A boom shook the air. They exchanged a look and ran out to the prow.
The skimmer at the head of the fleet was in full blaze.
Another boom echoed through the pass. A second ship exploded, sending blast fragments up so high that they crashed across the Kingfisher’s deck. Jinzha threw himself to the ground just before a piece of the Lapwing could skewer his head to the mast.
“Get down!” he roared. “Everybody down!”
But he didn’t have to tell them—even from a hundred yards away the burst impacts shook the Kingfisher like an earthquake, knocking everyone on deck off their feet.
Rin crawled as close as she could to the edge of the deck, spyglass in hand. She popped up from the railing and glanced frantically about the mountains, but all she saw were rocks. “There’s no one up there.”
“Those aren’t missiles,” Kitay said. “You’d see the heat glow in the air.”
He was right—the source of the explosions wasn’t from the air; they weren’t detonating on the decks. The very water itself was erupting around the fleet.
Chaos took over the Kingfisher. Archers scrambled to the top deck to open fire on enemies who weren’t there. Jinzha screamed himself hoarse ordering the ships to reverse direction. The Kingfisher’s paddle wheels spun frantically backward, pushing the turtle boat out of the tributary, only to bump into the Crake. Only after a frantic exchange of signal flags did the fleet begin backtracking sluggishly downriver.
They weren’t moving fast enough. Whatever was in the water must have been laced together by some chain reaction mechanism, because a minute later another skimmer went up in flames, and then another. Rin could see the explosions starting below the water, each one detonating the next like a vicious streak, getting closer and closer to the Kingfisher.
A massive gust of water shot out of the river. At first Rin thought it was just the force of the explosions, but the water spiraled, higher and higher, like a whirlpool in reverse, expanding to surround the warships, forming a protective ring that centered around the Griffon.
“What the fuck,” Kitay said.
Rin dashed to the prow.
Nezha stood beneath the Griffon’s mast, arms stretched out to the tower of water as if reaching for something.
He met Rin’s gaze, and her heart skipped a beat.
His eyes were shot through with streaks of ocean blue—not the eerie cerulean gleam of Feylen’s glare, but a darker cobalt, the color of old gems.
“You too?” she whispered.
Through the protective wave of water she saw explosions, splashes of orange and red and yellow. Warped by the water, they almost seemed pretty, a painting of angry bursts. Shrapnel seemed frozen in place, arrested by the wall. The water hung in the air for an impossibly long time, steady while the explosives went off one by one in a series of deafening booms that echoed around the fleet. Nezha collapsed on the deck.
The wave dropped, slammed inward, and drenched the wretched remains of the Republican Fleet.
Rin needed to get to the Griffon.
The great wave had knocked Nezha’s ship and the Kingfisher together into a dismal wreck. Their decks were separated by only a narrow gap. Rin took a running start, jumped, skidded onto the Griffon’s deck, and ran toward Nezha’s limp form.
All the color had drained from his face. He was already porcelain pale, but now his skin looked transparent, his scars cracks in shattered glass over bright blue veins.
She pulled him up into a sitting position. He was breathing, his chest heaving, but his eyes were squeezed shut, and he only shook his head when she tried to ask him questions.
“It hurts.” Finally, intelligible words—he twisted in her arms, scrabbling at something on his back. “It hurts . . .”
“Here?” She put her hand on the small of his back.
He managed a nod. Then a sudden, wordless scream.
She tried to help him pull his shirt off, but he kept thrashing in her arms, so she had to slice it apart with a knife and yank the pieces away. Her fingers splayed over his exposed back. Her breath caught in her throat.
A massive dragon tattoo, silver and cerulean in the colors of the House of Yin, covered his skin from shoulder to shoulder. Rin couldn’t remember seeing it before—but then, she couldn’t remember seeing Nezha shirtless before. This tattoo had to be old. She could see a rippled scar arcing down the left side where Nezha had