The Unbroken by C. Clark (ebook reader .txt) 📕

And she could see the shape of that sovereignty now. In the distance, on the other side of the Mile-Long Bridge, El-Wast was a sprawl of clay squares like the earth’s teeth. The skyline was missing the huge dome of the temple in the Old Medina, but there were smaller domes—smaller temples, shops. Balladairan flags waved at the different city gates, black rectangles that slowly vanished as the sky darkened.

It was easy to imagine the flags not being there at all. It might not come soon, but she could see the shape of that future in the girl she’d met in the slums, back when Touraine thought she could leave this all behind. The girl and her friends, fighting, fighting.

Touraine would keep fighting, and she would die. She could see that, too. It was coming.

It wasn’t here yet.

She dragged herself out of the canal, shivering. This must be what it’s like to stand at the edge of a cliff and decide to jump. From here on, it would be the rush of air, the speeding inevitability coming toward her, water or rocks—eventually she would make contact.

When she got back to the tiny rebel camp embedded in the slum city, she found Jaghotai in her tent.

“Jak?”

“Come in.”

Jaghotai was sprawled over a thin blanket laid right on the dirt. It was dark in the tent, but Touraine could make out the darker shadow of the other woman’s forearm across her face.

“I’m sorry about earlier,” Touraine said. “And thanks.”

Jaghotai grunted and rubbed her jaw. “Feel better?”

“No,” Touraine laughed, the edge of the dark still there. Yes. “I thought about what you said, though. You’re wrong. About Balladaire. They’re going to come for us, and they’re going to come hard. Waiting a week to prepare will mean the difference between saving anyone who isn’t fighting and throwing them all on Balladaire’s mercy. I know Balladairan mercy. It doesn’t last long.”

Jaghotai pushed herself up to sitting.

Touraine continued. “They’ll threaten you. They’re going to come for the children, the way they came for us. The last time that happened, they broke you.”

Jaghotai made a noise of protest, but Touraine cut her off with a gesture. The water had washed the fog from her mind. She could see the pieces they needed to move. It was the endgame, and there were few ways to win but a hundred ways to lose. She was done negotiating, done trusting Luca. And unlike Luca, Touraine knew battles. She knew blood and she knew soldiers under fire. She knew what it was to have faith not in power, but in the person fighting beside you. Luca didn’t have that.

She could see something else, too. She didn’t want Balladairan respect. Not after this. Maybe she had been a dog all this time, but she was ready to bite back.

“Cantic only knew about half of the gun shipment. We can move them in the dark, hide them out here, distribute them. Set people to stockpiling water, hiding it, rationing it. We’ll tighten the food rations.”

“We have more guns?” Jaghotai whispered slowly, as if saying the fact aloud would make it not true.

Touraine nodded, smiling briefly before sobering. “What about the terms of surrender? If it comes to that?” Which it probably would. She wasn’t naive about their odds.

“You mean under what conditions we’ll surrender the city?” Jaghotai sucked her teeth and breathed slowly, taking in the empty tent and the movement outside—their people, still buzzing like a kicked hive. She smiled back. “None.”

CHAPTER 36REPARATIONS

We need to launch an offensive,” Beau-Sang said, slamming his fist on the war room’s wooden table.

Luca, the governor, and the military’s senior officers sat in the planning room where Touraine’s court-martial had been held months ago. Today, the table sat in the center of the room again, with all the puffed-up Balladairan dignitaries crowded around it, trying to figure out what to do with the seething city that had imploded almost a week ago.

Colonel Taurvide, still just as thick in his head as he’d been before, agreed vehemently with Beau-Sang. “They’re weak. Crush them now and we can crush them for good.”

“What do you call burning their homes, looting their shops, and destroying their temple?” snapped Luca. She shot the colonel a dirty look. The general maintained that none of the destruction was under her orders, but it was her soldiers—and Taurvide’s, but ultimately Cantic’s—who had escalated the riots instead of stopping them.

Gil was right. Luca didn’t want to be this kind of queen. She wanted power, yes, respect, absolutely—but her stomach turned whenever she thought of the smoking ruins of the Grand Temple’s beautiful domes. The Rule of Rule said that a feared ruler had all the means to be a great ruler. Yverte would probably agree with Beau-Sang and Taurvide if he were still alive. If Luca didn’t get the city in hand, she would never get to be a ruler, great or otherwise. She couldn’t help thinking about the two cuts on her arm. The second one was scabbed over, the flesh tender.

“There must be another way,” she reiterated.

On Luca’s right, Cantic made a frustrated sound low in her throat. “We can’t tell who a rebel is by looking at them. They don’t wear uniforms, and this isn’t an open battlefield. Anyone could be plotting against us.”

“So we round them up and make an example,” Taurvide said. He knocked on the wood with thick, hairy knuckles. “It worked with my Sands.”

“And it worked in the quarries,” Beau-Sang added. “It will work now. We’ll show them that anyone can be punished, so everyone must behave. Then they’ll police themselves.”

Luca shivered at the cruelty, but Beau-Sang had a point. The Qazāli could be frightened out of joining the rebels. A large enough swath of “examples,” and Qazāli civilians would fall over themselves to turn in suspicious neighbors, if only to protect themselves. They would be cowed. For now. Eventually, though, they would rise above the fear to fight again, and