by R. F. Kuang
Bile rose up in Rin’s throat. “Get off of her.”
The soldier couldn’t, or refused to, understand her. He just kept going, panting like an animal.
Rin couldn’t believe those were noises of pleasure.
She threw herself into the soldier’s side. He twisted around and flung an awkward fist toward her face, but she ducked easily, grabbed his wrists, kicked in his kneecaps, and wrestled him into submission until he was lying on the ground, pinned down between her knees.
She reached down, feeling for his testicles. When she found them, she squeezed. “Is this what you wanted?”
He writhed frantically beneath her. She squeezed harder. He made a gurgling noise.
She dug her fingernails into soft flesh. “No?”
He screeched in pain.
She called the flame. His screams grew louder, but she grabbed his discarded shirt off the ground, shoved it into his mouth, and didn’t let him go until his member had turned to charcoal in her hands.
When he finally stopped moving, she climbed off his chest, sat down next to the trembling girl, and put her arm around her shoulders. Neither of them spoke. They just huddled together, watching the soldier with cold satisfaction as he twitched, mewling feebly, on the dirt.
“Is he going to die?” the girl asked.
The soldier’s whimpers were getting softer. Rin had burned half of his lower body. Some of the wounds were cauterized. It might take a long while for the blood loss to kill him. She hoped he was conscious for it. “Yes. If no one takes him to a physician.”
The girl didn’t sound scared, just idly curious. “Will you take him?”
“He’s not in my platoon,” Rin said. “Not my problem.”
More minutes passed. Blood pooled slowly beneath the soldier’s waist. Rin sat with the girl in silence, heart hammering, mind racing through the consequences.
The Hesperians would know the killer was her. The burn marks would give her away—only the Speerly killed with fire.
Tarcquet’s retaliation would be terrible. He might not settle for Rin’s death—if he found out what had just happened, he might abandon the Republic altogether.
Rin had to get rid of that body.
Eventually the soldier’s chest stopped rising and falling. Rin shuffled forward on her knees and felt his neck for a pulse. Nothing. She stood up and extended a hand to the girl. “Let’s get you cleaned up. Can you walk?”
“Don’t worry about me.” The girl sounded remarkably calm. She’d stopped trembling. She bent forward to wipe the blood and fluids off of her legs with the hem of her torn dress. “It’s happened before.”
Chapter 29
“Tiger’s fucking tits,” Kitay said.
“I know,” Rin said.
“And you just dumped him in the harbor?”
“Weighed him down with rocks first. I picked a pretty deep stretch by the docks; no one’s going to find him—”
“Holy shit.” Kitay ran a hand through his bangs and yanked as he paced around the library. “You’re going to die. We’re all going to die.”
“It might be all right.” Rin tried to convince herself as she said it, but she still felt terribly light-headed. She’d come to Kitay because he was the one person she trusted to figure out what to do, but now both of them were panicking. “Look, no one saw me—”
“How do you know?” he asked shrilly. “No one caught you dragging a Hesperian corpse halfway across the city? No one was looking out their windows? You’d be willing to stake your life on the fact that not a single person saw?”
“I didn’t drag it, I dumped it in a sampan and rowed out to shore.”
“Oh, that solves everything—”
“Kitay. Listen.” She took a deep breath, trying to get her mind to slow down enough to work properly. “It’s been over an hour. If they’d seen, don’t you think I’d be dead by now?”
“Tarcquet could be biding his time,” Kitay said. “Waiting until morning to set an army on you.”
“He wouldn’t wait.” Rin was certain of that. The Hesperians didn’t fuck around. If Tarcquet found out that a shaman, of all people, had killed one of his men, then her body would already be riddled with bullet holes. He wouldn’t have given her the chance to escape.
The more time that passed, the more she hoped—believed—that Tarcquet didn’t know. Vaisra didn’t know. They might never know. Rin wasn’t telling anyone, and the refugee girl would certainly keep her mouth shut.
Kitay rubbed his palms against his temples. “When did this happen?”
“I told you. Just over an hour ago, when I was walking Kesegi back to the barriers from the old warehouses.”
“What on earth were you doing by the warehouses?”
“Southern Warlords ambushed me. Wanted to talk. They’re thinking of defecting back to their home provinces to deal with the Federation armies and they wanted me to come along, and they had this insane theory about the Hesperians, and—”
“What did you say?”
“Of course I refused. That’d be a death sentence.”
“Well, at least you didn’t commit treason.” Kitay managed a shaky laugh. “And then, what, you just wandered back to the barracks and murdered a Hesperian on the way?”
“You didn’t see what he was doing.”
He threw his hands up. “Does it fucking matter?”
“He was on a girl,” she said angrily. “He had her by her neck and he wouldn’t stop—”
“So you decided to scorch any possible chance we have of surviving the Red Cliffs?”
“The Hesperians aren’t fucking coming, Kitay.”
“They’re still here, aren’t they? If they really didn’t care they’d have packed up and gone. Did that ever cross your mind? When your back is to the wall there’s a massive difference between zero and one percent but no, you’d rather guarantee it’s zero—”
Her cheeks burned. “I didn’t think—”
“Of course not,” Kitay snapped. His knuckles had gone white. “You never think, do you? You always just pick whatever fights you want, whenever you want, and fuck the consequences—”
Rin raised her voice. “Would you rather I had let him rape her?”
Kitay fell silent.
“No,” he said after a long pause. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—I didn’t mean that.”
“I didn’t think so.”
He pressed his face into his hands. “Gods, I’m just scared. And you didn’t have to kill him, you could have—”
“I know,” she said. She felt drained. All the adrenaline had gone out of her at once, and now she only wanted to collapse. “I know, I wasn’t thinking, I saw it happening and I just—”
“It’s my life on the line now, too.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know.” He sighed. “I don’t think— You didn’t have— Fine. It’s fine. I understand.”
“I really don’t think anyone saw.”
“Fine.” He took a deep breath. “Are you going to go back to the barracks?”
“No.”
“Me neither.”
They sat together on the floor for a long while in silence. He rested his head against her shoulder. She clutched at his hands. Neither of them could sleep. They were both watching the library windows, waiting to see Hesperian troops lined up at the door, to hear the fall of heavy boots in the hallway. Rin couldn’t help but feel a twinge of relief at every additional moment that passed.
It meant the Hesperians weren’t coming. It meant that, for now, she was safe.
But what happened when the Hesperians woke up in the morning and discovered a missing soldier? What happened when they started to search? They wouldn’t find him for days at least, she’d made sure of that, but the sheer fact that a soldier was missing might derail Hesperian negotiations regardless.
If the fallout didn’t land on Rin, then would they punish the entire Republic?
The southern Warlords’ words rose unbidden to her
mind. You shouldn’t fight for an alliance with people who think we’re barely human.
“Tell me what the southern Warlords said,” Kitay said, startling her.
She sat up. “About what?”
“The Hesperians. What’s this theory?”
“Just the usual. They don’t trust them, they think they’ll bring a second coming of the occupation, and . . . Oh.” She frowned. “They also think that the Hesperians let the Mugenese invade on purpose. They think Vaisra knew the Federation was going to launch an invasion, and that the Hesperians knew, too, but neither of them acted because they wanted the empire weakened and ripe for the taking.”
Kitay blinked. “Really.”
“I know. That’s crazy.”
“No,” he said. “That makes sense.”
“You can’t be serious. That would be awful.”
“But it tracks with everything we know, doesn’t it?” Kitay gave a short laugh that bordered on manic. “I’d been thinking it from the start, actually, but I thought, ‘Nah, no one could be that insane. Or evil.’ But think about the Republic’s ships. Think about how long it took to build that entire fleet. Vaisra’s been planning his civil war for years—that’s obvious. But he never launched an attack until now. Why?”
“Maybe he wasn’t ready,” she said.
“Or maybe he needed the country weakened if he was ever going to wage a successful war against the Vipress. Needed us shattered so he could pick up the pieces.”
“He needed someone else to attack first,” she said slowly.
He nodded. “And the Federation was the best pawn for that task. I bet he laughed when they marched on Sinegard. I bet he’d been wanting that war for years.”
Rin wanted to say no, say of course Vaisra wouldn’t let innocent people die, but she knew that wasn’t true. She knew Vaisra was more than happy to wipe entire provinces off his map as long as it meant he kept his Republic.
Gods, as long as he kept his city.
Which meant Hesperian passivity during the Second Poppy War had not been some political mistake, or a delay in communications, but entirely deliberate. Which meant that Vaisra had known the Federation would kill hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, and he’d let it happen.
When she thought about it now, it should have been so easy to realize that they’d been manipulated. They had been trapped in a geopolitical chess game that had been years, perhaps decades in the making.
And she hadn’t simply been fooled. She’d been deliberately blind to the clues around her, and she’d sat back and let everything happen.
She’d been stupidly, passively asleep for such a long time. She’d spent so much effort fighting in the trenches for Vaisra’s Republic that she’d barely considered what might happen after.
If they won, what price would the Hesperians demand for their aid? Would Petra’s experiments escalate once Vaisra no longer needed Rin on the battlefield?
It seemed so foolish now to imagine that as long as Vaisra vouched for her, she was safe from those arquebuses. Months ago she’d been lost and afraid, desperate to find an anchor, and that had primed her to trust him. But she’d also seen, over and over again by now, how easily Vaisra manipulated those around him like shadow puppets.
How quickly would he trade her away?
“Oh, Kitay.” She exhaled slowly. She suddenly felt very, very afraid. “What are we going to do?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
She thought through the possibilities out loud. “We have no good options. If we defect to the south, we’re dead.”
“And if you leave Arlong, then the Hesperians will hunt you down.”
“But if we stay loyal to the Republic, we’re just building a cage for ourselves.”
“And none of that even matters if we don’t survive the day after tomorrow.”
They stared at each other. Rin heard a heartbeat echoing against the silence; hers or Kitay’s, she didn’t know.
“Tiger’s tits,” she said. “We’re going to die. None of this even matters because Feylen is going to wreck us under the Red Cliffs and we’re all going to die.”
“Not necessarily.” Kitay stood up abruptly. “Come with me.”
She blinked up at him. “What?”
“You’ll see. I’ve been meaning to show you something ever since you got back.” He clasped her hands and pulled her to her feet. “I just haven’t had the chance. Follow me.”
Somehow they ended up in the armory. Rin wasn’t entirely sure they were supposed to be there, because Kitay had kicked through the lock to get in, but at this point she didn’t care.
He led her to a back storage room, pulled a bundle wrapped in a canvas sheet out from a corner, and dropped it on the table. “This is for you.”
She peeled the sheet back. “A pile of leather. Thank you. I love it.”
“Just unfold it,” he said.
She held up the contraption, a confusing combination of riding straps, iron rods, and long sheets of leather. She peered at it from all angles but couldn’t make sense of what she was looking at. “What is this?”
“You know how none of us have been able to defeat Feylen?” Kitay asked.
“Because he keeps flinging us into cliff walls? Yes, Kitay, I remember that.”
“Listen.” He had a manic glint in his eye. “What if he couldn’t? What if you could fight him on his turf? Well, turf doesn’t really apply, but you know what I mean.”
She stared at him, uncomprehending. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You’ve got far more control of that fire now, yes?” he asked. “Could probably call it without thinking?”
“Sure,” she said slowly. The fire felt like a natural extension of her now; she could extend it farther, burn hotter. But she was still confused. “You already know that. What does that have to do with anything?”
“How hot can you make it?” he pressed.
She frowned. “Isn’t all fire the same temperature?”
“Actually, no. You get different sorts of flames on different surfaces. There’s a difference between a candle flame and a blacksmith’s fire, for instance. I’m not an expert, but—”
“Why does that matter?” she interrupted. “I couldn’t get close enough to burn Feylen anyway, and I don’t have that kind of reach.”
He shook his head impatiently. “But what if you could?”
“We’re not all geniuses like you,” she snapped. “Just tell me what you’re going on about.”
He grinned. “Remember the signal lanterns before Boyang? The ones that would have exploded?”
“Of course, but—”
“Do you want to know how they work?”
She sighed and resigned herself to giving him free rein to talk as much as he wanted. “No, but I think you’re about to tell me.”
“Hot air rises,” he said gleefully. “Cool air sinks. The balloons trap the hot air in a small space and it lifts up the entire apparatus.”
She considered this for a moment. She was starting to understand where he was going, but she wasn’t sure if she liked the conclusion. “I weigh a lot more than a paper balloon.”
“It’s about the ratio,” Kitay insisted. “For instance, heavier birds need larger wings.”
“But even the largest bird is tiny compared to—”
“So you’d need even bigger wings. And you’ll need a hotter fire. But you have the strongest heat source in existence, so all we had to do was get you an apparatus to turn that into flying power. The wings, if you will.”
She blinked at him, and then looked down at the pile of leather and metal. “You’ve got to be joking.”
“Not in the slightest,” he said happily. “Do you want to try it on?”
She gingerly unfolded the apparatus. It was surprisingly light, the leather smooth under her hands. She wondered where Kitay had found the material. She held it up, marveling at the neat stitching.
“You did this all in a
week?”
“Yeah. I’d been thinking about it for a while, though. Ramsa came up with the idea.”
“Ramsa did?”
He nodded. “Half of munitions is aerodynamics. He’s spent a long time figuring out how to make things fly right.”
Rin was somewhat wary of gambling her life on the designs of a boy whose greatest passion in life was watching things explode, but she supposed that at this point she had very few options.
With Kitay’s help, she fastened the strap over her chest as tightly as she could manage. The iron rods shifted uncomfortably against her back, but otherwise the wings were surprisingly flexible, greased to rotate smoothly with every movement of her arms.
“You know, Altan used to give himself wings,” she said.
“He did? Could he fly?”
“I doubt it. They were made of fire. I think he just did it to look pretty.”
“Well, I think I can give you some functional ones.” He tightened the straps around her shoulders. “Everything fit okay?”
She lifted her arms, feeling somewhat like an overgrown bat. The leather wings looked pretty, but they seemed far too thin to sustain her body weight. The interlacing rods that kept the apparatus together also looked so terribly fragile she was sure she could snap them in half over her knee. “You sure that’s going to be enough to keep me up?”
“I didn’t want to add too much to your weight. The rods are as slender as they’ll go. Any heavier and you’ll sink.”
“They could also break and send me plummeting to my death,” she pointed out.
“Have a little faith in me.”
“It’s gonna hurt you if I crash.”
“I know.” He sounded far too giddy for her comfort. “Shall we go try this out?”
They found an open clearing up on the cliffs, well out of range of anything that was remotely flammable. Kitay had wanted to test his invention by pushing Rin off a ledge, but reluctantly agreed to let her try levitating over level ground first.
The sun was just beginning to rise over the Red Cliffs, and Rin would have found it exceptionally lovely if she weren’t so terrified that she could hear her heartbeat slamming in her eardrums.