Memories of her escape from the Drowned Cities were flooding back. The mobs and the soldiers, the torches and dripping machetes. The cleansing of everything the peacekeepers had wrought during their years of trying to civilize the city and make the different warlords stop fighting, once and for all.

She remembered hiding in the flooded lower floors of towers and apartment blocks, after her mother had been caught. Living in shadows. Praying that no one would notice her as she moved by darkness from one swamped building to the next. Praying that she wouldn’t run across someone in those rooms as she swam and waded and crawled to the city outskirts. Night after night, she lay in darkness, watching troops set up perimeters, waiting to slip past. She’d had two hands then.

And now she was going back.

On the tenth day of her recuperation, Mahlia clambered up onto one of the great vine-covered overpasses and looked toward the Drowned Cities.

From a distance, if you didn’t listen for the warfare, the place could have been abandoned. But as you got closer, you could make out details. Trees sprouting from windows, like hair from an old man’s ears. Robes of vines draping off slumped shoulders. Birds flying in and out of upper stories.

Mahlia tried to imagine what the place must have been like without all of that. She’d seen pictures of the old Drowned Cities, the version from long before, in one of the museums the peacekeepers had been trying to protect.

Her mother had taken her to the museum, wanting to examine what other old things might be of value to foreign collectors, and Mahlia had seen the photographs. But it had all been surreal. Open roads with cars on them. No boats at all. A river that cut through the place, instead of swamping it. A different place. She’d looked at the pictures and wondered where everyone had driven their cars away to. Or maybe they were just at the bottoms of all the canals. Sleeping.

The whole museum felt a little like a cemetery. A place where you came to look at the dead. And really, the artifacts weren’t anywhere near as good as the ones that her mother kept in her warehouse.

“People value history, Mahlia,” her mother said. “Here, look at this one.” She lifted a piece of parchment, holding it gingerly. “You see these names? This meant war. When they signed this, it changed the course of the world.” She laid the parchment down again, exquisitely careful. “People will spend fortunes to touch the paper that these men touched.”

She smiled then. “No one here knows the stories behind these things, so they don’t know the value. To them, this all looks like junk,” she said, and she waved at the warehouse around them, filled to bursting with her mother’s selections.