The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,65

themselves back together as quickly as they opened.

Nezha, whose powers flowed from the sea.

“Run,” she told Souji, just as another round of missiles tore them apart.

For a moment the world was silent.

All was darkness, and then colors began to return—only red at first, red everywhere she looked, and then muddled clumps of red and green. Rin didn’t know how she managed to stand, only that one moment she was lying on the ground and the next she was staggering through the forest, lurching from tree to tree because her balance was broken and she couldn’t stand up straight. She tasted blood on her lip, but she couldn’t tell where she’d been hurt; the pain was like a shroud, pulsing uniformly across her body with every step she took.

“Souji?”

No response. She wasn’t sure if she’d gotten the sounds out—she couldn’t hear her own voice, except for an odd muffle deep inside her skull.

“Souji?”

Still nothing.

She stumbled forward, rubbing at her eyes, trying to gain some better grasp on the world and her senses other than it hurt, it hurt . . .

A familiar smell suffused the air. Something nauseatingly, sickly sweet, something that made her stomach roil and her veins ache with longing.

The Republicans had set off opium bombs.

They knew her weakness. They intended to incapacitate her.

Rin took a deep breath and pulled a ball of flame into her hand. She had a higher opium tolerance than most, a gift of months and months of opium addiction and failed rehabilitation. All those nights spent high out of her mind, conversing with hallucinations of Altan, might buy her a few extra minutes before she was cut off from the Phoenix.

That meant she had to find Nezha now.

“Come on,” she murmured. She sent the flame into the air above and around her. Nezha wouldn’t be able to resist the flare; it’d function like a beacon. He was searching for her. He’d come.

“Where are you?” she shouted.

Lightning split the air in response. Then a sheet of rain abruptly hammered down so hard that Rin nearly fell.

This wasn’t natural rain. The sky had been clear just a moment ago, there hadn’t even been a whisper of clouds, and even if a storm had been brewing it couldn’t have moved in so quickly, so coincidentally . . .

But since when could Nezha summon the rain?

In some awful way it made sense. Dragons controlled the rain, so said the myths. Even in Tikany, a place where religion had long been diminished to children’s bedtime stories, the magistrates lit incense offerings to the dragon lords of the river during drought years to induce heavy showers.

But that meant Nezha’s domain wasn’t just the river but all the water around him. And if he could summon it, control it . . .

If this rain was his doing, he’d become so much more powerful than she’d feared.

“General?”

Rin turned. A band of troops had clustered around her. New recruits, she didn’t recognize them—they’d survived, bless them; they were rallying toward her, even when they’d just seen their comrades ripped apart.

Their loyalty amazed her. But their deaths would accomplish nothing.

“Get away,” she ordered.

They didn’t move. The one in the front spoke. “We’ll fight with you, General.”

“Don’t even try,” she said. “He will kill you all.”

She’d seen Nezha at the height of his abilities once before. He’d raised an entire lake to protect his fleet. If he’d perfected his skills since, then not a single one of them would survive for more than a few seconds.

This wasn’t a war of men anymore. This was a war of gods. This had to end between her and Nezha, shaman to shaman.

All she could do before then was minimize the fallout.

“Go help the villagers,” she told them. “Get them away from here, as many as you can. Seek cover under darkness and don’t stop running until you’re out of range of the rain. Hurry.”

They obeyed, leaving her alone in the storm. The rainfall was deafening. She couldn’t see a single Republican soldier, Nikara or Hesperian, around her, which meant Nezha, too, had sent away his reinforcements.

He would have done it out of nobility. Typical. He was always the righteous ruler, the noble aristocrat. She could just imagine Nezha giving the order in his arrogant, assured voice. Leave her to me.

Fire flickered around her body, winking in and out as sheets of rain kept crushing it away. The water was now coming down so hard it felt like repeated smacks from the flat side of a sword. She struggled