Don’t look sneaky, he told himself. Pretend like you’re a good soldier boy.
He walked quietly, listening to the jungle. No one was following. He was sure of it. He moved on through the jungle to where swamp water turned the ground squashy. Just a little farther. He reached the water.
Now, he thought. Run.
It was his chance. He needed to do it while they were distracted setting up camp. But something stilled him. Instead, Mouse crouched down and started filling bottles, listening to the jungle around him. Something didn’t sound right. He listened to water gurgling into the jugs, and to the jungle, trying to figure it out. It was too quiet.
With a chill, he realized that he wasn’t alone. Someone was watching him. He filled another canteen and casually let his eyes wander the greenery, as if he were simply bored and watching butterflies.
Nothing. But he was almost sure that he was being watched.
He finished filling the bottles. Straightened. Still nothing. But he couldn’t get rid of the fear that he was being watched. Mouse knew the jungle. He’d lived in it and hunted it, and foraged it, and there was someone out there.
He hefted the water bottles. Last chance to run. It won’t get any better. But he didn’t move.
Why was he so scared?
The boys back there weren’t supernatural. They were just thugs with guns. That was all. They couldn’t watch him all the time. They weren’t watching him now.
So why did he feel so afraid?
With a sick feeling, Mouse turned and started back toward the voices of the soldiers’ camp. Knowing that he was chickenshit. Knowing that he should run for it, but too afraid to risk it.
He came into the clearing and dropped the water bottles in a pile. The camp was just as he’d left it. Soldiers joking. One of them, a blond kid with an acid-burned face who he thought was called Slick, was kicking the villagers every time they looked like they were lifting their heads or looking around. Other soldiers were squatting down, eating smoked jerky. Sergeant Ocho sat against a tree, looking sleepy, holding his side where he’d been ripped up by the half-man. Nothing out of place—
Mouse froze. Lieutenant Sayle stood on the far side of the clearing, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. And he was watching him. Cold gray eyes, watching. They didn’t show a thought or a feeling, his gaunt face was expressionless, but the man’s eyes lingered.
Mouse made a hesitant salute as his skin prickled, aping what he’d seen the other warboys do. The lieutenant’s lips quirked into something like a smile, mocking, but he gave a lazy return to Mouse’s gesture of respect.
“Ghost!” someone shouted. “Hey, half-bar!” Mouse finally realized that he was being called and turned away from the lieutenant.
Gutty, the slack kid with the flappy skin on his arms and legs and belly.
“Go get us some firewood!” he ordered. “On the double, boy! We don’t keep no lazy maggots! You’re elite! Let’s see the sweat! UPF ain’t afraid to sweat! Get on it, warboy!”
Mouse tried another salute. He was as exhausted as everyone else, but he stumbled for the forest again.
Maybe this time, he’d get free.
As he headed into the jungle, he saw a pair of soldier boys emerge from the trees, liquid shadows, from the direction of the swamps where he’d just been, gathering water.
For the barest instant, they glanced at Mouse, and his gut tightened into a knot of fear as they crossed the camp, headed for Lieutenant Sayle.
They were all around, Mouse realized.
It was all a test. Every bit of it. He wasn’t crazy. There really were eyes on him.
“Make sure it’s dry!” Gutty shouted. “I don’t want no damn green wood smoking and going out!”
The jungle travel continued, warboys joking and talking themselves up, kicking the prisoners when they didn’t move fast enough. They put Mouse on guard duty, standing over people who had been kind to him.
Sometimes one of the soldiers would come over to him and tell him that one of the prisoners had disobeyed.
Mouse was supposed to kick them in the ribs, or else pour acid on their backs, to make their skin smoke. He called them maggots and worse.
He kicked them to stand up when they lay on the ground.
Made them put their faces in the dirt, when they were standing tall.
Mouse kept expecting someone to give him a gun and order him to kill one of them. He’d heard stories about how the warlords recruited. He knew what was coming, and he dreaded it.
He kicked and beat and burned the townspeople, waiting for the next horror, and the people of Banyan Town looked at him with all the hatred that they used to reserve for soldier boys.
The warboys laughed and encouraged him.
Mouse wanted to cry, to make it all stop, to just refuse, but the one time he flinched, they made him do more. They made him hit harder. He hesitated to thrash Auntie Selima with a bamboo cane the way they wanted, and so they made him do it again and again, until her back was bloody ribbons. And then they made him salt the wounds.
Mouse wanted to vomit, but he learned the lesson.
Once, he apologized to Mr. Donato after he’d kicked the man in the ribs, for being too slow getting up, but he couldn’t tell if the man was even listening.
“I’m sorry. I don’t want to. I’m sorry.”
But he was too much of a coward to stop doing what Lieutenant Sayle and the others ordered him to do.
One night, in the darkness by a campfire, Mouse finally just gave up and asked when it would happen. When would they make him kill these people who had taken him in?
Sergeant Ocho had plopped down beside him and asked, “How you doing, soldier?”
Mouse stared at the prisoners, but didn’t answer.
Keep silent. Ride through. Don’t let them know what you’re thinking.
He thought of Mahlia, who tried so hard to never let her feelings show on her face. To never let anyone know what was going on inside her head. No weakness. The only way to survive amongst these coywolv was to hide all your fear and weakness. Never show anything.
But Ocho saw right through. He followed Mouse’s gaze to the prisoners.
“It’s hard to get broke in, no doubt. This is the hardest part.”
Mouse kept his mouth shut, not daring to say anything. It was another test. If he said what he was thinking, they’d come up with some new way to hurt the townspeople and him. If he showed where he was vulnerable, they’d put a knife right there and twist and twist, and then after he’d cried and hurt enough and given away another weakness, they might just decide to blow his head off.
“After we get rid of these maggots, it’ll be better,” Ocho said. Then he gave a sort of laugh and said, “Well, it’ll be clearer, anyway. When you’re shooting at Freedom Militia or Army of God, you don’t got to feel sorry for them, ’cause you know they’ll do you the same.”
Mouse looked at the sergeant. “How come you don’t make me kill one of them? You make me do everything else.”
Ocho looked at him like he was crazy. “We ain’t animals! Not like the Army of God. Godboys, they shoot you for no reason at all. They shoot you if you ain’t wearing a patriotic shirt, or if they think you don’t sing loud enough for their general, or they think you got the wrong religion. We ain’t like that. These maggots are our prisoners, now. They try to run, or they hurt one of us, then they get themselves a bullet.”
He shrugged. “But we don’t just go around wasting people.” He nodded out at the prisoners, all lying flat on the ground, shadow lumps that might as well have been corpses for all that they moved. They’d learned that movement got them kicked, so they lay still like stones.
Ocho continued, “Dead maggots ain’t any good to us. They might not look like much, but all those maggots, they’re walking resupply. Every one of ’em. We start knocking them off, we hurt ourselves, too. We gotta keep them alive, get them earning. Maggots like that work scavenge for us, we sell the scrap to the blood buyers,
we get bullets to fight the war. Without these maggots here, no way we can take this place back from all the traitors and collaborators and maggots who tore this country up…” He trailed off.
“You don’t get all this, cause you ain’t with us, yet. You don’t think you’re a soldier. Don’t got the feel of it.”
He patted his rifle, then nodded out at the troops. “You got to know that these boys here, they’ll back you up. Maybe they give you all kinds of hell right now, but when the bullets start flying and you got one in the leg, they’ll come get you. They’ll get you back to camp and doctor your ass, even if all they got is a bottle of Black Ling whiskey and a shoelace to do it. As long as you’re still yelling and flopping, they’ll put it all on the line to make sure AOG don’t get their knives on you. We’re brothers. You’re our brother.”
“Doesn’t feel like it.”
Ocho laughed. “You only got half-bars, and you want them to treat you like a soldier?” He shook his head. “Nah. You got to earn that, little war maggot.
“We make the Drowned Cities, you see the real war—that’s when you show your boys that you’re worth calling a brother. You do that, and they’ll never let you down. The Colonel says it don’t matter where we come from before. Don’t matter what we did before. Here, we’re UPF. We back you up right.”
He clapped Mouse on the shoulder. “Don’t think you ain’t doing good, half-bar. Soon as we get a little blood on your prick, you’ll be golden.”
He flicked the brand that still throbbed on Mouse’s cheek. “We’ll give you some verticals to go with those horizontals. Burn you right. Let you stand tall.”
I don’t want this, Mouse thought. I don’t want to be golden with the boys. I don’t want blood on my prick. I don’t want them to burn me again.
It felt like some part of him was dying inside, but there were soldier boys all around, and wherever he turned, they were looking at him, making sure he followed the path they’d laid out.
Either he followed it, or he was dead.
Doctor Mahfouz used to talk about how everyone had choices, and when he said things like that, he made it seem so possible. And maybe for him, it had been. Mouse didn’t think the doctor would have whipped Auntie Selima or poured acid down Mr. Salvatore’s chest. He would have stood tall.
And the soldier boys would have shot his head right off and gone on to someone else without a second thought.
I don’t want to be a warboy.
But there was no escape. There was no other path that didn’t lead to death.
I’m a coward, he thought. I should stand up and fight them or run away, or something. But he was still afraid, and the soldier boys were always watching.
Three days later, they hit the Drowned Cities.
27
MAHLIA AND TOOL lived in the jungle, feeding off the dead coywolv for a week, while her torn-up arm healed and while the half-man gained back his strength.
Gradually their diet expanded. They caught fish and frogs. Mahlia ate ant eggs and grasshoppers and snared crawdads, and every day she improved.
She knew it was time to go when Tool came back with a wild pig slung over his shoulder, moving at a stride that would have made her jog to keep up. They were ready, as healthy as either of them could hope to be. That night, they roasted slabs of the pig over a fire of old cardboard boxes and timber chunks that she’d rooted out of one of the ruins.
She knew she needed to be on her way—Mouse was out there, trapped with those soldiers—but still she let days pass. It was like she was frozen in place. Here, she was safe. As long as she just lingered with the half-man, she was as safe as she had ever been since the peacekeepers left. Once she started pursuing Mouse, it would all be lost.
Memories of her escape from the Drowned Cities were flooding back. The mobs and the soldiers, the torches and dripping machetes. The cleansing of everything the peacekeepers had wrought during their years of trying to civilize the city and make the different warlords stop fighting, once and for all.
She remembered hiding in the flooded lower floors of towers and apartment blocks, after her mother had been caught. Living in shadows. Praying that no one would notice her as she moved by darkness from one swamped building to the next. Praying that she wouldn’t run across someone in those rooms as she swam and waded and crawled to the city outskirts. Night after night, she lay in darkness, watching troops set up perimeters, waiting to slip past. She’d had two hands then.
And now she was going back.
On the tenth day of her recuperation, Mahlia clambered up onto one of the great vine-covered overpasses and looked toward the Drowned Cities.
From a distance, if you didn’t listen for the warfare, the place could have been abandoned. But as you got closer, you could make out details. Trees sprouting from windows, like hair from an old man’s ears. Robes of vines draping off slumped shoulders. Birds flying in and out of upper stories.
Mahlia tried to imagine what the place must have been like without all of that. She’d seen pictures of the old Drowned Cities, the version from long before, in one of the museums the peacekeepers had been trying to protect.
Her mother had taken her to the museum, wanting to examine what other old things might be of value to foreign collectors, and Mahlia had seen the photographs. But it had all been surreal. Open roads with cars on them. No boats at all. A river that cut through the place, instead of swamping it. A different place. She’d looked at the pictures and wondered where everyone had driven their cars away to. Or maybe they were just at the bottoms of all the canals. Sleeping.
The whole museum felt a little like a cemetery. A place where you came to look at the dead. And really, the artifacts weren’t anywhere near as good as the ones that her mother kept in her warehouse.
“People value history, Mahlia,” her mother said. “Here, look at this one.” She lifted a piece of parchment, holding it gingerly. “You see these names? This meant war. When they signed this, it changed the course of the world.” She laid the parchment down again, exquisitely careful. “People will spend fortunes to touch the paper that these men touched.”
She smiled then. “No one here knows the stories behind these things, so they don’t know the value. To them, this all looks like junk,” she said, and she waved at the warehouse around them, filled to bursting with her mother’s selections.
Old flags. Paintings. The marble heads from statues of old men that had had their heads knocked off and found their way into her shop at the mouth of the river, where collectors came to buy history and scavenge.
Her mother had a tiny shop on the storefront, where she studied potential buyers. But it was the warehouse that was truly astonishing. She’d installed it in the belly of a huge building near the city center, several apartments that she’d bought and then carefully bricked up, hiding them away from prying eyes. It was there that she brought her best buyers.
When Mahlia was small, she was sometimes allowed to watch as men and women surveyed the paintings leaning against walls, the statuary of presidents, the murals chipped from government buildings and transported whole to the warehouse.
Her mother said that was how she met Mahlia’s father.
He’d had a passion for history, just like her. He’d bought little silver snuffboxes from revolutionary times, and quill pens that had signed famous documents. Handwritten letters. All sorts of things. He’d kept coming back, again and again, until her mother finally understood that it wasn’t just antiquities that her father loved. And that was where Mahlia had come from.
“You think you have a path?” Tool asked, breaking her thoughts.
Mahlia startled. For all his bulk, the half-man was silent. It was spooky to have him suddenly appear. “Yeah,” she said. “There’s a way.”
“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 y
ou 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.”
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