“It looked loads better than this months ago. Khudla’s a nice village—had some lovely historic architecture, until they tore down everything for firewood. And we made those barricades,” he said somewhat sulkily, pointing to the sandbags around the headquarters. “They just stole them.”

For a simple village’s defenses, Souji’s barricades had been surprisingly well constructed. He’d organized pillboxes the way she would have done it—wooden stakes driven into the ground to provide a lattice framework for layers of sandbags. She’d been taught that method at Sinegard. These defenses, Rin realized, had been built according to Militia guidelines.

“Then how did they get through in the end?” she asked.

Souji blinked at her as if she were an idiot. “They had gas.”

So Officer Shen was right. Rin stifled a shudder, imagining the impact of the noxious yellow fumes on unsuspecting civilians. “How much?”

“Just one canister,” Souji said. “I think they’d been hoarding it, because they didn’t use it when they first came. Waited until the third day of fighting, when they had us all barricaded into one place, and then they popped it over the wall. We fell apart pretty quickly after that.”

They reached the headquarters. Souji tried the door. It swung open without trouble; no one was left to lock it from the inside.

Food littered the table of the central conference room. Souji picked a wheat bun off its place, tore off a bite, then spat it back out. “Disgusting.”

“What, too stale for you?”

“No. It’s got too much salt. Gross.” Souji tossed the wheat bun back onto the table. “Salt doesn’t belong in buns.”

Rin’s mouth watered. “They have salt?”

She hadn’t tasted salt in weeks. Most salt in the Empire was imported from the basins of Dog Province, but those trade networks had completely broken down during Vaisra’s civil war. Out in the arid eastern Monkey Province, Rin’s army had been subsisting on the blandest rice gruel and boiled vegetables. There were rumored to be a few jars of fermented soy paste hidden in the kitchens at Ruijin, but if they existed, Rin had never seen nor tasted them.

“We had salt,” Souji corrected. He bent over to examine the contents of a barrel. “Looks like they’ve eaten through most of it. There’s only a handful left.”

“Take that back to the public kitchen. We’ll treat everyone.” Rin leaned over the commander’s desk. Documents were strewn all over its surface. Rin found troop numbers, food ration records, and letters written in a scrawled, messy script that she could barely read. Here and there she could make out a few words. Wife. Home. Emperor.

She collected them into a neat pile. She and Kitay would pore over them later, see if they bore any meaningful news about the Mugenese. But they were likely months old, like the other correspondence they’d found. Every dead Mugenese general kept letters from the mainland on their desk, as if rereading those Mugini characters could maintain their connection to a motherland they must have known was gone.

“They were reading Sunzi?” Rin picked up the slim text—a Nikara edition, not a translation. “And the Bodhidharma? Where’d they get these?”

“Those were mine. Stole them out of the Sinegard library way back in the day.” Souji plucked the booklet from her hand. “I take them with me everywhere I go. Those bastards wouldn’t have been able to make head or tail of them.”

Rin glanced at him, surprised. “You’re a Sinegard graduate?”

“Not a graduate. I was there for two years. Then the famine struck, so I went home. Jima didn’t let me back in when I returned. But I still needed a paycheck, so I enlisted in the Militia.”

So he’d passed the Keju. That was rare for someone from his background—Rin should know. She regarded Souji with a newfound respect. “Why wouldn’t they?”

“Because they thought that if I left once, then I’d do it again. That I’d always prioritize my family over my military career. Guess they were right. I would have left the ranks the moment we got wind of the Mugenese invasion.”

“And what about now?”

“Whole family’s dead.” His voice was flat. “Died this past year.”

“I’m sorry. Was it the Federation?”

“No. The flood.” Souji jerked out a shrug. “We’re usually pretty good at seeing floods coming. Not hard to read the weather if you know what you’re doing. But not this time. This was man-made.”

“The Empress broke the dams,” Rin said automatically. Chaghan and Qara felt like such a distant memory that she could speak this lie without struggle. Best that Souji didn’t know that the Cike, her old regiment, had deliberately caused the flood that killed his family.

“Broke the dams to stem an enemy that she’d invited in herself.” Souji’s voice turned bitter. “I know. I’d learned to swim at Sinegard. They hadn’t. There’s nothing where my village used to be.”

Rin felt a stab of guilt. She did her best to ignore it. She shouldn’t have to shoulder the blame for that particular atrocity. That flood had been the fault of the twins, an act of environmental warfare to slow the Federation’s progress inland.

Who could say if it had worked, or if it had even mattered? What was done was done. The only way to live with your transgressions, Rin had learned, was to lock them away in your mind and leave them in the abyss.

“Why can’t you just blow them up?” Souji asked abruptly.

She blinked at him. “What?”

“When you ended the war. When the longbow island went up in smoke. What’s stopping you from doing that again in the south?”

“Prudence,” she said. “If I burn them, I burn everyone. Fire on that scale doesn’t discriminate. A massive genocide on our own territory would—”

“We don’t need a massive genocide. Just a little one would do.”

“You don’t know what you’re asking for.” She turned away; she didn’t want to meet his eyes. “Even the little fires hurt people they shouldn’t.”

She’d grown tired of this question. That was what everyone wanted to know—why she couldn’t simply snap her fingers and incinerate the Mugenese camp like she’d done to their entire island. If she’d finished off a nation once, why couldn’t she do it again? Why couldn’t she end this whole war in seconds? Wasn’t that so obviously the next move?

She wished she could do it. There were times when she wanted so badly to send walls of flame roaring across the entire south, clearing out the Mugenese the way one might raze a field of blighted crops, with no regard for the collateral damage.

But every time that desire surged within her, she ran up against the same pulsing black venom that clouded her mind—Su Daji’s parting gift, the Seal that cut her off from direct access to the Pantheon.

Maybe it was a blessing that her mind remained blocked by the Seal, that she was forced to use Kitay as a conduit for her power. Kitay kept her sane. Stable. He let her call the fire, but only in targeted, limited bursts.

Without Kitay, Rin was terrified of what she might do.

“If I were you,” Souji said, “I would have gotten rid of them all. One single blaze, and the south would be clean. Fuck prudence.”