning. They could have saved the entire country months of starvation and bloodshed. But they’d waited out the unnecessary tragedy until the very end, when they could simply step in and call themselves the heroes.

They were nowhere near so pompous in their departure.

“Bloody cowards,” Venka said. “You’re just going to let them go?”

“Dunno,” Rin said. “Could be fun to sink all those ships in the harbor.”

Kitay sighed. “Rin.”

“I’m serious,” she said.

“Occupying a city is one thing,” he said. “Setting civilians on fire is quite another.”

“But it’d be so funny.” She was only half joking. She felt a thrill of dark, vindictive glee as she watched the mangled, escaping fleet. If she wanted to, she could turn every ship in that channel to ash. She had that power.

“Please, Rin.” Kitay shot her a wary look. “Don’t be an idiot. Right now the Hesperians are retreating because they’re exhausted, they’ve expended everything on a war on a continent that they don’t care for. They gambled on the wrong faction and lost. Right now, they’re just licking their wounds. But if you send flames after fleeing women and children, they really just might reconsider.”

“Spoilsport,” said Venka.

Rin sighed. “I so hate when you’re right.”

So she let the ships sail undisturbed out of the harbor. She’d let the Hesperians think, for now, that her new regime bore them no ill will. That her priorities lay within Nikan’s boundaries. She’d let them think they were safe.

And then, when they’d been lulled into complacency, when they’d become convinced that perhaps those dirty, stupid, inferior Nikara didn’t pose such a great threat after all—that was when she would strike.

Rin’s next task was to occupy the palace.

The place was in shambles. The grand painted doors had been left hanging ajar, hallways strewn with shattered vases that had fallen out of hastily packed wagons. The vast hall in the palace center had been stripped of almost all its furnishings; only the wall tapestries remained, too heavy and unwieldy to pull down and carry away.

The Yin family portrait hung at the far end of the chamber. Rin stood beneath it for a moment, gazing at the faces of the family that had imagined they might rule the Empire.

Whoever had woven this had rendered the Yins with impressive accuracy. Standing together, their similarities were even more pronounced. They all had the same high cheekbones, arched eyebrows, and sculpted, angular jaws. None of them smiled—not even the children, who gazed over the empty hall with identically haughty, contemptuous expressions.

At first Rin mistook Jinzha for Nezha, but then realized that the youths standing to their father’s right must be the firstborn twins—Jinzha and Muzha. Nezha was by himself, somber and forlorn, to his father’s left. This tapestry must have been completed years ago—he was represented here as a small child, barely rising to his father’s waist. To the far right stood Lady Yin Saikhara, cradling a baby in her arms. That had to be Mingzha—Nezha’s dead baby brother, the one lost to the Dragon.

What a beautiful family, destroyed in only the span of a year. Jinzha was captured and ground into dumpling stuffing at Lake Boyang. The charred remnants of Vaisra’s body lay indistinguishable from the burned wreckage of his fleet. Muzha had reportedly drowned in the Dragon’s attack on Arlong. And Nezha was broken and defeated, a slave to his Hesperian masters.

Rin wished, with a pulse of vicious hatred, she could have ended the lineage herself.

But the Lady Saikhara had escaped her justice. She’d flung herself off the highest tower of the palace when she saw the banners of southern troops marching into the city. Her fragile bones smashed like porcelain against the execution grounds outside the palace, and she joined a long tradition of noblewomen who had died along with their dynasties.

Rin learned from reports that Arlong’s residents had come to hate Saikhara in the final days. It was no great secret that the House of Yin had profited greatly from the civil war, even as it impoverished entire populations just on its border. Nezha’s sister, Muzha, had become rich acting as the go-between for Hesperian traders and the powerful merchant cronies that crowded the Republican court.

When Lady Saikhara had come back from her grand publicity tour in Hesperia, it had been revealed that she and Muzha had dumped huge swaths of Nikara goods into waiting Hesperian markets while everyone else was hoarding food and buying in a panic from rapidly inflating markets.

Popular opinion had called for Nezha to sanction his mother and sister, but he did nothing except remove them from his cabinet. So Nezha’s moniker had gone from the Young Marshal to the Filial Fool, while his mother was titled the Whore of the West. In the past week, the streets had been calling so loudly for her punishment that if the Southern Army hadn’t stormed Arlong’s gates then she might very well have been torn apart by the mobs regardless.

“You’d think she would have gotten out with the Hesperians,” Kitay said as they stood on the second-floor balcony, watching as servants scrubbed Saikhara’s blood from the steps. Her body lay several feet away, wrapped unceremoniously in a spare canvas sheet. Rin planned to weigh it down with rocks and toss it into the harbor for the fish. “I thought they loved her.”

“I think they left her behind,” Rin said. “I think they had to save their own skins.”

They would have done it. The Hesperians, facing an overwhelming tide of public hatred, wouldn’t have dared trying to ferret the despised Saikhara out of the city.

It didn’t matter that Lady Saikhara spoke fluent Hesperian, that she worshipped their Maker, or that she’d been masquerading as a Hesperian woman for half her life. In the end she was still Nikara, still one of the inferior race, and the Hesperians only looked out for their own.

The adjacent hallways were crammed with riches that put those in Jinzhou to shame. Rin had walked through those corridors a dozen times before, always on her way to Vaisra’s office, though she’d never dared to pause and peruse. Back then, their mere proximity had filled her with awe; those artifacts were shining evidence of a historical elite that she had, somehow, been invited to join.

Walking through the hallways felt very different now that she knew everything displayed on the walls belonged to her.

“Look.” Kitay stopped before a very old, very shiny helmet. “It says this belonged to the Red Emperor.”

“There’s no way.”

“Read the placard.”

The helmet did look old enough. Rin could see little jade stones embedded into the forehead. She reached into the case, plucked the helmet out, and tried it on. It was uncomfortably cold, obstructively heavy. Quickly she pulled it off. “I don’t know how anyone managed to fight wearing this.”

“It’s ceremonial, probably,” Kitay said. “I doubt he actually wore it into battle. This place is loaded with his stuff—look, there’s his breastplate, and that’s his old tea set.”

His fingers hovered over the relics, as if he was too awed to touch them. But Rin, glancing about the hall, was struck with a deep sense of pity. The Red Emperor was the greatest man in Nikara history, a man so famous that every child in the Empire knew his name by the time they could speak. The myths about him could and did fill up entire bookshelves. He’d united the country for the very first time; he’d brought fire and bloodshed on a scale the land had never witnessed before; and he’d built cities that remained intellectual, cultural, and commercial centers of the Empire.

And now, a millennium later, all that remained were his helmet, his breastplate, and a tea set.

His dynasty had not even survived a generation. Upon his death his sons had immediately fallen upon each other, and after the centuries of bloodshed that followed, the Empire was split under a provincial system that the Red Emperor had not designed nor intended. His bloodline was lost, his heirs extinguished within the first twenty years of the civil war they started. If his line persisted, no one recognized it.

He was king for a day. For a brief moment, he stood in the center of the universe. And for what?

He should have married Tearza, Rin thought. He was a fool to make the shamans his enemies. He should have leashed them to his regime. He should have put a Speerly on the throne, and then his Empire would have lasted for an eternity. By now their heirs would have conquered the world.

“This one has your name on it,” Kitay called from farther down the hall.

“What?”

“Look.” He pointed. It was the sword—the twin of the one she’d lost in the water during the battle at the Red Cliffs, the second one crafted from Altan’s melted-down trident.

They’d kept it as a trophy. Speerly mineral, read the placard, last wielded by Fang Runin.

Rin drew the sword out of its case and blew the dust off the blade. She’d thought it had sunk to the bottom of the river forever.

Her placard was so small. There were no further details, no reports of her exploits, just her name and the weapon’s make. She snorted. That was just like Vaisra. If he’d had his way, then she would only ever have remained a footnote in history.

When they build museums to my regime, Vaisra, I won’t even give you a plaque.

Nearly half the artifacts were missing from their cases. They looked recently pilfered, likely by Republican leadership; dust hadn’t had time to settle in the outlines they left behind. Rin couldn’t tell by reading the plaques why some had been stolen and some were left behind; the missing items were valuables of all types from all eras, and appeared to have been packed away at random.

One empty case stood on a prominent display—a shelf protruding from the wall, rimmed with golden edges to draw the viewer’s attention.

Rin picked up the plaque.

Imperial Seal of the Red Emperor.

She nearly dropped it. Incredible. She’d learned about this seal at school. When the Red Emperor died, he’d declared that his seal could only pass, along with the mandate of heaven, to the next rightful ruler of the Empire. It was promptly stolen the morning after his funeral. In the centuries after, the seal changed hands between princes, generals, clever concubines, and assassins, followed wherever it went by a trail of blood. Three hundred years later it finally dropped off the historical record, though provincial Warlords still claimed occasionally to have it locked in their private vaults.

So the House of Yin had kept it all along.

Of course Nezha had taken it with him. Rin found that hilarious. He’d lost the country, but he’d taken the ruler’s mandate.

Keep it, asshole, she thought. Nezha could have the seal, and every other shiny piece of junk his staff had loaded into their wagons. It didn’t matter that those treasures were hallmarks of Nikara history. That history didn’t matter to Rin. It was a record of slavery, oppression, misrule, and corruption. She wanted no heirlooms of her predecessors. She did not carry their legacy. She intended to build something new.

Vaisra’s throne remained at the end of the hall, too heavy to be carted away.

Rin felt very small as she approached it. It was much grander than the throne she’d sat on at Jinzhou. This was a proper emperor’s throne—a high-backed, ornamented chair on a multi-stair dais. An intricate map of the Empire was inked in black ridges across the entire marble floor. Sitting atop that throne, one surveyed the world.

Kitay nodded at the seat. “Gonna give it a try?”

“No,” Rin said. “That’s not for me.”

She knew as she stood in this dark, cold palace that she could never make this place hers. She’d never feel comfortable here; this place was haunted by the ghosts of the House of Yin. And that was just as well. The seat at Arlong had never ruled the entire Empire. It was the home of traitors and imposters, pretenders to the throne doomed to fail. She would not be the latest imposter to rule from the Dragon Province.

This was only a temporary base from which she would solidify her hold on the rest of the country.

The palace interior suddenly felt icy cold. We have so much work to do, Rin thought. The task before her seemed so monumental it did not quite seem real. She’d ripped the world apart, had inflicted one great tear that stretched from Mount Tianshan to the Nine Curves Grotto. And now she had to stitch it back together.

Had to restore order in the provinces. Had to clear the corpses off the streets. Had to put food on people’s tables. Had to return this country, which had fallen apart in every way conceivable, to normal.

Oh, gods. She swayed on her feet, suddenly dizzy. Where do we even start?

A knock sounded against the great hall’s heavy doors, echoing through the vast, dark space.

Rin blinked, struck from her reverie. “Come in.”

A young officer stepped through the doors. He was one of Cholang’s staff. Rin could remember his face—she’d seen it before in the command tent—but not his name. “Commander Miragha sent me to tell you we’ve found it.”

“Where?” Rin asked sharply.

“The far end of the Hesperian quarters. We have it surrounded, but haven’t moved in yet. No one’s going in or out. They’re waiting on your orders.”

“Good.” Rin had to pause for a moment before she could move. She couldn’t tell if the woozy rush in her limbs was a product of excitement or fatigue. When she took a step, it felt as if she were floating through air. “I’ll go now.”

She shrugged off Kitay’s concerned glance as she followed the officer out of the palace. They’d already concluded this debate. He knew what she intended. They agreed on what was necessary.

There was no room to hesitate. It was time for a reckoning.

The last time Rin had been near Arlong’s Hesperian quarter, she’d killed a man by burning off his testicles. Her clearest memories of this place were seeped in fear and panic—were of frantically dragging a body to a sampan, paddling out toward the harbor, and weighing the corpse down with rocks before anyone saw her and shot her full of bullets.

But then, all her memories involving the Hesperians were laced with fear. Even though they’d first come to Arlong as Vaisra’s allies, and even though for half a year they’d nominally fought on the same side, Rin could only associate the Hesperians with alien superiority: forceful, groping hands; steel instruments; and cold indifference.

Sister Petra’s laboratory occupied a square one-story building opposite the barracks. Rin’s troops surrounded the perimeter, armed and waiting. Commander Miragha saluted Rin as she approached.

“It’s locked from the inside,” she reported. “Someone’s definitely in there.”

“Have you communicated with them?” Rin asked.

“We shouted for them to come out, but they didn’t respond. Heard a bit of banging about—whoever is in there, they’re bracing for a fight.”

Rin knew most of the missionaries had already fled the city. She’d seen their slate-gray cloaks on the first boats out of the harbor, easily identified even from across the channel. The Gray Company were revered like royalty in the west; the remaining Hesperian troops would have personally escorted them out of the city.

That meant whoever was barricaded in the laboratory had remained there on purpose.

Outside the door, four of Miragha’s men stood ready around an iron-plated, wheeled battering ram the size of a small tent.

“That looks like overkill,” Rin said.

“We only bring our best,” Miragha said. “Ready whenever you are.”

“Hold on.” Rin scanned the soldiers until she found one holding a halberd. “Give me that.”

She wrapped a discarded Hesperian flag around the blade, knotted it tightly, and set the tip ablaze. She handed it back to the soldier. “You go in first. Let her think you’re me.”

He looked alarmed. “But—General, then—”

“You’ll be fine,” Rin said sternly. The arc of lightning, whatever it was, had not done lasting physical damage to her or Nezha. Against someone who wasn’t a shaman, it ought to have no effect at all. “Just prepare for a shock.”

She was impressed when he did not argue. He held the flaming halberd firm and gave her a curt, obedient nod.

“Do it,” Rin told Miragha.

Miragha gave the order. Her soldiers dragged the battering ram back several yards, then pushed it running against the door.

The wooden door smashed inward upon impact. The soldier with the halberd burst through, waving the torch about the dim interior, but nothing happened. The room was empty. When Rin walked inside, all she saw were toppled chairs and bare tables—and a trap door in the corner.

She pointed. “Down there.”

The soldier with the halberd descended first, Rin following several steps behind. The makeshift torch seemed a plausible imitation; its flame flickered and curved like something alive, casting distorted shadows against the wall.

Lightning immediately arced through the dark. The soldier yelped and dropped the halberd. In the brief, bright flash, Rin glimpsed a silhouette across the room—a crouched figure behind something the shape of a mounted cannon. That was enough. Flames burst from her palm and roared across the room. She heard a high mechanical whine, then saw an explosion of sparks, ricocheting across the room like a thunderstorm concentrated inside a jar.

The cannon-like device exploded. The lightning disappeared. When the smoke cleared, Rin’s flames, dancing steadily around her arms and shoulders as a makeshift lamp, illuminated a mass of scattered metallic parts and a limp form curled up in the corner.

Too easy, Rin thought as she crossed the room. If a soldier had designed this ambush, they wouldn’t have been so trigger-happy with the lightning. They would have known they would only get one chance; they would have waited until they’d established a clear line of fire at Rin.

But Sister Petra Ignatius was a scholar, not a soldier.

Rin pushed at Petra’s ribs with her foot, shoving her over onto her back. “If you wanted an audience, you could have just asked.”

Petra cringed under her boot. A thin trickle of blood ran down the left side of her face where shrapnel had sliced her temple, and bright red burn marks scorched her hands and neck, but she looked otherwise unharmed. Her eyes were open. She was conscious. She could talk.

Rin turned to the stairs, where Miragha waited with her troops. “Leave us.”

Miragha hesitated. “You sure?”

“She’s unarmed,” Rin said. “Post two troops to guard the exits and dispatch the rest back to the city center.”

“Yes, General.” Miragha followed her men back up through the trap door. The single column of sunlight winked out as they lowered the door closed behind them.

Then Rin and Petra were alone in the dim, fire-lit basement.

“Was that all you had?” Rin dragged a chair out from Petra’s work table and sat down. “An amateur’s ambush?”

Petra moaned softly as she drew herself to a sitting position.

“What is this?” Rin demanded. She snatched one of the machine’s broken fragments from the ground. The metal was spun in a tight coil, cold to the touch. “What does this do?”

Petra responded with wary silence. She tilted her head back against the wall, her stone-gray eyes roving up and down Rin’s form as if sizing up a wild animal.

Fine, thought Rin. Then she’d just have to resort to torture. She’d never done that before—she’d only ever watched Altan extract information with well-placed, sadistic bursts of flame—but the basic principles seemed simple enough. She knew how to hurt.

Then, absurdly, Petra began to laugh.

“As if you’d ever understand.” She raised an arm to wipe the blood from her eyes. “What, did you imagine you might devise a countermeasure? The theory behind my machines is centuries beyond your grasp. I could show you every component, every draft of my designs, and you still wouldn’t understand. You don’t have the brains.”

She rose to her feet. Rin tensed, prepared to strike. But Petra only stumbled to the chair opposite her and sat down, hands folded primly in her lap in some sick imitation of a teacher lecturing a student.

“It terrifies you, doesn’t it?” she sneered. “That your gods are nothing?”

Burn her, said the Phoenix. Make her scream.

Rin pushed away the impulse. She had this one chance to get information. She’d get her revenge later.

She held the metal coil out again and repeated the question. “What does this do?”

“Didn’t you feel it?” Petra’s bloody lips split in a grin. For the first time since Rin had met her, she saw a manic glint in the Gray Sister’s eyes, a crack in her inhumanly calm facade. “It silences your god. It nullifies.”

“That’s not possible,” Rin objected, despite herself. “The gods are fundamental forces; they made this world, they can’t just be cut off by some piece of metal, that’s not—”

“Listen to you,” Petra crooned. “Clinging to your pagan babble, even now. Your gods are nothing but a delusion. A chaotic rot in your brains that has plagued your country for centuries. But I’ve found the cure. I fixed that boy, and I’ll fix you, too.”

She was gloating now. She didn’t mind explaining—she wanted to explain, because even now, she wanted to wave her superiority in Rin’s face. Torture wouldn’t be necessary, Rin realized. Petra was going to tell her everything she wanted, because she knew she was about to die, and gloating was all that she had left.

“The principle was quite simple. In Hesperia, we have shock therapies for souls who have lost their grip on reality. The electricity calms their madness. It banishes Chaos from their brains. And once I realized that your shamanism was just madness of the extreme sort, the solution was so easy. Chaos was worming through your minds into the material world. So all I had to do was shut it off.”

She leaned forward. Blood had dripped again into her left eye, but she just blinked without wiping it away. “How does it feel? To know that your gods are nothing before the Divine Architect? We tamed the Dragon. We tamed your so-called Phoenix. Without your shamans, your army is an untrained, backward mass of idiot peasants that will never, ever—”

“Conquer Arlong?” Rin interrupted. She shouldn’t have burst out; she should have just let Petra keep talking, but she couldn’t stand the fucking condescension. “The Republic’s finished. Your people fled the harbor the first chance they got. You’ve lost.”

Petra barked out a laugh. “And you think you’ve won? The Gray Company’s network spans the world. We have eyes on every continent. And those pieces of trash”—she kicked at a bent shard of metal at her feet—“were only prototypes. When I understood what made Yin Nezha bleed, I sent my notes to the Gray Towers. They’ll have perfected my designs by now. The next time you encounter one will be the last.

“The Architect works in mysterious ways. Sometimes he moves slowly. Sometimes he makes sacrifices.” Petra took a rattling breath, coughed, then sighed. “But the world marches inevitably, inexorably toward order. This is his intent. The Gray Company is greater than you could ever imagine, and we now have the weapons to burn Chaos out of the world. You kill me and you accomplish nothing. Your world as you know it will end.”

Rin remained silent.

Petra meant to provoke. She wanted Rin to lose control, to explode and rage, all to prove her point that in the end, Speerlies were no better than animals. During those weeks on the northern expedition, Petra had always maintained such a cool placidity when she made Rin moan and thrash and howl, the condescending control of a woman who believed she was superior in every way.

But this time Rin was in control. She would not squander it.

She had meant to burn Petra alive. When Miragha’s messenger arrived in the palace, Rin had seen an immediate, fantastical vision of Petra screaming and writhing on the floor, begging for mercy as flames corroded her pale white flesh.

But all that now seemed so trite, so easy. Petra deserved no mundane death. Mere bodily torture wouldn’t satisfy. Rin had just been struck by a far better idea, something so deliciously cruel that part of her was astonished, amazed by her own creativity.

“I’m not going to kill you,” she said with as much calm as she could muster. “You don’t deserve that.”

For the first time, fear flickered across Petra’s face.

“Get up,” Rin ordered. “Get on the table.”

Petra remained in her chair, body tensing as if trying to decide whether to run or resist.

“Get on the table.” Rin let the flames around her shoulders jump higher, resembling wings for an instant before they flared out toward Petra. “Or I will char every part of your body. I’ll do it slowly, and I’ll start with your throat so I don’t have to hear you scream.”

Trembling, Petra stood up, climbed onto the examination table, and lay down.

Rin reached over the side of the table for the straps. Her left hand fumbled with the buckles, but she managed to loop them through the metal rings on the sides of the table and yank them tight. Petra lay still all the while. Rin could see the veins protruding from her jaw where she clenched it tight, trying to conceal her fear. But when Rin pulled the straps around Petra’s waist, pinning her arms to her sides, a keening whimper escaped the sister’s throat.

“Calm down.” Rin gave her cheek a patronizing pat. Somehow, that felt better than a slap. “It’ll be over soon.”

A year ago Petra had strapped her naked to a table and lectured her on the inferiority of her mind, the shortcomings of her body, and the genetically determined backwardness of her race. In the months since then, she’d likely done the same to Nezha. She’d probably stood where Rin stood now, watching impassively as lightning arced through his body, taking meticulous notes while her subject contorted in pain. She’d probably lectured him, too, on why this was the Divine Architect’s intention. Why these humiliations and violations were necessary for the slow, holy march toward civilization and order.

Now it was Rin’s turn to proselytize.

“Remember that time you drew my blood?” She smoothed Petra’s hair back with her fingers. “You filled entire jars with it. You didn’t need that much; you told me so yourself. You just wanted to punish me. You were angry because you wanted proof of Chaos, but I couldn’t show you the gods.”

A pungent smell filled the air. Rin glanced down and saw a damp spot spreading through Petra’s robes. She’d soiled herself.

“Don’t be scared.” Rin reached into her back pocket and withdrew a sachet of poppy seeds. “I’m giving you what you want. I’m going to show you the gods.”

She pulled the sachet open with her teeth, tipped it into her palm, and clamped it over Petra’s mouth.

A soldier might have been able to resist—might have held their breath, bit Rin’s palm hard enough to draw blood, or concealed the seeds under their tongue and spat them out the moment they broke free. But Petra didn’t know how to struggle. The Gray Company were untouchable in Hesperia; she’d never had the need. She wriggled pathetically under Rin’s grasp, but couldn’t break free; Rin jammed her stump over her nose, restricting her air flow, until at last she had no choice but to open her mouth and gasp.

Rin saw her throat bob. Then, several long minutes later, she saw her eyes flutter closed as the drug seeped through her bloodstream.

“Good girl.” She removed her palm—empty, good—and wiped it against her pant leg. “Now we wait.”

She wasn’t sure this would work. Petra could not even conceive of the Pantheon’s existence, much less how to get there. And Rin was not Chaghan; she could not flit back and forth between planes, dragging souls along like a shepherd.

But she could call upon the gods, and hers was the god of vengeance.

She dragged a chair next to the table, sat down, and closed her eyes.

The Phoenix answered immediately. It sounded amused. Really, little one?

Bring her to me, Rin thought. And take us to your brethren.

The Phoenix cackled. Whatever you wish.

Darkness rushed in around her. The workroom faded away. She felt herself hurtling into the void, spiraling through the bridge in her mind like an arrow shot straight into the heavens.

“Where are we?” Petra’s presence lashed out, panicked. “What is this?”

Rin could sense her fear like a tidal wave, an ongoing flood of horrified, uprooted alienation. This was the same emotion Rin had felt in the New City dialed to the extreme: the jarring realization that the world was not what she thought it was, that everything she believed, everything she had faith in, was wrong.

Petra wasn’t just scared, she was falling apart.

“It’s divinity,” Rin told her gleefully. “Look around.”

Suddenly the Pantheon was visible, a circle of plinths surrounding them like spectators around a stage. They crept closer, cruel and curious, one and sixty-three entities entranced by the presence of a soul that refused to acknowledge their presence.

“These are the forces that make up our world,” said Rin. “They have no intent. They have no agenda, and they do not tend toward order. They want nothing more than to be what they are. And they don’t care.”

Petra uttered something low and fearful, some repetitive chant in a language that sounded almost like Hesperian but not quite. A curse? A prayer? Whatever it was, the Pantheon did not care, because the Pantheon, unlike the Maker, was real.

“Take me back,” pleaded Petra. She’d lost all dignity; she’d lost all faith. Without her Maker she was stripped to a lost and terrified core, flailing wildly for something to cling to. “Take me—”

The gods pressed in.

Sound did not quite exist in the plane of spirit. What Rin perceived as words were transmitted thoughts, all equal in volume despite distance or intensity. She knew this in abstract. She knew that here, one could not really scream.

But the sheer intensity of Petra’s desperation came close.

“Bring me back down,” Rin told the Phoenix. “I’m finished here.”

She landed back in her body with a jolt. She opened her eyes.

Sister Petra lay still on the table. Her eyes were wide open. Her pupils darted fretfully about, tracking nothing. Rin watched her for a long while, wondering if she might find her way back to her body, but the only movement she made was the occasional tremor in her shoulders. A choked murmur escaped her throat.

Rin prodded Petra’s shoulder. “What was that?”

Drool trickled from the side of her mouth. Petra gurgled something incomprehensible, then fell silent.

“Congratulations.” Rin patted her head. “You’ve finally found religion.”