The Drowned Cities

  “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 o
n 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.

  Tool picked up a gray uniform of some long-forgotten soldier, and held it up to the light. Set it down carefully. Dust rose. He lifted an ancient musket, peered down its sights.

  “Well?” Mahlia asked.

  Tool looked over at her, inquiringly.

  “Do you think we could sell it?” Mahlia asked. “Do you think this could buy us out of here? Find a buyer and smuggle out? If they smuggle in guns, maybe they’d smuggle out us. For enough money, they’d do it, right?”

  Tool set the musket down, thoughtful. “Where did this come from?”

  “My mom. She sold this kind of stuff. She did scavenge. But only the old stuff. And then she did a lot more of it when the peacekeepers rolled in and made the war stop for a while.”

  Tool shook his head, smiling slightly. “It must have been profitable for her.”

  Mahlia shook her head. “I don’t know. That was all bank stuff.”

  “A bank… in China?”

  Again, Mahlia shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “Your father. The peacekeeper. Did he know of this trade?”

  “It’s how they met,” Mahlia said. “He collected things, too.”

  Tool snorted. “I’m sure he did.”

  Mahlia didn’t like the tone of the half-man’s voice, like he saw things she didn’t.

  “You think someone would buy this stuff?” she asked again.

  Tool looked thoughtful. “Any number of people would buy it. It seems your mother was very good at what she did.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I see things here that were thought lost long ago. These are the sorts of objects that should live in the greatest museums of the world.” He gingerly lifted up a piece of parchment and studied it. “Some of them once did.”

  “So we can sell them?” she pressed.

  “Oh yes. You can sell these pieces. The problem is that for every buyer, you will find a thousand others who would cut your throat for the chance to sell it themselves. We are surrounded by the treasure of the ages, and just outside those walls, tens of thousands of soldiers all kill one another over pieces of scrap that aren’t worth a tenth of what’s in this room.”

  “You think maybe there’s a way to cut a deal?” she asked. “Some way to bargain with the soldiers?”

  “A delicate negotiation, when they would just as soon put a bullet between your eyes. Neither of us is the sort the warlords like to speak with. A castoff and a half-man.” Tool smiled.

  “Mouse,” Mahlia said suddenly. “If we can get Mouse back. He could be a go-between.”

  “You build cloud castles from dream smoke.”

  “But we could do it, right? If the Fates look right on us, then maybe we could do it, right?”

  Tool looked at her. Scars and thought. “Do you believe the Fates smile on you?”

  Mahlia swallowed. “They got to sometime, right? Got to.”

  36

  GHOST WAS THROWING UP, head hung over a canal, when Ocho and the LT found him. They dragged him upright and splashed water on his face, and then waited again while he threw up some more, then led him down the boardwalk.

  “I thought we had R-and-R?” he said.

  Ocho almost looked guilty. “Yeah. Change of plan. We need you to go on patrol.”

  “Why me?”

  “ ’Cause I said so!” Ocho’s expression hardened. “Don’t think because you got a fancy pin from the Colonel means I don’t still own your maggot ass. I say jump, you jump, got it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Alil’s waiting for you.”

  When they got to Alil, he tossed Ghost his gun. Ghost hefted it, still feeling nauseated, trying to focus on his boys.

  “We searching civvies today,” Alil said. “Checking all the farmers and the girls, making sure they don’t got anything like a radio.” He paused. “And check our soldiers, too. If they got a radio, they ain’t ours, even if they got a brand.”

  “Army of God keeps poking us,” Ocho said. He wasn’t looking right at Ghost, more looking away. Looking toward AOG territory, maybe. “We think there might be some infiltrators, so we want you to go over some of our inside sectors, check them real close. See what crops up.”

  Sayle was more direct.

  “I want you boys to go out and make sure none of those cross-kissers makes it through on my watch. You catch one, you send him back without his hands and feet, right? Teach them a lesson.”

  “Yes, sir,” they all chorused, but Ghost still felt nauseated from the night before and the new brand on his cheek ached like crazy. No way he was going to complain about it, but still.

  Ocho gave them their sector. It was odd, because it was way inside their territory, but when Alil asked, Ocho just looked at him and said, “Maybe we got some intelligence, right?”

  “Seems like a small area.”

  “Yeah. Keep close on it. When you finish with it, loop on it again. We got other people patrolling the rest.”

  A few minutes later, Alil was leading them out over a rubble tra
il between two buildings, through another, and then out to the floating boardwalks.

  “You doing okay, soldier?” He clapped Ghost on the shoulder. “You look like hell.”

  Ghost just looked at him blearily.

  Alil grinned. “Don’t worry. This is crazy-easy duty. We’re two cordons back from where we’re seeing contact. Keep your eyes peeled, though. Maybe the LT really does got a lead on something. We don’t want any more of these FOs slipping through. And don’t get overconfident. Civvies sometimes get feisty when you search them. Got stuff they want to hide.”

  Ghost nodded and tried to pay attention. After their ambush with the FOs and the 999, he couldn’t afford to lose track of what was going on around him. He wouldn’t be overconfident ever again. Hell no. That’s what got you dead like… Pook?… Was that his name?

  Ghost was disturbed that he’d already forgotten the name of the boy who had trained him. Tubby? No… Gutty. Right. ’Cause of his gut. ’Cause he’d been fat, once. Back when the peacekeepers were around.

  “Mouse?”

  Ghost turned, surprised. The voice was familiar.

  Something blasted past him, piling into his friends. They went into the water with a huge splash. Ghost stood frozen, staring at what stood before him. Mahlia. Real as day. Not a hallucination. Not some hangover memory. Mahlia. For real.

  “Mahlia?”

  She grabbed him and dragged him into a building’s shelter, pulling him close. She was talking to him, saying things, but Ghost couldn’t stop staring at her face. She had the triple hash, right on her cheek, burned in good.

  “When did you get recruited?” he asked, and then all hell broke loose.

  Mahlia hadn’t expected it to be so easy.

  She’d been looking out the windows of her family’s old apartment, just killing time, waiting for dark so they could start moving again. She knew she’d eventually have to expose herself and leave her lair, but not yet. She’d wait, and then she’d find Mouse’s platoon. She’d look for that Lieutenant Sayle and his soldiers. The boys all had call signs, and she could make her way to them. Lieutenant Sayle, Hi-Lo Platoon, Dog Squad. She’d be a runner. A messenger. And if that didn’t seem workable, she’d come up with something else. They were inside UPF lines now. In the dark, with a hat over her eyes, and most of the castoffs long dead, she thought she could pass.