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“Do it,” Rin told Miragha.
Miragha gave the order. Her soldiers dragged the battering ram back several yards, then pushed it running against the door.
The wooden door smashed inward upon impact. The soldier with the halberd burst through, waving the torch about the dim interior, but nothing happened. The room was empty. When Rin walked inside, all she saw were toppled chairs and bare tables—and a trap door in the corner.
She pointed. “Down there.”
The soldier with the halberd descended first, Rin following several steps behind. The makeshift torch seemed a plausible imitation; its flame flickered and curved like something alive, casting distorted shadows against the wall.
Lightning immediately arced through the dark. The soldier yelped and dropped the halberd. In the brief, bright flash, Rin glimpsed a silhouette across the room—a crouched figure behind something the shape of a mounted cannon. That was enough. Flames burst from her palm and roared across the room. She heard a high mechanical whine, then saw an explosion of sparks, ricocheting across the room like a thunderstorm concentrated inside a jar.
The cannon-like device exploded. The lightning disappeared. When the smoke cleared, Rin’s flames, dancing steadily around her arms and shoulders as a makeshift lamp, illuminated a mass of scattered metallic parts and a limp form curled up in the corner.
Too easy, Rin thought as she crossed the room. If a soldier had designed this ambush, they wouldn’t have been so trigger-happy with the lightning. They would have known they would only get one chance; they would have waited until they’d established a clear line of fire at Rin.
But Sister Petra Ignatius was a scholar, not a soldier.
Rin pushed at Petra’s ribs with her foot, shoving her over onto her back. “If you wanted an audience, you could have just asked.”
Petra cringed under her boot. A thin trickle of blood ran down the left side of her face where shrapnel had sliced her temple, and bright red burn marks scorched her hands and neck, but she looked otherwise unharmed. Her eyes were open. She was conscious. She could talk.
Rin turned to the stairs, where Miragha waited with her troops. “Leave us.”
Miragha hesitated. “You sure?”
“She’s unarmed,” Rin said. “Post two troops to guard the exits and dispatch the rest back to the city center.”
“Yes, General.” Miragha followed her men back up through the trap door. The single column of sunlight winked out as they lowered the door closed behind them.
Then Rin and Petra were alone in the dim, fire-lit basement.
“Was that all you had?” Rin dragged a chair out from Petra’s work table and sat down. “An amateur’s ambush?”
Petra moaned softly as she drew herself to a sitting position.
“What is this?” Rin demanded. She snatched one of the machine’s broken fragments from the ground. The metal was spun in a tight coil, cold to the touch. “What does this do?”
Petra responded with wary silence. She tilted her head back against the wall, her stone-gray eyes roving up and down Rin’s form as if sizing up a wild animal.
Fine, thought Rin. Then she’d just have to resort to torture. She’d never done that before—she’d only ever watched Altan extract information with well-placed, sadistic bursts of flame—but the basic principles seemed simple enough. She knew how to hurt.
Then, absurdly, Petra began to laugh.
“As if you’d ever understand.” She raised an arm to wipe the blood from her eyes. “What, did you imagine you might devise a countermeasure? The theory behind my machines is centuries beyond your grasp. I could show you every component, every draft of my designs, and you still wouldn’t understand. You don’t have the brains.”
She rose to her feet. Rin tensed, prepared to strike. But Petra only stumbled to the chair opposite her and sat down, hands folded primly in her lap in some sick imitation of a teacher lecturing a student.
“It terrifies you, doesn’t it?” she sneered. “That your gods are nothing?”
Burn her, said the Phoenix. Make her scream.
Rin pushed away the impulse. She had this one chance to get information. She’d get her revenge later.
She held the metal coil out again and repeated the question. “What does this do?”
“Didn’t you feel it?” Petra’s bloody lips split in a grin. For the first time since Rin had met her, she saw a manic glint in the Gray Sister’s eyes, a crack in her inhumanly calm facade. “It silences your god. It nullifies.”
“That’s not possible,” Rin objected, despite herself. “The gods are fundamental forces; they made this world, they can’t just be cut off by some piece of metal, that’s not—”
“Listen to you,” Petra crooned. “Clinging to your pagan babble, even now. Your gods are nothing but a delusion. A chaotic rot in your brains that has plagued your country for centuries. But I’ve found the cure. I fixed that boy, and I’ll fix you, too.”
She was gloating now. She didn’t mind explaining—she wanted to explain, because even now, she wanted to wave her superiority in Rin’s face. Torture wouldn’t be necessary, Rin realized. Petra was going to tell her everything she wanted, because she knew she was about to die, and gloating was all that she had left.
“The principle was quite simple. In Hesperia, we have shock therapies for souls who have lost their grip on reality. The electricity calms their madness. It banishes Chaos from their brains. And once I realized that your shamanism was just madness of the extreme sort, the solution was so easy. Chaos was worming through your minds into the material world. So all I had to do was shut it off.”
She leaned forward. Blood had dripped again into her left eye, but she just blinked without wiping it away. “How does it feel? To know that your gods are nothing before the Divine Architect? We tamed the Dragon. We tamed your so-called Phoenix. Without your shamans, your army is an untrained, backward mass of idiot peasants that will never, ever—”
“Conquer Arlong?” Rin interrupted. She shouldn’t have burst out; she should have just let Petra keep talking, but she couldn’t stand the fucking condescension. “The Republic’s finished. Your people fled the harbor the first chance they got. You’ve lost.”
Petra barked out a laugh. “And you think you’ve won? The Gray Company’s network spans the world. We have eyes on every continent. And those pieces of trash”—she kicked at a bent shard of metal at her feet—“were only prototypes. When I understood what made Yin Nezha bleed, I sent my notes to the Gray Towers. They’ll have perfected my designs by now. The next time you encounter one will be the last.
“The Architect works in mysterious ways. Sometimes he moves slowly. Sometimes he makes sacrifices.” Petra took a rattling breath, coughed, then sighed. “But the world marches inevitably, inexorably toward order. This is his intent. The Gray Company is greater than you could ever imagine, and we now have the weapons to burn Chaos out of the world. You kill me and you accomplish nothing. Your world as you know it will end.”
Rin remained silent.
Petra meant to provoke. She wanted Rin to lose control, to explode and rage, all to prove her point that in the end, Speerlies were no better than animals. During those weeks on the northern expedition, Petra had always maintained such a cool placidity when she made Rin moan and thrash and howl, the condescending control of a woman who believed she was superior in every way.
