The Drowned Cities (Ship Breaker #2)(71)

Mahlia flushed and looked away. “It ain’t personal,” she said.

“It never is with your kind. You pick up guns and you hurt and you kill and none of it is personal.” The man looked at her. “Children with guns. We aren’t even people to you.”

“Hey! I ain’t part of this war,” Mahlia said. “I didn’t ask to be in it. I didn’t ask soldier boys to come hunting after me! I ain’t part of this.”

But even as she said it, she felt stupid. Before her, two boys lay on their backs in the bottom of the skiff, bound in kudzu vines that Tool had twisted into ropes. Her captives. Her victims.

With Tool, she could just as easily cut off their hands and dump them in the water and laugh while they tried to swim. She had power over them, and she’d used it to make sure they did exactly what she wanted.

She was in, all right. All in, and going deeper.

“Just get us downstream and we’ll leave you alone,” she mumbled. “We ain’t here to hurt no one.”

The man snorted at that and seemed to be about to say more, but he caught sight of Tool’s expression and fell silent. Mahlia felt bad again. Scared boys, all tied up. A man who hadn’t done anything wrong to her, and she’d taken advantage of it.

Am I just like the soldier boys?

It wasn’t like she’d killed anyone. If these licebiters had been picked up by soldier boys, they would have been dead already, or else recruited like Mouse. No way they’d just catch and release.

The wind filled the skiff’s sails and they eased away from shore. The water reflected the light of the rising sun, turning the river into a glittering dragon that twined all the way to the Drowned Cities, and the sea.

“I can take you as far as UPF territory,” the man said bitterly. “After that, I have no influence. I don’t do trade with the river mouth. I can’t take you all the way to the sea.”

Mahlia nodded. “That’s enough. Just get us through UPF lines.”

“With the… half-man?”

“Do not concern yourself with me,” Tool said. “The soldiers will not notice me.”

“What if I give you up to them?”

Tool looked at him. “I will kill you and yours.”

Was this what she wanted? Did she want to play the same game as the soldier boys?

“Untie them, Tool,” she said. “Let the boys go. They won’t do anything. They’ve got to be free for the checkpoints, anyway.”

Tool shrugged. He unbound their captives. The boys sat up, glaring and rubbing their wrists and ankles. “Knew we shouldn’t have helped a castoff,” one of them said.

Mahlia glared at him. “Would you have let us sail, if you knew I was with him?” She jerked her thumb toward Tool. “Would you?”

The boy just glared at her.

“Yeah,” she said. “That’s what I thought.”

Ahead of them, the river opened, showing the Drowned Cities poking up above the jungle. The buildings rose up, like bodies staggering up out of the grave. Towers and warehouses and glass and rubble. Piles of concrete and brick where whole buildings had collapsed. Swamp waters all around, mosquitoes buzzing, a miasma.

Mahlia saw it with a strange double vision. When she’d lived in the city it had been a place of play. Her school, her life with her mother and father, the collectors who came to buy antiques from her mother. Now it was burns and ruins and rubble and chattering gunfire, a map of safe territories, mining operations, and contested blocks.

When the peacekeepers had been there, they’d been all about setting up wind turbines for energy, wave generators, had even managed to create a few projects. Mahlia’s mother had taken her out to a wind turbine project right in the river mouth, huge white turbines going up like giant pale flowers. Her father had had something to do with it, but whether it had been guarding the turbines themselves, or the Chinese construction teams, or someone else, she had been too young to understand it. But now, as she looked at the open waters, Mahlia saw them again, but the turbines were all torn down.

She pointed to them. “My dad worked on those.”

“Castoff,” one of the boys muttered.

Mahlia wanted to kick him, but she held off. The man said, “They took them down.”

“The peacekeepers?”

“Warlords. As soon as China pulled its peacekeepers out, the warlords started shooting at them, trying to bring down the electric grid. It was a power-sharing arrangement that couldn’t last. UPF in charge of the towers, and Freedom Militia in charge of the conversion station, so they’d have shared responsibility.” He shrugged. “They shot each other up. UPF bombed the station. The Militia mined the turbines. And then the Army of God pushed them both out and sold the steel and composites, and the turbines all went out to Lawson & Carlson for new weapons.”

He nodded at Tool. “Bet that’s something his kind would know all about.”

Tool didn’t respond to the dig. “War breaks things,” was all he said.

His ears were pricking to the winds, and his eye seemed to gleam with interest as they cut across the waters. Mahlia watched him.

Sometimes, his strange bestial face seemed completely human, when he laughed at some bit of half-man humor or when he’d tried to show her the folly of swaggering with a gun. But now, as they approached the Drowned Cities, she was aware again of how many layers affected the creature. Part human, part dog, part tiger, part hyena… pure predator.