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“Eat.” Daji pressed a hard, stale bun into her hand. “You need your strength. You won’t survive immurement otherwise.”
Rin stared helplessly at her. She didn’t lift the bun; her fingers hardly had the strength to close around it. “Why are you doing this?”
“I am saving us both,” Daji said. “Maybe your incipient southern empire, too, if you’ll stop with the hysterics and listen.”
“The army—”
“Your army has abandoned you. Your loyal officers are in no position to help. You’ve been ousted by the Southern Coalition, and you can’t call the fire.” Daji smoothed Rin’s hair back behind her ears. “I am guaranteeing us safe passage to the Chuluu Korikh.”
“But why—”
“Because my strength now is not enough. We need an ally. A mutual friend, who to the best of my knowledge is currently whiling away eternity in a mountain.”
Rin blinked. She understood Daji’s words, but she didn’t understand what she meant; it took a moment of thoughts churning sluggishly through her mind before the pieces fell together.
Then she balked.
She hadn’t thought about Jiang for nearly a year. She hadn’t let herself; the memories hurt too much. He’d been not just her teacher but her master. She’d trusted him; he’d promised to keep her safe. And then, the moment her world descended into war, he’d simply abandoned her. He’d left her to seal himself in a fucking rock.
“He won’t come out,” Rin said hoarsely. “He’s too scared.”
Daji’s lip curled. “Is that what you think?”
“He wants to hide. He won’t leave. He’s—there’s something wrong—”
“His Seal is eroding,” Daji said fiercely. Her good eye glimmered. “I know. I’ve felt it, too. He’s getting stronger—he’s coming back to himself. I didn’t know what I was doing when I Sealed the three of us, but I’d always suspected—hoped—I hadn’t done it right. And I didn’t. The Seal was a broken, imperfect thing, and now it’s fading. Now I—we—get a second chance.”
“Doesn’t matter.” Rin shook her head weakly. “He won’t leave.”
“Oh, he’ll have to.” Daji resumed dabbing at Rin’s temples. “I need him.”
“But I needed him,” Rin said. She felt a sharp pang in her chest, a wrenching mix of frustration and despair that until now she’d been so good at suppressing. She wanted to kick something; she wanted to cry. How, after so much time, could old hurts sting so sharp?
“Perhaps you did.” Daji gave Rin a pitying look. “But Ziya’s not your anchor. He’s mine.”
The rest of the journey could have taken minutes or hours. Rin didn’t know; she passed it in a painful daze, slipping in and out of consciousness as her body ached from its myriad contusions. Daji lapsed into silence, cautious of eavesdroppers. At last the engine roar slowed to a whine, then stopped. Rin jolted fully awake as the carriage thudded against the ground at an angle and screeched as it dragged several feet to a halt. Then Republican soldiers came into her compartment, loaded her bound form onto a wooden stretcher, and carried her out into the icy mountain air.
She didn’t resist. Daji wanted her to play helpless.
She knew they had reached Snake Province. She recognized the shape of these mountains; she’d traveled this way before. But some part of her mind could not accept that they were really, truly, in the Kukhonin Mountains.
Less than a day had passed since Souji betrayed her in Tikany. They’d crossed half the country in the time since. But that couldn’t be right—this journey should have taken weeks. Rin had seen dirigibles fly, she knew how fast they moved, but this was absurd. This took her ingrained conceptions of time, space, and distance, and ripped them to shreds.
Was this how the Hesperians regularly traveled? She tried to imagine spatiality from their perspective. What would society be like if one could traverse the continent in mere days? If she could wake up one morning in Sinegard, and go to bed in Arlong that evening?
No wonder they acted as if they owned the world. To them it must seem so small.
“Which way?” asked a soldier.
“Up,” Daji said. “The entrance lies near the summit. There won’t be space up there to land a craft. We’ll have to climb.”
Rin was strapped down so tightly to the stretcher she could barely lift her head. She couldn’t see how much farther they had to march, but she suspected it would take hours. The only walking path to the entrance of the Chuluu Korikh grew treacherously narrow with altitude. There wouldn’t have been space to land anything as large as a dirigible more than a third of the way up.
At least she didn’t have to climb. As the soldiers hoisted her up the mountain, the rocking stretcher lulled her into a kind of half sleep. Her head felt light and fuzzy. She wasn’t sure if they had sedated her, or if her body was breaking down from wounds sustained earlier. She passed the march in a barely conscious fugue, just dazed enough that the bruises from Souji’s boot produced no more than a dull, nearly pleasant ache.
She didn’t realize they’d reached the Chuluu Korikh until she heard the scrape of the stone door sliding open.
“We need a light,” Daji said.
Rin heard a crackle as someone lit a torch.
Now, she thought. This was when Daji would turn on the soldiers, surely. She’d gotten what she wanted; she’d secured safe passage to the Chuluu Korikh, and now she only had to hypnotize them, lure them to the precipice, and push.
“Go on,” Daji said. “There’s nothing to fear here. Just statues.”
The soldiers bore Rin into the looming dark. An immense pressure slammed over her, like an invisible hand clamped over her nose and mouth.
Rin gasped, arching her back against the stretcher. She gulped down huge mouthfuls of air, but it was thin and insufficient, and did nothing to stop the black spots creeping in at the edges of her vision. She could breathe so hard she ruptured her lungs and it still wouldn’t be enough. The inside of the Chuluu Korikh was so grounded, so firmly material, a solid place with no possible crossover into the plane of spirit.
It felt worse than drowning.
Rin had barely tolerated the pressure the first time she’d come here with Altan. It was far worse now that she had lived and breathed for years with divinity just a glancing thought away. The Phoenix had become a part of her, a constant and reassuring presence in her mind. Even in Kitay’s absence, she’d still felt the barest thread of a connection to her god, but now even that was gone. Now she felt as if the weight of the mountain might shatter her from inside.
The soldier at the front rapped his knuckles against her forehead. “Ah, shut up.”
Rin hadn’t even realized she was screaming.
Someone stuffed a rag in her mouth. That made the suffocation worse. Rational thought fled. She forgot that this was all a feint, all part of Daji’s plan. How could Daji—Su Daji, who had lived with the voice of her god longer than Rin had been alive—withstand this? How could she walk calmly forward without screaming while Rin writhed, arrested in the last moment of drowning before death?
