The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,218

For armies were fueled by cities, and the city was on the verge of falling apart.

They upturned Arlong in a flurry of restoration. Work teams deployed to the beaches to run rescue operations on the settlements the Dragon had flooded. Triage centers opened across the city to treat civilians who had been injured in the battle and subsequent occupation. Lines formed before the public kitchens and stretched around the canals, intimidating crowds composed of thousands upon thousands of people whom she was now responsible for feeding.

Governance required a wholly different set of skills from commanding an army, very few of which Rin possessed. She didn’t know the first thing about civil administration, yet suddenly a million mundane tasks demanded her immediate attention. Relocation for civilians whose homes were underwater. Law enforcement against looting and pillaging. Finding caretakers for children whose parents were dead or missing. It was going to be a gargantuan task just to restore the city to a minimal level of functionality, and its difficulty was compounded by the fact that the public officers normally responsible for keeping the city running were either dead, imprisoned, or had fled with Nezha to Speer.

Rin was astonished they got anything done. She certainly couldn’t have gotten through that first morning without Kitay, who seemed undaunted by the impossibility of their mission, who calmly summoned staff and designated responsibilities like he knew exactly where everything was and what needed to be done.

Still, that morning did not quite seem real. It felt like a dream. It was absurd, the fact that the three of them were running a city. Her mind kept ricocheting between the wildly arrogant conviction that this was fine, they were managing, and doing a better job of it than any of Arlong’s corrupt leadership ever had; and the crippling fear that they weren’t qualified for this at all because they were just soldiers, just kids who hadn’t even graduated from Sinegard, and so wholly unprepared for the task of ruling that the city was going to collapse around them any minute. Despite Kitay’s astounding competency, their problems only kept stacking up. The moment they resolved one issue, they received reports of a dozen more. It felt as if they were trying to plug a dam with their fingertips while water kept bursting forth around them. If they strayed off focus for even one minute, Rin feared, they’d drown.

By midmorning she wanted to curl up and cry, I don’t want this, I can’t do this; wanted to hand off her responsibilities to an adult.

But you waged this war, Altan reminded her. You wanted to be in charge. And now you are. Don’t fuck it up.

But every time she got her thoughts back in order, she remembered that it wasn’t just Arlong at stake—it was the country.

And Arlong’s problems paled in comparison to what was going on across Nikan. The Republic had been holding together worse than she’d thought. Grain deficiencies plagued every province. The livestock trade was nearly nonexistent; it had been wrecked by the Mugenese invasion, and the following civil war had afforded it no space to recover. Fish, a staple in the southeast, was in short supply since Daji had poisoned the rivers a year ago. Rates of infectious diseases were skyrocketing. Almost every part of the country was suffering epidemics of typhus, malaria, dysentery, and—in a remote village in Rat Province—unprecedented cases of leprosy. These diseases affected rural populations on a cyclical schedule, but the tumult of war had uprooted entire communities and forced masses of people—many of whom had never been in contact with one another before—into smaller, cramped spaces. Infections had exploded as a result. Hesperian medicine had helped, to some extent. That wasn’t available anymore.

Then there were the normal by-products of war. Mass displacement. Rampant banditry. Trade routes were no longer safe; entire economies had ceased to function. The normal flow of goods, that crucial circulation that kept the Empire running, had broken down and would require months, if not years, to restore.

Rin wouldn’t have known about half of these issues if she hadn’t learned about them from Nezha’s private papers—a stack of neat, startlingly comprehensive accounts of every plea for government assistance over the last six months, kept fastidiously in elegant, oddly feminine handwriting. Despite herself, Rin found them immensely helpful. She spent hours poring over the scrolls, marking down his reflections and suggested solutions. They displayed the thoughts of someone trained for statesmanship since he could read. A distressing number of his