The Drowned Cities (Ship Breaker #2)(73)
“She’s with me.”
He pulled out papers and handed them over to the soldiers. They looked at her, looked at the papers. Mahlia wondered if they could even read.
The boatman said, “I have an arrangement with Captain Eamons.” He lifted a sack, offering it to them. “He will be expecting this.”
The boys looked at the sack, looked at the papers. Looked at Mahlia.
Their eyes were bloodshot. Red rippers or crystal slide. All the troops were hopped up on the stuff to give them a combat edge, but it made them crazy and wild, and suddenly she had a bad feeling about the plan.
These soldier boys, they just wanted to kill another castoff. It didn’t matter if she had the protection of this trading man or not. Didn’t matter if there was some agreement.
A castoff had no chance going into the Drowned Cities. She didn’t belong here. The warlords had demonstrated that when she and her mother fled the first time. People who had collaborated with China’s peacekeeping mission were public enemy number one. The warlords and their soldier boys had long memories for traitors.
One of the boys was looking her over. He only had one eye, which kind of reminded her of Tool, but this boy’s eye was brown and bloodshot and angry and crazy in a way that Tool, even when he seemed ready to kill, never was.
“You castoff?”
She tried to speak, but fear overtook her. Shook her head.
“Sure you are.” He looked at the boatman. “What you want a castoff for, old man?”
The boatman hesitated. “She’s helpful.”
“Yeah? How ’bout I buy her?”
Mahlia’s guts tightened. What a fool she’d been.
“She’s not for sale.”
The boy laughed. “You think you decide what’s for sale, old man?”
The boatman shook his head. Even though he looked calm, Mahlia could see sweat dripping from his temples, running down his neck. “Your captain and I have an agreement.”
“I don’t see him around.”
Mahlia thought she felt a thump through the base of the boat. Tool, either drowning, or readying himself to emerge and slaughter.
Stay down, she prayed. Stay down.
All the soldier boys were looking at her, hungry and predatory. Their little aluminum amulets of protection glinted on their bare chests. Some of them had a green cross painted on them; others had their general’s face painted there, the same one that slathered the walls, with his black skin like her mother’s and his hollow cheeks and his wild, intense eyes.
The amulets were different, though. General Sachs was still smiling, but whoever had painted him had made him look almost crazy. Mahlia couldn’t tell if it was because he wanted to look that crazy and dangerous, or because the painter just couldn’t paint worth a damn, but when she looked up at the boys, she knew she wasn’t going to ask. It didn’t matter if she thought the general they worshipped looked silly or not.
No one with a gun looked silly, in the end.
The boy looked at the boatman, then looked at Mahlia, weighing his cruelty. His troops all watched, interested. Ready for anything. Happy for everyone to end up dead.
Don’t shame him, Mahlia thought. Give him a way out. Give him some way to not lose face with his boys.
The boatman seemed to be reading her mind. “Your captain is expecting us.” He opened a sack and withdrew a dirty stack of Red Chinese paper money, with pictures of some woman on the front and a tall angular tower on the back. BEIJING BANKING CORPORATION written in Chinese and English.
Red hundreds.
“Once he pays us,” the boatman said, “there will be more on the way out.”
The soldier boys didn’t change their expressions. But the lead boy took the cash and waved them deeper into the Drowned Cities.
33
GLENN STERN’S FACE stared at Ghost from the side of a building.
The man was three stories tall, and ten stories up, and he was eye to eye with Ghost, because Ghost was sitting on top of a barracks building by a bonfire with all his warboys, and Ghost was the man of the hour.
They’d gone into an old building and found a whole bunch of old paintings and furniture, broken them up, and started a bonfire on top of the building, choosing one where they could see out across the Drowned Cities and enjoy the view.
It had been a hell of a time hauling the stuff up, but now it was all burning, and the fire was crackling and hissing, and all kinds of strange colored paints were bubbling on the canvas and going up in smoke.
Sergeant Ocho hadn’t wanted to go up so high, but seeing as they were behind the war lines, and seeing as Stork and Van and TamTam and everyone else were begging, he said it was okay.
Stork said the sergeant didn’t like getting pinned up in the towers; he’d been caught with an old squad and ended up doing an emergency jump into a canal from four stories up. Broke his leg doing it, but in the end, he’d come out okay.
Still didn’t like to get pinned, though.
So now they were up high, looking out over the city, with Glenn Stern staring at them, and they owned the place.
Far in the distance, other fires burned, beacons. Some of them UPF; others, farther away, the campfires of the enemy. Sometimes, some ass**le would launch a mortar and they’d watch it arc across, but there seemed to be some kind of agreement between the troops of the different factions that you didn’t mess with each other when you did a rooftop camp at night. Skirmishing was a day job. When you cycled back for R & R, they left you alone, and you did the same. Mostly.