The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,214

a teacher lecturing a student.

“It terrifies you, doesn’t it?” she sneered. “That your gods are nothing?”

Burn her, said the Phoenix. Make her scream.

Rin pushed away the impulse. She had this one chance to get information. She’d get her revenge later.

She held the metal coil out again and repeated the question. “What does this do?”

“Didn’t you feel it?” Petra’s bloody lips split in a grin. For the first time since Rin had met her, she saw a manic glint in the Gray Sister’s eyes, a crack in her inhumanly calm facade. “It silences your god. It nullifies.”

“That’s not possible,” Rin objected, despite herself. “The gods are fundamental forces; they made this world, they can’t just be cut off by some piece of metal, that’s not—”

“Listen to you,” Petra crooned. “Clinging to your pagan babble, even now. Your gods are nothing but a delusion. A chaotic rot in your brains that has plagued your country for centuries. But I’ve found the cure. I fixed that boy, and I’ll fix you, too.”

She was gloating now. She didn’t mind explaining—she wanted to explain, because even now, she wanted to wave her superiority in Rin’s face. Torture wouldn’t be necessary, Rin realized. Petra was going to tell her everything she wanted, because she knew she was about to die, and gloating was all that she had left.

“The principle was quite simple. In Hesperia, we have shock therapies for souls who have lost their grip on reality. The electricity calms their madness. It banishes Chaos from their brains. And once I realized that your shamanism was just madness of the extreme sort, the solution was so easy. Chaos was worming through your minds into the material world. So all I had to do was shut it off.”

She leaned forward. Blood had dripped again into her left eye, but she just blinked without wiping it away. “How does it feel? To know that your gods are nothing before the Divine Architect? We tamed the Dragon. We tamed your so-called Phoenix. Without your shamans, your army is an untrained, backward mass of idiot peasants that will never, ever—”

“Conquer Arlong?” Rin interrupted. She shouldn’t have burst out; she should have just let Petra keep talking, but she couldn’t stand the fucking condescension. “The Republic’s finished. Your people fled the harbor the first chance they got. You’ve lost.”

Petra barked out a laugh. “And you think you’ve won? The Gray Company’s network spans the world. We have eyes on every continent. And those pieces of trash”—she kicked at a bent shard of metal at her feet—“were only prototypes. When I understood what made Yin Nezha bleed, I sent my notes to the Gray Towers. They’ll have perfected my designs by now. The next time you encounter one will be the last.

“The Architect works in mysterious ways. Sometimes he moves slowly. Sometimes he makes sacrifices.” Petra took a rattling breath, coughed, then sighed. “But the world marches inevitably, inexorably toward order. This is his intent. The Gray Company is greater than you could ever imagine, and we now have the weapons to burn Chaos out of the world. You kill me and you accomplish nothing. Your world as you know it will end.”

Rin remained silent.

Petra meant to provoke. She wanted Rin to lose control, to explode and rage, all to prove her point that in the end, Speerlies were no better than animals. During those weeks on the northern expedition, Petra had always maintained such a cool placidity when she made Rin moan and thrash and howl, the condescending control of a woman who believed she was superior in every way.

But this time Rin was in control. She would not squander it.

She had meant to burn Petra alive. When Miragha’s messenger arrived in the palace, Rin had seen an immediate, fantastical vision of Petra screaming and writhing on the floor, begging for mercy as flames corroded her pale white flesh.

But all that now seemed so trite, so easy. Petra deserved no mundane death. Mere bodily torture wouldn’t satisfy. Rin had just been struck by a far better idea, something so deliciously cruel that part of her was astonished, amazed by her own creativity.

“I’m not going to kill you,” she said with as much calm as she could muster. “You don’t deserve that.”

For the first time, fear flickered across Petra’s face.

“Get up,” Rin ordered. “Get on the table.”

Petra remained in her chair, body tensing as if trying to decide whether to run or resist.

“Get on the table.” Rin let the flames around her