The boy before her had a sword, but he wasn’t using it. He didn’t even try to fight, only stumbled back with his arms raised, begging for her mercy.

“Please don’t,” he kept saying.

He might have been the patrolman from before; he spoke in that same reedy, wobbly voice. “Please.”

She stayed her hand only because she realized he was speaking Nikara.

She considered him for a moment. Was he Nikara? Was he a prisoner of war? He wasn’t wearing a Mugenese uniform, he might have been an innocent . . .

“Please,” he said again. “Don’t—”

His accent sealed his fate. His tones were too clipped. He wasn’t Nikara after all, just a clever Mugenese soldier who thought he might fool her into taking mercy.

“Burn,” she said.

The boy fell backward. She saw his mouth open, saw his face curdle into a piteous scream just as it blackened and solidified, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.

In the end, it was always so easy to kill her heart. It didn’t matter that they looked like boys. That they were nothing, nothing like the monsters she had once known. In this war of racial totality, none of that mattered. If they were Mugenese, that meant they were crickets and that meant when she crushed them under her heel, the universe hardly registered their loss.

Once, Altan had made her watch him burn a squirrel alive.

He’d caught it for their breakfast with a simple netted trap. It was still alive when he retrieved it from the trees, wriggling in his grasp. But instead of snapping its neck, he’d decided to teach her a lesson.

“Do you know how exactly fire kills a person?” he’d asked.

She’d shaken her head. She’d watched, entranced, as he conjured fire into his palms.

Altan had such remarkable control over the shape of fire. He was a puppeteer, casually twisting flames into the loveliest shapes: now a flying bird, now a twisting dragon, now a human figure, flailing inside the cage he made with his fingers until he clamped his palms shut.

She’d been captivated, watching his fingers dance through the air. His question had caught her off guard, and when she spoke, her words were clumsy and stupid. “Through heat? I mean, um . . .”

His lip had curled. “Fire is such an inefficient way to kill. Did you know the moment of death is actually quite painless? The fire eats up all the breathable air around the victim, and they choke to death.”

She blinked at him. “You don’t want that?”

“Why would you want that? If you want a quick death, you use a sword. Or an arrow.” He’d twirled a stream of flame around his fingers. “You don’t throw Speerlies into battle unless you want to terrorize. We want our victims to suffer first. We want them to burn, and slowly.”

He’d picked up the bound squirrel and wrapped his fingers around its middle. The squirrel couldn’t scream, but Rin had imagined the sound, quivering little gasps that corresponded to its twitching limbs.

“Watch the skin,” he’d said.

Once the fur burned off, she’d been able to glimpse the pink underneath, bubbling, crackling, hardening to black. “First it boils. Then it starts to slough off. Watch the color. Once you’ve turned it black, and once that black spreads, there’s nothing that can bring them back.”

He had held the squirrel out toward her. “Hungry?”

She had glanced down at its little black eyes, bulging and glassy, and her stomach roiled. And she hadn’t known what was worse, the way the animal’s legs twitched in its death throes, or the fact that the roasted flesh smelled so terribly good.

By the time she’d finished in the southern quarter, the rest of her soldiers had corralled the last Mugenese holdouts into a corner in Khudla’s eastern district. They parted to let her through to the front.

“Took you a while,” Officer Shen said.

“Got held up,” Rin said. “Having too much fun.”

“The southern quarter—”

“Finished.” Rin rubbed her fingers together, and crackled blood burned black fell to the ground. “Why aren’t we attacking?”

“They’ve taken hostages inside the temple,” Shen said.

That was smart. Rin regarded the structure. It was one of the nicer village temples she’d seen in a while, made from stone and not wood. It wouldn’t burn easily, and the Mugenese artillery inside had good vantage points from the upper floors.

“They’re going to shoot us out,” Shen said.

As if to prove her point, a fire rocket shrieked overhead and exploded against the tree ten paces from where they crouched.

“So storm them,” Rin said.

“We’re afraid they might have gas.”

“They would have used it by now.”

“They could be waiting for you,” Shen pointed out.

That was fair logic. “Then we’ll burn it.”

“We can’t get past the stone—”

“You can’t get past stone.” Rin wiggled her fingers in the air. A fiery dragon danced around her palm. She squinted at the temple, considering. It fell easily within her range; she could extend her flames to a radius of fifty yards. She only needed to sneak a flame through a window. Once past stone, her fire would find plenty of things to burn.

“How many hostages?” Rin asked.

“Does it matter?” Shen asked.

“It does to me.”

Shen paused for a long moment, and then nodded. “Maybe five, six. No more than eight.”

“Are they important?” Women and children could die without many ramifications. Local leadership likely couldn’t.

“Not as far as I can tell. Souji’s people are on the other side of town. And he doesn’t have family.”

Rin mulled over her options one last time.

She could still have her troops storm the temple, but she’d suffer casualties, especially if the Mugenese really did have gas canisters. The Southern Army couldn’t afford casualties; their numbers were low enough already.

And her margin of victory mattered. This was her great test. If she came home from this not just victorious but with minimal losses, the Monkey Warlord would give her an army. The decision, then, was clear; she wasn’t slinking back with only half her troops.

“Who else knows about the hostages?” she asked Shen.

“Just the men here.”

“What about the villagers?”

“We’ve evacuated everyone we could find,” Shen said, which was code for No one will speak of what you did.

Rin nodded. “Get your men out of here. At least a hundred paces. I don’t want them to inhale any smoke.”

Shen looked pale. “General—”

Rin raised her voice. “I wasn’t asking.”

Shen nodded and broke into a run. The field cleared in seconds. Rin stood alone in the yard, rubbing her fingers against her palm.

Can you feel this, Kitay? Can you tell what I’m doing?

No time for hesitation. She had to do this before the Mugenese ventured out to investigate the silence.

She turned her palm out. Fire roared. She directed the core of the flame toward the locks on the temple doors. She saw the metal warping, twisting into an unbreakable shape.