next patient.
Chapter 16
Hours later Rin finally received permission to leave the triage center. She stumbled back toward the Cike’s quarters, hollow-eyed and light-headed from sleep deprivation. Once she checked in with Altan, she intended to collapse in her bunk and sleep until someone forced her out to report for duty.
“Enki finally let you off?”
She glanced over her shoulder.
Unegen and Baji rounded the corner, coming back from patrol. They joined her as she walked down the eerily empty streets. The Warlords had imposed martial law on the city; civilians had a strict curfew now, no longer allowed to venture beyond their block without Militia permission.
“I’m to be back in six hours,” she said. “You?”
“Nonstop patrol until something more interesting happens,” said Unegen. “Did Enki get the casualty count?”
“Six hundred dead,” she said. “A thousand wounded. Fifty division soldiers. The rest civilians.”
“Shit,” Unegen muttered.
“Yeah,” she said listlessly.
“The Warlords are just sitting on their hands,” Baji complained. “The bombs scared the wits out of them. Fucking useless. Don’t they see? We can’t just absorb the attack. We’ve got to strike back.”
“Strike back?” Rin repeated. The very idea sounded halfhearted, disrespectful, and pointless. All she wanted to do was curl up in a ball and hold her hands over her ears and pretend nothing was happening. Leave this war to someone else.
“What are we supposed to do?” Unegen was saying. “The Warlords won’t attack, and we’ll get slaughtered on the open field ourselves.”
“We can’t just wait for the Seventh, they’ll take weeks—”
They approached headquarters just as Qara stepped out of Altan’s office. She closed the door delicately behind her, noticed them, and her face froze.
Baji and Unegen stopped walking. The heavy silence that transpired seemed to contain some unspoken message that everyone but Rin understood.
“It’s like that, huh?” Unegen asked.
“It’s worse,” said Qara.
“What’s going on?” Rin asked. “Is he in there?”
Qara looked warily at her. For some reason she smelled overwhelmingly of smoke. Her expression was unreadable. Rin might have seen tear tracks glistening on her cheek, or it might have been a trick of the lamplight.
“He’s indisposed,” Qara said.
The Federation’s retaliation did not end with the bombing.
Two days after the downtown explosions, the Federation sent bilingual agents to negotiate with starving fishermen in the town of Zhabei, just south of Khurdalain, and told them the Mugenese would clear their boats from the dock if the fishermen collected all the stray cats and dogs in the town for them.
Only starving civilians would have obeyed such a bizarre order. The fishermen were desperate, and they handed over every last stray animal they could find without question.
The Federation soldiers tied kindling to the animals’ tails and lit them on fire. Then they set them loose in Zhabei.
The ensuing flames burned for three days before rainfall finally extinguished them. When the smoke cleared, nothing remained of Zhabei but ashes.
Thousands of civilians were left homeless overnight, and the refugee problem in Khurdalain became unmanageable. The men, women, and children of Zhabei crammed into the shrinking parts of the city that were not yet under Federation occupation. Poor hygiene, lack of clean water, and an outbreak of cholera made the civilian districts a nightmare.
Popular sentiment turned against the Militia. The First, Fifth, and Eighth Divisions attempted to maintain martial rule, only to meet open defiance and riots.
The Warlords, desperately needing a scapegoat, publicly blamed their reversals of fortune on Altan. It helped them that the bombing shattered his credibility as a commander. He had won his first combat victory, only to have it ripped from him and turned into a tragic defeat, an example of the consequences of acting without thinking.
When Altan finally emerged from his office, he seemed to take it in stride. No one made mention of his absence; the Cike seemed to collectively pretend that nothing had happened at all. He showed no signs of insecurity—if anything, his behavior become almost manic.
“So we’re back where we started,” he said, pacing rapidly about his office. “Fine. We’ll fight back. Next time we’ll be thorough. Next time we’ll win.”
He planned far more operations than they could ever feasibly carry out. But the Cike were not historically soldiers, they were assassins. The battle at the marsh had been an unprecedented feat of teamwork for them; they were trained to take out crucial targets, not entire battalions. Yet assassinations did not go far in winning wars. The Federation was not like a snake, to be vanquished by cutting off the head. If a general was killed in his camp, a