The tone of his voice frightened her, because she realized that she had no idea what drove the half-man. When they’d been foraging for food together, she could sometimes forget that he was something other than human. And then suddenly the creature would be looking at her with his huge yellow eye, and scarred face, and doglike muzzle and tiger teeth, and she felt as if she was staring into the face of something that occasionally saw her as food.

Mahlia steeled herself. “So why?”

“I have decided I have unfinished business there.”

“Since when?”

Tool regarded her for a long time. Mahlia forced herself not to look away. Finally Tool said, “When Colonel Stern held me captive, he used me to fight. I fought panthers, and Army of God captives. I fought his own soldiers, the ones who ran from battle, or who failed him in some way. Stern enjoyed that. He used to sit just outside the fighting cage and watch me kill his enemies. He cheered a great deal when I tore off a man’s arms. I think that I would like to meet him again, without a cage between us.”

“That’s impossible.”

Tool smiled at that. “And saving your friend isn’t?”

Before Mahlia could answer, he turned and swung off the overpass, dropping down to a tree. It swayed and bent with his weight, leaves rustling wildly. Mahlia listened, expecting a thud as the half-man hit the ground, but she heard nothing. It was as if the jungle had swallowed him into its belly. Disappeared without a sound.

“Tool?”

“It will take two days for us to reach the river,” the half-man called up. “If you wish to have a chance of saving your friend, it’s past time we were on our way.”

28

WHEN MOUSE HAD been younger, his family had all talked with hushed tones of the Drowned Cities’ lawlessness and decay.

His father had sometimes gone there with a skiff full of chickens in bamboo cages, to sell to the city people and to the army soldiers, but his father’s face had always been grimly set when he poled off through the swamplands, and grimly set when he returned.

He’d always gotten the money they’d needed, along with the new hoe or the new barbed wire for fencing their pigs better, but he’d never been happy about it—the going out, or the coming back.

Mouse’s brother said it was because the soldiers shook you down as you crossed their territories. If you looked at them wrong, they’d call you a traitor or a turncoat or a spy or Chinese collaborationist, and just shoot you outright.

They made up things to call you. Anything would do. They’d call you a left-hand dog. Put a bullet in your face and laugh at your body while it floated in a canal.