Doctor Mahfouz counseled Salvatore. “You’re distraught. Let Mahlia take the infant. At least for a little while. We still must arrange for your daughter. She’ll need your rites to send her on. I don’t know the Deepwater prayers.”

The man continued glaring at Mahlia, but some of the rage was draining away. Maybe later, he’d have some fight, but now, he was just sad.

“Here.” Mahlia inched forward and eased the baby from his hands, not looking him in the eye, not challenging him. When the baby was in her arms, she bundled it up. With a last glance back at the dead girl, Mahlia hustled the baby down through the trapdoor in the floor.

There was a whole crowd waiting below.

People backed away as Mahlia came down the bamboo ladder using her left hand to catch the rungs while she cradled the baby in her right arm. Minsok and Auntie Selima, and Reg and Tua and Betty Fan, Delilah and Bobby Cross, and a bunch more, all of them caught in the act of lingering, heads cocked up and listening to the tragedy taking place above.

“Tani’s dead,” Mahlia said as she reached the bottom of the ladder. “If that’s what you’re wondering.”

Everyone except Auntie Selima looked at her as if it were her fault. A ripple of warding went through the crowd, people touching blue glass Fates Eyes, or kissing green prayer beads, lots of motions to push off bad luck. Mahlia pretended she didn’t see. She folded a triangle of blanket over the infant’s face to shade it, and pushed through the crowd.

Out from under the squat, the sun glared down on her. Mahlia made her way down a weedy trail, heading for Amaya’s place. Crumbled buildings loomed on either side of her, cracked sentries robed in jungle growth. Trees sprouted from their crowns and kudzu draped over their slumped shoulders. Birds clustered in the heights, making mud nests, flying out of empty window eyes, chattering and fluttering, sending down droppings on the unwary.

From amongst the green and leafy faces, more people peered out, watching Mahlia pass, families who lived on the old buildings’ upper floors while they kept the ground for chickens and ducks and goats that ran wild during the day and were penned at night, keeping coywolv and panthers from getting at them.

All along the lower walls of the buildings, the tags and colors of various warlord factions were splashed, painted scrawls competing with one another—Army of God, Tulane Company, Freedom Militia—evidence of the armies that had controlled and taxed and recruited in Banyan Town over the years.