The Drowned Cities (26 page)

“Undetected?” the half-man pressed.

Mahlia bristled. “Well, if it ain’t, we’re both dead pretty fast, right?”

Tool smirked. “Escape is simpler than infiltration, girl. Just because you managed to flee that place doesn’t mean that you can reenter it. The direction of your passage is not the only variable. Where will you lair once you have passed within? How will you survive until you find your brother?”

“He’s not my brother.”

Tool growled at that. “Then leave him to the Fates.”

Mahlia knew what Tool was getting at, but she didn’t like his bringing it up again.

“I owe him,” she said.

“Debts are a heavy burden. Throw them off, and you walk free.”

It was tempting, for sure. Just run away. Pretend that the licebiter who had cracked the jokes and played the pranks and who had rooted up an entire nest of pigeon eggs when they were starving had never existed. That he’d never saved her from all the pain the soldier boys had wanted to slash into her.

“Can’t.” She grimaced. “Anyway, why are you helping me? Why don’t you just run off? No one’s keeping you here.”

“I have my own reasons.”

“It’s not because I saved you?” Mahlia taunted.

Tool’s bestial face swung back to regard her. “No.”

The tone of his voice frightened her, because she realized that she had no idea what drove the half-man. When they’d been foraging for food together, she could sometimes forget that he was something other than human. And then suddenly the creature would be looking at her with his huge yellow eye, and scarred face, and doglike muzzle and tiger teeth, and she felt as if she was staring into the face of something that occasionally saw her as food.

Mahlia steeled herself. “So why?”

“I have decided I have unfinished business there.”

“Since when?”

Tool regarded her for a long time. Mahlia forced herself not to look away. Finally Tool said, “When Colonel Stern held me captive, he used me to fight. I fought panthers, and Army of God captives. I fought his own soldiers, the ones who ran from battle, or who failed him in some way. Stern enjoyed that. He used to sit just outside the fighting cage and watch me kill his enemies. He cheered a great deal when I tore off a man’s arms. I think that I would like to meet him again, without a cage between us.”

“That’s impossible.”

Tool smiled at that. “And saving your friend isn’t?”

Before Mahlia could answer, he turned and swung off the overpass, dropping down to a tree. It swayed and bent with his weight, leaves rustling wildly. Mahlia listened, expecting a thud as the half-man hit the ground, but she
heard nothing. It was as if the jungle had swallowed him into its belly. Disappeared without a sound.

“Tool?”

“It will take two days for us to reach the river,” the half-man called up. “If you wish to have a chance of saving your friend, it’s past time we were on our way.”

W
HEN
M
OUSE HAD
been younger, his family had all talked with hushed tones of the Drowned Cities’ lawlessness and decay.

His father had sometimes gone there with a skiff full of chickens in bamboo cages, to sell to the city people and to the army soldiers, but his father’s face had always been grimly set when he poled off through the swamplands, and grimly set when he returned.

He’d always gotten the money they’d needed, along with the new hoe or the new barbed wire for fencing their pigs better, but he’d never been happy about it—the going out, or the coming back.

Mouse’s brother said it was because the soldiers shook
you down as you crossed their territories. If you looked at them wrong, they’d call you a traitor or a turncoat or a spy or Chinese collaborationist, and just shoot you outright.

They made up things to call you. Anything would do. They’d call you a left-hand dog. Put a bullet in your face and laugh at your body while it floated in a canal.

Mouse had felt bad that his father needed to kiss soldier boots just to get the few things that they couldn’t make themselves or get from a merchant on his sales circuit. He’d also been secretly glad he never had to go himself.

Mahlia had her own stories of the Drowned Cities, from when she’d grown up there. Her stories and Mouse’s father’s were as different as night and day.

Mahlia talked about the city’s great rectangular reflecting pool that stretched more than a mile, and the vast marble palace that overlooked it with its great high dome where the peacekeepers ran their administration. She talked of
shaobing
sellers who sold their sweet roasted breads to the peacekeepers. She told of company offices and clipper ships in the harbors and biodiesel rafts running the canals, jostling through floating markets that sprang up every day as farmers like his father poled their way into the city to sell. She told of green bok choy, bitter melon, red pomegranates, long pork bodies hung above the water, fresh and clean from slaughter.

But that had all been peacekeeper territory. The rules had run different in her part of the city, where the Chinese
intervention had pushed the warlords out. Her life sounded like heaven to Mouse, at least until China got sick of trying to make everyone get along, and took its peacekeepers home, and let the Drowned Cities get back to its business of killing.

Regardless, Mouse’s impressions of the Drowned Cities were all secondhand. His life had been made up of his family’s flooded fields and their little home that his father had built in the second story of an old redbrick ruin. His life had been defined by planting times, and getting a mule to till the mud when the rains stopped, and thinking that if they made enough money, they might get a big old water buffalo like the Sims had, and then life would be good and easy.

A farm boy, Mahlia had called him. Just a silly little licebiter farm boy who didn’t know squat about the city.

Mouse thought about that as he stood atop a crumbling ten-story building, with a machete and a couple bottles of acid dangling from his belt, surveying his territory for Army of God infiltrators.

Now, he was more Drowned Cities than the girl who had come out of them, but he had to admit that the place looked like nothing he’d imagined.

He’d expected the city to look more… dead.

Instead, he surveyed miles of ancient buildings and swamped streets turned into canals. Networks of algae-clogged emerald waterways were dotted with lily pads and
the stalks of white lotus flowers. Block after block of buildings and apartments were swallowed up to their second stories and sometimes higher, like the whole city had suddenly wandered off and decided to go wading in the ocean.

Creeping vines and kudzu covered tower faces. Trees sprouted from window ledges and rooftops, green parasols that leaned out over the waters while their roots clung tight to masonry and concrete. The shortest buildings were entirely submerged, and made for nasty snags, but many of the buildings still stood above the sea, waist deep in saltwater swamps that rose and fell with the tides, green leafy giants squatting in warm ocean waters.

UPF warboys poled through the canals on skiffs or ran along bamboo boardwalks that they’d constructed to float on the waters. Troops were everywhere, traveling over fixed bridges from block to block, moving through the city’s orleans, sometimes wading, sometimes swimming. Sometimes catching rides on biodiesel zodiacs if they could manage to snag one from the reclamation companies that paid them for access to the scavenge in their territory.

Above all, Mouse was aware of how alive the city was, and not just with gunfire and soldiers and fighting. That was all there, for sure. The slathered colors of territory and control, the troops, the echo of gunfire and artillery along the contested borders. Sector numbers were painted slapdash on buildings along with painted names for canals: Stern’s River. Easy Canal. Gold Street. K Canal. Green
Canal. Peacekeeper Alley. He’d expected all that. The bullets and the buildings.

But he hadn’t expected to see flocks of birds roosting in broken windows. Or eagles wheeling overhead, diving for fish in the canals. He hadn’t expected to see a deer swimming across open water, or to listen to coywolv yipping and yowling at night, calling to one another across the rooftops.

There was war and ruin, and heat and sweat and mosquitoes and brackish water, and there was also a strange life in the Drowned Cities, as the jungle busily took back its own territory, reaching deeper and deeper into what had once been a place solely for human beings.

And then there was the scavenge.

Mouse had always thought of the Drowned Cities as a war zone, but what it really was, was a scavenge mine.

On his first day in the place, he watched a city block being torn down to raw parts. Clouds of concrete and rock dust, piles of pipes and ducts, steel and copper and iron being dragged out. Tangled heaps of wiring separated by weight and metal and color.

Some of the buildings were old, made of pink and white marble, and the marble was being mined and placed on barges, while the rest of the stone and concrete was heaved into the canals, filling up the waters and making new streets, raising the level of the city above where the tides could reach.

He’d stared at all the people swarming through the rubble. Hundreds and hundreds. They made long lines of wheelbarrows, filled with stone, and they gathered in clots around massive iron I beams that they lifted with kudzu ropes and hauled to the barges.

Dog Squad, the one Mouse had been assigned to, had guided the captives of Banyan Town into the mix of laborers.

“Get in there!” Gutty yelled. “Make yourselves useful!”

The other soldiers jeered at the captives and switched at them with bamboo canes as they were led away into the scavenge operation. Mouse knew those people. Knew Lilah and Tua and Joe Sands and Auntie Selima, who had been so kind to him. Mr. Salvatore, who had lost daughter and grandson both, looked at Mouse like he was dirt as he was chivied past.

Sergeant Ocho slapped Mouse on the back of the head.

“Ow!”

“Better not look too long, half-bar. LT will think you don’t want to be a soldier boy. Maybe think you want to join the rest of the war maggots.”

Sure enough, the lieutenant was watching Mouse again, cold gray eyes evaluating. It was like he was always watching. More often than not, Mouse could feel Sayle’s eyes, dragging on him, even when he wasn’t doing anything wrong. Even when he wasn’t fantasizing about making a run for it.

Had he given himself away?

Maybe the lieutenant had seen him as they marched toward the Drowned Cities. Seen Mouse as he sat by the campfire, looking again and again to the shadows of the jungle for some way to run off. But always there’d been some other soldier with a gun nearby.

“Look away, Ghost,” Ocho said. “Those prisoners ain’t even people now. They’re just maggots. They ain’t your business.”

The soldier boys herded the prisoners down into the mess of rubble. Clouds of concrete dust roiled around them, and then they were swallowed in the work.

When Mouse finally dared to glance after them again, they were lost amongst the many ants, just a bunch of dusty dots mingled with the many. But Ocho still caught the backward look and he jammed Mouse in the ribs with the butt of his rifle.

“Last warning, Ghost. You got a ways to go before you get your full bars. Don’t give anyone a reason to think you got no semper fi.”

And to Mouse’s everlasting shame, he turned away from the scavenge workers and the prisoners and did as he was told.

Even now, it still sat badly with him. Standing at his watch post atop a building, he could see the concrete dust and hear the clatter of the recycling work half a mile away.

His cheek still ached where they’d seared Glenn Stern’s mark into his face, but the pain was fading. And even though everyone still called him half-bar, and still made
him do their chores, whether it was fetching water or scraping pots, or cooking a deer they’d gunned down, they had also armed him with a machete and acid, and he stood watches with the rest.

He might have been their dog to whip around, but it was better than what the people who worked the scavenge operation were getting. He was fed and armed, and standing watch was easy work.

It frightened him to think about it. That the captives had been swallowed in that sea of labor, and that he walked free, for no good reason at all.

None of it made any sense. He hadn’t done anything one way or the other to end up where he was. The tide of war had rolled in and swallowed him up, and Banyan Town with him, and they’d all tumbled in the surf. And for reasons he couldn’t understand, he’d broken the surface and managed to breathe, while everyone else was drowning alive.

His parents had been Deepwater Christians, and they’d always told him the world might move in mysterious ways but God had a plan for them.

As Mouse stared across the clatter and roar of the recycling operations with its seething hordes of dust-covered slave labor, Mouse thought that if there was a plan, then it was a cruel and vicious one.

In the distance, gunfire chattered.

He couldn’t tell who was fighting for the territory. Could have been United Patriot Front or Army of God, or Tulane
Company, or Taylor’s Wolves, or the Freedom Militia. Impossible to guess. Just more gunfire.