“Yeah, well, you could do all this doctor work if you tried. You just got to pay attention and read what the doctor tells you to.”
“Not hard for you, maybe. I get twitchy just looking at all those letters.” Mouse shrugged. “Maybe if I could read up here, up high, you know? But I don’t like being down in the squat, with the lantern and all that. Don’t like being closed in, you know?”
“Yeah,” Mahlia said.
She had the same feeling herself sometimes. The chest-tight feeling of the Fates setting you up and getting ready to kill you off. It made it hard to focus on a book, or even to sit still. Maggot twitch, some people called it. If you’d seen much of the war, you had it. Some more. Some less. But everybody had it.
The only time Mouse seemed really at peace was when he was out in the jungle, fishing or hunting. The rest of the time he was twitchy and nervous and couldn’t sit still and damn sure couldn’t pay attention. Mahlia sometimes wondered what he would have turned out like if he’d been able to grow up on his parents’ farm, if a warlord’s patrol had never had a chance to kill his family. Maybe Mouse would have been real calm and still, then. Maybe he could have read a book all day, or been able to sleep inside a house and not be afraid of soldier boys sneaking up in the dark.
“Hey.” Mouse tapped her. “Where’d you go?”
Mahlia startled. She hadn’t even realized she’d drifted away. Mouse was looking at her with concern. “Don’t go off like that,” he said. “Makes me think you’ll just tip right off.”
“Don’t nanny me.”
“If I didn’t nanny you, you’d be dead by now. Either starved or chopped up. You need Momma Mouse to look after you, castoff.”
“If it wasn’t for me, you’d have been picked up in a patrol years ago.”
Mouse snorted. “’Cause you’re all Sun Tzu stra-tee-gic?”
“If I was strategic, I would have figured out how to get out of this place. Would have seen everything falling apart and got out while there were still ships to sail.”
“So why didn’t you leave?”
“My mom kept saying there were supposed to be boats for us, too. For dependents. Just kept saying it. Saying that there were supposed to be enough boats for everyone.” Mahlia made a face. “Anyway. She was stupid. She didn’t think strategic, either. And now there’s no way out of here.”
“You ever think about just trying to go north? Sneak across the border?”
Mahlia glanced at Mouse. “Coywolv, panthers, warlords, and then all those half-men up there to hold the line? They’d be picking our bones before we even got close to the Jersey Orleans. We’re stuck; that’s the fact. Like a bunch of crabs boiling in a pot.”
“That’s Mahfouz talking.”
“‘Crabs in a pot, pulling each other down while we all boil alive.’ ”
Mouse laughed. “You got to say it like he does, though. All disappointed.”
“You should have seen how he looked after I pushed up on Amaya. Talk about disappointed.” Mahlia waved the stump of her hand with irritation. “Like if I was nice and polite, they’d think I was some kind of gift from the Scavenge God.” She snorted.
Mouse laughed. “You going to sit there feeling sorry for yourself, or you going to tell me something I don’t know?”
“Is there something to say? Some fish jump out of a basement and I miss it?” Mahlia poked Mouse. “What’s the news, maggot? Why don’t you tell me something I don’t know?”
Mouse looked sly; then he nodded toward the Drowned Cities. “They’re fighting again.”
Mahlia burst out laughing. “That’s like saying the cities are drowning.”
“I’m serious! They’re shooting something different. Something big. I was wondering if you knew it. It’s a big old gun.”
“I don’t hear anything.”
“Well, maybe you should listen, right? Show some patience. They been blowing it off all morning. It’ll come again.”
Mahlia turned her attention to the horizon, studying the wreckage of the Drowned Cities where it poked up above the jungle. Distant iron spires, stabbing the sky. In some of them, beacon fires burned. A haze of smoke hung over the city center, brown and heavy. She listened.
A far-off rat-a-tat of gunfire, but nothing interesting. Couple of AKs. Maybe a heavy hunting rifle. Background noise, that. Skirmishers in the jungle or maybe target practices. Nothing—
The explosion rocked outward. The iron girder of Mahlia and Mouse’s perch shivered with its force.
Mahlia gaped. “Damn, maggot! That’s a gun.”
“I told you!” Mouse was grinning. “At first, I thought they were just dynamiting, right? But they keep going. Hammering away. Some kind of big old army shells or something.”
As if to underline his words, the explosion came again, and this time there was a flare and a rising cloud in the far distance. Lot of smoke and explosion for such a distance. They were looking out fifteen miles, maybe more, and there it was.
“It’s a 999,” Mahlia said.
“What’s that?”
“Big old gun. Serious artillery. Peacekeepers used to keep them. Dropped shells on all the warlords. Used some kind of spy eye to target it, then they’d drop a big old shell right down on Army of God, UPF, Freedom Militia, whoever. Peacekeepers spiked them all when they rabbited, so the warlords couldn’t use them, but that’s a 999 for sure.”
“You think China’s sending in peacekeepers again?” Mouse asked. “Maybe rolling up the warlords for good?”
The idea made Mahlia’s chest tighten. It was her own fantasy, the secret one she sometimes curled up to when she went to bed, knowing that it was stupid, but still wanting it, wanting it to somehow all make sense.
Her father would return from China. He’d come back with all his soldiers. He’d pick her up in his strong arms and say that he’d never meant to leave, that he hadn’t meant to sail away and leave her and her mother alone in the canals of the Drowned Cities as the Army of God and the UPF and the Freedom Militia came down like a hammer on every single person who’d ever trafficked with the peacekeepers.
A stupid little dream for a stupid little war maggot. Mahlia hated herself for dreaming it. But sometimes she curled in on herself and held the stump of her right hand to her chest and pretended that none of it had happened. That her father was still here, and she still had a hand, and everything was going to get better.
“You think they’re coming?” Mouse asked again.
You think?
“Nah.” Mahlia forced a laugh. “Warlords must have fixed one of the guns. Or bought one. Or maybe they pirated something off the Atlantic shipping lanes.” She shrugged. “The Chinese ain’t coming back.”
The 999 went off again. A nostalgic sound. The sound of a war that her father had been winning.
999.
It was a lucky number, her old man used to say. He’d sit in their apartment at night, drinking Kong Fu Jia Jiu shipped all the way from Beijing, gazing out the window at the orange and yellow flares of the fighting, a fireworks display every night. He listened to the guns.
“Jiu jiu jiu,” he’d say. “999.”
Mahlia remembered the 999 particularly, because he’d claimed the peacekeepers would knock the warlords back with their lucky 999s and maybe then they’d finally teach these Drowned Cities savages how to be civilized. The paper tiger warlords would learn that shooting and hatred solved nothing. Eventually, the warlords would sit down at the negotiating table and figure out some way to get along with one another, without bullets.
Her father had sat by the window with his clear bright liquor as gunfire echoed through the canals and he had named them all. “.45, 30-06, AK-47, .22, QBZ-95, M-60, AA-19, AK-74, .50-caliber, 999.” Mahlia knew the many voices of war from her father’s chant.