The Drowned Cities (37 page)

Ocho could hear worry in the boy’s voice.

“They just did, maggot.”

He couldn’t catch sight of which soldier had asked the question, but he knew the feeling. The Army of God was going after Colonel Glenn Stern, and the heart of the city. How was UPF supposed to survive if they lost their leader? What would happen to them if the Colonel died from the shelling? What would be left of the Drowned Cities if AOG was willing to destroy its last monuments?

If Ocho thought about it rationally, of course the Army of God would try to bomb the Colonel, but still, it was unnerving. No one was safe. Not even the Colonel. Suddenly, they were all just scared little rabbits, looking for cover. But the Colonel wasn’t supposed to be like that; he was supposed to be above all that.

“Can they kill the Colonel?” Stork asked.

“Anyone can die,” the LT said. “High or low, doesn’t matter. That’s not your problem, soldier.”

Stork shut up. Ocho watched the lieutenant. Sayle didn’t look worried. He looked completely calm. As if the 999
wasn’t a threat at all. The blond man stood tall as another round came down and hit the north wing of the building. He didn’t take cover. Didn’t even flinch as the explosion rocked outward. Just watched the hit with his cold gray eyes.

“Don’t worry, boys,” the LT said, smiling. “The Colonel has a plan.” He smiled again and looked down into the barge. “Army of God won’t know what hit them.”

Ocho followed Sayle’s gaze to the unconscious half-man. What could
it
do? But he didn’t have a chance to question, as their barge bumped up against the steps of the palace.

TamTam and Stork and Ocho rolled out and ran to grab one of the abandoned sledges that the workers had been using to move marble. The LT pointed his pistol at the barge pullers, and put them to work rolling the half-man onto the sledge, urging them to hurry up as everyone watched the sky for more shells. Ocho sweated and swore with everyone else. It felt like they were working in molasses. Waiting for the next shell to drop right on their heads at any moment.

Finally they had the half-man secured and the workers were hauling the monster up the steps. They passed inside, dragging the half-man. Colonel Stern’s elite squads watched, interested.

Inside, it was almost cool: out of the sun, surrounded by marble halls. Ocho had never been in the palace. He tried not to stare at the gleaming marble or the vaulted ceilings
with their paintings, the intricate carvings marching around their edges.

It was a strange, echoing place. He didn’t like being in it at all, not with the 999 trying to bracket them. He kept waiting for another shell to come crashing through one of the beautiful domed ceilings, but the artillery seemed to have stopped for the moment.

Was the Army of God just trying to show they could put rounds wherever they wanted, or were they trying to actually hurt them?

Either way, Ocho didn’t savor being blown to pieces. He didn’t think he was going anywhere but straight to hell when he died, so he wasn’t eager for the afterlife the way the Army of God boys were.

They followed the sledge, and finally got to a spot where Stern’s elite all wore black uniforms. Eagle Guard. The best of the UPF. Every one of them was older and more experienced than anyone except maybe the LT. Survivors. They’d grown taller than all the warboys except Stork and the LT, and they looked down on the rest of the platoon.

Ocho was surprised at how small he felt standing in front of them. Of course, he’d seen them in the past from a distance. They traveled with the Colonel when he toured the war lines, but here they were, and they were huge in front of him. Muscled and well-fed, with their black uniforms and their hard eyes.

At the sight of the half-man, though, their demeanors
changed. One of them whistled in surprise. Another, the oldest of the group, a man with small crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes, ran his hand over the inert monster.

“Haven’t seen one of these since we fought up north,” he said. “Nice work.”

Ocho and the rest of the boys straightened at the compliment. The older man motioned to his Eagles.

“We’ll take it from here.”

They gathered up the ropes to haul the drugged half-man away. Lieutenant Sayle waved to Ocho. “Get the girl. We’re done here for now.”

But the Eagle held up a hand. “The girl came with the half-man?” he asked. “They slipped in together?”

Sayle nodded unwillingly.

“We’ll take her, too. The Colonel will want her.”

Ocho could tell that the lieutenant wanted to argue, but he bit it down, and then Ocho caught sight of something more worrying. Ghost was staring at the girl. Ocho could practically see the gears turning in the soldier boy’s head.

He went over and grabbed the boy. “Outside, soldier,” he said. “We’re all going outside.”

Ghost resisted. Ocho gave him a shove. One of the Eagles grabbed the castoff girl and hefted her over his shoulder. She flopped limply, drugged and stupid with the opium that Ocho had given her. He couldn’t even tell if she was really there anymore.

Ocho wondered what would happen to her. Maybe she’d
be better off in the Colonel’s hands. At least she was out of the LT’s control. That had to be something, he told himself. As she was carried away, limp like a sack of potatoes, Ocho tried hard to believe it, and then he tried to figure out why he cared.

A
NEEDLE SLID
into Tool’s shoulder, flooding him with endorphins and amphetamines. He came alive. Awake and alive. Ready for war.

Men all around. Many of them. Deep voices, echoing dully against hard marble walls and tile floors.
Men.
Adults. Not just child soldiers from the swamps. Steel and iron and gunpowder. Tobacco smoke. The smells and sounds of a war machine’s beating heart.

Tool remembered the darts hitting, thinking for a moment that they were bullets and that it would be difficult to survive so much lead, and then he’d been surprised at how little each bullet hurt… Just before the tranquilizers washed over him like a tidal wave.

Captured then. But still alive. He listened to their words:

“K Canal… Angel Company… Lost fifteen at Constitution.”

The sounds of an army besieged. It had been a long time since Tool stood in the heart of a command center, but all of it was so familiar that it might as well have been yesterday. Their words and movements told him everything he needed to know about their present circumstance.

“
Artillery support… sorties into North Potomac 6.”

Tension in the adviser’s voices. Worried mutters as they relayed reports from various fronts. Fear. It was rank in the room. They were all going to die, and they knew it. The United Patriot Front found itself hard-pressed. Its Colonel was outmatched, and his soldier boys were inadequate.

Tool waited until he sensed one of military men coming close, smelled his sweat and fear, and then he opened his eyes and lunged.

He slammed up against iron shackles.

The man scuttled back, swearing. “It’s awake!”

Metal bit into Tool’s arms and ankles. He was still groggy from whatever tranquilizer they’d used on him. He hadn’t even realized he was bound.

Tool roared and lunged again, testing the chains, tearing at them. Military men flattened themselves against marbled columns and frescoed walls, eyes wide with fear. Tool strained to reach them and they shrank away, but the bonds held.

Tool lifted his hands to study the inch-thick iron that bound his wrists. More shackles clamped his ankles. All the chains were sunk deep into the floor.

The floor around him was covered with intricate colored tiles as ancient as the building that housed them, but here at his feet, there was new gray concrete. And his iron shackles were embedded in it.

Tool could sit or squat, but he could not rise to stand fully erect. He tested the chains again.

“You cannot escape.”

Tool recognized the speaker instantly. The man’s face looked down on the canals all across the UPF’s territory. Tool had been forced to salute that face each time he entered the ring fights. How long ago was that? It seemed as if it had been years, and yet it was only weeks since he had fought against men and coywolv and panthers at the behest of the Colonel. Only weeks since he had fought free. And now, he found himself the Colonel’s prisoner once again.

Tool growled. “You think these small chains will hold me, Colonel?” He set his feet and leaned against his bonds. His muscles bulged.

The concrete began to crack around his feet. Everyone stepped back, horrified. A few of the soldiers pulled out pistols and pointed them, but Glenn Stern just smiled and waved them off.

Tool bared his teeth and pulled harder, every tendon straining, muscles tearing. Concrete popped and cracked
and turned to dust around the chains. Tool’s skin began to shred, but the manacles neither broke nor slipped.

“You’ll rip your hands off if you keep doing that,” Stern said.

Tool let himself relax and studied his bonds again. The chains weren’t only embedded in concrete; they seemed to be connected to something larger below, something stronger than stone.

“They’re looped around the steel beams of the basement supports,” the Colonel explained. “It took quite a lot of work to dig up all that stone and marble, but it seems that I anticipated you adequately.”

“You planned to capture me?”

“If you recall, I already did capture you. I’d hoped to speak with you weeks and weeks ago, but then you escaped.”

“How inconvenient for you.”

The Colonel shrugged. “I suppose. But I have you now, and apparently I judged your capacity correctly.”

As they spoke, the rest of the Colonel’s staff began daring to move. The bustle of the command center slowly resumed, hushed conversations as they leaned over desks and discussed their maps and troops. But Tool noticed how they all looked to the Colonel with increased respect. He hadn’t flinched in the face of Tool’s threat, while everyone around him ducked for safety.

Colonel Glenn Stern might not have been the finest tactician, but he was a leader. It was no surprise that people fol
lowed. He had a faith in himself that appeared unshakeable. People would follow him, even when he was wrong or foolish.

Tool had met similar leaders in his time. Men and women who commanded through the force of their personality and whose words drove their followers forward in frenzied waves. In Tool’s experience, they created armies with a great deal of passion, and very little competence.

Tool settled back, accepting that he could not escape by brute force. He surveyed the command bunker, parsing it for clues that would help him survive this new challenge, seeking the cracks in Glenn Stern’s army.

The room was ancient. A chamber filled with marble columns and fading frescoes on the vaulted ceilings. Statues lined the walls, men and women cast in marble and bronze, but they had been pushed aside to accommodate the war room and its functionaries.

“Pardon the accommodations,” the Colonel said. “We’ve found it expedient to decamp from the upper chambers.” An explosion echoed above. The entire building seemed to shake, and the bare electric bulbs strung across the ceiling flickered. “The crypt is stable,” the Colonel explained. “Now that they’ve dropped so much rubble down on top, it will be difficult for them to reach us, but it’s not an ideal location.”

Tool assessed the group’s assets. A few computer screens flickered and glowed, most likely charged by the same solar systems that kept the lightbulbs glowing, and that
hadn’t yet been bombed out of existence. The computers would likely be gathering information from the Colonel’s battlefields and providing connection to the outside world where he traded his scavenge for the bullets and explosives that kept him in the war.

When Tool had still warred on behalf of his patron, tablets and computers had connected them to ancient satellites hurtling overhead, to gliders and drones that described the tactical realm, and allowed them to rain fire down from above. Here, there were only a few electronic devices. The rest of the place was dominated by dozens of chalkboards hanging on the walls or set up on stands, scratched with numbers. Other parts of the room were papered with maps of the Drowned Cities, its coastline and jungles, hand-inked by soldier surveyors, and tacked with small nails, each painted red or green or blue, to describe the larger battlefield and the UPF’s many enemies.

A quick glance at the boards reinforced what Tool already suspected about the Colonel’s position and chances for survival. The number of inexperienced child soldiers that the UPF was using only served to confirm it. Some of the children even stood in the command center itself, gawky and thin in comparison to their larger and better-fed leaders.

Tool’s eyes fell on a lump of a person, lying chained to one of the columns in the room.

Mahlia.

The Colonel followed his gaze. “You seem to have fared better than your compatriot.”

“What do you want, Colonel?”

“You’re quite a puzzle. It took a long time for us to discover what you were, and how you survived so long. Questions we had to ask.” The Colonel nodded at Tool’s neck, where a code was stamped. “We had to go all the way back to your country of origin, and then trace forward. Quite a lot of effort.”