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“Children?” Rin repeated. What children? What was Jiang talking about? This story had just become so much more complex and terrifying. Her mind spun, trying to fit together a narrative that made sense of it all, but everything it suggested horrified her. “Children like Altan? Like me?”
“Altan?” Jiang blinked. “No, no—poor boy, he never made it out—”
“Made it out of where?” Rin grasped Jiang by the collar, trying to catch the truth before it fled. “Jiang, who am I?”
But the moment had passed. Jiang stared down at her, his pale eyes vacant. The man who had the answers was gone.
“Fuck!” Rin screamed. Sparks flew out of her fist, singeing the front of Jiang’s tunic.
He flinched back. “I’m sorry,” he said in a small voice. “I can’t—don’t hurt me.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” She couldn’t bear seeing him cower like this, a fully grown man acting like a child. She wanted to vomit from the shame.
She grabbed his arm and dragged him back toward his tent. He obeyed her instructions without a word, crawling meekly onto his blanket without even a glance at Daji’s sprawled form.
Before Rin left she made him swallow a cup of laudanum tea. His sleep would be peaceful, dreamless. And tomorrow, if Jiang tried to tell anyone what had happened, she could easily pretend whatever he said was just his usual babbling nonsense.
“That’s all he said?” Kitay asked for what felt like the hundredth time. “‘If it hadn’t been for the children’?”
“It’s all I could get.” Rin dragged one heavy foot before the other and pushed herself up the incline. They’d only been marching for an hour since sunrise, but she was already so exhausted she didn’t know how she’d make it through the day. She hadn’t been able to sleep, not with Jiang’s words echoing over and over in her mind. They made no more sense now than they had when he’d first uttered them; her thousand unanswered questions had only sprouted a thousand more. “He didn’t say whose, he didn’t say where—”
“I mean, it’s got to be the Speerly children,” Kitay said. “Right? With Hanelai involved, there’s no one else.”
He’d said that already. They’d been running up against the same wall all morning, but that was the only conclusion they could deduce with any degree of certainty. Jiang had done something to Hanelai and the Speerly children, and he was still rotting with guilt over it.
But what?
“This is pointless,” Kitay declared after a silence. “There are too many unknowns. We can’t piece together a story through conjecture. We’ve no clue what happened twenty years ago.”
“Unless we do that again,” Rin said.
He shot her a sideways look. “Are you going to do that again?”
“Rin.” Before Rin could respond, Venka pushed her way up to the front of the column, her face flushed red. This was rare. Typically Venka marched near the back of the line, overseeing the rear to keep an eye out for stragglers and deserters. “There’s a problem.”
Rin motioned for the troops to halt. “What’s happened?”
“It’s two girls.” Venka had a strange expression on her face. “The soldiers are—ah, I mean, they’re—”
“Have they touched them?” Rin asked sharply. She’d made her policy on sexual assault very clear. The first time two soldiers were caught cornering a young woman alone at midnight, she and Venka had castrated the soldiers and left them to bleed out in the dirt with their cocks shoved in their mouths. It hadn’t happened again.
“It’s not that,” Venka said quickly. “But they’ve ganged up on them. They want punishment.”
Rin furrowed her brow. “For what?”
Venka looked deeply uncomfortable. “For violating the bodies.”
Hastily, Rin followed Venka down the column.
The first thing she saw when they broke through the gathered crowd was a corpse. She recognized the face of one of the Monkey Warlord’s former officers. His body was splayed in the snow, arms and legs stretched wide as if he’d been prepared for a dissection. His midsection looked as if a bear had taken two large bites from his flesh—one around his chest, and one near his stomach.
Then Rin saw the girls, both kneeling with their hands tied behind their backs. Their hands were bloody. So were their mouths and chins.
Rin’s stomach churned as she realized what had happened.
“They should burn,” snarled a soldier—another one of Gurubai’s men. He stood over the taller girl, one hand on his sword as if ready to behead her right then and there.
“Did they kill him?” Rin asked quickly.
“He was dead.” The taller girl jerked her head up, eyes flashing with defiance. “He was already dead, he was sick, we didn’t—”
“Shut up, you little whore.” The soldier jammed his boot into the small of her back. The girl’s mouth snapped shut and her eyes widened with pain, but she didn’t whimper.
“Unbind them,” Rin said.
The soldiers didn’t move.
“What is this, a trial?” Rin raised her voice, trying to imbue it with that same ring that had come so easily in the cavern. “Justice is mine to deal, not yours. Unbind them and leave them be.”
Sullenly they obeyed, then dispersed back to the marching column. Rin knelt down in front of the girls. She hadn’t recognized them at first, but now she saw they were the girls she’d recruited at the Beehive—the pale, pretty waif and her shy, freckled sister. Their faces were gaunt and shrunken, but she recognized that hard, flinty look in their eyes.
“Pipaji?” At last their names came to mind. “Jiuto?”
They gave no indication that they had heard. Pipaji rubbed at Jiuto’s arms, soothing her sister’s whimpers with hushed whispers.
“You ate him,” Rin said, because she wasn’t sure what else to say. This was too bizarre, too unexpected. She didn’t know what she was supposed to do next.
“I told you he was already dead.” If Pipaji was scared, she did a remarkable job of hiding it. “He wasn’t breathing when we found him.”
Beside her, Jiuto sucked at her fingertips.
Rin stared at them, astonished. “You can’t do that. That’s not—I mean, that’s a violation. That’s disgusting.”
“It’s food.” Pipaji gave her a very bored look—the sort of gaunt, indifferent stare that only starvation produced. Go ahead, said her eyes. Kill me. I won’t even feel it.
Rin noticed then that the corpse was not so brutally savaged as it had first appeared. The bloodstained snow only made it seem that way. The girls had only made two neat incisions. One over the heart, and one over the liver. They’d gone straight for organs that would provide the most sustenance, which meant they’d harvested meat from bodies before. They were well practiced at this by now—this was just the first time they’d been caught.
But what was Rin supposed to do about it? Force them to starve? She couldn’t tell them to subsist on rations. There wasn’t enough of anything to go around. Rin had sufficient rations because of course she did; she was the general, the Speerly, the one person in this column who could not be allowed to go hungry. Meanwhile Pipaji and Jiuto were no one of importance, not even trained soldiers. They were expendable.
