text: "Is he dead?" Zezili asked. "Fuck you to Rhea's eye, just tell me if he's dead!" She slumped against the wall of the closet they'd thrown her in – in the panic, no one had seemed sure what to do with her – and roared herself hoarse, but no one came for her. They'd ripped the skewer from her arm, and she felt her whole face puffing up from the surprisingly solid hit from Natanial Thorne, the man she intended to murder in his bed.
  
  She huffed herself against the door once, twice – and much to her surprise, it burst open. She tumbled to the stones and scrambled up. She ran past startled servants and one man fondling himself in front of some old painting, looking for an exit. Her body protested mightily, but it could rest when it was dead.
  
  Zezili broke out a side door, past a scattering of chickens, a horrified stable boy, and a young woman cutting up the body of a boar.
  
  She made for the kennels and slammed her right shoulder into a man leading a bear across the yard. He fell. She kicked him so he stayed down and stood on his body to get the leverage she needed to mount the bear.
  
  She slapped the bear with her good hand, keeping her seat entirely by clenching her thighs tight while gritting her teeth hard enough to make her face hurt.
  
  There was shouting behind her. Something zipped past. Arrows, already? The bear plunged down the muddy streets. Waves of civilians scrambled out of her way.
  
  She knew nothing of Tordin, but she knew the sky. She looked up, found the suns, and turned herself north. She rode for hours until the bear frothed at the mouth, its great forked tongue lolling.
  
  She had not heard any signs of pursuit for miles. Zezili came upon a little farm with a dog tied up out front, and exchanged the bear for the dog. The owner appeared on the stoop just as she whistled it forward. She took off again at a lope, following a dirt track she hoped was a road.
  
  Zezili camped that night well off the road in some abandoned barn. It worried her less than the woodland, which was treacherous, more treacherous than anywhere in Dorinah. The vegetation was dense, full of snapping, biting plant life. Her skin burned with dozens of bites.
  
  She pushed herself into a corner of the barn, and the dog curled up next to her. She slept badly, plagued by nightmares. Anavha, beautiful Anavha, bleeding in her arms. If he was dead, what did she have left but revenge? This was the Empress's doing. She kicked awake sometime in the blackest part of the night, and sobbed. Sobbed for the loss of many things – the loss of her legion, her health, her hand, the loss of her dog Dakar, and Anavha. She had spent her life trying to convince the world she was worth something, and in the end, she had nothing.
  
  Zezili slept in the barn for two days, nursing her aching body, living on young plant shoots and dandelions and a hare who made the mistake of coming into the barn within the length of the dog's lead.
  
  Then she rode out – north, stealing what she needed along the way. In a little town four days out she stopped to barter for a map, but found that her reputation had preceded her.
  
  She heard her own name whispered as she got off the dog. So she took what she wanted – with a look and sneer – and used the map and supplies to get her to the spot on the map Storm had given her. The final resting place for the Empress's weapon was nearer than ever.
  
  A week and a half alone on the roads, talking only to her dog and frightened village people, gave her too much time to think, and to dream. But the longer she was on the road, the less she dreamed, and the less far ranging her thoughts. Her focus was a searing brand.
  
  Saradyn and his people were a menace, yes. But it was the Empress who had called her dajian, who had made her dance like a puppet on a string. It was the Empress who had killed Anavha. The Empress who had taken her hand.
  
  And she would destroy everything the Empress wanted her to save. Burn it out as surely as she would a cancerous weed.
  
  When she came within sight of the circle of mountains that marked her final destination, the fist of her drive loosened. She took her time picking out the track the army must have taken. They would have arrived here weeks before, but the trail was still fresh. New plant life curled about the edges of crushed wildflowers.
  
  She followed the broad track around the towering deformity in the ground, that marked her final destination. They were not properly mountains, but some kind of spongy matter, like a single great tree stump that ran for miles along a circular border. She followed the track around the anomaly for half a day before she found the hole.
  
  Masses of dirt were piled up outside the hole. It looked like someone – or something – had tried to burrow under the ridge of the "mountains."
  
  Zezili dismounted. She saw dog and bear tracks, human tracks, too, and further on from the hole, a ragged line of abandoned tents, already curled in little tufts of moss and fast-growing vines.
  
  "Anyone here?" she yelled.
  
  Nothing.
  
  She tied off the dog near the hole and kicked around the abandoned camp. The supplies were all intact. She found packs of dried meat, rice, hard bread, and tubers.
  
  Then she saw the first and only body. A crumpled, partially rotted figure, hunched against a tree. Zezili recognized the armor. It was Jasoi.
  
  Zezili knelt in front of her to inspect the gaping wound in her side. It looked like the bite of some monstrous animal, but if that was so, why hadn't it eaten the rest of her? Wherever the others had gone, they hadn't intended to go long, and yet… She gazed over her shoulder, over at the hole. Shuddered.
  
  She stood. "We're going to eat," she told the dog. "You remember real food?"
  
  The dog whined.
  
  "Me either," Zezili said. She put Jasoi's name onto her very long mental list of the dead. She had killed hundreds of people in her lifetime, but it was her foolishness, her neglect, her poor choices, that murdered most of them.
  
  The weather was warm, but she wanted cooked rice, so she used one of the flint kits to make a fire. She yanked the vines off one of the tents and got it set up properly again. She kicked out a mean little rodent and two snakes. She stepped on the head of the biggest snake and mashed its head in. Rice and snake meat sounded delicious.
  
  She had gotten adept at skinning and gutting animals with her three good fingers and her teeth, and she did it now, throwing together a meal for her and the dog. When they were fed, she lay there with him at the center of the abandoned camp and stared up at the moons. She sucked in a breath of warm air while the insects buzzed around her, snapping and biting, undeterred by the smoke.
  
  It was a good final night.
  
  She woke at dawn covered in dew and dozens of shiny green beetles. They were harmless and beautiful, like being covered in jewels.
  
  With cool resolve, she spent nearly two hours tying a dagger to her left arm with a long string of cord pulled from one of the tents. The stump had healed well enough that she could wrap the cord from the stump around her elbow, so that if she kept her elbow crooked, it gave her the proper leverage. She shoved the blade into the wall of the surface anomaly a few times to test it out. Then she untied the dog's lead and yelled at him to clear off.
  
  He loped a few feet away to the edge of the camp, flicking his ears forward. At least he had a better chance at survival than Dakar.
  
  Zezili went to the edge of the hole and peered in. She got down on her belly to try to see the other side, but all was blackness. And in that blackness she saw Anavha's pained face. The mirror exploding in the other world. The end of the fucking world.
  
  Fuck it.
  
  She crawled down into the blackness, pushing dirt and insects, and Rhea's eye alone knew what, past her as she went. It wasn't high enough for her to walk, so she moved along on her elbows and knees, huffing in the smell of the dirt.
  
  The darkness stretched on. She was descending slowly. She felt the descent in the curve of the floor.
  
  What kind of weapon was down here?
  
  She crawled and crawled. The air still felt fresh.
  
  A flicker of light.
  
  She squinted and crawled toward the light. The hole was curved upward again.
  
  Thank Rhea.
  
  As she rose, she began to smell something bad. The unmistakable stench of rot.
  
  Zezili huffed her way to the lip of the hole and braced herself for whatever was on the other side.
  
  She took a deep breath and popped her head out. Then ducked back down.
  
  Her brain frantically tried to make sense of what she'd just seen. Zezili steadied herself. She looked again.
  
  She had come up inside the living circular barrier – the strange anomaly on the map. Great, tangled tree limbs clawed upward from the top of the barrier, obscuring the sky.
  
  The ground was littered with bodies for as far as Zezili could see, in various states of decay. Some were merely skeletons, tangles of bone and armor. Others were bloated bags of meat and she crawled over the lip of the hole carefully, weapon at the ready. She kept low, walked over to the first body. This one was very ripe, maybe six or seven days dead. She knew the armor. The Eye of Rhea was embossed on the helm.
  
  All around her, above the bodies, hung massive cocoons as big as cages. They dangled from the broad branches of the trees. Some of them had split open. They dripped with some kind of plant goo or mucus. The one nearest her trembled softly.
  
  Zezili stepped back, nearly falling back into the hole.
  
  She heard a susurrus, like a swarm of insects rubbing its wings together. A hundred paces across the broad plain of bodies, six figures moved toward her, ducking their heads, their arms moving strangely, as if double-jointed. They were golden creatures, naked, with two sets of legs and absurdly narrow waists, like wasps.
  
  But it was their gait that gave them away, the way they moved side to side, cocking their heads at her like curious cats, green eyes blinking furiously.
  
  They walked like the Empress. They walked like the woman who had sent for them, their… mother? Their companion? These were the Empress's weapon. Her own people.
  
  The Empress always wore a big, beautiful belled skirt, hiding two sets of legs, padding out an impossibly small waist.
  
  They were visitors from somewhere else, hidden in some other time for just this moment: the moment when Rhea herself was coming back into the sky, and the Empress called them home.