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“Rin!” Kesegi shouted. He dashed out after her. “Wait.”
She halted in her tracks. Please say something to make me stay. Please.
“Yes?”
“If you can’t get us food, can you ask them for some blankets?” he asked. “Just one? It gets so cold at night.”
She forced herself to smile. “Of course.”
Over the next week a torrent of people poured into Arlong on foot, in rickety carts, or on rafts hastily constructed of anything that could float. The river became a slow-moving eddy of bodies packed against each other so tightly that the famous blue waters of the Dragon Province disappeared under the weight of human desperation.
Republican soldiers checked the new arrivals for weapons and valuables before corralling them in neat lines to whichever quarters of the refugee district still had space.
The refugees met with very little kindness. Republican soldiers, Dragons especially, were terribly condescending, shouting at the southerners when they couldn’t understand the rapid Arlong dialect.
Rin spent hours each day walking the docks with Venka. She was glad to have escaped processing duty, which involved standing guard over miserable lines while clerks marked the refugees’ arrivals and issued them temporary residence papers. That was probably more important than what she and Venka were doing, which was fishing out the refuse from the segments of the Murui near the refugee chokepoints, but Rin couldn’t bear to be around the large crowds of brown skin and accusing eyes.
“We’re going to have to cut them off at some point,” Venka remarked as she lifted an empty jug from the water. “They can’t possibly all fit here.”
“Only because the refugee district is tiny,” Rin said. “If they opened up the city barriers, or if they funneled them into the mountainside, there would be plenty of space.”
“Plenty of space, maybe. But we haven’t got enough clothes, blankets, medicine, grain, or anything else.”
“Up until now the southerners were producing the grain.” Rin felt obligated to point that out.
“And now they’ve run from home, so no one is producing food,” Venka said. “Doesn’t really help us. Hey, what’s this?”
She reached gingerly into the water and drew a barrel out onto the dock. She set it on the ground. Out tumbled what at first looked like a soggy bundle of clothing. “Gross.”
“What is it?” Rin stepped closer to get a better look and immediately regretted it.
“It’s dead, look.” Venka held the baby out to show Rin the infant’s sickly yellow skin, the bumpy evidence of relentless mosquito attacks, and the red rashes that covered half its body. Venka slapped its cheeks. No response. She held it over the river as if to throw it back in.
The infant started to whimper.
An ugly expression twisted across Venka’s face. She looked so suddenly, murderously hateful that Rin was sure she was about to hurl the infant headfirst into the harbor.
“Give it to me,” Rin said quickly. She pulled the infant from Venka’s arms. A sour smell hit her nose. She gagged so hard she nearly dropped the infant, but got a grip on herself.
The baby was swaddled in clothes large enough to fit an adult. That meant someone had loved it. They wouldn’t have parted with the clothes otherwise—it was now the dead of winter, and even in the warm south, the nights got cold enough that refugees traveling without shelter could easily freeze to death.
Someone had wanted this baby to survive. Rin owed it a fighting chance.
She strode hastily to the end of the dock and handed the bundle off to the first soldier she saw. “Here.”
The soldier stumbled under the sudden weight. “What am I supposed to do with this?”
“I don’t know, just see to it that it’s cared for,” Rin said. “Take it to the infirmary, if they’ll let you.”
The soldier gripped the infant tightly in his arms and set off at a run. Rin returned to the river and resumed dragging her spear halfheartedly through the water.
She wanted very badly to smoke. She couldn’t get the taste of corpses out of her mouth.
Venka broke the silence first. “What are you looking at me like that for?”
She looked defensive. Furious. But that was Venka’s default reaction to everything; she’d rather die than admit vulnerability. Rin suspected Venka was thinking about the child that she’d lost, and she wasn’t sure what to say, only that she felt terribly sorry for her.
“You knew it was alive,” Rin said finally.
“Yes,” Venka snapped. “So what?”
“And you were going to kill it.”
Venka swallowed hard and jabbed her spear back into the water. “That thing doesn’t have a future. I was doing it a favor.”
Wartime Arlong was an ugly thing. Despair settled over the capital like a shroud as the threat of armies closing in from both the north and the south grew closer every day.
Food was strictly rationed, even for citizens of Dragon Province. Every man, woman, and child who wasn’t in the Republican Army was conscripted for labor. Most were sent to work in the forges or the shipyards. Even small children were put to task cutting linen strips for the infirmary.
Sympathy was the greatest scarcity. The southern refugees, crammed behind their barrier, were uniformly despised by soldiers and civilians alike. Food and supplies were offered begrudgingly, if at all. Rin discovered that if soldiers weren’t positioned to guard the supply deliveries, they would never reach the camps.
The refugees latched on to any potentially sympathetic advocates they could. Once word of Rin’s connection to the Fangs spread, she became an involuntarily appointed, unofficial champion of refugee interests in Arlong. Every time she was near the district she was accosted by refugees, all pleading for a thousand different things that she couldn’t obtain—more food, more medicine, more materials for cooking fires and tents.
She hated the position they’d thrown her into because it led only to frustration from both sides. The Republican leadership grew irritated because she kept making impossible requests for basic human necessities, and the refugees started resenting her because she could never deliver.
“It doesn’t make sense,” Rin complained bitterly to Kitay. “Vaisra’s the one who always said we had to treat prisoners well. And this is how we treat our own people?”
“It’s because the refugees have no strategic advantage to them whatsoever, unless you count the mild inconvenience that their stacked-up bodies might present Daji’s army,” Kitay said. “If I may be blunt.”
“Fuck off,” she said.
“I’m just reporting what they’re all thinking. Don’t kill the messenger.”
Rin should have been angrier, but she understood, too, just how pervasive that mind-set was. To most Dragons, the southerners barely registered as Nikara. She could see through a northerner’s eyes the stereotypical Rooster—a cross-eyed, buck-toothed, swarthy idiot speaking a garbled tongue.
It shamed and embarrassed her terribly, because she used to be exactly like that.
She’d tried to erase those parts of herself long ago. At fourteen she’d been lucky enough to study under a tutor who spoke near-standard Sinegardian. And she’d gone to Sinegard young enough that her bad habits were quickly and brutally knocked out of her. She’d adapted to fit in. She’d erased her identity to survive.
