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She was twenty-one years old and it was the first night she could remember that she could close her eyes without fearing for her life.
In the morning she stood up, combed the tangles out of her hair with her fingers, and stared at herself in front of the mirror. She worked at the muscles in her face until she looked composed. Assured. Ready. Leaders couldn’t display doubt. When she walked out that door, she was their general.
And then what? asked Altan’s voice. Their Empress? Their President? Their Queen? Rin didn’t know. She and Kitay had never discussed what kind of regime they might replace the Republic with. This whole time, they had—rather naively, she now realized—assumed that once they won, life in the Empire could go back to normal.
But there was no normal. In the span of a year they had smashed apart everything that was normal. Now there were no Warlords, no Empresses, and no Presidents. Just a great, big, beautiful, and shattered country, held together by common awe of a single god.
She was just General Fang for now, she decided. She didn’t have a kingdom to rule yet. Not until the Hesperians had been decisively defeated.
She walked out of the house. Five guards stood waiting outside her door, ready to escort her across the city. When they reached the palace, she had to stop and remind herself that she wasn’t dreaming. Ever since the start of the campaign from Ruijin, she’d spent so long thinking about what would happen if she were in charge that it seemed unreal that she was truly standing here, about to seize the levers of power.
Never mind that she had been in here only yesterday, pulling artifacts off the walls like she owned the place—because she did own the place. Yesterday was about a takeover, about eradicating the last traces of Republican authority. Today was the first day of the rest of Nikara history.
“You good?” Kitay asked.
“Yeah,” she breathed. “Just—trying not to forget this.”
She stepped over the threshold. Blood rushed to her head. She felt buoyant, weightless. The scales of everything had shifted. The decrees she wrote in that palace would ripple across the country. The rules she conceived would become law.
Overnight, she had become as close to a god as a mortal could be.
I’ve reached behind the canvas, she thought. And now I hold the brush.
Rin ran her administration not from the grand, empty great hall—that room was too cavernous, too intimidating—but from Vaisra’s smaller war office, which was furnished with only a single spare table and several uncomfortable hard-backed chairs. She couldn’t have sat on the palace throne—it was too grand, too dauntingly official. She wasn’t ready to play the role of Empress yet. But she felt comfortable in this cramped, undecorated chamber. She’d fought campaigns from this room before; it felt like the most natural thing in the world to do so again. Sitting at this table with Kitay to her right and Venka to her left, she didn’t feel like such an imposter. This was just a much nicer version of her tent.
This is not right, said a small voice in the back of her mind. This is insane.
But what in the past two years had not been insane? She had leveled a country. She’d destroyed the Trifecta. She’d commanded an army. She’d become, for all intents and purposes, a living god.
If she could do that, why could she not run a country?
The first thing on their agenda that morning was deciding what to do about Nezha. Rin’s scouts reported that he’d fled the country along with his closest officers and advisers, all packed into every last merchant skimmer and fishing dinghy that the Republic could scrounge together.
“Where have they gone?” Rin asked. “Ankhiluun? Moag won’t put him up.”
Kitay lowered the last page of the dispatch. “A little farther east.”
“Not the longbow island,” she said. “The air there is still poison.”
He gave her an odd look. “Rin, he’s on Speer.”
She couldn’t stop herself; she flinched.
So Nezha had taken refuge on the Dead Island.
It made sense. He couldn’t go all the way to Hesperia; that was as good as a surrender. But he must have known that he wasn’t safe anywhere on the mainland. If he wanted to stay alive, he needed to put an ocean between them.
“That’s cute,” she said with as much calm as she could manage. She saw them both watching her; she couldn’t let them think she was rattled. Nezha had certainly chosen Speer to aggravate her. She could just hear the taunts in his voice. You might have everything, but I have your home. I have the last piece of territory that you don’t control.
And she did feel a flicker of irritation, a sharp jolt of humiliation in her back where once he’d twisted a blade. But that was all she felt—annoyance. No fear, no panic. Escaping to Speer was an annoying move, but it was also the ultimate sign of weakness. Nezha had no cards left. He’d lost his capital and his fleet. He ruled a Republic in name only, and he’d been relegated to a cursed, desiccated island where nothing lived and where hardly anything grew. All he could do was taunt.
Moreover, according to dispatches, he’d lost the faith of his allies. The Hesperians didn’t listen to him anymore. The Consortium had chosen to cut their losses.
“He’s not received any reinforcements since Arlong fell,” Venka read. “And the Hesperians stripped his authority to command ground troops. He’s only got Nikara infantry at his disposal now, and a third of those numbers deserted after Arlong.” She glanced up from the report. “Incredible. You think the Consortium’s finished?”
“Perhaps for now—” Kitay began, at the same moment that Rin said, “Absolutely not.”
“They’ve withdrawn all their forces,” Kitay said.
“They’ll come back,” Rin said.
“Perhaps in a few months,” Kitay said. “But I think they’ve suffered more losses than they—”
“Doesn’t matter,” Rin said. “They’ll be back as soon as they possibly can. Could be days, could be weeks. But they’re going to hit back, hard, and we’ve got to be prepared. I told you what Petra said. They don’t merely think we’re just—just obstacles to trade. We’re not inconveniences to them. They think we’re an existential threat. And they won’t stop until we’re dust.”
She looked around the table. “We’re not done fighting. You all understand this, don’t you? They didn’t request an armistice. They haven’t sent diplomats. We don’t have a peace, we’ve only got a reprieve, and we don’t know how long it’ll last. We can’t just sit around and wait for it. We’ve got to strike first.”
If Rin had her way, the rest of the day would have been occupied with military remobilization. She wanted to open the ranks for enlistment. She wanted to set up training camps in the fields to plunder Arlong for Hesperian military technology and get her troops learning how to use it.
But her first priority had to be civil reconstruction. For armies were fueled by cities, and the city was on the verge of falling apart.
They upturned Arlong in a flurry of restoration. Work teams deployed to the beaches to run rescue operations on the settlements the Dragon had flooded. Triage centers opened across the city to treat civilians who had been injured in the battle and subsequent occupation. Lines formed before the public kitchens and stretched around the canals, intimidating crowds composed of thousands upon thousands of people whom she was now responsible for feeding.
