To their great relief, his own arm remained intact. A ridged white line appeared around his wrist like a bracelet where the incision was made, but his fingers were still functional, if somewhat stiff. Occasionally Rin saw him struggling to hold an ink brush, and he now took much longer to dress in the mornings. But he still had his hand, and though Rin was relieved, she couldn’t help but feel a constant, lingering jealousy.

“Can you see it?” She waved her wrist at him. “A little ghost hand?”

“You should put a hook on that,” he said.

“I’m not putting a fucking hook on it.”

“A blade, then. Then maybe you’d start practicing.”

She shot him an irritated look. “I’ll get around to it.”

“You’re never going to get around to it,” he said. “Keep acting like this and the first time you pick up a sword will be the last.”

“I won’t need to—”

“You know you might. Think, Rin, what happens when—”

“Not now,” she snapped. “I don’t want to talk about this now.”

She hated practicing with a sword. She hated fumbling at things with her left hand that her right hand had once done unconsciously. It made her feel helpless and stupid and inadequate, and she had spent such a long time trying to convince herself that she wasn’t powerless anymore. The first time she’d grasped a sword, a week after her surgery, her left arm had shaken with such debilitating weakness that she’d immediately flung the blade to the ground in disgust. She couldn’t bear feeling like that again.

“I see the problem,” Kitay said. “You’re nervous.”

“I don’t get nervous.”

“Bullshit. You’re terrified. That’s why you’re fidgeting. You’re scared.”

For good fucking reason, Rin thought.

Her throbbing wrist wasn’t the problem, just the symptom. She was searching for something, anything to go wrong. Their position could have been compromised. The Mugenese could know they were coming.

Or they might simply lose.

She hadn’t dealt with defenses this good before. The Mugenese at Khudla knew Rin’s troops were coming; their guard had been up for days. And they were primed to fear nighttime attacks now, even though most ambushing forces wouldn’t dare launch such a tricky operation without adequate light. This would be no easy, devastating raid.

But Rin couldn’t fail today.

Khudla was a test. She’d been begging the Monkey Warlord for a command position ever since they’d escaped Arlong, only to be told over and over that she couldn’t lead entire columns into battle until she had the experience. Today, at last, he’d put her in charge.

Liberating Khudla was her mission, and hers alone. Until now she’d been fighting like a unit of one, a juggernaut of fire that the Southern Coalition threw into battles like a wide-range missile. Now she was leading a brigade of hundreds.

These soldiers fought under her command. That terrified her. What if they died under her command?

“We have this down like clockwork. The guard changes every thirty minutes,” Kitay said. They’d been over this a dozen times before, but he was repeating it to calm her down. “You’ll know when the voices change. Get as close as you can before sunset, and then hit during the transition. Do you know the signals?”

She took a deep breath. “Yes.”

“Then you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

If only saying it made it so.

The minutes crawled past. Rin watched the sun dipping toward the mountains, dropping reluctantly, as if dragged downward by some creature in the valley below.

After Rin had raised the Phoenix on the Isle of Speer and ended the Third Poppy War, there was no formal surrender by the Federation of Mugen. Emperor Ryohai and his progeny were turned instantly into charcoal statues under mountains of ash. No one in the Mugenese imperial family survived to negotiate for peace.

So there had been no armistice, no treaty. No Mugenese generals provided a map of their troop placements and turned their weapons over to the Nikara leadership. Instead, all remaining Federation soldiers on the mainland became rogue threats—highly skilled roving soldiers without mission or nation. Yin Vaisra, the former Dragon Warlord and newly elected President of the Nikara Republic, could have dealt conclusively with them months ago, but he’d let them roam free to undercut his own allies in a long-term ploy to strengthen his grasp on the crumbling Nikara Empire. Now those scattered platoons had organized into several large independent bands terrorizing the south. For all intents and purposes, the Nikara and the Mugenese remained at war. Even without support from the longbow island, the Mugenese had essentially colonized the south in a matter of months. And Rin had let them, obsessed as she’d been with Vaisra’s insurrection while the real war was being fought at home.

She’d failed the south once. She wouldn’t do it again.

“Kazuo says the ships are still coming,” spoke a voice in Mugini. It was a boy’s voice, thin and reedy.

“Kazuo is a fucking idiot,” said his companion.

Rin and Kitay crouched hidden behind the tall grass. They’d crept close enough to the Mugenese camp that they could hear patrolmen gossiping idly, their hushed voices traveling far over still night air. Still, Rin’s Mugini was rusty from more than a year of disuse, and she had to strain her ears to understand what they were saying.

“This language is like insect chitter,” Nezha had once complained, back when they’d been stupid young children crammed into a classroom at Sinegard, when they had yet to realize that the war they were training to fight wasn’t hypothetical.

Nezha had hated Mugini lessons, Rin remembered. He hadn’t been able to comprehend the language when spoken at its standard rapid clip, so he’d spent class each day mocking it, making his fellow students laugh with gibberish that sounded so much like real sentences.

“Click click click,” he’d said, and made scuttling noises between his teeth. “Like little bugs.”

Like crickets, Rin thought. They’d started calling the Mugenese that in the countryside. Rin didn’t know if it was a new slur or an old insult recycled from a time before her birth. She wouldn’t have been surprised by the latter. History moved in circles—she’d learned that very well by now.

“Kazuo said that ships have started coming into the ports in Tiger Province,” said the first voice she’d heard, the boy’s voice. “They’re docking in the shadows, ferrying us back handful by handful—”

The second patrolman snorted. “That’s bullshit. We’d know by now if they had.”

There was a brief silence. Someone stirred in the grass. The patrolmen were lying down, Rin realized. Perhaps they were star-gazing. That was stupid of them, wildly irresponsible. But they sounded so very young; they sounded not like soldiers but like children. Did they simply not know any better?

“The moon is different here,” the first patrolman said wistfully.

Rin recognized that phrase. She’d learned it at Sinegard—it was an old Mugini expression, some aphorism derived from a myth about a ferryman who loved a woman who lived on a distant star, who built her a bridge between two worlds so that they could finally embrace.