“You have the biggest surplus of troops in the Empire and you won’t deploy them,” Han said. “Why, Nezha? Planning to use them for something else?”
Nezha’s eyes flashed. “You want me to break your neck?”
“The Mugenese aren’t going to invade,” Kitay interrupted quickly. “They’ll make noise on the Horse Province border, sure, but they won’t commit ground troops. They don’t want to make Hesperia angry—”
“The Hesperians don’t give a shit,” said Han. “They haven’t bothered with the eastern hemisphere for years. No ambassadors, no diplomats—”
“Because of the armistice,” Kitay said. “They think they don’t need to. But if the Federation tips the balance, they’ll have to intervene. And Mugen’s leadership knows that.”
“They also know we have no coordinated frontier defense and no navy,” Han snapped. “Don’t be delusional.”
“A ground invasion is not rational for them,” Kitay insisted. “The armistice benefits them. They don’t want to bleed thousands of men in the Empire’s heartland. There will be no war.”
“Sure.” Han crossed his arms. “What are we training for, then?”
The second crisis came two months later. Several border cities in Horse Province had begun to boycott Mugenese goods. The Mugenese governor-generals responded by methodically closing, looting, then burning down any Nikara businesses located on the Mugenese side of the border.
When the news broke, Han abruptly departed the Academy to join his father’s battalion. Jima threatened permanent expulsion if he left without permission; Han responded by tossing his armband onto her desk.
The third crisis was the death of the Federation’s emperor. Nikara spies reported that the crown prince Ryohai was lined up to succeed to the throne, news that deeply unsettled every master at the academy. Prince Ryohai—young, hotheaded, and violently nationalist—was a leading member of Mugen’s war party.
“He’s been calling for a ground invasion for years,” Irjah explained to the class. “Now he has his chance to actually do it.”
The next six weeks were terribly tense. Even Kitay had stopped arguing that Mugen would do nothing. Several students, most from the outer north, put in requests for a home leave. They were denied without exception. A few left regardless, but most obeyed Jima’s command—if it came down to a war, then some affiliation with Sinegard was better than none.
The new Emperor Ryohai did not declare a ground invasion. The Empress sent a diplomatic party to the longbow island, and by all accounts was politely received by Mugen’s new administration. The crisis passed. But a cloud of anxiety hung over the academy still—and nothing could not erase the growing fear that their class might be the first to graduate into a war.
The one person seemingly uninterested in news of Federation politics was Jiang. If asked about Mugen, he grimaced and waved the subject away; if pressed, he squeezed his eyes shut, shook his head, and sang out loud like a little child.
“But you fought the Federation!” Rin exclaimed. “How can you not care?”
“I don’t remember that,” Jiang said.
“How can you not remember that?” she demanded. “You were in the Second Poppy War—all of you were!”
“That’s what they tell me,” Jiang said.
“So then—”
“So I don’t remember,” Jiang said loudly, and his voice took on a fragile, tremulous tone that made Rin realize she had better drop the subject or risk sending him on a weeklong spell of absence or erratic behavior.
But as long as she didn’t bring up the Federation, Jiang continued to conduct their lessons in the same meandering, lackadaisical manner. It had taken Rin until the end of her first year of apprenticeship to learn to meditate for an hour without moving; once she could do that, Jiang had demanded that she meditate for five. This took her nearly another year. When she finally managed it, Jiang gave her a small opaque flask, the kind used to store sorghum wine, and instructed her to take it to the top of the mountain.
“There’s a cave near the peak. You’ll know it when you see it. Drink down that flask, then start meditating.”
“What’s in it?”
Jiang examined his fingernails. “Bits and things.”
“For how long?”
“As long as it takes. Days. Weeks. Months. I can’t tell you before you start.”
Rin told her other masters that she would be absent from class for an indefinite period of time. By now they had resigned themselves to Jiang’s nonsense; they waved her off and told her to try not to be gone for more than a year. She hoped they were joking.
Jiang did not accompany her to the top. He bade her farewell from the highest tier of the campus. “Here’s a cloak in case you get cold. There’s not much up there in terms of rain shelter. I’ll see you on the other side.”
It rained the entire morning. Rin hiked miserably, wiping mud off her shoes every few steps. When she reached the cave, she was shivering so hard that she almost dropped the flask.
She glanced around the muddy interior. She wanted to build a fire to warm herself, but couldn’t find any material for kindling that wasn’t soaked through. She huddled into the far end of the cave, as far away from the rain as she could get, and assumed a cross-legged stance. Then she closed her eyes.
She thought of the warrior Bodhidharma, meditating for years while listening to the ants scream. She suspected that the ants wouldn’t be the only ones screaming when she was done.
The contents of the flask turned out to be a slightly bitter tea. She thought it might be a hallucinogen distilled in liquid, but hours passed and her mind was as clear as ever.
Night fell. She meditated in darkness.
At first it was horribly difficult.
She couldn’t sit still. She was hungry after six hours. All she thought about was her stomach. But after a while the hunger was so overwhelming that she couldn’t think about it anymore, because she couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t been this hungry.
On the second day she felt dizzy. She was woozy with hunger, so starved that she couldn’t feel her stomach. Did she even have a stomach? What was a stomach?
On the third day her head was delightfully light. She was just air, just breath, just a breathing organ. A fan. A flute. In, out, in, out, and on and on.
On the fifth day things moved too fast, too slow, or not at all. She felt infuriated by the slow passage of time. Her brain was racing in a way that wouldn’t calm; she felt as if her heartbeat must now be faster than a hummingbird’s. How had she not dissolved? How had she not vibrated into nothingness?
On the seventh day she tipped into the void. Her body became very still; so still that she forgot she had one. Her left finger itched and she was amazed at the sensation. She didn’t scratch it, but observed the itch as if from the outside and marveled that after a very long time, it went away by itself.
She learned how breath moved through her body as if through an empty house. Learned how to stack her vertebrae one by one on top of each other so her spine formed a perfectly straight line, an unobstructed channel.
But her still body became heavy, and as it became heavy it became easier and easier to discard it, and to drift upward, weightless, into that place she could glimpse only from behind closed eyelids.
On the ninth day she suffered a geometric assault of lines and shapes without form or color, without regard to any aesthetic value except randomness.
You stupid shapes, she thought over and over again like a mantra. You stupid fucking shapes.
On the thirteenth day she had a horrible sensation of being trapped, as if buried within stone, as if covered in mud. She was so light, so weightless, but she had nowhere to go; she rebounded around inside this bizarre vessel called a body like a caught firefly.