Ghost was disturbed that he’d already forgotten the name of the boy who had trained him. Tubby? No… Gutty. Right. ’Cause of his gut. ’Cause he’d been fat, once. Back when the peacekeepers were around.

“Mouse?”

Ghost turned, surprised. The voice was familiar.

Something blasted past him, piling into his friends. They went into the water with a huge splash. Ghost stood frozen, staring at what stood before him. Mahlia. Real as day. Not a hallucination. Not some hangover memory. Mahlia. For real.

“Mahlia?”

She grabbed him and dragged him into a building’s shelter, pulling him close. She was talking to him, saying things, but Ghost couldn’t stop staring at her face. She had the triple hash, right on her cheek, burned in good.

“When did you get recruited?” he asked, and then all hell broke loose.

Mahlia hadn’t expected it to be so easy.

She’d been looking out the windows of her family’s old apartment, just killing time, waiting for dark so they could start moving again. She knew she’d eventually have to expose herself and leave her lair, but not yet. She’d wait, and then she’d find Mouse’s platoon. She’d look for that Lieutenant Sayle and his soldiers. The boys all had call signs, and she could make her way to them. Lieutenant Sayle, Hi-Lo Platoon, Dog Squad. She’d be a runner. A messenger. And if that didn’t seem workable, she’d come up with something else. They were inside UPF lines now. In the dark, with a hat over her eyes, and most of the castoffs long dead, she thought she could pass.

One step at a time.

And then she saw Mouse coming down the floating boardwalk, jumping around splintered bamboo spans—him and a couple of other soldier boys, but practically alone.

She stared.

Was it him? Was it really him?

He had scars on his face, the full triple hash of Glenn Stern, just like she’d burned into her own cheek, and his ear had some kind of brownish bandage on it, but it was him. He had an AK slung over his shoulder, and she had to look at him twice more before she was absolutely sure that he wasn’t just another soldier boy, but no, it was Mouse.

He was there. Right there.

“Tool,” she whispered. “I see him.”

Quick as a knife, Tool was there, looking down. “Only three.”

“Two,” Mahlia corrected. “Mouse doesn’t count.”

Tool didn’t say anything to that. He saw the world differently. But Mouse wasn’t going to shoot them. “I’ll talk to him,” she said.

“Not with those two.”

“If he sees me, he’ll break off.”