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.
She grimaced. “Yeah, you’re right. It doesn’t matter what I do. End of the day, I’m still a castoff. They either hate me for being weak or hate me for standing tall. Can’t win that fight.”
“So what’s really eating you?”
“Salvatore said something else, too.” She held up the stump of her right hand, with its puckered and mottled stub of brown skin folded over. “He said Tani would still be alive if the doctor had more hands to help.”
“Yeah? Think he’s right?”
“Probably.” Mahlia spat over the edge. Watched her saliva do cartwheels to the ground. “Me and the doctor work good together, but a stump ain’t no hand.”
“If you want to complain about what you got, you can always go back and ask the Army of God to take your lucky left. They’ll finish the job.”
“You know what I mean. I ain’t complaining that you saved me. But I still can’t do anything delicate.”
“Better than me. And I got all ten fingers.”
“Yeah, well, you could do all this doctor work if you tried. You just got to pay attention and read what the doctor tells you to.”
“Not hard for you, maybe. I get twitchy just looking at all those letters.” Mouse shrugged. “Maybe if I could read up here, up high, you know? But I don’t like being down in the squat, with the lantern and all that. Don’t like being closed in, you know?”
“Yeah,” Mahlia said.
She had the same feeling herself sometimes. The chest-tight feeling of the Fates setting you up and getting ready to kill you off. It made it hard to focus on a book, or even to sit still. Maggot twitch, some people called it. If you’d seen much of the war, you had it. Some more. Some less. But everybody had it.
The only time Mouse seemed really at peace was when he was out in the jungle, fishing or hunting. The rest of the time he was twitchy and nervous and couldn’t sit still and damn sure couldn’t pay attention. Mahlia sometimes wondered what he would hav
e turned out like if he’d been able to grow up on his parents’ farm, if a warlord’s patrol had never had a chance to kill his family. Maybe Mouse would have been real calm and still, then. Maybe he could have read a book all day, or been able to sleep inside a house and not be afraid of soldier boys sneaking up in the dark.
“Hey.” Mouse tapped her. “Where’d you go?”
Mahlia startled. She hadn’t even realized she’d drifted away. Mouse was looking at her with concern. “Don’t go off like that,” he said. “Makes me think you’ll just tip right off.”
“Don’t nanny me.”
“If I didn’t nanny you, you’d be dead by now. Either starved or chopped up. You need Momma Mouse to look after you, castoff.”
“If it wasn’t for me, you’d have been picked up in a patrol years ago.”
Mouse snorted. “ ’Cause you’re all Sun Tzu stra-tee-gic?”
“If I was strategic, I would have figured out how to get out of this place. Would have seen everything falling apart and got out while there were still ships to sail.”
“So why didn’t you leave?”
“My mom kept saying there were supposed to be boats for us, too. For dependents. Just kept saying it. Saying that there were supposed to be enough boats for everyone.” Mahlia made a face. “Anyway. She was stupid. She didn’t think strategic, either. And now there’s no way out of here.”
“You ever think about just trying to go north? Sneak across the border?”
Mahlia glanced at Mouse. “Coywolv, panthers, warlords, and then all those half-men up there to hold the line? They’d be picking our bones before we even got close to the Jersey Orleans. We’re stuck; that’s the fact. Like a bunch of crabs boiling in a pot.”
“That’s Mahfouz talking.”
“ ‘Crabs in a pot, pulling each other down while we all boil alive.’ ”
Mouse laughed. “You got to say it like he does, though. All disappointed.”
“You should have seen how he looked after I pushed up on Amaya. Talk about disappointed.” Mahlia waved the stump of her hand with irritation. “Like if I was nice and polite, they’d think I was some kind of gift from the Scavenge God.” She snorted.
Mouse laughed. “You going to sit there feeling sorry for yourself, or you going to tell me something I don’t know?”
“Is there something to say? Some fish jump out of a basement and I miss it?” Mahlia poked Mouse. “What’s the news, maggot? Why don’t you tell me something I don’t know?”
Mouse looked sly; then he nodded toward the Drowned Cities. “They’re fighting again.”
Mahlia burst out laughing. “That’s like saying the cities are drowning.”
“I’m serious! They’re shooting something different. Something big. I was wondering if you knew it. It’s a big old gun.”
“I don’t hear anything.”
“Well, maybe you should listen, right? Show some patience. They been blowing it off all morning. It’ll come again.”
Mahlia turned her attention to the horizon, studying the wreckage of the Drowned Cities where it poked up above the jungle. Distant iron spires, stabbing the sky. In some of them, beacon fires burned. A haze of smoke hung over the city center, brown and heavy. She listened.
A far-off rat-a-tat of gunfire, but nothing interesting. Couple of AKs. Maybe a heavy hunting rifle. Background noise, that. Skirmishers in the jungle or maybe target practices. Nothing—
The explosion rocked outward. The iron girder of Mahlia and Mouse’s perch shivered with its force.
Mahlia gaped. “Damn, maggot! That’s a gun.”
“I told you!” Mouse was grinning. “At first, I thought they were just dynamiting, right? But they keep going. Hammering away. Some kind of big old army shells or something.”
As if to underline his words, the explosion came again, and this time there was a flare and a rising cloud in the far distance. Lot of smoke and explosion for such a distance. They were looking out fifteen miles, maybe more, and there it was.
“It’s a 999,” Mahlia said.
“What’s that?”
“Big old gun. Serious artillery. Peacekeepers used to keep them. Dropped shells on all the warlords. Used some kind of spy eye to target it, then they’d drop a big old shell right down on Army of God, UPF, Freedom Militia, whoever. Peacekeepers spiked them all when they rabbited, so the warlords couldn’t use them, but that’s a 999 for sure.”
“You think China’s sending in peacekeepers again?” Mouse asked. “Maybe rolling up the warlords for good?”
The idea made Mahlia’s chest tighten. It was her own fantasy, the secret one she sometimes curled up to when she went to bed, knowing that it was stupid, but still wanting it, wanting it to somehow all make sense.
Her father would return from China. He’d come back with all his soldiers. He’d pick her up in his strong arms and say that he’d never meant to leave, that he hadn’t meant to sail away and leave her and her mother alone in the canals of the Drowned Cities as the Army of God and the UPF and the Freedom Militia came down like a hammer on every single person who’d ever trafficked with the peacekeepers.
A stupid little dream for a stupid little war maggot. Mahlia hated herself for dreaming it. But sometimes she curled in on herself and held the stump of her right hand to her chest and pretended that none of it had happened. That her father was still here, and she still had a hand, and everything was going to get better.
“You think they’re coming?” Mouse asked again.
You think?
“Nah.” Mahlia forced a laugh. “Warlords must have fixed one of the guns. Or bought one. Or maybe they pirated something off the Atlantic shipping lanes.” She shrugged. “The Chinese ain’t coming back.”
The 999 went off again. A nostalgic sound. The sound of a war that her father had been winning.
999.
It was a lucky number, her old man used to say. He’d sit in their apartment at night, drinking Kong Fu Jia Jiu shipped all the way from Beijing, gazing out the window at the orange and yellow flares of the fighting, a fireworks display every night. He listened to the guns.
“Jiu jiu jiu,” he’d say. “999.”
Mahlia remembered the 999 particularly, because he’d claimed the peacekeepers would knock the warlords back with their lucky 999s and maybe then they’d finally teach these Drowned Cities savages how to be civilized. The paper tiger warlords would learn that shooting and hatred solved nothing. Eventually, the warlords would sit down at the negotiating table and figure out some way to get along with one another, without bullets.
Her father had sat by the window with his clear bright liquor as gunfire echoed through the canals and he had named them all. “.45, 30-06, AK-47, .22, QBZ-95, M-60, AA-19, AK-74, .50-caliber, 999.” Mahlia knew the many voices of war from her father’s chant.
Later, when those guns were turned on her and she was belly-crawling out of hell, she’d known them, too: the chatter of the AKs and the bellowing of 12-gauges as they ripped the grasses and tore the swamp waters around her.
Mahlia had whispered their names to herself as she’d tried not to be stupid and jump up like a rabbit in the open as bullets zinged all around. Trying to think like Sun Tzu and not make a fatal mistake. Anything at all to keep herself from panicking the way all the other stupid civvies were panicking and getting themselves all shot to hell.
Another explosion rocked the distance—999, for sure. A lucky gun and a lucky number.
For someone, at any rate.
Mahlia looked down at her hand and was surprised to see blood still on it. Remembered the baby and Tani’s death. Remembered why she’d come looking for Mouse in the first place.
“Mahfouz wants us to go find some food and drop it by Amaya’s place. Help feed her since she’s going to be taking on Tani’s baby.”
“The doc’s too damn nice.”
Mahlia jostled him with an elbow. “Well, he takes in lazy-ass war maggots like you, so yeah, you’re probably right.??
?
“Hey!” Mouse grabbed for support before he toppled off the beam. “You trying to kill me?”
“Fates, no. You hit the ground, then I got to do all the work myself.”
“And we both know you don’t got the hands for that!”
Before Mahlia could slug him, Mouse swung down off the girder, dangling nimble as a monkey. He hand-over-handed across open air to a down girder.
Mahlia felt briefly envious of his easy movement. Forced herself not to watch too hungrily. Some things, it was better not to think about. It just made you mad and angry.
Mouse slid down the girder to the next level. “Why we bother working so hard hunting up dinner if we know the doc’s just going to give it away?” he asked as Mahlia balance-beamed back to her own route off the building.
“Hell if I know. Because Mahfouz thinks goes-around-comes-around works for the good stuff, too. Balancing the scales and all that.”
Mouse laughed. “That’s all Scavenge God foo-foo stuff. ‘Balancing the scales.’ ”
“Mahfouz ain’t Scavenge God.”
“It’s still a load. If there was balance, the soldier boys would all be dead, and we’d be sitting pretty in the middle of the Drowned Cities, shipping marble and steel and copper and getting paid Red Chinese for every kilo. We’d be rich and they’d be dead, if there was such a thing as the Scavenge God, or his scales. And that goes double for the Deepwater priests. They’re all full of it. Nothing balances out.”
“You’d know,” Mahlia said. “My family weren’t Deepwater.”
“Yeah, what do Chinese people worship, anyway? Buddhas?”
Mahlia shrugged. Her father had mostly seemed to worship guns and liquor, though he’d made sure there was a picture of the Kitchen God in their home as well. “My mom was Scavenge God,” she said. “On account of all those antiques she sold. Made offerings all the time, so she could find good antiques that the foreigners would buy.” She eased down after Mouse, using her lucky left hand for grip, her stump for balance. “Don’t worry about the food. We’ll hold back our dinner before we give over to the doctor.”
“Damn straight we’re holding back. I ain’t hunting all day and then getting rib-stuck because the doctor’s feeling charitable.”