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“Please, don’t thank me,” I cut in, a pang in my chest. If he knew who had caused the Killing Plague, he wouldn’t be thanking me at all. “It’s what I should be doing.”

But still he bows his head in my direction, shoulders shaking with gratitude I don’t deserve, before making his way over to the porridge station.

“Next,” I call out, motioning for the girl in line behind him to come forward.

Her injuries are less severe than many of the patients I’ve seen today; no signs of limping, no vital parts missing. As I lean forward to inspect her more closely, I’m aware of her staring. I lift my gaze to her face—pale, heart-shaped, no older than fifteen, lips chapped and bleeding from dehydration—and startle. The intensity of her stare sends a jolt of unease through me. Something about the way she’s looking at me—her unnerving, unwavering focus.

“You’re Rujia,” she says. “The Healer God. Aren’t you?”

I blink. It is not custom for gods to reveal their identities, but there is nothing customary about what I am doing, so what is the point in denying it? “I am,” I say slowly.

As soon as the confirmation leaves my tongue, her face twists with fury. She slams her hands down on the table so hard that it rattles, and I’m forced to confront the resentment blazing in her startlingly large eyes. “Where were you before?” she spits out. “What have you been doing?”

“What?”

“Where have you been?” she repeats, and she looks for a moment like she might burst into tears. Her lips tremble as she speaks, her fists balled, her chest rising and falling with feeling. “You say you’re a god—then what have you been doing all these years? Where were you when I prayed to you? For years and years, I visited your statue. I brought you fresh fruit and paper money and lit incense in your name. I cried and begged you to save my father before he passed last month. Why didn’t you? You have the power to, don’t try to deny it; I watched you heal that man just now merely by touching his arm. Why didn’t you do anything? Didn’t you hear my prayers? Didn’t you care?”

My stomach clenches. I am a god, but right now I feel more like a chastised child.

Of course I cared, I could tell her. I could try to excuse away my own guilt, but wouldn’t that be a lie? I should feel guilty because what I truly cared about was power. About what the other gods thought of me, whether I had a seat at their table, when my exile would end. About making my parents proud—but suddenly, staring at this girl, at all the mortals waiting along the shores, I realize what they’d meant.

I’d always thought they wanted me to climb the ranks, to make a name for myself, restore their honor in the Celestial Realms. I’d simply accepted their choices as a mistake. But they had died trying to protect the mortals. They would never have let the mortals’ pleas go unheard.

“I’m sorry,” I tell her, bowing my head. “You’re right. I should have done more. Even if I could not save every mortal, I should have at least attempted it. I did not understand . . . I did not know how to live outside myself, if that makes sense.”

She deflates. Whatever she had been expecting me to say, it was not this.

“I’m sorry you lost your father,” I go on.

“I thought I would have more time with him,” she says quietly. “I still felt like a child when he . . .”

“You still are a child.”

She’s silent, her eyes cast down on the pebbles at her feet.

“Let me see your wounds,” I tell her. “I know I cannot make up for what you’ve already lost, but . . . from now on, I will do everything within my power to heal you, and anyone else who seeks me out. I promise.”

The girl stares at me, searching, and I can tell she doesn’t trust me fully. Not yet. I cannot blame her for it; it is incredible that mortals would trust us gods at all, that their faith has survived with hardly anything to nourish it.

But after a moment, she lifts her hand to the table, her fist unfurling.

I honor my promises.

Over the next few weeks, from before the sun has even risen over the lakes to long after the sun has disappeared, I suture wounds, reset bones, purify poisons. I work harder than I ever have before, and shockingly, I am rewarded for it. The mortals start bringing me tokens of their gratitude: homemade millet buns even though they’re running out of grain themselves; dry bamboo leaves folded into dragonflies; new sets of robes, woven with shimmering blue thread to match my powers. A pregnant mother vows to name her daughter after me. A little girl presses a quick kiss to my cheek after I heal the cut on her finger, and I swear, I can feel the ice in my heart dissolving.

But the lines of patients outside the tents do not dwindle; instead, they multiply. Just when I think I have cured almost everyone who’d been hurt by the Killing Plague, a violent earthquake destroys one of the villages down south. The victims are brought to me on stretchers, some pulled straight from the rubble, their hair and skin coated in a fine layer of powder.

“Earthquakes never happen around here,” one of them tells me weakly. His arm had been crushed by a falling pillar, and it hangs limp at his side like a detached object. “Everyone was asleep. We couldn’t have seen it coming.”

Before I have time to even start treating them, the birds begin feasting on human flesh.

They sweep in from the mountains, blood on their beaks, sending villagers running for cover and screaming. None of the mortals can explain the change, but Keran and I only need to exchange a glance to understand. Yet another imbalance, more proof that the universe is falling apart around us.

We both understand, but neither of us voice it. We only throw ourselves deeper into the work. I keep healing the mortals, and he keeps collecting the souls I cannot save, returning to my side every now and then to check on me.

One afternoon, he disappears for hours, and when he returns, I notice right away that something is off. His expression is bleak, his posture stiff.

“Keran?” I rise from the chair where I’ve been sitting for so long my knees buckle briefly before I regather my strength. I walk up to him slowly, cup his face in my hands. My eyes search his, but he won’t look at me. “What’s wrong?”