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She did not know how long she stood there staring. She was incited to movement only when jostled by a pair of soldiers rushing past her with a stretcher, reminding her that she had a job to do.
Find the survivors. Help the survivors.
She made her way down the street, but her sense of balance seemed to have disappeared completely along with her hearing. She lurched from side to side when she tried to walk, and so she traversed the street by clinging to furniture like a drunkard.
To her left she saw a group of soldiers hauling a pair of children out from a pile of debris. She couldn’t believe they had survived, it seemed impossible so close to the blast epicenter—but the little boy they lifted from the wreckage was moving, wailing and struggling but moving nonetheless. His sister was not so fortunate; her leg was mangled, crushed by the foundations of the house. She clung to the soldier’s arms, white-faced, too racked with pain to cry.
“Help me! Help me!”
A tinny voice made it through the roaring in her ears, like someone shouting from across a great field, but it was the only sound she could hear.
She looked up and saw a man clinging desperately to the remains of a wall with one hand.
The floor of the building had been blown out right beneath him. It was a five-story inn; without its fourth wall it looked like one of the porcelain dollhouses that Rin had seen in the market, the kind that swung wide open to reveal its contents.
The floors tilted down toward the gap; the inn’s furniture and its other occupants had already slid out, forming a grotesque pile of shattered chairs and bodies.
A small crowd had gathered under the teetering inn to watch the man.
“Help,” he moaned. “Someone, help . . .”
Rin felt like a spectator, like this was a show, like the man was the only thing in the world that mattered, yet she couldn’t think of anything to do; the building had been blown apart; it looked minutes from collapsing in on itself, and the man was too high up to reach from the rooftops of any surrounding buildings.
All she could do was stand there in awe with her mouth hanging slackly open, watching as the man struggled in vain to hoist himself up.
She felt so utterly, entirely useless. Even if she could call the Phoenix then, summoning fire now would not save this man from dying.
Because all the Cike knew how to do was destroy. For all their powers, for all their gods, they couldn’t protect their people. Couldn’t reverse time. Couldn’t bring back the dead.
They had won that battle on the marsh, but they were powerless in the face of the consequences.
Altan shouted something, and he might have been calling for a sheet to break the man’s fall, because moments later Rin saw several soldiers come running back down into the square with a cloth.
But before they could reach the end of the street, the inn teetered perilously. Rin thought it might crash all the way to the ground, flattening the man underneath it, but the wooden planks dipped downward and came to a jarring halt.
The man was now only four floors up. He flung his other hand up at the roof in an attempt to secure a better hold. Perhaps he was emboldened by his closeness to the ground. For a moment Rin thought he might make it—but then his hand slipped against the shattered glass and he fell back, the downward rebound pulling him off the roof entirely.
He seemed to hang in the air for a moment before he fell.
The crowd scrambled backward.
Rin turned away, grateful that she could not hear his body break on the ground.
The city settled into a tense silence.
Every soldier was dispatched to Khurdalain’s defenses in anticipation of a ground assault. Rin held her post on the outer wall for hours, eyes trained on the perimeter. If the Federation was going to attempt to breach the walls, certainly it would be now.
But evening fell, and no attack came.
“They can’t possibly be afraid,” Rin murmured, then winced. Her hearing had finally come back, though a high-pitched ringing still sounded constantly in her ears.
Ramsa shook his head. “They’re playing the long game. They’ll keep trying to weaken us. Get us scared, hungry, and tired.”
Eventually the defensive line relaxed. If the Federation launched a midnight invasion, the city alarm system would bring the troops back to the walls; in the meantime, there was more pressing work to do.
It felt brutally ironic that civilians had been dancing on this street only hours ago, celebrating what they’d thought would be a Federation surrender. Khurdalain had expected to win this war. Khurdalain had thought that things were going back to normal.
But Khurdalain was resilient. Khurdalain had survived two Poppy Wars. Khurdalain knew how to deal with devastation.
The civilians quietly combed through the wreckage for their loved ones, and when so many hours had passed that the only bodies that were recovered were those of the dead, they built them a funeral bier, lit it on fire, and pushed it out to the sea. They did this with a sad, practiced efficiency.
The medical squads of all three divisions jointly created a triage center in the city center. For the rest of the day civilians straggled in, amateur tourniquets tied clumsily around severed limbs—crushed ankles, hands shattered to the stump.
Rin had a year’s worth of instruction in field medicine under Enro, so Enki put her to work tying off new tourniquets for those bleeding in line as they waited for medical attention.
Her first patient was a young woman, not much older than Rin was. She held out her arm, wrapped in what looked like an old dress.
Rin unwrapped the blood-soaked bundle and hissed involuntarily at the damage. She could see bone all the way up to the elbow. That entire hand would have to go.
The girl waited patiently as Rin assessed the damage, eyes glassy, as if she’d long ago resigned herself to her new disability.
Rin pulled a strip of linen out of a pot of boiling water and wrapped it around the upper arm, looped one end around a stick, and twisted to tighten the binding. The girl moaned with pain, but gritted her teeth and glared straight forward.
“They’ll probably take the hand off. This will keep you from losing any more blood, and it’ll make it easier for them to amputate.” Rin fastened the knot and stepped back. “I’m sorry.”
“I knew we should have left,” the girl said. The way she spoke, Rin wasn’t sure that she was talking to her. “I knew we should have left the moment those ships landed on the shore.”
“Why didn’t you?” Rin asked.
The girl glared at her. Her eyes were hollow, accusatory. “You think we had anywhere to go?”
Rin fixed her eyes on the ground and moved on to the next patient.
Chapter 16
Hours later Rin finally received permission to leave the triage center. She stumbled back toward the Cike’s quarters, hollow-eyed and light-headed from sleep deprivation. Once she checked in with Altan, she intended to collapse in her bunk and sleep until someone forced her out to report for duty.
“Enki finally let you off?”
She glanced over her shoulder.
Unegen and Baji rounded the corner, coming back from patrol. They joined her as she walked down the eerily empty streets. The Warlords had imposed martial law on the city; civilians had a strict curfew now, no longer allowed to venture beyond their block without Militia permission.
