“Are you all right?” Jiang asked.
“What? Of course—”
“You’re sweating.”
Rin glanced down, and realized that the front of her tunic was soaked through.
What was wrong with her? She had never felt a panic like this before—this low, crescendoing distress of gradual suffocation. She felt like she’d been dropped blindfolded into a fairy realm. She did not want to be here. She wanted to run, back out past the walls and into the forests; anything to get away from this hopeless, confused alienation.
“This is how we felt last time.” Daji’s tone was uncharacteristically gentle. “They came in, rebuilt our cities, and transformed them according to their principles of order, and we almost couldn’t bear it.”
“But they have their own cities,” Rin said. “What do they want here?”
“They want to erase us. It’s their divine mandate. They want to make us better, to improve us, by turning us into a mirror of themselves. The Hesperians understand culture as a straight line.” Daji dragged her finger through the air. “One starting point, and one destination. They are at the end of the line. They loved the Mugenese because they came close. But any culture or state that diverges is necessarily inferior. We are inferior, until we speak, dress, act, and worship just like them.”
That terrified Rin.
Until now she had perceived the Hesperian threat in terms of hard power—through memories of airship fleets, smoking arquebuses, and exploding missiles. She’d seen them as an enemy on the battlefield.
She’d never considered that this alternate form of soft erasure might be far worse.
But what if the Nikara wanted this future? The New City was full of Nikara residents—they had to outnumber the Hesperians five to one—and they seemed completely fine with their new arrangement. Happy, even.
How had things changed so quickly? Once upon a time any Nikara on the continent would have run from the mere sight of the blue-eyed devils. They’d been primed for xenophobia by centuries of rumors and stereotypes, stories that Rin had half believed until she’d met the Hesperians in the flesh. They eat their food raw. They steal orphan babies to cook them into stews. Their penises are three times larger than normal, and their women’s openings are cavernous to accommodate.
But the Nikara in the New City seemed to adore their new neighbors. They nodded, smiled, and saluted Hesperian soldiers as they passed. They sold Hesperian food from carts parked on street corners—rocklike brown pastries, hard yellow rounds that gave off pungent odors, and varieties of fish so stinkingly moist Rin was surprised they hadn’t rotted. They—the upper class, at least—had begun to imitate Hesperian dress. Merchants, bureaucrats, and officers walked down the streets garbed in tight trousers, thick white socks pulled up to their knees, and strange coats that buttoned over their waists but draped in the back past their buttocks like duck tails.
They’d even started learning Hesperian. It sounded like bad Hesperian—a clipped, pidgin dialect that morphed the two languages and made them, oddly, mutually understandable. Foreign phrases peppered exchanges between merchants and customers, soldiers and civilians—Good day. How much? Which ones? Thank you.
But despite all their pretensions and efforts, they were not the Hesperians’ equals. They couldn’t be, by virtue of their race. This Rin noticed soon enough—it was clear from the ways the Nikara bowed and scraped, nodding obsequiously while the Hesperians ordered them about. This wasn’t a surprise. This was the Hesperians’ idea of a natural social order.
Sister Petra’s words rose to her mind. The Nikara are a particularly herdlike nation. You listen well, but independent thought is difficult for you. Your brains, which we know to be an indicator of your rational capacity, are by nature smaller.
“Look,” Jiang murmured. “They’ve started bringing their women.”
Rin followed his gaze and saw a tall, wheat-haired woman stepping out of the horseless carriage, her waist enveloped in massive bunches of ruffled fabric. She stretched out a gloved hand. A Nikara foot servant ran up to help her off, then stooped to pick up her bags.
Rin couldn’t stop staring at the woman’s skirts, which arced out from her waist in the unnatural shape of an overturned teacup. “Are they—”
“Wooden frame,” Jiang said, anticipating her confusion. “Don’t fret, it’s still legs underneath. They think it’s fashionable.”
“Why?”
Jiang shrugged. “Beyond me.”
Before now, Rin had never seen regular Hesperian civilians—Hesperians who were not soldiers, nor part of the Gray Company. Hesperians who purportedly had no official business in Nikan other than to keep their husbands company. Now they strolled the New City’s streets as if they belonged.
She shuddered to think of what that meant. If the Hesperians were shipping in their wives, it meant they intended to stay.
A sudden sharp prickle stung her left shin. She dropped to her knee and tugged her pant leg up, hoping fervently that the pain would continue.
For a few seconds she felt nothing. Then came another stab of pain so sharp she felt as if a needle had pierced all the way through her flesh and emerged out the other side. She uttered a quiet moan of relief.
“What’s wrong?” Daji asked sharply.
“It’s Kitay,” Rin whispered. “He’s writing back, look—”
“Not here,” Daji hissed. She yanked Rin up by the arm and pulled her down the street. Pain continued to lance up Rin’s left leg, the agony intensifying by the second.
Kitay likely didn’t have access to a sharp, clean blade. He was probably carving his flesh with a nail, a piece of scrap wood, or the jagged edge of a shattered vase. Perhaps he was using his own fingernails to carve out the long, jagged strokes that dragged in sharp twists down the length of her shin, creating scars she couldn’t wait to see.
It didn’t matter how badly it hurt. This felt good. Every stab was proof that Kitay was here, he’d heard her, and he was writing back.
At last they reached an empty street corner. Daji let go of Rin’s arm. “What does it say?”
Rin rolled her pant leg up to the knee. Kitay had written four characters, engraved in pale white lines along her inner calf.
“Three, six,” Rin said. “Northeast.”
“Coordinates,” Jiang guessed. “Has to be. The intersection of the third and sixth streets. That makes sense, this city’s arranged like a grid.”
“Then which one’s the vertical coordinate?” Daji asked.
Rin thought for a moment. “How do you read wikki positions?”
“The board game?” Jiang thought for a moment. “Vertical first, then horizontal, origin point in the southwest. Does he—”
“Yes,” Rin said. “He loves it.” Kitay was wild about the strategy game. He’d always tried to get other students to play with him at Sinegard, but no one ever would. Losing to Kitay was too annoying; he kept lecturing you on all your strategic missteps as he cleaned your pieces off the board. “Third street north. Sixth street east.”
None of them could place themselves in relation to the grid, so they had to first find the southwest corner of the city, then count the blocks as they moved northeast. It took them the better part of the hour. All the while Jiang complained under his breath, “Stupid directions, that boy; there are four sides of an intersection, he could be in any one of them, should have included a description.”