The Drowned Cities (5 page)

Mahlia hesitated, but there was no point sticking around. “Sorry,” she said, not sure if she was saying it to the doctor, or Amaya, or herself, or who. “Sorry,” she said again, and turned away.

Mahfouz was always telling her to stand down, to let the insults roll off, and here she was, picking fights she didn’t have to. She could practically hear his voice in her head as she plodded back toward the doctor’s squat and her friend Mouse: “A harmless war orphan is something they may not love, but still, they can empathize. But if you seem violent, they’ll see you the same way they see coywolv.”

Which meant they’d leave her alone as long as she looked soft. But if she stood up, they’d put her down right quick.

Sun Tzu said that you had to pick your battles and fight only when you knew what victory was supposed to look like. Victory came to people who knew when to attack and when to avoid, and now Mahlia suspected that she’d just done something stupid. She’d let the enemy goad her into exposing herself.

Her father would have laughed at that. A hasty temper was one of the greatest faults a general could have, and people who were provoked by insults were easy to defeat. Mahlia had done what Drowned Cities people always did: She’d fought without thinking.

Her father would have called her an animal for that.

D
OCTOR
M
AHFOUZ’S SQUAT
was tucked into a five-story war ruin. Missiles and bullets had left holes in its concrete walls, and the upper floors were missing entirely, showing where bombs had dropped down through the roof and blown the top to smithereens. But even with all the wreckage, the building still had good iron bones, and the doctor had chosen to nestle his squat in the second story, amongst those solid iron ribs.

A home.

When the doctor first took Mahlia and Mouse into his care, the squat had barely been sufficient to hold a single person. Not because the squat was tiny—which it was—but because its shadowy interior had been so filled with moldering books that the doctor was forced to sleep in the
open air whenever it wasn’t raining, all because his books were more important to keep safe than he was.

But with the intrusion of the castoff girl from the heart of the Drowned Cities and the orphan boy from the torched village of Brighton, the doctor at last admitted that his home was inadequate.

With Mouse’s help, and later Mahlia’s as the stump of her right arm healed, they laid rough planking across the I beams and expanded the doctor’s floor space. Using scavenged rusty tin and rough-cut plastic, they made a larger roof to keep off downpours. They’d used plastic for the walls as well, at first. It wasn’t like they needed walls for warmth, not even during the dark season. Swamp panthers sometimes leaped up to the second story to prowl, so they’d also cut bamboo for walls and chinked them with mud and straw until they’d made a solid defended space both for people and for even more of the doctor’s moldy books.

On the ground floor, the doctor kept his kitchen and a small emergency surgery. The kitchen was stocked with dented pans that hung from bits of bent iron rebar. A large pot that Mahlia used for boiling surgical items sat at the ready atop a cylindrical metal cookstove, one of the many that the peacekeepers had given away in the villages around the Drowned Cities. The humanitarian message on the side of the stove read,
BEST WISHES FOR PEACE, FROM THE PEOPLE OF ISLAND SHANGHAI
, in English and Chinese.

A little away from their squat, Doctor Mahfouz had
built a livestock house out of carefully masoned rubble, making it so that it stood almost as straight and square as the buildings must have looked during the Accelerated Age, but most important, strong enough to keep out coywolv and panthers. Gabby, their goat, was standing tethered beside the house, placidly chewing kudzu. Mahlia went over to her. Gabby bleated.

“You’ve already been milked,” Mahlia said. “Stop pushing on me.”

Mahlia checked the rest of the house. The buckets for washing had already been filled from the pool formed in the basement of the neighboring collapsed building. From that evidence, Mouse was nearby.

Mahlia climbed up the squat’s log ladder and levered herself through the trapdoor. The smell of sawdust and rotten paper enveloped her, the smells that she most associated with the doctor. Books lay everywhere, stacked and piled, crowding rough-cut shelves, every wall covered. The man couldn’t bear to leave a library alone. Mahlia picked her way around the piles.

“Mouse?”

Nothing.

When Mouse and Mahlia had first arrived, they’d rolled their eyes at the man’s obsession with books. There was no point saving books, unless you were going to use them to start a fire. Books didn’t save you from a bullet. But Mahfouz had stood tall for Mahlia and Mouse, so if the doctor wanted to keep books stacked to the ceiling until they
tumbled over on you, or if he asked you to hike all the way to a place he called Alexandria, then Mahlia and Mouse were going to do it. The doctor had put himself on the line for them. It was the least they could do.

“We’re going to Alexandria,” the doctor had said.

“Why?” Mahlia had asked.

The doctor looked up from where he’d been studying an old Accelerated Age map, from before the Drowned Cities had drowned. “Because the Army of God burns books, and we are going to save them.”

All the way to Alexandria, ahead of the next big push by the Army of God. It was their last chance to save the knowledge of the world, Mahfouz said.

But of course they were too late and by the time they got there, Alexandria was smoking rubble. Corpses littered the town: people who had thrown themselves in the way of an army. People who’d tried to shield books with their bodies, instead of the other way around.

Mahlia remembered looking at all those dead bodies and feeling sad for the crazy adults who thought books were more important than their lives. When the dogs of war came howling down on you, you didn’t stand tall; you ran. That was Sun Tzu. If your enemy was strong, you avoided him. Which seemed pretty damn obvious to Mahlia and Mouse. But these people had stood tall anyway.

So they’d been shot and macheted to pieces. They’d been lit on fire and burned by acid.

And their books had burned anyway.

Doctor Mahfouz had fallen to his knees before the torched library and tears ran down his cheeks, and Mahlia had suddenly feared for him, and for herself and Mouse.

The doctor didn’t have any sense at all, she’d realized. He was just like the people who’d kept the library. He would die for a few pieces of paper. And she’d been afraid, because if the one man who cared for her and Mouse was that kind of crazy, then she and Mouse didn’t stand a chance.

Mahlia shook off the memory and called out again. “Mouse? Where are you?”

“Up here!”

Mahlia lifted a flap of old plastic with a fat Patel Global Transit logo on it and eased out onto one of the I beams that supported the house. Three stories higher up, legs dangling in the open air, Mouse perched on an iron spar.

Of course.

Mahlia took a breath. She kicked off her sandals and balanced her way across a hot rusty I beam. Foot in front of foot, looking down at their kitchen and the makeshift surgery, balancing across the fall until she reached a wall of crumbling concrete and its exposed rebar, where she could scale to Mouse’s height with less difficulty.

She started climbing, using her stump for balance, her left hand for gripping, her bare brown toes finding holds as she climbed.

One story, two stories…

Mouse could just shimmy up the vertical I beams, a dexterous monkey climbing with his thin legs and ropy arms and perfect hands. Mahlia had to take the slow way.

Three stories…

The world opened around her.

Five stories up, the jungle spread in all directions, broken only where the war-shattered ruins of the Drowned Cities poked higher than the trees. Old concrete highway overpasses arched above the jungle like the coils of giant sea serpents, their backs fuzzy and covered, dripping long tangled vines of kudzu.

To the west, Banyan Town’s shattered buildings and cleared fields lay tidy in the sunshine. Occasional walls poked up from the fields like shark fins. Rectangular green pools pocked the fields in regular lines, marking where ancient neighborhoods had once stood, the outlines of basements, now filled with rainwater and stocked with fish. They glittered like mirrors in the hot sun, dotted with lily pads, the graves of suburbia, laid open and waterlogged.

To the north, trackless jungle stretched. If you hiked far enough, past the warlords and the roaming packs of coywolv and hungry panthers, you’d eventually hit the border. There, an army of half-men stood guard, keeping Drowned Cities war maggots and soldier boys and warlords from carrying the fighting any farther north. Keeping them from infecting places like Manhattan Orleans and Seascape Boston with their sickness.

To the south and east, jungle gave way to salt swamp,
and finally, Drowned Cities proper. Far off in the hazy distance, the sea gleamed.

Mahlia stood tall atop the gutted ruin, squinting in the bright light. Iron burned under her feet and the sun beat on her dark brown skin. It was a good time to be lying low, out of the burn, but here Mouse perched, pale and freckled, staring across the jungles. Skinny little licebiter. Red-haired and skin-roasted, with gray-blue eyes as twitchy as any war maggot she’d ever seen. Not saying anything. Just staring out at the jungle. Maybe looking toward where his family used to have a farm, and where maybe he’d been happy before the soldier boys rolled through and took it all away.

Mouse said his full name was Malati Saint Olmos, like his mother had been trying to make good with the Rust Saint and the Deepwater Christians at the same time. Splitting the difference for luck. But Mahlia had only ever called him Mouse.

Mouse glanced over as she dropped down beside him. “Damn, maggot, you got blood all over you,” he said.

“Tani died.”

“Yeah?” Mouse looked interested.

“Bled right out,” Mahlia said. “Might as well have stuck a knife in her. Baby ripped her inside out.”

“Remind me not to get knocked up,” Mouse said.

Mahlia snorted. “Too true, maggot. Too true.”

Mouse studied her. “So why you look so down?” he asked. “You didn’t even like that girl. She was always in your face about being castoff.”

Mahlia grimaced. “Amaya and old man Salvatore put the blame on me. Said I was bad luck. Said I put the Fates Eye on her, like on Alejandro’s goats.”

“Alejandro’s goats?” Mouse laughed. “That wasn’t no Fates Eye. That was goes-around-comes-around, coywolv-scent-and-Alejandro-deserved-it is what that was.”

Goes-around-comes-around.
Mahlia almost smiled at that.

The scent had come from a coywolv dissection that she’d helped Doctor Mahfouz perform; he was interested in hybrids and wanted to know more about this creature that no biology book of the Accelerated Age had ever discussed.

Mahfouz claimed the coywolv had evolved to fill niches that had opened up in a damaged and warming world—all the size and cooperation of a wolf, all the intelligence and adaptability of a coyote. Coywolv had come loping down out of Canada’s black winter darkness and then just kept spreading.

Now they were everywhere. Like fleas, but with teeth.

When Mahlia and Mahfouz had cut out the female’s scent sack, he’d warned her about it, that they should bottle the scent and keep it careful, and wash thoroughly afterward. Which had been all Mahlia needed in order to know that she had something powerful in her hands.

With Mouse, she’d hatched a plan. It hadn’t taken much, and suddenly, Alejandro—who’d been all up on her about being a castoff and not worth anything except as a nailshed girl—had his entire herd slaughtered.

“Anyway,” Mouse said, “how were we supposed to know the coywolv would figure out how to open the gate?”

Mahlia laughed. “That was purely unnatural.”

And it was. Coywolv were scary that way. Smarter than you wanted to believe. When Mahlia had seen the ropes of strewn guts and the last few patches of goat fur in the morning, she’d been as amazed as anyone. She’d been aiming to give the dumb farmer a scare, and she’d gotten a thousand times that.

Goes-around-comes-around to the
nth
.

“Eh.” Mouse made a face. “He deserved it. All talking about how you weren’t good for nothing but a nailshed girl. All that Chinese castoff stuff. He barely looks at you now. You put the fear of the Fates in him good.”

“Yeah. I guess.” Mahlia picked at the rust of the I beam. Peeled off a flake as long as her pinky. “But now with Tani, it means all his whispering about me carries weight. It was the first thing Salvatore said right after Tani died.”

Mouse snorted. “They’d blame a castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and they’d still blame you.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“Maybe?” Mouse looked at her incredulously. “For sure. They’re just pissed you actually stood up for yourself. Mahfouz can talk peace and reconciliation all he wants, but if you don’t stand tall, no one gives you respect.”

Mahlia knew he was right. Alejandro wouldn’t have let up on her if she hadn’t scared him off. For a little while, she’d been able to walk tall and not feel afraid, thanks to
that stunt with the coywolv scent. But at the same time, now she had a cloud of distrust hanging over her, and Doctor Mahfouz didn’t let her into his medicines without supervision. Goes-around-comes-around whipping back at her.