The Drowned Cities (Ship Breaker #2)(68)

The docks were quiet. Rain pattered down on the Potomac, making rings. Rivulets of muddy water trickled around a couple of raggedy piers thrust into the brown river flow.

This close to the sea, the surge of salt water pushed its way up into the mouth with the tide, then flowed back. What seemed like years ago, Doctor Mahfouz had told her that it was a unique environment. In other places, where a river was less poisoned with war and rotting city, it would have been rich with life, teeming with fish and turtles.

Some of those animals were probably there, but Mahlia had heard that the best fishing was always for bodies. People floating down from other parts of the war, headed for the ocean. Some of them dumped, some of them floated there on little rafts. People were always snagging those.

Mahlia hesitated at the docks. One of the people on the water was a woman. She looked up at Mahlia from under a dripping rain hat. Mahlia started toward the lady, but then hesitated. Just because she was a woman didn’t mean she was safe. And Mahlia didn’t like the way the woman looked.

She had a pair of pistols strapped to her hips, and her lip was split wide, raggedly sewed back into place. And her eyes were so cold that Mahlia took a step back. The woman might as well have been coywolv.

Mahlia turned and started away and caught sight of the man she’d seen before. The one she’d taken for an officer when he took a leak at the edge of the woods.

He and his two bodyguards were tying gear down on their skiff, covering it with ripped plastic stamped with old Chinese company symbols. Mahlia even recognized an old banner that the peacekeepers had hung when she’d been young.

DISARM TO FARM, it said, in English.

She remembered the campaign. They’d been trying to resettle ex-soldiers back into the countryside, to give them seeds and land and expertise to become farmers again, and all they had to do was turn in their guns.

One of the boys stood atop the torn plastic advertisement, a shotgun held low. For a second, Mahlia thought she was going to be shot, but then the boy’s eyes passed on.

The woman was still looking at her. She climbed out of her skiff, striding toward her.

“You,” she said. “Come here, girl. Let me get a look at you.”

Mahlia started to back away, and then to run, but behind her she heard new movement.

She lifted her machete to defend herself, but the two boys moved past her, ignoring her entirely. Their faces dripped with rain, but they barely squinted as they brought up their rifles.

“Move off, lady,” one of them said. He had a head like a bullet and dark black skin. His arms and legs might as well have been sticks, but he had his hunting rifle up and aimed. The other boy was moving sideways, getting clear room. He could have been Chinese, but not like her. Not castoff. Some full-blooded patriot, born and raised in the Drowned Cities, instead of a half-breed like her. He had a shotgun.

“You leave the girl alone,” he said.

The woman’s hand eased toward her pistol, but the man called out. “They are expert shots, Clarissa. Move on.”

She looked at them all, and then she turned and went back to her skiff and untied the lines. A moment later, she was in the river, and drifting away. Looking back at them. And then disappearing into gray and rain and mist.

Mahlia looked at them all, surprised. “Thanks.”

The man shrugged it off. “You should go. She is a collector. Even without your hand, she’d be able to get a price for you, and if you had walked right up to her, she would have taken you.”

The two boys were looking at her.

“You castoff?” the darker one asked.

Mahlia wondered how to answer, but before she could form a response, the boy answered the question for her. “They don’t like castoffs here. You better get yourself clear or tag AOG, real quick, girl.”

AOG. Army of God. Of course. Tag herself. She’d been stupid. She needed an amulet, or something. And then, when she got down to UPF territory, she’d need to mark herself again. She’d have to brand her cheek, probably. Put the triple hash on herself, if she wanted to slide past without getting challenged.

“Thanks,” she said again.

But they were already securing the last of their bundles in their skiff and unwrapping their ropes.

“Hey!” she called. “You going downriver?”

“Why?”

“I want to come on, if you are.”

“You got money?”

“My friend does.”

“Yeah?”

“He’s hurt. I need help getting him down. We can buy on, if you can take us. We just want to get out of here.”

“And you want to go downriver?” Their disbelief showed.

“We got friends,” Mahlia said. “They say they got us room on a scrap ship, going out. Going north. To the Seascape.”

“First time I heard of something like that. No one gets out of here.”

“We got a friend. We just got to get there.” She hesitated. “Please. We got to get downriver. My friend’s just in the trees. We can pay. We got rice. We got machetes. We got coywolv skin.”

In a burst of inspiration, she thought of Mouse and his profiteering schemes. “I got some half-man teeth. Dog-face teeth. You can sell those, right? Lucky charms. Soldier boys love those, right?”

She almost laughed when they perked right up.

Tool took the boys so fast that Mahlia actually felt bad.