The Drowned Cities (Ship Breaker #2)(39)
16
THE PRICK OF a needle. A surprise.
Small pain.
Which meant large pain was receding.
Tool held still as the needle found its way into muscle tissue. Monitored the liquid as it spread warmth into his muscle. A deep injection. 1 cc… 3 cc… 5 cc… 10 cc… 20 cc. A great deal of it. An antibiotic, from the way his body drank it in, instead of rejecting it as it rejected toxins.
The needle withdrew.
“That’s right. Now check the bandages.”
A man’s voice. Full-grown. Unusual in the Drowned Cities, where war ate its young long before they reached maturity. And a doctor from the sound of it. Two oddities. Tool couldn’t remember the last time he’d encountered a genuinely trained medic.
“Are these clean enough?”
A girl’s voice, and with it, the whiff of blood and fertility. Postadolescent, human, female.
The man’s voice responded, irritated. “It’s why we boil them.”
Delicate hands picked at Tool’s chest. Peeled away stinking bandages with a wet tearing. The smell of infection and iron. Blood and stink.
Again the man’s voice, flat. Instructive to a fault, but laden with disapproval. Disgust, almost. “That’s right. Pluck out the maggots. You don’t want them turning to flies.”
Tool let them work and listened. No other exhalations nearby, no scuffles or footfalls. Two only, then. And close enough to snap in half. Tool relaxed; he had the tactical advantage. These frail and stupid human beings had no idea that they were being stalked. He was upwind of them.
“If it’s healing,” the girl asked, “why don’t it wake up?”
“It may never wake up, Mahlia. I know you hoped to turn this monster to your purpose, but it’s fantasy. Given the wounds it has sustained, you should be amazed that the medicines worked at all. It has taken grievous injuries.”
Injuries. Indeed. The catalog of insults he had received was almost infinite. But now he was healing, and soon he would be fully himself. Soon he would hunt as he was meant to.
The hands reset a bandage around his ribs, then moved to the bandages of his torn shoulder. Delicate fingers prodded at the place where the alligator had buried its teeth.
“It’s closed up,” the girl said, surprised.
The man leaned close, tobacco sweet on his breath. “Don’t think of a half-man as human. It is a demon, designed for war. Its blood is full of super-clotting agents and its cells are designed to replicate as quickly as a kudzu grows.
“If you cut a creature like this with a knife, the wound closes itself within minutes. Deep punctures heal in only a few days. Flesh torn down to the bone. Ligaments ripped apart. Bones snapped. None of it matters to a creature like this.” The man rocked back. “All the wonders of our medical knowledge, and we use it to create monsters.”
Tool could practically hear the man shaking his head.
“Why do you care?” the girl asked.
“Because I’m an old fool who imagines our sciences turned to healing, instead of war. To saving your hand for instance, instead of designing a more resilient killer. Imagine that. Imagine every person in the Drowned Cities with hands and feet, and nothing to fear from soldiers with machetes. Now that would be a true medical advancement.”
The girl was quiet. Tool couldn’t ascertain from her breathing if it was embarrassment or agreement or thought. Finally she asked, “Will it wake up, or not?”
“It’s alive and healing,” the man snapped. “It will wake, or it won’t. You should be glad it heals more quickly than any human being on the face of this earth.”
Quicker than you know, man.
Indeed, even as the man and girl spoke, more of Tool’s faculties were returning, the world opening around him like a flower, petals splayed wide: scent, touch, taste, hearing. The world began to illustrate itself in his mind.
Salt scents and rippling water. The ocean whispering, pushing brackish fingers into swamplands. Water skippers skating over glasslike swamp ponds. Sun dappling over his skin. Rustling kudzu. Birch leaves shivering in the wind. Bird calls: crows and magpies, jays and cockatoos. In the far distance, the yip of coywolv and the squeal of a pig.
More and more information poured in. Twenty meters away, a python swished through reeds, a baby practically, no more than two meters long. Overhead, a squirrel’s claws scrabbled up a tree trunk—a banyan, judging from the scent and the rustling curtains of foliage and roots that draped all around.
The theater of operation built itself in Tool’s mind. From the gaps in rustling leaves, he sensed trails running through the jungle. From the lap of waters, he knew the shapes of stagnant pools. He could guess where gaps in the kudzu led, thanks to the lingering scents of coywolv and deer. Access and egress routes. The most likely paths of enemy attack if he were besieged. The best lines of escape if he was forced to retreat. A battle map, constructed entirely in his head.
He could fight blind, if need be.
A breeze rustled the banyan tree’s dangling tendrils, and with it, a whiff of wood smoke carried. Tool’s nose twitched. Meat cooking. Snake. Rat. Goat. More than one cookfire, then, and with that information, the knowledge that a village lay not far away, with many families living there.
The man and the girl lifted another bandage. The scent of Tool’s own rotting flesh was strong, demanding that he lick the wounds and coat them in the healing enzymes of his saliva. Urging him to seek his packmates. To let their tongues bathe the bloody rents in his frame.