The Dragon Republic (The Poppy War #2) - R. F. Kuang Page 0,175

it. She still had to try.

She tried broadening her search. “Is anyone here from Tikany?”

Blank looks. She moved faster and faster through the camp, breaking into a run. “Tikany? Please? Anyone?”

Then at last she heard one voice through the crowd—one that was laced not with casual indifference but with sheer disbelief.

“Rin?”

She stumbled to a halt. When she turned around she saw a spindly boy, no more than fourteen, with a mop of brown hair and large, downward-sloping eyes. He stood with a sodden shirt dangling from one hand and a bandage clutched in the other.

“Kesegi?”

He nodded wordlessly.

Then she was sixteen years old again herself, crying as she held him, rocking him so hard they almost fell to the dirt. He hugged her back, wrapping his long and scrawny limbs all the way around her like he used to.

When had he gotten so tall? Rin marveled at the change. Once, he’d barely come up to her waist. Now he was taller than she by about an inch. But the rest of him was far too skinny, close to starved; he looked like he’d been stretched more than he had grown.

“Where are the others?” she asked.

“Mother’s here with me. Father’s dead.”

“The Federation . . . ?”

“No. It was the opium in the end.” He gave a false laugh. “Funny, really. He heard they were coming, and he ate an entire pan of nuggets. Mother found him just as we were packing up to leave. He’d been dead for hours.” He gave her an awkward smile. A smile. He’d lost his father, and he was trying to make her feel better about it. “We just thought he was sleeping.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. Her voice came out flat. She couldn’t help it. Her relationship with Uncle Fang had been one between master and servant, and she couldn’t conjure up anything that remotely resembled grief.

“Tutor Feyrik?” she asked.

Kesegi shook his head. “I don’t know. I saw him in the crowd when we left, I think, but I haven’t seen him since.”

His voice cracked when he spoke. She realized that he was trying to imitate a deeper voice than he possessed. He stood up overly straight, too, to appear taller than he was. He was trying to pass himself off as an adult.

“So you’ve come back.”

Rin’s blood froze. She’d been walking blindly without a destination, assuming Kesegi had been doing the same, but of course they’d been walking back to his tent.

Kesegi stopped. “Mother. Look who I found.”

Auntie Fang gave Rin a thin smile. “Well, look at that. It’s the war hero. You’ve grown.”

Rin wouldn’t have recognized her if Kesegi hadn’t introduced her. Auntie Fang looked twenty years older, with the complexion of a wrinkled walnut. She had always been so red-faced, perpetually furious, burdened with a foster child she didn’t want and a husband addicted to opium. She used to terrify Rin. But now she seemed shriveled dry, as if the fight had been drained from her completely.

“Come to gloat?” Auntie Fang asked. “Go on, look. There’s not much to see.”

“Gloat?” Rin repeated, baffled. “No, I . . .”

“Then what is it?” Auntie Fang asked. “Well, don’t just stand there.”

How was it that even now Auntie Fang could still make her feel so stupid and worthless? Under her withering glare Rin felt like a little girl again, hiding in the shed to avoid a beating.

“I didn’t know you were here,” she managed. “I just—I wanted to see if—”

“If we were still alive?” Auntie Fang put bony hands on narrow hips. “Well, here we are. No thanks to you soldiers—no, you were too busy drowning up north. It’s Vaisra’s fault we’re here at all.”

“Watch your tone,” Rin snapped.

It shocked her when Auntie Fang cringed backward like she was expecting to be hit.

“Oh, I didn’t mean that.” Auntie Fang adopted a wheedling, wide-eyed expression that looked grotesque on her leathery face. “The hunger’s just getting to me. Can’t you get us some food, Rin? You’re a soldier, I bet they’ve even made you a commander, you’re so important, surely you could call in some favors.”

“They’re not feeding you?” Rin asked.

Auntie Fang laughed. “Not unless you’re talking about the Lady of Arlong walking around handing out tiny bowls of rice to the skinniest children she can find while the blue-eyed devils follow her around to document how wonderful she is.”

“We don’t get anything,” Kesegi said. “Not clothes, not blankets, not medicine. Most of us forage for our own food—we were eating fish for a while, but they’d all