The Burning God (The Poppy War Book 3)

The next morning they set off for the heart of enemy territory. They’d decided the Republican wartime headquarters was the most likely candidate for Kitay’s location. Nezha and Vaisra had to be on the front lines, and if they were making use of Kitay as anyone in their position should, then he’d be right there with them.

The battlefront had moved far west in a very short period of time. They traversed through Snake Province and crossed over the northern tip of Dragon Province, and found the juncture of the Western Murui and Southern Murui in Hare Province, where they stole a raft and made a quick trip into Boar Province. Every passing mile where Rin did not find evidence of the Southern Coalition’s resistance felt like another punch to the gut.

It meant Nezha had already pushed them this far across the country. It might mean they’d already been obliterated.

They tried their best to avoid civilians on their journey. That wasn’t hard. This stretch of central Nikan was a war-stricken cesspool, much of which had lain straight in the paths of the destroyed Four Gorges Dam. The refugees who remained were scarce, and the few straggling souls they glimpsed tended to keep to themselves.

Rin stared at the banks as their raft floated through Boar Province, trying to imagine how this region would have looked barely a year ago. Whole villages, townships, and cities had thrived here once. Then the dam broke with no warning, and hundreds of thousands of villagers had either drowned or fled down south toward Arlong. When the survivors returned, they found their villages submerged still under floodwaters, ancestral lands that had housed generations lost to the river.

The region still hadn’t recovered. The fields where once sorghum and barley crops grew lay under a sheet of water three inches thick, now rank from decomposing corpses. Occasionally, Rin glimpsed signs of life on the banks—either small camps of tents or tiny hamlets of no more than six or seven thatched huts. Never anything larger. These were subsistence hideaways, not long-term settlements.

It would take a long time for this region to sprout cities again. The destruction of the dam hadn’t been the only source of devastation. The Murui was already a fickle river, prone to breaking its banks on unpredictably rainy years, and by destroying all vegetation cover, this great flood had destroyed the region’s natural defenses. And before that, on their warpath inland, Mugenese soldiers had slashed and burned so many fields that they had ensured local starvation for years. Back in Ruijin, Rin had heard stories of children playing in the fields who had dug up explosives buried long ago, of children accidentally wiping out half their villages because they’d opened gas canisters in curiosity.

How many of those canisters still lurked hidden in the fields? Who was going to volunteer to find out?

Every day since the end of the Third Poppy War, Rin had learned that her victory on Speer mattered less and less. War hadn’t ended when Emperor Ryohai perished on the longbow island. War hadn’t ended when Vaisra’s army defeated the Imperial Navy at the Red Cliffs.

She’d been so stupid to once think that if she ended the Federation then she’d ended the hurting. War didn’t end, not so cleanly—it just kept building up in little hurts that piled on one another until they exploded afresh into raw new wounds.

Only when they reached the heart of Boar Province did they find evidence of recent fighting.

No—not fighting. Destruction was the better word. Rin saw the wreckage of thatched houses that still lay clumped near their foundations, instead of scattered in the patterns of older ruins. She saw scorch marks that hadn’t yet been wiped away by wind and rain. Here and there, in ditches and along the stands, she saw bodies that hadn’t fully decomposed—rotting flesh lumped over bones that hadn’t yet been picked clean.

This proved the civil war wasn’t over. Rin had been right—Vaisra hadn’t rewarded the south for betraying her. He must have turned his dirigibles on the Southern Coalition the moment Rin and Daji left for the Chuluu Korikh. He’d chased them into Boar Province, and Boar Province must have put up a resistance. They had no reason to trust the Republic; their warlord had been unceremoniously decapitated at Arlong days after Daji’s defeat. They must have rallied to the Southern Coalition’s side.

From the looks of it, Vaisra had thrashed them for their impudence.

Rin whistled. “What happened here?”

They’d turned a corner of the river onto a bizarre shoreline; the area where trees should have stood was burned and flattened, like some flaming giant had come trampling through on a mindless rampage.

“Same thing that happened last time,” Daji said. “They bring their bombers, and if they can’t find their enemy they attack indiscriminately. They flatten the terrain to make it harder for the rebels to hide.”

“But those aren’t bombing marks,” Rin said, still confused. “They’re not all in crater patterns.”

“No, that’s the jelly,” Jiang said.

“Jelly?”

“It’s what they used last time. Something the Gray Company invented in their towers. It catches fire when it hits any living things—plants, animals, people. We never figured out how to put it out—water and smothering don’t work. You have to wait for it to burn all the way through. And that takes a very long time.”

The implications terrified Rin. This meant the Hesperians didn’t just rule the skies; they also had flames that rivaled her own.

The destruction here was so much worse than the wreckage at Tikany. Boar Province must have fought so hard; that was the only thing that warranted retaliation on this scale. But they must have known they couldn’t win. How did it feel when the heavens rained down a fire that wouldn’t die? What was it like to fight the sky itself? She tried to imagine the moment when this forest turned into a chessboard of green, black, green, and black, when civilians running terrified through trees turned twitching and smoking into charcoal.

“The air campaigns are very clever, actually.” Daji trailed her fingers idly through the water. “You drop bombs over dense areas with no built-in defenses, so they think they’re entirely vulnerable. Then you fly your dirigibles over the widest possible area, so they know no one is safe no matter where they hide.”

She wasn’t speaking from conjecture, Rin realized. This was all from experience. Daji had fought this same war, decades before.

“You fly the airships at random schedules,” Daji continued. “Sometimes at day and night, until the locals are terrified even of going outside, even though they’re safer where their house won’t collapse on them. Then you’ve robbed them of everything. Sleep, food, comfort, security. No one dares move in the open, so you’ve cut off communications and industry, too.”

“Stop.” Rin didn’t want to hear any more. “I understand.”

Daji ignored her. “You drive them into total collapse. Fear turns into despair, despair to panic, and then panic into utter submission. It’s incredible, the power of psychological warfare. And all it takes is a couple of bombs.”

“Then what did you do?” Rin asked.

Daji blinked slowly at her as if the answer were obvious. “We went to the Pantheon, darling.”

“Things got a lot easier after that,” Jiang said. “I used to snatch them out of the sky like mosquitoes. Riga and I made it a game. Record time was four crafts in five seconds.”

He said this so casually that Rin couldn’t help but stare. Immediately, like a gnat had buzzed into his ear, he shook his head quickly and looked away.

Whoever had emerged from the Chuluu Korikh was not the man she’d known at Sinegard. The Master Jiang at Sinegard had no recollection of the Second Poppy War. But this Jiang made constant offhand references about it and then backpedaled quickly, as if he were dipping his toes in an ocean of memory just to see if he’d like it, then cringing away because the water was too cold.

The memory lapses weren’t the things about Jiang that bothered her. Ever since they’d left the Chuluu Korikh, she had been watching him, following his movements and vocal patterns to track the differences. He was refreshingly familiar and jarringly different all at once, often within the span of the same sentence. She couldn’t predict the switches in the timbre of his voice, the sudden sharpness of his gaze. Sometimes he was affable, eccentric. And other times he carried himself like a man who had fought and won wars.

Rin knew his Seal was eroding. But what did it mean? Did it happen gradually, one regained memory at a time, until he collected everything that he’d lost? Or would it be erratic and unpredictable, like the way Jiang approached everything else?

What confused her even more were the times when Jiang slipped almost fully back into his former skin, when he acted so much like the teacher she’d once known that every day, for brief pockets of time, she almost forgot that anything had changed.

He would tease her about her hair, which was shorn so messily near her temples that she looked like she’d been raised in the wild. He would tease her about her stump (“Kitay’s right, you should fix a blade on that”), about the Southern Coalition (“Losing a belt is one feat, losing an entire army is something else entirely”), about Altan (“You couldn’t even mention him without blushing, you hopeless child”), about Nezha (“Well, there’s no accounting for taste”). Those jokes would have prompted a slap if they’d come from anyone else, but when uttered in Jiang’s detached, deadpan delivery, they somehow made her laugh.

During long, boring afternoons floating down empty stretches of river, he would tilt his head back at the clear sky and belt out bawdy, ribald songs whose lyrics made Daji snort and Rin blush. Occasionally, he’d even spar with her, teetering back and forth on the uneven raft, teaching her mental tricks to fix her balance, and jabbing her in the side with his staff until she corrected her form.

At those times Rin felt like a student again, eager and happy, learning from a master she adored. But inevitably, his smile always slipped, his shoulders tensed, and the laughter went out of his eyes, as if the ghost of who he had been had abruptly fled.

Only once, nearly three weeks into their journey, when Daji had fallen asleep during Jiang’s watch rotation, did Rin work up the nerve to ask him about it.

“Get on with it,” Jiang said promptly as soon as she opened her mouth.

“Um—sorry, what?”

“You’ve been eyeing me like a lovestruck village girl since we left the mountain,” he said. “Go on. Proposition me.”

She wanted to both laugh and hit him. A pang of nostalgia hit her stomach like a club, and her questions scattered on her tongue. She couldn’t remember what she had wanted to ask him. She didn’t even know where to start.

His expression softened. “Are you trying to see if I remember you? Because I do, you know. You’re difficult to forget.”

“I know you do, but . . .” She felt tongue-tied and bewildered, the way she’d often felt during the years she’d spent as Jiang’s apprentice, groping at the truth about the gods before she even understood what she was looking for. She felt the absence of knowledge like a gap inside her. But she didn’t know how to phrase her questions, couldn’t trace the contours of what she lacked. “I suppose I wanted to know . . . well, the Seal, Daji said that—”

“You want to know what the Seal is doing to me.” Jiang’s voice took on a hard edge. “You’re wondering if I am the same man who trained you. I am not.”

Rin shuddered as memories rose unbidden to her mind: flashes of the vision the Sorqan Sira had once showed her, a nightmare of savaged corpses and manic laughter. “Then are you . . .”

“The Gatekeeper?” Jiang tilted his head. “Riga’s right hand? The man who overthrew the Mugenese? No. I don’t think I am him, either.”

“I don’t understand.”

“How can I describe it?” He paused, tapping at his chin. “It’s like seeing a warped reflection in a mirror. Sometimes we are the same and sometimes we are not; sometimes he moves with me, and sometimes he acts of his own volition. Sometimes I catch glimpses of his past, but it’s like I’m watching from far away like a helpless observer, and that—”

He broke off, wincing, and pressed his fingers against his temples. Rin watched the headache pass; she’d witnessed these spasms before. They never lasted more than several seconds.

“And other times?” she prompted, after the lines around his eyes relaxed.

“Other times the memories are from my perspective, but it’s like I’m experiencing them for the first time. For him, it’s a memory. He already knows what happened. But for me, it’s like watching a story unfold, but I don’t know its ending. The only thing I do know, with absolute certainty, is that I did it. I see the bodies, and I know I’m responsible.”

Rin tried to wrap her head around this, and failed. She couldn’t see how one could live with two different sets of memories, belonging to two different personalities, and still remain sane.

“Does it hurt?” she asked.

“Knowing what I’ve done? Yes, it hurts. Unlike anything you could ever imagine.”

Rin didn’t have to imagine. She knew very well how it felt for a chasm of guilt to eat at her soul, to try to sleep when an abyss of vengeful souls whispered that she’d put them there, and for that she deserved to die.

But she had owned her memories. She knew what she’d done, and she’d come to terms with it. How did Jiang relate to his crimes? How could he take responsibility for them if he still couldn’t identify with the person who had done them? And if he couldn’t face his own past, couldn’t even recognize it as his, was he doomed to remain a divided man, trapped in the schism of his psyche?

She phrased her next question carefully. She could tell she’d pushed him to the edge—he looked pale and skittish, ready to bolt if she said the wrong thing. She was reminded of her time at the Academy, when she’d had to mince and contort her words so that Jiang wouldn’t mock them, skirt them, or simply pretend she hadn’t spoken.

She understood now what he had been afraid of.

“Do you think . . .” She swallowed, shook her head, and started over. “Do you think you’ll transform back to the person you were supposed to be? Before the Seal?”

“Is that who you want me to become?” he inquired.

“I think that’s the man we need,” she said. She blurted out her next words before her boldness receded. “But the Sorqan Sira said that man was a monster.”

He didn’t answer for a while. He sat back, watching the shore, trailing his fingers through the murky water. She couldn’t tell what was going on behind those pale, pale eyes.

“The Sorqan Sira was right,” he said at last.

Rin had thought—hoped, really—that when she came near enough to Kitay, she’d start sensing his presence, a warm familiarity that might gradually strengthen as she drew closer. She didn’t think it would be so sudden. One morning she woke up shaking and gasping, nerves tingling like she’d been set on fire.

“What’s wrong?” Daji asked sharply.

“Nothing, I’m . . .” Rin took several deep breaths, trying to pin down what had changed. She felt as if she’d been slowly drowning without realizing it until one day, abruptly, she broke for air. “I think we’re close.”

“It’s your anchor.” It wasn’t a question; Jiang sounded certain. “How do you feel?”

“It’s like—like I’m whole again.” She struggled to articulate the feeling. It wasn’t as if she could read Kitay’s thoughts or sense his emotions. She still hadn’t received any messages from him, not even scars in her skin. But she knew, as surely as she knew that the sun would set, that he was close. “It’s as if—you know how when you’re ill for a long time, you forget how it feels to be healthy? You get used to your head ringing, your ears being blocked, or your nose being stuffed—and you don’t even notice you’re not right anymore. Until you are.”

She wasn’t sure she’d made sense; the words sounded stupid tumbling out of her mouth. But Jiang and Daji only nodded.

Of course they understood. They were the only ones who could understand.

“Soon you’ll start feeling his pain,” Daji said. “If he’s suffered any. That’ll give us some clue about how he’s been treated. And that feeling will get stronger and stronger the closer we get. Convenient, no? Our very own homing pigeon.”

Their suspicions had been correct—Kitay was being held right on the Republican battlefront. The next morning, after long weeks on a road that seemed composed of never-ending bomb craters and ghost villages, the New City rose out of the horizon like a garish dash of color against a scorched background.

It made sense that the Republic would stake their base here, in one of the bloodiest cities in Nikara history. The New City, once named Arabak, had served as a military bastion since the campaigns of the Red Emperor. Originally it was a string of defensive forts over which warlords had fought for so long that the border between Boar and Hare Province was drawn in blood. The war machine required labor and talent, so over the years, civilians—physicians, farmers, craftsmen, and artisans—had moved with their families into the fortress complexes, which grew to accommodate the masses of people whose sole business was fighting.

Now, the New City was the frontier hub of the Republican Army and the air base of the Hesperian dirigible fleet. The Republican’s senior military command was stationed behind those walls, and so was Kitay.

Rin, Jiang, and Daji had to get creative as they got closer to the city. They started traveling only at night, and even then in short, careful bursts, hiding in the forest undergrowth to avoid the dirigibles that circled the city in regular patrols, shining unnaturally strong lights at the ground below. They altered their appearances—Daji clipped her hair short above her ears, Rin started hiding her eyes behind messy shanks of hair, and Jiang dyed his white locks a rich brown with a mix of walnut hulls and ochre, ingredients that he found so easily that Rin had to assume he’d done it before. They agreed on a cover story in case they were stopped by sentries—they were a family of refugees, Rin their daughter, traveling from Snake Province to reunite with Daji’s brother, a low-level bureaucrat in Dragon Province.

Rin found this last ploy ridiculous.

“No one’s going to think I’m your daughter,” she said.

“Why not?” Jiang asked.

“We look nothing alike! For one, your skin’s infinitely paler than mine—”

“Ah, darling.” He patted her on the head. “That’s your fault. What did I tell you about staying out in the sun?”

Half a mile out from the gates they found crowds. Actual refugees, it turned out, had flocked to the New City in hordes. Those fortresses were the only thing within miles that guaranteed safety from the bombing campaigns.

“How are we going to get in?” Rin asked.

“The way you approach any other city,” Daji said, as if this were obvious. “Right through the gates.”

Rin cast a doubtful look at the lines snaking from the gates around the fortress walls. “They’re not letting anyone in.”

“I’m very persuasive,” Daji said.

“You’re not afraid they’ll recognize you?”

Daji gave her a droll look. “Not if I instruct them to forget.”

Surely it couldn’t be so easy. Rin followed along, bewildered, as Daji led them straight to the gates, ignoring the cries of complaint from everyone else in the queue, and demanded so boldly to be let through that Rin was sure they were going to be shot.

But the soldiers only blinked, nodded, and parted.

“This never happened,” Daji said as she passed. They nodded, eyes glazed. “You never saw me, and you have no idea what I look like.”

She gestured for Jiang and Rin to follow. Astonished, Rin obeyed.

“Bothered?” Jiang asked.

“She just told them what to do,” she muttered. “She just told them, without even—I mean, she wasn’t even trying.”

“Oh, yes.” Jiang gave Daji a fond look. “We told you she’s persuasive.”

Persuasive didn’t describe half of it. Rin knew about Daji’s hypnosis. She’d been victim to it herself many times. But in the past, Daji’s illusions had taken several long moments of careful coaxing. Never had Rin seen her utter such casual, dismissive commands with the full expectation that they would be obeyed.

Was it because Jiang was now freed from the Chuluu Korikh? Did Daji’s powers amplify when her anchors grew stronger? And if so, then what would happen when they woke Riga?

Behind its walls, the New City felt like a punch to the face.

Rin had panicked the first time she’d ever left Tikany, when she’d woken up on the second morning of her journey to Sinegard and her caravan had traveled far enough that her surroundings felt truly foreign. It took her days to get used to the morphing landscape, the receding mountains, the terrifying reality that when she went to sleep at night on her cramped mat in the caravan wagon, Tikany’s packed-earth walls no longer protected her.

She had traveled the Nikara Empire since then. She had been swept up in the overwhelming clamor of Sinegard, had walked the planks of the Floating City at Ankhiluun, had entered the Autumn Palace in lush, regal Lusan. She’d thought she understood the range of cities in the empire, spanning from the dusty poverty of Tikany to the winding disorder of Khurdalain’s oceanside shacks to the sapphire-blue canals of Arlong.

But the New City was foreign on a different scale. The Hesperians had been here for only months—they could not possibly have dismantled and built over Nikara stone fortresses that had stood there for centuries. Yet its architectural skeleton seemed drastically altered—the old fortresses were augmented by a number of new installations that imposed a blockish sense of order, transforming the cityscape into a place of straight lines instead of the curved, winding alleys that Rin was used to.

Gone, too, were all Nikara-style decorations. She saw no lanterns, no wall banners, no sloping pagoda roofs or latticed windows, which would have appeared even in this sparsely utilitarian military city. Instead, everywhere she looked, she saw glass—clear glass on most windows, and colored patterns in the larger buildings, stained illustrations depicting scenes she did not recognize.

The effect was startling. Arabak, a city with more than a thousand years of history, seemed to have simply been erased.

This wasn’t the first time Rin had seen Hesperian architecture. Khurdalain and Sinegard, too, had both been rebuilt by foreign occupation. But those were cities built first on Nikara roots, and later reclaimed by the Nikara. There, western architecture had been curious remnants of the past. The New City, on the other hand, felt as if a piece of Hesperia had simply been carved out and dropped whole into Nikan.

Rin found herself staring at things she had never dreamed could exist. On every street corner she saw blinking lights of every conceivable color powered not by flame, but by some energy source she couldn’t see. She saw what looked like a monstrous black carriage mounted on steel tracks, chugging ponderously over the well-paved streets as thin trails of steam emitted from its head. Nothing pushed or pulled it—no laborers, no horses. She saw miniature dirigibles humming around the city, machines so perfectly small that she at first mistook them for loud birds. But their whine was unmistakable: a thinner, higher version of the airship engine whine she now associated with death.

No one controlled them. No one pulled their strings or even shouted out commands. The miniature airships seemed to have minds of their own; autonomously they dipped and swerved through the spaces between buildings, dodging deftly into windows to deliver letters and parcels.

Rin knew she couldn’t keep gawking like this. The longer she stood here, eyes darting around at a million new and startling sights, the more she stood out. But she couldn’t move. She felt dizzy, disoriented, like she had been plucked off the Earth and tossed adrift into an entirely different universe. She’d spent much of her life feeling like she didn’t belong, but this was the first time she’d felt truly foreign.

Six months. Six months, and the Hesperians had transformed a riverside municipality into something like this.

How long would it take them to reconfigure the entire nation?

A whirring, apparently self-driving brass wagon across the street caught her eye, and she was so astonished that she didn’t notice she was standing on two thin steel tracks. She didn’t see the black horseless carriage sliding noiselessly in her direction until it was mere feet away, barreling straight toward her.

“Move!”

Jiang tackled her to the ground. The carriage zoomed past them both, chugging indifferently along its preordained route.

Heart pounding, Rin crawled to her feet.

“What is wrong with you?” Daji yanked her up by the wrist and dragged her off the main road. They were attracting bystanders; Rin saw a Hesperian sentry eyeing them cautiously, arms cradling his arquebus. “Do you want to get caught?”

“I’m sorry.” Rin followed her past a thicket of civilians into a narrow alley. She still felt terribly dizzy. She leaned against the cool, dark wall and took a breath. “It’s just—this place, I didn’t—”

To her surprise, Daji looked sympathetic. “I know. I feel it, too.”

“I don’t understand.” Rin couldn’t put her discomfort into words. She could barely breathe. “I don’t know why—”

“I do,” Daji said. “It’s realizing that the future doesn’t include you.”

“Let’s not dawdle.” Jiang’s tone was brusque, almost cold. Rin didn’t recognize it at all. “We’re wasting time. Where is Kitay?”

She shot him a puzzled glance. “How would I know?”

He looked impatient. “Surely you’ve sent a message.”

“But there’s no—” She faltered. “Oh. I see.”

She glanced around the alley. It was thin and narrow, less a passageway and more a tight strip of space between two square buildings. “Can you cover me?”

Daji nodded. “Be quick.”

They moved to guard either side of the alley. Rin sat down against a wall and pulled her knife out of her belt. She sent a probing question to the back of her mind, tentative, hopeful. Are you there?

To her surprise, a small flame flickered to life in her hand. She could have screamed in relief. She made a cage with her fingers over the blade, waiting until the tip glowed orange. She just needed to scar, not mutilate; a quick burn would be easier than drawing blood.

But Daji shook her head. “You have to press it in deep. You’ve got to bleed. Or he won’t even feel it.”

“Fine.” Rin held the tip over the fleshy back of her lower left leg, but found that she couldn’t stop her fingers from shaking.

“Would you like me to do it?” Daji asked.

“No—no, I’ll do it.” Rin clenched her teeth tight to make sure she wouldn’t bite her tongue. She took a breath. Then she pushed the tip into her skin.

Her calf screamed. Every impulse told her to draw her hand away, but she kept the metal embedded inside her flesh.

She couldn’t keep her fingers from shaking. The knife clattered to the ground.

She picked it up, embarrassed, unable to meet Daji’s eyes.

Why was the pain so terrible now? She’d inflicted worse harms on herself before. She still had faint white burn scars on her arms from the candle wax she’d once dripped on herself to stay awake. Ridged, puckered marks covering her thighs where she’d once stabbed herself to escape her own hallucinations.

But those wounds were the product of fevered, desperate outbursts. She was sober right now, clear-minded and calm, and her full presence of mind made it so much harder to deliberately inflict pain.

She squeezed her eyes shut.

Get a grip, Altan said.

She thought of when a javelin had slammed her out of the sky over the Red Cliffs. Of when Daji had pinned her under a mast. Of when Kitay had smashed her hand apart, then pulled the mangled remnants through iron cuffs. Her body had been through so much worse than a shallow cut from a clean blade. This was a small pain. This was nothing.

She dug the metal under her skin. This time her hand held steady as she carved out a single character in clear, even strokes.

Where?

Minutes passed. Kitay didn’t respond.

Rin glanced at her arm every several seconds, watching for pale scars that didn’t emerge.

She tried not to panic. There were a million reasons why he hadn’t yet answered. He might be asleep. He might be drugged. He might have seen the message, but either lacked any means of responding, or couldn’t because he was under surveillance. He needed time.

Meanwhile, they had nothing to do but wait.

Daji wanted to remain in hiding inside the alley, but Jiang suggested that they walk the length of the New City. This was purportedly to gather intelligence. He wanted to map out exit routes and mark down the guard post locations, so that if and when Kitay responded, they could smoothly get him out.

But Rin suspected that Jiang, like her, wanted to explore the New City simply out of sheer, sick fascination. To see how much had changed, to fully understand what the Hesperians were capable of.

“It’s been decades,” he told Daji when she objected. “We need to know what we’re up against.”

And so, scarves wrapped tight over their noses, they ventured back out onto the street.

The first thing Rin noticed was that the New City was clean.

She quickly discovered why. Ordinances printed on giant sheets of parchment were pasted all along the walls in Hesperian and Nikara characters. No urinating in the street. No dumping garbage from windows. No unlicensed sale of alcohol. No unleashed animals on the street. No fireworks, gambling, brawling, fighting, or shouting.

Rin had seen such ordinances before—Nikara magistrates often posted public notices like these in futile attempts to clean up their unruly cities. But here the ordinances were followed. The New City was far from pristine; it had all the crowded din of every large city. But that was a function of its swollen population, not their habits. The streets were dusty, but free from litter. The air smelled not of filth, excrement, or rotted trash, but of the normal stench of many tired humans crowded into one place.

“Look at that.” Jiang paused by a metal plaque nailed to a streetlamp, engraved in alternating Nikara and Hesperian script.

The Four Cardinal Principles of Order

Propriety

Righteousness

Frugality

Modesty

Below that was a list of rules for the “Maintenance of Societal Order.” Do not spit. Queue politely in line to await your turn. Practice hygiene. Under that last rule was another, indented list that clarified:

Practices that are unhygienic include:

Failure to wash hands before one cooks or eats.

Preparing raw meat with the same blade as vegetables.

Reusing cooking oil.

It went on for eight more lines.

“That’s obnoxious.” Rin had the sudden urge to rip it down, but the gleaming plaque looked so grand and official she was afraid one of the miniature dirigibles would start attacking her if she did.

“What’s wrong with washing your hands?” Jiang asked. “Sounds fair to me.”

“There’s nothing wrong, it’s just . . .” Rin trailed off, unsure how to phrase her discomfort. She felt like a little child being admonished to finish her rice. She didn’t hate the idea of hygiene itself, but rather the presumption that the Nikara were so backward, so barbaric, that the Hesperians had to remind them in huge, clear text how not to behave like animals. “I mean, we know all this already.”

“Do we?” Jiang chuckled. “Have you ever been to Sinegard?”

“There’s nothing wrong with Sinegard.” Rin didn’t know why she was defending the old Nikara capital. She knew Sinegard was disgusting. The first time she’d traveled north, she’d been warned to eat nothing from dirt-cheap street vendors, since they produced their soy sauce from human hair and sewage. Yet now, for some reason, she felt territorial. Sinegard was the capital; Sinegard was a shining delight, and she would have far preferred its bustling din to this freak show of a city. “Let’s just keep walking.”

Her discomfort didn’t ebb as they traveled farther into the New City. It worsened. Every time she turned a corner she saw something—new decorations, new technologies, new attire—that reinforced how bizarre this place was.

Even the background noise threw her off. She’d gotten used to the soundscape of her country; it was all she’d ever known. She knew its roadside shouts, its creaking wheels, its jabbering hagglers and crowded footsteps. She knew its language, had come to expect certain vowel-consonant combinations and vocal intonations. But the noises of the New City sounded on an entirely different register. From teahouses and street buskers she heard new strains of music, awful and discordant. She heard too many voices speaking Hesperian, or some accented attempt at Hesperian.

Nikara cities were loud, but their loudness was of a different type—local, discrete, irregular. The New City seemed run on an ever-present mechanical heartbeat, its thousand machines whirring, humming, and whining without end. Once Rin noticed it, she couldn’t get it out of her head. She couldn’t imagine living against this backdrop; it would drive her mad. How did anyone sleep in this city?

“Are you all right?” Jiang asked.

“What? Of course—”

“You’re sweating.”

Rin glanced down, and realized that the front of her tunic was soaked through.

What was wrong with her? She had never felt a panic like this before—this low, crescendoing distress of gradual suffocation. She felt like she’d been dropped blindfolded into a fairy realm. She did not want to be here. She wanted to run, back out past the walls and into the forests; anything to get away from this hopeless, confused alienation.

“This is how we felt last time.” Daji’s tone was uncharacteristically gentle. “They came in, rebuilt our cities, and transformed them according to their principles of order, and we almost couldn’t bear it.”

“But they have their own cities,” Rin said. “What do they want here?”

“They want to erase us. It’s their divine mandate. They want to make us better, to improve us, by turning us into a mirror of themselves. The Hesperians understand culture as a straight line.” Daji dragged her finger through the air. “One starting point, and one destination. They are at the end of the line. They loved the Mugenese because they came close. But any culture or state that diverges is necessarily inferior. We are inferior, until we speak, dress, act, and worship just like them.”

That terrified Rin.

Until now she had perceived the Hesperian threat in terms of hard power—through memories of airship fleets, smoking arquebuses, and exploding missiles. She’d seen them as an enemy on the battlefield.

She’d never considered that this alternate form of soft erasure might be far worse.

But what if the Nikara wanted this future? The New City was full of Nikara residents—they had to outnumber the Hesperians five to one—and they seemed completely fine with their new arrangement. Happy, even.

How had things changed so quickly? Once upon a time any Nikara on the continent would have run from the mere sight of the blue-eyed devils. They’d been primed for xenophobia by centuries of rumors and stereotypes, stories that Rin had half believed until she’d met the Hesperians in the flesh. They eat their food raw. They steal orphan babies to cook them into stews. Their penises are three times larger than normal, and their women’s openings are cavernous to accommodate.

But the Nikara in the New City seemed to adore their new neighbors. They nodded, smiled, and saluted Hesperian soldiers as they passed. They sold Hesperian food from carts parked on street corners—rocklike brown pastries, hard yellow rounds that gave off pungent odors, and varieties of fish so stinkingly moist Rin was surprised they hadn’t rotted. They—the upper class, at least—had begun to imitate Hesperian dress. Merchants, bureaucrats, and officers walked down the streets garbed in tight trousers, thick white socks pulled up to their knees, and strange coats that buttoned over their waists but draped in the back past their buttocks like duck tails.

They’d even started learning Hesperian. It sounded like bad Hesperian—a clipped, pidgin dialect that morphed the two languages and made them, oddly, mutually understandable. Foreign phrases peppered exchanges between merchants and customers, soldiers and civilians—Good day. How much? Which ones? Thank you.

But despite all their pretensions and efforts, they were not the Hesperians’ equals. They couldn’t be, by virtue of their race. This Rin noticed soon enough—it was clear from the ways the Nikara bowed and scraped, nodding obsequiously while the Hesperians ordered them about. This wasn’t a surprise. This was the Hesperians’ idea of a natural social order.

Sister Petra’s words rose to her mind. The Nikara are a particularly herdlike nation. You listen well, but independent thought is difficult for you. Your brains, which we know to be an indicator of your rational capacity, are by nature smaller.

“Look,” Jiang murmured. “They’ve started bringing their women.”

Rin followed his gaze and saw a tall, wheat-haired woman stepping out of the horseless carriage, her waist enveloped in massive bunches of ruffled fabric. She stretched out a gloved hand. A Nikara foot servant ran up to help her off, then stooped to pick up her bags.

Rin couldn’t stop staring at the woman’s skirts, which arced out from her waist in the unnatural shape of an overturned teacup. “Are they—”

“Wooden frame,” Jiang said, anticipating her confusion. “Don’t fret, it’s still legs underneath. They think it’s fashionable.”

“Why?”

Jiang shrugged. “Beyond me.”

Before now, Rin had never seen regular Hesperian civilians—Hesperians who were not soldiers, nor part of the Gray Company. Hesperians who purportedly had no official business in Nikan other than to keep their husbands company. Now they strolled the New City’s streets as if they belonged.

She shuddered to think of what that meant. If the Hesperians were shipping in their wives, it meant they intended to stay.

A sudden sharp prickle stung her left shin. She dropped to her knee and tugged her pant leg up, hoping fervently that the pain would continue.

For a few seconds she felt nothing. Then came another stab of pain so sharp she felt as if a needle had pierced all the way through her flesh and emerged out the other side. She uttered a quiet moan of relief.

“What’s wrong?” Daji asked sharply.

“It’s Kitay,” Rin whispered. “He’s writing back, look—”

“Not here,” Daji hissed. She yanked Rin up by the arm and pulled her down the street. Pain continued to lance up Rin’s left leg, the agony intensifying by the second.

Kitay likely didn’t have access to a sharp, clean blade. He was probably carving his flesh with a nail, a piece of scrap wood, or the jagged edge of a shattered vase. Perhaps he was using his own fingernails to carve out the long, jagged strokes that dragged in sharp twists down the length of her shin, creating scars she couldn’t wait to see.

It didn’t matter how badly it hurt. This felt good. Every stab was proof that Kitay was here, he’d heard her, and he was writing back.

At last they reached an empty street corner. Daji let go of Rin’s arm. “What does it say?”

Rin rolled her pant leg up to the knee. Kitay had written four characters, engraved in pale white lines along her inner calf.

“Three, six,” Rin said. “Northeast.”

“Coordinates,” Jiang guessed. “Has to be. The intersection of the third and sixth streets. That makes sense, this city’s arranged like a grid.”

“Then which one’s the vertical coordinate?” Daji asked.

Rin thought for a moment. “How do you read wikki positions?”

“The board game?” Jiang thought for a moment. “Vertical first, then horizontal, origin point in the southwest. Does he—”

“Yes,” Rin said. “He loves it.” Kitay was wild about the strategy game. He’d always tried to get other students to play with him at Sinegard, but no one ever would. Losing to Kitay was too annoying; he kept lecturing you on all your strategic missteps as he cleaned your pieces off the board. “Third street north. Sixth street east.”

None of them could place themselves in relation to the grid, so they had to first find the southwest corner of the city, then count the blocks as they moved northeast. It took them the better part of the hour. All the while Jiang complained under his breath, “Stupid directions, that boy; there are four sides of an intersection, he could be in any one of them, should have included a description.”

But they didn’t need one. When Rin turned the corner toward the sixth street, Kitay’s location became obvious.

A massive building dominated the block in front of them. Unlike the other buildings, which were Hesperian scaffolds built over Nikara foundations, this had clearly been constructed from scratch. The red bricks gleamed. Stained-glass windows stretched along every wall, depicting various insignia—scrolls, scales, and ladders.

At the center was a symbol Rin knew too well: an intricate circle inscribed with the pattern of a timepiece, complicated gears interlocking in a symmetrical pattern. The symbol of the Gray Company. The Architect’s perfect design.

Jiang whistled. “Well, that’s not a prison.”

“It’s worse,” Rin said. “That’s a church.”