“That’s not necessary,” Altan said immediately.
But Jun said, “She should take a Militia man. Just in case.”
Altan glared at Jun, and she realized what this was about. Jun wanted someone to accompany her, just in case she saw something that Altan didn’t report to Jun.
Rin couldn’t believe that division politics were at play even now.
Altan looked like he wanted to argue. But there was no time. He shoved past Nezha toward the crowd and seized a torch from a passing civilian.
“Hey! I need that!”
“Shut up,” Altan said, and pushed the civilian away. He handed the torch to Rin and pulled her into a side alley where she could avoid the traffic. “Go.”
Rin and Nezha couldn’t reach downtown by fighting the stampede of bodies. But the buildings in their district had low, flat roofs that were easy to climb onto. Rin and Nezha ran across them, their torches bobbing in the light. When they reached the end of the block, they dropped down into an alley and crossed another block in silence.
Finally Nezha asked, “What’s a chimei?”
“You heard the woman,” Rin said curtly. “Great beast. Red eyes.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“Probably shouldn’t have come along, then.” She turned a corner.
“I read the bestiaries, too,” Nezha said after he had caught up to her. “Nothing about a chimei.”
“You didn’t read the old texts. Archive basement,” she said. “Red Emperor’s era. It only gets a few mentions, but it’s there. Sometimes it’s depicted as a child with red eyes. Sometimes as a black shadow. It tears the faces off its victims but leaves the rest of the corpse intact.”
“Creepy,” Nezha said. “What’s its deal with faces?”
“I’m not sure,” Rin admitted. She searched her memory for anything else she could remember about chimeis. “The bestiaries didn’t say. I think it collects them. The books claim that the chimei can imitate just about anyone—people you care about, people you could never hurt.”
“Even people it hasn’t killed?”
“Probably,” she guessed. “It’s been collecting faces for thousands of years. With that many facial features, you could approximate anyone.”
“So what? How does that make it dangerous?”
She shot him a glance over her shoulder. “You’d be fine stabbing something with your mother’s face?”
“I’d know it wasn’t real.”
“You’d know in the back of your mind it wasn’t real. But could you do it in the moment? Look in your mother’s eyes, listen to her begging, and put your knife to her throat?”
“If I knew there was no way it could be my mother,” Nezha said. “The chimei sounds scary only if it catches you by surprise. But not if you know.”
“I don’t think it’s that simple,” said Rin. “This thing didn’t just frighten one or two people. It scared off half the city. What’s more, the bestiaries don’t tell us how to kill it. There isn’t a defeat of a chimei on record in history. We’re fighting this one blind.”
The streets in the middle of town were still—doors closed, wagons parked. What should have been a bustling marketplace was dusty and quiet.
But not empty.
Bodies were littered around the streets in various states.
Rin knelt down by the closest one and turned it over. The corpse was unmarked except for the head. The face had been chewed off in the most grotesque manner. The eye sockets were empty, the nose missing, lips torn clean off.
“You weren’t kidding,” Nezha said. He covered his mouth with a hand. “Tiger’s tits. What happens when we find it?”
“Probably I’ll kill it,” she said. “You can help.”
“You are obnoxiously overconfident in your combat abilities,” said Nezha.
“I thrashed you at school. I’m frank about my combat abilities,” she said. It helped if she talked big. It made the fear go away.
Several feet away, Nezha kicked another body over. It wore the dark blue uniform of the Federation Armed Forces. A five-pointed yellow star on his right breast identified him as an officer of rank.
“Poor guy,” he said. “Someone didn’t get the message.”
Rin walked past Nezha and held her torch out over the bloody walkway. An entire squadron of slain Federation forces was littered across the cobblestones.
“I don’t think the Federation sent it,” she said slowly.
“Maybe they’ve kept it locked up all this time,” Nezha suggested. “Maybe they didn’t know what it could do.”
“The Federation doesn’t take chances like that,” she said. “You saw how cautious they were with the trebuchets at Sinegard. They wouldn’t unleash a beast they couldn’t control.”
“So it just came on its own? A monster that no one’s seen in centuries decides to reappear in the one city under siege?”
Rin had a sinking suspicion of where the chimei had come from. She’d seen the monster before. She’d seen it in the illustrations of the Jade Emperor’s menagerie.
I will summon into existence beings that should not be in this world.
When Jiang had opened that void at Sinegard, he had ripped a hole in the fabric between their world and the next. And now, with the Gatekeeper gone, demons were climbing through at will.
There is a price. There is always a price.
Now she could see what he meant.
She pushed the thoughts from her mind and knelt down to examine the corpses more closely. None of the soldiers had drawn their weapons. This made no sense. Surely they couldn’t all have been caught off guard. If they’d been fighting a monstrous beast, they should have died with their swords drawn. There should be signs of a struggle.
“Where do you think—” she began to ask, but Nezha clamped a cold hand over her mouth.
“Listen,” he whispered.
She could hear nothing. But then, across the market square from where they stood, a faint noise came from within an overturned wagon, the sound of something shaking. Then the shaking stilled, giving way to what sounded like high-pitched sobbing.
Rin walked closer with her torch held out to investigate.
“Are you mad?” Nezha grabbed her arm. “That could be the beast itself.”
“So what are we going to do, run from it?” She shook him off and continued at a brisk pace toward the wagon.
Nezha hesitated, but she heard him following. When they reached the wagon, he met her eyes over the torchlight, and she nodded. She drew her sword, and together they yanked the cover off the wagon.
“Go away!”
The thing under the cover wasn’t a beast. It was a tiny girl, no taller than Nezha’s waist, curled up in the back end of the wagon. She wore a flimsy blood-covered dress. She shrieked when she saw them and buried her head in her knees. Her entire body convulsed with violent, terrified sobs. “Get away! Get away from me!”
“Put your sword down, you’re scaring her!” Nezha stepped in front of Rin, blocking her from the little girl’s view. He shifted his torch to his other hand and put a hand softly on the girl’s shoulder. “Hey. Hey, it’s okay. We’re here to help you.”
The girl sniffled. “Horrible monster . . .”
“I know. The monster isn’t here. We’ve, uh, we’ve scared it away. We’re not here to hurt you, I promise. Can you look at me?”
Slowly, the girl lifted her head and met Nezha’s gaze. Her eyes were enormous, wide and scared, in her tear-streaked face.
As Rin looked over Nezha’s shoulder into those eyes, she was struck with the oddest sensation, a fierce desire to protect the little girl at all costs. She felt it like a physical urge, a foreign maternal desire. She would die before letting any harm come to this innocent child.
“You’re not a monster?” the girl whimpered.
Nezha stretched his arms out to her. “We’re humans through and through,” he said gently.
The girl leaned into his arms, and her sobs subsided.
Rin watched Nezha in amazement. He seemed to know exactly how to act around the child, adjusting his tone and his body language to be as comforting as possible.