“Souji?”
No response. She wasn’t sure if she’d gotten the sounds out—she couldn’t hear her own voice, except for an odd muffle deep inside her skull.
“Souji?”
Still nothing.
She stumbled forward, rubbing at her eyes, trying to gain some better grasp on the world and her senses other than it hurt, it hurt . . .
A familiar smell suffused the air. Something nauseatingly, sickly sweet, something that made her stomach roil and her veins ache with longing.
The Republicans had set off opium bombs.
They knew her weakness. They intended to incapacitate her.
Rin took a deep breath and pulled a ball of flame into her hand. She had a higher opium tolerance than most, a gift of months and months of opium addiction and failed rehabilitation. All those nights spent high out of her mind, conversing with hallucinations of Altan, might buy her a few extra minutes before she was cut off from the Phoenix.
That meant she had to find Nezha now.
“Come on,” she murmured. She sent the flame into the air above and around her. Nezha wouldn’t be able to resist the flare; it’d function like a beacon. He was searching for her. He’d come.
“Where are you?” she shouted.
Lightning split the air in response. Then a sheet of rain abruptly hammered down so hard that Rin nearly fell.
This wasn’t natural rain. The sky had been clear just a moment ago, there hadn’t even been a whisper of clouds, and even if a storm had been brewing it couldn’t have moved in so quickly, so coincidentally . . .
But since when could Nezha summon the rain?
In some awful way it made sense. Dragons controlled the rain, so said the myths. Even in Tikany, a place where religion had long been diminished to children’s bedtime stories, the magistrates lit incense offerings to the dragon lords of the river during drought years to induce heavy showers.
But that meant Nezha’s domain wasn’t just the river but all the water around him. And if he could summon it, control it . . .
If this rain was his doing, he’d become so much more powerful than she’d feared.
“General?”
Rin turned. A band of troops had clustered around her. New recruits, she didn’t recognize them—they’d survived, bless them; they were rallying toward her, even when they’d just seen their comrades ripped apart.
Their loyalty amazed her. But their deaths would accomplish nothing.
“Get away,” she ordered.
They didn’t move. The one in the front spoke. “We’ll fight with you, General.”
“Don’t even try,” she said. “He will kill you all.”
She’d seen Nezha at the height of his abilities once before. He’d raised an entire lake to protect his fleet. If he’d perfected his skills since, then not a single one of them would survive for more than a few seconds.
This wasn’t a war of men anymore. This was a war of gods. This had to end between her and Nezha, shaman to shaman.
All she could do before then was minimize the fallout.
“Go help the villagers,” she told them. “Get them away from here, as many as you can. Seek cover under darkness and don’t stop running until you’re out of range of the rain. Hurry.”
They obeyed, leaving her alone in the storm. The rainfall was deafening. She couldn’t see a single Republican soldier, Nikara or Hesperian, around her, which meant Nezha, too, had sent away his reinforcements.
He would have done it out of nobility. Typical. He was always the righteous ruler, the noble aristocrat. She could just imagine Nezha giving the order in his arrogant, assured voice. Leave her to me.
Fire flickered around her body, winking in and out as sheets of rain kept crushing it away. The water was now coming down so hard it felt like repeated smacks from the flat side of a sword. She struggled to stand up straight. Her fingers trembled on the hilt of her blade.
Then at last she saw him, striding through rain that parted cleanly around him whenever he moved.
Pain arced through the knotted scar in her lower back. Memories stabbed her mind like daggers. A touch, a whisper, a kiss. She clenched her jaw tight to keep from trembling.
He looked older, though only several months had passed since she last saw him. Taller. He moved differently; his stride was more assertive, imbued with a new sense of authority. With Jinzha dead, Nezha was the crown prince of Arlong, the Young Marshal of his father’s army, and the heir apparent to the Nikara Republic. Nezha was about to own the entire country, and only Rin stood in his way.
They regarded each other for a moment in a silence that seemed to stretch on for an eternity, the weight of their shared past hanging heavy between them. Rin felt a sudden pang of nostalgia, that complicated mix of longing and regret, and couldn’t make it go away. She’d spent so long fighting by his side, she had to make herself remember how to hate him.
He stood close enough that she could see his grotesque smile, the tortured ripple that pulled at the scar lines drawn into the left half of his face. His cheeks and jaw, once angular perfection, were shattered porcelain. Cracked tiles. A map of the country falling apart.
Venka had claimed he was ill. He looked the furthest thing from ill—Rin couldn’t detect a shred of weakness in the way he carried himself. He was primed for battle, lethal.
“Hello, Rin,” he called. His voice seemed deeper, crueler. He sounded a near match to his father. “What happened to your hand?”
She opened her palm. Flame roared at his face. Dismissively he waved a hand, and a gust of rain extinguished the fire long before it reached him.
Fuck. Rin could feel her fingers going numb. She was running out of time.
“This doesn’t have to be hard,” he said. “Come quietly and no one else has to die.”
She braced her heels against the dirt. “You’re going home in a coffin.”
He shrugged. The rain began to pound even harder, pummeling so vigorously that her knees buckled.
She gritted her teeth, fighting to stay upright.
She would not kneel to him.
She had to get past that rain; it was functioning too well as a shield. But the solution was so simple. She’d learned it long ago at Sinegard. Years later, the basic pattern of their fights remained the same. Nezha was stronger than she was. His limbs were longer. Then and now, she only stood a chance when she got in close, where his reach didn’t matter.
She lunged. Nezha crouched, whipping his sword out. But she’d aimed lower than he’d anticipated. She wasn’t going for his head—she wanted his center of gravity. He came down easier than she’d expected. She scrambled for control as they fell. She was so much lighter than he was, she’d only pin him down if she caught him at just the right angle—but he slashed upward, and she lost her balance as she ducked.
He landed heavily atop her. She thrashed. He jabbed his sword down, twice missing her face for mud.
She opened her mouth and spat fire.
It engulfed his face for one glorious moment. She saw skin crinkling and peeling back. She caught a glimpse of bone. Then a wall of water crashed over both of them, extinguishing her flame, leaving them both sputtering for breath.
She recovered first. She got her knee up in his solar plexus. He flailed backward. She wriggled out from under him and settled into a crouch.
The rain’s stopped, she realized. The pressure was gone; the forest fell silent.