Doctor Mahfouz was always talking about places where kids grew up without worrying about bolt holes and what to do if soldier boys came. Places where you lived past twenty. Mouse should have been born there. He just didn’t have the Drowned Cities instinct. He was too nice for his own damn good. Just a sad-sack farm kid who didn’t know how to stay alive.

Yeah. He was so dumb, he saved you, right?

Mahlia hated the thought, but couldn’t keep it from surfacing. Mouse had charged, when he should have run in the opposite direction. He threw rocks and drew gunfire, even though it was the dumbest thing in the world.

Why didn’t you do the same for him? You owe him. If it had been you in that village, he would have done something.

And that was why he’d gone back for the doctor, and all the townspeople, and how he’d gotten himself killed.

Coward.

The word kept running through her head as she stumbled through the jungle, accompanied by the silent, shambling half-man.

Coward.

The thought burrowed into her heart as darkness fell. It coiled in her guts as she wedged herself amongst the boughs of a tree to sleep. And in the morning, it woke with her and clung to her back, riding on her shoulders as she climbed down, hungry and exhausted from nightmares.

She was a coward.

Yellow dawn light filtered through the jungle, highlighting misty humidity. Mahlia looked around at the greenery, feeling sick, knowing she would feel this way until she died. She would never escape it. She’d run away instead of helping the only family she had left.

She was just like her father.

When the peacekeepers finally gave up on their fifteen-year attempt to civilize the Drowned Cities, the man hadn’t even looked back. He’d just run for his troop transport with the rest of his soldiers as the warlords flooded back into the city.

Mahlia remembered the gunfire and explosions. Remembered how she and her mother had run frantically for the docks, sure that the peacekeepers had saved berths for them. She remembered people leaping into Potomac Harbor as the last peacekeeping troop transports and corporate trading ships set sail without them. Remembered those huge white sails unfurling, clipper ships rising on hydrofoils as winds caught canvas.

Mahlia and her mother had stood on the docks and waved and waved, begging for the ships to come back, begging for her father to care, and then they’d been shoved forward into the ocean by the desperate press of others behind, all of them begging for the same thing.

Her father had abandoned her, and now she’d done the same. Mouse and the doctor had risked everything for her, and she’d just walked away. Saving her own skin, because it was easier than risking everything in return.