The Drowned Cities (Ship Breaker #2)(23)

Mahlia finished washing her hands in boiled water and rinsed in alcohol, fighting to ignore Gabby’s dismemberment.

It’s what they do, she reminded herself. Don’t fight things you can’t fight. She needed to think like Sun Tzu. Make her own plans for how to get the meds she needed and escape back to Mouse.

Mahlia focused on Sayle, listening to him plan. “B-6, Hi-Lo Platoon, Potomac…” None of the names meant anything to Mahlia except that soldiers were out there—lots of them—and they wanted that half-man, and Mouse’s life wasn’t worth rust. If they found the half-man before Mahlia could return, the monster would believe she had betrayed it, and Mouse would die, and she was stuck here, fixing up someone who would just as soon chop off her last hand.

Mahlia finished washing, grabbed boiled forceps and scalpels and needles from their battered cook pot, and shoved through the ring of watching soldiers to the last living victim, wishing there were some way to tell the doctor what was happening to Mouse.

“Ease back,” she ordered as she pushed through. The soldiers shifted a little but didn’t move away.

The doctor looked up. “Your comrade needs air and he needs your dirt away from his wounds. Either you listen to the girl, or your friend will not survive.”

“He dies, you die,” one of them muttered.

Mahlia couldn’t tell if it was Soa or one of the others, but the wounded boy reacted to the challenge. “You heard them,” he grunted. “Get back. Let the doctors do their thing.”

Mahlia knelt down and began swabbing out the wound, plucking bits of fabric from torn brown flesh, inspecting to see if his broken ribs looked as if they had damaged his internal organs.

The boy didn’t flinch as she probed. The only evidence of his pain was that sometimes his breath would hold as she dug deep. He stared straight ahead with a fixed expression of contempt. She squeezed blood out of her rag, swabbed the wounds again.

What a fool she had been. Of course the monster had been hunted. There’d been boot and dog prints all over that place. The creature hadn’t come from nowhere. It had come out of the Drowned Cities, and the soldiers had followed. In hindsight, it made perfect sense.

“Don’t look like a pig did this,” she said.

The wounded soldier boy’s gaze focused on her for the first time. Gold-flecked green eyes, glinting violence. A face sculpted by war. Hard. “If I say it was pig, it was pig.”

Mahlia dropped her eyes. It wasn’t worth fighting over. Boys like this had seen too much blood to care one way or the other if they spilled a little more. Antagonizing them was stupid.

“Problem, Sergeant Ocho?”

The voice was soft, but it made Mahlia’s skin scrawl. The lieutenant was looking at them. Pale skin, pale hair, gray empty eyes. She’d thought he looked like a corpse at first because he was so pale, and then like an insect, because of his long, thin body and limbs. But suddenly Mahlia knew what he was: coywolv. Pure blood and rust coywolv. A predator. Deadly and smart.

Sayle’s gray eyes lingered on her. “Anything I need to be aware of?”

Ocho glanced at Mahlia dismissively. “Nothing here, Lieutenant.”

“You let me know.”

“Nah. Castoff knows her place.”

Lieutenant Sayle went back to his moldy maps and his murmured instructions to the other soldier boys, and Mahlia let out her breath. She went back to work, wishing she dared hurry.

As she plucked out leaves and debris from the wounds, she couldn’t help thinking of the meds just overhead, up in the doctor’s squat. The soldiers hadn’t found them—yet. The doctor kept them hidden in oiled leather wrappings, tucked inside hollowed-out books. Just more books among the many. But they were there. The antibiotics that could buy Mouse’s freedom from the dying half-man. If she could just get to the damn things.

The doctor joined her with a needle and catgut. His eyes were bad, even with his jury-rigged eyeglasses. He had to lean close to study the wound.

“The damage isn’t as bad as it could be,” he said. “His ribs did a good job of protecting him.”

Mahlia pointed at one of the wounds. “This is the only one that’s bleeding hard.”

“Hmm.” The doctor squinted. “Laceration to a neurovascular bundle. We’ll cauterize this first,” he said, “then stitch up the wounds.”

Their patient suddenly asked, “Can you even see, old man?”

Mahlia looked up at him, trying to remember his name. Ocho. A sergeant. “I can,” she said. “And I’m the one doing the stitching.”

“Blood and rust! Stumpy’s going to stitch?”

“Watch your mouth,” Mahlia said, “or I’ll stitch your guts shut.”

The doctor sucked in his breath, but the patient just smirked. “Castoff’s got some bark in her.”

“No bark. Just a needle.”

Mahlia set the point and pushed it in with her good left fingers. The doctor’s hand met the needle on the other side and drew the catgut through. He handed it back to her. Between the two of them, they nearly made a whole doctor. They worked the thread through again.

“We don’t have any sulfa here,” the doctor said. “You will need to keep this wound clean and dry.”

Ocho was looking into space again. “Yeah. I know.”