The Drowned Cities (12 page)

“That’s enough, soldier.”

To Mahlia’s surprise, Soa broke off. She blinked blood from her eyes.

From his sickbed, Sergeant Ocho was waving Soa away. “Don’t let the war maggot rile you, soldier.”

“I ain’t riled, I’m just teaching her a lesson.”

The sergeant’s voice was dryly amused, but still it carried authority as he said, “I think she gets it.”

Soa looked like he was about to protest, but then he looked at Mahlia and made a face of disgust. “Well, she gets it now.”

“That’s right, Private. She gets it.” Sergeant Ocho waved him on. “Now go ask Gutty when that goat’s going to be cooked. Smells good.”

And to Mahlia’s surprise, Soa actually backed off. With a final jerk to her hair, he set her loose and headed toward the fire.

Ocho watched him go, then nodded at Mahlia. “Get yourself cleaned up, and then get our dead clean, too. They
need last rites.” He looked at her seriously. “And keep your thoughts off your face. Soa’s dying for an excuse to cut you. I ain’t going to save your ass twice.”

Mahlia stared at the sergeant, trying to figure him out. He wasn’t human, but he also wasn’t crazy. He wasn’t hungry for blood, not like Soa or the lieutenant, but that didn’t make him nice, either.

She got a new bucket of water and cleaned herself up as best she could before setting to work on the dead boys, swabbing off their bodies and arranging bloody torn garments. She arranged one of the boys so his broken neck wasn’t so twisted. He couldn’t have been more than ten years old. One of those cannon-fodder licebiters who got swept up in recruiting drives, and who they shoved out in front to draw fire. Bullet bait. Not even really a recruit yet. Only the first three horizontal bars of Glenn Stern’s mark branded on his cheek.

“Half-bar,” Ocho said. “They die faster.”

Mahlia glanced over at the soldier where he lay. “Not like you.”

Gold-flecked eyes studied her, unblinking. “Got to learn quick if you want to stay alive. Drowned Cities eats stupid for breakfast.” He straightened, pushing himself up in bed, wincing. “ ’Spect you know that, though. I ain’t seen a castoff in more than a year. Last time I saw a girl like you, LT had her head on a stick.”

“That what you’re going to do to me, after I heal you up? Put my head on a stick?”

Ocho shrugged. “Ask the LT.”

“You always do what the LT says?”

“That’s how it works. I do what LT orders. My boys do what I order.” He nodded at the dead boy that Mahlia was cleaning. “Right down the line to half-bars.”

“Looks like that worked out real good for him.”

“Hell, we’re all bullet bait sooner or later. Doubt it makes much difference. You make it to sixteen, you’re a goddamn legend.” Ocho paused, then said, “If the LT decides to put you down, I’ll make sure it’s quick.” He jerked his head toward the fire where Soa was carving meat off the goat’s roasting form. “I won’t let Soa near you.”

“Is that how you make friends? By promising not to torture them before you kill them?”

Ocho’s scarred face suddenly broke into a grin. “Damn. You’re pushy for a castoff.”

“I ain’t castoff. I’m Drowned Cities.”

He laughed. “That don’t mean you ain’t pushy.”

It was almost like he was human. Like he didn’t have a dozen kill scars hacked into his bicep. He could have been anyone.

A crash resounded from the fire pit. Mahlia jumped at the noise. She spun to see a cooking pot lying on its side, rice spilled across concrete. One of the soldiers, a skinny boy with ears that had been cut off, was sucking on his hand. Soa was shouting at him.

“Grind it, Van! The pot’s hot, right?” He slapped the smaller boy upside the head.

Van dodged back and his hand went to his knife. “You touch me again, I gut you.”

“Let’s see you try, war maggot.”

“Shut it, you two!”

It was Ocho, sitting up straighter than Mahlia would have thought he could, his voice full of command. “Van! You pick up that rice. You serve us all off the top, and you eat what touched the ground. Soa, get out and get some fresh water. I won’t have you fighting in this unit. We ain’t Army of God.” He made a dismissing motion with his hand. “Go on. Get to it.”

“Trouble, Sergeant?”

Lieutenant Sayle’s voice floated down from the squat above, where he had ensconced himself. A voice full of threat. Everyone seemed to freeze. “Anything I need to know about?”

“No, sir,” Ocho responded. “Just a little kitchen mess, right, boys?”

They all said, “Yes, sir,” and then Van was scooping up rice and putting it onto palm leaves and handing it out to the other soldier boys as they shuffled up and took rice and goat, and then went back to their various posts. Only when everyone else was served did Van squat down and scoop up the last rice for himself.

Mahlia watched as everything got cleaned, trying to figure out what felt odd about it all. It felt wrong. She kept trying to put her finger on it, and then it dawned on her… They were afraid.

They were all staring out at the black rustling jungle
and casting nervous glances toward their dead, and every one of them was afraid. They’d had four of theirs torn to pieces in seconds. Despite all their bravado and threats of violence, these soldier boys were little puppies in comparison to the creature they were hunting in the jungle, and they knew it.

Mahlia wished fervently that there was some way to sic the half-man on them. She went back to her cleaning, imagining the half-man mowing through them. Wishing that the jungle’s teeth would just swallow them up.

Teeth. Mahlia paused. She studied the nervous warboys again. The jungle had teeth, and it made them afraid. Mahlia started to smile.

I’ll give you teeth.

She straightened and wrung out her rag.

“Where you going?” Ocho asked. “You ain’t done here.”

“You need better meds. I got something for you.”

“Thought you already gave everything.”

“Maybe if you act decent toward me instead of treating me like an animal, you get treated better, too.”

“That’s peacekeeper talk.” But the almost-smile flickered again as Ocho said it, and the soldier boy waved her off.

In the squat above, Mahlia found the lieutenant seated at Doctor Mahfouz’s rough-cut table, studying an old book of the doctor’s, while the doctor sat quietly and answered the man’s questions about the jungles in his steady voice.

The lieutenant looked up as she climbed through the hatch. “What you want, girl?”

“I need to fix your sergeant’s bandages. And I remember where we had some other meds,” she said.

“Other meds?” the lieutenant asked. “You holding out on us, doctor?”

Doctor Mahfouz looked surprised, but he covered well enough. “Mahlia manages our medicines.” He touched his glasses. “Because of my sight.” He nodded to her. “Go on, then.”

Mahlia looked at the lieutenant. “You want me to get the meds or not?”

He waved her on. “Don’t let me stop you.”

Mahlia went over and crouched in a shadowy corner. Started pulling half-moldy books off a lower shelf. She hated giving away the doctor’s hiding place, but she suspected that the soldiers would have found it eventually, or else forced the information from her or the doctor at knifepoint.

Behind the first row of books, more books were tucked away. These, Mahlia pulled out and started opening, revealing the doctor’s medicine supply. She extracted blister packs of pills from within the hollowed-out volumes while the lieutenant watched.

“And you said you only had a few,” the man said.

The doctor gave a quiet sigh. “It’s all we will ever have. They are very difficult to acquire, and we have little to trade. The sort of men who have black market pills aren’t the sort who care about what we have to offer.”

Mahlia ignored the hungry interest as she went through
the pills. She couldn’t read much of the text on the labels, because it was all more complicated than the Chinese she had learned as a child, but the instruction diagrams were made by the peacekeepers for illiterates in the Drowned Cities, so you could mostly tell how many you were supposed to take and what it was for.

She wanted to take them all, but there was no way she could carry everything. She fingered through the blister packs. Black market meds. Old meds that had been hoarded, and new ones the doctor had paid for with great risk and expense by going to the smugglers in Moss Landing.

She took a fistful. It would have to be enough. With that done, she opened another book and found the bottle she wanted. Cloudy liquid corked inside a little green glass bottle, gleaming.

Coywolv scent.

The bottle felt like a grenade in her hand. After Mahlia’s first destructive experiment with the scent and Alejandro’s goats, Doctor Mahfouz had instructed her explicitly that she was always to ask him before using any of his medicines in the future. He’d never made a direct accusation, but he’d tucked away the scent, and the message had been clear.

Now, Mahlia held up the bottle, showing it to the doctor. “I’m going to use this, right?”

You understand?
she wanted to say.
You going to be ready?

The doctor looked at her, shocked.

For a second, Mahlia was afraid he would stop her, but
really, he was stuck. If he told the lieutenant what was in the bottle, there was no telling what kind of punishment they’d get.

“Are you sure, Mahlia? That’s quite strong.”

“Lieutenant wants his soldier taken care of.”

“That’s not a simple medicine.”

“It’s what we got.”

Lieutenant Sayle was looking between her and the doctor, not understanding that there were two conversations happening, right in front of him.

“What is that?” he asked.

“Meds for your boy,” Mahlia said. Her eyes went to Doctor Mahfouz, daring him to rat her out.

“Let me see.”

Mahlia came over to the lieutenant, her heart pounding. Showed him the green glass bottle. He held it up to the light. “What’s in it?”

“Antibacterial. We make it, because other stuff’s hard to buy,” she said. But the lieutenant wasn’t really paying attention. His eyes had gone to the other packages of meds in her hands.

“And those?”

“You want the best, right? Peacekeeper meds. Top grade. Only a year past expiration.”

The lieutenant plucked them out of her grasp. He turned the packages over in his hands, studying the foreign script, then handed them back to her with a smile. “Very good.”

“Yeah,” Mahlia said. “The best.”

S
ERGEANT
O
CHO LAY STILL
, watching the burn of the fire and trying to keep his mind off the pain in his ribs. When the doctor girl had come back down, she’d given him something that cushioned the pain, and it made him a little hazy. It wasn’t as good as the opiates you could find in the Drowned Cities, but it helped a little.

The watches had changed, and his boys were fed. From his sickbed, he studied them, considering them for combat-readiness.

Some of them were still jumpy and on edge from their last run-in with the half-man, but more of them were settling down. Soa was just as crazy as he always was. Van was cracking jokes, which meant he was still afraid. Gutty was sleeping, easy as a baby, always. A few of them started
passing a bottle. If they’d been closer to the war lines, Ocho might have shut it down, but soldiers couldn’t stand ready all the time, and at least they were out of the heart of the Drowned Cities.

Ocho watched them pass the bottle, listening to their murmured banter and insults. The half-man had hurt them, all right, but Ocho thought their previous encounters had also made them stronger. If it came to another fight, they were ready. They knew what to expect this time.

He lay back, trying to make himself comfortable, knowing the pain in his ribs was too much to let him sleep. He wished there were more of those pink pills the doctor girl had given him, but he was damned if he was going to look like he was begging to get out of a little hurt.

The fire burned lower and the liquor bottle went around again. Or was it a new bottle? Van had rousted more than one off the people in the town. He was good at that—finding the secret stashes.

Soa was complaining again. “What’s that stink?” he asked. “Did Slim fart, or what?”

Ocho sniffed. Soa was right. There was a strange nauseous reek of blood and musk in the air. Ocho sniffed again, puzzled. It seemed to be coming off the bodies lying right beside him.

Was the smell something that the half-man had done? He’d never heard of a smell associated with half-men. Just that they were fast and strong and hard to kill. Whatever this was, it was nasty.

Ocho looked away from his dead troops, feeling ill at the losses. Jones and Bugball and Allende. Dead and stinking.

Of all the ways Ocho had expected to die, being torn apart by a dog-face had never been one of them. Bullet in the head, sure. Hands chopped off and him thrown into a canal to bleed out, maybe. Blown to pieces by some leftover land mine from when Tulane Company had occupied all their territory, for sure. He’d come to terms with all those options, long ago.