“You need better meds. I got something for you.”

“Thought you already gave everything.”

“Maybe if you act decent toward me instead of treating me like an animal, you get treated better, too.”

“That’s peacekeeper talk.” But the almost-smile flickered again as Ocho said it, and the soldier boy waved her off.

In the squat above, Mahlia found the lieutenant seated at Doctor Mahfouz’s rough-cut table, studying an old book of the doctor’s, while the doctor sat quietly and answered the man’s questions about the jungles in his steady voice.

The lieutenant looked up as she climbed through the hatch. “What you want, girl?”

“I need to fix your sergeant’s bandages. And I remember where we had some other meds,” she said.

“Other meds?” the lieutenant asked. “You holding out on us, doctor?”

Doctor Mahfouz looked surprised, but he covered well enough. “Mahlia manages our medicines.” He touched his glasses. “Because of my sight.” He nodded to her. “Go on, then.”

Mahlia looked at the lieutenant. “You want me to get the meds or not?”

He waved her on. “Don’t let me stop you.”

Mahlia went over and crouched in a shadowy corner. Started pulling half-moldy books off a lower shelf. She hated giving away the doctor’s hiding place, but she suspected that the soldiers would have found it eventually, or else forced the information from her or the doctor at knifepoint.

Behind the first row of books, more books were tucked away. These, Mahlia pulled out and started opening, revealing the doctor’s medicine supply. She extracted blister packs of pills from within the hollowed-out volumes while the lieutenant watched.

“And you said you only had a few,” the man said.

The doctor gave a quiet sigh. “It’s all we will ever have. They are very difficult to acquire, and we have little to trade. The sort of men who have black market pills aren’t the sort who care about what we have to offer.”

Mahlia ignored the hungry interest as she went through the pills. She couldn’t read much of the text on the labels, because it was all more complicated than the Chinese she had learned as a child, but the instruction diagrams were made by the peacekeepers for illiterates in the Drowned Cities, so you could mostly tell how many you were supposed to take and what it was for.

She wanted to take them all, but there was no way she could carry everything. She fingered through the blister packs. Black market meds. Old meds that had been hoarded, and new ones the doctor had paid for with great risk and expense by going to the smugglers in Moss Landing.

She took a fistful. It would have to be enough. With that done, she opened another book and found the bottle she wanted. Cloudy liquid corked inside a little green glass bottle, gleaming.

Coywolv scent.