Four massive, deep parallel gashes cleaved across his chest, tearing his clothes and shearing deep through brown flesh. The white cage of his ribs showed amid the red. Mahlia held her hand over the torn flesh, unwillingly measuring the size of the claw that had dealt the blow.

Mahlia felt sick. It all made sense.

She knew why these soldier boys had come. She knew what they sought, and she knew, too, that if they found it, Mouse would surely die.

8

“OUR FRIENDS TELL US they encountered a wild boar,” Doctor Mahfouz said.

It was a stupid lie. No boar could do that. Only a monster. Only a half-man. And Mouse was trapped with that creature, and if Mahlia didn’t get him free, he was going to die, and if she didn’t get free of these soldiers and find some way to get the meds from Doctor Mahfouz—

“Mahlia!”

She startled from her mesmerized staring at the soldier’s wounds. Mahfouz repeated himself. “I have my tools boiling. If you’ll wash your hands, I’ll need you for the cleaning and stitching.”

Mahlia hurried to the boiling water, feeling numb. The soldiers were everywhere. She snuck glances at them, studying her enemies as she cleaned herself.

They were a raggedy bunch. The kind her father used to scoff at, all beat-up equipment and missing teeth and acid-burned faces, but their guns had bullets and their blades gleamed with razor edges, and they were everywhere. Walking the perimeter, pillaging the doctor’s squat, stalking out on patrol. They lit campfires and hauled ancient plastic jugs filled with water from the basement pool next door, and stacked looted piles of everything from rice to dead chickens on the dirty concrete. It looked like they were shaking down the entire village.

A tall black-skinned boy with piercing eyes directed a squad of three in gathering wood and starting a bonfire. Kill scars slashed his bicep, nine enemies ticked off, the way the doctor checked off his medicine inventory.

Mahlia started to count kill scars on the other soldiers but gave up. There were too many; they must have had more than two hundred kills. Even the youngest of them, the little licebiters who were only allowed to carry hydrochlor and machetes, had kills. And the oldest, like the lieutenant and the wounded soldier boy with his ribs opened up, had more than a dozen.

“What we want to do with this?” a soldier called out. Mahlia looked up at the slurred voice. A machete cut had cleaved the soldier’s jaw and scarred his face all the way up to the eye. But what drew Mahlia’s gaze was his prize, a goat he was leading into their midst.

With a start, Mahlia realized it was Gabby, the doctor’s goat. “You can’t—” Mahlia started to object, before she shut herself up.