Mouse had felt bad that his father needed to kiss soldier boots just to get the few things that they couldn’t make themselves or get from a merchant on his sales circuit. He’d also been secretly glad he never had to go himself.

Mahlia had her own stories of the Drowned Cities, from when she’d grown up there. Her stories and Mouse’s father’s were as different as night and day.

Mahlia talked about the city’s great rectangular reflecting pool that stretched more than a mile, and the vast marble palace that overlooked it with its great high dome where the peacekeepers ran their administration. She talked of shaobing sellers who sold their sweet roasted breads to the peacekeepers. She told of company offices and clipper ships in the harbors and biodiesel rafts running the canals, jostling through floating markets that sprang up every day as farmers like his father poled their way into the city to sell. She told of green bok choy, bitter melon, red pomegranates, long pork bodies hung above the water, fresh and clean from slaughter.

But that had all been peacekeeper territory. The rules had run different in her part of the city, where the Chinese intervention had pushed the warlords out. Her life sounded like heaven to Mouse, at least until China got sick of trying to make everyone get along, and took its peacekeepers home, and let the Drowned Cities get back to its business of killing.

Regardless, Mouse’s impressions of the Drowned Cities were all secondhand. His life had been made up of his family’s flooded fields and their little home that his father had built in the second story of an old redbrick ruin. His life had been defined by planting times, and getting a mule to till the mud when the rains stopped, and thinking that if they made enough money, they might get a big old water buffalo like the Sims had, and then life would be good and easy.

A farm boy, Mahlia had called him. Just a silly little licebiter farm boy who didn’t know squat about the city.

Mouse thought about that as he stood atop a crumbling ten-story building, with a machete and a couple bottles of acid dangling from his belt, surveying his territory for Army of God infiltrators.

Now, he was more Drowned Cities than the girl who had come out of them, but he had to admit that the place looked like nothing he’d imagined.

He’d expected the city to look more… dead.

Instead, he surveyed miles of ancient buildings and swamped streets turned into canals. Networks of algae-clogged emerald waterways were dotted with lily pads and the stalks of white lotus flowers. Block after block of buildings and apartments were swallowed up to their second stories and sometimes higher, like the whole city had suddenly wandered off and decided to go wading in the ocean.