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But then she heard the crew shouting commands to each other, and they were in fluent Nikara. “Halt. Ready to board.”
What Nikara general had access to a Hesperian ship?
Rin heard shouting, the sound of groaning wood, and heavy footsteps moving about the deck. She strained harder against the ropes, but all that did was chafe at her wrists; her skin stung like it had been scraped raw.
“What’s happening?” she screamed. “Who are you?”
She heard someone order a salute formation, which meant they were being boarded by someone of higher rank. A Warlord? A Hesperian?
“I think we’re about to be handed off,” Baji said. “It was nice knowing you all. Except you, Chaghan. You’re weird.”
“Fuck you,” Chaghan said.
“Wait, I’ve still got a whale bone in my back pocket,” said Ramsa. “Rin, you could try igniting just a little bit, burn through the ropes and then I’ll get it out—”
Ramsa droned on, but Rin barely heard what he was saying.
A man had just walked into her field of vision. A general, judging from his uniform. He wore a half mask over his face—a Sinegardian opera mask of cerulean-blue ceramic. But it was his tall, lean build that caught her gaze, and his gait: confident, arrogant, like he expected everyone around him to bow before him.
She knew that stride.
“Suni can handle the main guard, and I’ll commandeer the cannons, implode the ship or something—”
“Ramsa,” Rin said in a strangled voice. “Shut. Up.”
The general crossed the deck and paused in front of them.
“Why are they bound?” he asked.
Rin stiffened. She knew that voice.
One of the crew hastened over. “Sir, we were warned not to let their hands out of sight.”
“These are our people. Not prisoners. Unbind them.”
“Sir, but they—”
“I don’t enjoy repeating myself.”
It had to be him. She’d only ever met one person who could convey so much disdain in so few words.
“You’ve bound them so tight their limbs will suffer blood loss,” the general said. “If you deliver them damaged to my father, he will be very, very angry.”
“Sir, I don’t think you understand the nature of the threat—”
“Oh, I understand. We were classmates. Weren’t we, Rin?” The general knelt down before her and pulled off his mask.
Rin flinched.
The boy she remembered was so beautiful. Skin like porcelain, features finer than any sculptor could carve, delicately arched eyebrows that conveyed precisely that mixture of condescension and vulnerability that Nikara poets had been trying to describe for centuries.
Nezha wasn’t beautiful anymore.
The left side of his face was still perfect, somehow; still smooth like the glaze on fine ceramic. But the right side . . . the right side was mottled with scars, crisscrossing over his cheek like the plates of a tortoise shell.
Those were not natural scars. They looked nothing like the burn scars Rin had seen on bodies destroyed by gas. Nezha’s face should have been twisted and deformed, if not utterly blackened. But his skin remained as pale as ever. His porcelain face had not darkened, but rather looked like glass that had been shattered and glued back together. Those oddly geometric scars could have been drawn over his skin with a fine brush.
His mouth was pulled into a permanent sneer toward the left side of his face, revealing teeth, a mask of condescension that he couldn’t ever take off.
When Rin looked into his eyes, she saw noxious yellow fumes rolling over withering grass. She heard shrieks that dwindled into chokes. And she heard someone screaming her name, over and over and over.
She found it harder and harder to breathe. A buzzing noise filled her ears, and black spots clouded the sides of her vision like ink drops on wet parchment.
“You’re dead,” she said. “I saw you die.”
Nezha looked amused. “And you were always supposed to be the clever one.”
Chapter 6
“What the fuck?” she screamed.
“Hello to you, too,” said Nezha. “I thought you’d be happy to see me.”
She couldn’t do anything but stare at him. It seemed impossible, unthinkable, that he was really alive, standing before her, speaking, breathing.
“Captain,” Nezha called. “The ropes.”
Rin felt the pressure around her wrists tighten briefly, then disappear. Her arms dropped to her sides. Blood rushed back into her extremities, sending a million shocks of lightning through her fingers. She rubbed her wrists and winced when skin came off in her hands.
“Can you stand?” Nezha asked.
She managed a nod. He pulled her to her feet. She took a step forward, and a dizzying spell of vertigo slammed into her like a wave.
“Steady.” Nezha caught her arm just as she lurched toward him.
She righted herself. “Don’t touch me.”
“I know you’re confused. But it’ll—”
“I said don’t touch me.”
He backed away, hands out. “It’ll all make sense in a minute. You’re safe. Just trust me.”
“Trust you?” she repeated. “You bombed my ship!”
“Well, it’s not technically your ship.”
“You could have killed us!” she shrieked. Her brain still felt terribly sluggish, but this fact struck her as very, very important. “You fired opium onto my ship!”
“Would you rather we fired real missiles? We were trying not to hurt you.”
“Your men bound us to the mast for hours!”
“Because they didn’t want to die!” Nezha lowered his voice. “Look, I’m sorry it came to that. We needed to get you out of Ankhiluun. We weren’t trying to hurt you.”
His placating tone only made her angrier. She wasn’t a fucking child; he couldn’t calm her with soothing whispers. “You let me think you were dead.”
“What did you want, a letter? It’s not like it was terribly easy to track you down, either.”
“A letter would have been better than bombing my ship!”
“Are you ever going to let that go?”
“It’s a rather large thing to let go!”
“I will explain everything if you come with me,” he said. “Can you walk? Please? My father’s waiting for us.”
“Your father?” she repeated dumbly.
“Come on, Rin. You know who my father is.”
She blinked at him. Then it hit her.
Oh.
Either she’d been hit by a massive stroke of fortune, or she was about to die.
“Just me?” she asked.
Nezha’s eyes flickered toward the Cike, lingering briefly on Chaghan. “I was told you’re the commander now?”
She hesitated. She hadn’t been acting much like a commander. But the title was hers, even if in name only. “Yes.”
“Then just you.”
“I’m not going without my men.”
“I’m afraid I can’t allow that.”
She stuck her chin out. “Sucks, then.”
“Do you seriously think any of them are in a state for an audience with a Warlord?” Nezha gestured toward the Cike. Suni was still asleep, the puddle of drool widening under his mouth. Chaghan stared open-mouthed at the sky, fascinated, and Ramsa had his eyes squeezed shut, giggling at nothing in particular.
