Paolo Bacigalupi - The Drowned Cities

Mahlia shook off the memory and called out again. “Mouse? Where are you?”

“Up here!”

Mahlia lifted a flap of old plastic with a fat Patel Global Transit logo on it and eased out onto one of the I beams that supported the house. Three stories higher up, legs dangling in the open air, Mouse perched on an iron spar.

Of course.

Mahlia took a breath. She kicked off her sandals and balanced her way across a hot rusty I beam. Foot in front of foot, looking down at their kitchen and the makeshift surgery, balancing across the fall until she reached a wall of crumbling concrete and its exposed rebar, where she could scale to Mouse’s height with less difficulty.

She started climbing, using her stump for balance, her left hand for gripping, her bare brown toes finding holds as she climbed.

One story, two stories…

Mouse could just shimmy up the vertical I beams, a dexterous monkey climbing with his thin legs and ropy arms and perfect hands. Mahlia had to take the slow way.

Three stories…

The world opened around her.

Five stories up, the jungle spread in all directions, broken only where the war-shattered ruins of the Drowned Cities poked higher than the trees. Old concrete highway overpasses arched above the jungle like the coils of giant sea serpents, their backs fuzzy and covered, dripping long tangled vines of kudzu.

To the west, Banyan Town’s shattered buildings and cleared fields lay tidy in the sunshine. Occasional walls poked up from the fields like shark fins. Rectangular green pools pocked the fields in regular lines, marking where ancient neighborhoods had once stood, the outlines of basements, now filled with rainwater and stocked with fish. They glittered like mirrors in the hot sun, dotted with lily pads, the graves of suburbia, laid open and waterlogged.

To the north, trackless jungle stretched. If you hiked far enough, past the warlords and the roaming packs of coywolv and hungry panthers, you’d eventually hit the border. There, an army of half-men stood guard, keeping Drowned Cities war maggots and soldier boys and warlords from carrying the fighting any farther north. Keeping them from infecting places like Manhattan Orleans and Seascape Boston with their sickness.

To the south and east, jungle gave way to salt swamp, and finally, Drowned Cities proper. Far off in the hazy distance, the sea gleamed.

Mahlia stood tall atop the gutted ruin, squinting in the bright light. Iron burned under her feet and the sun beat on her dark brown skin. It was a good time to be lying low, out of the burn, but here Mouse perched, pale and freckled, staring across the jungles. Skinny little licebiter. Red-haired and skin-roasted, with gray-blue eyes as twitchy as any war maggot she’d ever seen. Not saying anything. Just staring out at the jungle. Maybe looking toward where his family used to have a farm, and where maybe he’d been happy before the soldier boys rolled through and took it all away.

Mouse said his full name was Malati Saint Olmos, like his mother had been trying to make good with the Rust Saint and the Deepwater Christians at the same time. Splitting the difference for luck. But Mahlia had only ever called him Mouse.

Mouse glanced over as she dropped down beside him. “Damn, maggot, you got blood all over you,” he said.

“Tani died.”

“Yeah?” Mouse looked interested.

“Bled right out,” Mahlia said. “Might as well have stuck a knife in her. Baby ripped her inside out.”

“Remind me not to get knocked up,” Mouse said.

Mahlia snorted. “Too true, maggot. Too true.”

Mouse studied her. “So why you look so down?” he asked. “You didn’t even like that girl. She was always in your face about being castoff.”

Mahlia grimaced. “Amaya and old man Salvatore put the blame on me. Said I was bad luck. Said I put the Fates Eye on her, like on Alejandro’s goats.”

“Alejandro’s goats?” Mouse laughed. “That wasn’t no Fates Eye. That was goes-around-comes-around, coywolv-scent-and-Alejandro-deserved-it is what that was.”

Goes-around-comes-around. Mahlia almost smiled at that.

The scent had come from a coywolv dissection that she’d helped Doctor Mahfouz perform; he was interested in hybrids and wanted to know more about this creature that no biology book of the Accelerated Age had ever discussed.

Mahfouz claimed the coywolv had evolved to fill niches that had opened up in a damaged and warming world—all the size and cooperation of a wolf, all the intelligence and adaptability of a coyote. Coywolv had come loping down out of Canada’s black winter darkness and then just kept spreading.

Now they were everywhere. Like fleas, but with teeth.

When Mahlia and Mahfouz had cut out the female’s scent sack, he’d warned her about it, that they should bottle the scent and keep it careful, and wash thoroughly afterward. Which had been all Mahlia needed in order to know that she had something powerful in her hands.

With Mouse, she’d hatched a plan. It hadn’t taken much, and suddenly, Alejandro—who’d been all up on her about being a castoff and not worth anything except as a nailshed girl—had his entire herd slaughtered.

“Anyway,” Mouse said, “how were we supposed to know the coywolv would figure out how to open the gate?”

Mahlia laughed. “That was purely unnatural.”

And it was. Coywolv were scary that way. Smarter than you wanted to believe. When Mahlia had seen the ropes of strewn guts and the last few patches of goat fur in the morning, she’d been as amazed as anyone. She’d been aiming to give the dumb farmer a scare, and she’d gotten a thousand times that.

Goes-around-comes-around to the nth .

“Eh.” Mouse made a face. “He deserved it. All talking about how you weren’t good for nothing but a nailshed girl. All that Chinese castoff stuff. He barely looks at you now. You put the fear of the Fates in him good.”

“Yeah. I guess.” Mahlia picked at the rust of the I beam. Peeled off a flake as long as her pinky. “But now with Tani, it means all his whispering about me carries weight. It was the first thing Salvatore said right after Tani died.”

Mouse snorted. “They’d blame a castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and they’d still blame you.”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“Maybe?” Mouse looked at her incredulously. “For sure. They’re just pissed you actually stood up for yourself. Mahfouz can talk peace and reconciliation all he wants, but if you don’t stand tall, no one gives you respect.”

Mahlia knew he was right. Alejandro wouldn’t have let up on her if she hadn’t scared him off. For a little while, she’d been able to walk tall and not feel afraid, thanks to that stunt with the coywolv scent. But at the same time, now she had a cloud of distrust hanging over her, and Doctor Mahfouz didn’t let her into his medicines without supervision. Goes-around-comes-around whipping back at her.

She grimaced. “Yeah, you’re right. It doesn’t matter what I do. End of the day, I’m still a castoff. They either hate me for being weak or hate me for standing tall. Can’t win that fight.”

“So what’s really eating you?”

“Salvatore said something else, too.” She held up the stump of her right hand, with its puckered and mottled stub of brown skin folded over. “He said Tani would still be alive if the doctor had more hands to help.”

“Yeah? Think he’s right?”

“Probably.” Mahlia spat over the edge. Watched her saliva do cartwheels to the ground. “Me and the doctor work good together, but a stump ain’t no hand.”

“If you want to complain about what you got, you can always go back and ask the Army of God to take your lucky left. They’ll finish the job.”