The Drowned Cities (33 page)

Tool just smiled. “Do not be so easily discouraged.” He took her hand and led her into the bowels of a swamped building. “We will swim.”

“Swim where? They’ll see us.”

Tool’s teeth showed. “Come.” He drew her down into the water. “Trust me.”

He dragged her deeper into the water. Mahlia started to struggle. Tool said, “Breathe deep,” and she did, just as he pulled her down below the waterline. Warm seawater swallowed her. Distant waves and gunfire. Tool drew her onto his back, and then he was swimming.

He swam out through a broken window and into a canal, and still he swam. Water dragged at Mahlia as he accelerated, swimming hard. Mahlia clung to him and tried not to be torn loose by the pressure of the water streaming around her.

Her lungs began to heave with a need for air, but still Tool swam. She needed to breathe. Had to surface. Tool didn’t stop. The half-man didn’t seem to care. Still he swam. Mahlia started to panic. She tried to let go, to try to surface, but Tool seized her.

I’m going to drown.

She fought to surface, but the half-man pinned her arms, and kept her down. He pulled her close. His great face loomed before her. Blew a stream of bubbles in her face.

For a second, Mahlia was so surprised that she almost drowned herself. And then she understood. Tool had more than enough air for both of them. She steeled herself, and let herself exhale. Nodded to him, knowing the half-man’s plan.

Tool’s maw gaped wide, showing teeth. He pressed his mouth over hers. Breathed. Mahlia inhaled. Oxygen and
carrion. Life and death, all at once. Mahlia’s lungs filled to bursting with the half-man’s breath.

Tool drew away, and motioned for her to hold on once again.

They swam.

Above them a firefight raged, but down deep in the water, they passed unnoticed. Canal after canal. Block after drowned block. They slipped through the city like fish, unremarked by the warfare that raged above.

At last, they had crossed the final battle lines, and Tool found shelter. He swam into a new building, and they surfaced to the sound of sloshing, salty waves and distant remote gunfire. Mahlia sucked clean air, desperately grateful to be breathing something that hadn’t come out of the lungs of the killer. Clean oxygen. She gulped at it, coughed, and gulped air again.

“Do you know where we are?” Tool asked.

Mahlia swam to a window. It was half above the water level, so she could see a bit of the world outside. She peered out, then jerked back with a hiss. A floating boardwalk was right outside, at eye level. People outside, straining to drag a barge, slave laborers, under the eye of UPF soldiers. The barge was full of scrap. Rolls and rolls of wire and cable. Even through the glass, she could hear the groan of the scavenge laborers.

She waited until they were past and scanned the canal again, getting her bearings. “Yeah. I know where to go. We still got a ways.”

Tool didn’t complain. He just took her on his back once again, and they swam on. Hours later, they reached the place Mahlia had been seeking.

She surfaced first, climbing out of the water and slipping inside the building. She paused, listening. Praying that it was empty. No sounds echoed other than the flutter of pigeons. No voices. No smell of human habitation. Nothing. No one. Just another abandoned building.

Mahlia returned to the canal and motioned for Tool. The half-man surfaced and followed her into the tower of Mahlia’s memories.

When Mahlia was young, her father and his peacekeepers had dominated the building. They’d lived in profusion. Here, Mahlia had spoken Chinese, like a civilized person. When she was out on the street, she spoke Drowned Cities, but here, she spoke Mandarin.

She had moved and blended between two worlds, and she’d done it easily. She was like her mother that way. Her mother had had the knack for crossing back and forth between cultures and worlds. She could make foreign buyers look at her and take her seriously. Trust that the antiques she sold were genuine. Get them to give her money. And she’d known how to float the Drowned Cities as well, ferreting out the things that foreigners wanted to buy. She could scavenge with the best, and then she could take her prizes to the foreign buyers and they’d seen her not as just
another Drowned Cities con artist, but as a respected handler of antiquities.

“What is this place?” Tool asked.

“I grew up here,” Mahlia said. “Lots of peacekeepers used to rent apartments here. The owners had ancestors from China, a long time ago, so they knew how to rent to peacekeepers, make them happy. Make food they liked, stuff like that.”

The door to the apartment had been knocked down, furniture had been chopped up and burned. Soldiers had camped in it, and then some other animals had nested after. Pack rats maybe, from the piles of torn fluff and glittering objects in the corner.

Mahlia stood in the middle of the apartment, remembering. It seemed small in comparison to her memories. This place had been so large, and now the halls seemed short and the ceilings seemed lower. She pushed open another door and found her bed. The mattress was missing. She found it pushed up against a window in her mother’s room, burned and shot through, as if someone had used it to shield themselves from weapons fire.

Home, now torn apart completely. Bullet holes in the walls, shell casings on the floor. The stink of a latrine long dead. A few pieces of art were still on the walls, but someone had painted a green crucifix over half of them.

Tool stalked the rooms like a tiger, probably building one of those tactical maps that he liked to have in his mind.
Noting every window and every door, every shared wall, every drop to the canals below.

Mahlia peered out a broken window. There was some kind of nest just outside, maybe hawk or pigeon, but it looked like it hadn’t been used for a while.

Tool had counseled her to watch not just for people but for animals as well. Running animals, flights of birds, all were indicators of soldiers approaching, and all of them would be savvy for the same dangers from her. If Mahlia scared a group of roosting pigeons up here, she was marking herself as surely as if she stood up and shouted.

Down in the emerald green of the canal, someone was poling a skiff. Some kind of noodle seller. She was still surprised to see that anyone lived in the Drowned Cities other than soldiers, but Tool said that armies always acquired hangers-on—merchants, children, nailshed girls, farmers, smugglers, black marketeers, drug dealers.

Armies had needs, and they found ways to make sure those needs were supplied. They’d shoot every castoff they found, but plenty of other civvies were allowed to survive. It was Glenn Stern’s patriotic duty to scrape the Army of God and Taylor’s Wolves and the Freedom Militia from the face of the earth, but he needed the support of the people within his territory to carry it off.

And people did support him. After all, they had nowhere to go, either. Just like the soldiers. They were all pinned in by border armies and impassable jungle wilderness and the sea. A bunch of crabs stuffed in a pot, all ripping away at each other.

Mahlia felt a wave of bitterness at the sight of civvies down in the canals, selling their vegetables, meat, hot noodles. They could talk to those soldier boys. Probably, they’d ratted to the soldier boys, too. Probably told the returning armies exactly where to find every single peacekeeper family in the city, currying favor in order to keep the bullets pointed away from themselves.

Mahlia stared down at them, and imagined shooting them. Paying them all back for ratting her out and running her off, for helping to kill everything she’d grown up with and depended on.

“Vengeance,” Tool rumbled behind her.

Mahlia startled. “You read minds now?”

Tool shook his head. “Your body is full of rage. Every sinew. It is easy to read. You speak volumes with a clenched fist.”

Mahlia laughed shortly. “All those people down there, they didn’t have to run.”

“And you would like to make them run the way you had to.”

Mahlia shrugged. “Sure. Teach them a lesson.”

“You believe that seeing your enemies running and afraid would accomplish something?”

“What? You Doctor Mahfouz now?” Mahlia didn’t like the tone of judgment coming from Tool. “Don’t give me that ‘eye for an eye makes us all blind’ talk.”

Tool’s teeth showed briefly, a cynical smile. “Not I. Vengeance is sweet.” He was squatting in the shadows, a
massive statue of muscle and death. “But this place has gone beyond that. The people here don’t even remember why they revenge upon one another.”

“Doctor Mahfouz used to say living in the Drowned Cities made people crazy. Like it came in with the tide. When the water came up, so did the killing.”

Tool laughed at that.

“Nothing so mystical. Human beings hunger for killing, that is all. It only takes a few politicians to stoke division, or a few demagogues encouraging hatred to set your kind upon one another. And then before you know it, you have a whole nation biting on its own tail, going round and round until there is nothing left but the snapping of teeth. Destroying a place like the Drowned Cities is easy when you have human beings to work with. Your kind loves to follow. My kind at least has an excuse, but yours?” Tool smiled again. “I have never seen a creature more willing to rip out its neighbor’s throat.”

Mahlia was about to retort, but a 999 boomed, interrupting her. Its artillery shell buried itself somewhere to the east of them. Another followed. And then another. Tool’s ears pricked to the sounds. He began nodding slowly.

“What do you hear?” Mahlia asked.

Tool glanced over. “The tides of war. They are flowing strongly against Glenn Stern. The Army of God suddenly finds itself well armed.”

“And?”

“The UPF will not last long. If your friend Mouse is still
alive, he will be in greater and greater danger. The 999 means that the Army of God has negotiated a way to bring in weapons past the sea blockades. Presumably they have made promises to share the UPF’s corpse with their suppliers, people on the outside who are rich enough and hungry enough for raw materials.” Tool shrugged. “It could be any of dozens of countries or companies. Perhaps Cycan Mining? Perhaps Lawson & Carlson. Or Patel Global or Xinhua Industrial. It hardly matters. The Army of God has sold the last scraps of their city so that they can dance on the skulls of their enemies.”

“You don’t know that’s what’s happening.”

Tool smiled. “I am ignorant of many human things, but war I know. War requires a steady diet of bullets and rifles and explosives shoveled into its open maw. None of that comes cheaply. The only thing the warlords have to offer is the scrap of this city. I very much doubt they even remember what started their fighting with one another. Now they just want the territory so that they can sell a little more scrap and buy another handful of bullets.”

Mahlia considered. “So they buy things from the outside?”

“They don’t have the intelligence or the wherewithal to make their own equipment. All of them are funded by other groups who hope to profit.”

“Those other people,” she said. “Lawson & Carlson, or whoever. Would they buy stuff from other people? Not just soldiers?”

“What are you suggesting?”

Buyers. Mahlia tried to control her excitement. There were buyers, still. Just like when she’d been young and her mother had found the rich people who wanted antiques from the past. There were buyers.

She motioned Tool to follow, then guided him down a dusty stairwell.

“You can’t tell anyone,” she said, her words a whisper. Echoing her mother’s own words the first time Mahlia had seen her coming out of her secret place.

Mahlia reached the level above the canals. Scanned the hall. It was abandoned. No one was moving about. She ran her fingers along a wall, pushing on it, feeling for the latch buttons. Pushed hard. They were stuck.

Tool reached past her. He leaned and she heard the click. A portion of wall opened. Tool cocked his head. “A secret door?”

“My mom had it built, my old man’s idea. He bribed people. You’ll see.”

Mahlia waved for Tool to follow. Past the secret door, the warehouse was large. Bigger than two apartments put together. It was dim. The only light filtered in from the outside through high-up slits with bars. Barely noticeable. Barely worthwhile to investigate. With no way into this corner of the building, it had lain undiscovered, even as all the living spaces and apartments were ransacked.

Mahlia squinted in the gloom. Treasures surrounded her. They still existed. It wasn’t just her child’s dreaming mind that remembered this place.

It was truly here.

Oil paintings in gold-leaf frames. Marble busts of old men and women. Ancient muskets. A tattered banner with a circle of white stars on blue, and bars of red and white. A head, almost as tall as her, marble and craggy, knocked from some forgotten monument and moved by barge to this secret hiding place, until a buyer could be found. Old books, moth-eaten. Bits of paper curled and torn. Manuscripts. Bits and pieces of the Accelerated Age.

Mahlia’s mother had known history, and she had had an instinct for what foreign buyers might desire. And it was all here. Still undisturbed. The valuables that she’d been sure the man who had fathered her daughter would never abandon.