“It’s still a load. If there was balance, the soldier boys would all be dead, and we’d be sitting pretty in the middle of the Drowned Cities, shipping marble and steel and copper and getting paid Red Chinese for every kilo. We’d be rich and they’d be dead, if there was such a thing as the Scavenge God, or his scales. And that goes double for the Deepwater priests. They’re all full of it. Nothing balances out.”

“You’d know,” Mahlia said. “My family weren’t Deepwater.”

“Yeah, what do Chinese people worship, anyway? Buddhas?”

Mahlia shrugged. Her father had mostly seemed to worship guns and liquor, though he’d made sure there was a picture of the Kitchen God in their home as well. “My mom was Scavenge God,” she said. “On account of all those antiques she sold. Made offerings all the time, so she could find good antiques that the foreigners would buy.” She eased down after Mouse, using her lucky left hand for grip, her stump for balance. “Don’t worry about the food. We’ll hold back our dinner before we give over to the doctor.”

“Damn straight we’re holding back. I ain’t hunting all day and then getting rib-stuck because the doctor’s feeling charitable.”

“I just said that,” Mahlia emphasized. “You don’t got to worry. We ain’t starving for Amaya. Now you going to help me hunt, or not?”

“Yeah. Okay.” He dropped to the ground and looked up. “Get yourself cleaned up, though. You look like a war maggot with all that blood on you.”

Mahlia scrambled down to the ground beside him in a cloud of clattering rubble. “I am a war maggot.”

“You’re dinner for coywolv if you don’t get that smell off.”

Mahlia reached over and wiped some grime off the boy’s own dirty face. “Fussy little licebiter, ain’t you?”

Mouse spat. “Only when it matters.”

5

AWAY FROM DOCTOR MAHFOUZ’S squat, the jungle lay thick. Trails ran through banyan, kudzu, pine, and palms. The doctor called it a landscape in transition—used to be one way, now it was turning into something else.

To Mahlia and Mouse, the jungle was pretty much the same as it always had been—a whole lot of heat, vines, snakes, and mosquitoes—but the doctor claimed that there didn’t used to be swamp panthers or coywolv or even pythons. No gators. None of that. Those animals were all new arrivals, hot-weather animals migrated north, taking advantage of the new warm winters.

Winter didn’t seem all that warm to Mahlia. She shivered plenty in the dark season, but the doctor said that not so long ago, standing water used to freeze and ice used to fall right out of the air, which if Mahlia hadn’t seen pictures of it in some of his moldy books, she wouldn’t have believed at all.

Ice.