The Drowned Cities (Ship Breaker #2)(52)

You a coward, or not?

After half an hour of watching swirls of ravens and vultures rise and fall over town with no sign of other life, she gave up on being smart. Whatever had happened to Mouse, she needed to know, and the only way she was going to find out was if she went in.

She started across the fields, watching for signs of ambush. Ash rustled under her feet like leaves. Insects creaked and sawed in the humidity, but nothing rose to challenge her.

Halfway across the field, she found Doctor Mahfouz.

He was facedown in a black slurry of mud and ash and half-burned wheat. The mud stuck to Mahlia’s feet and legs, staining them black. She crouched and rolled him over. His glasses were shattered. She realized that the mud was from his own blood, mixing with the dirt and ash. Fates. What a mess. She wiped at the muddy shattered lenses.

He’d walked right into it. Like he was one of the soldiers who fought for the Army of God. One of those soldier boys who wore an amulet that was supposed to protect them from bullets.

“How could you be so stupid?” she asked, and then she felt bad for saying it aloud. He might have been stupid, but he’d been kind. It seemed like he deserved some respect, or something. Not this, at least. Not to end up with his face shoved into bloody char.

Mahlia started to try to put his glasses back on, but it was too hard to get them to fit, and it was pointless, anyway. She crouched there, holding the glasses, feeling stuck.

He’d been kind and compassionate, and he’d stood tall for her when no one else would, and now he was just as dead as all the people who’d spit on her and called her castoff.

So what was she supposed to do now? Was she supposed to pray or something?

Everyone had different rites for their bodies, offerings they were supposed to make, but the doctor hadn’t been Deepwater Christian, or Scavenge God. He’d had a little prayer rug that he sometimes got out to pray on at different times of day, and he’d sometimes read out of a book with script that Mahlia couldn’t piece together and that he’d called Arabic, but she wasn’t sure what Arabics did for their dead.

Fire, maybe. Her father said that the Chinese burned their bodies. Maybe that would do. She grabbed the doctor under the shoulders and started pulling, grunting with the effort. Dead, he was surprisingly heavy. A leaden sack, passively resisting every tug.

Mahlia kept at it, dragging him through mud and ash. She grunted and sweated and hauled. His shirt tore away under her fists. She lost her balance and thudded back in the ash, exhausted and defeated.

This was crazy. There wasn’t even anything left to burn in the town. The UPF had already burned everything. There was no way she could build a funeral pyre.

Mahlia sat in the middle of the field, dripping sweat, staring at the dead man.

They don’t even let us die right.

She wanted to cry. She couldn’t even get Doctor Mahfouz passed on to whatever afterlife he was supposed to have. She didn’t know how long she sat, staring at the man’s body. Minutes. Hours.

A shadow loomed.

Mahlia gave a startled gasp. The half-man stood over her.

“The dead are always heavy.”

The half-man scooped up the doctor, and even though the man’s body was stiff with rigor mortis, Tool lifted him easily and slung him over his shoulder.

24

TOOL LISTENED TO the girl as she searched the village, while he dug into the earth, preparing a grave with a shovel he’d found abandoned. He heard her calling Mouse’s name, over and over, and had to stifle the urge to silence her, to remonstrate with her for breaking sound discipline. She was foolish with her grief.

Let the girl mourn, he told himself. The soldiers are gone.

Still, it irritated him. She had no discipline. If they were to march north together, she would be a liability.

Leave her, then.

But he didn’t, and Tool wondered at it. It was time to move. Past time. He could sense more and more eyes returning. He wanted to be well clear of the village by nightfall. And yet still Mahlia searched, calling Mouse’s name, turning dead charred bodies and digging through burn-hollowed buildings, and still Tool lingered with her.

Eventually, Mahlia stumbled back to where Tool was lowering the doctor into his grave.

“Maybe they buried Mouse,” she said.

Tool shook his head. “No. These ones do not waste effort on such niceties.”

The girl looked for a moment as if she was going to cry, but then she mastered herself, and helped him move the earth back over the doctor’s body, filling the grave. Tool went and found large chunks of concrete lying in the blackened rubble and piled them over the grave, moving slowly, testing his strength against his memories of what he should have been able to carry.

He moved the last of the rubble into place.

“Will that keep the coywolv out?” Mahlia asked, looking at the pile of concrete and stones.

“It’s more than anyone has given me or mine,” Tool said sharply. He almost smiled when she flinched at his words.

Humans were so precious about their dead. When his own people died on distant battlefields, no one cared to gather them or bury them. If you were lucky, you were present to hear their stories, and if not, you told their stories after the battle. But you did not linger like this.

Human beings lingered. It made them vulnerable.

The girl stood, staring at the pile of rubble. Her face was smeared with mud and blood and ash. Just another bit of debris in the wreckage of war. Just like all the other children of all the other wars that Tool had ever fought.