Chapter 24
She woke in darkness. She was lying on a flat, swaying surface—a wagon?
A ship? Though she was certain her eyes were open, she could see nothing.
Had she been sealed inside something, or was it simply nighttime?
She had no idea how much time had passed.
She tried to move and discovered that she was bound: hands tied tightly behind her back, legs strapped together.
She tried to sit up, and the muscles around her left shoulder screamed in pain.
She choked back a whimper and lay down until the throbbing subsided.
Then she tried moving horizontally instead.
Her legs were stiff; the one she lay on was numb from lack of blood flow, and when she shifted so that it would regain feeling, it hurt like a thousand needles were being slowly inserted into her foot.
She could not move her legs separately so she writhed back and forth like a worm, inching about until her feet kicked against the sides of something.
She pushed against it and writhed the other way.
She was sure now that she was in a wagon.
With great effort she pulled herself to a sitting position. The top of her head bumped against something scratchy. A canvas sheet. Or a tarp? Now that her eyes had adjusted, she could see that it was not dark outside after all; the wagon cover simply blocked out the sunlight.
She strained against the tarp until a crack of light flooded in through the side. Trembling with effort, she pressed her eye to the slit.
It took her a while to comprehend what she saw.
The road looked like something out of a dream.
It was as if a great gust of wind had blown through a small city, turning households inside out, distributing the contents at random on the grass by the trail.
A pair of ornate wooden chairs lay tipped over next to a set of woolen stockings.
A dining table sat beside a carved chess set, jade pieces scattered across the dirt.
Paintings. Toys. Entire trunks of clothing lay open by the roadside.
She saw a wedding dress. A matching set of silken sleepwear.
It was a trail of fleeing villagers. Whatever Nikara had lived in this area, they had long gone, and they had flung things by the roadside as they became too heavy to carry.
As desperation for survival outweighed their attachment to their possessions, the Nikara had dropped off their belongings one by one.
Was this Feylen’s doing, or the Federation’s?
Rin’s stomach curdled at the idea that she might be responsible for this.
But if the Wind God had indeed caused this destruction, then he had long moved on.
The air was calm when they rode, and no freak winds or tornadoes materialized to rip them to pieces.
Perhaps he was wreaking havoc on the world elsewhere. Perhaps he had fled north to bide his time, to heal and adjust to his long-awaited freedom. Who could predict the will of a god?
Had the Federation razed Tikany to the ground yet? Had the Fangs heard rumors of the advancing army early enough to run before the Federation tore their village apart? What about Kesegi?
She thought the Federation soldiers might loot the debris. But they were moving so fast that the officers yelled at their troops when they stopped to pick things up. Wherever they were going, they wanted to get there soon.
Among the abandoned chests and furniture, Rin saw a man sitting by the road.
He slouched beside a bamboo carrying pole, the kind farmers used to balance buckets of water for irrigation.
He had fashioned a large sign out of the back of a painting, on which he’d scrawled in messy calligraphy FIVE INGOTS.
“Two girls,” he said in a slow chant. “Two girls, healthy girls, for sale.”
Two toddlers peered out over the tops of the wooden buckets.
They stared wonderingly at the passing soldiers.
One noticed Rin peeking out from under the tarp, and she blinked her luminous eyes in uncomprehending curiosity.
She lifted her tiny fingers and waved at them, just as a soldier shouted out in excitement.
Rin shrank back into the wagon. Tears leaked out the sides of her eyes. She couldn’t breathe. She squeezed her eyes shut. She did not want to see what became of those girls.
“Rin?”
For the first time she noticed that Altan was curled up in the other corner of the wagon. She could barely see him under the darkness of the tarp. She inched clumsily toward him like a caterpillar.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“I can’t tell,” she said. “But we’re nowhere near the Kukhonin range. We’re traveling over flat roads.”
“We’re in a wagon?”
“I think so. I don’t know how many of them there are.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ll get us out. I’m going to burn through these ropes,” he announced. “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 me, they told me I could never go back. They told me there was nothing on the island but bones and ash.”
He fell quiet.
Rin was at a loss for words. She felt like she needed to say something, something to rouse him, turn his attention to seeking a way out of this place, but anything that came to mind was laughably inadequate. What kind of consolation could she possibly give?
“Good! You’re awake.”
A high, tremulous voice interrupted her thoughts. Whoever it was spoke from directly behind her, out of her line of sight. Rin’s eyes bulged and she strained against the straps.