Lizi doesn’t remember standing up.

  One moment she is in the alley on her knees with a dead prince in her arms; the next the prince is gone, carried away like a sack of meat for some impossible blood-ritual, and she is just… there. Empty arms. Blood on her dress that isn’t hers. Thumb still remembering the shape of his cheekbone.

  The city roars around her and through her. Flames, muskets, the distant crash of walls giving up. It all feels far away, like a play on the other side of a thin wall.

  She staggers out of the alley on automatic, following the nearest intact piece of street. Her feet know Bo’anem whether her mind is attached or not. Left to avoid the fallen balcony, right to dodge the courtyard where the militia like to shoot people in groups, duck under the laundry line that somehow still has socks on it while the capital burns.

  Her hands shake.

  She stares at them, and thinks, wildly, of the Slump roof where it started.

  Aram’s stolen blanket spread on hot tiles. Hanae’s feet dangling over the edge, bare toes inches from a three-story drop. The three of them passing a chipped cup of rice wine back and forth, grimacing like adults. Aram humming a song her mother used to sing before the guards took her. Hanae harmonizing without thinking. Lizi spinning between them, arms out, making fun of both their voices.

  “Who kills the king first?” Aram had asked, grinning, eyes shining with the mean joy of children in a cruel place.

  “I will,” Hanae had said. “With a cannon.”

  “I will,” Lizi had said. “With a brick.”

  “I will,” Aram had said again, softer. “With everyone’s help.”

  None of them ever said “my father.” Or “my uncle.” Or “the man who hits me when I speak.” That was understood. Home was the thing you didn’t name.

  They knew Hanae’s hands were rough from scrubbing floors that weren’t hers. Knew Aram flinched when someone grabbed her wrist too quickly. They knew Lizi always refused to talk about going back at night, only said, “I like the sky better.”

  They never asked why she came to the roof with a split lip and new bruises every few days. They never asked why she stopped talking entirely when someone mentioned uncles.

  Years later, she killed that uncle with the same hands she used to dance with. Knife in the kitchen, his breath thick with booze and cheap perfume, the sound he made when the blade went in—not noble, not dramatic, just wet and startled. She wiped his blood on his own wall. She took nothing. She walked out and did not go back. There was no ceremony. No last words.

  She never told Aram and Hanae. By the time she had a chance, she was already on the Blood Lotus, lying badly about “opportunities” and “promotion” and “don’t worry, I’ll come back with stories.”

  Now Aram is ash by a prison wall, Hanae is… somewhere, probably bleeding, and the first royal she ever genuinely liked is cooling on some table.

  Shan Xi’s words walk alongside her like a ghost.

  All kings must die.

  On the surface, it fits. The line is clean. The world they grew up in was built on crowns and titles and names that only mattered if you had the right mother. Every time they climbed a rope or stole bread or ducked a patrol it was because some king, somewhere, had decided their lives were worth less than his dinner.

  All kings must die is neat.

  But Yotaka was not neat.

  He was ten. Maybe eleven. He still tripped over loose paving stones and said “excuse me”. He talked about a just kingdom like it was a storybook he could step into if he just held his breath hard enough. He flinched when someone raised a hand too fast and apologized afterward as if that too were his fault.

  He wasn’t a king. He wasn’t even a prince, not really, not in the way the word is used when people curse. He was a human being who hadn’t had time to do anything unforgivable yet.

  He deserved, at minimum, the right to find his own ways to disappoint her.

  Lizi leans her shoulder against a soot-blackened wall and lets herself slide down until she’s sitting on the ground in a puddle that is either water or blood or both.

  “Maybe she’s right,” she mutters to nobody. “Maybe you would have become just like them. Maybe you would have grown up and believed your own speeches and sent people like me to die in tidy little wars. Maybe. But you didn’t get the chance to be anything else either, did you.”

  The city answers with another dull boom as something important collapses.

  She tilts her head back against the bricks and laughs once, short and ugly.

  “Congratulations, little prince,” she says. “You finally made it. You died for a cause. Not even yours, but—details.”

  The sky above Bo’anem is a greasy gray, smeared by smoke. Then, suddenly, it is not.

  A streak of blue-green fire tears up from the horizon, from the sea mouth. It screams as it goes, then bursts high above the water in a hard, metallic blossom. Silver spits from its heart, falling like teeth.

  Lizi squints. Her throat tightens.

  “That’s not ours,” she whispers.

  The Khan of Tepr. Naci’s hello.

  The second flare comes moments later, lower, messier, clawing its way up from the Slump. Yellow and dirty green, sparks coughing sideways instead of falling properly.

  She actually snorts.

  “Sen,” she says. “Still using the cheap powder, huh?”

  Her chest hurts around the laugh.

  Two messages. Sea and Slump. Alliance points on a burning map.

  It wasn’t in the plan, but in Lizi’s mind, there should be a third one. A flare for Shan Xi’s. The Blood Lotus’s. The captain’s answer to the storm and the gutters: We’re here too. We kept our end. The prince is alive. The pirates are in play.

  Except the prince is not alive.

  And Shan Xi has made a choice the storm did not authorize.

  The old Lizi—the roof-thief, the kitchen runaway, the girl who climbed onto the Blood Lotus deck and thought she’d been reborn—wants to curl around that betrayal and never look at it too closely. Shan Xi saved her, gave her steel and songs and a crew that called her sister. Shan Xi taught her to spit at kings and steered her through storms. Her whole adult life has been under that flag.

  But the flare in the sky is Naci’s, not Shan Xi’s.

  And what’s coming is bigger than one ship, one captain, one pirate queen’s theory of revolution.

  Lizi watches the blue-green blossom fade and feels something inside her unhook.

  She has always loved storms. The way they don’t ask permission. The way they flatten rich houses and poor roofs without checking who paid more taxes. The way you either get out of the way or you don’t, and the sky doesn’t care.

  Naci is a storm. Not perfect, not pure—storms never are—but honest in her destruction.

  Shan Xi is just a knife. Necessary, useful, terrifying. Also, occasionally, wrong.

  Lizi can live with knives being wrong. She has to. She has carried one too long herself to pretend otherwise.

  But storms? Storms, you follow or you die.

  She pushes herself to her feet, palms skidding on the wall.

  “All right,” she says, voice raw. “Fine.”

  She wipes her face with the back of her hand. It doesn’t help much.

  “You want a world where kings are a memory and not a job title,” she mutters to the absent flare. “You want to raze this whole rotten board and start over. Good. Me too. But you should probably know your ally wants you dead now.”

  The storm cannot hear her. Not like this.

  But there is one thing Naci will hear.

  Lizi turns at a corner and there she is again.

  Hanae’s base. Half the shutters are broken from the last raid. The door is still kicked open.

  Inside, the main room is a chaos of overturned crates and scattered papers, signs of the militia’s rough search. A cot lies on its side, straw spilling like guts. A familiar chart of Bo’anem’s sewers flaps on the wall, half-torn.

  Lizi’s chest tightens when she sees Hanae’s handwriting on a margin note: don’t let Yotaka see this.

  Yotaka won’t see anything anymore. Good for him.

  At the back, under a tarp that used to be a sail, is the thing she’s come for: a stubby brass tube mounted on a wooden frame, its muzzle scorched black from too many bad ideas. It looks like an angry cooking pot that decided to make something of itself.

  The cannon.

  Really it’s a portable mortar, a signal tube, a “perfectly safe device” according to Shan Xi.

  “Just in case you need to tell each other something from far away,” she’d said, eyes bright. “Or set the sky on fire. Both good.”

  Lizi had left it here.

  “Look at you,” she tells the thing. “Little dragon.”

  It takes all her strength to carry it to the open loading bay that faces the harbor. Her shoulders ache. An old cut in her side pulls and complains.

  “Stop whining,” she tells her own body. “We’ve carried it many times.”

  She props the frame on a stack of crates so it points up and out, clear of the nearest rooflines.

  She fits the flare into the tube. It slides in with a satisfying, heavy thunk.

  She closes her eyes.

  “Naci,” she says, under her breath. “Storm-queen, wolf, whatever name you like. I’m yours. Not hers. Not anymore. This is my warning: the board is already bloodier than you think. Don’t trust the knife too far.”

  She opens her eyes.

  “Let’s talk,” she says to it.

  She strikes the flint. Sparks jump. The fuse catches with a hungry hiss, spitting.

  “Don’t explode in my face,” she tells the cannon. “I am very tired and I will haunt you personally.”

  The hiss climbs, racing into the tube.

  For a heartbeat, nothing happens.

  Then the cannon coughs like a dragon clearing its throat.

  A column of smoke and light punches out of it. The flare rockets up, shrieking, tearing a ragged hole through the low clouds of ash. Lizi’s hair whips around her face. The entire warehouse shudders.

  She runs to the doorway, wipes soot from her eyes with the back of her hand, and looks up.

  High above Bo’anem, the Blood Lotus’s firework claws into the sky and explodes—red petals, white core, a crooked last spray of sparks whipping sideways like a drunk starfall.

  ...

  The old customs fort at the mouth of the bay—once a damp, useless relic where clerks argued about tariffs—is now the heart of the Republic. Red-and-black banners hang from its teeth-like battlements. The warehouses around it are requisitioned as barracks and offices. Militia patrols march where fishmongers used to swear. Cannon mouths stare out to sea.

  Inside, Hanae sits in a chair bolted to the floor of an upper chamber, wrists chained to a ring. Her back aches. Her left knee throbs where a rifle butt found it. Blood has dried along her hairline in a crackle. The sea booms faintly through the stone, steady as a heartbeat that does not care about hers.

  A narrow window looks out toward the harbor. From here she can see masts like a forest of bare winter trees.

  The door opens with a clean, unhurried swing. Baek Miju steps in.

  Behind her comes Seo Yorin. Yorin’s gaze snaps first to Hanae, then flicks to the empty space where an admiral should be.

  “Any word from Tomoe?” she asks quietly, before Miju can speak.

  “Still missing,” reports the guard at the door. “Last seen near the hospital…” He gestures vaguely.

  Yorin’s mouth tightens. “Wonderful,” she mutters. “Our entire navy held together by a woman who’s probably flirting with death.”

  Miju doesn’t look at her. Her attention is already on Hanae, taking her in the way a butcher looks at an animal.

  “Citizen Mitsune Hanae,” Miju says pleasantly. “Or do you prefer ‘harmonist,’ ‘terrorist,’ ‘hero?’ Your comrades used many names.”

  “My friends called me Hanae,” Hanae replies. Her voice is hoarse, but it still works. “You can pick whichever one fits your speech best.”

  “‘Hanae’ it is,” Miju says, as if granting a small favor. She settles into the chair opposite, crossing one leg over the other. The chains at Hanae’s wrists clink softly when she shifts.

  Miju steeples her fingers. “Let us discuss what happened earlier,” she says. “You, a fugitive harmonist. The prince of the old world. A pirate queen burning my palace. Northern barbarian warbands as backup.” Her smile is thin. “That’s quite a cast.”

  “The catering was terrible,” Hanae says. “I don’t recommend the bullets.”

  Yorin exhales a sound that might be an involuntary laugh, quickly strangled.

  Miju’s eyes crinkle, amused despite herself. “I admire your composure,” she says. “I hope you keep it. I am genuinely curious.” She leans in a touch. “Why were pirates and northern cavalry working together to rescue a prince and two terrorists?”

  Hanae licks cracked lips. The taste of old smoke clings there. “They weren’t,” she says. “Not as far as I know.’”

  “Coincidence,” Miju echoes. She lets the word lounge on her tongue like it’s something she might eat. “You expect me to believe that the Khan of Tepr and the Blood Lotus just happened to converge on my capital the same afternoon you chose to assault my palace.”

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  Hanae shrugs as much as the chains allow. “Your city’s very fashionable,” she says. “Everyone wants a piece right now.”

  “That’s not an answer,” Miju says.

  “It’s the only one I have,” Hanae replies. “I knew the Khan was coming. I didn’t know it would be this week. Or that Shan Xi would be here. Or that your palace would shed that much.”

  Miju’s gaze hardens. “The Khan of Tepr cannot be in two places at once,” she says. “Reports placed her at Gigu, two days ago. Yet we fought riders in the street.”

  “Riders, yes,” Hanae says. “Khan, no. You think someone like her would sneak in without a speech?”

  Yorin shifts her weight. “We do have accounts of steppe scouts operating ahead of the main force,” she says quietly. “If the fleet approaches—”

  “—we will know because I will tell you,” Miju cuts in, without looking. “For now, we deal with the rot already inside the walls.”

  Her eyes return to Hanae. “If you won’t explain the cooperation, perhaps you will explain your allies. The Slump.” She tilts her head. “If I decide to cleanse it—block by block, house by house—how long before your friends notice?”

  Hanae smiles. “We have noses,” she says. “The Slump will smell your self-righteous piss long before your boots arrive.”

  “Bold,” Miju says. “Stupid, but bold. You know I can do it, yes? That I can light a match and call it sanitation?”

  “You can try,” Hanae says. “You’ll find out how well wet wood burns. Half your militiamen are Slump-born. The other half buy their fun there. You torch it, you lose beds and bribes. You like numbers too much to enjoy that.”

  Yorin’s eyebrow ticks up. It is, annoyingly, a fair point.

  Miju smiles.

  “I see,” she says. “You know my math. Good. Then we can skip the stupid threats and go to the interesting questions.” She leans back. “Tell me about the other woman. The one that was with you.”

  Hanae looks at the table. The wood is old ship timber, salted, scarred. Her pulse thrums against the iron around her wrists.

  “She’s nobody,” Hanae says. “Just a pirate.”

  Miju’s lashes lower. “And yet you risked yourself to drag her out,” she says. “And she shouted herself hoarse when you were taken.” She glances at Yorin. “Funny, isn’t it, how nobodies do that.”

  Yorin’s mouth tightens. She says nothing.

  Miju leans forward again, elbows on knees, voice dropping like a confidante’s. “I am going to ask you a question,” she says. “And you will be honest, not because you fear me, but because you need to say it out loud. Do you understand the difference?”

  Hanae stays quiet.

  Miju waits. She doesn’t rush. She lets the silence stretch until it starts to feel like pressure on Hanae’s skin.

  Yorin shifts her weight, uneasy. “We could—” she begins.

  Miju lifts one finger. It is not aimed at Hanae. Yorin goes silent.

  The sea thuds against the outer wall.

  Finally, Hanae exhales, a little too sharply.

  “Lizi,” she says. “Her name is Lizi.”

  Miju nods once, as if confirming an entry on a ledger. “I thought as much,” she murmurs. “A pirate of the Blood Lotus, yes?”

  Hanae’s jaw clenches. “Yes.”

  “And how,” Miju asks mildly, “does a Slump-born harmonist end up knowing a pirate of Shan Xi’s crew well enough to make her scream like that when you were taken?”

  Hanae’s mouth twists. “We were children together,” she says. “Before you made the Slump fashionable enough to police. We ran the same roofs, stole the same bread, broke the same windows.”

  “And then?” Miju prompts.

  “And then she left,” Hanae says, flat. “Joined Shan Xi. I stayed. We disagreed about the method for changing the world. She preferred knives in the back. I preferred pamphlets and bombs.”

  “Mm.” Miju’s fingers drum lightly on her knee. “And now? Is she your lover, now that Shin Aram is dead?”

  Yorin flinches at the bluntness. Hanae does not.

  “No,” she says. The word is sure. Then, quieter: “Aram was… Aram.”

  Miju tilts her head. “You loved her,” she says. Not a question.

  “Yes,” Hanae replies, without flinching. “With the part of me that believed in anything.”

  “And Lizi?” Miju says. “Did you hate her for leaving, or did you hate her for showing you how much easier it is to cut throats than to write manifestos?”

  Hanae’s mouth curves, painful and fond all at once. “Both,” she says. “I hated her very efficiently. I rehearsed speeches where I told her so. I was going to throw them at her like bricks.”

  “And now?” Miju asks softly. “Now that she came back for you. Now that she fought beside you. What do you feel for her?”

  Hanae’s eyes sting. It annoys her. She swallows and looks at the table again. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t hate her anymore.”

  Miju smiles. It starts small and grows like a crack in ice.

  “Honest at last,” she says. “That’s all I wanted.”

  She rises, smooth as a tide.

  Yorin shifts. “We still need her for—”

  Miju holds up her hand, palm outward, never taking her eyes off Hanae. “We have what we need,” she says. “The Slump’s favorite daughter. Blood ties to the pirates. Useful information. A story.”

  Hanae’s chains rattle as she straightens. Her back remembers how to brace. “What story?” she asks.

  “The one I will tell the city,” Miju replies. “They like stories. They liked yours for a while. Now they will like mine more.”

  She steps around the table, close enough that Hanae can smell the faint tang of steel oil on her.

  “How do you think Lizi will react,” Miju asks conversationally, “when she sees your head?”

  Hanae’s brain stutters. “What—”

  The saber is half-drawn already; Hanae doesn’t hear it.

  Miju’s arm moves in a single, economical arc.

  For Hanae, there isn’t time for fear to cross the room. There is the brief sensation of sudden wind at her throat, a hot sting, a pressure that vanishes so fast her body doesn’t believe it. The world tips sideways.

  For Yorin and the guards, it is brutally simple: a flash of curved steel, a wet, chopping sound, a spray.

  Hanae’s head leaves her shoulders as cleanly as if the blade has been measuring her neck all along.

  It hits the table edge, spins, and drops to the flagstones with a meaty crack. Black hair fans, slick with blood. Her eyes are still open, looking surprised and furious and faintly amused, as if she’s just realized she won an argument too late to enjoy it.

  Blood jets from the stump in two strong pulses before settling into a heavy pour. It soaks the front of her robe, runs off the chair, patters onto the stone in a spreading, irregular circle.

  One of the guards swears under his breath, then bites his tongue when Miju glances his way.

  “Put her somewhere visible,” Miju says calmly, wiping the blade on Hanae’s shoulder before sliding it home. “The harbor gate, perhaps. The Slump should see what their myths look like without bodies.”

  Yorin’s face has gone a shade lighter. “We could have used her,” she says, voice thin.

  “We did use her,” Miju says. She brushes a droplet of blood from her sleeve, irritated more at the stain than the corpse. “Now the others can decide whether they want to follow her example onto a pike or mine into a voting hall.”

  Yorin presses her lips together. “We already tried that with Shin Aram,” she mutters, mostly to herself.

  “The more the merrier,” Miju says. “This way the voice and her harmonist are reunited. They shall sing together forever.”

  Hanae’s head lies where it fell, cheek against cold stone, blood pooling around one ear.

  Outside, beyond the narrow window, the sky over Bo’anem cracks open.

  A streak of harsh blue-green fire claws up from the sea horizon and bursts above the bay in a hard, metallic blossom.

  From the Slump, low and crooked, a second flare sputters up—yellow and dirty green, sparks coughing sideways like a drunken crown.

  And from deeper in the city, near the heart of the harbor district, a third firework rises higher than both, then explodes in red and white petals that twist at the last moment into a lopsided, star-sprayed bloom.

  ...

  Naci stands by the rail, jaw tight, fingers drumming against the wood.

  Behind her, Bimen clears his throat in that careful Moukopl way that means I would like to panic, but with procedure.

  “We need to discuss this,” he says. “All of it. Now.”

  “Then discuss,” Naci says without turning. “You’re the admiral.”

  He winces slightly at the lack of Great, then gestures sharply. “Council. Quarterdeck. Move.”

  They gather around the big nailed-down crate that has become their traveling war table: Horohan with her arms folded, eyes already scanning the burning city; Borak still smelling faintly of powder; Pomogr broad and scarred, cloak flapping; Lang, a Seop admiral, now Banner, standing a half-step back, the habit of a man who used to advise people he also hated.

  Borak slaps the crate. “Well,” he says. “That was not in the plan.”

  “Understatement,” Bimen mutters. He taps the side of his nose toward the receding flare. “The Slump answering, that we expected. But that…” He points at where the Blood Lotus firework bloomed.

  Naci finally turns, eyes hooded. “Someone might be trying to impersonate Shan Xi.”

  Horohan snorts. “Or she is exactly herself and decided to stab the plan in the kidneys.”

  Pomogr scratches his beard. “Shan Xi doesn’t throw her colors for fun,” he says. “If she set that off without orders, something snapped.”

  “Most plausible,” Lang says quietly, “is that you have a quarrel inside the city. Between your Khan Regent and your pirate queen.”

  Naci’s gaze sharpens. “Why?”

  Lang lifts a shoulder. “You ask me to think as a Seop. I do.” He points toward Bo’anem, his tone flat, academic. “You have pirates with their own agenda, a city choking on its own revolutions, and three different foreign armies circling like sharks. That’s enough tension to make a statue crack. Add your Khan and Baek Miju’s paranoia and… conflict is not a question.”

  Naci grinds her teeth. “Puripal, Dukar, Temej—between the three of them they should be able to keep a single pirate pointed in the right direction.”

  Horohan raises an eyebrow. “You are the one who keeps saying pirates aren’t arrows, they’re thunder you rent by the day.”

  “Doesn’t mean they’re allowed to whirl off,” Naci snaps back, then catches herself. “I’m not just worried about the plan. I need to know why that flare went up.”

  Bimen rubs his temples. “We will know why when we can actually talk to someone who is not setting the sky on fire,” he says. “Until then, we have a very simple problem: a fortified harbor, a city that hates us on principle, and a fleet once again debating whether to ram itself face-first into a stone wall.”

  Horohan’s smile shows teeth. “Or,” she says, “we don’t use the wall.”

  Bimen eyes her warily. “I am listening with great fear.”

  “We know how the pirates came and went,” Horohan says. She nods toward the inner coastline, invisible in the smoke. “Sen’s way. They run through the Slump canals, yes? Shallow draft, hidden in the filth. We take that route. Land a spearhead under cover of night, straight into the Slump instead of wasting time politely asking the harbor for permission.”

  Bimen stares. “With what?” he demands. “Your steppe horses with oars? My war junks sitting on gutters like stranded whales? It works for one sloop with a drunk crew. It does not work for a Moukopl fleet. We would be noticed immediately.”

  Borak shrugs. “What if we are?” he says. “We’re here to be noticed.”

  Lang folds his hands behind his back. “If they see you coming through those channels, they will collapse them,” he says. “Or burn them. Or both. The Slump knows those routes; the Republic does too by now. They have batteries emplaced along the main harbor mouth, scorpions on the roofs, powder stored where you don’t expect it. If you crawl through their drains, they will drown you in them.”

  Pomogr grunts. “The plan was to storm from both sides,” he says. “Puripal’s horses on the beach, ships in the harbor. Force them to split.”

  “And give their artillery two perfect lines of fire,” Lang says. “No. You do not win a siege of Bo’anem by being clever. You win by being faster than their politics.”

  Bimen gestures at him. “Listen to the traitor, please.”

  Lang inclines his head, unoffended. “They cannot maintain a long war at sea,” he continues. “Not now. They’ve burned half their navy already chasing Moukopl junks and pirates, and Miju is bleeding the treasury dry to arm street militias. If you sit out there and trade cannon with them for weeks, their batteries will eat you. If you leave, they claim they drove you away. Your best shot is a sudden, overwhelming strike before they coordinate. Hit the harbor before they can close it with scuttled ships.”

  Borak leans forward, eyes bright. “We set fireships,” he suggests. “Send old hulls in full of pitch and powder, blow the chains, and ride the wake. Beautiful.”

  “Messy,” Bimen says, but he doesn’t dismiss it. “The currents in that harbor are treacherous. But Lang is right on one point: we cannot dance outside their walls forever. They have stone and we have wood. Time favors stone.”

  Naci listens, arms folded, gaze flicking between them and the dying flare-smudge.

  “I don’t care how we get in,” she says finally. “Harbor mouth, Slump drain, roof, sky. What matters is knowing what we are riding into. Shan Xi is supposed to be the knife on the inside. If she has turned on Puripal, or he on her, or both decided to reinvent war in my absence, I want to know before we commit.”

  Borak snorts. “So that’s all?” he says. “You just want to look first?”

  “Yes,” Naci says. “I would like not to charge a burning city blind, for once.”

  Borak’s grin widens. “Well, that’s easy.”

  He sticks two fingers in his mouth and lets out a piercing whistle.

  Sailors flinch. Horohan winces, covering one ear. Bimen swears in Moukopl.

  From the rigging, from the yardarms, from the shadows of the upper masts, shapes uncoil and drop.

  Twenty Tepr eagles hit the air at once like a breaking wave.

  Wings snap wide, catching the wind in explosive beats. Feathers flash bronze and black. The deck erupts in gusts and frantic shouting as men throw up arms to protect faces from talons.

  “Watch the lines!” Bimen yells. “If any of your birds cut a halyard, I will personally pluck them!”

  Borak laughs, delighted. “They know rigging better than you do, Admiral.”

  Uamopak sweeps low over Naci’s head, screaming, then wheels to perch on the rail beside her, claws gouging the wood. Khatan lands on a cannon, glaring at anyone foolish enough to come near.

  Naci’s shoulders loosen by a fraction. She reaches out and runs a knuckle along Uamopak’s breastbone. The big bird leans into it with a grating croon.

  “They’ll fly in this smoke?” Horohan asks.

  “They’ll fly through worse for fresh liver,” Borak says. He pulls a small leather case from his belt and flips it open, revealing tiny scrolls and thinner strips of oiled paper. “We send three to look, three to listen, the rest to scream at anything that shoots at them. Simple.”

  “Nothing about you is simple,” Bimen mutters.

  Borak ignores him. He nods at Naci. “Say what you want to know. Short words. They don’t read poetry.”

  Naci hesitates, then takes one of the little scrolls and chews the end thoughtfully.

  “‘Storm at sea. Ally flare not planned. Blood Lotus signal. Report truth. Find Puripal, Dukar, Temej, Sen, Shan Xi, Lizi. Any alive, send back word. Need harbor gates open,’” she says. “Can you fit that?”

  Borak scribbles a savage shorthand in Moukopl, all hooks and slashes. He rolls the strip and slides it into a tiny tube. He ties the tube to Uamopak’s leg with quick fingers.

  He does the same for three more, varying the wording—one addressed to “anyone with sense on land,” another to “whoever, really,” one just a crude sketch of the Blood Lotus flare pattern and a question mark.

  “Bring back gossip,” he murmurs to the birds.

  He steps back and snaps his fingers. Uamopak shrieks and launches, wings hammering. The rest follow, bursting upward in a ragged spiral. Within heartbeats they’re just darker smudges against the grey.

  ...

  The fleet rides at anchor, creaking and muttering. Lanterns are hooded. Men whisper or sit silent, staring at the burning city.

  From the quarterdeck Naci watches Bo’anem pulse and flicker. Sometimes the fires die down; sometimes a new blossom of orange flares in a different quarter, like a disease spreading under skin.

  Horohan cat-naps in coils of rope, one hand on Khatan’s jesses. Pomogr plays a miserable game of dice with himself and loses. Bimen walks his decks with the relentless pacing of a man afraid that if he stops, so will the ships.

  Hours crawl.

  Some eagles return with nothing but soot and two broken feathers. One limps back to the mast with a crossbow bolt through its wing, eyes furious, and has to be soothed by Borak and half a skinned rabbit.

  Uamopak does not come back.

  The night thins toward dawn.

  Naci is on the rail again when he does.

  He drops out of the paling sky in a messy spiral, one wing dragging. He lands hard on the rail in front of her, claws scraping deep grooves, and wobbles. Something small and wrapped is tied to his leg with a strip torn from a dark red sleeve.

  “Good boy,” Naci says softly, already reaching.

  Borak materializes at her elbow, fingers nimble. He works the knot loose and peels back filthy cloth.

  Inside is a twist of oiled paper and—tucked with it—a tiny charm: a painted wooden bead carved like a lotus petal, chipped at one edge.

  Borak unfolds the message and whistles low. “Oh,” he says. “That’s… not great.”

  He hands it to her.

  The handwriting is quick and cramped, ink blotched in places where the pen snagged.

  Khan,

  Blood Lotus flare mine. Shan Xi betrayed you. Admiral with her now. Harbor fort about to fall to them.

  If you want Bo’anem, you come now. I’ll find you.

  —Lizi

  Naci reads it twice. Her jaw works once.

  Over the city, new smoke rises from the low sprawl of the Slump. It is darker, thicker, more furious than the palace fires—a purge, not an accident.

  Bimen comes up behind her, sees her face, and doesn’t bother with pleasantries. “Well?” he asks. “Do I get to keep arguing about angles, or are we simply dying this morning?”

  Naci gives him the paper.

  He reads. His expression goes from skeptical to resigned to something like queasy admiration.

  “Of course,” he says. “Of course the pirates would betray you. What did you think, really?”

  Pomogr squints at the horizon. “Slump’s burning,” he says.

  “Then the harbor fort is thin on brains,” Lang says. “Miju wanted to watch the Slump burn since forever.”

  Naci’s eyes are on the rising plume. “Baek Miju puts torches to the poorest quarter,” she says softly. She looks at Bimen. “We are out of time.”

  Bimen stares at the map painted on the inside of his skull, at the careful arrows he had arranged there, all sweet and orderly.

  Then he folds them up and sets them on fire.

  “Signal the fleet,” he says. “All sails. Battle pennants. We ram the harbor mouth before they can drop chains or sink hulks.”

  Borak’s grin is pure predator. “Straight at them?”

  “Straight at them,” Naci says. “No more clever. We’ll improvise with the survivors.”

  Horohan whoops. “That’s more like it.”

  Lang nods once. “Fast is all you have left,” he says. “Pray their gunners were drafted for the Slump.”

  ...

  Most of the garrison in the harbor fort is on the walls or the guns. The inner rooms feel hollowed-out, echoing, as if the stone itself is waiting to see who owns it tomorrow.

  Seo Yorin sits at a desk that used to belong to an honest customs officer and now belongs to whatever the Republic is pretending to be today.

  Ledgers stack around her like fortifications: tax registers, casualty lists, requisitions, arrears. The ink on her fingers is darker than the old blood on the floor.

  “Fort repairs, cannon powder, sailor pay, Slump compensation… hah,” she mutters, scratching notes. “We can pay either the widows or the cooper guild. Perhaps they can marry and solve two problems at once.”

  Outside, the guns boom intermittently, testing ranges. The walls groan. Somewhere, a runner shouts about sails on the horizon.

  Yorin dips her brush again, lips pursed.

  The door slides open.

  “Tomoe?” Yorin doesn’t look up immediately. “You’re late. I expected your report many hours ago.”

  “I was busy,” Tomoe says.

  There is something in the way she says it—flat, scraped clean—that makes Yorin’s hand still on the page. She looks up.

  Tomoe stands framed in the doorway, armor scorched, hair singed along one side. Her naginata is in her hands, blade angled politely down. There is dried blood on the shaft. Her eyes are very, very clear.

  “Busy… counting,” Tomoe adds.

  Yorin blinks. “Counting what?”

  Tomoe tilts her head. “Options.”

  She steps into the room. The door swings shut behind her with a soft, final sound.

  “Where is the First Consul?” Tomoe asks.

  “At the Slump,” Yorin answers. “Personally overseeing the purge. I advised against. She said—” Yorin waves a hand. “It does not matter. She likes the sound of screams when she is angry.”

  “Mm,” Tomoe says. “She would.”

  Yorin’s eyes narrow. “Why?” she asks quietly. “What did you do, Admiral?”

  Tomoe’s smile does not reach her eyes. “I chose which ledger I wanted to belong in,” she says. “Turns out, not this one.”

  Before Yorin can decode that, the naginata moves.

  The blade slams through the ledger, the table, and Yorin’s midsection in one smooth drive. The force lifts her half out of her chair, back arched, brush flying from her hand to splatter ink across the ceiling.

  Her breath leaves her in a shocked, indignant sound.

  Tomoe steps in close, both hands on the shaft, and twists just enough to make everything under Yorin’s ribs go wrong.

  Yorin’s fingers scrabble at the wood. Blood spreads in a fan under the ledger.

  “You… have no… mandate,” she grits out.

  Tomoe leans in until their faces are inches apart. “On the contrary,” she murmurs. “I have two.”

  Bootsteps clatter in the corridor.

  The door slams open again, banging off the wall.

  Shan Xi strides in, coat scorched, sabre at her hip, broken fan tucked into her belt. A trio of pirates fan out behind her, grinning like they’ve found a tavern with no bouncer.

  “Aw,” Shan Xi says. “You started without me.”

  Tomoe doesn’t look away from Yorin. “This is a personal matter,” she says.

  Yorin glares at Shan Xi, face paling. “You—” she starts.

  Shan Xi doesn’t let her finish.

  She steps forward, draws her sabre, and in one clean, economical motion, slashes.

  The blade takes Yorin across the throat, deep and final. Blood sprays in a brief, bright arc, spattering the neat columns of her last page. Her eyes go wide, then glassy. Her body sags along the naginata’s shaft.

  Tomoe eases the weapon back, letting the corpse slide onto the desk amid her precious accounts.

  Silence hums in the room for a heartbeat.

  Then Shan Xi plants one boot on the fallen ledger, looks around at the fort’s stone walls, the stacks of Republic paperwork, the distant boom of incoming guns.

  She grins, wide and sharp.

  “Ladies and gentlemen! This harbor,” Shan Xi announces, “is now a pirate haven.”