The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,70

away with nothing.

Nothing but the Seal—always lurking, taunting, Altan’s laughter echoing louder and louder to match her despair.

Kitay? She tried sending her thoughts out to him. That wasn’t how the anchor bond worked; they couldn’t communicate telepathically, they could only feel each other’s pain. But regardless of distance, their souls were still linked—didn’t that count for something?

Please. She threw her thoughts against the barrier in her mind, praying they might somehow reach him. Please, I need you. Where are you?

She was met with deafening silence.

She clutched her head, shaking, breathing in short and frantic bursts. Then came the sheer and utter terror as she realized what this meant.

She didn’t have the fire.

She didn’t have the fire.

Kitay was gone, truly gone, and without him she was vulnerable. Powerless. A girl who didn’t have a fighting arm or the shamanic ability that justified her inability to wield a blade. Not a Speerly, not a soldier, not a goddess.

What army would follow her now?

Desperate, she gripped her knife and carved a shaky question mark into her upper thigh, deep enough to leave scars that might reappear as thin white lines on Kitay’s skin. They’d communicated this way once before; it had to work again. She carved another mark. Then another. She sliced her thigh bloody. But Kitay never answered.

Tikany was shrouded in terrified silence when she returned from the fields. No one seemed to know what to do. Here and there Rin saw desultory efforts at rescue and reconstruction. A triage center was set up on the bonfire grounds, where the bombs had hit hardest, but Rin saw only two physicians and one assistant, hardly enough to deal with the lines of the wounded stretching around the square. Here and there she saw soldiers clearing away rubble or making futile attempts to create temporary shelters from the hollowed pits where once had stood buildings. But most of the survivors, civilians and soldiers both, just stood around looking dazed, as if they still couldn’t quite believe what had just happened.

No one was giving orders.

Rin supposed she should have been the one giving the orders.

But she, too, walked about in a helpless fugue. She didn’t know what to say. Every order, every action she could possibly take seemed utterly pointless. How could they come back from this?

She couldn’t turn back time. She couldn’t bring back the dead.

Don’t be pathetic, Altan would have said. She could hear his voice loud and clear, as if he were standing right beside her. Stop being such a little brat. So you lost. You’re still alive. Pick up the pieces and figure out how to start over.

She took a deep breath, squared her shoulders, and tried to at least act like she knew what she was doing.

Back to the basics. She had to know what assets she still had, and what she had lost. She needed to determine what her fighting capabilities were. She had to gather her officers.

She seized the arm of the first Iron Wolf she saw. “Where’s Souji?”

She wouldn’t have been surprised if he said he didn’t know. Most of the Iron Wolves were milling about, looking just as confused and disoriented as the rest. But she wasn’t prepared for the look of terror that came over his face.

He looked as if she’d just threatened to kill him.

He paused before he answered. “Ah, not here, ma’am—”

“I can see that,” she snapped. “Find him for me. Tell him I want to see him. Right now.”

The Iron Wolf seemed to be trying to decide something. He had a strange look in his eye that Rin couldn’t quite read. Defiance? Mere disorientation? She opened her mouth to ask again, but he gave her a curt nod and headed off toward the wreckage.

She returned to the general’s complex, one of the few buildings left intact thanks to its solid stone foundations. She sat behind the desk, pulled out a sheaf of planning documents from a drawer, and spread them on her desk. Then she started to think.

The opium was nearly gone from her bloodstream. Her mental clarity had returned. Her mind went back to the cool, logical plane where strategy existed outside the friction of war. It felt familiar, calming. She could do this. She’d been trained for this.

For a moment she forgot the trauma of what she’d just seen, forgot the million hurts lacerating her body, and busied herself with next steps. She’d start with the tasks that she didn’t need Souji for. First things first: She gathered a handful