The Drowned Cities sb-2

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  But even as she said it, she felt stupid. Before her, two boys lay on their backs in the bottom of the skiff, bound in kudzu vines that Tool had twisted into ropes. Her captives. Her victims.

  With Tool, she could just as easily cut off their hands and dump them in the water and laugh while they tried to swim. She had power over them, and she’d used it to make sure they did exactly what she wanted.

  She was in, all right. All in, and going deeper.

  “Just get us downstream and we’ll leave you alone,” she mumbled. “We ain’t here to hurt no one.”

  The man snorted at that and seemed to be about to say more, but he caught sight of Tool’s expression and fell silent. Mahlia felt bad again. Scared boys, all tied up. A man who hadn’t done anything wrong to her, and she’d taken advantage of it.

  Am I just like the soldier boys?

  It wasn’t like she’d killed anyone. If these licebiters had been picked up by soldier boys, they would have been dead already, or else recruited like Mouse. No way they’d just catch and release.

  The wind filled the skiff’s sails and they eased away from shore. The water reflected the light of the rising sun, turning the river into a glittering dragon that twined all the way to the Drowned Cities, and the sea.

  “I can take you as far as UPF territory,” the man said bitterly. “After that, I have no influence. I don’t do trade with the river mouth. I can’t take you all the way to the sea.”

  Mahlia nodded. “That’s enough. Just get us through UPF lines.”

  “With the… half-man?”

  “Do not concern yourself with me,” Tool said. “The soldiers will not notice me.”

  “What if I give you up to them?”

  Tool looked at him. “I will kill you and yours.”

  Was this what she wanted? Did she want to play the same game as the soldier boys?

  “Untie them, Tool,” she said. “Let the boys go. They won’t do anything. They’ve got to be free for the checkpoints, anyway.”

  Tool shrugged. He unbound their captives. The boys sat up, glaring and rubbing their wrists and ankles. “Knew we shouldn’t have helped a castoff,” one of them said.

  Mahlia glared at him. “Would you have let us sail, if you knew I was with him?” She jerked her thumb toward Tool. “Would you?”

  The boy just glared at her.

  “Yeah,” she said. “That’s what I thought.”

  Ahead of them, the river opened, showing the Drowned Cities poking up above the jungle. The buildings rose up, like bodies staggering up out of the grave. Towers and warehouses and glass and rubble. Piles of concrete and brick where whole buildings had collapsed. Swamp waters all around, mosquitoes buzzing, a miasma.

  Mahlia saw it with a strange double vision. When she’d lived in the city it had been a place of play. Her school, her life with her mother and father, the collectors who came to buy antiques from her mother. Now it was burns and ruins and rubble and chattering gunfire, a map of safe territories, mining operations, and contested blocks.

  When the peacekeepers had been there, they’d been all about setting up wind turbines for energy, wave generators, had even managed to create a few projects. Mahlia’s mother had taken her out to a wind turbine project right in the river mouth, huge white turbines going up like giant pale flowers. Her father had had something to do with it, but whether it had been guarding the turbines themselves, or the Chinese construction teams, or someone else, she had been too young to understand it. But now, as she looked at the open waters, Mahlia saw them again, but the turbines were all torn down.

  She pointed to them. “My dad worked on those.”

  “Castoff,” one of the boys muttered.

  Mahlia wanted to kick him, but she held off. The man said, “They took them down.”

  “The peacekeepers?”

  “Warlords. As soon as China pulled its peacekeepers out, the warlords started shooting at them, trying to bring down the electric grid. It was a power-sharing arrangement that couldn’t last. UPF in charge of the towers, and Freedom Militia in charge of the conversion station, so they’d have shared responsibility.” He shrugged. “They shot each other up. UPF bombed the station. The Militia mined the turbines. And then the Army of God pushed them both out and sold the steel and composites, and the turbines all went out to Lawson & Carlson for new weapons.”

  He nodded at Tool. “Bet that’s something his kind would know all about.”

  Tool didn’t respond to the dig. “War breaks things,” was all he said.

  His ears were pricking to the winds, and his eye seemed to gleam with interest as they cut across the waters. Mahlia watched him.

  Sometimes, his strange bestial face seemed completely human, when he laughed at some bit of half-man humor or when he’d tried to show her the folly of swaggering with a gun. But now, as they approached the Drowned Cities, she was aware again of how many layers affected the creature. Part human, part dog, part tiger, part hyena… pure predator.

  As they approached the Drowned Cities, Tool seemed more and more alive. His huge frame seemed to pulse with the vitality of war. The hunger to hunt.

  The boatman said, “As soon as we make this bend, we’ll be in the city itself. Army of God territory. They’ll want their bribes.”

  “You’ve done this before?” Tool asked.

  The man nodded. “I have agreements to let me through. I bring supplies in for the captain who covers the river.”

  Tool nodded. “How long before they can see us?”

  “I’ll be sailing into the canals now.”

  Without another word, Tool flipped over the side of the boat and into the water. The boys looked at her, suddenly speculative, started to reach for their rifles. Tool surfaced beside the boat.

  “Do not think I am gone. I am here, and I am listening, and I can drown you all. Best not to be hasty in your decisions.”

  He disappeared underwater again. The boat rocked oddly and the boatman grimaced. “The damn dog-face must be right under the boat.”

  Like some kind of massive barnacle attached to the skiff.

  The boatman hauled on his sails and his boys scrambled to pull out oars as they closed on the shore. The boatman looked around the boat, stared at Mahlia. Threw her a blue-and-gold cap with an old Patel Global logo on it.

  “Pull that down. You look too much like a castoff.”

  “Other people got eyes like mine. Your boy, even.”

  “Other people aren’t you. Everything about you screams castoff. You’re the right age, and you look too mixed.” He glanced to where canals of the Drowned Cities were opening before them. “You have no idea how much danger you put us all in.”

  They sailed into the canals. From under her cap, Mahlia eyed the city. It was different than when she’d been here last. It all had a dreamlike quality, one city on top of another city. Memory and reality, superimposed.

  “The water’s higher,” she realized.

  The boatman glanced over. “When were you here last?”

  “When the peacekeepers left.”

  “Yes. The water here is higher, then. The dike and levee system the peacekeepers tried to install was destroyed as soon as they left. The warlords wanted to flood each another, so they blew them up, and all the drainage projects and hurricane protection barriers with them. So the ocean came flooding back in. All that work to push the water out, and they just let it right back in.”

  The place was worse than Mahlia had expected. Old neighborhoods were collapsed on themselves. Waterways made a maze through twisting broken buildings and rubble. Kudzu-tangled jungle and swamped buildings intertwined with brackish pools and clouds of biting flies and mosquitoes.

  There were bars full of nailshed girls and drunk soldiers, rifles slung over their shoulders, shouting at one another, smashing liquor bottles. Squatters and addicts watched the river traffic with drool stringing from their lips and red eyes. Thick pythons undulated in the canals, and ravens and magpies circled overhead.
Mahlia spied a den of coywolv peering from a window, three stories up.

  City and jungle bled into one.

  River traffic moved sluggishly. The red-starred flag of the Army of God hung bedraggled from building windows, and the face of the AOG’s general, a man named Sachs, was slathered everywhere. Pictures of him holding up the green cross to his true believers, or wielding a shining sword and an assault rifle while the AOG flag billowed behind him.

  His face stared out at the populace, challenging. Even the crudest paintings of the warlord drew Mahlia’s eye. General Sachs had close-cropped hair and a scar that ran the length of his jaw. But it was his eyes, black and intense, that held her. The man seemed to inhabit his paintings, seemed alive within those eyes, and seemed to promise things.

  Other people seemed to think so, too. As the populace of the Drowned Cities walked past the warlord’s various images, they made motions of supplication to him. Small gifts of food and flowers and snuffed-out candles were scattered beneath each painting, as if he were the Scavenge God or one of the Fates, but bigger.

  His influence seemed to touch every neighborhood. Water sellers and nailshed girls and three-year-old children wore his political colors, and his soldiers were everywhere. In the streets and waterways. Clogging boardwalks as they smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and watched the river traffic. Army of God. Owners of the city. At least for now.

  Much like the shotgun Mahlia had inspected, the walls of the city were decorated with the images of previous owners, emphasizing how quickly the tides of war shifted in the Drowned Cities.

  AOG colors were slathered over other warlord faces, blotting them out. Other army flags were blacked out or painted over, but some images still peeked out. Mahlia could even make out a few peacekeeper slogans from when the cease-fire had been in effect. IMMUNIZE FOR LIFE. BEAT YOUR SWORDS INTO PLOWSHARES.

  Mahlia saw soldiers on a boardwalk, waving them over. They were just boys, some of them as young as Mouse, all of them armed with assault rifles and shotguns. Bony bodies and knotted muscles and scars that ripped across their bare backs and ribs and chests. All sorts of races and mixes, black and brown and pale freckled pink, and all of them as hard-eyed as their warlord. All of them full of the same hungry swagger as the UPF soldiers who had taken Mouse.

  “Who’re you, girl?” one of them asked.

  Mahlia didn’t answer. The boatman answered for her.

  “She’s with me.”

  He pulled out papers and handed them over to the soldiers. They looked at her, looked at the papers. Mahlia wondered if they could even read.

  The boatman said, “I have an arrangement with Captain Eamons.” He lifted a sack, offering it to them. “He will be expecting this.”

  The boys looked at the sack, looked at the papers. Looked at Mahlia.

  Their eyes were bloodshot. Red rippers or crystal slide. All the troops were hopped up on the stuff to give them a combat edge, but it made them crazy and wild, and suddenly she had a bad feeling about the plan.

  These soldier boys, they just wanted to kill another castoff. It didn’t matter if she had the protection of this trading man or not. Didn’t matter if there was some agreement.

  A castoff had no chance going into the Drowned Cities. She didn’t belong here. The warlords had demonstrated that when she and her mother fled the first time. People who had collaborated with China’s peacekeeping mission were public enemy number one. The warlords and their soldier boys had long memories for traitors.

  One of the boys was looking her over. He only had one eye, which kind of reminded her of Tool, but this boy’s eye was brown and bloodshot and angry and crazy in a way that Tool, even when he seemed ready to kill, never was.

  “You castoff?”

  She tried to speak, but fear overtook her. Shook her head.

  “Sure you are.” He looked at the boatman. “What you want a castoff for, old man?”

  The boatman hesitated. “She’s helpful.”

  “Yeah? How ’bout I buy her?”

  Mahlia’s guts tightened. What a fool she’d been.

  “She’s not for sale.”

  The boy laughed. “You think you decide what’s for sale, old man?”

  The boatman shook his head. Even though he looked calm, Mahlia could see sweat dripping from his temples, running down his neck. “Your captain and I have an agreement.”

  “I don’t see him around.”

  Mahlia thought she felt a thump through the base of the boat. Tool, either drowning, or readying himself to emerge and slaughter.

  Stay down, she prayed. Stay down.

  All the soldier boys were looking at her, hungry and predatory. Their little aluminum amulets of protection glinted on their bare chests. Some of them had a green cross painted on them; others had their general’s face painted there, the same one that slathered the walls, with his black skin like her mother’s and his hollow cheeks and his wild, intense eyes.

  The amulets were different, though. General Sachs was still smiling, but whoever had painted him had made him look almost crazy. Mahlia couldn’t tell if it was because he wanted to look that crazy and dangerous, or because the painter just couldn’t paint worth a damn, but when she looked up at the boys, she knew she wasn’t going to ask. It didn’t matter if she thought the general they worshipped looked silly or not.

  No one with a gun looked silly, in the end.

  The boy looked at the boatman, then looked at Mahlia, weighing his cruelty. His troops all watched, interested. Ready for anything. Happy for everyone to end up dead.

  Don’t shame him, Mahlia thought. Give him a way out. Give him some way to not lose face with his boys.

  The boatman seemed to be reading her mind. “Your captain is expecting us.” He opened a sack and withdrew a dirty stack of Red Chinese paper money, with pictures of some woman on the front and a tall angular tower on the back. BEIJING BANKING CORPORATION written in Chinese and English.

  Red hundreds.

  “Once he pays us,” the boatman said, “there will be more on the way out.”

  The soldier boys didn’t change their expressions. But the lead boy took the cash and waved them deeper into the Drowned Cities.

  33

  GLENN STERN’S FACE stared at Ghost from the side of a building.

  The man was three stories tall, and ten stories up, and he was eye to eye with Ghost, because Ghost was sitting on top of a barracks building by a bonfire with all his warboys, and Ghost was the man of the hour.

  They’d gone into an old building and found a whole bunch of old paintings and furniture, broken them up, and started a bonfire on top of the building, choosing one where they could see out across the Drowned Cities and enjoy the view.

  It had been a hell of a time hauling the stuff up, but now it was all burning, and the fire was crackling and hissing, and all kinds of strange colored paints were bubbling on the canvas and going up in smoke.

  Sergeant Ocho hadn’t wanted to go up so high, but seeing as they were behind the war lines, and seeing as Stork and Van and TamTam and everyone else were begging, he said it was okay.

  Stork said the sergeant didn’t like getting pinned up in the towers; he’d been caught with an old squad and ended up doing an emergency jump into a canal from four stories up. Broke his leg doing it, but in the end, he’d come out okay.

  Still didn’t like to get pinned, though.

  So now they were up high, looking out over the city, with Glenn Stern staring at them, and they owned the place.

  Far in the distance, other fires burned, beacons. Some of them UPF; others, farther away, the campfires of the enemy. Sometimes, some asshole would launch a mortar and they’d watch it arc across, but there seemed to be some kind of agreement between the troops of the different factions that you didn’t mess with each other when you did a rooftop camp at night. Skirmishing was a day job. When you cycled back for R & R, they left you alone, and you did the same. Mostly.

  Tracer fire launched across a dark
ened street along with the chatter of a .50-caliber. Ghost was surprised to realize that he didn’t need Mahlia to tell him what the guns were. He knew them all.

  Van grabbed another big painting and dropped it on the fire. It hissed as the fumes from its paints went up.

  The flames cooked through the picture. Some lady, sort of lying on a wheat field, looking across the hills to a house, all the colors kind of washed-out and grayed. The colors were boring, not like the kinds of paint they decorated their guns with. Those colors really stood out.

  Ghost was looking at his own gun. It had color after color on it. Bright. A green cross on a red background, a sign that the Army of God had been the last owner.

  Ocho squatted beside Ghost, nodded at the gun. “You should paint it,” he said. “Make it your own.”

  “With what?”

  “Romey’s got some colors; he does the pictures of the Colonel sometimes.”

  “Like that one?” Ghost jerked his head at the huge image across the canal.

  Ocho grinned. “Not quite. But he can get some supply. You can put your mark on it. Put a Fates Eye on it, or something. Get yourself some protection. Make it yours, right? All that AOG crap’s got to go, though. No cross-kisser stuff. Fates Eye, or else UPF blue and white, you want to get all patriotic.”

  “How’d they even get him up there?” Ghost wondered.

  Slim looked over at the image. “Patriotic fury, right? They scaled that sucker.”

  “Ropes,” Ocho said. “They dropped ropes over the side, and lowered themselves off the top. Worked for weeks on it. For Colonel Stern’s birthday. Bunch of Alpha Company put the civvies on it.”

  “I still say they climbed.”

  “You weren’t there,” Ocho said. “It was before you even got your half-bars.”

  “Why you want to run down a good legend? Where’s your patriotic fire?”

  “I’m all for patriotic fire,” Ocho said. “Especially if it’s a bonfire.” He tossed a cracked chair leg into the blaze, sending up sparks.

  Ghost stared across the gap between the buildings. The people who had painted Glenn Stern had done a good job. The man looked like some kind of god. Hard and angular and his green eyes that did the same thing that Ocho’s did. Sort of green with gold flecks.