Mouse looked at the sergeant. “How come you don’t make me kill one of them? You make me do everything else.”

Ocho looked at him like he was crazy. “We ain’t animals! Not like the Army of God. Godboys, they shoot you for no reason at all. They shoot you if you ain’t wearing a patriotic shirt, or if they think you don’t sing loud enough for their general, or they think you got the wrong religion. We ain’t like that. These maggots are our prisoners, now. They try to run, or they hurt one of us, then they get themselves a bullet.”

He shrugged. “But we don’t just go around wasting people.” He nodded out at the prisoners, all lying flat on the ground, shadow lumps that might as well have been corpses for all that they moved. They’d learned that movement got them kicked, so they lay still like stones.

Ocho continued, “Dead maggots ain’t any good to us. They might not look like much, but all those maggots, they’re walking resupply. Every one of ’em. We start knocking them off, we hurt ourselves, too. We gotta keep them alive, get them earning. Maggots like that work scavenge for us, we sell the scrap to the blood buyers, we get bullets to fight the war. Without these maggots here, no way we can take this place back from all the traitors and collaborators and maggots who tore this country up…” He trailed off.

“You don’t get all this, cause you ain’t with us, yet. You don’t think you’re a soldier. Don’t got the feel of it.”

He patted his rifle, then nodded out at the troops. “You got to know that these boys here, they’ll back you up. Maybe they give you all kinds of hell right now, but when the bullets start flying and you got one in the leg, they’ll come get you. They’ll get you back to camp and doctor your ass, even if all they got is a bottle of Black Ling whiskey and a shoelace to do it. As long as you’re still yelling and flopping, they’ll put it all on the line to make sure AOG don’t get their knives on you. We’re brothers. You’re our brother.”

“Doesn’t feel like it.”

Ocho laughed. “You only got half-bars, and you want them to treat you like a soldier?” He shook his head. “Nah. You got to earn that, little war maggot.

“We make the Drowned Cities, you see the real war—that’s when you show your boys that you’re worth calling a brother. You do that, and they’ll never let you down. The Colonel says it don’t matter where we come from before. Don’t matter what we did before. Here, we’re UPF. We back you up right.”