The Drowned Cities (Ship Breaker #2)(46)

She was moving so fast she almost stepped on them before she realized what was happening. Bodies lay everywhere. Dozens and dozens of dead. Mahlia jerked up short, on the verge of crying out. She was surrounded by a carpet of bodies. Her breath came out in a low, trembling exhalation. She took another breath, fighting for calm.

It’s just the dead. You’ve seen plenty of them. Just keep going.

She started picking her way over the bodies, trying hard not to tread on them, trying hard not to look at their faces, at the blood, how torn and broken they were. Trying hard not to see Bobby Cross where he lay.

But even as she tried to ignore the carpet of death, a part of her was seeing the wounds and trying to fix them in her mind. All her doctor training, plucking at her conscience, telling her how to fix up something that couldn’t be fixed. Doctor Mahfouz instructing her in that calm voice of his that first she should stabilize the patient, make sure that breathing and circulation weren’t compromised. First fix that. Close the hemorrhaging wounds. Then onto the splints and sewing and…

Had she really brought this down on them? Was this all her fault? Was this an army’s revenge for the coywolv?

Mahlia started to retch, and suddenly it came out, all of it. The doctor was right. Everything you did just made it worse. One thing spinning into the next, into the next until a whole village was dead—

Tool clamped his hand over her mouth. “Be silent!” he growled. And though she struggled, he didn’t let her go. He buried her face against his body so that even her screams were barely sounds at all, and then her sobs poured out and he stifled those as well with his huge body.

“Lock it away,” the half-man whispered. “You feel, after. Not now. Now you are a soldier. Now you do your duty for your pack. If you break, your Mouse will die, and you with him. Feel, after. Not now.”

Mahlia wiped at her watery eyes and snotty face, nodding, and they went on.

The smoked lessened. They came to the edge of the blackened fields, with fires guttering all around. Ravens picked at the burned remains of the place. Across the fields, she saw the soldiers. Lieutenant Sayle and his pack, all together, standing around a cluster of people kneeling, and in the center of that knot, under cover of weapons—

“Fates.”

21

OCHO WIPED SOOT from his face. All his boys were a mess. The burning had taken longer than the lieutenant had wanted. Some of the crops had been wet, so setting the villagers to work ripping up their food and then lighting it on fire with cooking fuel and wood that his boys made them gather had taken longer than they’d planned, but Sayle wanted scorched earth and Ocho was going to make damn sure he got it.

There’d been a bit of resistance from the villagers, right at the beginning. Some of them had tried to run for the swamps, just as the lieutenant had planned, and Ocho heard gunfire and screaming as a bullet squad tore them apart with heavy weapons. After that, they had fewer defectors. Ocho ordered an acid squad to round up stragglers, while he limped behind.

His rib splints were hurting him, but he wasn’t going to show anyone how bad it was. He wasn’t showing a bit of weakness, today. The LT had given him a second chance. By the time they finished this operation, he wanted to be back in Sayle’s good graces, solid. Ocho wasn’t drugged on painkillers now. He was ready for war. And by the end of the day everyone would know it: Sayle, soldiers, civvies. Every one of them.

Ocho gritted his teeth through the pain and soldiered on, ordering half-bar patrols up into abandoned buildings, trying to ferret out the last of the people who were still hiding in the ruins. Getting others organized to put the townspeople to work, burning their own town. He was just assigning a new squad when the doctor came back into town.

At first, Ocho couldn’t believe what he was seeing. While half the villagers were scheming to flee, slipping out through the LT’s security nets, or dashing off into the jungle when they got half a chance, here the doctor was, coming out of the jungle with his damn doctor bag.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Van said as he watched the doctor come on. “LT was right. We got ourselves a doctor. Bo-na-fide human-ee-tarian.”

Ocho spat, watching. The doctor was a fool. He’d kind of suspected it, the way he’d stood up to Lieutenant Sayle on their first night in Banyan Town, but here it was again. The doctor, striding across the blackened field like he was the Rust Saint himself, coming to save everyone.

From the jungle, a bunch of gunfire opened up. Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch.

The doctor spun, and fell.

“Dammit!” Ocho waved his hand. “Make Hoopie stop shooting shit, will you?”

One of the licebiters was dispatched, running back across the sooty, uneven ground. Ocho headed across the fields toward the doctor, moving slowly. The man lay in the soot and muddy soil, facedown, but trying to sit up. He groaned as Ocho arrived.

“Whoa there, Doc.” Ocho knelt beside the man. Saw the blood. Sayle was going to be pissed.

Another bullet winged overhead.

“Blood and rust! Make that Hoopie stop with the shooting, or I’ll ram that rifle up his ass!”

“I got it, Sarge.”

Van took off running. A second later, the gunfire stopped and then Hoopie was making his way out of the forest. His skin was all torched and scarred up from the disaster with the castoff girl and the coywolv. He came and stood over the doctor.

Ocho scowled. “LT wanted this one alive.”