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The effect of the agaric had begun to set in. Everything seemed terribly bright. When objects moved in her field of vision, they left behind trails like streaks of paint that sparked and swirled before they faded away.
She focused with difficulty on the deer’s neck.
She and Kitay were to make two cuts, one on either side of the animal, so that neither could bear full responsibility for its death. Alone, each wound would be insufficient to kill. The deer might drag itself away, cover the cut in mud and somehow survive. But wounds on both sides meant certain death.
Rin picked her knife off the ground and gripped it tightly in her hands.
“Repeat after me,” said the Sorqan Sira, and uttered a slow stream of Ketreyid words. The foreign syllables sounded clunky and awkward in Rin’s mouth. She knew their meaning only because the twins had explained them to her.
We will live as one. We will fight as one.
And we will kill as one.
“The sacrifice,” said the Sorqan Sira.
They brought their knives down.
Rin found it harder than she’d expected. Not because she was unused to killing—cutting through flesh was as easy to her now as breathing. It was the fur that offered resistance. She clenched her teeth and pushed harder. The knife sank into the deer’s side.
The deer arched its neck and screamed.
Rin’s knife hadn’t gone in deep enough. She had to widen the cut. Her hands shook madly; the handle was loose between her fingers.
But Kitay dragged his knife across the deer’s side with one clean, steady stroke.
Blood pooled, fast and dark, around their knees. The deer stopped writhing. Its head drooped to the ground.
Through the haze of the agaric, Rin saw the moment the deer’s life left its body—a golden, shimmering aura that lingered over the corpse like an ethereal copy of its physical form before drifting upward like smoke. She tilted her head up, watched it floating higher and higher toward the heavens.
“Follow it,” said the Sorqan Sira.
She did. It seemed such a simple matter. Under the agaric’s influence her soul was lighter than air itself. Her mind ascended, her material body became a distant memory, and she flew up into the vast and dark void that was the cosmos.
She found herself standing on the periphery of a great circle, its circumference etched with glowing Hexagrams—characters that together spelled the nature of the universe, the sixty-four deities that constituted all that was and would ever be.
The circle tilted and became a pool, inside which swam two massive carp, one white, one black, each with a large dot of the opposite color on its flank. They drifted lazily, chasing each other in a slow-moving, eternal circle.
She saw Kitay on the other side of the circle. He was naked. It was not a physical nakedness; he was made more of light than he was of body—but every thought, every memory, and every feeling he’d ever had shone out toward her. Nothing was hidden.
She was similarly naked before him. All of her secrets, her insecurities, her guilt, and her rage had been laid bare. He saw her cruelest, most brutal desires. He saw parts of her that she didn’t even understand herself. The part that was terrified of being alone and terrified of being the last. The part that realized it loved pain, adored it, could find release only in pain.
And she could see him. She saw the way that concepts were stored in his mind, great repositories of knowledge linked together to be called up at a moment’s notice. She saw the anxiety that came with being the only person he knew who was this smart. She saw how scared he was, trapped and isolated in his own mind, watching his world break down around him because of irrationalities that he could not fix.
And she understood his sadness. The grief; the loss of a father, but more than just that—the loss of an empire, the loss of loyalty, of duty, his sole meaning for existence—
She saw his fury.
How had it taken her this long to understand? She wasn’t the only one fueled by anger. But where her rage was explosive, immediate and devastating, Kitay’s burned with a silent determination; it festered and rotted and lingered, and the strength of his hate stunned her.
We’re the same.
Kitay wanted vengeance and blood. Under that frail veneer of control was an ongoing scream of rage that originated in confusion and culminated in an overwhelming urge for destruction, if only so he could tear the world down and rebuild it in a way that made sense.
The circle glowed between them. The black carp and white carp began to circle faster and faster until the darkness and brightness were indistinct; not gray, not melded into each other but yet the same entity—two sides of the same coin, necessary complements balancing each other like the Pantheon was balanced.
The circle spun and they spun with it—faster and faster, until the Hexagrams blurred and melded into a glowing hoop. For a moment Rin was lost in the convergence—up became down, right became left, all distinctions were broken . . .
Then she felt the power, and it was magnificent.
She felt like she had when Shiro injected her veins with heroin. It was the same rush, the same dizzying flood of energy. But this time her spirit did not drift farther and farther from the material world. This time she knew where her body was, could return to it in seconds if she wanted. She was halfway between the spirit world and the material world. She could perceive both, affect both.
She had not gone up to meet her god; her god had been drawn down into her. She felt the Phoenix all about her, the rage and fire, so deliciously warm that it tickled as it coursed over her.
She was so delighted that she wanted to laugh.
But Kitay was moaning. He had been for some time now, but she was so entranced with the power that she’d hardly noticed.
“It’s not taking.” The Sorqan Sira intruded sharply on Rin’s reverie. “Stop it, you’re overpowering him.”
Rin opened her eyes and saw Kitay curled into a ball, whimpering on the ground. He jerked his head back and uttered a long, keening scream.
Her sight blurred and shifted. One moment she was looking at Kitay and the next she couldn’t see him at all. All she could see was fire, vast expanses of fire over which only she had control . . .
“You’re erasing him,” hissed the Sorqan Sira. “Pull yourself back.”
But why? She’d never felt so good before. She never wanted this sensation to stop.
“You are going to kill him.” The Sorqan Sira’s fingers dug into her shoulder. “And then nothing will save you.”
Dimly, Rin understood. She was hurting Kitay, she had to stop, but how? The fire was so alluring, it reduced her rational mind to just a whisper. She heard the Phoenix’s laughter echoing around her mind, growing louder and stronger with every passing moment.
“Rin,” Kitay gasped. “Please.”
That brought her back.
Her grasp of the material world was fading. Before it disappeared entirely she snatched up her knife and stabbed down into her leg.
Spots of white exploded in her vision. The pain chased the fire away, induced a stark clarity back to her mind. The Phoenix fell silent. The void was still.
She saw Kitay across the spirit plane—kneeling, but alive, present, and whole.
She opened her eyes to dirt. Slowly she pulled herself into a sitting position, wiped the soil off the side of her face. She saw Kitay looking around in a daze, blinking as if he were seeing the world for the first time.
