She had a pair of pistols strapped to her hips, and her lip was split wide, raggedly sewed back into place. And her eyes were so cold that Mahlia took a step back. The woman might as well have been coywolv.

Mahlia turned and started away and caught sight of the man she’d seen before. The one she’d taken for an officer when he took a leak at the edge of the woods.

He and his two bodyguards were tying gear down on their skiff, covering it with ripped plastic stamped with old Chinese company symbols. Mahlia even recognized an old banner that the peacekeepers had hung when she’d been young.

DISARM TO FARM, it said, in English.

She remembered the campaign. They’d been trying to resettle ex-soldiers back into the countryside, to give them seeds and land and expertise to become farmers again, and all they had to do was turn in their guns.

One of the boys stood atop the torn plastic advertisement, a shotgun held low. For a second, Mahlia thought she was going to be shot, but then the boy’s eyes passed on.

The woman was still looking at her. She climbed out of her skiff, striding toward her.

“You,” she said. “Come here, girl. Let me get a look at you.”

Mahlia started to back away, and then to run, but behind her she heard new movement.

She lifted her machete to defend herself, but the two boys moved past her, ignoring her entirely. Their faces dripped with rain, but they barely squinted as they brought up their rifles.

“Move off, lady,” one of them said. He had a head like a bullet and dark black skin. His arms and legs might as well have been sticks, but he had his hunting rifle up and aimed. The other boy was moving sideways, getting clear room. He could have been Chinese, but not like her. Not castoff. Some full-blooded patriot, born and raised in the Drowned Cities, instead of a half-breed like her. He had a shotgun.

“You leave the girl alone,” he said.

The woman’s hand eased toward her pistol, but the man called out. “They are expert shots, Clarissa. Move on.”

She looked at them all, and then she turned and went back to her skiff and untied the lines. A moment later, she was in the river, and drifting away. Looking back at them. And then disappearing into gray and rain and mist.

Mahlia looked at them all, surprised. “Thanks.”

The man shrugged it off. “You should go. She is a collector. Even without your hand, she’d be able to get a price for you, and if you had walked right up to her, she would have taken you.”

The two boys were looking at her.

“You castoff?” the darker one asked.