“They kept saying you were going to come for us.” His voice cracked. “That a fire goddess from the Rooster Province had destroyed the longbow island, and that you were going to come back home to liberate us, too.”

“I wanted to. I would have—”

“No, you wouldn’t have. Where were you all those months? Launching a coup in the Autumn Palace. Starting another war.” Venom crept into his voice. “You don’t get to say you don’t want any part of this. This is your fault. Without you we wouldn’t be here.”

She could have replied. She could have argued with him, said it wasn’t her fault but the Empress’s, told him there were political forces at play that were much larger than any of them.

But she simply couldn’t form the sentences. None of them felt genuine.

The simple truth was that she’d abandoned her foster brother and hadn’t thought about him for years. He’d barely crossed her mind until they’d met in the camp. And she would have forgotten him again if he weren’t standing right here before her.

She didn’t know how to fix that. She didn’t know if fixing it was even possible.

They turned the corner toward a line of single-story stone buildings. They had made it to the Hesperian quarters. A few more minutes and they’d be back at the refugee district. Rin was glad of it. She wanted to get away from Kesegi. She couldn’t bear the full brunt of his resentment.

From the corner of her eye, she saw a blue uniform disappear around the back of the closest building. She would have dismissed it, but then she heard the sounds—a rhythmic shuffle, a muffled moan.

She’d heard those noises before. She’d delivered parcels of opium to Tikany’s whorehouses plenty of times. She just couldn’t imagine how this could be the time or the place.

Kesegi heard it, too. He stopped walking.

“Run to the barrier,” she hissed.

“But—”

“I’m not asking.” She pushed him. “Go.”

He obeyed.

She broke into a run. She saw two half-naked bodies behind the building. Hesperian soldier, Nikara girl. The girl whimpered, trying to scream, but the soldier covered her mouth with one hand, grasped her hair with the other, and jerked her head back to expose her neck.

For a moment all Rin could do was stand and watch.

She’d never seen a rape before.

She’d heard about them. She’d heard too many stories from the women who had survived Golyn Niis, had imagined it vividly so many times that they invaded her nightmares and made her wake up shaking in rage and fear.

And the only thing she could think about was whether this was how Venka had suffered at Golyn Niis. Whether Venka’s face had contorted like this girl’s, mouth open in a silent scream. Whether the Mugenese soldiers who had pinned her down had been laughing like the Hesperian soldier was now.

Bile rose up in Rin’s throat. “Get off of her.”

The soldier couldn’t, or refused to, understand her. He just kept going, panting like an animal.

Rin couldn’t believe those were noises of pleasure.

She threw herself into the soldier’s side. He twisted around and flung an awkward fist toward her face, but she ducked easily, grabbed his wrists, kicked in his kneecaps, and wrestled him into submission until he was lying on the ground, pinned down between her knees.

She reached down, feeling for his testicles. When she found them, she squeezed. “Is this what you wanted?”

He writhed frantically beneath her. She squeezed harder. He made a gurgling noise.

She dug her fingernails into soft flesh. “No?”

He screeched in pain.

She called the flame. His screams grew louder, but she grabbed his discarded shirt off the ground, shoved it into his mouth, and didn’t let him go until his member had turned to charcoal in her hands.

When he finally stopped moving, she climbed off his chest, sat down next to the trembling girl, and put her arm around her shoulders. Neither of them spoke. They just huddled together, watching the soldier with cold satisfaction as he twitched, mewling feebly, on the dirt.

“Is he going to die?” the girl asked.

The soldier’s whimpers were getting softer. Rin had burned half of his lower body. Some of the wounds were cauterized. It might take a long while for the blood loss to kill him. She hoped he was conscious for it. “Yes. If no one takes him to a physician.”

The girl didn’t sound scared, just idly curious. “Will you take him?”

“He’s not in my platoon,” Rin said. “Not my problem.”

More minutes passed. Blood pooled slowly beneath the soldier’s waist. Rin sat with the girl in silence, heart hammering, mind racing through the consequences.

The Hesperians would know the killer was her. The burn marks would give her away—only the Speerly killed with fire.

Tarcquet’s retaliation would be terrible. He might not settle for Rin’s death—if he found out what had just happened, he might abandon the Republic altogether.

Rin had to get rid of that body.

Eventually the soldier’s chest stopped rising and falling. Rin shuffled forward on her knees and felt his neck for a pulse. Nothing. She stood up and extended a hand to the girl. “Let’s get you cleaned up. Can you walk?”

“Don’t worry about me.” The girl sounded remarkably calm. She’d stopped trembling. She bent forward to wipe the blood and fluids off of her legs with the hem of her torn dress. “It’s happened before.”

Chapter 29

“Tiger’s fucking tits,” Kitay said.

“I know,” Rin said.

“And you just dumped him in the harbor?”

“Weighed him down with rocks first. I picked a pretty deep stretch by the docks; no one’s going to find him—”

“Holy shit.” Kitay ran a hand through his bangs and yanked as he paced around the library. “You’re going to die. We’re all going to die.”

“It might be all right.” Rin tried to convince herself as she said it, but she still felt terribly light-headed. She’d come to Kitay because he was the one person she trusted to figure out what to do, but now both of them were panicking. “Look, no one saw me—”

“How do you know?” he asked shrilly. “No one caught you dragging a Hesperian corpse halfway across the city? No one was looking out their windows? You’d be willing to stake your life on the fact that not a single person saw?”

“I didn’t drag it, I dumped it in a sampan and rowed out to shore.”

“Oh, that solves everything—”

“Kitay. Listen.” She took a deep breath, trying to get her mind to slow down enough to work properly. “It’s been over an hour. If they’d seen, don’t you think I’d be dead by now?”

“Tarcquet could be biding his time,” Kitay said. “Waiting until morning to set an army on you.”

“He wouldn’t wait.” Rin was certain of that. The Hesperians didn’t fuck around. If Tarcquet found out that a shaman, of all people, had killed one of his men, then her body would already be riddled with bullet holes. He wouldn’t have given her the chance to escape.