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

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

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

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

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

  She couldn’t derive any joy from this.

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

  No, it was more than that.

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

  And she knew she could never get that back again.

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

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

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

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

  But where was the screaming now?

  “What’s wrong?” Souji asked.

  She blinked and straightened up. “Hmm?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Despite herself, Rin found herself curving into that heat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What?”

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

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

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

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

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

  Rin’s breath caught in her throat.

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

  So why was she so afraid?

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

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

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

  She cut him off. “Do you hear that?”

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

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

  “Shut up,” Rin hissed. “Just listen.”

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

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

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

  Chapter 9

  They hit the ground together, Souji’s elbows digging painfully into Rin’s ribs. There was the briefest moment of silence, then an eerie ringing in her ears. She peered up from beneath Souji’s splayed body, groaning, just as Tikany lit up in a flash of orange light.

  Then the bombing resumed, a roll of thunder that just kept going.

  Souji rolled off of Rin. She scrambled unsteadily to her feet.

  Kitay. Her vision was half-gone, along with her balance; as she stumbled toward the general’s complex she kept lurching to the side like a drunkard. I have to find Kitay.

  A high, tortured keen sounded behind her. She turned around. By firelight she could just make out a young officer’s face, one of Zhuden’s men whose name she’d never learned. He lay on the ground several yards away. She stared at him for a moment, utterly confused. She and Souji had been alone in the street until now; all the other officers had remained at the bonfire, a good five minutes’ walk from here.

  Was it the blast? Could the force of the explosion have hurled him this far?

  But the officer looked fine—his head, shoulders, and torso were all intact, unbloodied. Unburned, even. Why was he—

  The black smudges cleared slowly from Rin’s vision, and she saw what had at first been hidden by smoke and darkness. The officer’s legs had been blown away from the upper thigh.

  He was looking at her. Gods, he was still conscious. He lifted a trembling hand toward her. His mouth moved. No sound came out, at least none that she could hear, but she understood.

  Please.

  She reached for the knife at her belt, but her fingers fumbled clumsily against the sheath.

  “I’ll do it.” Souji’s voice rang as loud as a gong against her ears. He seemed to have sobered completely, his alcohol-drenched sluggishness evaporated by the same adrenaline pounding through her veins. He seemed far more in command of himself than she felt. With a brisk efficiency, he pulled the knife out of her hand and bent down to slit the officer’s throat.

  She stared, swaying on her feet.

  We weren’t ready.

  She’d thought she had more time. When she’d destroyed Kesegi’s message she’d known Nezha had her in his sights, but she’d thought she might have the chance to train her newly won Southern Army while the Republic finished their campaign in the north. She’d thought, after the Beehive fell, that they could take a moment to breathe.

  She hadn’t known Nezha was on their fucking doorstep.

  Air cannons boomed continuously in harmony with the drone of dirigible engines. A celestial orchestra, Rin thought, dazed. The gods were playing a dirge to their demise.

  She heard screaming from the town center. She knew that there was no mounted ground defense, no chance of fending the airships off. Her troops were flush with victory and drunk from revels. They’d only posted a skeleton guard at the township gates because they’d thought, for once, they were safe.

  And the fucking bonfires—gods, the bonfires must have been like beacons, screaming out their location from the ground.

  The shouts grew louder. Panicked, scattered crowds were flooding through the streets, away from the bonfires. A little girl ran screaming in Rin’s direction, and Rin didn’t have time to yell, No, stop, get down, before a blast rocked the air and flames shrouded the tiny body.

  The same explosion knocked Rin off her feet. She rolled onto her back and moaned, her good hand pressed against her left ear. The bombing was so frequent that she could no longer hear any pause between drops, only an incessant rumble while fiery orange flares went off everywhere she looked.

  She pushed her hand against the ground and forced herself to stand.

  “We need to get out of here.” Souji yanked her up by the wrist and dragged her toward the forest. Explosions went off so close that she felt the heat sear her face, but the dirigibles weren’t firing over the forests.

  They were only aiming at the campfires—at open, vulnerable civilians.

  “Hold on,” she said. “Kitay—”

  Souji wouldn’t let go of her arm. “We’ll move farther into the trees. They haven’t got visibility near the forest. We’ll take the mountain routes, get as far as we can before—”

  She struggled against his grip. “We have to get Kitay!”

  “He’ll make his own way out,” Souji said. “But you’ll be dead in seconds if you—”

  “I’ll manage.” She didn’t know how she’d fend off the dirigibles—they didn’t seem to have weak points she could easily burn—but she might aim fire at the steering mechanisms, the ammunition basket, something. But she couldn’t leave without Kitay.

  Was he still in the general’s complex, or had he gone to the center square? The complex up the hill was still untouched, hidden under the cover of darkness, but the square was now an inferno. He couldn’t be critically injured—if he were, she would feel it, and right now she didn’t feel anything, which meant—

  “Hold on.” Souji’s fingers tightened around her wrist. “It’s stopped.”

  The sky had turned silent. The buzzing had died away.

  They’re landing, Rin realized. This was a ground assault. The dirigibles didn’t want to eradicate all Tikany by air. They wanted prisoners.

  But didn’t they understand the dangers of a ground assault? They might have their arquebuses, but she had a god, and she would smite them down the moment they approached. They only bore a fighting chance against her if they hovered out of her range. They had to understand that sending down troops was suicide.

  Unless—

  Unless.

  An icy chill crept through her veins.

  She saw it now. The Hesperians didn’t want her bombed. She was their favorite test subject; they didn’t want her blown to pieces. They wanted her captured alive, delivered whole and writhing to the Gray Company’s laboratories, so they’d brought the only person in the world who could face her in hand-to-hand combat and win.

  Nezha, whose wounds stitched themselves back together as quickly as they opened.

  Nezha, whose powers flowed from the sea.

  “Run,” she told Souji, just as another round of missiles tore them apart.

  For a moment the world was silent.

  All was darkness, and then colors began to return—only red at first, red everywhere she looked, and then muddled clumps of red and green. Rin didn’t know how she managed to stand, only that one moment she was lying on the ground and the next she was staggering through the forest, lurching from tree to tree because her balance was broken and she couldn’t stand up straight. She tasted blood on her lip, but she couldn’t tell where she’d been hurt; the pain was like a shroud, pulsing uniformly across her body with every step she took.

  “Souji?”

  No response. She wasn’t sure if she’d gotten the sounds out—she couldn’t hear her own voice, except for an odd muffle deep inside her skull.

  “Souji?”

  Still nothing.

  She stumbled forward, rubbing at her eyes, trying to gain some better grasp on the world and her senses other than it hurt, it hurt . . .

  A familiar smell suffused the air. Something nauseatingly, sickly sweet, something that made her stomach roil and her veins ache with longing.

  The Republicans had set off opium bombs.

  They knew her weakness. They intended to incapacitate her.

  Rin took a deep breath and pulled a ball of flame into her hand. She had a higher opium tolerance than most, a gift of months and months of opium addiction and failed rehabilitation. All those nights spent high out of her mind, conversing with hallucinations of Altan, might buy her a few extra minutes before she was cut off from the Phoenix.

  That meant she had to find Nezha now.

  “Come on,” she murmured. She sent the flame into the air above and around her. Nezha wouldn’t be able to resist the flare; it’d function like a beacon. He was searching for her. He’d come.

  “Where are you?” she shouted.

  Lightning split the air in response. Then a sheet of rain abruptly hammered down so hard that Rin nearly fell.

  This wasn’t natural rain. The sky had been clear just a moment ago, there hadn’t even been a whisper of clouds, and even if a storm had been brewing it couldn’t have moved in so quickly, so coincidentally . . .

  But since when could Nezha summon the rain?

  In some awful way it made sense. Dragons controlled the rain, so said the myths. Even in Tikany, a place where religion had long been diminished to children’s bedtime stories, the magistrates lit incense offerings to the dragon lords of the river during drought years to induce heavy showers.

  But that meant Nezha’s domain wasn’t just the river but all the water around him. And if he could summon it, control it . . .

  If this rain was his doing, he’d become so much more powerful than she’d feared.

  “General?”

  Rin turned. A band of troops had clustered around her. New recruits, she didn’t recognize them—they’d survived, bless them; they were rallying toward her, even when they’d just seen their comrades ripped apart.

  Their loyalty amazed her. But their deaths would accomplish nothing.

  “Get away,” she ordered.

  They didn’t move. The one in the front spoke. “We’ll fight with you, General.”

  “Don’t even try,” she said. “He will kill you all.”

  She’d seen Nezha at the height of his abilities once before. He’d raised an entire lake to protect his fleet. If he’d perfected his skills since, then not a single one of them would survive for more than a few seconds.

  This wasn’t a war of men anymore. This was a war of gods. This had to end between her and Nezha, shaman to shaman.

  All she could do before then was minimize the fallout.

  “Go help the villagers,” she told them. “Get them away from here, as many as you can. Seek cover under darkness and don’t stop running until you’re out of range of the rain. Hurry.”

  They obeyed, leaving her alone in the storm. The rainfall was deafening. She couldn’t see a single Republican soldier, Nikara or Hesperian, around her, which meant Nezha, too, had sent away his reinforcements.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62