“How could you be so stupid?” she asked, and then she felt bad for saying it aloud. He might have been stupid, but he’d been kind. It seemed like he deserved some respect, or something. Not this, at least. Not to end up with his face shoved into bloody char.

Mahlia started to try to put his glasses back on, but it was too hard to get them to fit, and it was pointless, anyway. She crouched there, holding the glasses, feeling stuck.

He’d been kind and compassionate, and he’d stood tall for her when no one else would, and now he was just as dead as all the people who’d spit on her and called her castoff.

So what was she supposed to do now? Was she supposed to pray or something?

Everyone had different rites for their bodies, offerings they were supposed to make, but the doctor hadn’t been Deepwater Christian, or Scavenge God. He’d had a little prayer rug that he sometimes got out to pray on at different times of day, and he’d sometimes read out of a book with script that Mahlia couldn’t piece together and that he’d called Arabic, but she wasn’t sure what Arabics did for their dead.

Fire, maybe. Her father said that the Chinese burned their bodies. Maybe that would do. She grabbed the doctor under the shoulders and started pulling, grunting with the effort. Dead, he was surprisingly heavy. A leaden sack, passively resisting every tug.

Mahlia kept at it, dragging him through mud and ash. She grunted and sweated and hauled. His shirt tore away under her fists. She lost her balance and thudded back in the ash, exhausted and defeated.

This was crazy. There wasn’t even anything left to burn in the town. The UPF had already burned everything. There was no way she could build a funeral pyre.

Mahlia sat in the middle of the field, dripping sweat, staring at the dead man.

They don’t even let us die right.

She wanted to cry. She couldn’t even get Doctor Mahfouz passed on to whatever afterlife he was supposed to have. She didn’t know how long she sat, staring at the man’s body. Minutes. Hours.

A shadow loomed.

Mahlia gave a startled gasp. The half-man stood over her.

“The dead are always heavy.”

The half-man scooped up the doctor, and even though the man’s body was stiff with rigor mortis, Tool lifted him easily and slung him over his shoulder.

24

TOOL LISTENED TO the girl as she searched the village, while he dug into the earth, preparing a grave with a shovel he’d found abandoned. He heard her calling Mouse’s name, over and over, and had to stifle the urge to silence her, to remonstrate with her for breaking sound discipline. She was foolish with her grief.

Let the girl mourn, he told himself. The soldiers are gone.