Imagine an army of shamans, whispered a quiet voice in her mind. Altan’s voice. Imagine the sheer firepower. Imagine having the Cike back. Imagine getting a second chance.

“We should at least talk this through,” she said.

“No,” Kitay said firmly. “We are ruling it out, now and forever.”

“But why—”

“Because you can’t do this to people,” he snapped. “Ignore the realistic chances of global apocalypse for a moment—which I’m shocked you haven’t considered, by the way. You know what it does to a person’s mind. This isn’t something you can inflict on anyone.”

“I think I turned out all right.”

“All right is not a term anyone would use to describe you.”

“I’m functional,” she said. “Which is all you need.”

“Barely,” he said, in the cruelest tone he could muster. “And you had training. But Jiang’s gone, and the Sorqan Sira’s dead. If you do this to anyone else, it’s a death sentence.”

“The Cike went through it,” Rin pointed out.

“And you’re willing to inflict the Cike’s fate on anyone?”

Rin winced. There were, and only ever had been, two possible fates for the Cike—death or the Chuluu Korikh. Rin had heard this warning repeated countless times from the moment she joined the Bizarre Children, and she’d watched it play out, inevitably and brutally, over and over again. She’d seen Altan engulfed in flame. She’d seen Baji torn apart by bullets. She’d seen Suni and Feylen imprisoned in their own minds by demons that they couldn’t exorcise. She’d almost succumbed to that fate herself.

Could she force it on someone else?

Yes. If that was their only hope against a fleet of dirigibles, then absolutely yes. For the future of the Nikara south, for the sake of their survival—yes.

“It’s been done before,” she said.

“But not by us. Never by us. We can’t do this to other people.” Kitay’s voice trembled. “I won’t be complicit in that.”

She had to laugh. “This is the moral line you won’t cross? Come on, Kitay.”

“Do you not understand how that feels? Look at what happened to Nezha. You forced him to call his god and—”

“I never forced him to do shit,” she snapped.

“Don’t lie to yourself. You pushed him past his limits when you knew it was torture to him and look what that got you, a scar in your back the size of Mount Tianshan.”

She recoiled. “Fuck you.”

That was a low blow. Kitay knew that; he knew exactly where she hurt the most, and still he’d stabbed and twisted the blade.

He didn’t apologize. Instead, he raised his voice. “If you’d put aside your wild dreams of conquest for a fucking second, if you’d stop getting drunk off the Vipress’s very presence, you’d realize this is one of the worst things you could do to someone.”

“Oh, like you’d fucking know.”

“You think I don’t know?” His eyes widened, incredulous. “Rin, I was at Golyn Niis, and the Phoenix ripping through my mind is still the cruelest torture I’ve ever felt.”

That shut her up.

She wanted to kick herself for forgetting that she could call the fire only because he let her, because every day he let a vicious god claw through his mind into the material world. He’d borne it all in silence because he didn’t want her to worry. He’d borne it so well that she’d stopped thinking about it entirely.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She reached for his shoulder. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think—”

“No, Rin.” Kitay brushed her hand away. He wouldn’t be appeased; he was finished talking. They weren’t moving past this, at least not now. “You never do.”

Rin walked through Tikany alone. Kitay had stormed off somewhere inside the general’s complex, and she didn’t bother trying to find him.

They had fought like this before. Not so frequently after the Battle of the Red Cliffs, but every few weeks the same argument bubbled up between them, a chasm they couldn’t bridge. It always boiled down to the same fundamental impasse, with a hundred different manifestations. Kitay found her callous. Astonishingly careless with human life, he’d once put it. And she found him weak, too hesitant to take decisive action. She’d always been convinced that he didn’t quite grasp the stakes at hand, that he clung still to some bizarre, pacifist hope of diplomacy. Yet somehow their fights always left her feeling guilty and strangely embarrassed, like a child who had acted out in the classroom.

Fuck this, she thought. Forget Kitay. Forget his morals. She needed to remind herself of the stakes.

Her troops had constructed a public kitchen in the town square. Soldiers doled out bowls of rice gruel and steamed shanyu to long lines of waiting civilians. Camp aides walked along the lines reminding the civilians not to eat too quickly; if their stomachs began to hurt, they should stop immediately. After prolonged periods of starvation, ruptured stomachs from overeating could prove fatal.

Rin cut the line and grabbed two bowls piled high with shanyu root, balancing one nimbly in the crook of her right elbow.

The tent complex in Tikany’s northern quarter couldn’t be properly called an infirmary. It was more like an emergency triage center, constructed from the wreckage of what used to be the town hall. Cloth-covered bamboo mats had been laid out in neat lines outside the surgery room, through which harried-looking assistants ferried antiseptics and painkillers to peasants whose wounds had been festering for months.

Rin approached the nearest physician and asked for the boy from the killing fields.

“Over there in the corner,” he told her. “See if you can get him to eat. He hasn’t touched a thing.”

The boy’s torso was wrapped in bandages, and he looked just as pale and wan as when they’d found him in the graves. But he was sitting up, alert and conscious.

Rin sat down on the dirt beside him. “Hello.”

He blinked owlishly at her.

“I’m Runin,” she prompted. “Rin. I pulled you from the grave.”

His voice was a breathy rasp. “I know who you are.”

“And what’s your name?” she asked softly.

“Zhen,” he started, and then coughed. He pressed a hand against his chest and winced. “Zhen Dulin.”

“Looks like you got lucky, Dulin.”

He snorted at that.

She placed one bowl on the ground and held out the other. “Are you hungry?”

He shook his head.

“If you starve yourself to death, then you’re just letting them win.”

He shrugged.

She tried something else. “It’s got salt.”

“Bullshit,” Dulin said.

She couldn’t help but grin. Nobody south of Monkey Province had tasted salt in months. It was easy to take such a common condiment for granted during peacetime, but after months of bland vegetables, salt became as valuable as gold.

“I’m not lying.” She waved the bowl under his nose. “Try it.”

Dulin hesitated, then nodded. She passed the bowl carefully into his trembling fingers.