“You’re with TamTam and Stork, then.” Ocho waved to the other warboys. “Hey, Stork! Pook’s gone. You got Ghost.”

Two boys he hadn’t worked with. One of them a little licebiter with castoff eyes and a smashed-up nose: TamTam. The other, black-skinned, tall, and gawky, and older. Ghost liked that. If Stork was older, he might not be stupid. Might not get him killed.

Stork eyed him. “Nice job with the 999.” He paused, looking at the rifle Ghost had brought back with predatory interest. “Nice gun.”

Ghost gripped it warily, knowing what was coming.

“TamTam don’t have a gun,” Stork said.

“So?”

“He outranks you.”

Ghost just stared him down. He didn’t let himself blink or show fear. He just looked back at Stork. “If he wants one, I guess he better find one,” he said.

Stork almost looked like he was going to be pissed, but then he just smiled and shook his head.

“Yeah. Guess he better.”

31

DAWN BROKE STILL and hot and wet on Moss Landing. Rain came down and soaked everything, turning everything to mud.

The place looked almost as bad as Banyan Town had looked after the UPF burned it. If the people hadn’t been puking and lying facedown but breathing, they could have been dead. Some of them were so exhausted from debauchery that they weren’t even conscious.

Mahlia stepped over the bodies. In the gray flat light of the rainy morning, Moss Landing seemed less threatening. No one wanted to be outside making trouble. No one wanted to be awake. She heard someone shouting, but they were far away. Someone else was singing an old licebiter nursery rhyme about being a soldier boy and winding up dead.

The docks were quiet. Rain pattered down on the Potomac, making rings. Rivulets of muddy water trickled around a couple of raggedy piers thrust into the brown river flow.

This close to the sea, the surge of salt water pushed its way up into the mouth with the tide, then flowed back. What seemed like years ago, Doctor Mahfouz had told her that it was a unique environment. In other places, where a river was less poisoned with war and rotting city, it would have been rich with life, teeming with fish and turtles.

Some of those animals were probably there, but Mahlia had heard that the best fishing was always for bodies. People floating down from other parts of the war, headed for the ocean. Some of them dumped, some of them floated there on little rafts. People were always snagging those.

Mahlia hesitated at the docks. One of the people on the water was a woman. She looked up at Mahlia from under a dripping rain hat. Mahlia started toward the lady, but then hesitated. Just because she was a woman didn’t mean she was safe. And Mahlia didn’t like the way the woman looked.