So they’d been shot and macheted to pieces. They’d been lit on fire and burned by acid.

And their books had burned anyway.

Doctor Mahfouz had fallen to his knees before the torched library and tears ran down his cheeks, and Mahlia had suddenly feared for him, and for herself and Mouse.

The doctor didn’t have any sense at all, she’d realized. He was just like the people who’d kept the library. He would die for a few pieces of paper. And she’d been afraid, because if the one man who cared for her and Mouse was that kind of crazy, then she and Mouse didn’t stand a chance.

Mahlia shook off the memory and called out again. “Mouse? Where are you?”

“Up here!”

Mahlia lifted a flap of old plastic with a fat Patel Global Transit logo on it and eased out onto one of the I beams that supported the house. Three stories higher up, legs dangling in the open air, Mouse perched on an iron spar.

Of course.

Mahlia took a breath. She kicked off her sandals and balanced her way across a hot rusty I beam. Foot in front of foot, looking down at their kitchen and the makeshift surgery, balancing across the fall until she reached a wall of crumbling concrete and its exposed rebar, where she could scale to Mouse’s height with less difficulty.

She started climbing, using her stump for balance, her left hand for gripping, her bare brown toes finding holds as she climbed.

One story, two stories…

Mouse could just shimmy up the vertical I beams, a dexterous monkey climbing with his thin legs and ropy arms and perfect hands. Mahlia had to take the slow way.

Three stories…

The world opened around her.

Five stories up, the jungle spread in all directions, broken only where the war-shattered ruins of the Drowned Cities poked higher than the trees. Old concrete highway overpasses arched above the jungle like the coils of giant sea serpents, their backs fuzzy and covered, dripping long tangled vines of kudzu.

To the west, Banyan Town’s shattered buildings and cleared fields lay tidy in the sunshine. Occasional walls poked up from the fields like shark fins. Rectangular green pools pocked the fields in regular lines, marking where ancient neighborhoods had once stood, the outlines of basements, now filled with rainwater and stocked with fish. They glittered like mirrors in the hot sun, dotted with lily pads, the graves of suburbia, laid open and waterlogged.

To the north, trackless jungle stretched. If you hiked far enough, past the warlords and the roaming packs of coywolv and hungry panthers, you’d eventually hit the border. There, an army of half-men stood guard, keeping Drowned Cities war maggots and soldier boys and warlords from carrying the fighting any farther north. Keeping them from infecting places like Manhattan Orleans and Seascape Boston with their sickness.