“Rin’s stronger than you can imagine,” Nezha said.

“You know, if the Speerlies were so strong, you’d think they’d be less dead.” Jinzha’s lip curled. “Spent my whole childhood hearing about what a marvel your precious Altan was. Turns out he was just another dirt-skinned idiot who blew himself up for nothing.”

Rin’s vision flashed red. When she looked at Jinzha she didn’t see flesh but a charred stump, ashes peeling off what used to be a man—she wanted him dying, dead, hurting. She wanted him to scream.

“You want to see what I can do?” she asked. Her voice sounded very distant, as if someone were speaking at her from very far away.

“Rin . . .” Nezha cautioned.

“No, fuck off.” She shrugged his hand off her arm. “He wants to see what I can do.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Get back.”

She turned her palms out toward Jinzha. It took nothing to summon the anger. It was already there, waiting, like water bursting forth from a dam—I hate, I hate, I hate—

Nothing happened.

Jinzha raised his eyebrows.

Rin felt a twinge of pain in her temples. She touched her finger to her eyes.

The twinge blossomed into a searing bolt of agony. She saw an explosion of colors branded behind her eyelids: reds and yellows, flames flickering over a burning village, the silhouettes of people writhing inside, a great mushroom cloud over the longbow island in miniature.

For a moment she saw a character she couldn’t recognize, swimming into shape like a nest of snakes, lingering just in front of her eyes before it disappeared. She drifted in a moment between the world in her mind and the material world. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see . . .

She sagged to her knees. She felt Nezha’s arms hoisting her up, heard him shouting for someone to help. She struggled to open her eyes. Jinzha stood above her, staring down with open contempt.

“Father was right,” he said. “We should have tried to save the other one.”

Chaghan slammed the door shut behind him. “What happened?”

“I don’t know.” Rin’s fingers clenched and unclenched around the bedsheets while Chaghan unpacked his satchel beside her. Her voice trembled; she had spent the last half hour trying simply to breathe normally, but still her heart raced so furiously that she could barely hear her own thoughts. “I got careless. I was going to call the fire—just a bit, I didn’t really want to hurt him, and then—”

Chaghan grabbed her wrists. “Why are you shaking?”

She hadn’t realized she was. She couldn’t stop her hands from trembling, but thinking about it only made her shake harder.

“He won’t want me anymore,” she whispered.

“Who?”

“Vaisra.”

She was terrified. If she couldn’t call the fire, then Vaisra had recruited a Speerly for nothing. Without the fire, she might be tossed away.

She’d been trying since she regained consciousness to call the fire, but the result was always the same—a searing pain in her temples, a burst of color, and flashes of visions she never wanted to see again. She couldn’t tell what was wrong, only that the fire remained out of her reach, and without the fire she was nothing but useless.

Another tremor passed through her body.

“Just calm down,” Chaghan said. He set the satchel on the floor and knelt beside her. “Focus on me. Look in my eyes.”

She obeyed.

Chaghan’s eyes, pale and without pupils or irises, were normally unsettling. But up close they were strangely alluring, two shards of a snowy landscape embedded in his thin face that drew her in like some hypnotized prey.

“What is wrong with me?” she whispered.

“I don’t know. Why don’t we find out?” Chaghan rummaged in his satchel, closed his fist around something, and offered her a handful of bright blue powder.

She recognized the drug. It was the ground-up dust of some dried northern fungus. She’d ingested it once before with Chaghan in Khurdalain, when she’d taken him to the immaterial realm where Mai’rinnen Tearza was haunting her.

Chaghan wanted to accompany her to the inner recesses of her mind, the point where her soul ascended to the plane of the gods.

“Afraid?” he asked when she hesitated.

Not afraid. Ashamed. Rin didn’t want to bring Chaghan into her mind. She was scared of what he might see.

“Do you have to come?” she asked.

“You can’t do it alone. I’m all you’ve got. You have to trust me.”

“Will you promise to stop if I ask you to?”

Chaghan scoffed, reached for her hand, and pressed her finger into the powder. “We’ll stop when I say we can stop.”

“Chaghan.”

He gave her a frank look. “Do you really have another option?”

The drug began to act almost from the moment it hit her tongue. Rin was surprised at how fast and clean the high was. Poppy seeds were so frustratingly slow, a gradual crawl into the realm of spirit that worked only if she concentrated, but this drug was like a kick through the door between this world and the next.

Chaghan grabbed her hand just before the infirmary faded from her vision. They departed the mortal plane in a swirl of colors. Then it was just the two of them in an expanse of black. Drifting. Searching.

Rin knew what she had to do. She homed in on her anger and created the link to the Phoenix that pulled their souls from the chasm of nothing toward the Pantheon. She could almost feel the Phoenix, the scorching heat of its divinity washing over her, could almost hear its malicious cackle—

Then something dimmed its presence, cut her off.

Something massive materialized before them. There was no way to describe it other than a giant word, slashed into empty space. Twelve strokes hung in the air, a great pictogram the shimmering hue of green-blue snakeskin, glinting in the unnatural brightness like freshly spilled blood.

“That’s impossible,” Chaghan said. “She shouldn’t be able to do this.”

The pictogram looked both entirely familiar and entirely foreign. Rin couldn’t read it, though it had to be written in the Nikara script. It came close to resembling several characters she knew but deviated from all of them in significant ways.

This was something ancient, then. Something old; something that predated the Red Emperor. “What is this?”

“What does it look like?” Chaghan reached out an incorporeal hand as if to touch it, then hastily drew it back. “This is a Seal.”

A Seal? The term sounded oddly familiar. Rin remembered fragments of a battle. A white-haired man floating in the air, lightning swirling around the tip of his staff, opening a void to a realm of things not mortal, things that didn’t belong in their world.

You’re Sealed.

Not anymore.

“Like the Gatekeeper?” she asked.

“The Gatekeeper was Sealed?” Chaghan sounded astonished. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I had no idea!”

“But that would explain so much! That’s why he’s been lost, why he doesn’t remember—”

“What are you talking about?”

“The Seal blocks your access to the world of spirit,” Chaghan explained. “The Vipress left her venom inside you. That’s what it’s made of. It will keep you from accessing the Pantheon. And over time it will grow stronger and stronger, eating away at your mind until you lose even your memories associated with the Phoenix. It’ll make you a shell of yourself.”