Daji nodded. “Be quick.”
They moved to guard either side of the alley. Rin sat down against a wall and pulled her knife out of her belt. She sent a probing question to the back of her mind, tentative, hopeful. Are you there?
To her surprise, a small flame flickered to life in her hand. She could have screamed in relief. She made a cage with her fingers over the blade, waiting until the tip glowed orange. She just needed to scar, not mutilate; a quick burn would be easier than drawing blood.
But Daji shook her head. “You have to press it in deep. You’ve got to bleed. Or he won’t even feel it.”
“Fine.” Rin held the tip over the fleshy back of her lower left leg, but found that she couldn’t stop her fingers from shaking.
“Would you like me to do it?” Daji asked.
“No—no, I’ll do it.” Rin clenched her teeth tight to make sure she wouldn’t bite her tongue. She took a breath. Then she pushed the tip into her skin.
Her calf screamed. Every impulse told her to draw her hand away, but she kept the metal embedded inside her flesh.
She couldn’t keep her fingers from shaking. The knife clattered to the ground.
She picked it up, embarrassed, unable to meet Daji’s eyes.
Why was the pain so terrible now? She’d inflicted worse harms on herself before. She still had faint white burn scars on her arms from the candle wax she’d once dripped on herself to stay awake. Ridged, puckered marks covering her thighs where she’d once stabbed herself to escape her own hallucinations.
But those wounds were the product of fevered, desperate outbursts. She was sober right now, clear-minded and calm, and her full presence of mind made it so much harder to deliberately inflict pain.
She squeezed her eyes shut.
Get a grip, Altan said.
She thought of when a javelin had slammed her out of the sky over the Red Cliffs. Of when Daji had pinned her under a mast. Of when Kitay had smashed her hand apart, then pulled the mangled remnants through iron cuffs. Her body had been through so much worse than a shallow cut from a clean blade. This was a small pain. This was nothing.
She dug the metal under her skin. This time her hand held steady as she carved out a single character in clear, even strokes.
Where?
Minutes passed. Kitay didn’t respond.
Rin glanced at her arm every several seconds, watching for pale scars that didn’t emerge.
She tried not to panic. There were a million reasons why he hadn’t yet answered. He might be asleep. He might be drugged. He might have seen the message, but either lacked any means of responding, or couldn’t because he was under surveillance. He needed time.
Meanwhile, they had nothing to do but wait.
Daji wanted to remain in hiding inside the alley, but Jiang suggested that they walk the length of the New City. This was purportedly to gather intelligence. He wanted to map out exit routes and mark down the guard post locations, so that if and when Kitay responded, they could smoothly get him out.
But Rin suspected that Jiang, like her, wanted to explore the New City simply out of sheer, sick fascination. To see how much had changed, to fully understand what the Hesperians were capable of.
“It’s been decades,” he told Daji when she objected. “We need to know what we’re up against.”
And so, scarves wrapped tight over their noses, they ventured back out onto the street.
The first thing Rin noticed was that the New City was clean.
She quickly discovered why. Ordinances printed on giant sheets of parchment were pasted all along the walls in Hesperian and Nikara characters. No urinating in the street. No dumping garbage from windows. No unlicensed sale of alcohol. No unleashed animals on the street. No fireworks, gambling, brawling, fighting, or shouting.
Rin had seen such ordinances before—Nikara magistrates often posted public notices like these in futile attempts to clean up their unruly cities. But here the ordinances were followed. The New City was far from pristine; it had all the crowded din of every large city. But that was a function of its swollen population, not their habits. The streets were dusty, but free from litter. The air smelled not of filth, excrement, or rotted trash, but of the normal stench of many tired humans crowded into one place.
“Look at that.” Jiang paused by a metal plaque nailed to a streetlamp, engraved in alternating Nikara and Hesperian script.
The Four Cardinal Principles of Order
Propriety
Righteousness
Frugality
Modesty
Below that was a list of rules for the “Maintenance of Societal Order.” Do not spit. Queue politely in line to await your turn. Practice hygiene. Under that last rule was another, indented list that clarified:
Practices that are unhygienic include:
Failure to wash hands before one cooks or eats.
Preparing raw meat with the same blade as vegetables.
Reusing cooking oil.
It went on for eight more lines.
“That’s obnoxious.” Rin had the sudden urge to rip it down, but the gleaming plaque looked so grand and official she was afraid one of the miniature dirigibles would start attacking her if she did.
“What’s wrong with washing your hands?” Jiang asked. “Sounds fair to me.”
“There’s nothing wrong, it’s just . . .” Rin trailed off, unsure how to phrase her discomfort. She felt like a little child being admonished to finish her rice. She didn’t hate the idea of hygiene itself, but rather the presumption that the Nikara were so backward, so barbaric, that the Hesperians had to remind them in huge, clear text how not to behave like animals. “I mean, we know all this already.”
“Do we?” Jiang chuckled. “Have you ever been to Sinegard?”
“There’s nothing wrong with Sinegard.” Rin didn’t know why she was defending the old Nikara capital. She knew Sinegard was disgusting. The first time she’d traveled north, she’d been warned to eat nothing from dirt-cheap street vendors, since they produced their soy sauce from human hair and sewage. Yet now, for some reason, she felt territorial. Sinegard was the capital; Sinegard was a shining delight, and she would have far preferred its bustling din to this freak show of a city. “Let’s just keep walking.”
Her discomfort didn’t ebb as they traveled farther into the New City. It worsened. Every time she turned a corner she saw something—new decorations, new technologies, new attire—that reinforced how bizarre this place was.
Even the background noise threw her off. She’d gotten used to the soundscape of her country; it was all she’d ever known. She knew its roadside shouts, its creaking wheels, its jabbering hagglers and crowded footsteps. She knew its language, had come to expect certain vowel-consonant combinations and vocal intonations. But the noises of the New City sounded on an entirely different register. From teahouses and street buskers she heard new strains of music, awful and discordant. She heard too many voices speaking Hesperian, or some accented attempt at Hesperian.
Nikara cities were loud, but their loudness was of a different type—local, discrete, irregular. The New City seemed run on an ever-present mechanical heartbeat, its thousand machines whirring, humming, and whining without end. Once Rin noticed it, she couldn’t get it out of her head. She couldn’t imagine living against this backdrop; it would drive her mad. How did anyone sleep in this city?