The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,103

fidgeted in his lap; he was clearly struggling with how much he wanted to tell her. Nothing could have prepared her for what he said next. “Do you think they might just be better than us?”

“Kitay.” She twisted around to stare at him. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“When Nezha first brought me into Arabak, he spent the first two days giving me a tour of the city,” he said. “Showing me everything that they’d built in just a few weeks. Do you remember how insufferable he was when we first got to Arlong? Couldn’t stop jabbering about this naval innovation and that. But this time, everything I saw really was a marvel. Everywhere I looked I saw things that I never dreamed could exist.”

She folded her arms against her chest. “So what?”

“So how did they build them? How did they create objects that defy every known law of the natural world? Their knowledge of so many fields—mathematics, physics, mechanics, engineering—eclipses ours to a terrifying degree. Everything we’re discovering at Yuelu Mountain, they must have known already for centuries.” His fingers twisted in his lap. “Why? What do they have that we don’t have?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “But it doesn’t mean they’re just naturally better, whatever the fuck that means—”

“But could it? Every member of the Gray Company I’ve met believes that they are just innately, biologically superior to us. And they don’t say this to be cruel or condescending. They see it as fact. A scientific fact, as simple as the fact that the ocean is salty and that the sun rises every morning.” His fingers wouldn’t stop twisting. Rin had the sudden impulse to slap them. “They see human evolution as a ladder, and they’re at its top, or at least as far as it can reach for now. And we—the Nikara—are clinging on to the lower rungs. Closer to animals than human.”

“That’s bullshit.”

“Is it? They built dirigibles. Not only can they fly, they’ve been flying for decades, and here we are with only a rudimentary knowledge of seafaring because we bombed our own navies to bits in civil wars over nothing. Why?”

Dread twisted Rin’s stomach. She didn’t want to hear these words from Kitay’s mouth. This felt worse than betrayal. This felt like discovering her best friend was an utter stranger.

She would be lying if she said she’d never asked these questions herself. Of course she had. She’d asked them during all those weeks she’d spent undergoing examinations in Sister Petra’s cabin, putting her naked, helpless body at the Hesperian’s disposal, letting her take measurements and write them down while explaining in a cold, matter-of-fact tone that Rin’s brain was smaller, her stature was shorter, and her eyes saw less because of her race.

Of course she’d wondered, often, whether the Hesperians were right. But she hated how Kitay spoke as if he’d already decided they were.

“They could be horribly wrong about us,” he said. “But they’re right about almost everything else; they couldn’t have built all that if they weren’t. Look at a city they threw up in weeks. Compare that to the finest cities in the Empire. Can’t you at least see where I’m coming from?”

Rin thought of the New City’s spotless streets, its neat grid-like layout, and its quick, efficient modes of transportation. The Nikara had never built something like that. Even in Sinegard, the Red Emperor’s capital and the crown jewel of the Empire, sewage had rushed freely down the streets like rainwater.

“Maybe it’s their Maker.” She tried to inject some levity into her voice. He was tired, she was tired; perhaps by morning, after they’d slept, this entire conversation would seem like a joke. “Maybe those prayers are working.”

He didn’t smile. “It’s not their religion. Perhaps that’s related—the Divine Architect is certainly more friendly to scientific research than any of our gods are. But I don’t think they need deities at all. They have machines, and that’s perhaps more powerful than anything they could summon. They rewrite the script of the world, just like you do. And they don’t need to sacrifice their sanity to do it.”

Rin had no rebuttal to that.

Jiang would have an answer. Jiang, who was so sure that the Pantheon lay at the center of the universe, had warned her once against treating the material world like a thing to be mechanized, dominated, and militarized. He’d believed firmly that the Hesperian and Mugenese societies had long ago forgotten their essential oneness with universal being, and were spiritually lost