Tool didn’t complain. He just took her on his back once again, and they swam on. Hours later, they reached the place Mahlia had been seeking.

She surfaced first, climbing out of the water and slipping inside the building. She paused, listening. Praying that it was empty. No sounds echoed other than the flutter of pigeons. No voices. No smell of human habitation. Nothing. No one. Just another abandoned building.

Mahlia returned to the canal and motioned for Tool. The half-man surfaced and followed her into the tower of Mahlia’s memories.

When Mahlia was young, her father and his peacekeepers had dominated the building. They’d lived in profusion. Here, Mahlia had spoken Chinese, like a civilized person. When she was out on the street, she spoke Drowned Cities, but here, she spoke Mandarin.

She had moved and blended between two worlds, and she’d done it easily. She was like her mother that way. Her mother had had the knack for crossing back and forth between cultures and worlds. She could make foreign buyers look at her and take her seriously. Trust that the antiques she sold were genuine. Get them to give her money. And she’d known how to float the Drowned Cities as well, ferreting out the things that foreigners wanted to buy. She could scavenge with the best, and then she could take her prizes to the foreign buyers and they’d seen her not as just another Drowned Cities con artist, but as a respected handler of antiquities.

“What is this place?” Tool asked.

“I grew up here,” Mahlia said. “Lots of peacekeepers used to rent apartments here. The owners had ancestors from China, a long time ago, so they knew how to rent to peacekeepers, make them happy. Make food they liked, stuff like that.”

The door to the apartment had been knocked down, furniture had been chopped up and burned. Soldiers had camped in it, and then some other animals had nested after. Pack rats maybe, from the piles of torn fluff and glittering objects in the corner.

Mahlia stood in the middle of the apartment, remembering. It seemed small in comparison to her memories. This place had been so large, and now the halls seemed short and the ceilings seemed lower. She pushed open another door and found her bed. The mattress was missing. She found it pushed up against a window in her mother’s room, burned and shot through, as if someone had used it to shield themselves from weapons fire.

Home, now torn apart completely. Bullet holes in the walls, shell casings on the floor. The stink of a latrine long dead. A few pieces of art were still on the walls, but someone had painted a green crucifix over half of them.