Chapter 10

She awoke choking on mud. She’d rolled into it while unconscious, and it had caked over the lower half of her face. She couldn’t breathe and couldn’t see; she clawed agitatedly at her eyes, nose, and mouth, terrified a rocket had blown them off. The mud came away in sharp, sticky tiles that left her skin raw and stinging, and her panic subsided.

She lay still for a moment, breathing deep, and then rose slowly to her feet.

She could stand without swaying. The opium high was fading. She knew this stage of the comedown—was familiar with the numb dryness of her tongue and the faint, disorienting buzzing in her temples. She needed hours still before her mind fully cleared, but at least she could walk.

Everything hurt. She didn’t want to stop and take stock of her wounds. She didn’t want to know the full list of what was wrong with her, not now. She could move all four limbs. She could see, breathe, hear, and walk. That was good enough. The rest had to wait.

She staggered back toward the village, wincing with every step.

The sun was just starting to rise. The attack had occurred just after midnight. That meant she’d been lying out there for five hours at least. That boded ill—if her army was still intact then their very first task would have been to search for her—their general, their Speerly.

But no one had come.

She knew they’d lost. That was a foregone conclusion; they’d never had a ground-based air defense to begin with. But how bad was the damage?

Silence met her in the town square. Small fires still crackled around every corner, smoldering inside bomb craters. A handful of soldiers moved through the streets, combing through the ruins and pulling bodies from the wreckage. So few of those bodies were moving. So few of those bodies were whole. Rin saw scattered parts wherever she looked: an arm here, a headless torso there, a pair of little feet on the dirt path right in front of her.

She couldn’t even muster the strength to vomit. Still dazed, she focused on just breathing, on staying calm and figuring out what to do next.

Should they hide? Should she round up the survivors and send them fleeing to the nearest caves? Or were they temporarily safe, now that the dirigibles had gone? Kitay would know what to do—

Kitay.

Where was Kitay?

When she reached for the Phoenix, all she met was a wall of silence. She tried to suppress a rising wave of panic. If the back door wasn’t working, then it only meant that Kitay was asleep or unconscious. It didn’t mean he was gone. He couldn’t be gone.

“Where is Kitay?”

She asked every person she saw. She shook exhausted soldiers and half-conscious survivors alike and screamed the question into their faces. But no one had any answers; they returned her pleas with stricken, glassy-eyed silence.

For hours she shouted his name around Tikany, limping through the lanes of wounded bodies, scanning the wreckage for any sign of his wiry, overgrown hair and his slender freckled limbs. When she found Venka, miraculously unhurt, they searched together, checking every street, alley, and dead end, even in the districts that had been far removed from the center of the bombing. They checked twice. Thrice.

He had to be here. He had to be fine. She had searched for him like this once before, in Golyn Niis, where his odds of survival had been far worse. Yet still he had answered then, and she hoped that he might again, that she would hear his thin voice carrying once more through the still air.

She knew he was alive. She knew he wasn’t too badly wounded, not more than she was, because she would have felt it. He has to be here. She didn’t dare consider the alternatives because the alternatives were too awful, because without Kitay she was just—

She was just—

Her whole body trembled.

Oh, gods.

“He’s gone.” Finally Venka said out loud what they both knew, wrapping her arms tight around Rin’s waist as if she were afraid Rin might hurt herself if she moved. “They took him. He’s not lost, he’s gone.”

Rin shook her head. “We have to keep looking—”

“We’ve walked twice through every square foot in a mile’s radius,” Venka said. “He’s not here. We’ve got other things to worry about, Rin.”

“But Kitay—we can’t—”

“He might still be all right.” Venka’s voice was inordinately gentle; she was making a valiant effort to comfort. “There’s no body.”

Of course there was no body. If Kitay were dead then Rin wouldn’t be standing—which left only one conclusion.

Nezha had taken him prisoner.

And what a valuable prisoner he was, a hostage worth his weight in gold. He was so smart, he was too fucking smart, and that made him vulnerable to anyone who had the faintest idea of who he was and what his mind could do. The Pirate Queen Moag had once locked Kitay in a safe house and assigned him to balance Ankhiluun’s books. Yin Vaisra had made him a senior strategist.

What would Nezha use him for? How cruel would he be?

This was her fault. She should have killed him, she couldn’t kill him, and now he had Kitay.

“Calm down.” Venka gripped her by the shoulders. “You have to calm down, you’re shaking. Let’s get you to a physician—”

Rin jerked out of her grasp, more violently than she’d intended. “Don’t touch me.”

Venka recoiled, startled. Rin staggered away. She would have run off, but her left ankle screamed in protest every time she moved. She hobbled resolutely forward, trying to breathe, trying not to cry. It didn’t matter where she was going, she just had to get away from these bodies—the smoke, the embers, the dying, and the dead.

Venka didn’t follow.

Then Rin was halfway to the killing fields, alone on the dusty plain. No soldiers in sight, no spies or witnesses.

She tilted her head to the sky, shut her eyes, and reached for the fire.

Come on. Come on . . .

Of course the fire didn’t come. She knew it wouldn’t; she was trying only because she needed to confirm it, like the way one prodded the sore gap left by a wrenched tooth to examine the extent of the loss. When she groped for the void, tried to tilt backward into the Pantheon like she had done so many times before with ease, she came away with nothing.

Nothing but the Seal—always lurking, taunting, Altan’s laughter echoing louder and louder to match her despair.

Kitay? She tried sending her thoughts out to him. That wasn’t how the anchor bond worked; they couldn’t communicate telepathically, they could only feel each other’s pain. But regardless of distance, their souls were still linked—didn’t that count for something?

Please. She threw her thoughts against the barrier in her mind, praying they might somehow reach him. Please, I need you. Where are you?

She was met with deafening silence.

She clutched her head, shaking, breathing in short and frantic bursts. Then came the sheer and utter terror as she realized what this meant.

She didn’t have the fire.

She didn’t have the fire.

Kitay was gone, truly gone, and without him she was vulnerable. Powerless. A girl who didn’t have a fighting arm or the shamanic ability that justified her inability to wield a blade. Not a Speerly, not a soldier, not a goddess.

What army would follow her now?