The Dragon Republic. R.F. Kuang

      “Why not?” He made a noise of disgust. “Altan did.”

      “But I’m not Altan.” She couldn’t hold back her tears. “Is that what you wanted to tell me? I’m not as strong as him, I’m not as smart as him, I can’t do what he could do—”

      He laughed harshly. “Oh, that much is clear.”

      “You take command then. You act like you’re in charge already, why don’t you just take the post? I don’t fucking care.”

      “Because Altan named you commander,” he said simply. “And between us, at least I know how to respect his legacy.”

      That shut her up.

      He leaned forward. “That burden’s on you. So you will learn to control yourself, and you will start protecting them.”

      “But what if that’s not possible?” she asked.

      His pale eyes didn’t blink. “Frankly? Then you should kill yourself.”

      Rin had no idea how to respond to that.

      “If you think you can’t beat it, then you should die,” Chaghan said. “Because it will corrode you. It will turn your body into a conduit, and it will burn down everything until it’s not just civilians, not just Unegen, but everyone around you, everything you’ve ever loved or cared about.

      “And once you’ve turned your world to ash, you’ll wish you could die.”

      She found the others in the mess once she finally recovered the physical coordination to make her way down the passageway without tripping.

      “What is this?” Ramsa spat something onto the table. “Bird droppings?”

      “Goji berries,” Baji said. “You don’t like them in porridge?”

      “They’ve got mold on them.”

      “Everything’s got mold on them.”

      “But I thought we were getting new supplies,” Ramsa whined.

      “With what money?” Suni asked.

      “We are the Cike!” Ramsa exclaimed. “We could have stolen something!”

      “Well, it’s not like—” Baji broke off as he saw Rin standing in the doorway. Ramsa and Suni followed his gaze. They fell silent.

      She stared back at them, utterly lost for words. She’d thought she knew what she was going to say to them. Now she only wanted to cry.

      “Rise and shine,” Ramsa said finally. He kicked a chair out for her. “Hungry? You look horrific.”

      She blinked at him. Her words came out in a hoarse whisper. “I just wanted to say …”

      “Don’t,” said Baji.

      “But I just—”

      “Don’t,” Baji said. “I know it’s hard. You’ll get it eventually. Altan did.”

      Suni nodded in silent agreement.

      Rin’s urge to cry grew stronger.

      “Have a seat,” Ramsa said gently. “Eat something.”

      She shuffled to the counter and tried clumsily to fill a bowl. Porridge slopped out of the ladle onto the deck. She walked toward the table, but the floor kept shifting under her feet. She collapsed into the chair, breathing hard.

      No one commented.

      She glanced out the porthole. They were moving startlingly fast over choppy waters. The shoreline was nowhere in sight. A wave rolled under the planks, and she stifled the attendant swell of nausea.

      “Did we at least get Yang Yuanfu?” she asked after a pause.

      Baji nodded. “Suni took him out during the commotion. Bashed his head against the wall and flung his body into the ocean while his guards were too busy with Daji to fend us off. I guess the diversion tactic worked after all. We were going to tell you, but you were, ah, incapacitated.”

      “High out of your mind,” Ramsa supplied. “Giggling at the floor.”

      “I get it,” Rin said. “And we’re heading back to Ankhiluun now?”

      “As fast as we can. We’ve got the entire Imperial Guard chasing us, but I doubt they’ll follow us into Moag’s territory.”

      “Makes sense,” Rin murmured. She worked her spoon through the porridge. Ramsa was right about the mold. The greenish-black blotches were so large that they almost rendered the entire thing inedible. Her stomach roiled. She pushed the bowl away.

      The others sat around the table, fidgeting, blinking, and making eye contact with everything except her.

      “I heard Enki and Unegen left,” she said.

      The statement was met with blank stares and shrugs.

      She took a deep breath. “So I suppose—what I wanted to say was—”

      Baji interrupted before she could continue. “We’re not going anywhere.”

      “But you—”

      “I don’t like being lied to. And I especially hate being sold. Daji has what’s coming for her. I’m seeing this through to the end, little Speerly. You don’t have to worry about desertion from me.”

      Rin glanced around the table. “Then what about the rest of you?”

      “Altan deserved better than he got,” Suni said simply, as if that much sufficed.

      “But you don’t have to stay here.” Rin turned to Ramsa. Young, innocent, tiny, brilliant, and dangerous Ramsa. She wanted to make sure he’d remain with her, and knew it’d be selfish to ask. “I mean, you shouldn’t.”

      Ramsa scraped at the bottom of his bowl. He seemed thoroughly disinterested in the conversation. “I think going anywhere else would get a little boring.”

      “But you’re just a kid.”

      “Fuck off.” He dug around his mouth with his little finger, picking at something stuck behind his back molars. “You’ve got to understand that we’re killers. You spend your life doing one thing, it’s very hard to stop.”

      “That, and our only other option is the prison at Baghra,” Baji said.

      Ramsa nodded. “I hated Baghra.”

      Rin remembered that none of the Cike had good track records with Nikara law enforcement. Or with civilized society, for that matter.

      Aratsha hailed from a tiny village in Snake Province where the villagers worshipped a local river god that purportedly protected them from floods. Aratsha, a novice initiate to the river god’s cult, became the first shaman in generations who succeeded in doing what his predecessors had claimed. He drowned two little girls by accident in the process. He was about to be stoned to death by the same villagers who praised his fraudulent teachers when Tyr, the Cike’s former commander, recruited him to the Night Castle.

      Ramsa came from a family of alchemists who’d produced fire powder for the Militia until an accidental explosion near the palace had killed his parents, cost him an eye, and landed him in the notorious prison at Baghra for alleged conspiracy to assassinate the Empress, until Tyr pulled him out of his cell to engineer weapons for the Cike instead.

      Rin didn’t know much about Baji or Suni. She knew they had both been students at Sinegard once, members of Lore classes of years past. She knew they’d been expelled when things went terribly wrong. She knew they’d both spent time at Baghra. Neither of them would volunteer much else.

      The twins Chaghan and Qara were equally mysterious. They weren’t from the Empire. They spoke Nikara with a lilting Hinterlander accent. But when asked about home, they