The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,132

fingertips.

Rin stared at them, astonished. “You can’t do that. That’s not—I mean, that’s a violation. That’s disgusting.”

“It’s food.” Pipaji gave her a very bored look—the sort of gaunt, indifferent stare that only starvation produced. Go ahead, said her eyes. Kill me. I won’t even feel it.

Rin noticed then that the corpse was not so brutally savaged as it had first appeared. The bloodstained snow only made it seem that way. The girls had only made two neat incisions. One over the heart, and one over the liver. They’d gone straight for organs that would provide the most sustenance, which meant they’d harvested meat from bodies before. They were well practiced at this by now—this was just the first time they’d been caught.

But what was Rin supposed to do about it? Force them to starve? She couldn’t tell them to subsist on rations. There wasn’t enough of anything to go around. Rin had sufficient rations because of course she did; she was the general, the Speerly, the one person in this column who could not be allowed to go hungry. Meanwhile Pipaji and Jiuto were no one of importance, not even trained soldiers. They were expendable.

Could she punish these girls for wanting to survive?

“Take everything you want and put it in a bag,” she said finally. She could barely believe the words coming out of her mouth, but in that instant, they seemed like the only appropriate things to say. “Wrap it in leaves so that the blood doesn’t leak. Eat only when no one is looking. If they catch you again, they’ll tear you apart, and I won’t be able to help you. Do you understand?”

Pipaji’s tongue darted out to lick the blood off the corner of her bottom lip.

“Do you understand?” Rin repeated.

“Whatever you say,” Pipaji muttered. She gave Jiuto a nod. Without another word, they knelt back over the body and resumed deftly pulling the organs out of the carcass.

Pipaji and Jiuto were not the only ones who resorted to eating human flesh. They were just the first. The longer the march stretched on, the more it became apparent that their food supplies were not going to last. The army was subsisting on one ration of dried salted mayau and one cup of rice gruel a day. They foraged the best they could—some of the soldiers had even started swallowing tree bark to stifle their pangs of hunger—but at this altitude, vegetation was scarce and there was no wildlife in sight.

So Rin wasn’t surprised when rumors circulated of corpses—usually victims of frostbite or starvation—divvied up and eaten raw, roasted, or parceled out for the road.

“Say nothing,” Kitay advised her. “If you sanction it, you’ll horrify them. If you denounce it, they’ll resent you. But if you keep quiet, you get plausible deniability.”

Rin couldn’t see what other choice she had. She’d known this march would be hard, but their prospects looked bleaker with each passing day. Morale, which had been so blazingly strong at the start of their journey, began to wilt. Whispers of dissent and complaints about Rin riddled the column. She doesn’t know where she’s going. Sinegard-trained, and she can’t find her way through a damned mountain. She’s led us up here to die. Order collapsed along the column. Troops routinely ignored, or didn’t hear, her commands. It took nearly an hour to rouse the camp into marching in the mornings. At first, the deserters numbered in handfuls, and then dozens.

Venka suggested sending search parties to chase them down, but Rin couldn’t see the point. What good would that do? The deserters had sentenced themselves to death—alone, they would freeze or starve in days. Their numbers made no difference to her ultimate victory or defeat.

All that mattered was Mount Tianshan. Their future was laid out in stark black and white now—either they woke Riga, or they died.

The days began blurring together. There was no difference between one instance of monotonous suffering and the next. Rin, fatigued beyond belief, started feeling a profound sense of detachment. She felt like an observer, not a participant, like she was watching a shadow puppet show about a beautiful and suicidal struggle, something that had already happened in the past and been enshrined in myth.

They weren’t humans, they were stories; they were paintings winding their way across wall scrolls. The terrain transformed around them as they marched, became brighter, sharper, and lovelier, as if warping to match the mythic status of their journey. The snow gleamed a purer white. The mist grew