he didn’t say something.
“So it’s true,” he said finally. “You can really call gods.”
His eyes hadn’t left her face. She wished she had a mirror, so that she could see her own crimson eyes.
“What is it? What are you not telling me?”
“Do you really have no idea?” Kitay whispered.
She shrank from him, suddenly fearful. She had some idea. She had more than an idea. But she needed confirmation.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.
“Come with me,” Kitay said. She followed him the length of the deck until they stood on the other side of the ship.
Then he pointed out to the horizon.
“There.”
Far out over the water sprouted the most unnatural-looking cloud Rin had ever seen. It was a massive, dense plume of ash, spreading over the earth like a flood. It looked like a thundercloud, but it was erupting upward from a dark landmass, not concentrated in the sky. Great rolls of gray and black smoke billowed out, like a slow-growing mushroom. Illuminated from behind by red rays of the setting sun, it looked like it was bleeding bright rivulets of blood into the ocean.
It looked like something alive, like a vengeful smoke giant arisen from the depths of the ocean. It was somehow beautiful, the way that the Empress was beautiful: lovely and terrible all at once. Rin could not tear her eyes away.
“What is that? What happened?”
“I didn’t see it happen,” said Kitay. “I only felt it. Even miles away from the shore, I felt it. A great trembling under my feet. A sudden jolt, and then everything was still. When we went outside, the sky was pitch-black. The ash blotted out the sun for days. This is the first sunset I’ve seen since we found you.”
Rin’s insides curdled. That small, dark landmass, there in the distance . . . that was Mugen?
“What is it?” she asked in a small voice. “The cloud?”
“Pyroclastic flows. Ash clouds. Do you remember the old fire mountain eruptions we studied in Yim’s class?” Kitay asked.
She nodded.
“That’s what happened. The landmass under the island was stable for millennia, and then it erupted without warning. I’ve spent days trying to puzzle out how it happened, Rin. Trying to imagine how it must have felt for the people on the island. I’ll bet most of the population was incinerated in their homes. The survivors wouldn’t have lasted much longer. The whole island is trapped in a firestorm of poisonous vapors and molten debris,” said Kitay. His voice was oddly flat. “We couldn’t get nearer if we tried. We would choke. The ship would burn from the heat a mile off.”
“So Mugen is gone?” Rin breathed. “They’re all dead?”
“If they aren’t, they will be soon,” said Kitay. “I’ve imagined it so many times. I’ve pieced things together from what we studied. The fire mountain would have emitted an avalanche of hot ash and volcanic gas. It would have swallowed their country whole. If they didn’t burn to death, they choked. If they didn’t choke to death, they were buried under rubble. And if all of that didn’t kill them, then they’ll starve to death, because sure as hell nothing is going to grow on that island now, because the ash would have decimated the island agriculture. When the lava dries, the island will be a solid tomb.”
Rin stared out at the plume of ash, watched the smoke yet unfurling, bit by bit, like an eternally burning furnace.
The Federation of Mugen had become, in some perverse way, like the Chuluu Korikh. The island across the narrow strait had turned into a stone mountain of its own. The citizens of the Federation were prisoners arrested in suspended animation, never to reawaken.
Had she really destroyed that island? She felt a swell of panicked confusion. Impossible. It couldn’t be. That kind of natural disaster could not have been her doing. This was a freak coincidence. An accident.
Had she truly done this?
But she had felt it, precisely at the moment of eruption. She had triggered it. She had willed it into being. She had felt each one of those lives wink out of existence. She had felt the Phoenix’s exhilaration, experienced vicariously its frenzied bloodlust.
She had destroyed an entire country with the power of her anger. She had done to Mugen what the Federation did to Speer.
“The Dead Island was dangerously close to that ash cloud,” Kitay said finally. “It’s a miracle you’re alive.”
“No, it’s not,” she said. “It’s the will of the gods.”
Kitay looked as if he was