The Drowned Cities (Ship Breaker #2)(61)
Mahlia steeled herself. “So why?”
“I have decided I have unfinished business there.”
“Since when?”
Tool regarded her for a long time. Mahlia forced herself not to look away. Finally Tool said, “When Colonel Stern held me captive, he used me to fight. I fought panthers, and Army of God captives. I fought his own soldiers, the ones who ran from battle, or who failed him in some way. Stern enjoyed that. He used to sit just outside the fighting cage and watch me kill his enemies. He cheered a great deal when I tore off a man’s arms. I think that I would like to meet him again, without a cage between us.”
“That’s impossible.”
Tool smiled at that. “And saving your friend isn’t?”
Before Mahlia could answer, he turned and swung off the overpass, dropping down to a tree. It swayed and bent with his weight, leaves rustling wildly. Mahlia listened, expecting a thud as the half-man hit the ground, but she heard nothing. It was as if the jungle had swallowed him into its belly. Disappeared without a sound.
“Tool?”
“It will take two days for us to reach the river,” the half-man called up. “If you wish to have a chance of saving your friend, it’s past time we were on our way.”
28
WHEN MOUSE HAD been younger, his family had all talked with hushed tones of the Drowned Cities’ lawlessness and decay.
His father had sometimes gone there with a skiff full of chickens in bamboo cages, to sell to the city people and to the army soldiers, but his father’s face had always been grimly set when he poled off through the swamplands, and grimly set when he returned.
He’d always gotten the money they’d needed, along with the new hoe or the new barbed wire for fencing their pigs better, but he’d never been happy about it—the going out, or the coming back.
Mouse’s brother said it was because the soldiers shook you down as you crossed their territories. If you looked at them wrong, they’d call you a traitor or a turncoat or a spy or Chinese collaborationist, and just shoot you outright.
They made up things to call you. Anything would do. They’d call you a left-hand dog. Put a bullet in your face and laugh at your body while it floated in a canal.
Mouse had felt bad that his father needed to kiss soldier boots just to get the few things that they couldn’t make themselves or get from a merchant on his sales circuit. He’d also been secretly glad he never had to go himself.
Mahlia had her own stories of the Drowned Cities, from when she’d grown up there. Her stories and Mouse’s father’s were as different as night and day.
Mahlia talked about the city’s great rectangular reflecting pool that stretched more than a mile, and the vast marble palace that overlooked it with its great high dome where the peacekeepers ran their administration. She talked of shaobing sellers who sold their sweet roasted breads to the peacekeepers. She told of company offices and clipper ships in the harbors and biodiesel rafts running the canals, jostling through floating markets that sprang up every day as farmers like his father poled their way into the city to sell. She told of green bok choy, bitter melon, red pomegranates, long pork bodies hung above the water, fresh and clean from slaughter.
But that had all been peacekeeper territory. The rules had run different in her part of the city, where the Chinese intervention had pushed the warlords out. Her life sounded like heaven to Mouse, at least until China got sick of trying to make everyone get along, and took its peacekeepers home, and let the Drowned Cities get back to its business of killing.
Regardless, Mouse’s impressions of the Drowned Cities were all secondhand. His life had been made up of his family’s flooded fields and their little home that his father had built in the second story of an old redbrick ruin. His life had been defined by planting times, and getting a mule to till the mud when the rains stopped, and thinking that if they made enough money, they might get a big old water buffalo like the Sims had, and then life would be good and easy.
A farm boy, Mahlia had called him. Just a silly little licebiter farm boy who didn’t know squat about the city.
Mouse thought about that as he stood atop a crumbling ten-story building, with a machete and a couple bottles of acid dangling from his belt, surveying his territory for Army of God infiltrators.
Now, he was more Drowned Cities than the girl who had come out of them, but he had to admit that the place looked like nothing he’d imagined.
He’d expected the city to look more… dead.
Instead, he surveyed miles of ancient buildings and swamped streets turned into canals. Networks of algae-clogged emerald waterways were dotted with lily pads and the stalks of white lotus flowers. Block after block of buildings and apartments were swallowed up to their second stories and sometimes higher, like the whole city had suddenly wandered off and decided to go wading in the ocean.
Creeping vines and kudzu covered tower faces. Trees sprouted from window ledges and rooftops, green parasols that leaned out over the waters while their roots clung tight to masonry and concrete. The shortest buildings were entirely submerged, and made for nasty snags, but many of the buildings still stood above the sea, waist deep in saltwater swamps that rose and fell with the tides, green leafy giants squatting in warm ocean waters.
UPF warboys poled through the canals on skiffs or ran along bamboo boardwalks that they’d constructed to float on the waters. Troops were everywhere, traveling over fixed bridges from block to block, moving through the city’s orleans, sometimes wading, sometimes swimming. Sometimes catching rides on biodiesel zodiacs if they could manage to snag one from the reclamation companies that paid them for access to the scavenge in their territory.