They returned together to Jiang’s tent. Rin sat down next to where Jiang lay and watched him, her heart twisting with pity. He looked so miserable, even in dreamless, morphine-induced sleep. His features were pressed into a worried frown, his fingers clenching his blankets as if he were hanging on to the edge of a cliff.

This wasn’t the last time she’d see him suffer like this, she realized. He was going to get worse and worse the closer they got to the mountain. He’d deteriorate until he finally snapped, and a victor emerged between the personalities battling in his mind.

Could she do this to him?

It would be easier if the Jiang who had been Sealed were truly derivative, if he were truly a pale shade of the other, genuine personality. But the Jiang she’d known at Sinegard was a full person in his own right, a person with wants and memories and desires.

That Jiang was so scared of who he used to be—who he was about to become. He’d found a refuge in his partitioned mind. How could she take that from him?

She tried to imagine how Jiang’s Seal must have felt all those years he’d lived at Sinegard. What if she were blocked not only from the Pantheon but from her own memories? What if she were held captive behind a wall in her mind, screeching in silent anguish as a bumbling idiot took control of her limbs and tongue?

If she were him, of course she’d want to be free.

But what if someone could erase all memories of what she’d done?

No more guilt. No more nightmares. She wouldn’t have flaring pockets in her memory like gaping wounds that hurt to touch. She wouldn’t hear screams when she tried to sleep. She wouldn’t see bodies burning every time she closed her eyes.

Maybe that was the coward’s asylum. But she’d want it, too.

The next morning, Jiang had regained some degree of lucidity. Sleep, however forced, had helped—the shadows disappeared from under his eyes, and his face lost its rictus of dread, settling back into a placid calm.

“Hello, Master,” she said when he awoke. “How are you feeling?”

He yawned. “I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.”

She decided to push her luck. “You had a bad night.”

“Did I?”

His amused indifference annoyed her. “You called me Altan.”

“Oh, really?” He scratched the back of his head. “I’m sorry, that was terribly rude. I know you used to follow him around with those shining puppy eyes.”

She brushed that off. Shut up, spoke a little voice in her mind. Stop talking, walk away. But she wasn’t done. She wanted to push him, to see how much he remembered. “And you asked me to kill you.”

She couldn’t tell if his laugh sounded nervous, or if that was the way Jiang had always laughed—high, unsettling, and foolish.

“My goodness, Runin.” He reached out to pat her on the shoulder. “Surely I taught you better than to fret over the little things.”

Jiang’s advice had been flippant. But as their altitude increased and the air grew thinner, Rin lost the mental energy to think about anything except the daily exigencies of the march. Her flames barely made the mountain pathways tolerable; the ice refroze almost as quickly as she melted it. At night, when the temperatures dropped dangerously low, the soldiers started sleeping only in one-hour shifts to prevent anyone from succumbing to the numb, beckoning dark.

At least the environment, not the Republic, formed the bulk of their problems. The first few days on the march Rin had kept her eyes trained on the pale gray sky, expecting dark shapes to materialize from the clouds any moment. But the fleet never came. Kitay floated a number of theories for why they weren’t being pursued—the Hesperians were low on fuel, the misty mountain terrain made blind flying dangerous, or the fleet had been so badly damaged at the Anvil that the Hesperians wouldn’t sanction sending out the remaining ships in pursuit of an enemy that could summon shadows from nothing.

“They’ve just seen what we can do,” he told the officers, his tone so obviously full of artificial confidence. “They know it’s suicide to come after us. They might be tracing where we are. But they won’t risk an attack.”

Rin hoped to the gods he was right.

Another week passed and the skies remained empty, but that didn’t come close to putting her at ease. So what if Nezha chose to let them live for another day? He might change his mind tomorrow. He might cave under internal pressure for a quick victory. They couldn’t be hard to pick out against the terrain—he might decide that following them through the mountains wasn’t worth it, that the drain on fuel and resources was too great a cost to justify ferreting out whatever hotbed of shamanism he might find.

She was well aware that with every step she took, she moved under the threat of immediate extermination. The Republic was capable of inflicting mass death in seconds. They could end this at any time. But all she could do was forge ahead and hope that it would be far too late by the time Nezha realized he should have killed her long ago.

Chapter 19

Rin’s journey by airship to the Chuluu Korikh had made the world seem so small. But their trek through the Baolei range felt infinite, and the mountains, which before now she had only ever known as little marks on a map, seemed to encompass a territory greater than the Empire itself. Exhausting weeks stretched into grueling, monotonous months and somehow, when the march had gone on for so long it seemed there had never been a time when they weren’t climbing, the daily horrors they faced became routine.

They learned to scale tricky, narrow passages with rope and knives in lieu of ice picks. They learned to pour warm water over their genitals when they relieved themselves because otherwise the freezing temperatures would give them frostbite. They learned to drink boiled chili water constantly because that was the only thing that would keep them warm, which meant they spent half their nights crouching to relieve their diarrhea.

They learned how frightening snow blindness could be when their eyes grew red and itchy and their vision blinked out for hours at a time. They learned to focus on the dull gray of the paths beneath their feet instead of the snow that surrounded them. At noon, when the sun glinted so glaringly off the white peaks that it gave them headaches, they stopped and sat in their shaded tents until the brightness had dimmed.

They adapted in these ways and more. They had decided that if the best of Hesperian technology couldn’t kill them, then the mountains certainly wouldn’t, so they learned dozens of ways to stay alive in a terrain intent on burying them.

Jiang didn’t recover, but his condition didn’t become noticeably worse. Most days he sat obediently on the wagon, whittling sculptures of deformed animals out of half-frozen bark with a dull, worn knife because Rin and Daji didn’t trust him with sharper objects.

His ramblings continued. They had spiraled past his usual nonsensical babbles. Every time Rin visited him, he launched into invectives involving people and events she had never heard of. Over and over, he addressed her as either Altan or Hanelai. Rarely did he call her by her name. Even more rarely did he look at her at all; more often he spoke to the snow, muttering with a hushed urgency, as if she were a chronicler present to record a history quickly slipping away from his grasp.