The Dragon Republic (The Poppy War Trilogy #2)
The Dragon Republic: Part 2 – Chapter 13

Rin squeezed through the crowd behind Nezha, who made liberal use of elbows to get them to the front of the harbor. The dock was already thronged with curious civilians and soldiers alike, all angling to get a good look at the Hesperian ship. But no one was looking out at the harbor. All heads were tilted to the sky.

Three whale-sized crafts sailed through the clouds above. Each had a long, rectangular basket strapped to its underbelly, with cerulean flags sewn along the sides. Rin blinked several times as she stared.

How could structures so massive possibly stay aloft?

They looked absurd and utterly unnatural, as if some god were moving them through the sky at will. But it couldn’t be the work of the gods. The Hesperians didn’t believe in the Pantheon.

Was this the work of their Maker? The possibility made Rin shiver. She’d always been taught that the Hesperians’ Holy Maker was a construct, a fiction to control an anxious population. The singular, anthropomorphized, all-powerful deity that the Hesperians believed in could not possibly explain the complexity of the universe. But if the Maker was real, then everything she knew about the sixty-four deities, about the Pantheon, was wrong.

What if her gods weren’t the only ones in the universe? What if a higher power did exist—one that only the Hesperians had access to? Was that why they were so infinitely more advanced?

The sky filled with a sound like the drone of a million bees, amplified a hundred times over as the flying crafts drew closer.

Rin saw people standing at the edges of the hanging baskets. They looked like little toys from the ground. The flying whales began approaching the harbor to land, looming larger and larger in the sky until their shadows enveloped everyone who stood below. The people inside the baskets waved their arms over their heads. Their mouths opened wide—they were shouting something, but no one could hear them over the noise.

Nezha dragged Rin backward by the wrist.

“Back away,” he shouted into her ear.

There followed a brief period of chaos while the city guard wrangled the crowd back from the landing area. One by one the flying crafts thudded to the ground. The entire harbor shook from the impact.

At last, the droning noise died away. The metal whales shriveled and slumped to the side as they deflated over the baskets. The air was silent.

Rin watched, waiting.

“Don’t let your eyes pop out of your head,” said Nezha. “They’re just foreigners.”

“Just foreigners to you. Exotic creatures to me.”

“They didn’t have missionaries down in Rooster Province?”

“Only on the coastlines.” Hesperian missionaries had been banned from the Empire after the Second Poppy War. Several dared to continue visiting cities peripheral to Sinegard’s control, but most kept their distance from rural places like Tikany. “All I’ve ever heard are stories.”

“Like what?”

“The Hesperians are giants. They’re covered in red fur. They boil infants and eat them in soup.”

“You know that never happened, right?”

“They’re pretty convinced of it where I come from.”

Nezha chuckled. “Let’s let bygones be bygones. They’re coming now as friends.”

The Empire had a troubled history with the Republic of Hesperia. During the First Poppy War, the Hesperians had offered military and economic aid to the Federation of Mugen. Once the Mugenese had obliterated any notion of Nikara sovereignty, the Hesperians had populated the coastal regions with missionaries and religious schools, intent on wiping out the local superstitious religions.

For a short time, the Hesperian missionaries had even outlawed temple visits. If any shamanic cults still existed after the Red Emperor’s war on religion, the Hesperians drove them even further underground.

During the Second Poppy War, the Hesperians became the liberators. The Federation had committed too many atrocities for the Hesperians, who had always claimed that their occupation benefited the natives, to pretend neutrality was morally defensible. After Speer burned, the Hesperians sent their fleets to the Nariin Sea, joined forces with the Trifecta’s troops, pushed the Federation all the way back to their longbow island, and orchestrated a peace agreement with the newly reformed Nikara Empire in Sinegard.

Then the Trifecta seized dictatorial control of the country and threw the foreigners out by the ship. Whatever Hesperians remained were smugglers and missionaries, hiding in international ports like Ankhiluun and Khurdalain, preaching their word to anyone who bothered to entertain them.

When the Third Poppy War began, those last Hesperians had sailed away on rescue ships so fast that by the time Rin’s contingent had reached Khurdalain they might never have been there. As the war progressed, the Hesperians had been willful bystanders, watching aloof from across the great sea while Nikara citizens burned in their homes.

“They might have come a little earlier,” Rin quipped.

“There’s been a war ravishing the entire western continent for the past two decades,” said Nezha. “They’ve been a bit distracted.”

This was news to her. Until now, news of the western continent had been so utterly irrelevant to her it might not have existed. “Did they win?”

“You could say that. Millions are dead. Millions more are without home or country. But the Consortium states came out in power, so they consider that a victory. Although I don’t—”

Rin grabbed his arm. “They’re coming out.”

Doors had opened at the sides of each basket. One by one the Hesperians filed out onto the dock.

Rin recoiled at the sight of them.

Their skin was terribly pale—not the flawless porcelain-white shade that Sinegardians prized, but more like the tint of a freshly gutted fish. And their hair looked all the wrong colors—garish shades of copper, gold, and bronze, nothing like the rich black of Nikara hair. Everything about them—their coloring, their features, their proportions—simply seemed off.

They didn’t look like people; they looked like things out of horror stories. They might have been demon-possessed monsters conjured up for Nikara folk heroes to fight. And though Rin was too old for folktales, everything about these light-eyed creatures made her want to run.

“How’s your Hesperian?” Nezha asked.

“Rusty,” she admitted. “I hate that language.”

They had all been forced to study several years of diplomatic Hesperian at Sinegard. Rules of pronunciation were haphazard at best and its grammar system was so riddled with exceptions it might not exist at all.

None of Rin’s classmates had paid much attention to their Hesperian grammar lessons. They had all assumed that as the Federation was the primary threat, Mugini was more important to learn.

Rin supposed things would be very different now.

A column of Hesperian sailors, identical in their close-cropped hair and dark gray uniforms, walked out of the baskets and formed two neat lines in front of the crowd. Rin counted twenty of them.

She examined their faces but couldn’t tell one apart from the next. They all seemed to have the same lightly colored eyes, broad noses, and strong jaws. They were all men, and each held a strange-looking weapon across his chest. Rin couldn’t determine the weapon’s purpose. It looked like a series of tubes of different lengths, joined together near the back with something like a handle.

A final soldier emerged from the basket door. Rin assumed he was their general by his uniform, which bore multicolored ribbons on the left chest where the others’ were bare. He struck Rin immediately as dangerous. He stood at least half a head taller than Vaisra, he sported a chest as wide as Baji’s, and his weathered face was lined and intelligent.

Behind the general walked a row of hooded Hesperians clothed in gray cassocks.

“Who are they?” Rin asked Nezha. They couldn’t be soldiers; they wore no armor and held no weapons.

“The Gray Company,” he said. “Representatives of the Church of the Divine Architect.”

“They’re missionaries?”

“Missionaries who can speak for the central church. They’re highly trained and educated. Think of them like graduates from the Sinegard Academy of religion.”

“What, they went to priest school?”

“Sort of. They’re scientists, too. In their religion, the scientists and priests are one and the same.”

Rin was about to ask what that meant when a last figure emerged from the center basket. She was a woman, slender and petite, wearing a buttoned black coat with a high collar that covered her neck. She looked severe, alien, and elegant all at once. Her attire was certainly not Nikara, but her face was not Hesperian. She seemed oddly familiar.

“Hello.” Baji whistled behind Rin. “Who is that?”

“It’s Lady Yin Saikhara,” said Nezha.

“Is she married?” Baji asked.

Nezha shot him a disgusted look. “That’s my mother.”

That was why Rin recognized the woman’s face. She had met the Lady of Dragon Province once, years ago, on her first day at Sinegard. Lady Saikhara had taken Rin’s guardian Tutor Feyrik for a porter, and she had dismissed Rin entirely as southerner trash.

Perhaps the past four years had done wonders for Lady Saikhara’s attitude, but Rin was strongly inclined to dislike her.

Lady Saikhara paused before the crowd, eyes roving the harbor as if surveying her kingdom. Her gaze landed on Rin. Her eyes narrowed—in recognition, Rin thought; perhaps Saikhara remembered Rin as well—but then she grasped the Hesperian general’s arm and pointed, her face contorted into what looked like fear.

The general nodded and spoke an order. At once, all twenty Hesperian soldiers pointed their barrel tube weapons at Rin.

A hush fell over the crowd as the civilians hastily backed away.

Several cracks split the air. Rin dove to the ground by instinct. Eight holes dotted the dirt in front of her. She looked up.

The air smelled like smoke. Gray flumes unfurled from the tips of the barrel tubes.

“Oh, fuck,” Nezha muttered under his breath.

The general shouted something that Rin couldn’t understand, but she didn’t have to translate what he’d said. There was no way to interpret this as anything but a threat.

She had two default responses to threats. And she couldn’t run away, not in this crowd, so her only choice was to fight.

Two of the Hesperian soldiers came running toward her. She slammed her trident against the closest one’s shins. He doubled over, just briefly. She jammed an elbow into the side of his head, grabbed him by the shoulders, and barreled forward, using him as a human shield to deter further fire.

It worked until something landed over Rin’s shoulders. A fishing net. She flailed, trying to wriggle out, but it only tightened around her arms. Whoever held it yanked hard, knocking her off balance.

The Hesperian general loomed above her, his weapon pointed straight down at her face. Rin looked up the barrel. The smell of fire powder was so thick she nearly choked on it.

“Vaisra!” she shouted. “Help—”

Soldiers swarmed around her. Strong arms pinned her arms over her head; others grabbed her ankles, rendering her immobile. She heard the clank of steel next to her head. She twisted around and saw a wooden tray on the ground beside her, upon which lay a vast assortment of thin devices that looked like torture instruments.

She’d seen devices like that before.

Someone pulled her head back and jerked her mouth open. One of the Gray Company, a woman with skin like alabaster, knelt over her. She pressed something hard and metallic against Rin’s tongue.

Rin bit at her fingers.

The woman snatched her hand away.

Rin struggled harder. Miraculously, the grips on her shoulders loosened. She flailed out and upturned the tray, scattering the instruments across the ground. For a single, desperate moment, she thought she might break free.

Then the general slammed the butt of his weapon into her head and Rin’s vision exploded into stars that winked out into nothing.

“Oh, good,” said Nezha. “You’re awake.”

Rin found herself lying on a stone floor. She scrambled to her feet. She was unbound. Good. Her hand jumped for a weapon that wasn’t there, and when she couldn’t find her trident she curled her hands into fists. “What—”

“That was a misunderstanding.” Nezha grabbed her by the shoulders. “You’re safe, we’re alone. What happened out there was a mistake.”

“A mistake?”

“They thought you were a threat. My mother told them to attack as soon as they reached land.”

Rin’s forehead throbbed. She touched her fingers to where she knew a massive bruise was forming. “Your mother is a real bitch, then.”

“She often is, yes. But you’re in no danger. Father is talking them down.”

“And if he can’t?”

“He will. They’re not idiots.” Nezha grabbed her hand. “Will you stop that?”

Rin had begun pacing back and forth in the small chamber like a caged animal, teeth chattering, rubbing her hands agitatedly up and down her arms. But she couldn’t stand still; her mind was racing in panic, if she stopped moving she would start to shake uncontrollably.

“Why would they think I was a threat?” she demanded.

“It’s, ah, a little complicated.” Nezha paused. “I guess the simplest way to put it is that they want to study you.”

“Study?”

“They know what you did to the longbow island. They know what you can do, and as the most powerful country on earth of course they’re going to investigate it. Their proposed treaty terms, I think, were that they’d get to examine you in exchange for military aid. Mother put it in their heads that you weren’t going to come quietly.”

“So what, Vaisra’s selling me for their aid?”

“It’s not like that. My mother . . .” Nezha continued talking, but Rin wasn’t listening. She scrutinized him, considering.

She had to get out of here. She had to rally the Cike and get them out of Arlong. Nezha was taller, heavier, and stronger than she was, but she could still take him—she’d go after his eyes and scars, gouge her fingernails into his skin and knee his balls repeatedly until he dropped his guard.

But she might still be trapped. The doors could be locked from the outside. And if she broke the door down, there could be—no, there certainly were guards outside. What about the window? She could tell from a glance they were on the second, maybe third story, but maybe she could scale down somehow, if she could manage to knock Nezha unconscious. She just needed a weapon—the chair legs might do, or a shard of porcelain.

She lunged for the flower vase.

“Don’t.” Nezha’s hand shot out and gripped her wrist. She struggled to break free. He twisted her arm painfully behind her back, forced her to her knees, and pressed a knee against the small of her back. “Come on, Rin. Don’t be stupid.”

“Don’t do this,” she gasped. “Nezha, please, I can’t stay here—”

“You’re not allowed to leave the room.”

“So now I’m a prisoner?”

“Rin, please—”

“Let me go!”

She tried to break free. His grip tightened. “You’re not in any danger.”

“So let me go!”

“You’ll derail negotiations that have been years in the making—”

“Negotiations?” she screeched. “You think I give a fuck about negotiations? They want to dissect me!”

“And Father won’t let that happen! You think he’s about to give you up? You think I’d let that happen? I’d die before I let anyone hurt you, Rin, calm down—”

That did nothing to calm her down. Every second she was still felt like a vise tightening around her neck.

“My family has been planning this war for over a decade,” Nezha said. “My mother has been pursuing this diplomatic mission for years. She was educated in Hesperia; she has strong ties to the west. As soon as the third war was over, Father sent her overseas to solidify Hesperian military support.”

Rin barked out a laugh. “Well, then she cut a shitty deal.”

“We won’t take it. The Hesperians are greedy and malleable. They want resources only the Empire can offer. Father can talk them down. But we must not anger them. We need their weapons.” Nezha let go of her arms when it was clear she’d stopped struggling. “You’ve been in the councils. We won’t win this war without them.”

Rin twisted around to face him. “You want whatever those barrel things are.”

“They’re called arquebuses. They’re like hand cannons, except they’re lighter than crossbows, they can penetrate wooden panels, and they shoot for longer distance.”

“Oh, I’m sure Vaisra just wants crates and crates of them.”

He gave her a frank look. “We need anything we can get our hands on.”

“But suppose you win this war, and the Hesperians don’t want to leave,” she said. “Suppose it’s the First Poppy War all over again.”

“They have no interest in staying,” he said dismissively. “They’re done with that now. They’ve found their colonies too difficult to defend, and the war’s weakened them too much to commit the kind of ground resources they could before. All they want is trade rights and permission to dump missionaries wherever they want. At the end of this war we’ll make them leave our shores quickly enough.”

“And if they don’t want to go?”

“I expect we’ll find a way,” Nezha said. “Just as we have before. But at present, Father’s going to choose the lesser of two evils. And so should you.”

The doors opened. Captain Eriden walked inside.

“They’re ready for you,” he said.

“‘They’?” Rin echoed.

“The Dragon Warlord is entertaining the Hesperian delegates in the great hall. They’d like to speak to you.”

“No,” Rin said.

“You’ll be fine,” Nezha said. “Just don’t do anything stupid.”

“We have very different ideas of what defines ‘stupid,’” she said.

“The Dragon Warlord would prefer not to be kept waiting.” Eriden motioned with a hand. Two of his guards strode forward and seized Rin by the arms. She managed a last, panicked glance over her shoulder at Nezha before they escorted her out the door.

The guards deposited Rin in the short walkway that led to the palace’s great hall and shut the doors behind her.

She stepped hesitantly forward. She saw the Hesperians sitting in gilded chairs around the center table. Jinzha sat at his father’s right hand. The southern Warlords had been relegated to the far end of the table, looking flustered and uncomfortable.

Rin could tell she’d walked into the middle of a heated argument. A thick tension crackled in the air, and all parties looked flustered, red-faced, and furious, as if they were about to come to blows.

She hung back in the hallway for a moment, concealed by the corner wall, and listened.

“The Consortium is still recovering from its own war,” the Hesperian general was saying. Rin struggled to make sense of his speech at first, but gradually the language returned to her. She felt like a student again, sitting in the back of Jima’s classroom, memorizing verb tenses. “We’re in no mood to speculate.”

“This isn’t speculation,” Vaisra said urgently. He spoke Hesperian like it was his native tongue. “We could take back this country in days, if you just—”

“Then do it yourselves,” the general said. “We’re here to do business, not alchemy. We are not interested in transforming frauds into kings.”

Vaisra sat back. “So you’re going to run my country like an experiment before you choose to intervene.”

“A necessary experiment. We didn’t come here to lend ships at your will, Vaisra. This is an investigation.”

“Into what?”

“Whether the Nikara are ready for civilization. We do not distribute Hesperian aid lightly. We made that mistake before. The Mugenese seemed even more ready for advancement than you are. They had no factional infighting, and their governance was more sophisticated by far. Look how that turned out.”

“If we’re underdeveloped, it’s because of years of foreign occupation,” Vaisra said. “That’s your fault, not ours.”

The general shrugged, indifferent. “Even so.”

Vaisra sounded exasperated. “Then what are you looking for?”

“Well, it would be cheating if we told you, wouldn’t it?” The Hesperian general gave a thin smile. “But all of this is a moot point. Our primary objective here is the Speerly. She has purportedly leveled an entire country. We’d like to know how she did it.”

“You can’t have the Speerly,” Vaisra said.

“Oh, I don’t think you get to decide.”

Rin strode into the room. “I’m right here.”

“Runin.” If Vaisra looked surprised, he quickly recovered. He stood up and gestured to the Hesperian general. “Please meet General Josephus Tarcquet.”

Stupid name, Rin thought. A garbled collection of syllables that she could hardly pronounce.

Tarcquet rose to his feet. “I believe we owe you an apology. Lady Saikhara had us rather convinced that we were dealing with something like a wild animal. We didn’t realize that you would be so . . . human.”

Rin blinked at him. Was that really supposed to be an apology?

“Does she understand what I’m saying?” Tarcquet asked Vaisra in choppy, ugly Nikara.

“I understand Hesperian,” Rin snapped. She deeply wished that she’d learned Hesperian curse words at Sinegard. She didn’t have the full vocabulary range to express what she wanted to say, but she had enough. “I’m just not keen on dialoguing with fools who want me dead.”

“Why are we even speaking to her?” Lady Saikhara burst out.

Her voice was high and brittle, as if she had just been crying. The pure venom in her glare startled Rin. This was more than contempt. This was a vicious, murderous hatred.

“She is an unholy abomination,” Saikhara snarled. “She is a mark against the Maker, and she ought to be dragged off to the Gray Towers as soon as possible.”

“We’re not dragging anyone off.” Vaisra sounded exasperated. “Runin, please, sit—”

“But you promised,” Saikhara hissed at him. “You said they’d find a way to fix him—”

Vaisra grabbed at his wife’s wrist. “Now is not the time.”

Saikhara jerked her hand free and slammed a fist down on the table. Her cup toppled over, spilling hot tea across the embroidered cloth. “You swore to me. You said you’d make this right, that if I brought them back they’d find a way to fix him, you promised—”

“Silence, woman.” Vaisra pointed to the door. “If you cannot calm yourself, then you will leave.”

Saikhara shot Rin a tight-lipped look of fury, muttered something under her breath, and stormed out of the room.

A long silence hung over her absence. Tarcquet looked somewhat amused. Vaisra leaned back in his chair, took a draught of tea, then sighed. “You’ll have to excuse my wife. She tends to be ill-tempered after travel.”

“She’s desperate for answers.” A woman in a gray cassock, the one who had stood over Rin at the dock, laid her hand on Vaisra’s. “We understand. We’d like to find a cure, too.”

Rin shot her a curious look. The woman’s Nikara sounded remarkably good—she could have been a native speaker if her tones weren’t so oddly flat. Her hair was the color of wheat, straight and slick, braided into a serpent-like coil that rested just over her shoulder. Gray eyes like castle walls. Pale skin like paper, so thin that blue veins were visible beneath. Rin had the oddest urge to touch it, just to see if it felt human.

“She’s a fascinating creature,” said the woman. “It is rare you meet someone possessed by Chaos who yet remains so lucid. None of our Hesperian madmen have been so good at fooling their observers.”

“I’m standing right in front of you,” Rin said.

“I’d like to get her in an isolation chamber,” the woman continued, as if Rin hadn’t spoken. “We’re close to developing instruments that can detect raw Chaos in sterile environments. If we could bring her back to the Gray Towers—”

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” Rin said.

General Tarcquet stroked the arquebus that lay in front of him. “You wouldn’t really have a choice, dear.”

The woman lifted a hand. “Wait, Josephus. The Divine Architect values free thought. Voluntary cooperation is a sign that reason and order yet prevail in the mind. Will the girl come willingly?”

Rin stared at the two of them in disbelief. Did Vaisra possibly believe that she would say yes?

“You could even keep her on campaign for the time being,” the woman said to Vaisra, as if they were discussing something no more pressing than dinner arrangements. “I would only require regular meetings, perhaps once a week. They would be minimally invasive.”

“Define ‘minimally,’” Vaisra said.

“I would only observe her, for the most part. I’d perhaps conduct a few experiments. Nothing that will affect her permanently, and certainly nothing that would affect her fighting ability. I’d just like to see how she reacts to various stimuli—”

A ringing noise grew louder and louder in Rin’s ears. Everyone’s voices became both slurred and magnified. The conversation proceeded, but she could decipher only fragments.

“—fascinating creature—”

“—prized soldier—”

“—tip the balance—”

She found herself swaying on her feet.

She saw in her mind’s eye a face she hadn’t let herself imagine for a long time. Dark, clever eyes. Narrow nose. Thin lips and a cruel, excited smile.

She saw Dr. Shiro.

She felt his hands moving over her, checking her restraints, making sure she couldn’t move an inch from the bed he’d strapped her down on. She felt his fingers feeling around in her mouth, counting her teeth, moving down past her jaw to her neck to locate her artery.

She felt his hands holding her down as he pushed a needle into her vein.

She felt panic, fear, and rage all at once and she wanted to burn but she couldn’t, and the heat and fire just bubbled up in her chest and built up inside her because the fucking Seal had gotten in the way, but the heat just kept building and Rin thought she might implode—

“Runin.” Vaisra’s voice cut through the fog.

She focused with difficulty on his face. “No,” she whispered. “No, I can’t—”

He got up from his seat. “This isn’t the same as the Mugenese lab.”

She backed away from him. “I don’t care, I can’t do this—”

“What are you debating?” demanded the Boar Warlord. “Hand her to them and be done with it.”

“Quiet, Charouk.” Vaisra drew Rin hastily into the corner of the room, far from where the Hesperians could hear. He lowered his voice. “They will force you either way. If you cooperate you will garner us sympathy.”

“You’re trading me for ships,” she said.

“No one is trading you,” he said. “I am asking you for a favor. Please, will you do this for me? You’re in no danger. You’re no monster, and they’ll discover that soon enough.”

And then she understood. The Hesperians wouldn’t find anything. They couldn’t, because Rin couldn’t call the fire anymore. They could run all the experiments they liked, but they wouldn’t find anything. Daji had ensured that there was nothing left to find.

“Runin, please,” Vaisra murmured. “We don’t have a choice.”

He was right about that. The Hesperians had made it clear that they would study her by force if necessary. She could try to fight, but she wouldn’t get very far.

Part of her wanted desperately to say no. To say fuck it, to take her chances and try her best to escape and run. Of course, they’d hunt her down, but she had the smallest chance of making it out alive.

But hers wasn’t the only life at stake.

The fate of the Empire hung in the balance. If she truly wanted the Empress dead, then Hesperian airships and arquebuses were the best way to get it done. The only way she could generate their goodwill was if she went willingly into their arms.

When you hear screaming, Vaisra had told her, run toward it.

She’d failed at Lusan. She couldn’t call the fire anymore. This might be the only way to atone for the colossal wrongs she’d committed. Her only chance to put things right.

Altan had died for liberation. She knew what he would say to her now.

Stop being so fucking selfish.

Rin steeled herself, took a breath, and nodded. “I’ll do it.”

“Thank you.” Relief washed over Vaisra’s face. He turned to the table. “She agrees.”

“One hour,” Rin said in her best Hesperian. “Once a week. No more. I’m free to go if I feel uncomfortable, and you don’t touch me without my express permission.”

General Tarcquet removed his hand from his arquebus. “Fair enough.”

The Hesperians looked far too pleased. Rin’s stomach twisted.

Oh, gods. What had she agreed to?

“Excellent.” The gray-eyed woman rose from her chair. “Come with me. We’ll begin now.”

The Hesperians had already occupied the entire block of buildings just west of the palace, furnished residences that Rin suspected Vaisra must have prepared long ago. Blue flags bearing an insignia that looked like the gears of a clock hung from the windows. The gray-eyed woman motioned for Rin to follow her into a small, windowless square room on the first floor of the center building.

“What do you call yourself?” asked the woman. “Fang Runin, they said?”

“Just Rin,” Rin muttered, glancing around the room. It was bare except for two long, narrow stone tables that had recently been dragged there, judging from the skid marks on the stone floor. One table was empty. The other was covered with an array of instruments, some made of steel and some of wood, few of which Rin recognized or could guess the function of.

The Hesperians had been preparing this room since they got here.

A Hesperian soldier stood in the corner, arquebus slung over his shoulder. His eyes tracked Rin every time she moved. She made a face at him. He didn’t react.

“You may call me Sister Petra,” said the woman. “Why don’t you come over here?”

She spoke truly excellent Nikara. Rin would have been impressed, but something felt off. Petra’s sentences were perfectly smooth and fluent, perhaps more grammatically perfect than those of most native speakers, but her words came out sounding all wrong. The tones were just the slightest bit off, and she inflected everything with the same flat clip that made her sound utterly inhuman.

Petra picked a cup off the edge of the table and offered it to her. “Laudanum?”

Rin recoiled, surprised. “For what?”

“It might calm you down. I’ve been told you react badly to lab environments.” Petra pursed her lips. “I know opiates dampen the phenomena you manifest, but for a first observation that won’t matter. Today I’m interested only in baseline measurements.”

Rin eyed the cup, considering. The last thing she wanted was to be off her guard for a full hour with the Hesperians. But she knew she had no choice but to comply with whatever Petra asked of her. She could reasonably expect that they wouldn’t kill her. She had no control over the rest. The only thing she could control was her own discomfort.

She took the cup and emptied it.

“Excellent.” Petra gestured to the bed. “Up there, please.

Rin took a deep breath and sat down at the edge.

One hour. That was it. All she had to do was survive the next sixty minutes.

Petra began by taking an endless series of measurements. With a notched string she recorded Rin’s height, wingspan, and the length of her feet. She measured the circumference around Rin’s waist, wrists, ankles, and thighs. Then with a smaller string she took a series of smaller measurements that seemed utterly pointless. The width of Rin’s eyes. Their distance from her nose. The length of each one of her fingernails.

This went on forever. Rin managed not to flinch too hard from Petra’s touch. The laudanum was working well; a lead weight had settled comfortably in her bloodstream and kept her numb, torpid, and docile.

Petra wrapped the string around the base of Rin’s thumb. “Tell me about the first time you communed with, ah, this entity you claim to be your god. How would you describe the experience?”

Rin said nothing. She had to present her body for examination. That didn’t mean she had to entertain small talk.

Petra repeated her question. Again Rin kept silent. Sᴇaʀch Thᴇ Findɴovel.ɴet website on Gøøglᴇ to access chapters of novels early and in the highest quality.

“You should know,” Petra said as she put the tape measure away, “that verbal cooperation is a condition of our agreement.”

Rin gave her a wary look. “What do you want from me?”

“Only your honest responses. I am not solely interested in the stock of your body. I’m curious about the possibilities for the redemption of your soul.”

If Rin’s mind had been working any faster she would have managed some clever retort. Instead she rolled her eyes.

“You seem confident our religion is false,” Petra said.

“I know it’s false.” The laudanum had loosened Rin’s tongue, and she found herself spilling the first thoughts that came to her mind. “I’ve seen evidence of my gods.”

“Have you?”

“Yes, and I know that the universe is not the doing of a single man.”

“A single man? Is that what you think we believe?” Petra tilted her head. “What do you know about our theology?”

“That it’s stupid,” Rin said, which was the extent of what she’d ever been taught.

They’d studied Hesperian religion—Makerism, they called it—briefly at Sinegard, back when none of them thought the Hesperians would return to the Empire’s shores during their lifetime. None of them had taken their studies of Hesperian culture seriously, not even the instructors. Makerism was only ever a footnote. A joke. Those foolish westerners.

Rin remembered idyllic walks down the mountainside with Jiang during the first year of her apprenticeship, when he’d made her research differences between eastern and western religions and hypothesize the reasons they existed. She remembered sinking hours into this question at the library. She’d discovered that the vast and varied religions of the Empire tended to be polytheistic, disordered, and irregular, lacking consistency even across villages. But the Hesperians liked to invest their worship in a single entity, typically represented as a man.

“Why do you think that is?” Rin had asked Jiang.

“Hubris,” he’d said. “They already like to think they are lords of the world. They’d like to think something in their own image created the universe.”

The question that Rin had never entertained, of course, was how the Hesperians had become so vastly technologically advanced if their approach to religion was so laughably wrong. Until now, it had never been relevant.

Petra plucked a round metal device about the size of her palm off the table and held it in front of Rin. She clicked a button at the side, and its lid popped off. “Do you know what this is?”

It was a clock of some sort. She recognized Hesperian numbers, twelve in a circle, with two needles moving slowly in rotation. But Nikara clocks, powered by dripping water, were installations that took up entire corners of rooms. This thing was so small it could have fit in her pocket.

“Is it a timepiece?”

“Very good,” Petra said. “Appreciate this design. See the intricate gears, perfectly shaped to form, that keep it ticking on its own. Now imagine that you found this on the ground. You don’t know what it is. You don’t know who put it there. What is your conclusion? Does it have a designer, or is it an accident of nature, like a rock?”

Rin’s mind moved sluggishly around Petra’s questions, but she knew the conclusion Petra wanted her to reach.

“There exists a creator,” she said after a pause.

“Very good,” Petra said again. “Now imagine the world as a clock. Consider the sea, the clouds, the skies, the stars, all working in perfect harmony to keep our world turning and breathing as it does. Think of the life cycles of forests and the animals that live in them. This is no accident. This could not have been forged through primordial chaos, as your theology tends to argue. This was deliberate creation by a greater entity, perfectly benevolent and rational.

“We call him our Divine Architect, or the Maker, as you know him. He seeks to create order and beauty. This isn’t mad reasoning. It is the simplest possible explanation for the beauty and intricacy of the natural world.”

Rin sat quietly, running those thoughts through her tired mind.

It did sound terribly attractive. She liked the thought that the natural world was fundamentally knowable and reducible to a set of objective principles imposed by a benevolent and rational deity. That was much neater and cleaner than what she knew of the sixty-four gods—chaotic creatures dreaming up an endless whirlpool of forces that created the subjective universe, where everything was constantly in flux and nothing was ever written. Easier to think that the natural world was a neat, objective, and static gift wrapped and delivered by an all-powerful architect.

There was only one gaping oversight.

“So why do things go badly?” Rin asked. “If this Maker set everything in motion, then—”

“Then why couldn’t the Maker prevent death?” Petra supplied. “Why do things go wrong if they were designed according to plan?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

Petra gave her a small smile. “Don’t look so surprised. That is the most common question of every new convert. Your answer is Chaos.”

“Chaos,” Rin repeated slowly. She’d heard Petra use this word at the council earlier. It was a Hesperian term; it had no Nikara equivalent. Despite herself, she asked, “What is Chaos?”

“It is the root of evil,” Petra said. “Our Divine Architect is not omnipotent. He is powerful, yes, but he leads a constant struggle to fashion order out of a universe tending inevitably toward a state of dissolution and disorder. We call that force Chaos. Chaos is the antithesis of order, the cruel force trying constantly to undo the Architect’s creations. Chaos is old age, disease, death, and war. Chaos manifests in the worst of mankind—evil, jealousy, greed, and treachery. It is our task to keep it at bay.”

Petra closed the timepiece and placed it back on the table. Her fingers hovered over the instruments, deliberating, and then selected a device with what looked like two earpieces and a flat circle attached to a metal cord.

“We don’t know how or when Chaos manifests,” she said. “But it tends to pop up more often in places like yours—undeveloped, uncivilized, and barbaric. And cases like yours are the worst outbreaks of individual Chaos that the Company has ever seen.”

“You mean shamanism,” Rin said.

Petra turned back to face her. “You understand why the Gray Company must investigate. Creatures like you pose a terrible threat to earthly order.”

She raised the flat circle up under Rin’s shirt to her chest. It was icy cold. Rin couldn’t help but flinch.

“Don’t be scared,” Petra said. “Don’t you realize I’m trying to help you?”

“I don’t understand,” Rin murmured, “why you would even keep me alive.”

“Fair question. Some think it would be easier simply to kill you. But then we would come no closer to understanding Chaos’s evil. And it would only find another avatar to wreak its destruction. So against the Gray Company’s better judgment, I am keeping you alive so that at last we may learn to fix it.”

“Fix it,” Rin repeated. “You think you can fix me.”

“I know I can fix you.”

There was a fanatic intensity to Petra’s expression that made Rin deeply uncomfortable. Her gray eyes gleamed a metallic silver when she spoke. “I’m the smartest scholar of the Gray Company in generations. I’ve been lobbying to come study the Nikara for decades. I’m going to figure out what is plaguing your country.”

She pressed the metal disc hard between Rin’s breasts. “And then I’m going to drive it out of you.”

At last the hour was over. Petra put her instruments back on the table and dismissed Rin from the examination room.

The last of the laudanum wore off just as Rin returned to the barracks. Every feeling that the drug had kept at bay—discomfort, anxiety, disgust, and utter terror—came flooding back to her all at once, a sickening rush so abrupt that it wrenched her to her knees.

She tried to get to the lavatory. She didn’t make it two steps before she lurched over and vomited.

She couldn’t help it. She hunched over the puddle of her sick and sobbed.

Petra’s touch, which had seemed so light, so noninvasive under the effect of laudanum, now felt like a dark stain, like insects burrowing their way under Rin’s skin no matter how hard she tried to claw them out. Her memories mixed together; confusing, indistinguishable. Petra’s hands became Shiro’s hands. Petra’s room became Shiro’s laboratory.

Worst of all was the violation, the fucking violation, and the sheer helplessness of knowing that her body was not hers and she had to sit still and take it, this time not because of any restraints, but due to the simple fact that she’d chosen to be there.

That was the only thing that kept her from packing her belongings and immediately leaving Arlong.

She needed to do this because she deserved this. This was, in some horrible way that made complete sense, atonement. She knew she was monstrous. She couldn’t keep denying that. This was self-flagellation for what she’d become.

It should have been you, Altan had said.

She should have been the one who died.

This came close.

After she had cried so hard that the pain in her chest had faded to a dull ebb, she pulled herself to her feet and wiped the tears and mucus off her face. She stood in front of a mirror in the lavatory and waited to come out until the redness had faded from her eyes.

When the others asked her what had happened, she said nothing at all.

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