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“You can’t kill me,” Altan hissed. “You love me.”
“I don’t love you,” Rin said. “And I can kill anything.”
It was a terrifying power of the chimei’s that the more it burned, the more it looked like Altan. Rin’s heart slammed against her rib cage. Close your mind. Block out your thoughts. Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t . . .
But she couldn’t detach Altan’s likeness from the chimei. They were one and the same. She loved it, she loved him, and he was going to kill her. Unless she killed him first.
But no, that didn’t make sense . . .
She tried to focus again, to still her terror and regain her rationality, but this time what she concentrated on was not detaching Altan from the chimei but resolving to kill it no matter who she thought it was.
She was killing the chimei. She was killing Altan. Both were true. Both were necessary.
She didn’t have the poppy seed, but she didn’t need to call the Phoenix in this moment. She had the torch and she had the pain, and that was enough.
She smashed the blunt end of the torch into Altan’s face. She smashed again, with a greater force than she knew she was capable of. Bone gave way to wood. His cheek caved in, creating a cavernous hole where flesh and bone should be.
“You’re hurting me.” Altan sounded shocked.
No, I’m killing you. She smashed it again and again and again. Once her arm started going, she couldn’t stop. Altan’s face became a mottled mess of fragmented bone and flesh. Brown skin turned bright red. His face lost shape altogether. She beat out those eyes, beat them bloody so she wouldn’t have to look into them anymore. When he struggled, she turned the torch around and burned him in the wounds. Then he screamed.
Finally the chimei ceased its struggles beneath her. Its muscles stopped tensing, its legs stopped kicking. Rin lurched forward over its head, breathing heavily. She had burned through its face to the bone. Underneath the charred, smoking skin lay a tiny, pristine white skull.
Rin climbed off the corpse and sucked in a great, heaving breath. Then she vomited.
“I’m sorry,” said Nezha when he awoke.
“Don’t be,” Rin said. She lay slumped against the wall beside him. The entire contents of her stomach were splattered on the sidewalk. “It’s not your fault.”
“It is my fault. You didn’t freeze when you saw it.”
“I did freeze. An entire squadron froze.” Rin jerked her thumb back toward the Federation carcasses in the market square. “And you helped me snap out of it. Don’t blame yourself.”
“I was stupid. I should have known that little girl—”
“Neither of us knew,” Rin said curtly.
Nezha said nothing.
“Do you have a sister?” she asked after a while.
“I used to have a brother,” Nezha said. “A little brother. He died when we were young.”
“Oh.” Rin didn’t know what to say to that. “Sorry.”
Nezha pulled himself to a sitting position. “When the chimei was screaming at me it felt like—like it was my fault again.”
Rin swallowed hard. “When I killed it, it felt like murder.”
Nezha gave her a long look. “Who was it for you?”
Rin didn’t answer that.
They limped back to the base together in silence, occasionally ducking around a dark corner to make sure they weren’t being followed. They did so more out of habit than necessity. Rin guessed there wouldn’t be any Federation soldiers in that part of the city for a while.
When they reached the junction that split the Cike headquarters and the Seventh Division’s base, Nezha stopped and turned to face her.
Her heart skipped a beat.
He was so beautiful then, standing right in the space of the road where a beam of moonlight fell across his face, illuminating one side and casting long shadows on the other.
He looked like glazed porcelain, preserved glass. He was a sculptor’s approximation of a person, not human himself. He can’t be real, she thought. A boy made of flesh and bone could not be so painfully lovely, so free of any blemish or flaw.
“So. About earlier,” he said.
Rin folded her arms tightly across her chest. “Not a good time.”
Nezha laughed humorlessly. “We’re fighting a war. There’s never going to be a good time.”
“Nezha . . .”
He put his hand on her arm. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Yes, I do. I’ve been a real dick to you. And I had no right to talk about your commander like that. I’m sorry.”
“I forgive you,” she said cautiously, and found that she meant it.
Altan was waiting in his office when she returned to base. He opened the door even before she knocked.
“It’s gone?”
“It’s gone,” Rin confirmed. She swallowed; her heart was still racing. “Sir.”
He nodded curtly. “Good.”
They regarded each other in silence for a moment. He was hidden in the shadow of the door. Rin couldn’t see the expression on his face. She was glad of that. She couldn’t face him right now. She couldn’t look at him without seeing his face burning, breaking under her hands, dissolving into a pulpy mess of flesh and gore and sinew.
All thoughts of Nezha had been pushed out of her mind. How could that possibly matter right now?
She had just killed Altan.
What was that supposed to mean? What did it say that the chimei had thought she wouldn’t be able to kill Altan, and that she had killed him anyway?
If she could do this, what couldn’t she do?
Who couldn’t she kill?
Maybe that was the kind of anger it took to call the Phoenix easily and regularly the way Altan did. Not just rage, not just fear, but a deep, burning resentment, fanned by a particularly cruel kind of abuse.
Maybe she’d learned something after all.
“Anything else?” Altan asked.
He took a step toward her. She flinched. He must have noticed it, and still he moved closer. “Something you want to tell me?”
“No, sir,” she whispered. “There’s nothing.”
Chapter 18
“The riverbanks are clear,” Rin said. “Small signs of activity on the northwestern corner, but nothing we haven’t seen before. Probably just transporting more supplies to the far end of camp. I doubt they’ll try today.”
“Good,” said Altan. He marked a point on his map, then set the brush down. He rubbed at his temples and paused like he’d forgotten what he was going to say.
Rin fidgeted with her sleeve.
They hadn’t trained together in weeks. It was just as well. There was no time for training now. Months into the siege, the Nikara position in Khurdalain was dire. Even with the added reinforcements of the Seventh Division, the port city was perilously close to falling under Federation occupation. Three days before, the Fifth Division had lost a major town in the suburbs of Khurdalain that had served as a transportation center, exposing much of the eastern part of the city to the Federation.
