The Drowned Cities (Ship Breaker #2)(14)

“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.”

“I just said that,” Mahlia emphasized. “You don’t got to worry. We ain’t starving for Amaya. Now you going to help me hunt, or not?”

“Yeah. Okay.” He dropped to the ground and looked up. “Get yourself cleaned up, though. You look like a war maggot with all that blood on you.”

Mahlia scrambled down to the ground beside him in a cloud of clattering rubble. “I am a war maggot.”

“You’re dinner for coywolv if you don’t get that smell off.”

Mahlia reached over and wiped some grime off the boy’s own dirty face. “Fussy little licebiter, ain’t you?”

Mouse spat. “Only when it matters.”

5

AWAY FROM DOCTOR MAHFOUZ’S squat, the jungle lay thick. Trails ran through banyan, kudzu, pine, and palms. The doctor called it a landscape in transition—used to be one way, now it was turning into something else.

To Mahlia and Mouse, the jungle was pretty much the same as it always had been—a whole lot of heat, vines, snakes, and mosquitoes—but the doctor claimed that there didn’t used to be swamp panthers or coywolv or even pythons. No gators. None of that. Those animals were all new arrivals, hot-weather animals migrated north, taking advantage of the new warm winters.

Winter didn’t seem all that warm to Mahlia. She shivered plenty in the dark season, but the doctor said that not so long ago, standing water used to freeze and ice used to fall right out of the air, which if Mahlia hadn’t seen pictures of it in some of his moldy books, she wouldn’t have believed at all.

Ice.

Mahlia had eaten ice a couple of times. Her father had taken her to a peacekeepers’ officers’ club, which had solar generators and power to spare to make luxuries. In exchange for Mahlia’s promising to speak Chinese like a civilized person and keeping herself polite, her father had given her ice cream while he’d sipped cold whiskey, diamond cubes of ice floating in alcohol amber.

Ever after, the clink and freeze of ice was something that Mahlia associated with China. A fairy-tale luxury from a fairy-tale land. According to her father, China had ice for drinking and electric bicycles for traveling; they had cities with towers a thousand feet high, all because they were civilized. Chinese people didn’t war amongst themselves. They planned and built. When the sea levels rose, they built huge dikes to protect their coastlines, and floated their greatest cities on the waves, like they did with Island Shanghai.

“You wenhua,” he’d said. China had culture. It was civilized. Chinese people knew how to hezuo—“cooperate.” Work together.

Not like the Drowned Cities. Drowned Cities people were like animals. They didn’t plan. They fought all the time, and blamed each other for being poor and broken, instead of standing tall. Drowned Cities people were less than animals, really, because they had reason, but didn’t use it.

“It’s hard to believe this country was ever strong,” her father had said, more than once, as he gazed out at the place he had been posted.

The difference was obvious to Mahlia when she sailed through the canals of the Drowned Cities. All the Drowned Cities people were poor and raggedy, while the peacekeepers were tall and healthy. The pictures of Island Shanghai that were printed on the Chinese paper money showed a similar difference: Island Shanghai, tall and gleaming, surrounded by blue ocean, in comparison to the Drowned Cities, where muddy, brackish water swamped every street and ate away at the foundations of buildings.

Mahlia had been glad she was Chinese then, all the way up until her father took a toy wooden horse away from her and she bit him for it. He slapped her then, and said she had too much Drowned Cities in her.

“No respect,” he said. “Drowned Cities, through and through. Just like your mother. Animals.”

Mahlia’s mother fought with him over that, and then he called them both Drowned Cities, and suddenly Mahlia was afraid. Her father hated the Drowned Cities more than anything. And now she discovered she was the same as the people he fought every day.