But she kept going, knowing she couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t. Knowing that she was doing exactly what her father had always scorned about Drowned Cities people. They were stupid and never thought strategically. They rushed pell-mell into revenge and bloodshed and war and death, even if it made no sense.

Mahlia remembered her father kicking off combat boots and cursing the Drowned Cities and its thirst for conflict. Stripping off body armor as her mother had clucked around him, cleansing wounds.

“They’re animals. Nothing but dogs, tearing at each other.”

“Not all of us,” her mother said soothingly as she helped him into a steaming bath. “Just because you’ve been here a few years doesn’t mean you know everything about us.”

“Animals,” he repeated. “You only defend this place because you don’t know how good life can be. If you’d seen Beijing, or Island Shanghai, you’d know. In China we aren’t like this. We aren’t dogs tearing at one another’s throats. We plan. We think ahead. We cooperate. But you people?” He snorted. “If you had any sense, you’d spend less time shooting at one another and calling each other traitors, and more time building seawalls.” He closed his eyes in the steaming bath. “Sha. Stupid. All of you. Too stupid to drink water even when it’s given.”

On the second day, the coywolv caught her.

She’d found a new ruin of a town, and amongst its rubble had found some sun-cracked sandals lying in the junk of the place. She remembered the wire and glass and rubble of the city. Her feet were tough, but she doubted she could walk over raw glass.

She sat on the ground and slipped the sandals onto her feet, but their plastic cracked as she walked on them, so she tossed them aside. They were too old, and too sun-broken to be any good. But she spied a plastic jug that looked good for carrying water, and there was some rope as well, and then she’d straightened.

The coywolv was staring at her, eyes like lamps. Yellow eyes as predatory as the half-man’s.

Mahlia’s skin prickled. She slowly retreated, looking left and right. Sure enough, she saw other shadows flitting through the ruins.

Fates. Who knew how long they’d been stalking her? If they were revealing themselves, it meant that they’d already set up their kill.

Coywolv were smart like that. Liked to follow and circle and evaluate, and then they came in on you and you were dead. Sun Tzu would have approved, but all Mahlia felt was a sick fear as she realized the beasts had chosen to attack her in an area of ruins that had nothing but weedy little trees no more than the width of her wrist, and few rubble-pile walls. Nothing to climb up on. No place easy to flee.