her to look.
“You can’t kill me,” Altan hissed. “You love me.”
“I don’t love you,” Rin said. “And I can kill anything.”
It was a terrifying power of the chimei’s that the more it burned, the more it looked like Altan. Rin’s heart slammed against her rib cage. Close your mind. Block out your thoughts. Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t think. Don’t . . .
But she couldn’t detach Altan’s likeness from the chimei. They were one and the same. She loved it, she loved him, and he was going to kill her. Unless she killed him first.
But no, that didn’t make sense . . .
She tried to focus again, to still her terror and regain her rationality, but this time what she concentrated on was not detaching Altan from the chimei but resolving to kill it no matter who she thought it was.
She was killing the chimei. She was killing Altan. Both were true. Both were necessary.
She didn’t have the poppy seed, but she didn’t need to call the Phoenix in this moment. She had the torch and she had the pain, and that was enough.
She smashed the blunt end of the torch into Altan’s face. She smashed again, with a greater force than she knew she was capable of. Bone gave way to wood. His cheek caved in, creating a cavernous hole where flesh and bone should be.
“You’re hurting me.” Altan sounded shocked.
No, I’m killing you. She smashed it again and again and again. Once her arm started going, she couldn’t stop. Altan’s face became a mottled mess of fragmented bone and flesh. Brown skin turned bright red. His face lost shape altogether. She beat out those eyes, beat them bloody so she wouldn’t have to look into them anymore. When he struggled, she turned the torch around and burned him in the wounds. Then he screamed.
Finally the chimei ceased its struggles beneath her. Its muscles stopped tensing, its legs stopped kicking. Rin lurched forward over its head, breathing heavily. She had burned through its face to the bone. Underneath the charred, smoking skin lay a tiny, pristine white skull.
Rin climbed off the corpse and sucked in a great, heaving breath. Then she vomited.
“I’m sorry,” said Nezha when he awoke.
“Don’t be,” Rin said. She lay slumped against the wall beside him. The entire contents of her stomach were splattered on the sidewalk. “It’s not your fault.”
“It is my fault. You didn’t freeze when you saw it.”
“I did freeze. An entire squadron froze.” Rin jerked her thumb back toward the Federation carcasses in the market square. “And you helped me snap out of it. Don’t blame yourself.”
“I was stupid. I should have known that little girl—”
“Neither of us knew,” Rin said curtly.
Nezha said nothing.
“Do you have a sister?” she asked after a while.
“I used to have a brother,” Nezha said. “A little brother. He died when we were young.”
“Oh.” Rin didn’t know what to say to that. “Sorry.”
Nezha pulled himself to a sitting position. “When the chimei was screaming at me it felt like—like it was my fault again.”
Rin swallowed hard. “When I killed it, it felt like murder.”
Nezha gave her a long look. “Who was it for you?”
Rin didn’t answer that.
They limped back to the base together in silence, occasionally ducking around a dark corner to make sure they weren’t being followed. They did so more out of habit than necessity. Rin guessed there wouldn’t be any Federation soldiers in that part of the city for a while.
When they reached the junction that split the Cike headquarters and the Seventh Division’s base, Nezha stopped and turned to face her.
Her heart skipped a beat.
He was so beautiful then, standing right in the space of the road where a beam of moonlight fell across his face, illuminating one side and casting long shadows on the other.
He looked like glazed porcelain, preserved glass. He was a sculptor’s approximation of a person, not human himself. He can’t be real, she thought. A boy made of flesh and bone could not be so painfully lovely, so free of any blemish or flaw.
“So. About earlier,” he said.
Rin folded her arms tightly across her chest. “Not a good time.”
Nezha laughed humorlessly. “We’re fighting a war. There’s never going to be a good time.”
“Nezha . . .”
He put his hand on her arm. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Yes, I do. I’ve been a real dick to you. And I had no right to talk about your commander like that. I’m sorry.”
“I forgive you,” she