The Drowned Cities (Ship Breaker #2)(91)

Tool studied the man, considering his options, but again Mahlia’s voice interrupted his thoughts.

“Ask him if he wants to give me back my fingers, too,” she slurred. “As long as he’s making promises, ask him if he’s got my fingers.”

42

MAHLIA HAD BEEN watching the conversation for some time. Through the haze of opiates and her own pain, she watched them, faced off against each other. Two monsters. Two killing creatures, bargaining and testing each other.

As the two of them bargained, Mahlia felt an increasing anger. They weren’t talking about saving Tool and Mahlia—not really. They were talking about more war and more killing. Changing the tide of blood so that it would swamp the Army of God, instead of the UPF. And if she and Tool wanted to survive, they had to help. Tool would slaughter and leave bodies in his wake, just as he was designed to do.

She remembered how Tool moved through jungles and tore apart coywolv. A monster. A killing creature. A slaughter demon. She remembered Doctor Mahfouz, what seemed like a million years before, urging her to let Tool die.

If you heal this thing, you bring war into your house.

At the time, she’d thought Mahfouz only meant that the soldiers would come looking for her, that she was putting herself in danger.

But now, as she watched the half-man and the leader of the UPF barter, she thought she saw what Mahfouz had been trying to tell her. She wasn’t just bringing war into her house—her house was becoming a house of war. Mouse was recruited, full-bar-branded, a soldier boy now, no different from any other UPF killer, and if she and Tool wanted to survive, they would join as well.

If men like Glenn Stern and the rest of the grown-ups in this room had a use for you, you could live a little while. But you were just a pawn. Her. Mouse. All those soldier boys who’d been hand-raised to shoot and knife and bleed out there in the Drowned Cities.

Mahlia leaned against the pillar, watching the Colonel and his advisers, and finally, she thought she understood Doctor Mahfouz and his blind rush into the village.

He wasn’t trying to change them. He wasn’t trying to save anyone. He was just trying to not be part of the sickness. Mahlia had thought he was stupid for walking straight into death, but now, as she lay against the pillar, she saw it differently.

She thought that she’d been surviving. She thought that she’d been fighting for herself. But all she’d done was create more killing, and in the end it had all led to this moment, where they bargained with a demon of the Drowned Cities, not for their lives, but for their souls.

“Fight the patriotic fight,” Stern said. “Smash the Army of God.”

But what he meant was keep on killing. If you wanted to stay alive, you had to keep on killing.

Mahlia was done with it. Done with being shoved around and threatened. Done with the bargaining that always said that if she wanted to live, someone else had to die. Done with armies like UPF and Army of God and Freedom Militia, who all claimed that they’d do right, just as soon as they were done doing wrong.

“Ask him if he’ll give me my fingers back,” Mahlia croaked. Her throat felt dry from the drugs and it was almost too much effort to speak, but she managed.

“Long as he’s making pretty promises, ask him if he’s got my pinky somewhere. He gonna sew me back together? He gonna get my hand back from the Army of God? Gonna make it all right?”

One of the Eagle Guards strode toward Mahlia, but Stern waved him back.

“Did you say something, young one?”

Through the muffled distance of opium, Mahlia watched the man crouch over her. He wasn’t as big as his pictures. Not that imposing at all. But then he leaned close, and Mahlia imagined that she could smell death rising from him.

“Did you say something to me?” he whispered.

Mahlia wondered if she would have been frightened of him if she weren’t so drugged, but as she looked up at him, she felt very little at all. He was a monster. A man made powerful because he strung words together in pretty ways. A man who could get his face painted three stories tall, and get a bunch of war maggots to worship it.

Mahlia cleared her throat. “If you got my hand somewhere, then we can do business.”

The Colonel laughed. “You think you dictate for your friend?”

“Nah.” Mahlia let her head lean back against the column. “He’ll do what he does. I can’t control him.” She looked dully up at the Colonel. “But that don’t mean I got to agree, and it don’t mean I got to go along.”

“Even if it meant you could go free? Run on to some distant place? Run to Seascape Boston? Manhattan Orleans? Maybe Beijing and your father’s people there?”

“You ain’t going to let us go.”

“After your friend wins the war for us, I will.”

Mahlia thought about that for a little while, finding her way around the edges of the man’s words.

Finally she said, “No one ever wins, here. Bunch of dogs fighting over scraps of something… you don’t even know what it is.”

For the first time, Stern looked irritated. “I fight to cleanse this place, and revive a country. You have no right to question the sacrifices we make.”

“I bet the guys who started this war said stuff like that, too. Bet they sounded real nice.” She let her voice fall to a whisper. “You know something, though?” She let her voice fall lower. “You know what I realized?”