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He met Rin’s gaze, and her heart skipped a beat.
His eyes were shot through with streaks of ocean blue—not the eerie cerulean gleam of Feylen’s glare, but a darker cobalt, the color of old gems.
“You too?” she whispered.
Through the protective wave of water she saw explosions, splashes of orange and red and yellow. Warped by the water, they almost seemed pretty, a painting of angry bursts. Shrapnel seemed frozen in place, arrested by the wall. The water hung in the air for an impossibly long time, steady while the explosives went off one by one in a series of deafening booms that echoed around the fleet. Nezha collapsed on the deck.
The wave dropped, slammed inward, and drenched the wretched remains of the Republican Fleet.
Rin needed to get to the Griffon.
The great wave had knocked Nezha’s ship and the Kingfisher together into a dismal wreck. Their decks were separated by only a narrow gap. Rin took a running start, jumped, skidded onto the Griffon’s deck, and ran toward Nezha’s limp form.
All the color had drained from his face. He was already porcelain pale, but now his skin looked transparent, his scars cracks in shattered glass over bright blue veins.
She pulled him up into a sitting position. He was breathing, his chest heaving, but his eyes were squeezed shut, and he only shook his head when she tried to ask him questions.
“It hurts.” Finally, intelligible words—he twisted in her arms, scrabbling at something on his back. “It hurts . . .”
“Here?” She put her hand on the small of his back.
He managed a nod. Then a sudden, wordless scream.
She tried to help him pull his shirt off, but he kept thrashing in her arms, so she had to slice it apart with a knife and yank the pieces away. Her fingers splayed over his exposed back. Her breath caught in her throat.
A massive dragon tattoo, silver and cerulean in the colors of the House of Yin, covered his skin from shoulder to shoulder. Rin couldn’t remember seeing it before—but then, she couldn’t remember seeing Nezha shirtless before. This tattoo had to be old. She could see a rippled scar arcing down the left side where Nezha had once been pierced by a Mugenese general’s halberd. But now the scar glistened an angry red, as if freshly branded into his skin. She couldn’t tell if she was imagining things in her panic, but the dragon seemed to undulate under her fingers, coiling and thrashing against his skin.
“It’s in my mind.” Nezha let out another strangled cry of pain. “It’s telling me—fuck, Rin . . .”
Pity washed over her, a dark wave that sent bile rising up in her throat.
Nezha gave a low moan. “It’s in my head . . .”
She had an idea of what that was like.
He grabbed her wrists with a strength that startled her. “Kill me.”
“I can’t do that,” she whispered.
She wanted to kill him. All she wanted was to put him out of his pain. She couldn’t bear to look at him like this, screaming like it was never going to end.
But she’d never forgive herself for that.
“What’s wrong with him?” Jinzha had arrived. He was looking down at Nezha with a genuine concern that Rin had never seen on his face.
“It’s a god,” she told him. She was certain. She knew exactly what was going through Nezha’s head, because she’d suffered it before. “He called a god and it won’t go away.”
She had a good idea of what had happened. Nezha, watching the fleet exploding around him, had tried to protect the Griffon. He might not have been aware of what he was doing. He might only remember wishing that the waters would rise, would protect them from the fires. But some god had answered and done exactly what he’d wished, and now he couldn’t get it to give him his mind back.
“What are you talking about?” Jinzha knelt down and tried to pull Nezha out of her grasp, but she wouldn’t let go.
“Get back.”
“Don’t you touch him,” he snarled.
She smacked his hand away. “I know what this is, I’m the only one who can help him, so if you want him to live, then get back.”
She was astounded when Jinzha complied.
Nezha thrashed in her arms, moaning.
“So help him,” Jinzha begged.
I’m fucking trying, Rin thought. She forced herself to calm. She could think of only one thing that might work. If this was a god—and she was almost certain that this was a god—then the only way to silence its voice was to shut off Nezha’s mind, close off his connection to the world of spirit.
“Send a man to my bunk,” she told Jinzha. “Cabin three. Have him pull up the second floorboard in the right corner and bring me what’s hidden under there. Do you understand?”
He nodded.
“Then hurry.”
He stood up and started to bark out orders.
“Get out.” Nezha was curling in on himself, muttering. He scrabbled at his shoulder blades, digging his nails deep into his skin, drawing blood. “Get out—get out!”
Rin grabbed his wrists and forced them away from his back. He wrenched them, flailing, out of her grip. A stray hand hit her across the chin. Her head whipped to the side. For a moment she saw black.
Nezha looked horrified. “I’m sorry.” He clutched at his shoulders like he was trying to shrink. “I’m so sorry.”
Rin heard a groaning noise. It came from the deck—the ship was moving, ever so slowly. Something was pushing at it from below. She looked up, and her stomach twisted with dread. The waves were swelling, rising around the Griffon like a hand preparing to clench its fingers in a fist. They had grown higher than the mast.
Nezha might lose control entirely. He might drown them all.
“Nezha.” She grasped his face between her palms. “Look at me. Please, look at me. Nezha.”
But he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, listen to her—his seconds of lucidity had passed, and it was all she could do to hold him tight so that he wouldn’t shred his own skin while he moaned and screamed.
An eternity later she heard footsteps.
“Here,” Jinzha said, pressing the packet into her hand. Rin crawled onto Nezha’s chest, pinning down his arms with her knees, and tore the packet open with her teeth. Nuggets of opium tumbled out onto the deck.
“What are you doing?” Jinzha demanded.
“Shut up.” Rin scraped up two nuggets and held them tightly in her fist.
What now? She didn’t have a pipe on hand. She couldn’t call the fire to just light up the opium nuggets and make him inhale, and making a fire would take an eternity—everything on deck was drenched.
She had to get the opium into him somehow.
She couldn’t think of any other way. She balled the nuggets up in her hand and forced them into his mouth. Nezha thrashed harder, choking. She pinched his jaw shut, then wrenched it open and pushed the nuggets farther into his mouth until he swallowed.
She held his arms down and leaned over him, waiting. A minute passed. Then two. Nezha stopped moving. His eyes rolled up into the back of his head. Then he stopped breathing.
“You could have killed him,” said the ship’s physician.
Rin recognized Dr. Sien from the Cormorant. He was the physician who had tended to Vaisra after Lusan, and appeared to be the only man permitted to treat the members of the House of Yin.
