The Dragon Republic. R.F. Kuang

first she’d thought she only needed the opium for the grief. She thought she would smoke it for the relief, until the memories of Speer and Altan dulled to a faint ache, until she could function without the suffocating guilt of what she’d done.

      She thought guilt must be the word for it. The irrational feeling, not the moral concept. Because she’d told herself she wasn’t sorry, that the Mugenese deserved what they got and that she was never looking back. Except the memory loomed like a gaping chasm in her mind where she’d tossed in every human feeling that threatened her.

      But the abyss kept calling for her to look in. To fall inside.

      And the Phoenix didn’t want to let her forget. The Phoenix wanted her to gloat about it. The Phoenix lived on rage, and rage was intricately tied to the past. So the Phoenix needed to claw apart the open wounds in her mind and set fire to them, day after day, because that gave her memories and those memories fueled the rage.

      Without opium the visions flashed constantly through Rin’s mind’s eye, often more vivid than her surrounding reality.

      Sometimes they were of Altan. More times they weren’t. The Phoenix was a conduit to generations of memories. Thousands upon thousands of Speerlies had prayed to the god in their grief and desperation. And the god had collected their suffering, stored it, and turned it into flames.

      The memories could also be deceptively calm. Sometimes Rin saw brown-skinned children running up and down a pristine white beach. She saw flames burning higher on the shore—not funeral pyres, not flames of destruction, but campfires. Bonfires. Hearth fires, warm and sustaining.

      And sometimes she saw the Speerlies, enough of them to fill a thriving village. She was always amazed by how many of them there were, an entire race of people that sometimes she feared she’d only dreamed up. If the Phoenix lingered, then Rin could even catch fragments of conversations in a language she almost understood, could see glimpses of faces that she almost recognized.

      They weren’t the ferocious beasts of Nikara lore. They weren’t the mindless warriors the Red Emperor had needed them to be and every subsequent regime had forced them to be. They loved and laughed and cried around their fires. They were people.

      But every time, before Rin could sink into the memory of a heritage she didn’t have, she saw on the fading horizon boats sailing in from the Federation naval base on the mainland.

      What happened next was a haze of colors, accumulated perspectives that shifted too fast for Rin to follow. Shouts, screams, movement. Rows and rows of Speerlies lined up on the beach, weapons in hand.

      But it was never enough. To the Federation, they must have seemed savages, using sticks to fight gods, and the booms of cannon fire lit up the village as quickly as if someone had held a light to kindling.

      Gas pellets launched from the tower ships with terribly innocent popping noises. Where they hit the ground they expelled huge, thick clouds of acrid yellow smoke.

      Women fell. Children twitched. The warrior ranks broke. The gas did not kill immediately; its inventors were not so kind.

      Then the butchering began. The Federation fired continuously and indiscriminately. Mugenese crossbows could shoot three bolts at a time, unleashing an unceasing barrage of metal that ripped open necks, skulls, limbs, hearts.

      Spilled blood traced marble patterns into white sand. Bodies lay still where they fell. At dawn, the Federation generals marched to the shore, boots treading indifferently over crushed bodies, advancing to slam their flag into the bloodstained sand.

      “We’ve got a problem,” Baji said.

      Rin snapped back to attention. “What?”

      “Take a look.”

      She heard the sudden sound of jangling bells—a happy sound, utterly out of place in this ruined city. She pressed her face to a gap in the warehouse slats. A cloth dragon bobbed up and down through the crowd, held up on tent poles by dancers below. Dancers waving streamers and ribbons followed behind, accompanied by musicians and government officials lifted on bright red sedan chairs. Behind them was the crowd.

      “You said it was a small ceremony,” Rin said. “Not a fucking parade.”

      “It was quiet just an hour ago,” Unegen insisted.

      “And now the whole township’s clustering in that square.” Baji squinted through the slats. “Are we still going by that ‘no civilian casualties’ rule?”

      “Yes,” Chaghan said before Rin could answer.

      “You’re no fun,” Baji said.

      “Crowds make targeted assassinations easier,” Chaghan said. “It’s a better opportunity to get in close. Make your hit without being spotted, then filter out before his guards have time to react.”

      Rin opened her mouth to say That’s still a lot of witnesses, but the withdrawal cramps hit her first. A wave of pain tore through her muscles; it started in her gut and flared out, so sudden that for a moment the world turned black, and all she could do was clutch her chest, gasping.

      “Are you all right?” Baji asked.

      A wave of bile rose up in her throat before she could respond. She heaved. A second swell of nausea racked her gut. Then a third.

      Baji put a hand on her shoulder. “Rin?”

      “I’m fine,” she insisted for what seemed like the thousandth time.

      She wasn’t fine. Her head was throbbing again, and this time the pain was accompanied by a nausea that seized her rib cage and didn’t let go until she was doubled over on her knees, whimpering.

      Vomit splattered the floor.

      “Change of plans,” Chaghan said. “Rin, get back to the ship.”

      She wiped her mouth. “No.”

      “I’m telling you you’re not in any state to be useful.”

      “And I’m your commander,” she said. “So shut up and do as I say.”

      Chaghan’s eyes narrowed. The warehouse fell silent.

      Rin had been wrestling Chaghan for control over the Cike for months. He questioned her decisions at every turn; he took every chance he could to make it very clear that he thought Altan had made a stupid decision naming her commander.

      And Rin knew, in all fairness, he was right.

      She was dreadful at leadership. Most of her attack plans over the past three months had boiled down to “everyone attack at once and see if we come out all right on the other side.”

      But command ability aside, she had to be here. Had to see Adlaga through. Since they’d left Speer her withdrawals had only been getting worse and worse. She’d been mostly functional during their first few missions for Moag. Then the endless killings, the screams, and the flashbacks to the battlefield kept setting her anger off again and again until she was spending more hours of the day high than she did sober, and even when she was sober she felt like she was still teetering on the brink of madness because the fucking Phoenix never shut up.

      She needed to pull herself back from the precipice. If she couldn’t do this basic, simple task; couldn’t kill some township official who wasn’t even a shaman, then she would hardly be able to stand up to the Empress.

      And she couldn’t lose her chance at revenge. Revenge was the only thing she had.

      “Don’t you jeopardize this,” Chaghan said.

      “Don’t you patronize me,” she retorted.

      Chaghan sighed and turned to Unegen. “Can you watch her? I’ll give you laudanum.”

      “I thought I was supposed to return to the ship,” Unegen said.

      “Change of plans.”

      “Fine.”