The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,149

the bottom of the carriage. The dirigible tilted dangerously to one side, jerked down by her sudden weight. Rin curled her fingers tighter as her other wrist flailed uselessly in the air. The dirigible readjusted its balance. Its pilot must have known she was there—he swerved back and forth, trying to shake her off. The thin metal rod dug into her flesh, nearly slicing through her joints. She screamed in pain.

Something—one of Jiang’s beasts, a misfired missile, or flying debris; Rin couldn’t see—struck the opposite side of the carriage. The dirigible lurched, flipping her upward. She strained to maintain her grip. They weren’t anywhere near solid ground yet—if she let go now she’d fall to her death.

She made the mistake of looking down. The chasm loomed. Her heart skipped a beat, and she squeezed her eyes shut.

The dirigible kept rising. She felt it turn away from the mountain, retreating to safer skies. The lurching had stopped.

The pilot had figured out who she was. He wanted to take her alive.

No. Oh, no no no . . .

Something shrieked above her head. Rin glanced up. Something had punctured the side of the dirigible—the balloon deflated as air escaped the hole with a deafening whistle.

The dirigible’s movements grew erratic, dipping toward the mountain one moment and twisting away the next. Rin fought to keep a hold but her fingers were slick with sweat; her thumb slipped off the iron bar, numb, and then it was just four fingers between her and the chasm.

The pilot had lost all control. The dirigible was starting to nosedive.

But—thank the gods—it was careening toward the mountain.

Rin eyed the craggy surface, fighting to stay calm. She had to jump as soon as she was close enough, just before the airship crushed her in its wreckage.

The rock face loomed closer and closer.

She took a deep breath.

Three, two, one. She exhaled and let go.

Am I dead?

The world was black. Her body was on fire, and she could not see.

But death would not hurt so much. Death was easy; she’d come close so many times now that she knew dying was like falling backward into a black pit of comforting nothingness. Death made the pain go away. But hers only intensified.

Ah, Rin. Altan’s voice rang in her temples—amused, teasing. Ever the surprise.

For once she did not recoil from his presence. She was grateful for the company. She needed him to filter through the horror.

Something wrong?

“I’m the only one now,” she said. “They . . . they’re not . . . I’m the only one.”

It’s nice to be the only one.

“But I wanted allies.”

He just laughed. Shouldn’t you know better by now?

And he was right—she should have known better than to put her fate in the hands of people more powerful than she. She should have learned, many times over, that everyone she pledged her faith to would inevitably use and abuse her.

But she’d wanted to follow the Trifecta. She wanted someone else to fight her battles for her, because she was so, so exhausted. She wanted Jiang back, and she wanted to believe Daji was the woman she hoped she’d be. She’d wanted to believe she could foist this war onto someone else. And she’d always clung far too hard to her illusions.

Forget those assholes, Altan said. We can do this on our own.

She snorted, tasting blood. “Yeah.”

After a long time, the explosions stopped. By then, Rin’s vision was fully restored. At first she’d seen only blotches of color—great patches of red against the white sky, flaring with every boom. Then her vision clarified, differentiated between billows of smoke and the fires that created them.

She lay flat on her back, head tilted to the sky, and laughed.

She’d done it.

She’d fucking done it.

In one blow, she’d rid herself of the Trifecta and the Hesperian fleet. Two of the greatest forces the Empire had ever seen—gone, wiped off the face of the earth with no monument but ash. The entire balance of the world had just changed. She saw the forces reversing in her mind.

For so long she’d been fighting a mad, hopeless, desperate war. And now it looked so very, very winnable.

Ever so faintly in the back of her mind, though muted and strained by the spiritual back door that ran through Kitay’s mind, she heard the Phoenix laughing, too—the low, harsh cackle of a deity who had finally gotten everything it had wanted.

“Fuck you all,” she whispered at the coiling smoke that dissipated up into the reforming mist. She made a rude