A castoff had no chance going into the Drowned Cities. She didn’t belong here. The warlords had demonstrated that when she and her mother fled the first time. People who had collaborated with China’s peacekeeping mission were public enemy number one. The warlords and their soldier boys had long memories for traitors.

One of the boys was looking her over. He only had one eye, which kind of reminded her of Tool, but this boy’s eye was brown and bloodshot and angry and crazy in a way that Tool, even when he seemed ready to kill, never was.

“You castoff?”

She tried to speak, but fear overtook her. Shook her head.

“Sure you are.” He looked at the boatman. “What you want a castoff for, old man?”

The boatman hesitated. “She’s helpful.”

“Yeah? How ’bout I buy her?”

Mahlia’s guts tightened. What a fool she’d been.

“She’s not for sale.”

The boy laughed. “You think you decide what’s for sale, old man?”

The boatman shook his head. Even though he looked calm, Mahlia could see sweat dripping from his temples, running down his neck. “Your captain and I have an agreement.”

“I don’t see him around.”

Mahlia thought she felt a thump through the base of the boat. Tool, either drowning, or readying himself to emerge and slaughter.

Stay down, she prayed. Stay down.

All the soldier boys were looking at her, hungry and predatory. Their little aluminum amulets of protection glinted on their bare chests. Some of them had a green cross painted on them; others had their general’s face painted there, the same one that slathered the walls, with his black skin like her mother’s and his hollow cheeks and his wild, intense eyes.

The amulets were different, though. General Sachs was still smiling, but whoever had painted him had made him look almost crazy. Mahlia couldn’t tell if it was because he wanted to look that crazy and dangerous, or because the painter just couldn’t paint worth a damn, but when she looked up at the boys, she knew she wasn’t going to ask. It didn’t matter if she thought the general they worshipped looked silly or not.

No one with a gun looked silly, in the end.

The boy looked at the boatman, then looked at Mahlia, weighing his cruelty. His troops all watched, interested. Ready for anything. Happy for everyone to end up dead.

Don’t shame him, Mahlia thought. Give him a way out. Give him some way to not lose face with his boys.

The boatman seemed to be reading her mind. “Your captain is expecting us.” He opened a sack and withdrew a dirty stack of Red Chinese paper money, with pictures of some woman on the front and a tall angular tower on the back. BEIJING BANKING CORPORATION written in Chinese and English.

Red hundreds.