The Drowned Cities

  “Tani’s dead,” Mahlia said as she reached the bottom of the ladder. “If that’s what you’re wondering.”

  Everyone except Auntie Selima looked at her as if it were her fault. A ripple of warding went through the crowd, people touching blue glass Fates Eyes, or kissing green prayer beads, lots of motions to push off bad luck. Mahlia pretended she didn’t see. She folded a triangle of blanket over the infant’s face to shade it, and pushed through the crowd.

  Out from under the squat, the sun glared down on her. Mahlia made her way down a weedy trail, heading for Amaya’s place. Crumbled buildings loomed on either side of her, cracked sentries robed in jungle growth. Trees sprouted from their crowns and kudzu draped over their slumped shoulders. Birds clustered in the heights, making mud nests, flying out of empty window eyes, chattering and fluttering, sending down droppings on the unwary.

  From amongst the green and leafy faces, more people peered out, watching Mahlia pass, families who lived on the old buildings’ upper floors while they kept the ground for chickens and ducks and goats that ran wild during the day and were penned at night, keeping coywolv and panthers from getting at them.

  All along the lower walls of the buildings, the tags and colors of various warlord factions were splashed, painted scrawls competing with one another—Army of God, Tulane Company, Freedom Militia—evidence of the armies that had controlled and taxed and recruited in Banyan Town over the years.

  Mahlia didn’t like any of them, but then, since most soldier boys would kill her on sight, the feeling was mutual. But the villagers held on to the illusion that they could assuage the soldiers who warred around them, so they still hung the patriotic flags of whatever faction was currently in power, and hoped that it would be enough.

  This year, rags of blue dangled in upper windows signaling support for Colonel Glenn Stern’s United Patriot Front, but Mahlia knew the townspeople also kept red stars close, in case the Army of God regained the upper hand and took back this territory. A few buildings still showed the stars and bars of Tulane, all chipped and peeled and defaced and mostly covered over, but not many anymore. No one had seen Tulane soldiers for years. Rumor had it that they’d been pushed into the swamps, and had turned to fishing and crawdad hunting and eels because they didn’t have enough bullets to keep fighting. Either that, or else they’d made a desperate run north and their bones were now being picked clean by the army of corporate half-men who patrolled the northern borders and let no one pass.

  Mahlia’s father used to spit whenever he said any of the warlords’ army names. It didn’t matter if it was Army of God or Freedom Militia or the United Patriot Front. There wasn’t a single one of them that was worth anything. A bunch of zhi laohu, “paper tigers.” They liked to roar, but they blew away like paper in the face of the slightest breath of real combat. Whenever her father’s troops showed up, they ran like rats or died like flies.

  Mahlia’s father had always talked about the ancient Chinese general called Sun Tzu and his strategies, and how all the paper tiger warlords had no strategy at all—he used to joke about what garbage they were as soldiers.

  Laji, he’d said. “Garbage.” Every one of them.

  But in the end, the warlords had won, and her father had left with the rest of China’s peacekeeper army while the paper tigers roared their victories from the rooftops of the Drowned Cities.

  Sweat dripped down Mahlia’s back, soaking her tank as she walked. Being out in the middle of the day was crazy. The humidity and heat made doing everything more miserable. She should have been hunkered down in the shade, instead of sweating her way across town with blood all over her and a baby in her arms.

  Mahlia passed the shop where Auntie Selima sold black market soap and cigarettes hauled from Moss Landing, along with whatever junk she could scavenge from the suburban ruins that surrounded them. Old cups made of glass that hadn’t shattered in the fighting. Rubber tubing for moving irrigation water. Rusty wire for binding together bamboo into fences. All kinds of things.

  A couple of Chinese-made sheet-metal stoves were stacked in a corner, from when the peacekeepers had been around, trying to make friends. For all Mahlia knew, her own father’s battalion might have been the ones who’d delivered the stoves out here, showing people how they burned better and hotter than an open campfire. Trying to do all that peacekeeper outreach that was supposed to make Drowned Cities people who fought one another all the time focus instead on taking care of themselves. Soft power, her father had called it, the winning of hearts and minds that was just as important as the peacekeeper ability to smash the local militias’ combat units.

  Ahead, Amaya’s squat waited. It was small, scabbed into the second story of an old brick building that had tumbled in on itself. On the ground floor, Amaya and her husband had restacked the crumbled bricks to form a strong pen for their goats.

  Mahlia ducked into the shade of the open ground floor. Amaya’s ladder was painted blue, and little ragged UPF talismans hung like prayer flags to Kali-Mary Mercy, thin offerings meant to keep Glenn Stern’s soldier boys at bay.

  When Mahlia first saw Banyan Town, she hadn’t understood why everyone lived in the upper stories. Mouse had laughed at that, calling her a swank city girl for not knowing about the panthers and coywolv that stalked the night. Mouse’s family had grown soybeans on a farm way out in the suburban collapse of the Drowned Cities, so he had known all about living in the middle of nowhere, but Mahlia had had to learn everything from scratch.

  “Amaya?” Mahlia called.

  The woman appeared from behind her goat pen. One of her licebiters was slung on her back, a tiny snotty-faced creature. Another kid peeked down from the squat above, dark eyes and brown skin almost as dark as Mahlia’s, peering down the ladder, serious.

  At the sight of Mahlia covered with blood and carrying the baby, Amaya’s eyes widened. She made a sign of warding, putting the Fates Eye on Mahlia, who pretended not to notice.

  Mahlia held up her bundle. “It’s Tani’s.”

  “How is she?” Amaya asked.

  “She’s dead. The doctor wants you to take care of her baby. For Mr. Salvatore, since you’re nursing anyway. Until he can take care of it on his own.”

  Amaya didn’t extend her arms to take the bundle. “I told her those soldier boys weren’t any good for her.”

  Mahlia still held out the baby. “The doctor says you’ll nurse it.”

  “He does, does he?”

  The woman was a brick wall. Mahlia wished the doctor had come instead. He could have convinced her, easy. Amaya didn’t want the baby, and if Mahlia was honest, Mahlia didn’t blame her. She didn’t want it, either.

  “We aren’t doing it any favors,” Amaya said finally. “No one needs another mouth.”

  Mahlia just waited. She was good at that. When you were a castoff, it didn’t do any good trying to talk to people, but sometimes, if you just kind of waited them out, people would get uncomfortable and feel like they had to do something.

  Amaya wasn’t really complaining about more mouths, exactly. She was talking about orphans. And when she said that, she really meant war maggots. Orphans like Mahlia, who had shown up in Banyan Town with a chopped-off right hand, bleeding, dying for help. No one wanted a war maggot in their midst. It meant they had to decide one way or another about a peacekeeper’s castoff, lying in the dirt in the middle of their town. Most people had decided one way; Doctor Mahfouz decided different.

  Mahlia said, “You don’t need to worry about the extra mouth. Salvatore’s going to take it back as soon as it can eat on its own. And Doctor’s going to send you more food for your trouble.”

  “What’s that man see in a one-handed nurse?” Amaya asked. “Is that why Tani’s dead? Because you got no hand?”

  “Wasn’t my fault she got herself pregnant.”

  “No. But she didn’t need a useless crippled China girl for a nurse.”

  Mahlia bristled. “I ain’t Chinese.”

  Amaya just
looked at her.

  “I ain’t,” Mahlia repeated.

  “You got the blood right there on your face. China castoff, through and through.” She turned away, then stopped. Looked back at Mahlia.

  “The thing I keep wondering about is what was wrong with you, girl? How come the peacekeepers didn’t want you? If the peacekeepers didn’t care enough to take you when they went back to China, why in the name of the Fates would we want you, either?”

  Mahlia fought to keep down the anger that was starting to bubble in her. “Well, this one ain’t Chinese, and it ain’t castoff. It’s Banyan Town’s. You want it? Or am I telling the doctor you dumped it?”

  Amaya looked at Mahlia like she was a sack of goat guts, but she finally took the infant.

  As soon as the baby was in Amaya’s hands, Mahlia pressed close. Right in Amaya’s face, as eye to eye as she could make it with a grown woman. Mahlia was a little surprised to find that she almost had the height. Amaya backed up against the ladder of the squat, clutching the baby as Mahlia pushed closer.

  “You call me castoff,” Mahlia said, “Chinese throwaway, whatever.” Amaya was trying to look away, but Mahlia had her pinned, kept her eye to eye. “My old man might have been peacekeeper, but my mom was pure Drowned Cities. You want to war like that, I’m all in.” Mahlia lifted the scarred stump of her right hand, shoved it up in Amaya’s face. “Maybe I cut you the way the Army of God cut me. See how you do with just a lucky left. How’d you like that?”

  Amaya’s eyes filled with horror. For a second, Mahlia had the satisfaction of at least getting respect. Yeah. You see me now, all right. Before I was just another castoff, but you see me now.

  “Mahlia! What are you doing?”

  It was Doctor Mahfouz, hurrying toward them. Mahlia backed off. “Nothing,” she said, but Doctor Mahfouz was staring at her with dismay, as if she were some kind of animal gone wild.

  “What’s going on here, Mahlia?”

  Mahlia scowled. “She called me Chinese.”

  Mahfouz threw up his hands. “You are Chinese! There’s no shame in that!”

  Amaya broke in. “She threatened me!” she said. “That animal threatened me.” She was furious now that she had backup from Doctor Mahfouz. Angry that she’d been scared by a castoff war maggot. Mahlia braced for the tongue-lashing, but before Amaya could get going, the doctor took Mahlia’s shoulder.

  “Go home, Mahlia,” he said.

  To Mahlia’s surprise, he wasn’t mean when he said it, or mad. Just… tired. “Go see if you can find Mouse,” he said. “We’ll need to gather extra food to help Amaya with this new child.”

  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.

  4

  DOCTOR MAHFOUZ’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 worl
d, 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.