“I just said that,” Mahlia emphasized. “You don’t got to worry. We ain’t starving for Amaya. Now you going to help me hunt, or not?”
“Yeah. Okay.” He dropped to the ground and looked up. “Get yourself cleaned up, though. You look like a war maggot with all that blood on you.”
Mahlia scrambled down to the ground beside him in a cloud of clattering rubble. “I am a war maggot.”
“You’re dinner for coywolv if you don’t get that smell off.”
Mahlia reached over and wiped some grime off the boy’s own dirty face. “Fussy little licebiter, ain’t you?”
Mouse spat. “Only when it matters.”
5
AWAY FROM DOCTOR MAHFOUZ’S squat, the jungle lay thick. Trails ran through banyan, kudzu, pine, and palms. The doctor called it a landscape in transition—used to be one way, now it was turning into something else.
To Mahlia and Mouse, the jungle was pretty much the same as it always had been—a whole lot of heat, vines, snakes, and mosquitoes—but the doctor claimed that there didn’t used to be swamp panthers or coywolv or even pythons. No gators. None of that. Those animals were all new arrivals, hot-weather animals migrated north, taking advantage of the new warm winters.
Winter didn’t seem all that warm to Mahlia. She shivered plenty in the dark season, but the doctor said that not so long ago, standing water used to freeze and ice used to fall right out of the air, which if Mahlia hadn’t seen pictures of it in some of his moldy books, she wouldn’t have believed at all.
Ice.
Mahlia had eaten ice a couple of times. Her father had taken her to a peacekeepers’ officers’ club, which had solar generators and power to spare to make luxuries. In exchange for Mahlia’s promising to speak Chinese like a civilized person and keeping herself polite, her father had given her ice cream while he’d sipped cold whiskey, diamond cubes of ice floating in alcohol amber.
Ever after, the clink and freeze of ice was something that Mahlia associated with China. A fairy-tale luxury from a fairy-tale land. According to her father, China had ice for drinking and electric bicycles for traveling; they had cities with towers a thousand feet high, all because they were civilized. Chinese people didn’t war amongst themselves. They planned and built. When the sea levels rose, they built huge dikes to protect their coastlines, and floated their greatest cities on the waves, like they did with Island Shanghai.
“You wenhua,” he’d said. China had culture. It was civilized. Chinese people knew how to hezuo—“cooperate.” Work together.
Not like the Drowned Cities. Drowned Cities people were like animals. They didn’t plan. They fought all the time, and blamed each other for being poor and broken, instead of standing tall. Drowned Cities people were less than animals, really, because they had reason, but didn’t use it.
“It’s hard to believe this country was ever strong,” her father had said, more than once, as he gazed out at the place he had been posted.
The difference was obvious to Mahlia when she sailed through the canals of the Drowned Cities. All the Drowned Cities people were poor and raggedy, while the peacekeepers were tall and healthy. The pictures of Island Shanghai that were printed on the Chinese paper money showed a similar difference: Island Shanghai, tall and gleaming, surrounded by blue ocean, in comparison to the Drowned Cities, where muddy, brackish water swamped every street and ate away at the foundations of buildings.
Mahlia had been glad she was Chinese then, all the way up until her father took a toy wooden horse away from her and she bit him for it. He slapped her then, and said she had too much Drowned Cities in her.
“No respect,” he said. “Drowned Cities, through and through. Just like your mother. Animals.”
Mahlia’s mother fought with him over that, and then he called them both Drowned Cities, and suddenly Mahlia was afraid. Her father hated the Drowned Cities more than anything. And now she discovered she was the same as the people he fought every day.
Mahlia hid under her bed and bit herself for her stupidity. “Mei wenhua,” she said. “No culture.” She bit herself again and again, driving the lesson home. But when she showed her father her bleeding hand, proving that she’d punished herself, he’d only looked at her with more disappointment.
Now, as Mahlia and Mouse padded through the swamps, Mahlia wondered what her father would think of her. A girl with one hand? A muddy war maggot who stole eggs from bird nests to survive? What would he think of her now? She already knew the answer. She might have been half Chinese, but she was pure Drowned Cities. Just another one of the animals he’d found ungovernable.
Mahlia smiled bitterly at that. He could go grind. Her father had run away with his tail between his legs because he’d been too damn civilized for the Drowned Cities. He might have called the warlords paper tigers, but in the end, he’d been the one made of paper. Sure, the Chinese peacekeepers had looked dangerous with their guns and their skin armor, but in the end, they’d blown away like leaves.
If Mahlia had been as civilized as the peacekeepers, she would have been dead ten times over, just getting out of the Drowned Cities. As it was, it had only been luck that had saved her, the Fates putting their touch on her, in the form of a crazy redheaded war maggot who had intruded at the right time and made a distraction.
“Hey, Mouse?”
“Hm?” Mouse was taking his turn with the machete, chopping aside new vines that had filled the trail, not really paying attention.
“How come you saved me?” Mahlia asked. “When the Army of God…” She hesitated, remembering her hand lying on the ground, blood muddy. She swallowed. “When the soldier boys… cut me… how come you made a noise?”
Mouse straightened from his chopping and glanced back, pale brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”
“You didn’t have to. It would have been safer for you to just steer clear.”
“Just stupid, I guess.” He mopped at the sweat coursing down his freckled neck and face and turned back to the vines. “I don’t remember this trail having so much tangle on it,” he said.
“Here. I got it.” Mahlia took the machete and started chopping. Tough weedy vines parted under the sharp blade. When she’d first fled to the jungle from the Drowned Cities, she’d been soft. Now, she swung the machete with expert strength. City girl learning country living.
“So?” she pressed. “How come?”
Mouse grimaced. “Hell, I don’t know. Maybe I was crazy. I still get nightmares about that. I’m running through the jungle, but the soldier boys turn out to be better shots, and they light me up.” He paused. “I don’t think it even was me. Didn’t feel like me when I stood up. I just did it.”
“But why? I was just a castoff. Peacekeepers were gone. No one was going to give you a reward or nothing. You weren’t going to get anything out of it.”
“Wasn’t about that,” Mouse said.
Another nonanswer.
Mahlia slashed through more vines, and the trail opened before her. Instinctively, she paused, examining it for signs of danger.
Sometimes trails went wrong. Auntie Selima’s daughter had blown off her legs that way. She’d followed a little-used trail and ended up in a minefield that dated back to the very beginning of the fighting in the Drowned Cities. The explosion had been loud enough that people heard it in town, but by the time Mahlia and Doctor Mahfouz picked their own way through the mines, the girl had bled out.
Mouse peered over Mahlia’s shoulder, examining the trail with her. “Look good?”
The dirt was hard-packed. Lots of people and pigs and coywolv had wandered this way before. “Yeah. Looks safe.”
Mahlia handed over the machete and wiped her sweaty face as the redheaded boy took up the blade and the lead.
“So?” Mahlia pressed again.
“So, what?”
He was being deliberately dense. “So, it was stupid,” she said. “You just stood up and started throwing rocks at a whole platoon of soldier boys with guns. It did
n’t make any sense. You could have just snuck away, and you threw rocks?”
Mouse laughed. “Yeah. You’re right. That was stupid.”
“So why?”
Mouse took an idle whack at some kudzu as he passed, but his face was serious. “Hell, I don’t know. Why do you care? That was right after our farm burned. They got everyone. Mom and Dad. Simon. Shane got recruited. I saw that. They shot Simon because he was too little, but they took Shane.” He knocked aside more kudzu. “Maybe I was hoping they’d just shoot me and get it over with. I was so sick of hiding and scavenging. I think I wanted the bullet.”
He shrugged. “And then it turned out that they missed. All those bullets they shot at me, and I didn’t take a single one, like the Fates put a hand down between me and them. And then it turned out that you got away, too… Well, you were bleeding out, so there was something to do. And you were hungry, and I knew how to get food. So then I had something to think about, other than… you know.” He shrugged again. “Maybe you saved me, right?”
“Yeah,” Mahlia joked. “You owe me, big time.” She let the subject drop because she could tell Mouse wasn’t going to give her any more, but as they continued down the trail, she still wasn’t satisfied.
She’d survived the Drowned Cities because she wasn’t anything like Mouse. When the bullets started flying and warlords started making examples of peacekeeper collaborators, Mahlia had kept her head down, instead of standing up like Mouse. She’d looked out for herself, first. And because of that, she’d survived.
All the other castoffs like her were dead and gone. The kids who went to the peacekeeper schools, all those almond-eyed kids… Amy Ma and Louis Hsu and Ping Li and all those others… They’d been too civilized to know what to do when the hammer came down. Mahlia had survived because she’d been nothing like Mouse. And then she’d survived again because Mouse was nothing like her.
Mahlia was pretty sure Doctor Mahfouz would have said that Mouse was right to stand up and she was wrong to duck down, but Mahlia was certain that if she’d been like Mouse, she would have had her head on a stick.
There wasn’t any rhyme or reason to it. No balancing of the scales. No reward, unless it was in some afterlife like the Deepwater Christians talked about.
Ahead, Mouse lifted a hand in warning.
Mahlia froze, then crouched. “What we got?” she whispered.
“Dunno.”
Ahead, the swamps opened into a clearing, and then into more swamp, waters covered with cattails and lily pads. Mahlia listened, trying to discern what triggered Mouse’s concern. The buzz of insects. Nothing seemed wrong. Mouse pointed. Mahlia craned her neck, trying to see—
There.
In the swamp, amongst the cattails, something floated. It didn’t move.
After waiting awhile longer, Mouse finally said, “It’s clear.”
As one, they slipped forward, then separated, scanning the rest of the jungle and swamp, but keeping their eyes on the mass of fur and leathery skin that lay in the water.
The land around the edge of the pool was disturbed, muddy banks torn, grasses trampled. Blood spattered the dirt, blackened with age. Many tracks clawed the ground.
“Coywolv?” Mouse whispered.
Mahlia shook her head. “Too small, right?”
“Yeah.” He squatted. “But they’re doggy, for sure, not cat. You can see the scrapes where their nails dug in.”
He sucked his teeth, thoughtful. Stood up and circled the muddy ground. “Uh-huh.” Nodding. “Doggy. Right.” He looked up. “War dogs. Hunters, for sure.”
“How the hell would you know?”
He waved her over. On the ground before him, another track marked the mud, from another kind of predator. A boot print. A good heavy boot, with a solid waffle tread.
Thick soles might make you noisy, but it also meant you could run over anything. Run over broken glass and rusty wire in the Drowned Cities without slowing down, for instance.
“Soldiers,” Mouse said. “Boots like that, it’s got to be.”
“So we got rich soldiers and their dogs?” She felt a chill of fear. Soldiers. Here in the jungle. Close to town. “UPF, you think?”
“Can’t say. But they got boots. If they’re that rich, they probably got guns, too. Not just some wannabe warboys with acid and machetes.”
“But there’s nothing out here. No scavenge. No enemy.”
“Maybe they’re recruiting.”
If that was true, they all needed to run. Everyone in the village. If the soldier boys wanted you, they took you, and Mahlia had never heard of anyone coming back after they got recruited.
“So what’s that thing out there?” Mouse asked.
Mahlia followed his gaze to the huge alien mass, floating in the swamp. “Hell if I know. Looks like a gator.”
“Not with fur.”
Mahlia didn’t want to stick around anymore. The jungle was making her skin crawl. “We got to get back to the doc, tell him about the soldiers. Let people know there’s military around.”
“In a minute.”
“Mouse…”
But the licebiter was already wading in, headstrong and crazy.
“Mouse!” Mahlia whispered. “Get back here!”
Mouse ignored her, wading deeper, pushing aside cattails. He prodded the floating mass with the machete. Flies lifted off the dead thing, buzzing and humming. Matted hair and grime, clots of blackened blood, leathery hard skin.
In the light of day, crawdads were in it, and beetles feeding on ragged putrid wounds. Mahlia saw a centipede-like thing come out of a gash and drop into the water, slither-swimming through the water like a cottonmouth.
Mouse leaned against the thing with his blade.
“Damn,” he grunted. “It’s big.”
Huge, more like. Meters and meters of meat, fur, and rough armored skin. It rocked sullenly, so big that it barely moved, even when Mouse leaned hard. Green mossy scum water rippled around it. Rafts of tiny lilies bobbed up and down. Water skippers fled.
“I do believe we’ve found dinner,” Mouse announced.
“Don’t be gross.”
“It ain’t spoiled. And there’s enough here for us to smoke. Better than scraping for crawdads and trying to snare lizards and rabbits. Plenty to give to Amaya and her new baby.”
“No way the doctor will eat something like that.”
“Just because he don’t eat pig, don’t mean he won’t eat this.” Mouse spat into the water, irritated. “Anyway, we don’t have to tell him what it is.”
“We don’t know what it is.”
“So we just feed it to him. We can call it goat, or something. Or make up some of his Latin talk for it. Deadus pondus, right? Mahfouz’d eat that right up. He loves those big words.”
Mahlia laughed. “You try that, he’ll definitely know you’re up to something.”
“Come on, Mahlia. If we don’t carve it up, coywolv will.”
Something about the dead thing made her uneasy. She scanned the swampy pools, the jungle all around. Nothing but trees, green leaves, and kudzu draping over everything. Deep mossy pools. And then in the middle of it, this bloody leaking thing.
Mouse was smirking at her.
Grind it. She couldn’t be paranoid forever. Mahlia waded in, feeling stupid for her fear. The warm waters of the swamp eased up around her thighs, hot as blood.
“You’ll eat anything,” she said.
“It’s why I’m still alive.”
Mosquitoes buzzed around her as she waded through cattails and algae slime. Together, they grabbed the floating mass. Clouds of flies rose up again, a choking tornado.
Mouse caught Mahlia’s eye. “On three, right?”
“Yeah. I’m ready.”
“One. Two. Three!”
They hauled, straining and grunting, dragging with all their strength. The thing moved sluggishly.
“Come on!”
Mahlia set her feet and pulled. Her feet scrabbled in the mud, heav
ing, pulling—
The thing ripped apart.
Unbalanced, Mahlia and Mouse toppled back into the water. Mahlia came up sputtering, expecting to find herself in a sea of guts and blood. Instead, one half of the dead thing had rolled up, revealing a face, scarred and terrible.
“Kali-Mary Mother of God!” Mahlia gave a startled yelp and scrambled back.
“Damn!” Mouse crowed. “I should’ve seen it before! Should’ve known!”
It wasn’t one creature, but two. Monsters intertwined. A big king of an alligator, and another creature—a thing that Mahlia hadn’t seen since the cease-fire died and the last of the peacekeepers cleared out, all of them running for the docks as the Drowned Cities returned to war.
A half-man. A war creature that only the richest corporations, the Chinese peacekeepers, and the armies in the North could afford to grow and use.
“A dog-face!” Mouse was practically hooting with excitement. “Must’ve been epic ring!” He splashed over for a closer look. “Must’ve killed each other! Dog-face killed the gator, gator killed the dog-face.”
He shook his head with admiration as he ran a hand down the monster’s flank. “Check out those teeth marks. Gator practically tore its shoulder off. Had to be epic ring.”
“Mouse…”
“What?” He looked up from his inspection of the battle wounds. “Ain’t gonna bite. We’ll take the gator. Good eating, for sure. Even old Mahfouz likes gator.”
Mouse was right. The monsters were dead. She was being stupid.
After the initial shock of the half-man’s face, Mahlia could think through her reaction. It had just seemed too human, that was all. One minute it had been a beast; the next, a person.
“You coming?” Mouse asked. He was looking at her like she was some kind of baby war maggot who’d never rolled a dead body.
“You didn’t see its face,” she said.
It was submerged again, but it had been terrifying—beast and human welded together in an unholy mix. Her skin crawled at the memory of that visage.
“If you got no spine…”