The Drowned Cities (Ship Breaker #2)(99)

She started to answer, to try to tell him that everything would be okay. They could buy respect. They could go someplace where no one had even heard of the UPF or the Drowned Cities or the Army of God. Where none of it even existed. Beijing, maybe. Or Seascape Boston. Or farther even. They could disappear from everything that they’d been.

Somewhere they’d find a place, she wanted to say.

But then she looked down at her own hands, her missing right and the bandage on her left, and she wondered the same thing herself. What good was anyone going to find in a doctor girl who had only four fingers?

Finally she said, “One step at a time, soldier boy. We’ll take it one step at a time, and we’ll figure it out.”

They swept up beside the clipper ship and it loomed over them. Someone threw a rope ladder down, and then soldier boys were scrambling up the ladder and climbing aboard. They went up one by one, and then the ladder was in front of Mahlia.

She took a deep breath, then reached up and hooked her arms through the rungs. The soldier boys helped her, shoving her higher, and then she was lifting free of the zodiac, climbing.