He might have been their dog to whip around, but it was better than what the people who worked the scavenge operation were getting. He was fed and armed, and standing watch was easy work.

It frightened him to think about it. That the captives had been swallowed in that sea of labor, and that he walked free, for no good reason at all.

None of it made any sense. He hadn’t done anything one way or the other to end up where he was. The tide of war had rolled in and swallowed him up, and Banyan Town with him, and they’d all tumbled in the surf. And for reasons he couldn’t understand, he’d broken the surface and managed to breathe, while everyone else was drowning alive.

His parents had been Deepwater Christians, and they’d always told him the world might move in mysterious ways but God had a plan for them.

As Mouse stared across the clatter and roar of the recycling operations with its seething hordes of dust-covered slave labor, Mouse thought that if there was a plan, then it was a cruel and vicious one.

In the distance, gunfire chattered.

He couldn’t tell who was fighting for the territory. Could have been United Patriot Front or Army of God, or Tulane Company, or Taylor’s Wolves, or the Freedom Militia. Impossible to guess. Just more gunfire.

Gutty came up behind him and clapped him on the shoulder. “C’mon, Ghost,” he said. “We’re doing patrol. Guess who walks point?” and then he laughed, because to him, it was funny.

29

MAHLIA AND TOOL reached Moss Landing in the afternoon of the second day. Twice they had to double back and work their way around patrols that Tool sensed, and so their route was circuitous, but eventually the broad muddy swathe of the Potomac River opened before them.

Mahlia had been to Moss Landing twice before with the doctor, but each time she had remained on its fringes while the doctor went into its heart to bargain for medicines from the troops who smuggled black market goods in from the coast.

As long as there was a river, there was transport, the doctor had said. Medicines were smuggled upriver from where the big scavenge companies and their corrupt workers would sell to the troops, and guns moved downriver, magically penetrating the war lines, even though armies and refugees could not.

More guns and bullets for the struggle.

“Why do they keep fighting?” Mouse had asked once. “Wouldn’t it be easier to just stop? Everyone would make more money.”

Mahlia had almost laughed at that. He was basically repeating what her own father had said every night for years.

“They’re stupid and crazy,” she’d said.