“The future is always a source of comfort.” Lei’s voice was bitter. “It’s the past I despise.”
The suffocating darkness pressed against me.
And yet I cling to hope, that obstinate creature, my mother had written.I must hold out until the end of winter, when I can make my last journey to the Red Mountains—and save myself—
“You never understood me.” I’d tried to cut Sky where it would hurt the most. “Sometimes I think it was a mistake for us to be together.”
“Do you want to die?” Lei had asked. “If you die, they win. Remember that.”
I imagined diving into the frigid Ximing sea to escape imprisonment, training under the stars every night to prove myself, dressing as a concubine and crossing inside my enemy’s bedchamber, not knowing if I would survive the night. My addiction had begun to define me, but so did my persistent will to live.
“It is inevitable—” the dragon snarled. But I was gone before his words could reach me. My eyes flew open and I jolted awake, once again returned to my body.
I was lying on the hard dirt, and there was someone leaning over me. A man. One of Kuro’s rebels. Terror and fury surged through me, each strengthening the other. His hand rested on my shoulder, his eyes hungry in a way that made my body lock in conditioned fear. Though I was no longer a prisoner of Ximing, no longer bound in chains, my body remembered. It remembered the paralyzing fear from the war, when General Huyi loomed over me, reveling in my helplessness.
“You’re awake,” the rebel said, surprised. “Did you have too much to drink, doll?”
I snarled, an animal-like sound, and threw him off me with such force that his body struck a neighboring tree. Stunned and bewildered, I looked down at my hands, before understanding that I’d used my lixia.
The world was tinted red with my thirst for violence. I advanced toward him as he groaned and clambered to his feet. “Look,” he said, holding out his empty hands. “I only—”
His mind lay open to me, like a nest of baby chicks to a hungry hawk.You will never touch another woman again, I told him silently.
“Cut off your thumb,” I ordered.
His body went rigid, his face turning vacant. From his boot he drew a hidden dagger. Then, without hesitation, he began to saw at his left thumb, barely blinking as blood poured from the wound.
The scent of blood only quickened my hunger. I would make him suffer, I decided. I would make him suffer so badly he would wish for his own death.
I smiled, baring my teeth. “Now your hand.”
He was bleeding profusely already. But under the spell of compulsion, he ignored his injuries and directed his attention to my order. Shaking, he lifted his blade in the air.
“Meilin?”
I turned at the sound of that voice, that low, crackling baritone. I glanced at him, and what he read in my face must have frightened him, for he seized me by my shoulders and shook me. “Meilin!”
“Release me,” I ordered. But although he trembled, he withstood my compulsion.
“Meilin, look at me. Look at me!”
His voice carried no spirit power, but it held a strength of a different sort. I looked at him, truly looked, and at last, I saw him.
“Lei,” I said, my shoulders slumping as the haze of violence cleared. “You’re recovered.”
Behind him, I heard the rebel saw through bone. “Stop!” I cried out. “Stop.”
At the commotion, others emerged from their tents. The man named Hanwen approached hesitantly, before spotting the rebel bleeding out on the dirt.
“Lan!” He crouched beside the unconscious man. To me: “What have you done?” His eyes were both accusatory and afraid. “You—you monster.”
I was shaking all over. “He attacked me,” I said, my voice thin and frightened. But, I wondered, had he? Or had he only been checking on a sleeping girl lying on the forest floor? How could I have jumped to such conclusions? How could I have tried to prolong his pain—I, who had experienced no scarcity of suffering?
My knees buckled. Lei caught me before I collapsed, steadying me against him. My veins were so black they looked like streaks of ink against my paper-white arms.
“Kill me,” I whispered. “Just kill me now—before I ruin myself.”
“No,” he said, his grip tightening around me.
