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“How are we going to get in?” Rin asked.
“The way you approach any other city,” Daji said, as if this were obvious. “Right through the gates.”
Rin cast a doubtful look at the lines snaking from the gates around the fortress walls. “They’re not letting anyone in.”
“I’m very persuasive,” Daji said.
“You’re not afraid they’ll recognize you?”
Daji gave her a droll look. “Not if I instruct them to forget.”
Surely it couldn’t be so easy. Rin followed along, bewildered, as Daji led them straight to the gates, ignoring the cries of complaint from everyone else in the queue, and demanded so boldly to be let through that Rin was sure they were going to be shot.
But the soldiers only blinked, nodded, and parted.
“This never happened,” Daji said as she passed. They nodded, eyes glazed. “You never saw me, and you have no idea what I look like.”
She gestured for Jiang and Rin to follow. Astonished, Rin obeyed.
“Bothered?” Jiang asked.
“She just told them what to do,” she muttered. “She just told them, without even—I mean, she wasn’t even trying.”
“Oh, yes.” Jiang gave Daji a fond look. “We told you she’s persuasive.”
Persuasive didn’t describe half of it. Rin knew about Daji’s hypnosis. She’d been victim to it herself many times. But in the past, Daji’s illusions had taken several long moments of careful coaxing. Never had Rin seen her utter such casual, dismissive commands with the full expectation that they would be obeyed.
Was it because Jiang was now freed from the Chuluu Korikh? Did Daji’s powers amplify when her anchors grew stronger? And if so, then what would happen when they woke Riga?
Behind its walls, the New City felt like a punch to the face.
Rin had panicked the first time she’d ever left Tikany, when she’d woken up on the second morning of her journey to Sinegard and her caravan had traveled far enough that her surroundings felt truly foreign. It took her days to get used to the morphing landscape, the receding mountains, the terrifying reality that when she went to sleep at night on her cramped mat in the caravan wagon, Tikany’s packed-earth walls no longer protected her.
She had traveled the Nikara Empire since then. She had been swept up in the overwhelming clamor of Sinegard, had walked the planks of the Floating City at Ankhiluun, had entered the Autumn Palace in lush, regal Lusan. She’d thought she understood the range of cities in the empire, spanning from the dusty poverty of Tikany to the winding disorder of Khurdalain’s oceanside shacks to the sapphire-blue canals of Arlong.
But the New City was foreign on a different scale. The Hesperians had been here for only months—they could not possibly have dismantled and built over Nikara stone fortresses that had stood there for centuries. Yet its architectural skeleton seemed drastically altered—the old fortresses were augmented by a number of new installations that imposed a blockish sense of order, transforming the cityscape into a place of straight lines instead of the curved, winding alleys that Rin was used to.
Gone, too, were all Nikara-style decorations. She saw no lanterns, no wall banners, no sloping pagoda roofs or latticed windows, which would have appeared even in this sparsely utilitarian military city. Instead, everywhere she looked, she saw glass—clear glass on most windows, and colored patterns in the larger buildings, stained illustrations depicting scenes she did not recognize.
The effect was startling. Arabak, a city with more than a thousand years of history, seemed to have simply been erased.
This wasn’t the first time Rin had seen Hesperian architecture. Khurdalain and Sinegard, too, had both been rebuilt by foreign occupation. But those were cities built first on Nikara roots, and later reclaimed by the Nikara. There, western architecture had been curious remnants of the past. The New City, on the other hand, felt as if a piece of Hesperia had simply been carved out and dropped whole into Nikan.
Rin found herself staring at things she had never dreamed could exist. On every street corner she saw blinking lights of every conceivable color powered not by flame, but by some energy source she couldn’t see. She saw what looked like a monstrous black carriage mounted on steel tracks, chugging ponderously over the well-paved streets as thin trails of steam emitted from its head. Nothing pushed or pulled it—no laborers, no horses. She saw miniature dirigibles humming around the city, machines so perfectly small that she at first mistook them for loud birds. But their whine was unmistakable: a thinner, higher version of the airship engine whine she now associated with death.
No one controlled them. No one pulled their strings or even shouted out commands. The miniature airships seemed to have minds of their own; autonomously they dipped and swerved through the spaces between buildings, dodging deftly into windows to deliver letters and parcels.
Rin knew she couldn’t keep gawking like this. The longer she stood here, eyes darting around at a million new and startling sights, the more she stood out. But she couldn’t move. She felt dizzy, disoriented, like she had been plucked off the Earth and tossed adrift into an entirely different universe. She’d spent much of her life feeling like she didn’t belong, but this was the first time she’d felt truly foreign.
Six months. Six months, and the Hesperians had transformed a riverside municipality into something like this.
How long would it take them to reconfigure the entire nation?
A whirring, apparently self-driving brass wagon across the street caught her eye, and she was so astonished that she didn’t notice she was standing on two thin steel tracks. She didn’t see the black horseless carriage sliding noiselessly in her direction until it was mere feet away, barreling straight toward her.
“Move!”
Jiang tackled her to the ground. The carriage zoomed past them both, chugging indifferently along its preordained route.
Heart pounding, Rin crawled to her feet.
“What is wrong with you?” Daji yanked her up by the wrist and dragged her off the main road. They were attracting bystanders; Rin saw a Hesperian sentry eyeing them cautiously, arms cradling his arquebus. “Do you want to get caught?”
“I’m sorry.” Rin followed her past a thicket of civilians into a narrow alley. She still felt terribly dizzy. She leaned against the cool, dark wall and took a breath. “It’s just—this place, I didn’t—”
To her surprise, Daji looked sympathetic. “I know. I feel it, too.”
“I don’t understand.” Rin couldn’t put her discomfort into words. She could barely breathe. “I don’t know why—”
“I do,” Daji said. “It’s realizing that the future doesn’t include you.”
“Let’s not dawdle.” Jiang’s tone was brusque, almost cold. Rin didn’t recognize it at all. “We’re wasting time. Where is Kitay?”
She shot him a puzzled glance. “How would I know?”
He looked impatient. “Surely you’ve sent a message.”
“But there’s no—” She faltered. “Oh. I see.”
She glanced around the alley. It was thin and narrow, less a passageway and more a tight strip of space between two square buildings. “Can you cover me?”
