Still, it irritated him. She had no discipline. If they were to march north together, she would be a liability.

Leave her, then.

But he didn’t, and Tool wondered at it. It was time to move. Past time. He could sense more and more eyes returning. He wanted to be well clear of the village by nightfall. And yet still Mahlia searched, calling Mouse’s name, turning dead charred bodies and digging through burn-hollowed buildings, and still Tool lingered with her.

Eventually, Mahlia stumbled back to where Tool was lowering the doctor into his grave.

“Maybe they buried Mouse,” she said.

Tool shook his head. “No. These ones do not waste effort on such niceties.”

The girl looked for a moment as if she was going to cry, but then she mastered herself, and helped him move the earth back over the doctor’s body, filling the grave. Tool went and found large chunks of concrete lying in the blackened rubble and piled them over the grave, moving slowly, testing his strength against his memories of what he should have been able to carry.

He moved the last of the rubble into place.

“Will that keep the coywolv out?” Mahlia asked, looking at the pile of concrete and stones.

“It’s more than anyone has given me or mine,” Tool said sharply. He almost smiled when she flinched at his words.

Humans were so precious about their dead. When his own people died on distant battlefields, no one cared to gather them or bury them. If you were lucky, you were present to hear their stories, and if not, you told their stories after the battle. But you did not linger like this.

Human beings lingered. It made them vulnerable.

The girl stood, staring at the pile of rubble. Her face was smeared with mud and blood and ash. Just another bit of debris in the wreckage of war. Just like all the other children of all the other wars that Tool had ever fought.

If she had been born in another place, during another time, he supposed she might have been the sort of girl who concerned herself with boyfriends and parties and fashionable clothes. If she had lived in a Boston arcology or a Beijing super tower, perhaps. Instead, she carried scars, and her hand was a stump, and her eyes were hard like obsidian, and her smile was hesitant, as if anticipating the suffering that she knew awaited her, just around the corner.

A little ways off, a dog was picking through the ashes, hunting for prizes. It started to nip and tear into a dead goat. Finally succeeded in ripping out the goat’s intestines. Another mongrel approached, teeth bared. It snarled, and the first sped off with its prize of guts.

The girl watched.

“That was Reg’s dog,” she said. And then she said, “That was his goat, too.”