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She didn’t see the last dirigible swooping low through the smoke at Jiang until it was too late.
“Watch out!” she screamed, but the boom of cannons drowned out her voice.
Jiang dropped like a puppet with cut strings. His beasts vanished. The dirigible veered tentatively backward, as if trying to assess the damage before it took a second shot. She flung her head back and screamed fire. A single jet of flame ripped through the airship balloon. The carriage spiraled into the ground and exploded.
Rin sprinted through the raining wreckage to Jiang.
He lay still where he had fallen. She pressed her fingers into his neck. She felt a pulse, strong and insistent. Good. She patted her hand over his body, trying to check the extent of his wounds. But there was no blood—his clothes were dry.
They weren’t safe yet. Arquebuses went off all around them; Jiang had not finished off the Republican artillery.
“Get him up.” Daji materialized, seemingly from nowhere. Her eyes were wild and frantic; her hair and clothes singed black. She jammed her hands under Jiang’s arms and hoisted him to a sitting position. “Hurry.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Rin asked. “He’s not even—”
Daji shook her head just as the crack of arquebus fire echoed around them. They both ducked.
“Quickly!” Daji hissed.
Rin pulled one of Jiang’s arms around her shoulder. Daji took the other. Together they staggered to their feet and ran for cover, Jiang lolling between them like a drunkard.
Somehow they made it unscathed to the Southern Coalition’s rear guard. Venka and a line of defenders stood at the base of the mountains, firing back at the Republicans as the civilians clustered around the blocked tunnel entrances.
“Oh, thank fuck, there you are.” Venka dropped her crossbow to help them hoist Jiang toward a wagon. “Is he hurt?”
“I can’t tell.” Rin helped Daji push Jiang’s legs up over the cart. He didn’t look wounded. In fact, he was still conscious. He pulled his knees up into a crouched sitting position, rocking back and forth, emitting bursts of low, nervous giggles.
Rin couldn’t look at him. This was wrong, this was so wrong. Her gut wrenched with a mix of horror and shame; she wanted to vomit.
“Riga,” Jiang whispered suddenly. He’d stopped giggling. He sat utterly still, eyes fixed at something Rin couldn’t see.
Daji recoiled like she’d been slapped.
“Riga?” Rin repeated. “What—”
“He’s here,” Jiang said. His shoulders began to tremble.
“He’s not here.” The blood had drained from Daji’s face. She looked terrified. “Ziya, listen to me—”
“He’s going to kill me,” Jiang whispered.
His eyes rolled up to the back of his head. He shuddered so hard his teeth clacked. Then he slumped to the side and lay still.
Chapter 17
The mining tunnels felt more like a tomb than an escape. After Rin blew open the entrances with flame and several well-placed barrels of fire powder, the Southern Coalition filed in a packed column of bodies through a passage wide enough to fit only three men walking side by side. It seemed to stretch on for miles. All around them was cold stone, stale air, and a looming black that seemed to constrict like a vise as they pressed farther into the belly of the deep.
They stumbled through the dark, groping at the tunnel walls and tapping the floor before them to check for sudden drop-offs. Rin hated this—she wanted to light every inch of her body aflame and become a human lantern—but she knew that in such packed quarters, fire would suffocate. Altan had showed her once, with a pigeon in a glass vase, how quickly flames could eat up all the breathable air. She remembered clearly the eager fascination in his eyes as he watched the pigeon’s little neck pulse frantically, then go still.
So she walked at the head of the column, illuminating the way with a tiny flame flickering inside a cupped hand, while the back of the line followed in complete darkness.
An hour into their journey, the soldiers behind her began begging that they stop. Everyone wanted to rest. They were exhausted; many of them were marching with undressed open wounds dripping blood into the dirt. The dirigibles couldn’t reach them underground, they argued. Surely they would be safe for twenty minutes.
Rin refused. She and Jiang might have decimated the Republican front lines, but Nezha was certainly still alive, and she didn’t trust him to give up. He would have called for reinforcements long ago. Ground troops might be preparing to enter the tunnels as they marched. Nezha could use explosives and poisonous gas to smoke them out like rats right now, and then the Southern Coalition would disappear with muffled screams beneath the earth, and the only evidence they had ever existed would be ossified bones revealed eons later as the mountains eroded.
She ordered that they continue until they emerged out the other side. To her pleasant surprise, the troops obeyed her without question. She had expected to hear at least a little pushback—she had only just rejoined their ranks, with no explanation or apology, before she thrust them into a war zone wreaked by gods.
But she had broken them out of the Anvil. She’d done what the Southern Coalition had failed to do for months. Right now, her word was divine command.
At last, after what felt like an eternity, they emerged into a marvelous accident of nature—a cavern whose ceiling split into a jagged crack in the darkness, revealing the sky above. Rin stopped walking and tilted her head up at the stars. After a day spent underground trying to convince her racing heart at every second that she wasn’t being buried alive, she felt like she’d come up from drowning.
Had the night sky always shone so bright?
“We should rest here.” Kitay pointed to a ridge in the opposite wall. Rin squinted and saw a staircase carved into the stone—a narrow, precipitous set of steps, likely built by miners who hadn’t revisited these tunnels in years. “If anything starts coming through those tunnels, we’ve got a way out.”
“All right.” Rin suddenly felt a wave of exhaustion that until now had been kept at bay by adrenaline and fear. She was still afraid. But she couldn’t push herself or the army any farther, or they’d collapse. “Just until dawn. We start moving the moment the sun comes up.”
A collective moan of relief echoed through the tunnels when she gave the order. The southerners set down their packs, spread out through the cavern and its adjacent tunnels, and unfurled sleeping mats on the dirt. Rin wanted nothing more than to curl up in a corner and close her eyes.
But she was in charge now, and she had work to do.
She walked through the huddled masses of soldiers and civilians, taking stock of what kind of numbers she had left. She lit their torches and warmed them with her flame. She answered honestly every question they asked about where she’d been—she told them about the Chuluu Korikh, the Trifecta’s return, and her break-in to Arabak.
She found, to her surprise, a great deal of new faces not from Monkey or Rooster Provinces, but from the north—mostly young and middle-aged men with the hardy physique of laborers.
“I don’t understand,” she told Venka. “Where’d they come from?”
“They’re miners,” Venka said. “The Hesperians set up tungsten mines all over the Daba range after they took over Arlong. They’ve got these drilling machines that blast through mountainside like you’ve never seen. But they still needed warm bodies to do the dangerous work—crawling into tunnels, loading the carts, testing the rock face. The northerners came down to work.”
