A wildly discordant mash of gongs and war drums drowned out the lute music from the front of the parade. Merchants hawked their wares every time they turned a corner, screaming prices with the sort of urgency that she associated with evacuation warnings. Celebratory red confetti littered the streets, tossed out in handfuls by children and entertainers, a snowfall of red paper flecks that covered every surface.
“How do they have the funds for this?” Rin muttered. “The Federation left them starving.”
“Aid from Sinegard,” Unegen guessed. “End-of-war celebration funds. Keeps them happy, keeps them loyal.”
Rin saw food everywhere she looked. Huge cubes of watermelon on sticks. Red bean buns. Stalls selling soup dumplings dripping with soy sauce and lotus seed tarts lined the streets. Merchants flipped egg cakes with deft movements, and the crackle of oil under any other circumstances would make her hungry, but now the pungent smells only made her stomach turn.
It seemed both unfair and impossible that there could be such an abundance of food. Just days ago they had sailed past people who were drowning their babies in river mud because that was a quicker and more merciful death than letting them slowly starve.
If all this came from Sinegard, then that meant the Imperial bureaucracy had possessed food stores like this the entire time. Why had they withheld it during the war?
If the people of Adlaga were asking that same question, they didn’t show it. Everyone looked so happy. Faces relaxed in simple relief because the war was over, the Empire was victorious, and they were safe.
And that made Rin furious.
She’d always had trouble with anger, she knew that. At Sinegard she’d constantly acted in furious, impulsive bursts and dealt with the consequences later. But now the anger was permanent, an unspeakable fury imposed upon her that she could neither contain nor control.
But she also didn’t want to make it stop. The anger was a shield. The anger helped her to keep from remembering what she’d done. Because as long as she was angry, then it was okay—she’d acted within reason. She was afraid that if she stopped being angry, she might crack apart.
She tried to distract herself by scanning the crowd for Yang Yuanfu and his guards. Tried to focus on the task at hand.
Her god wouldn’t let her.
Kill them, encouraged the Phoenix. They don’t deserve their happiness. They didn’t fight.
She had a sudden vision of the marketplace on fire. She shook her head frantically, trying to tune out the Phoenix’s voice. “No, stop …”
Make them burn.
Heat flared up in her palms. Her gut twisted. No—not here, not now. She squeezed her eyes shut.
Turn them to ash.
Her heartbeat began to quicken; her vision narrowed to a pinprick and expanded again. She felt feverish. The crowd suddenly seemed full of enemies. In one instant everyone was a blue-uniformed Federation soldier, bearing weapons; and in another they were civilians once again. She took a deep, choking breath, trying to force air into her lungs, eyes squeezed shut while she willed the red haze to go away once more.
This time it wouldn’t.
The laughter, the music, the smiling faces standing around her all made her want to scream.
How dare they live when Altan was dead? It seemed horrifically unfair that life could keep on going and these people could be celebrating a war that they hadn’t won for themselves, when they hadn’t suffered for it …
The heat in her hands intensified.
Unegen seized her by the shoulder. “I thought you had your shit under control.”
She jumped and spun around. “I do!” she hissed. Too loud. The people around her backed away from her.
Unegen pulled her toward the edge of the crowd, into the safety of the shadows under Adlaga’s ruins. “You’re drawing attention.”
“I’m fine, Unegen, just let go—”
He didn’t. “You need to calm down.”
“I know—”
“No. I mean right now.” He nodded over her shoulder. “She’s here.”
Rin turned.
And there sat the Empress, borne like a bride on a palanquin of red silk.
The last time Rin had encountered the Empress Su Daji, she had been burning with fever, too delirious to see anything but Daji’s face—lovely, hypnotic, with skin like porcelain and eyes like moth’s wings.
The Empress was just as arresting as ever. Everyone Rin knew had emerged from the Mugenese invasion looking a decade older, jaded and scarred, but the Empress was as pale, ageless, and unmarked as ever, as if she existed on some transcendent plane untouchable by mortals.
Rin’s breath quickened.
Daji wasn’t supposed to be here.
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.
Images of Daji’s body flashed through her mind. Head cracked against white marble. Pale neck sliced open. Body charred to nothing—but she wouldn’t have burned immediately. Rin wanted to do it slowly, wanted to relish it.
A slow cheer went up through the crowd.
The Empress leaned out through the curtains and raised a hand so white it nearly glimmered in the sunlight. She smiled.
“We are victorious,” she called out. “We have survived.”
Anger flared inside Rin, so thick she almost choked on it. She felt like her body was covered with ant bites that she couldn’t scratch at—a kind of frustration bubbling inside her, just begging her to let it explode.
How could the Empress be alive? The sheer contradiction infuriated her, the fact that Altan and Master Irjah and so many others were dead and Daji looked like she’d never even been wounded. She was the head of a nation that had bled millions to a senseless invasion—an invasion she’d invited—and she looked like she’d just arrived for a banquet.
Rin barged forward.
Unegen immediately dragged her back. “What are you doing?”
“What do you think?” Rin wrenched her arms out of his grip. “I’m going to get her. Go rally the others, I’ll need backup—”
“Are you crazy?”
“She’s right there! We’ll never get a shot this good again!”
“Then let Qara do it.”
“Qara doesn’t have a clear shot,” Rin hissed. Qara’s station in the ruined bell towers was too high up. She couldn’t get an arrow through—not past the carriage windows, not past this crowd. Inside the palanquin Daji was shielded on all sides; shots from the front would be blocked by the guards standing right before her.
And Rin was more concerned that Qara wouldn’t shoot. She’d certainly seen the Empress by now, but she might be afraid to fire into a crowd of civilians, or to give away the Cike’s location before any of them had a clear shot. Qara might have decided to be prudent.
Rin didn’t care for prudence. The universe had delivered her this chance. She could end this all in