Then the screaming started, and the ecstasy set in.

Rin had spent so long hating how she felt when she burned, hating her fire and her god. Not anymore. She could admit to herself now that she liked it. She liked letting her basest instincts take over. She reveled in it.

She didn’t have to think hard to summon the rage. She only had to remember the corpses at Golyn Niis. The corpses in the research laboratory. Altan burning on the pier, a miserable end to the miserable life they’d given him.

Hate was a funny thing. It gnawed at her insides like poison. It made every muscle in her body tense, made her veins boil so hot she thought her head might split in half, and yet it fueled everything she did. Hate was its own kind of fire and if you had nothing else, it kept you warm.

Once, Rin had wielded fire like a blunt instrument, letting the Phoenix’s will control her as if she were the weapon and not the other way around. Once, she’d only known how to act as a gateway for a torrent of divine fire. But such unrestrained explosions were only useful when one intended genocide. Campaigns for liberation demanded precision.

She had spent weeks with Kitay practicing the intricacies of calling the flame. She’d learned to shape it like a sword. To lash it out in tendrils like a whip. She’d learned to mold it into moving, dancing entities—lions, tigers, phoenixes.

She’d learned so many ways to kill with fire. She liked going for the eyes the best. Burning limbs to ash took too long. The human body could sustain a burn for a surprisingly long time, and she wanted her fights over quickly. Really, the entire face presented an excellent target—hair would keep burning, and light head wounds fazed combatants more than other minor wounds could. But if she aimed for the eyes, she could scorch retinas, seal eyelids shut, or blister the surrounding skin, all of which would blind her opponents in seconds.

She saw a flash of movement to her right. Someone was trying to charge her.

The Phoenix cackled. The audacity.

Half a second before he reached her, she opened her palm toward his face.

His eyes popped one by one. Viscous fluid dribbled down his cheeks. He opened his mouth to scream, and Rin sent flames pouring down his throat.

This was only grotesque if she saw her opponents as human. But she didn’t see humans, because Sinegard and Altan had taught her to compartmentalize and detach. Learn to look and see not a man but a body. The soul is not there. The body is simply a composite of different targets, and all of them burn so bright.

“Do you know where the Mugenese come from?” Altan had asked her once. “Do you know what kind of race they are?”

They had been sailing down the Murui toward Khurdalain then. The Third Poppy War had just begun. She’d been fresh out of Sinegard, stupid and naive, a student who was struggling with the fact that she was now a soldier. Altan had just become her commander and she had hung on his every word, so in awe of him she could barely string together a sentence.

She’d realized he was waiting for her to answer, so she’d said the first thing that came to mind. “They’re. Um. Related to us?”

“Do you know how?”

She could have repeated any textbook answer to him. Migration induced by droughts or flooding. Exiled aristocracy. Clan warfare dating back to the days of the Red Emperor. No one was really certain. She’d been taught many theories that were all equally plausible. But she’d suspected that Altan wasn’t really interested in her answer, so she had shaken her head instead.

She’d guessed right. He’d wanted to tell a story.

“A long time ago the Red Emperor had a pet,” he’d said. “It was a beastly thing, some very intelligent ape he’d found in the mountains. One ugly, vicious fucker. Do you know this tale?”

“I don’t,” she’d whispered. “Tell me.”

“The Red Emperor kept it in a cage in his palace,” he continued. “Occasionally he brought it out for guests to see. They liked to watch it kill things. They’d release pigs or roosters into its cage to watch it dismember them. I imagine they had great fun. Until one day the beast sprang free of its cage, killed a minister with its bare hands, kidnapped the Red Emperor’s daughter, and escaped back to the mountains.”

“I didn’t know the Red Emperor had a daughter,” Rin had said, stupidly. For some reason, she’d found this the most striking detail. History only remembered the princes—the Red Emperor’s sons.

“No one does. He would have erased her from the record, after what happened. She became pregnant by the beast but couldn’t find any means of expelling the fetus from her womb, not while she was its prisoner, so she gave birth to a little brood of half-men and raised them in the mountains. Years later the Red Emperor sent his generals to chase them out of the Empire, and they fled to the longbow island.”

Rin had never heard that iteration of the story, but it made sense. The Nikara did like to compare the Mugenese to monkeys. Half-men, they called them; short and little—even though when she had finally seen a Federation soldier with her own eyes she wouldn’t have been able to tell him apart from a Nikara villager.

Altan had paused then, watching her, waiting for her response.

But she’d only had one question, which she hadn’t wanted to ask, because she’d known Altan wouldn’t have an answer.

If they were beasts, how did they kill us?

Who decided who counted as human? The Nikara thought the Speerlies were beasts, too, and they’d made them warrior slaves for centuries. The enemy was not human—fine. But if they were animals, then they must be inferior. If the Mugenese were inferior, though, then how could they have been the victors? Did that mean that, in this world, one had to be a beast to survive?

Maybe no one was truly a beast. Maybe that was just how murder became possible. You took away someone’s humanity, and then you killed them. At Sinegard, Strategy Master Irjah had taught them once that during the heat of battle, they should regard their opponents as objects, abstract and disparate parts and not the sum, because that would make it easier to plunge a blade into a pumping heart. But maybe if you looked at someone as not an object but an animal, you could not only commit the murder without flinching, you could let yourself take some pleasure in it. Then it felt good, the same way kicking down anthills felt good.

“Monkeys raping humans. Half-breed brats. Beastly freaks. Stupid savages.” Altan had said the last words with bitter relish, and Rin had thought that perhaps it was because those were the same words so many others used to describe him. “That’s where the Mugenese come from.”

Rin carved her way through the camp in minutes. The Mugenese presented almost no resistance. The soldiers she’d faced at Sinegard and Khurdalain had been well trained and lethally armed, with lines of glinting swords and an endless supply of chemical weapons they hurled into civilian centers at will. But these soldiers ran instead of fighting, and they died with an ease that astounded her.

This was all too simple, so simple that it made Rin slow down. She wanted to savor this power differential. Once I was your screaming victim, begging for your mercy. And now you cower before me.

She shouldn’t have slowed.

Because once she slowed, she noticed how unprepared they were. How utterly unlike soldiers they seemed. How young they looked.