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For a moment, they merely looked at each other, taking stock of one another, staring as if they were strangers.
Rin’s gaze dropped to the golden circlets around his wrists. Her stomach twisted as she realized what they were. Not jewelry. Conductors. They hadn’t attracted the lightning by accident. They’d been designed for it.
Then it dawned on her, what Nezha must have gone through in the year since she’d left Arlong. After Rin escaped, Petra had needed a shaman upon whom to experiment.
After the Cike were killed, that left only one in the Republic.
The skin around his wrists and ankles was badly discolored, mottled shades of bruised purple and angry red. The sight made her chest tighten. She’d seen Nezha’s body stitch itself together from wounds that should have killed instantly. She’d seen his skin smooth itself over from burns that had turned it black. She’d thought the Dragon’s powers could heal anything. But they couldn’t heal this.
Rin had once been so absolutely sure the Pantheon constituted the whole of creation. That there was no higher power, and that the Hesperian religion, their Divine Architect, was nothing more than a convenient story.
Now she wasn’t so sure.
Slowly, miserably, Nezha stood and wiped the back of his mouth with his hand. It came away bloody. “Is she alive?”
Rin was so bewildered that his words didn’t process. Nezha nodded at Pipaji and repeated the question. “Is she alive?”
“I—I don’t know,” Rin said, startled into a response. “She—I’ll try.”
“I didn’t want to . . .” Nezha coughed again. His chin glistened red. “It wasn’t her fault.”
Rin opened her mouth to respond, but nothing came out.
The problem wasn’t that she had nothing to say. It was that she had too much, and she didn’t know where to begin, because everything that came to mind seemed so utterly inadequate.
“You should have killed me,” she said at last.
He gave her a long look. She couldn’t read his face; what she thought she saw confused her. “But I never wanted you dead.”
“Then why?”
Those two words weren’t enough. Nothing she could think to say was enough. The gulf between them was too vast now, and the thousand questions on her mind all seemed too shallow, too frivolous to have the slightest chance of bridging it.
“Duty,” he said. “You couldn’t understand.”
She had nothing to say to that.
He watched her in silence, his sword dangling uselessly at his side. His face spasmed, as if he, too, was struggling with thoughts he could never say out loud.
It would be so easy to kill him. He could barely stand. His god had just fled, shuddering from some greater power that she hadn’t even known existed. If she’d carved him open right then, the wounds likely wouldn’t heal.
But she couldn’t make the flame come. That required rage, and she couldn’t even summon the faintest memory of anger. She couldn’t curse, or shout, or do any of the million things she’d imagined she might do if she had the chance to confront him like this.
How many chances, asked Altan, are you going to throw away?
At least one more, she thought, and ignored his jeering laughter.
If she could remember how to hate Nezha, she would have killed him. But instead, she turned her back and let him make his retreat while she made hers.
Chapter 30
Pipaji was dying.
Her condition deteriorated rapidly in the half hour it took for Rin to drag her toward her main forces in the city and flag down soldiers to find and fetch Lianhua. By the time Rin had her laid out on a dry tarp on the beach, her pulse had grown so faint that Rin almost thought she’d already died, until she lifted Pipaji’s eyelids and saw her twitching eyeballs flickering dangerously between brown and black.
She’d tried giving the girl opium. She always kept a packet in her back pocket, and she’d started carrying double ever since she began sending the shamans into battle. It didn’t work. Pipaji obediently inhaled the smoke, but her whimpering didn’t stop, and the purple veins protruding grotesquely from her skin only grew thicker.
The god was taking control.
Great Tortoise. Rin stared down at Pipaji’s white face, trying not to panic. Shamans who lost their minds to the gods couldn’t be killed. They were trapped inside bodies turned divine, sentenced to live until the world stopped turning.
Rin couldn’t sentence Pipaji to that.
But that meant she had to kill her, while her eyes were still flickering back to brown, while she still clung to a shred of mortality.
Rin reached a shaking hand toward Pipaji’s throat.
“I have opium!” Lianhua shouted as she rushed down the beach. She halted over Pipaji, panting. “Do you—”
“I’ve tried it,” Rin said. “Didn’t work. She’s losing it, she’s on the edge—the pain’s not helping, she’s hurt on the inside, Nezha did something to her and I can’t see but I think there’s bleeding on the inside and I need you to—don’t touch.”
Lianhua, now kneeling over Pipaji, jerked her hands back.
“Touch her over her clothes,” Rin said. “And watch the sand. Be careful. She’s not in control.”
Lianhua nodded. To her great credit she didn’t seem afraid, just focused. She exhaled, closed her eyes, and spread her fingers over Pipaji’s torso. A soft glow illuminated Pipaji’s drenched uniform.
Pipaji’s eyelids fluttered. Rin held her breath.
Maybe this wasn’t the end. Maybe the pain was the only problem; maybe she’d come back to them.
“Pipaji? Pipaji!”
Rin glanced up and cursed under her breath. The little sister—Jiuto—was racing down the beach, screaming.
Who had let her out here? Rin could have throttled someone.
“Get back.” As Jiuto approached, Rin whipped out an arm to bar her from her sister. Jiuto was tiny, but she was scared and hysterical; she wriggled ferociously from Rin’s grasp and dropped to her knees beside her sister.
“Don’t—” Rin shouted.
But Jiuto had already pushed Lianhua aside. She flung herself over her sister, sobbing. “Pipaji!”
Just as Rin and Lianhua reached to drag Jiuto away, Pipaji lifted her head. “Don’t.”
Her eyes shot open. They were their normal, lovely brown.
Rin hesitated, left hand clutching the neck of Jiuto’s shirt.
“It’s okay.” Pipaji reached her arms up, stroking her sister’s hair. “Jiuto, calm down. I’m okay.”
Jiuto’s sobs instantly subsided to frightened hiccups. Pipaji rubbed her hand in circles against her sister’s back, whispering a stream of comfort into her ear.
Rin shot Lianhua a glance. “Is she—”
Lianhua sat frozen, hands outstretched. “I’m not sure. I fixed the rib, but the rest—I mean, there’s something . . .”
Pipaji met Rin’s gaze over Jiuto’s shoulder. Her face was pinched in discomfort. “They’re so loud.”
Rin’s heart sank. “Who’s being loud?”
“They’re screaming,” Pipaji murmured. Her eyes darkened. “They’re so . . . oh.”
