The Drowned Cities (30 page)

“We need you. Need you to get us past the checkpoints. Tell us where they are.”

“Who are you?”

“Just a war maggot, looking to get out.”

“There’s no way out. No one gets onto the scrap ships. They won’t take your kind, or any other. Not unless you’ve got a king’s ransom stuffed down your shorts. No one goes anywhere. The armies up north, all the battle lines. There’s nowhere to go. And not for your kind, for sure. Now where’s my boys?”

“You want them to live, you go downriver, past town. Tie up just out of sight. We’ll meet you.” Mahlia turned away.

“Wait!”

“What?” Mahlia glared at him, summoning all her threat. “What? You got something to say, old man?” She tossed the shotgun to him. “Take it. We don’t want it. You either come downriver and get your boys back, or you don’t—and you don’t.”

“Maybe I gun you down right here.”

“Fates,” Mahlia said. “I’m dead already, old man. Don’t you get it? You kill me, it don’t matter. I’m just another castoff. People won’t even blink about it, will they? They’d mourn a nailshed girl more than they’d mourn me.”

She held up her arms, stretching them wide. “I got no armor. Got nothing. You want to blow me away, you do it. No one cares.” She looked at him. “But if you care about your boys, then you come downriver, and you meet us, and you get them back, all in one piece.

“Otherwise, you got my head, and you get theirs, too.”

She turned and headed back into the jungle, not looking back. Her spine prickled and sweat gushed down her ribs. Waiting for the bullet.

A gamble. Everything was a damn gamble. Betting against luck and the Fates, again and again, and again.

She kept walking, waiting for the bullet.

“Y
OU WANT ME
to carry
that
downriver?”

The boatman stared at Tool as he emerged from the jungle. They had rendezvoused below Moss Landing, but as Tool materialized from the shadows of the jungle, the boatman was so startled that he almost let the current carry him away.

Tool bared his teeth. “I am not here to war with you. We will pass through your life and be gone and you need never remember that we existed.”

The man just stared. He looked at Mahlia. “What are you?”

“Just some castoff,” she answered as Tool swung the two captives aboard the skiff and climbed aboard himself, making the sailboat tilt alarmingly.

“It’s impossible,” the man said. “I can’t hide a dog-face on my boat.”

Tool growled and bared his tiger teeth. “You may call me Tool, or half-man or augment, but if you think to call me dog-face again, I will tear open your chest, and eat your heart, and sail your skiff myself.”

The man recoiled. “It’s impossible. There’s no way they’ll let us pass with… with…” Mahlia could tell he wanted to say dog-face again, but didn’t dare. “You,” the man finished, finally.

Tool dismissed him. “That is not your concern. Tell us where our enemies lie. I will conceal myself at the necessary moments.”

The boatman still looked doubtful. “And you let us go, when you’re done?”

Mahlia and Tool both nodded. Mahlia said, “We’re just trying to help a friend.”

“Helping a friend?” The man looked at Mahlia, askance. “And this is how you repay our kindness? What if we hadn’t helped you with Clarissa? Where would you be, then?”

Mahlia flushed and looked away. “It ain’t personal,” she said.

“It never is with your kind. You pick up guns and you hurt and you kill and none of it is personal.” The man looked at her. “Children with guns. We aren’t even people to you.”

“Hey! I ain’t part of this war,” Mahlia said. “I didn’t ask to be in it. I didn’t ask soldier boys to come hunting after me! I ain’t part of this.”

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.