The Winds of Tepr

From the roof of the old mint, Shan Xi watches it breathe: the long, low intake of the front steps, the exhale of chimneys, the steady pulse of lanterns in the inner courts. With Baek Miju and Seo Yorin off dragging half the garrison toward the Slump, the great stone beast lies half-muzzled. Not unguarded. Never that. But drowsy.

Around her, pirates crouch among chimneys and broken tiles. Sen huddles over a coil of rope and brass, whispering to it. Pragya and Pragati run gloved fingers over the contents of their medical satchel.

"We hit the palace now," Shan Xi had said, half an hour ago, jabbing a knife at the map. "While Miju guts the Slump. We rip its ledgers out, burn the rest, and leave the republic arguing with smoke."

"We will wait," Puripal had answered, tone deceptively light. "Let you make fire. Then, when they rush to put it out, we cut the bucket line in half."

Ta had listened. He had even nodded. Then he had seen the little ink sketch of the palace, the neat squares and triangles.

And remembered Përëk at the Needle's Ear.

The grey riders. The sky splitting. The way his own voice came out as an animal sound.

Puripal had looked at him with eyes that, just for an instant, were not princely at all.

Now the blaze is about to start.

Shan Xi lifts her hand. "Spider," she says.

Sen's contraption answers.

The line-thrower kicks with a muffled thump. A hook whistles across the gap, trailing thin rope. It bites into the palace parapet with a satisfying clonk. Pirates grip the line, testing it.

"Secure," Sen whispers, delighted. "I tuned the counterweight. It should even hold your ego."

"Good," Shan Xi says. "My ego has killed more men than your spider."

She climbs first, boots against the wall, body slanting like a gull on an updraft. Behind her, pirates swarm up, ropes creaking, breath quiet. Ta follows, lean and fast, that birthmark on his cheek a dark wing.

They pour over the parapet like a wave.

The first guards die without knowing they are under attack. A hand over a mouth, a knife through a throat. A sap to the back of a skull, gentle as a lullaby. Bodies fold into shadows. One man has time to blink, to see Shan Xi's grin, before her sabre kisses his ribs and slides in.

"Inside," she murmurs. "Take the lower records. Leave the food stores. We're thieves, not savages."

"That is factually inaccurate," one of her crew mutters.

They fan through the lower halls, a tide of leather and steel. Scribes scream and shut up when they see the knives. Pirates crack open cabinets like shellfish, spilling scrolls and coin. Sen dives into the treasury office with a joyful sound, arms already full of ledgers.

"These are beautiful," she gasps, eyes sparkling. "So many numbers."

"Take the ones about the black wagons," Ta calls. "And any list that begins with 'undesirable elements.'"

Pragya and Pragati trail behind. They mark exits, note wounded, quietly redirect overexcited pirates away from anything marked lamp oil.

In the senate chamber, Ta plants his boot on the dais where proclamations are read. The Republic's tricolor hangs behind him, stern and dyed with good intentions.

"Help me," he says, gesturing to two raiders.

Together they haul the flag down. It comes away with a rip, leaving a raw rectangle of pale stone.

Ta stands there a moment, breathing hard.

Shouts rise from the outer halls. The noise changes tenor—no longer surprise, but organized alarm. The palace finally understands.

In the courtyard, a bell begins to toll.

Shan Xi strides in from a side corridor, coat splashed with other people's blood, a roll of scrolls under her arm.

"We have ten minutes," she says. "Light it."

Sen moves like a spark. Oil sloshes. Cloth flares. Paper curls. Fire licks eagerly up the shelves where petitions and decrees have slept. The air thickens with the sweet, choking smell of burning lacquer and ink.

Ta breathes in the smoke like incense. His heart is pounding in his chest.

He turns toward the grand stair that leads to the inner courts, head high, knife swinging.

That is when he hears it.

Not the bell. Not the shouts. A sound underneath, regular, hard, like someone knocking on the world with iron knuckles.

The bell stops midswing, cut off by a barked order.

Ta freezes on the marble landing, looking down.

Not militia—those shambling, mix-matched thugs in half-armor. These are the republic's proper spine: naval marines in dark coats, helmets lacquered deep blue, the crest of the Baekjeon-kai painted in stark white. They move in ranks, not a clump. Faces grim, eyes forward.

And among them, the grey.

The front line wears the new coats: dull, uniform, stitched with reinforced shoulders and strange little pouches at the belt. Long muskets rest on their shoulders, bayonets glinting. They look like the Winged Tigers Ta saw in the pass, softened by Seop tailoring.

His throat closes. For a moment, the marble under his boots is not polished stone; it is mountain dust. The bell is the echo of the Needle's Ear. Përëk is alive again, laughing, about to die.

"Ta," Shan Xi snaps. "Back. Now."

He doesn't move.

The officer at the head of the column lifts her hand. Her hair is braided tight, her jaw set. She wears no helmet. She does not need one. Her presence is armor.

Kagawa Tomoe raises her musket.

Her voice carries up the stair, clear and quiet. "Front rank," she says. "Ready."

The muzzles come down in one smooth motion, wooden stocks slotting into shoulders.

Ta hears the scrape of ramrods, the click of flints. His chest is a drum.

"Ta!" Shan Xi barks, already moving, sabre coming up, fan snapping open in her left hand like a steel petal.

He flinches at the crack before it arrives. His body remembers the first volley. The world squeezes.

"Fire," Tomoe says.

The volley tears the air.

Smoke explodes from the muzzles, a wall of white that rears like surf. The sound is a single terrible chord. Men around Ta jerk and fall, blood misting the stair. A pirate's shoulder opens like rotten fruit. Another's jaw vanishes. Stone chips sing through the air.

Ta feels the impact before he hears it.

Something hits his neck just above the collarbone, a punch that is all heat and force. His head snaps sideways. For a heartbeat he thinks someone has thrown a rock at him. Then wet warmth floods down his chest.

He drops, the world tilting. Smoke pours over him. He hears someone shouting his name from very far away.

He knows this feeling. The helpless drop. The way his mind scrabbles for purchase and finds only empty air.

If Puripal were here, he thinks wildly, stupidly. If Dukar, if Notso—if I hadn't insisted on playing the hero—

The thought dissolves into a hot, wet gurgle.

He hits the stair.

Pragya and Pragati are there before the second volley.

"Neck," Pragya snaps, hands already on him. Blood pulses between her fingers. "Entrance here. No exit. That's good."

"That's terrible. Breath sounds?" Pragati says, her voice high and thin with professional terror.

Ta tries to say something witty. A joke about nice girls putting their hands on his throat. All that comes out is a bubbling hiss.

"Not talking is an improvement," Pragya mutters automatically.

"Shut up and press," Pragati says. She jams wadding against the wound, leans her weight on it. Blood soaks her sleeve to the elbow in a heartbeat. "If it's the big artery he's dead already. If it's only the… less big artery he's maybe dead in a minute. Very encouraging."

"Hold," Pragya says. "Hold." She wedges her knee under his shoulder to keep his airway open, slaps his cheek. "Hey. Sand-Fox. If you die, we will be very annoyed. I just learned your actual pulse too."

His eyes roll toward her. He sees twin faces above him, smeared with his blood. His hearing tunnels. The noise of battle recedes until it is just a high whine in his skull.

"For what it's worth," Pragya says, which is the sort of thing you only say to men on the edge, "your plan was mathematically interesting."

"And ethically disastrous," Pragati adds. "Do not make us tell the pretty boy he was right. You die, and we have to admit that, and that will kill us."

He tries to laugh. The sound is horrific.

"Out!" Shan Xi snarls, stepping over him, fan catching a stray musket ball with a metallic ting. The ball falls, flattened, at her feet.

She grins at Tomoe through the smoke. It is not a nice grin.

"Admiral," she calls. "I was wondering when you'd bring your floating sticks ashore."

Tomoe lowers the spent musket, hands it back to a marine without looking. A second musket slides into her palm. Behind her, two lines begin the practiced dance of reload and aim.

"Captain," Tomoe replies. Her voice is very even. "You should have stayed on the water. Fire travels faster on land."

She slides the musket to the crook of her arm, frees her other hand, and takes up her naginata from where an attendant holds it.

Its blade gleams pale in the rising firelight.

"Pragya. Pragati," Shan Xi says without taking her eyes off Tomoe. "Get him out. If he dies, I will be… inconvenienced."

"Medically speaking, he's already dead," Pragya says, tightening her grip.

"Then resurrect him," Shan Xi snaps. "I'm busy."

She steps forward, fan raised, sabre low.

Tomoe gives a quick, sharp order. The musketeers peel aside like a curtain, making a corridor. She walks down it, naginata balanced, musket in her left hand, eyes never leaving Shan Xi.

They meet halfway up the marble stair, between a fallen statue and a burning banner.

"Funny," Shan Xi says. "I always thought the republic's pet sailor would be taller."

"I always thought the pirate queen would know how to count odds," Tomoe replies. "Yet here you are. Outnumbered. Outgunned. Again."

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Shan Xi flicks the fan. Light beads along its steel ribs. "I never liked numbers," she says.

Tomoe smiles, short and sharp.

She moves first.

The musket barks, point-blank. Shan Xi snaps the fan across her body. The shot punches through two of the ribs, twisting them, and grazes her shoulder. Pain flares. She rides it. The impact shoves her sideways instead of back.

Tomoe drops the musket, now empty, and swings the naginata in a broad arc. The blade sings. Shan Xi ducks, sabre flashing up to catch the haft, metal screeching. The force drives her to one knee.

Around them, marines and pirates clash. The palace howls. Fire eats tapestries. A beam groans as its supports char.

"You could have been an admiral," Tomoe says, pressing down, voice calm despite the effort. "You have the mind for it. The cruelty too. Instead you chose chaos."

Shan Xi bares her teeth. "Chaos and I get along. Admiralty requires discipline." She wrenches, twists the naginata aside, and slashes at Tomoe's midsection.

Tomoe spins, the blade whispering past her coat. Shan Xi's sabre cuts cloth, not flesh. They separate by a breath, panting.

They crash together again.

Tomoe uses the naginata's reach, carving lines in the air that force Shan Xi back. Shan Xi uses the fan to disrupt, to turn slicing arcs into glancing blows, the steel ribs ringing with each impact. Her sabre darts, looking for openings: a thigh, a wrist, the hollow at the collarbone. Tomoe's footwork is textbook perfect, every step measured, weight centred. Shan Xi's is improvisation, a dance stolen from a dozen fight pits and ship decks.

Shan Xi pants, ducking under another swing. Tomoe pivots, bringing the butt of the naginata around to smash at Shan Xi's temple. Shan Xi blocks with the fan. The jolt rattles her teeth. The fan cracks along one hinge.

A portion of the ceiling chooses this moment to surrender. A chunk of plaster and gilding tears free and slams into the floor beside them, sending shards knifing into the melee. A marine goes down screaming, half-buried.

"Admiral!" someone shouts.

Tomoe doesn't look away. "Hold the line," she snaps.

Shan Xi grins, wild and bright. "Your house is burning down around your ears and you still stand on ceremony. I almost respect that."

"The republic survives buildings," Tomoe says. "Can you say the same of your ship?"

The naginata's blade kisses Shan Xi's cheek, opening a shallow line. Blood beads.

Shan Xi swears, and her sabre answers, flicking out in a tight coupe, scoring a line across Tomoe's brow. Blood trickles into Tomoe's eye. She blinks, annoyed more than hurt.

They circle, each weighing the other, each feeling the building groan around them.

Outside, someone screams, "The roof! The roof!"

Heat thickens. Smoke rolls in, turning air into soup. The flames have leaped a corridor somewhere; firelight spills along the stair, painting Tomoe in flickering orange, Shan Xi in red.

"Admiral," a marine coughs from below. "Orders?"

Tomoe's jaw works. She looks past Shan Xi for the first time, up toward the main hall. The beams there glow dully. Another crack spiderwebs the plaster overhead.

"If we stay, we die for nothing," she says.

Shan Xi arches a brow. "You say that like dying for something would make more sense."

Tomoe steps back, naginata coming to rest across her body, a barrier rather than a spear. "Another time, Captain," she says.

Shan Xi exhales, relief and frustration intertwined. "Try bringing fewer guns next time," she says. "It makes conversation awkward."

Tomoe gives her a thin smile. "Try bringing a better neck."

She turns, barking orders. "Fall back! Bucket lines on the east wing! Leave the west—if it burns, it burns."

Marines peel away, disciplined even in retreat. They drag their wounded, haul fallen comrades, kick open side doors. The palace stairs become a river of uniforms.

Shan Xi stands alone for a heartbeat, sabre lowered, fan dangling from torn ribs.

Then Pragati's voice cuts through the crackle of fire. "Shan Xi!"

She spins.

The twins stagger under Ta's weight, hauling him between them, his boots scraping. His skin is grey, his eyes half-lidded. The bandage at his neck is already red-black, their fingers plunged into it.

"He thinks he's funny," Pragya pants. "He's wrong. Move."

Shan Xi is at their side in three strides.

"Which exit?" she demands.

"Any that isn't falling down," Pragati says. "Preferably one with air."

Shan Xi glances up at the nearest window. Smoke claws at the frame. The courtyard beyond is a chaos of flames, militia, and panicked scribes.

"Left," she says. "Service stairs. Carriage yard."

The carriage yard is hell.

Flames paint the cobbles. Oil from an overturned lantern has turned one puddle into a black, burning mirror. Militia sprint with buckets, shouting, forming lines that break whenever a pirate crashes through them. A horse kicks itself free of its hitching post and bolts, mane on fire, eyes wild. The air is a choke of smoke and ash.

Into this, Shan Xi bursts with Ta and the twins and half a dozen pirates, stumbling out of a servant's arch as the door behind them belches heat.

She almost runs straight into the carriage.

The same carriage that, moments ago, rattled to a halt with Baek Miju inside.

Now its door is flung open. Miju stands beside it, katana already in her hand, gaze fixed on the inferno of her burning senate.

Shan Xi skids to a stop, dragging Ta's limp arm from underfoot, blinking smoke from her eyes.

"Ah," she says hoarsely. "Administrative oversight. We forgot to schedule you a fire drill."

Miju turns her head.

Her gaze drops, takes in Shan Xi's coat, the Blood Lotus patch, the blood. Takes in Ta's limp form. Takes in the twins' hands at his throat. Takes in, inside the carriage, Hanae's pale face, Lizi's bound wrists, Yotaka's wide eyes.

"Convenient," she says. "All my vermin in one cart."

She steps forward.

Her katana slides free of its scabbard with a sibilant hiss. The blade catches the firelight, a straight line of judgment.

"Wait," Yorin says sharply from inside the carriage. "We agreed—"

"We agreed nothing about pirates in my courtyard," Miju snaps.

She raises the sword.

Shan Xi moves without thinking, stepping between the blade and the carriage door, sabre up, fan spread despite its broken rib.

"Careful," she says. "You swing that thing, you'll invalidate a lot of paperwork."

Miju's lip curls. "Stand aside, wharf-trash. This is a matter of state."

Behind her, Lizi shouts, "Captain!"

Hanae's voice is low, urgent. "Shan Xi, don't—"

"Shut up," Shan Xi says cheerfully. "I'm having an argument."

Miju's eyes narrow. Her stance lowers, blade angling. "You die first," she says.

"Duck," someone says.

At first Shan Xi thinks it's Yotaka, or one of the twins. Then she realizes the word came from above. She looks up.

For a heartbeat, the sky is hooves.

Yohazatz cavalry pour through the outer gate like a flood of metal and muscle. They are not in full formation—this is a wedge improvised on the run—but it is still terrifying. Horses foam and scream, nostrils flared, hooves striking sparks. Riders lean low in the saddles, spears leveled.

Puripal rides at the point, hair streaming, coat flapping. Temej is on his flank, teeth bared, a Tepr curse already half-formed.

"Down!" Shan Xi roars.

She grabs Yotaka by the front of his tunic and yanks him bodily from the carriage as the first horse slams into the Baekjeon-kai line.

Impact turns the courtyard into chaos.

Spears punch into shields. Shields splinter. A militia man flies backward, helmet spinning. Another goes under a panicked horse's hooves with a crunch that cuts through the roar. A rider tumbles, rolls, comes up swinging a sabre.

Miju is forced to leap aside or be trampled. Her katana flashes, severing a spearhead, then a horse's bridle. The animal screams, rears, crashes into another, taking both down in a tangle of limbs and iron.

Yorin ducks back into the carriage, slamming the door as a rider's boot narrowly misses her head. The coach lurches, half-lifted by the press, then shudders as a wheel snaps.

"Move!" Shan Xi snarls.

She shoves Lizi out of the carriage, into the swirl, then grabs Yotaka again. He clings, coughing, eyes wide with shock and smoke.

Hanae scrambles after them, only to be shoved back by someone's shoulder as militia pile toward the carriage to protect their leaders. A shield wall forms by reflex around Miju and the vehicle, blades out.

For a moment, Shan Xi sees Hanae's face through a gap: hair wild, eyes blazing.

They lock eyes.

"Go!" Hanae mouths, voice lost in the din.

Shan Xi hesitates.

A riderless horse slams into the carriage then, spinning it. The jolt knocks Yotaka from her grip. He stumbles sideways, colliding with Lizi, who grabs him by reflex. Their momentum carries them toward a narrow service arch, half-hidden by smoke.

"Cap'n!" a pirate yells. "Roof's coming down!"

He's right. The main hall behind them belches flame. A cornice cracks, then falls, smashing a section of courtyard and sending a shock wave of dust.

Puripal's voice cuts through, hoarse. "Retreat! Pull out! We've opened the gap—use it!"

The gap is an alley, half-choked with barrels and a laundry line that starts to smoulder from stray embers.

Shan Xi looks from the alley to the carriage, to Miju already carving her way toward them, to Hanae pressed back by a shield, to Ta being dragged through the arch by the twins like a blood-slicked bundle.

Choice snaps tight like a knot.

"Later, Beautiful," she snarls at Miju, and spits in the woman's direction. It lands on a shield instead. "I have better company."

She seizes Lizi's collar with one hand, Yotaka's with the other, and dives for the alley.

Behind them, the courtyard collapses into a single roiling scene: cavalry wheeling, militia forming and reforming, Miju a pale blade in the centre of it, Yorin clutching her folio like a sacrament, Hanae vanishing behind a wall of shields and smoke.

Sen's spider line, still anchored to a parapet, snaps in the heat, whipping down like a burning snake.

The alley swallows Shan Xi, Lizi, Yotaka, Ta, the twins, and a handful of pirates. A falling beam crashes down behind them, sealing the gap with fire and stone.

The roar of the courtyard cuts off.

In the sudden, narrow dark of the service lane, they stand panting, coughing, blinking soot from their eyes.

"Roll call," she says roughly, voice raw. "Who's not dead?"

Lizi wheezes. "I'd raise my hand but I think they're all borrowed."

Yotaka coughs into his sleeve, eyes wet. "Present."

Pragya and Pragati speak together, hands still clamped on Ta's neck. "Conditionally alive."

Shan Xi looks back at the wall of fire cutting them off from the courtyard, from Hanae, from the Triumvirate.

Smoke claws at the sky. Hooves thunder faintly, retreating or regrouping, she can't tell.

"We're separated," Yotaka says quietly.

Shan Xi adjusts her grip on her sabre. The broken fan hangs limp at her side.

Then she moves.

It is not a flourish, not a duel, not anything that belongs on a battlefield. It is a step and a cut, as simple and efficient as breathing. Yotaka is still looking back at the wall of fire, lips parted to say something else—maybe "what now"—when the sabre's point punches cleanly between his ribs.

For an instant, he doesn't seem to understand that the world has changed.

His body jerks. His eyes lower, as if he's dropped something. They find the steel jutting from his chest, dark already, slick, impossibly there.

"C–" he tries, then coughs. Blood spatters his chin in a small, surprised bloom.

Lizi's brain refuses the picture. It simply rejects it. Her mouth gets there first.

"NO!"

Her scream tears out of her like something with claws. She lunges, too late, grabbing for him as Shan Xi yanks the blade free. The withdrawal is almost tender. Yotaka's knees give. Lizi catches him clumsily, his weight folding into her arms like a wet sail.

He looks up at her, blinking, eyes blown wide.

"I—" he starts.

He doesn't find the rest. His breath leaves him in a long, soft exhale against her collarbone, warm for a heartbeat, then nothing at all.

The alley shrinks around the sound of Lizi's sob, raw and animal.

Shan Xi stands over them, sabre dripping. Her face is pale under the soot, eyes too bright. The broken fan hangs from her left hand, forgotten.

"Good," she says hoarsely. "Good. Finally."

Pragya and Pragati stare, hands still clamped on Ta's neck, frozen in place.

"Finally," Shan Xi repeats, louder, as if she's forcing the word through a rusted hinge. "My head's clear. No more… soft thoughts. No more 'maybe this one' or 'maybe that one.'"

She wipes the sabre on the hem of her coat. It leaves a wide, obscene smear.

"I've made mistakes," she says. "Fewer than most kings, more than I care to count. I let a boy's face talk me into compromises. I let princes bargain with my crew. I let thrones become… sentimental."

She laughs then, a short, cracked sound.

"All kings must die," she says. "That's the only clean line left. Not just the fat ones drunk on power. Not just the old monsters. The innocent ones. The clever girls with good speeches. The boys who still say 'please' when they ask for water. All of them. Every crown taken off a neck is one less story about how we were meant to kneel."

Lizi clutches Yotaka tighter. His blood runs over her hands, hot, quickly cooling. She shakes her head, tears cutting channels through the ash on her cheeks.

"He was a child," she chokes. "He was a child, Cap—"

"And that's why it matters," Shan Xi cuts in, voice sharp enough to flay. "If the line bends for a sweet face, it bends for all of them. If we say 'not this king, he's nice,' we're back where we started with prettier curtains."

Her gaze flicks to Ta—grey, barely breathing—then to the twins.

"You two," she says. "Can you use it?"

Pragya blinks. "Use… what?"

Shan Xi flicks the bloody sabre toward Yotaka, toward the spreading red on the cobbles.

"His blood," she says. "You said his neck was hit, not his heart. Ta's bleeding out. Can you—" she makes a vague, impatient gesture with the sabre, as if sketching pipes in the air— "move it. From one body to another. Patch the bastard with royal scrap."

Pragati swallows. "You mean… a transfusion."

"Is that a word?" Shan Xi says.

Both twins glance down at Ta. The bandage at his neck is a dark, oozing knot under their fingers. His pulse trembles against Pragya's palm.

"In theory," Pragya says slowly, medical instinct surfacing even through the shock. "Yes. If they're the same general type. But they are young. Healthy. It could work. But not here."

"We need somewhere stable," Pragati adds, voice thin. "Clean instruments. Boiled needles."

Shan Xi nods, once. Decision slots into place like a blade in a sheath. "I'll get you there."

She jerks her chin at Yotaka's body in Lizi's lap.

"Look," she says, almost gently. "Ta fought his Khan to keep this island from becoming a stable. He spat in the face of a empire and then turned around to drag fools like me into a better war. That is what a hero looks like."

She taps her own forehead with the hilt of the sabre. "I am done wasting heroes because I'm squeamish about princes. I am not a nurse, I am a pirate. If it takes a hundred Yotakas to keep one Ta breathing, I will stack their corpses myself."

The words hang in the alley, heavy as a noose.

Even the distant thunder of hooves feels further away for a moment, like the world itself is holding its breath.

Lizi's laugh breaks it.

It's a thin, hysterical sound. She doesn't seem to know it's coming until it's out.

"A hundred," she repeats, staring up at Shan Xi with eyes that look too big for her face. "You'd… you'd kill a hundred of him."

Her gaze drops to Yotaka's slack, blood-slick face. A smear of ash sits on his cheek where her thumb brushed him once, earlier, while they planned stupid futures over stolen porridge.

She presses her hand there again, as if she can rub life back in like warmth.

"We don't have time," Shan Xi says, ignoring Lizi. She gestures to Ta. "He does not have time. Twins, can you move him?"

Pragya nods. "Yes," she says. "If we get him to a table in the next quarter hour, maybe. If we don't get stopped, maybe. If the universe decides not to spit in our faces for once."

"Ha," Shan Xi says. "Ambitious."

She sheathes the sabre with a firm, final motion.

"Give it to me," she says to Lizi.

Lizi does not move.

Her fingers are locked in Yotaka's tunic, knuckles bone-white under the blood. Her eyes are fixed on his, as if waiting for a blink that is never going to come.

"Lizi," Shan Xi says.

Nothing.

Shan Xi crouches in front of her. The movement is slow, painful; somewhere in all this she's collected a dozen impacts, a dozen bruises, a slice along her ribs. Ash has settled in her hair like early snow.

Lizi looks through her.

"You stabbed a boy who wanted to be better than his father," she says, voice dull. "Should children pay for their parents' sins?"

She lifts her hand. It shakes. For a moment Shan Xi thinks she is reaching for her, to strike or cling. Instead Lizi just stares at the blood on her own palm, as if she's never seen the color before.

"It's on me too," she murmurs. "Should've seen it. Should've known. You were always going to do this."

"Good," Shan Xi says, and there is something like self-disgust under the steel. "Hate me later. Hunt me later. For now, carry your end or get out of the way."

She stands, turns to the twins. "Take Ta. I'll clear the street and come with the royal donor in a minute."

Pragya and Pragati begin to lift, moving by habit, by training, by sheer refusal to let one more patient go without a fight. They work around Yotaka's body as if it's just another piece of debris in a narrowing corridor.

Lizi does not help.

She kneels in the alley, holding what's left of a prince who will never be a king, eyes wide and empty as the palace windows behind them.

The city burns. The republic howls. A bell dies mid-ring as its tower collapses.

Inside Lizi's head, everything goes very, very quiet.