Ship Breaker (Ship Breaker #1)(49)

“Don’t tell me about worth,” Nita said. “My father commands fleets.”

“The wealthy measure everything with the weight of their money.” Tool leaned close. “Sadna once risked herself and the rest of her crew to help me escape from an oil fire. She did not have to return, and she did not have to help lift an iron girder that I could not lift alone. Others urged her not to. It was foolhardy. And I, after all, was only half of a man.” Tool regarded Nita steadily. “Your father commands fleets. And thousands of half-men, I am sure. But would he risk himself to save a single one?”

Nita scowled at him, but she didn’t reply. Silence stretched between them. Eventually everyone settled down to sleep as well as they could in the creak and jolt of the train.

The great drowned city of New Orleans didn’t come all at once, it came in portions: the sagging backs of shacks ripped open by banyan trees and cypress. Crumbling edges of concrete and brick undermined by sinkholes. Kudzu-swamped clusters of old abandoned buildings shadowed under the loom of swamp trees.

The train rose into the air, rail pilings lifting it over the swamps below. They passed over cool green pools full of algae and lily pads, the white flash of egrets and the whir of flies and mosquitoes. The entire elevated track system was reinforced against the city killer storms that rolled into the coast with such astonishing regularity, but it was the only evidence that any people successfully inhabited the jungle swamplands now.

They sped above the mossy broke-back structures of a dead city. A whole waterlogged world of optimism, torn down by the patient work of changing nature. Nailer wondered at the people who had inhabited those collapsing buildings. Wondered where they had gone. Their buildings were huge, larger than anything in his experience at the ship-breaking yards. The good ones were built with glass and concrete and they’d died just the same as the bad ones that seemed to have simply melted in on themselves, leaving rotting timbers and boards that were warped and molded and sagging.

“Is this it?” Nailer asked. “Is this the Orleans?”

Nita shook her head. “These were just towns outside the city. Support suburbs. They’re everywhere. Stuff like this goes for miles. From when everyone had cars.”

“Everyone?” Nailer tested the theory. It seemed unlikely. How could so many people be so rich? It was as absurd as everyone owning clipper ships. “How could they do that? There’s no roads.”

“They’re there.” She pointed. “Look.”

And indeed, if Nailer scrutinized the jungle carefully, he could make out the boulevards that had been, before trees punctured their medians and encroached. Now, the roads were more like flat fern and moss-choked paths. You had to imagine none of the trees sprouting up in the center, but they were there.

“Where’d they get the petrol?” he asked.

“They got it from everywhere.” Nita laughed. “From the far side of the world. From the bottom of the sea.” She waved at the drowned ruins, and a flash of ocean. “They used to drill out there, too, in the Gulf. Cut up the islands. It’s why the city killers are so bad. There used to be barrier islands, but they cut them up for their gas drilling.”

“Yeah?” Nailer challenged. “How do you know?”

Nita laughed again. “If you went to school, you’d know it, too. Orleans city killers are famous. Every dummy knows about them.” She stopped short. “I mean…”

Nailer wanted to hit her smug face.

Tool laughed, a low rumble of amusement.

Sometimes Nita seemed okay. Other times she was just swank. Smug and rich and soft. It was those moments that made Nailer think she could have learned a thing or two on Bright Sands Beach, that even Sloth with all her greed and willingness to betray him had been better than this rich swank who still looked pretty even after living amongst them all, as if she weren’t touched by the grime and pain and struggle that the rest of them felt.

“I’m sorry,” Nita said, but Nailer shrugged away her apology. It was clear what she thought of him.

They rode in silence. A village showed through the jungle, a clearing carved from the trees and shadows, a small fishing community perched amongst the bogs, dotted with slump shacks like the ones that Nailer’s own people constructed, with pigs and vegetables in their yards. To him, it looked like home. He wondered what Nita saw.

At last the jungle parted, opening on a wide expanse where the trees were lower and the height of the train gave them a view. Even from a distance, the city was huge. A series of needles, piercing the sky.

“Orleans II,” Tool said.

17

Nailer craned his neck to see over the tops of the trees and take in the mangled metropolis. “There’s got to be good scavenge there,” he said.

Nita shook her head. “You’d have to knock down the towers. You’d need all kinds of explosives. It’s not worth it.”

“Depends how much copper and iron you can pull,” Nailer said. “Put a light crew in the building, see what’s what.”

“You’d have to work in the middle of a lake.”

“So? If you swanks left a lot behind, it would be worth it.” He hated the way she acted like she knew everything. He stared out at the towers. “I’ll bet all the good stuff’s been stripped, though. Too good to leave lying there.”