The Poppy War (The Poppy War #1) - R. F. Kuang Page 0,182

“Get back.”

She wriggled to the other side of the wagon just as Altan ignited a small flame from his arms. His bonds caught fire at the edges, began slowly to blacken.

Smoke filled the wagon. Rin’s eyes teared up; she could not stop herself from coughing. Minutes passed.

“Just a bit longer,” Altan said.

The smoke curled off the rope in thick tendrils. Rin glanced about the tarp, panicked. If the smoke didn’t escape out the sides, they might suffocate before Altan broke through his bonds. But if it did . . .

She heard shouting above her. The language was Mugini but the commands were too terse and abrupt for her to translate.

Someone yanked the tarp off.

Altan’s flames exploded into full force, just as a soldier drenched him with an entire bucket full of water. A great sizzling noise filled the air.

Altan screamed.

Someone clamped a damp cloth over Rin’s mouth. She kicked and struggled, holding her breath, but they jabbed something sharp into her bruised shoulder and she could not help inhaling sharply in pain. Then her nostrils filled with the sweet smell of gas.

Lights. Lights so bright they hurt like knives jabbing into her eyes. Rin tried to squirm away from the source, but nothing happened. For a moment she thrashed in vain, terrified that she’d been paralyzed, until she realized she was tied down with restraints. Strapped to some flat bed. Rin’s peripheral vision was limited to the top half of the room. If she strained, she could just see Altan’s head adjacent to hers.

Rin’s eyes darted around in terror. Shelves filled the sides of the room. They brimmed with jars that contained feet, heads, organs, and fingers, all meticulously labeled. A massive glass chamber stood in the corner. Inside was the body of an adult man. Rin stared at him for a minute before she realized the man was long dead; it was only a corpse that was being preserved in chemicals, like pickled vegetables. His eyes were still frozen in an expression of horror; mouth wide in an underwater scream. The label at the top of the jar read in fine, neat handwriting: Nikara Man, 32.

The jars on the shelves were labeled similarly. Liver, Nikara Child, 12. Lungs, Nikara Woman, 51. She wondered dully if that was how she would end up, neatly parceled in this operating room. Nikara Woman, 19.

“I’m back.” Altan had awoken beside her. His voice was a dry whisper. “I never thought I’d be back.”

Rin’s insides twisted with dread. “Where are we?”

“Please,” Altan said. “Don’t make me explain this to you.”

She knew, then, exactly where they were.

Chaghan’s words echoed in her mind.

After the First Poppy War, the Federation became obsessed with your people . . . They spent the decades in between the Poppy Wars kidnapping Speerlies, experimenting on them, trying to figure out what made them special.

The Federation soldiers had brought them to that same research facility that Altan had been abducted to as a child. The place that had left him with a crippling addiction to opium. The place that had been liberated by the Hesperians. The place that should have been destroyed after the Second Poppy War.

Snake Province must have fallen, she realized with a sinking feeling. The Federation had occupied more ground than she’d feared.

The Hesperians were long gone. The Federation was back. The monsters had returned to their lair.

“You know the worst part?” Altan said. “We’re so close to home. To Speer. We’re on the coastline. We’re right by the sea. When they first brought us here, there weren’t so many cells . . . they put us in a room with a window facing the water. I could see the constellations. Every night. I saw the star of the Phoenix and thought that if I could just slip away, I could swim and keep swimming and find my way back home.”

Rin thought of a four-year-old Altan, locked in this place, staring out at the night sky while around him his friends were strapped down and dissected. She wanted to reach out and touch him, but no matter how hard she strained against those straps, she couldn’t move. “Altan . . .”

“I thought someone would come and get us,” he continued, and Rin didn’t think he was talking to her anymore. He spoke like he was recounting a nightmare to the empty air. “Even when they killed the others, I thought that maybe . . . maybe my parents would still come for me. But when the Hesperian troops liberated