The Burning God (The Poppy War #3) - R.F. Kuang Page 0,95

City’s streets as if they belonged.

She shuddered to think of what that meant. If the Hesperians were shipping in their wives, it meant they intended to stay.

A sudden sharp prickle stung her left shin. She dropped to her knee and tugged her pant leg up, hoping fervently that the pain would continue.

For a few seconds she felt nothing. Then came another stab of pain so sharp she felt as if a needle had pierced all the way through her flesh and emerged out the other side. She uttered a quiet moan of relief.

“What’s wrong?” Daji asked sharply.

“It’s Kitay,” Rin whispered. “He’s writing back, look—”

“Not here,” Daji hissed. She yanked Rin up by the arm and pulled her down the street. Pain continued to lance up Rin’s left leg, the agony intensifying by the second.

Kitay likely didn’t have access to a sharp, clean blade. He was probably carving his flesh with a nail, a piece of scrap wood, or the jagged edge of a shattered vase. Perhaps he was using his own fingernails to carve out the long, jagged strokes that dragged in sharp twists down the length of her shin, creating scars she couldn’t wait to see.

It didn’t matter how badly it hurt. This felt good. Every stab was proof that Kitay was here, he’d heard her, and he was writing back.

At last they reached an empty street corner. Daji let go of Rin’s arm. “What does it say?”

Rin rolled her pant leg up to the knee. Kitay had written four characters, engraved in pale white lines along her inner calf.

“Three, six,” Rin said. “Northeast.”

“Coordinates,” Jiang guessed. “Has to be. The intersection of the third and sixth streets. That makes sense, this city’s arranged like a grid.”

“Then which one’s the vertical coordinate?” Daji asked.

Rin thought for a moment. “How do you read wikki positions?”

“The board game?” Jiang thought for a moment. “Vertical first, then horizontal, origin point in the southwest. Does he—”

“Yes,” Rin said. “He loves it.” Kitay was wild about the strategy game. He’d always tried to get other students to play with him at Sinegard, but no one ever would. Losing to Kitay was too annoying; he kept lecturing you on all your strategic missteps as he cleaned your pieces off the board. “Third street north. Sixth street east.”

None of them could place themselves in relation to the grid, so they had to first find the southwest corner of the city, then count the blocks as they moved northeast. It took them the better part of the hour. All the while Jiang complained under his breath, “Stupid directions, that boy; there are four sides of an intersection, he could be in any one of them, should have included a description.”

But they didn’t need one. When Rin turned the corner toward the sixth street, Kitay’s location became obvious.

A massive building dominated the block in front of them. Unlike the other buildings, which were Hesperian scaffolds built over Nikara foundations, this had clearly been constructed from scratch. The red bricks gleamed. Stained-glass windows stretched along every wall, depicting various insignia—scrolls, scales, and ladders.

At the center was a symbol Rin knew too well: an intricate circle inscribed with the pattern of a timepiece, complicated gears interlocking in a symmetrical pattern. The symbol of the Gray Company. The Architect’s perfect design.

Jiang whistled. “Well, that’s not a prison.”

“It’s worse,” Rin said. “That’s a church.”

Chapter 15

“This is easy enough,” Jiang said. They stood huddled against the wall of a tea shop across the street, eyeing the church’s thick double doors. “We’ll just kill and impersonate one of those missionary fellows. Drag them into a corner, strip off their cassock—”

“You can’t do that,” Rin said. “You’re Nikara. All the Gray Company are Hesperians.”

“Hmm.” Jiang rubbed his chin. “A devastatingly good point.”

“Servant’s entrance, then?” Daji suggested. “They’ve always got some Nikara on hand to sweep their floors, and I can talk them down until you’ve found Kitay.”

“Too risky,” Jiang said. “We don’t know how many there are, and we need to buy more than five minutes to search.”

“So I’ll ask them what I need, then stick them with needles.”

Jiang reached out to tuck a lock of hair behind her ear. “Darling, people pay you less attention when you don’t leave a trail of bodies in your wake.”

Daji rolled her eyes.

Rin glanced back toward the church. Then the solution struck her—it was so blindingly obvious, she almost laughed.

“We don’t have to do any of that.” She pointed to the line of Nikara civilians stretching out the front