do is burn you alive.”
Her connection to the Phoenix was the last advantage she had. The Federation had raped and burned her country. The Federation had destroyed her school and killed her friends. By now they had mostly likely razed her hometown to the ground. Only the Pantheon remained sacred, the one thing in the universe that Mugen still had no access to.
Rin had been tortured, bound, beaten, and starved, but her mind was her own. Her god was her own. She would die before she betrayed it.
Eventually, Shiro grew bored of her. He summoned the guards to drag the prisoners into a cell. “I will see you both tomorrow,” he said cheerfully. “And we will try this again.”
Rin spat on his coat as the guards marched her out. Another guard followed with Altan’s inert form thrown over his shoulder like an animal carcass.
One guard chained Rin’s leg to the wall and slammed the cell door shut on them. Beside her Altan jerked and moaned, muttering incoherently under his breath. Rin cradled his head in her lap and kept a miserable vigil over her fallen commander.
Altan did not come to his senses for hours. Many times he cried out, spoke words in the Speerly language that she didn’t understand.
Then he moaned her name. “Rin.”
“I’m here,” she said, stroking his forehead.
“Did he hurt you?” he demanded.
She choked back a sob. “No. No—he wanted me to talk, teach him about the Pantheon. I didn’t, but he said he’d just keep hurting you . . .”
“It’s not the drug that hurts,” he said. “It’s when it wears off.”
Then, with a sickening pang in her stomach, she understood.
Altan was not lapsing when he smoked opium. No—smoking opium was the only time when he was not in pain. He had lived his entire life in perpetual pain, always longing to have another dose.
She had never understood how horrendously difficult it was to be Altan Trengsin, to live under the strain of a furious god constantly screaming for destruction in the back of his mind, while an indifferent narcotic deity whispered promises in his blood.
That’s why the Speerlies became addicted to opium so easily, she realized. Not because they needed it for their fire. Because for some of them, it was the only time they could get away from their horrible god.
Deep down, she had known this, had suspected this ever since she’d learned that Altan didn’t need drugs like the rest of the Cike did, that Altan’s eyes were perpetually bright like poppy flowers.
Altan should have been locked into the Chuluu Korikh himself a long time ago.
But she hadn’t wanted to believe, because she needed to trust that her commander was sane.
Because without Altan, what was she?
In the hours that followed, when the drug seeped out of his bloodstream, Altan suffered. He sweated. He writhed. He seized so violently that Rin had to restrain him to keep him from hurting himself. He screamed. He begged for Shiro to come back. He begged for Rin to help him die.
“You can’t,” she said, panicking. “We have to escape here. We have to get out.”
His eyes were blank, defeated. “Resistance here means suffering, Rin. There is no escape. There is no future. The best you can hope for is that Shiro gets bored and grants you a painless death.”
She almost did it then.
She wanted to end his misery. She couldn’t see him tortured like this anymore, couldn’t watch the man she had admired since she set eyes on him reduced to this.
She found herself kneeling over his inert torso, hands around his neck. All she had to do was put pressure into her arms. Force the air out of his throat. Choke the life out of him.
He would hardly feel it. He could hardly feel anything anymore.
Even as her fingers grasped his skin, he did not resist. He wanted it to end.
She had done this once before. She had killed the likeness of him in the guise of the chimei.
But Altan had been fighting then. Then, Altan had been a threat. He was not a threat now, only the tragic, glaring proof that her heroes inevitably let her down.
Altan Trengsin was not invincible after all.
He had been so good at following orders. They told him to jump and he flew. They told him to fight and he destroyed.
But here at the end, without a purpose and without a ruler, Altan Trengsin was broken.
Rin’s fingers tensed, but then she trembled and pushed his limp form violently away from her.
“How