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She noticed one more dirigible flying in the opposite direction of the fleet. Its guns weren’t firing. Its flight pattern seemed erratic—she couldn’t tell if the dirigible had been damaged, or if something was wrong with the crew. It climbed several feet in altitude above the rest of the fleet, teetered for a moment, and then turned back in the direction of the New City.
Rin knew then exactly who was on that dirigible. Someone who badly needed protection. Someone who had to be extracted from the fracas, immediately.
“Master!” She shouted, pointing. Her flames couldn’t reach that high, but perhaps his beasts could. “Bring down that ship!”
Jiang didn’t answer. She wasn’t even sure that he’d heard her. His pale eyes had gone entirely blank; he seemed trapped in the throes of his own symphony of ruin.
But then a small cluster of shadows peeled away from the rest, hurtled upward through the air, and fell on the balloon like a ravenous pack of wolves. Moments later the carriage started tumbling to the ground.
The crash shook the earth. Rin sprinted toward the wreckage.
Most of the crew had died on impact. She made short work of the survivors. Two Hesperian soldiers made staggering advances when they saw her coming. One had an arquebus, so she took him out first, shrouding his head and shoulders in a ball of flame before he had time to pull the trigger. The other soldier had a knife. But he’d been injured in the crash, and his movements were comically slow. Rin let him approach, twisted the hilt from his hand, and jammed the blade into his neck so hard the point came up through his eye.
Then she started digging through the debris.
Yin Vaisra was still alive. She found him pinned beneath part of the basket hull and the corpses of two of his guards, gasping hoarsely as he struggled to free himself. His eyes widened when he saw her. The twist of fear was visible for only an instant before his face resumed its habitual mask of calm, but Rin saw. She felt a vicious pulse of glee.
He reached for a knife lying by his waist. She wedged her toe beneath its hilt and flicked it out of his reach. She sat back and waited, expecting him to produce another weapon, but he seemed otherwise unarmed. All he could do was squirm.
Easy. This was so easy. She could kill him where he lay, could gut him with his own knife with no more ceremony than a butcher slaughtering a pig. But that would be so terribly unsatisfying. She wanted to milk this moment for all it was worth.
She braced herself under the carriage hull and pushed her legs against the ground. The hull was heavier than it looked. Those things seemed so elegant and lightweight in the air; now it took all her strength to shift it off Vaisra’s legs.
At last, he struggled out from beneath the corpses. She dropped the hull.
“Get up,” she ordered.
To her surprise, he obeyed.
Slowly he rose to his feet. It hurt him terribly to stand—she could tell from the stoop of his shoulders and the way he winced as his left leg shook beneath him. But he didn’t make a sound of protest.
No, the first President of the Nikara Republic had too much dignity for that.
They stood face-to-face for a moment in silence. Rin looked him up and down, etching every detail of him into her memory. She wanted to remember everything about this moment.
He really was the spitting image of Nezha—an older, crueler version, an unsettling premonition of everything Nezha was supposed to be. Small wonder she’d so eagerly cast him her loyalty. She’d been attracted to him; she could admit this to herself, now that it didn’t matter. It couldn’t humiliate her anymore. She could concede that not so long ago, she’d wanted to be commanded and owned by someone who looked like Nezha.
Gods, she’d been so stupid.
Every day since her escape from Arlong, she’d wondered what she would say to Vaisra if she ever saw him again. What she might do if he were ever at her mercy. She’d fantasized about this moment so many times, but now, as he stood weakened and vulnerable before her, she couldn’t think of anything to say.
There was nothing more to be said. She sought no answers or explanations from him. She knew very well why he’d betrayed her. She knew he considered her less human than animal. She didn’t need his acknowledgment or respect. She needed nothing from him at all.
She just needed him gone. Out of the equation; off the chessboard.
“You do realize they’re going to destroy you,” he said.
She lifted her chin. “Are those your last words?”
“Everything you do convinces them you should not exist.” Blood trickled from his lips. He knew he was a dead man; all he could do now was try to rattle her. “Every time you call the fire, you remind the Gray Order why you cannot remain free. The only reason you stand here now is because you’ve been useful in the south. But they’ll come for you soon, my dear. These are your final days. Enjoy them.”
Rin didn’t flinch.
If he thought he could unsettle her with words, he was wrong. Once, perhaps, he could manipulate her with coaxing, praise, and insults like she was clay in his hands. Once, she’d clung to everything he said because she was weak and drifting, flailing about for anything solid to hold on to. But nothing he said could shake her now.
She couldn’t feel the revulsion she’d anticipated at the sight of him. She’d spent so long thinking of Vaisra as a monster. This man had traded everything for power—his southern allies, all three of his sons, and Rin herself. But she found she couldn’t fault him for that. Like her, like the Trifecta, Vaisra had only been pursuing his vision for Nikan with a ruthless and single-minded determination. The only difference between them was that he’d lost.
“Do you know your biggest mistake?” she asked softly. “You should have gambled on me.”
Before Vaisra could respond, she seized his chin and brought his mouth to hers. He tried to twist away. She gripped the back of his head and kept it pressed against her face. He struggled, but he was so weak. He bit desperately at her lips. The taste of blood filled her mouth, but she just pressed her lips harder against his.
Then she funneled flame into his mouth.
It wasn’t enough simply to kill him. She had to humiliate and mutilate him. She had to force an inferno down his throat and char him from the inside, to feel his burned flesh sloughing away under her fingers. She wanted overkill. She had to reduce him to a pile of something unfixable, unrecognizable.
This couldn’t undo the past. It couldn’t bring Suni, Baji, or Ramsa back, couldn’t erase all the tortures she’d suffered at his commands. Couldn’t erase the scar on her back or restore her missing hand. But it felt good. The point of revenge wasn’t to heal. The point was that the exhilaration, however temporary, drowned out the hurt.
He went limp against her. She let his body drop; he fell forward, chest curled over his knees, as if he were bowing to her.
She breathed deep, inhaling the smoky tang of his burning innards. She knew this ecstasy wouldn’t last. It would fade away in minutes, and then she’d want more. She almost wished that he would come back to life so she could kill him again, and then again, that she might keep experiencing the thrill of glimpsing the wretched fear in his eyes before her flames extinguished their light.
She felt the same way now that she did every time she destroyed a Mugenese contingent. She knew revenge was a drug. She knew it couldn’t sustain her forever. But right now, while she was riding the high, before her adrenaline crashed and the weight and horror of what she’d just done flooded back through the crevices of her mind, while she stood breathing hard over the blackened ashes of the man who had destroyed almost everything she loved, it felt better than anything in the world.
