The Drowned Cities (Ship Breaker #2)(36)

Mahfouz pressed on her uncertainty. “Violence begets violence, Mahlia.”

Mahlia stared at the wounded monster—the teeth marks, the blood, the stinking rot of its wounds. The carrion scent of its breath. Was she crazy? Maybe the half-man was just like coywolv. Always vicious, even if you raised it from a pup.

But what if it was something else? It hadn’t killed Mouse, even when it could have. A soldier boy would have done him in a second, but the half-man had let him go. That had to count for something.

Mahlia set her ear to the creature, listening for the slow thud of its heart. It took almost a minute before she heard it. Huge and thick. Heavy. The heart must have been as big as her head. Crazy big. Crazy dangerous.

She thought of Soa, looming over her: coywolv eyes in the body of a young man. Thought of the lieutenant and his casual way of cutting off her air when Mahfouz didn’t jump fast enough. All kinds of deadly there, and she hadn’t been able to do anything.

The half-man’s heart thudded again under her ear.

Crazy big.

She began inspecting the wounds. What are you like when you’re healthy? How much fight you got in you?

The doctor seemed to finally understand that she wasn’t listening. He waded toward her, pushing through the dangling banyan roots.

“Reconsider, Mahlia. This is not the path you want to follow. You’re distraught from everything that’s happened.” He scrambled up onto the bank. “You need to think clearly.”

Something about the doctor’s approach warned her. Mahfouz was coming too fast, or maybe there was something of the predator about him. Mahlia couldn’t say afterward what warned her, but she yanked her knife out just as the doctor made a lunge for the meds.

She slashed the air between them. He sprang away with a gasp. Mahlia crabbed backward, putting herself up against the dying half-man. She cradled the meds to her chest with the stump of her right hand, keeping her knife raised between her and the doctor.

“Step back, or I swear I’ll cut you.”

The doctor’s eyes widened at the gleaming blade. Horror twisted his expression.

“Mahlia…”

She felt sick in her guts, like dirt, like a worm. She could hear her father sneering at her—Drowned Cities, through and through—but she didn’t back down. “Don’t,” she warned.

Mouse was staring. “Damn, Mahlia. And I always thought I was the crazy one.”

Mahlia wanted to say she was sorry, to apologize, to make it right, but the knife was already between them, and the doctor was looking at her like she was some kind of soldier boy, a monster without morals.

With a sick feeling, she realized that even if she put the knife down and apologized, there wasn’t any going back. She and Doctor Mahfouz stood on two sides now. Pulling the knife had changed everything.

The doctor eased off. “All right,” he said soothingly. “All right. Let’s not be hasty.”

He slowly sat, hands held open and defensive. He looked old suddenly. Old and tired and broken and worn out. Mahlia felt ill. This was how she repaid the man who saved her. No one else had lifted a finger for the peacekeeper castoff, but Mahfouz had stood tall for her. She wanted to cry, but her voice didn’t crack.

“You might as well tell me how to do it right. I’m giving it the meds no matter what.”

“Those medicines aren’t yours to give, Mahlia. There are people who will need those. Good, innocent people. You can still do right by them,” the doctor pleaded. “You don’t have to do this.”

Mahlia rattled the pills in their fancy blister packs. “How many I got to give?”

Mahfouz’s voice hardened. “If you do this, you are no longer my charge. I cared for you as best I could, but this is too much.”

Mahlia felt as if she’d stepped out the window of a Drowned Cities tower, and was plummeting toward the canals. Freefall. Nothing to catch her. Just a hard hit, rushing up.

Part of her wanted to take everything back, to apologize for the knife, for the meds, for everything, as the bond of trust that she’d relied on for so long unraveled.

You in or you out?

Mahlia looked from the dying half-man to the doctor. Was she wrong? Was she stupid? Fates, it was impossible to tell.

But then she looked again at the doctor’s disappointed expression and she realized it didn’t matter. She’d already chosen, as soon as she’d raised the knife. Old Mahfouz had never hurt anything, and she’d put a knife between them. It was already done. There was no going back. It was like her father said, she was Drowned Cities, through and through. Whatever trust she’d had between her and the doctor was cut now. Cut wide and deep.

“How many pills?”

Doctor Mahfouz looked away. “Four. To start. You’ll need four. For that thing’s body weight, you’ll need four of the blue-and-white ones.”

Mahlia fumbled for the meds and started prying pills out. She’d have to grind them, feed them in water to make the thing swallow in its unconscious state. She wondered if she was in time. Wondered if it would all be a waste.

“Four, you say?”

The doctor nodded, disappointment dragging on his expression. “And then more daily, until they are all gone. Every one of them.”

You in? she wondered. You really in?

Yeah. She was in, all right. All in, whether she liked it or not.