“He dies, you die,” one of them muttered.

Mahlia couldn’t tell if it was Soa or one of the others, but the wounded boy reacted to the challenge. “You heard them,” he grunted. “Get back. Let the doctors do their thing.”

Mahlia knelt down and began swabbing out the wound, plucking bits of fabric from torn brown flesh, inspecting to see if his broken ribs looked as if they had damaged his internal organs.

The boy didn’t flinch as she probed. The only evidence of his pain was that sometimes his breath would hold as she dug deep. He stared straight ahead with a fixed expression of contempt. She squeezed blood out of her rag, swabbed the wounds again.

What a fool she had been. Of course the monster had been hunted. There’d been boot and dog prints all over that place. The creature hadn’t come from nowhere. It had come out of the Drowned Cities, and the soldiers had followed. In hindsight, it made perfect sense.

“Don’t look like a pig did this,” she said.

The wounded soldier boy’s gaze focused on her for the first time. Gold-flecked green eyes, glinting violence. A face sculpted by war. Hard. “If I say it was pig, it was pig.”

Mahlia dropped her eyes. It wasn’t worth fighting over. Boys like this had seen too much blood to care one way or the other if they spilled a little more. Antagonizing them was stupid.

“Problem, Sergeant Ocho?”

The voice was soft, but it made Mahlia’s skin scrawl. The lieutenant was looking at them. Pale skin, pale hair, gray empty eyes. She’d thought he looked like a corpse at first because he was so pale, and then like an insect, because of his long, thin body and limbs. But suddenly Mahlia knew what he was: coywolv. Pure blood and rust coywolv. A predator. Deadly and smart.

Sayle’s gray eyes lingered on her. “Anything I need to be aware of?”

Ocho glanced at Mahlia dismissively. “Nothing here, Lieutenant.”

“You let me know.”

“Nah. Castoff knows her place.”

Lieutenant Sayle went back to his moldy maps and his murmured instructions to the other soldier boys, and Mahlia let out her breath. She went back to work, wishing she dared hurry.

As she plucked out leaves and debris from the wounds, she couldn’t help thinking of the meds just overhead, up in the doctor’s squat. The soldiers hadn’t found them—yet. The doctor kept them hidden in oiled leather wrappings, tucked inside hollowed-out books. Just more books among the many. But they were there. The antibiotics that could buy Mouse’s freedom from the dying half-man. If she could just get to the damn things.

The doctor joined her with a needle and catgut. His eyes were bad, even with his jury-rigged eyeglasses. He had to lean close to study the wound.