The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,90

gasping, nerves tingling like she’d been set on fire.

“What’s wrong?” Daji asked sharply.

“Nothing, I’m . . .” Rin took several deep breaths, trying to pin down what had changed. She felt as if she’d been slowly drowning without realizing it until one day, abruptly, she broke for air. “I think we’re close.”

“It’s your anchor.” It wasn’t a question; Jiang sounded certain. “How do you feel?”

“It’s like—like I’m whole again.” She struggled to articulate the feeling. It wasn’t as if she could read Kitay’s thoughts or sense his emotions. She still hadn’t received any messages from him, not even scars in her skin. But she knew, as surely as she knew that the sun would set, that he was close. “It’s as if—you know how when you’re ill for a long time, you forget how it feels to be healthy? You get used to your head ringing, your ears being blocked, or your nose being stuffed—and you don’t even notice you’re not right anymore. Until you are.”

She wasn’t sure she’d made sense; the words sounded stupid tumbling out of her mouth. But Jiang and Daji only nodded.

Of course they understood. They were the only ones who could understand.

“Soon you’ll start feeling his pain,” Daji said. “If he’s suffered any. That’ll give us some clue about how he’s been treated. And that feeling will get stronger and stronger the closer we get. Convenient, no? Our very own homing pigeon.”

Their suspicions had been correct—Kitay was being held right on the Republican battlefront. The next morning, after long weeks on a road that seemed composed of never-ending bomb craters and ghost villages, the New City rose out of the horizon like a garish dash of color against a scorched background.

It made sense that the Republic would stake their base here, in one of the bloodiest cities in Nikara history. The New City, once named Arabak, had served as a military bastion since the campaigns of the Red Emperor. Originally it was a string of defensive forts over which warlords had fought for so long that the border between Boar and Hare Province was drawn in blood. The war machine required labor and talent, so over the years, civilians—physicians, farmers, craftsmen, and artisans—had moved with their families into the fortress complexes, which grew to accommodate the masses of people whose sole business was fighting.

Now, the New City was the frontier hub of the Republican Army and the air base of the Hesperian dirigible fleet. The Republican’s senior military command was stationed behind those walls, and so was Kitay.

Rin, Jiang, and Daji had to get creative as they got closer to the city. They started traveling only at night, and even then in short, careful bursts, hiding in the forest undergrowth to avoid the dirigibles that circled the city in regular patrols, shining unnaturally strong lights at the ground below. They altered their appearances—Daji clipped her hair short above her ears, Rin started hiding her eyes behind messy shanks of hair, and Jiang dyed his white locks a rich brown with a mix of walnut hulls and ochre, ingredients that he found so easily that Rin had to assume he’d done it before. They agreed on a cover story in case they were stopped by sentries—they were a family of refugees, Rin their daughter, traveling from Snake Province to reunite with Daji’s brother, a low-level bureaucrat in Dragon Province.

Rin found this last ploy ridiculous.

“No one’s going to think I’m your daughter,” she said.

“Why not?” Jiang asked.

“We look nothing alike! For one, your skin’s infinitely paler than mine—”

“Ah, darling.” He patted her on the head. “That’s your fault. What did I tell you about staying out in the sun?”

Half a mile out from the gates they found crowds. Actual refugees, it turned out, had flocked to the New City in hordes. Those fortresses were the only thing within miles that guaranteed safety from the bombing campaigns.

“How are we going to get in?” Rin asked.

“The way you approach any other city,” Daji said, as if this were obvious. “Right through the gates.”

Rin cast a doubtful look at the lines snaking from the gates around the fortress walls. “They’re not letting anyone in.”

“I’m very persuasive,” Daji said.

“You’re not afraid they’ll recognize you?”

Daji gave her a droll look. “Not if I instruct them to forget.”

Surely it couldn’t be so easy. Rin followed along, bewildered, as Daji led them straight to the gates, ignoring the cries of complaint from everyone else in the queue, and demanded so boldly to be let