The Drowned Cities (Ship Breaker #2)(60)

She remembered hiding in the flooded lower floors of towers and apartment blocks, after her mother had been caught. Living in shadows. Praying that no one would notice her as she moved by darkness from one swamped building to the next. Praying that she wouldn’t run across someone in those rooms as she swam and waded and crawled to the city outskirts. Night after night, she lay in darkness, watching troops set up perimeters, waiting to slip past. She’d had two hands then.

And now she was going back.

On the tenth day of her recuperation, Mahlia clambered up onto one of the great vine-covered overpasses and looked toward the Drowned Cities.

From a distance, if you didn’t listen for the warfare, the place could have been abandoned. But as you got closer, you could make out details. Trees sprouting from windows, like hair from an old man’s ears. Robes of vines draping off slumped shoulders. Birds flying in and out of upper stories.

Mahlia tried to imagine what the place must have been like without all of that. She’d seen pictures of the old Drowned Cities, the version from long before, in one of the museums the peacekeepers had been trying to protect.

Her mother had taken her to the museum, wanting to examine what other old things might be of value to foreign collectors, and Mahlia had seen the photographs. But it had all been surreal. Open roads with cars on them. No boats at all. A river that cut through the place, instead of swamping it. A different place. She’d looked at the pictures and wondered where everyone had driven their cars away to. Or maybe they were just at the bottoms of all the canals. Sleeping.

The whole museum felt a little like a cemetery. A place where you came to look at the dead. And really, the artifacts weren’t anywhere near as good as the ones that her mother kept in her warehouse.

“People value history, Mahlia,” her mother said. “Here, look at this one.” She lifted a piece of parchment, holding it gingerly. “You see these names? This meant war. When they signed this, it changed the course of the world.” She laid the parchment down again, exquisitely careful. “People will spend fortunes to touch the paper that these men touched.”

She smiled then. “No one here knows the stories behind these things, so they don’t know the value. To them, this all looks like junk,” she said, and she waved at the warehouse around them, filled to bursting with her mother’s selections.

Old flags. Paintings. The marble heads from statues of old men that had had their heads knocked off and found their way into her shop at the mouth of the river, where collectors came to buy history and scavenge.

Her mother had a tiny shop on the storefront, where she studied potential buyers. But it was the warehouse that was truly astonishing. She’d installed it in the belly of a huge building near the city center, several apartments that she’d bought and then carefully bricked up, hiding them away from prying eyes. It was there that she brought her best buyers.

When Mahlia was small, she was sometimes allowed to watch as men and women surveyed the paintings leaning against walls, the statuary of presidents, the murals chipped from government buildings and transported whole to the warehouse.

Her mother said that was how she met Mahlia’s father.

He’d had a passion for history, just like her. He’d bought little silver snuffboxes from revolutionary times, and quill pens that had signed famous documents. Handwritten letters. All sorts of things. He’d kept coming back, again and again, until her mother finally understood that it wasn’t just antiquities that her father loved. And that was where Mahlia had come from.

“You think you have a path?” Tool asked, breaking her thoughts.

Mahlia startled. For all his bulk, the half-man was silent. It was spooky to have him suddenly appear. “Yeah,” she said. “There’s a way.”

“Undetected?” the half-man pressed.

Mahlia bristled. “Well, if it ain’t, we’re both dead pretty fast, right?”

Tool smirked. “Escape is simpler than infiltration, girl. Just because you managed to flee that place doesn’t mean that you can reenter it. The direction of your passage is not the only variable. Where will you lair once you have passed within? How will you survive until you find your brother?”

“He’s not my brother.”

Tool growled at that. “Then leave him to the Fates.”

Mahlia knew what Tool was getting at, but she didn’t like his bringing it up again.

“I owe him,” she said.

“Debts are a heavy burden. Throw them off, and you walk free.”

It was tempting, for sure. Just run away. Pretend that the licebiter who had cracked the jokes and played the pranks and who had rooted up an entire nest of pigeon eggs when they were starving had never existed. That he’d never saved her from all the pain the soldier boys had wanted to slash into her.

“Can’t.” She grimaced. “Anyway, why are you helping me? Why don’t you just run off? No one’s keeping you here.”

“I have my own reasons.”

“It’s not because I saved you?” Mahlia taunted.

Tool’s bestial face swung back to regard her. “No.”

The tone of his voice frightened her, because she realized that she had no idea what drove the half-man. When they’d been foraging for food together, she could sometimes forget that he was something other than human. And then suddenly the creature would be looking at her with his huge yellow eye, and scarred face, and doglike muzzle and tiger teeth, and she felt as if she was staring into the face of something that occasionally saw her as food.