“Do you think we could sell it?” Mahlia asked. “Do you think this could buy us out of here? Find a buyer and smuggle out? If they smuggle in guns, maybe they’d smuggle out us. For enough money, they’d do it, right?”

Tool set the musket down, thoughtful. “Where did this come from?”

“My mom. She sold this kind of stuff. She did scavenge. But only the old stuff. And then she did a lot more of it when the peacekeepers rolled in and made the war stop for a while.”

Tool shook his head, smiling slightly. “It must have been profitable for her.”

Mahlia shook her head. “I don’t know. That was all bank stuff.”

“A bank… in China?”

Again, Mahlia shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“Your father. The peacekeeper. Did he know of this trade?”

“It’s how they met,” Mahlia said. “He collected things, too.”

Tool snorted. “I’m sure he did.”

Mahlia didn’t like the tone of the half-man’s voice, like he saw things she didn’t.

“You think someone would buy this stuff?” she asked again.

Tool looked thoughtful. “Any number of people would buy it. It seems your mother was very good at what she did.”

“Yeah?”

“I see things here that were thought lost long ago. These are the sorts of objects that should live in the greatest museums of the world.” He gingerly lifted up a piece of parchment and studied it. “Some of them once did.”

“So we can sell them?” she pressed.

“Oh yes. You can sell these pieces. The problem is that for every buyer, you will find a thousand others who would cut your throat for the chance to sell it themselves. We are surrounded by the treasure of the ages, and just outside those walls, tens of thousands of soldiers all kill one another over pieces of scrap that aren’t worth a tenth of what’s in this room.”

“You think maybe there’s a way to cut a deal?” she asked. “Some way to bargain with the soldiers?”

“A delicate negotiation, when they would just as soon put a bullet between your eyes. Neither of us is the sort the warlords like to speak with. A castoff and a half-man.” Tool smiled.

“Mouse,” Mahlia said suddenly. “If we can get Mouse back. He could be a go-between.”

“You build cloud castles from dream smoke.”

“But we could do it, right? If the Fates look right on us, then maybe we could do it, right?”

Tool looked at her. Scars and thought. “Do you believe the Fates smile on you?”

Mahlia swallowed. “They got to sometime, right? Got to.”

36

GHOST WAS THROWING UP, head hung over a canal, when Ocho and the LT found him. They dragged him upright and splashed water on his face, and then waited again while he threw up some more, then led him down the boardwalk.

“I thought we had R-and-R?” he said.