The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,114

emerged into a marvelous accident of nature—a cavern whose ceiling split into a jagged crack in the darkness, revealing the sky above. Rin stopped walking and tilted her head up at the stars. After a day spent underground trying to convince her racing heart at every second that she wasn’t being buried alive, she felt like she’d come up from drowning.

Had the night sky always shone so bright?

“We should rest here.” Kitay pointed to a ridge in the opposite wall. Rin squinted and saw a staircase carved into the stone—a narrow, precipitous set of steps, likely built by miners who hadn’t revisited these tunnels in years. “If anything starts coming through those tunnels, we’ve got a way out.”

“All right.” Rin suddenly felt a wave of exhaustion that until now had been kept at bay by adrenaline and fear. She was still afraid. But she couldn’t push herself or the army any farther, or they’d collapse. “Just until dawn. We start moving the moment the sun comes up.”

A collective moan of relief echoed through the tunnels when she gave the order. The southerners set down their packs, spread out through the cavern and its adjacent tunnels, and unfurled sleeping mats on the dirt. Rin wanted nothing more than to curl up in a corner and close her eyes.

But she was in charge now, and she had work to do.

She walked through the huddled masses of soldiers and civilians, taking stock of what kind of numbers she had left. She lit their torches and warmed them with her flame. She answered honestly every question they asked about where she’d been—she told them about the Chuluu Korikh, the Trifecta’s return, and her break-in to Arabak.

She found, to her surprise, a great deal of new faces not from Monkey or Rooster Provinces, but from the north—mostly young and middle-aged men with the hardy physique of laborers.

“I don’t understand,” she told Venka. “Where’d they come from?”

“They’re miners,” Venka said. “The Hesperians set up tungsten mines all over the Daba range after they took over Arlong. They’ve got these drilling machines that blast through mountainside like you’ve never seen. But they still needed warm bodies to do the dangerous work—crawling into tunnels, loading the carts, testing the rock face. The northerners came down to work.”

“I guess they didn’t like it much,” Rin said.

“What do you expect? No one flees a good job to join rebel bandits. From what I’ve heard, those mines were hell. The machines were death traps. Some of those men weren’t allowed to see sunlight for days. They joined up the minute they saw us coming.”

It took Rin nearly two hours to move through the tunnels. Everyone wanted to speak to her, to hear her voice, to touch her. They didn’t believe that she was back or that she was alive. They had to see her fire with their own eyes.

“I’m real,” she assured them, over and over again. “I’m back. And I’ve got a plan.”

Quickly their doubt and confusion turned to wonder, then gratitude, and then clear and adamant loyalty. The more Rin spoke to the troops, the more she understood how the past day had played out in their minds. They had been on the brink of extermination, trapped for weeks in tunnels without enough food or water, awaiting imminent death from bullets, incineration, or starvation. Then Rin had shown up, returned from the stone mountain with barely a scratch and two of the Trifecta in tow, and reversed their fortunes in a single chaotic morning.

To them, what had just happened was divine intervention.

They might have been skeptical of her before. They couldn’t be skeptical now. She’d proven without a shadow of a doubt that Souji was wrong—that the Republic would never show them mercy, and that she was the south’s best hope for survival. And Rin realized, as she walked through the crowds of awed, grateful faces, that this army was finally hers for good.

Jiang wasn’t getting better.

He had recovered consciousness shortly after they reached the cavern, but he hadn’t spoken an intelligible word since. He gave no indication that he saw Rin as she approached his sleeping mat, where he sat like a child with his knees drawn up into his chest. He seemed lost somewhere inside himself, somewhere troubled and terrifying, and although Rin could tell from the way his mouth twitched and his eyes darted back and forth that he was fighting to claw his way back, she had no idea how to reach him.

“Hello, Master,” she