The Drowned Cities (Ship Breaker #2)(72)
As they approached the Drowned Cities, Tool seemed more and more alive. His huge frame seemed to pulse with the vitality of war. The hunger to hunt.
The boatman said, “As soon as we make this bend, we’ll be in the city itself. Army of God territory. They’ll want their bribes.”
“You’ve done this before?” Tool asked.
The man nodded. “I have agreements to let me through. I bring supplies in for the captain who covers the river.”
Tool nodded. “How long before they can see us?”
“I’ll be sailing into the canals now.”
Without another word, Tool flipped over the side of the boat and into the water. The boys looked at her, suddenly speculative, started to reach for their rifles. Tool surfaced beside the boat.
“Do not think I am gone. I am here, and I am listening, and I can drown you all. Best not to be hasty in your decisions.”
He disappeared underwater again. The boat rocked oddly and the boatman grimaced. “The damn dog-face must be right under the boat.”
Like some kind of massive barnacle attached to the skiff.
The boatman hauled on his sails and his boys scrambled to pull out oars as they closed on the shore. The boatman looked around the boat, stared at Mahlia. Threw her a blue-and-gold cap with an old Patel Global logo on it.
“Pull that down. You look too much like a castoff.”
“Other people got eyes like mine. Your boy, even.”
“Other people aren’t you. Everything about you screams castoff. You’re the right age, and you look too mixed.” He glanced to where canals of the Drowned Cities were opening before them. “You have no idea how much danger you put us all in.”
They sailed into the canals. From under her cap, Mahlia eyed the city. It was different than when she’d been here last. It all had a dreamlike quality, one city on top of another city. Memory and reality, superimposed.
“The water’s higher,” she realized.
The boatman glanced over. “When were you here last?”
“When the peacekeepers left.”
“Yes. The water here is higher, then. The dike and levee system the peacekeepers tried to install was destroyed as soon as they left. The warlords wanted to flood each another, so they blew them up, and all the drainage projects and hurricane protection barriers with them. So the ocean came flooding back in. All that work to push the water out, and they just let it right back in.”
The place was worse than Mahlia had expected. Old neighborhoods were collapsed on themselves. Waterways made a maze through twisting broken buildings and rubble. Kudzu-tangled jungle and swamped buildings intertwined with brackish pools and clouds of biting flies and mosquitoes.
There were bars full of nailshed girls and drunk soldiers, rifles slung over their shoulders, shouting at one another, smashing liquor bottles. Squatters and addicts watched the river traffic with drool stringing from their lips and red eyes. Thick pythons undulated in the canals, and ravens and magpies circled overhead. Mahlia spied a den of coywolv peering from a window, three stories up.
City and jungle bled into one.
River traffic moved sluggishly. The red-starred flag of the Army of God hung bedraggled from building windows, and the face of the AOG’s general, a man named Sachs, was slathered everywhere. Pictures of him holding up the green cross to his true believers, or wielding a shining sword and an assault rifle while the AOG flag billowed behind him.
His face stared out at the populace, challenging. Even the crudest paintings of the warlord drew Mahlia’s eye. General Sachs had close-cropped hair and a scar that ran the length of his jaw. But it was his eyes, black and intense, that held her. The man seemed to inhabit his paintings, seemed alive within those eyes, and seemed to promise things.
Other people seemed to think so, too. As the populace of the Drowned Cities walked past the warlord’s various images, they made motions of supplication to him. Small gifts of food and flowers and snuffed-out candles were scattered beneath each painting, as if he were the Scavenge God or one of the Fates, but bigger.
His influence seemed to touch every neighborhood. Water sellers and nailshed girls and three-year-old children wore his political colors, and his soldiers were everywhere. In the streets and waterways. Clogging boardwalks as they smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and watched the river traffic. Army of God. Owners of the city. At least for now.
Much like the shotgun Mahlia had inspected, the walls of the city were decorated with the images of previous owners, emphasizing how quickly the tides of war shifted in the Drowned Cities.
AOG colors were slathered over other warlord faces, blotting them out. Other army flags were blacked out or painted over, but some images still peeked out. Mahlia could even make out a few peacekeeper slogans from when the cease-fire had been in effect. IMMUNIZE FOR LIFE. BEAT YOUR SWORDS INTO PLOWSHARES.
Mahlia saw soldiers on a boardwalk, waving them over. They were just boys, some of them as young as Mouse, all of them armed with assault rifles and shotguns. Bony bodies and knotted muscles and scars that ripped across their bare backs and ribs and chests. All sorts of races and mixes, black and brown and pale freckled pink, and all of them as hard-eyed as their warlord. All of them full of the same hungry swagger as the UPF soldiers who had taken Mouse.
“Who’re you, girl?” one of them asked.
Mahlia didn’t answer. The boatman answered for her.