The Drowned Cities (Ship Breaker #2)(62)
Above all, Mouse was aware of how alive the city was, and not just with gunfire and soldiers and fighting. That was all there, for sure. The slathered colors of territory and control, the troops, the echo of gunfire and artillery along the contested borders. Sector numbers were painted slapdash on buildings along with painted names for canals: Stern’s River. Easy Canal. Gold Street. K Canal. Green Canal. Peacekeeper Alley. He’d expected all that. The bullets and the buildings.
But he hadn’t expected to see flocks of birds roosting in broken windows. Or eagles wheeling overhead, diving for fish in the canals. He hadn’t expected to see a deer swimming across open water, or to listen to coywolv yipping and yowling at night, calling to one another across the rooftops.
There was war and ruin, and heat and sweat and mosquitoes and brackish water, and there was also a strange life in the Drowned Cities, as the jungle busily took back its own territory, reaching deeper and deeper into what had once been a place solely for human beings.
And then there was the scavenge.
Mouse had always thought of the Drowned Cities as a war zone, but what it really was, was a scavenge mine.
On his first day in the place, he watched a city block being torn down to raw parts. Clouds of concrete and rock dust, piles of pipes and ducts, steel and copper and iron being dragged out. Tangled heaps of wiring separated by weight and metal and color.
Some of the buildings were old, made of pink and white marble, and the marble was being mined and placed on barges, while the rest of the stone and concrete was heaved into the canals, filling up the waters and making new streets, raising the level of the city above where the tides could reach.
He’d stared at all the people swarming through the rubble. Hundreds and hundreds. They made long lines of wheelbarrows, filled with stone, and they gathered in clots around massive iron I beams that they lifted with kudzu ropes and hauled to the barges.
Dog Squad, the one Mouse had been assigned to, had guided the captives of Banyan Town into the mix of laborers.
“Get in there!” Gutty yelled. “Make yourselves useful!”
The other soldiers jeered at the captives and switched at them with bamboo canes as they were led away into the scavenge operation. Mouse knew those people. Knew Lilah and Tua and Joe Sands and Auntie Selima, who had been so kind to him. Mr. Salvatore, who had lost daughter and grandson both, looked at Mouse like he was dirt as he was chivied past.
Sergeant Ocho slapped Mouse on the back of the head.
“Ow!”
“Better not look too long, half-bar. LT will think you don’t want to be a soldier boy. Maybe think you want to join the rest of the war maggots.”
Sure enough, the lieutenant was watching Mouse again, cold gray eyes evaluating. It was like he was always watching. More often than not, Mouse could feel Sayle’s eyes, dragging on him, even when he wasn’t doing anything wrong. Even when he wasn’t fantasizing about making a run for it.
Had he given himself away?
Maybe the lieutenant had seen him as they marched toward the Drowned Cities. Seen Mouse as he sat by the campfire, looking again and again to the shadows of the jungle for some way to run off. But always there’d been some other soldier with a gun nearby.
“Look away, Ghost,” Ocho said. “Those prisoners ain’t even people now. They’re just maggots. They ain’t your business.”
The soldier boys herded the prisoners down into the mess of rubble. Clouds of concrete dust roiled around them, and then they were swallowed in the work.
When Mouse finally dared to glance after them again, they were lost amongst the many ants, just a bunch of dusty dots mingled with the many. But Ocho still caught the backward look and he jammed Mouse in the ribs with the butt of his rifle.
“Last warning, Ghost. You got a ways to go before you get your full bars. Don’t give anyone a reason to think you got no semper fi.”
And to Mouse’s everlasting shame, he turned away from the scavenge workers and the prisoners and did as he was told.
Even now, it still sat badly with him. Standing at his watch post atop a building, he could see the concrete dust and hear the clatter of the recycling work half a mile away.
His cheek still ached where they’d seared Glenn Stern’s mark into his face, but the pain was fading. And even though everyone still called him half-bar, and still made him do their chores, whether it was fetching water or scraping pots, or cooking a deer they’d gunned down, they had also armed him with a machete and acid, and he stood watches with the rest.
He might have been their dog to whip around, but it was better than what the people who worked the scavenge operation were getting. He was fed and armed, and standing watch was easy work.
It frightened him to think about it. That the captives had been swallowed in that sea of labor, and that he walked free, for no good reason at all.
None of it made any sense. He hadn’t done anything one way or the other to end up where he was. The tide of war had rolled in and swallowed him up, and Banyan Town with him, and they’d all tumbled in the surf. And for reasons he couldn’t understand, he’d broken the surface and managed to breathe, while everyone else was drowning alive.
His parents had been Deepwater Christians, and they’d always told him the world might move in mysterious ways but God had a plan for them.
As Mouse stared across the clatter and roar of the recycling operations with its seething hordes of dust-covered slave labor, Mouse thought that if there was a plan, then it was a cruel and vicious one.