The Dragon Republic. R.F. Kuang
to go.
“What’s the matter?” Baji asked. “Sounds like you want us gone.”
“It’s not that,” Rin said. “I just—I can’t make it go away. I’m scared.”
“Of what?”
“I’m scared I’ll hurt you. Adlaga won’t be the end. I can’t make the Phoenix go away and I can’t make it stop and—”
“Because you’re new to this,” Baji interrupted. He sounded so kind. How could he be so kind? “We’ve all been there. They want to use your body all the time. And you think you’re on the brink of madness, you think that this moment is going to be when you finally snap, but it’s not.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because it gets easier every time. Eventually you learn to exist on the precipice of insanity.”
“But I can’t promise I won’t—”
“You won’t. And we’ll go after Daji again. And we’ll keep doing it, over and over, as many times as it takes, until she’s dead. Tyr didn’t give up on us. We’re not giving up on you. This is why the Cike exists.”
She stared at him, stricken. She didn’t deserve this, whatever this was. It wasn’t friendship. She didn’t deserve that. It wasn’t loyalty, either. She deserved that even less. But it was camaraderie, a bond formed by a common betrayal. The Empress had sold them to the Federation for a silver and a song, and none of them could rest until the rivers ran red with Daji’s blood.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Then just shut up and stop being a little bitch about it.” Ramsa pushed her bowl back in front of her. “Eat your porridge. Mold is nutritious.”
Night fell over Omonod Bay. The Petrel spirited down the coast under the cover of darkness, buoyed by a shamanic force so powerful that within hours it had lost its Imperial pursuers. The Cike spread out—Qara and Chaghan to their cabin, where they spent almost all of their time, secluded from the others; Suni and Ramsa onto the front deck for night watch, and Baji to his hammock in the main sleeping quarters.
Rin locked herself inside her cabin to wage a mental battle with a god.
She didn’t have much time. The laudanum had nearly worn off. She wedged a chair under the doorknob, sat down on the floor, squeezed her head between her knees, and waited to hear the voice of a god.
She waited to return to the state in which the Phoenix wanted utter command and shouted down her thoughts until she obeyed.
This time she would shout back.
She placed a small hunting knife beside her knee. She pressed her eyes shut. She felt the last of the laudanum pass through her bloodstream, and the numb, foggy cloud left her mind. She felt the curdling clench in her stomach and gut that never disappeared. She felt, along with the terrifying possibility of sobriety, awareness.
She always came back to the same moment, months ago, when she’d been on her hands and knees in that temple on the Isle of Speer. The Phoenix relished that moment because to the god it was the height of destructive power. And it kept bringing her back because it wanted her to believe that the only way to reconcile herself with that horror was to finish the job.
It wanted her to burn up this ship. To kill everyone around her. Then to find her way to land, and start burning that down, too; like a small flame igniting the corner of a sheet of paper, she was to make her way inland and burn down everything in her path until nothing was left except a blank slate of ash.
And then she would be clean.
She heard a symphony of screams, voices both collective and individual, Speerly or Mugini voices—it never mattered because wordless agony didn’t have a language.
She could not bear how they were numbers and not numbers all at once, and the line kept blurring and it was awful because as long as they were numbers it wasn’t so bad but if they were lives, then the multiplication was unbearable—
Then the screaming solidified into Altan.
His face splintered apart along cracks of skin turned charcoal, eyes burning orange, black tears opening streaks across his face, fire tearing him open from the inside—and she couldn’t do anything about it.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I tried …”
“It should have been you,” he said. His lips blistered, crackled, fell away to reveal bone. “You should have died. You should have gone up in flames.” His face became ash became a skull, pressed against hers; bony fingers around her neck. “It should have been you.”
Then she couldn’t tell if her thoughts were his or her own, only that they were so loud they drowned out everything in her mind.
I want you to hurt.
I want you to die.
I want you to burn.
“No!” She slammed her blade into her thigh. The pain was only a temporary respite, a blinding whiteness that drove out everything in her mind, and then the fire would be back.
She’d failed.
And she’d failed last time, too, and the time before that. She’d failed every time she tried. At this point she didn’t know why she did it, except to torture herself with the knowledge that she could not control the fire raging in her mind.
The cut joined a line of open wounds on her arms and legs that she’d sliced open weeks before—and kept sliced open—because even though it was only temporary, pain was still the only option other than opium that she could think of.
And then she couldn’t think anymore.
The motions were automatic now, and it all came so easily—rolling the opium nugget between her palms, the spark of the first flicker of flame, and then the smell of crystallized candy concealing something rotten.
The nice thing about opium was that once she’d inhaled it, everything stopped mattering; and for hours at a time, carved out into her world, she could stop dealing with the responsibility of existence.
She sucked in.
The flames receded. The memories disappeared. The world stopped hurting her, and even the frustration of surrender faded to a dull nothing. And the only thing that remained was the sweet, sweet smoke.
“Did you know that Ankhiluun has a special government office dedicated to figuring out how much weight the city can sustain?” Ramsa asked brightly.
He was the only one of them who could navigate the Floating City with ease. He hopped ahead, effortlessly navigating the narrow footbridges that lined the sludgy canals, while the rest inched warily along the wobbly planks.
“And how much weight is that?” Baji asked, humoring him.
“I think they’re approaching maximum capacity,” Ramsa said. “Someone’s got to do something about the population, or Ankhiluun’s going to start sinking.”
“You could send them inland,” Baji said. “Bet we’ve lost a couple hundred thousand people in the last few months.”
“Or just have them fight another war. Good way to kill people off.” Ramsa skipped off toward the next bridge.
Rin followed clumsily behind, blinking blearily under the unforgiving southern sun.
She hadn’t left her cabin on the ship for days. She’d taken the smallest possible daily dose of opium that worked to keep her mind quiet while leaving her functional. But even that amount fucked so badly with her sense