“I know,” Altan said. “We saw the same thing in Khurdalain.”
“They took out practically the entire Second Division in one night,” said Kitay. “Some of us put up a last stand near the south gate. When the gas cleared, nothing was alive. I went there afterward to find survivors. At first I didn’t know what I was looking at. All over the ground, you could see animals. Mice, rats, rodents of every kind. So many of them. They’d crawled out of their holes to die. When the Militia was gone, nothing stood between the soldiers and our people. The Federation had fun. They made it a sport. They threw babies in the air to see if they could cleave them in half before they hit the ground. They had contests to see how many civilians they could round up and decapitate in an hour. They raced to see who could stack bodies the fastest.” Kitay’s voice cracked. “Could I have some water?”
Qara wordlessly handed him her canteen.
“How did Mugen become like this?” Chaghan asked wonderingly. “What did you ever do to make them hate you so much?”
“It’s not anything we did,” said Altan. His left hand, Rin noticed, was shaking again. “It’s how the Federation soldiers were trained. When you believe your life means nothing except for your usefulness to your Emperor, the lives of your enemies mean even less.”
“The Federation soldiers don’t feel anything.” Kitay nodded in agreement. “They don’t think of themselves as people. They are parts of a machine. They do as they are commanded, and the only time they feel joy is when reveling in another person’s suffering. There is no reasoning with them. There is no attempting to understand them. They are accustomed to propagating such grotesque evil that they cannot properly be called human.” Kitay’s voice trembled.
“When they were cutting my squadron down, I looked into the eyes of one of them. I thought I could make him recognize me as a fellow man. As a person, not just an opponent. And he stared back at me, and I realized I couldn’t connect with him at all. There was nothing human in those eyes.”
Once the survivors began to realize that the Militia had arrived, they emerged from their hiding holes in miserable, straggling groups.
The few survivors of Golyn Niis had been driven deep into the city, hiding in disguised shelters like Kitay or locked up in makeshift prisons and then forgotten when the Federation soldiers decided to continue their march inland. After discovering two or three such holding rooms, Altan ordered them—Cike and civilians alike—to carefully search the city.
No one disagreed with the order. They all knew, Rin suspected, that it would be horrible to die alone, chained to walls when their captors had long since departed.
“I guess we’re saving people for once,” Baji said. “Feels nice.”
Altan himself led a squad to take on the nearly impossible task of clearing away the bodies. He claimed it was to ward against rot and disease, but Rin suspected it was because he wanted to give them a proper funeral—and because there was so little else that he could do for the city.
They had no time to dig mass graves on the scale necessary before the stench of rotting bodies became unbearable. So they stacked the corpses into large pyres, great bonfires of bodies that burned constantly. Golyn Niis turned from a city of corpses to a city of ash.
But the sheer number of the dead was staggering. The corpses Altan burned barely made a dent in the piles of rotting bodies inside the city walls. Rin didn’t think it was possible to truly cleanse Golyn Niis unless they burned the entire city to the ground.
Eventually they might have to. But not while there could still be survivors.
Rin was outside the city walls trying to find a fresh source of water that wasn’t spoiled with blood when Kitay pulled her aside and reported that they had found Venka. She had been kept in a “relaxation house,” which was likely the only reason why the Federation had let a division soldier live. Kitay did not elaborate on what a “relaxation house” was, but he didn’t need to.
Rin could hardly recognize Venka when she went to see her that night. Her lovely hair was shorn short, as if someone had hacked at it with a knife. Her lively eyes were now dull and glassy. Both her arms had been broken at the wrist. She wore them in slings. Rin saw the angle at which Venka’s arms had been twisted, and knew there was only one way they could have gotten like that.
Venka hardly stirred when Rin entered her room. Only when Rin closed the door did she flinch.
“Hi,” Rin said in a small voice.
Venka looked up dully and said nothing.
“I thought you’d want someone to talk to,” said Rin, though the words sounded hollow and insufficient even as they left her mouth.
Venka glared at her.
Rin struggled for words. She could think of no questions that were not inane. Are you all right? Of course Venka was not all right. How did you survive? By having the body of a woman. What happened to you? But she already knew.
“Did you know they called us public toilets?” Venka asked suddenly.
Rin stopped two paces from the door. Comprehension dawned on her, and her blood turned to ice. “What?”
“They thought I couldn’t understand Mugini,” Venka said with a horrifying attempt at a chuckle. “That’s what they called me, when they were in me.”
“Venka . . .”
“Do you know how badly it hurt? They were in me, they were in me for hours and they wouldn’t stop. I blacked out over and over but every time I awoke they were still going, a different man would be on top of me, or maybe the same man . . . they were all the same after a while. It was a nightmare, and I couldn’t wake up.”
Rin’s mouth filled with the taste of bile. “I’m so sorry—” she tried, but Venka didn’t seem to hear her.
“I’m not the worst,” Venka said. “I fought back. I was trouble. So they saved me for last. They wanted to break me first. They made me watch. I saw women disemboweled. I saw the soldiers slice off their breasts. I saw them nail women alive to walls. I saw them mutilate young girls, when they had tired of their mothers. If their vaginas were too small, they cut them open to make it easier to rape them.” Venka’s voice rose in pitch. “There was a pregnant woman in the house with us. She was seven months to term. Eight. At first the soldiers let her live so she’d take care of us. Wash us. Feed us. She was the only kind face in that house. They didn’t touch her because she was pregnant, not at first. Then one day the general decided he’d had enough of the other girls. He came for her. You’d think she’d have learned by then, after watching what the soldiers did to us. You’d think she would know there wasn’t any point in resisting.”
Rin didn’t want to hear any more. She wanted to bury her head under her arms and block everything out. But Venka continued, as if now that she had started her testimony she couldn’t stop. “She kicked and dragged. And then she slapped him. The general howled and grabbed at her stomach. Not with his knife. With his fingers. His nails. He knocked her down and he tore and tore.” Venka turned her head away. “And he pulled out her stomach, and her intestines, and then finally the baby . . . and the baby was still moving. We saw everything from the hallway.”
Rin stopped breathing.
“I was glad,” Venka said. “Glad that she was dead, before the general ripped her baby in half the way you’d split an orange.” Underneath her slings, Venka’s fingers clenched and spasmed. “He made me mop it up.”
“Gods. Venka.” Rin couldn’t look her in the eye. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t pity me!” Venka shrieked suddenly. She made a movement as if trying to reach for Rin’s arm, as if she had forgotten that her arms were broken. She stood up and walked toward Rin so that they were face-to-face, nose to nose.
Her expression was as unhinged as it had been that day when they fought in the ring.
“I don’t need your pity. I need you to kill them for me. You have to kill them for me,” Venka hissed. “Swear it. Swear on your blood that you will burn them.”