“Reconsider, Mahlia. This is not the path you want to follow. You’re distraught from everything that’s happened.” He scrambled up onto the bank. “You need to think clearly.”

Something about the doctor’s approach warned her. Mahfouz was coming too fast, or maybe there was something of the predator about him. Mahlia couldn’t say afterward what warned her, but she yanked her knife out just as the doctor made a lunge for the meds.

She slashed the air between them. He sprang away with a gasp. Mahlia crabbed backward, putting herself up against the dying half-man. She cradled the meds to her chest with the stump of her right hand, keeping her knife raised between her and the doctor.

“Step back, or I swear I’ll cut you.”

The doctor’s eyes widened at the gleaming blade. Horror twisted his expression.

“Mahlia…”

She felt sick in her guts, like dirt, like a worm. She could hear her father sneering at her—Drowned Cities, through and through—but she didn’t back down. “Don’t,” she warned.

Mouse was staring. “Damn, Mahlia. And I always thought I was the crazy one.”

Mahlia wanted to say she was sorry, to apologize, to make it right, but the knife was already between them, and the doctor was looking at her like she was some kind of soldier boy, a monster without morals.

With a sick feeling, she realized that even if she put the knife down and apologized, there wasn’t any going back. She and Doctor Mahfouz stood on two sides now. Pulling the knife had changed everything.

The doctor eased off. “All right,” he said soothingly. “All right. Let’s not be hasty.”

He slowly sat, hands held open and defensive. He looked old suddenly. Old and tired and broken and worn out. Mahlia felt ill. This was how she repaid the man who saved her. No one else had lifted a finger for the peacekeeper castoff, but Mahfouz had stood tall for her. She wanted to cry, but her voice didn’t crack.

“You might as well tell me how to do it right. I’m giving it the meds no matter what.”

“Those medicines aren’t yours to give, Mahlia. There are people who will need those. Good, innocent people. You can still do right by them,” the doctor pleaded. “You don’t have to do this.”

Mahlia rattled the pills in their fancy blister packs. “How many I got to give?”

Mahfouz’s voice hardened. “If you do this, you are no longer my charge. I cared for you as best I could, but this is too much.”

Mahlia felt as if she’d stepped out the window of a Drowned Cities tower, and was plummeting toward the canals. Freefall. Nothing to catch her. Just a hard hit, rushing up.