That gesture confirmed the spell—the suspension of reality all three of them wanted. The unwritten rules hung in the air, reinforced by every passing moment that blood wasn’t spilled. No one would lift a weapon. No one would fight or flee. Just this night, just this moment, they had entered a liminal space where their past and their future did not matter, where they could be the children they used to be.

Nezha held out a bundle of incense. “Do you have a light?”

Somehow they found themselves sitting in a silent triangle, shrouded in thick, scented smoke. The wine bottle lay between them, empty. Nezha had drunk almost all of it, Kitay the rest. Kitay had been the first to reach out with his fingers, and then all three of them were holding hands, Nezha and Rin on either side of Kitay, and it felt and looked absolutely, terribly wrong and still Rin never wanted to let go.

Was this how Daji, Jiang, and Riga had once felt? What were they like at the height of their empire? Did they love one another so fiercely, so desperately?

They must have. No matter how much they despised one another later, so much that they’d precipitated their own deaths, they must have loved one another once.

She tilted her face up at the low crimson moon. The dead were supposed to talk to the living on Qingmingjie. They were supposed to come through the moon like it was a door, transfixed by the fragrance of incense and the sound of firecrackers. But when she gazed out over the battlefield, all she saw were corpses.

She wondered what she would say if she could reach her dead.

She would tell Pipaji and Dulin that they had done well.

She would tell Suni, Baji, and Ramsa that she was sorry.

She would tell Altan that he was right.

She would tell Master Jiang thank you.

And she would promise them all that she would make their sacrifice worth it. Because that was what the dead were for her—necessary sacrifices, chess pieces lost to advance her position, tradeoffs that, if she were given the chance, she would make all over again.

She didn’t know how long they sat there. It could have been minutes. It could have been hours. It felt like a moment carved out of time, a refuge from the inexorable progress of history.

“I wish things had been different,” Nezha said.

Rin and Kitay both tensed. He was breaking the rules. They couldn’t maintain this fragile fantasy, this indulgence of nostalgia, if he broke the rules.

“They could have been different.” Kitay’s voice was hard. “But you had to go and be a fucking prick.”

“Your Republic is dead,” Rin said. “And if we see you tomorrow, then so are you.”

No one had anything to say after that.

There would be no truce or negotiation tonight. Tonight was a borrowed grace, innocent of the future. They sat in miserable and desperate silence, wishing and regretting while the bloody moon traced its ponderous path across the sky. When the sun came up, Rin and Kitay got up, shook the ache from their bones, and trudged back toward the city. Nezha walked in the other direction. They didn’t care to watch where he went.

They marched back to Arlong, eyes fixed forward on the half-drowned city whose ruins shone in the glimmering light of dawn.

They’d won their war. Now they had a country to rule.

Chapter 31

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.