Chaghan ignored his sister, gazing around as if he could see Rin. But his pale eyes went straight through her. He was looking for something that no longer existed.
“Altan, are you there?”
She tried to say something, but no sound came out. She didn’t have a mouth. She didn’t have a body. Scared, she flitted away, and then the void was pulling her through again so that she couldn’t have gone back if she’d tried.
She flew through the present to the past.
She saw a great temple, a temple built of stone and blood.
She saw a familiar woman, tall and magnificent, brown-skinned and long-limbed. She wore a crown of scarlet feathers and ash-colored beads. She was weeping.
“I won’t,” said the woman. “I will not sacrifice the world for the sake of this island.”
The Phoenix shrieked with a fury so great that Rin trembled under its naked rage.
“I will not be defied. I will smite those who have broken their promises. And
The woman screamed, collapsed to her knees, and clutched at something within her, as if trying to claw her very heart out. She glowed from inside like a burning coal; light poured through her eyes, her mouth, until cracks appeared in her skin and she shattered like rock.
Rin would have screamed, too, if she had a mouth.
The Phoenix turned its attention to her, just as the void dragged her away again.
She hurtled through time and space.
She saw a shock of white hair, and then everything stood still.
The Gatekeeper hung in a vacuum, frozen in a state of suspended animation, a place next to nowhere and on the way to everywhere.
“Why did you abandon us?” she cried. “You could have helped us. You could have saved us.”
His eyes shot open and found her.
She did not know how long he stared at her. His eyes bored into the back of her soul, searched through all of her. And she stared back. She stared back, and what was she saw nearly broke her.
Jiang was no mortal. He was something old, something ancient, something very, very powerful. And yet at the same time he was her teacher, he was that frail and ageless man whom she knew as human.
He reached out for her and she almost touched him, but her fingers glided through his and touched nothing, and she thought with a sickening fright that she was drifting away again. But he uttered a word, and she hung still.
Then their fingers met, and she had a body again, and she could feel, feel his hands cup her cheeks and his forehead press against hers. She felt it acutely when he grasped her shoulders and shook her, hard.
“Wake up,” he said. “You’re going to drown.”
She hauled herself out of the water onto hot sand.
She took a breath, and her throat burned as if she had drunk a gallon of peppercorn sauce. She whimpered and swallowed, and it felt like a fistful of rocks was trying to scrape its way down her esophagus. She curled into herself, rolled over, hauled herself to her feet, and attempted a step forward.
Something crunched under her foot. She lurched forward and tripped onto the ground. Dazed, she glanced around. Her ankle had wedged inside something. She wiggled her foot and lifted it up.
She dragged a skull out of the sand.
She had stepped inside a dead man’s jaw.
She shrieked and fell backward. Her vision pulsed black. Her eyes were open but they had shut down, refusing all sensory input. Bright flashes of light swam before her eyes. Her fingers scrabbled through the sand. It was full of hard little objects. She lifted them out and brought them to her eyes, squinting until her vision returned.
They weren’t pebbles.
Little bits of white stuck up in the sand everywhere she looked. Bones. Bones, everywhere.
She was kneeling in a massive graveyard.
She trembled so hard the sand beneath her vibrated. She doubled over onto her knees and gagged. Her stomach was so shrunken that with every dry heave, she felt as if she had been stabbed with a knife.
She dragged herself across the sand, heaving every time her fingers rolled over a skull. She shook with tearless sobs, too dehydrated to cry.
Paths? What paths? Whatever walkways had once existed had long ago been reclaimed by the island. She knelt there, staring stupidly at the foliage.
