“He has a cause,” the half-man said. “It makes him dangerous.”

“I got a cause,” Mahlia said. “It’s keeping my head from getting shot off.”

“A worthy one, I’m sure.”

Mahlia couldn’t tell if the half-man was mocking her or not. They kept walking through the swamp.

Abruptly the half-man said, “It seems your brother Mouse has found his own cause.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Look and see.”

Mahlia turned to look behind her. Mouse was gone, disappeared into the thickening smoke.

19

MAHLIA AND MOUSE, Mouse and Mahlia.

She’d been the one who’d always been good at keeping them from getting killed; he’d been the one who’d always been good at keeping them alive. She’d kept them out of the bullets, using everything she’d ever gleaned from her old man about Sun Tzu and warlords.

Mouse had been the one who knew how to dig for ant eggs under a rock, or knew how to go hunting for crawdads. How to catch a frog. They didn’t have anything in common, not really, but they’d been a unit. A tight little unit. And because they’d been tight, they’d survived.

While people were running across the fields ahead of Freedom Militia, she’d grabbed Mouse and held him low while the bullets flew overhead and mothers and fathers and kids and grandmas all flopped in the weeds.

You didn’t rabbit when they had all the guns; you played dumb and you played dead, and you lay with your face beside some bleeding dead woman and wiped her blood all over you and Mouse, and then you lay like the dead until they’d walked right over you.

You lay like stone, with your blood pounding in your ears and your eyes open and staring straight into the sun like the true dead while soldier boys stepped over you and macheted the ones they’d only wounded.

She’d done that. She’d saved his licebiter ass when he didn’t know enough to lie low.

And then, when the Army of God bagged her and she hadn’t seen it coming, when they’d chopped one of her hands off already, and were going to do the other, while they were all laughing, Mouse had been the one who’d eeled up to their camp and started throwing rocks—rocks against bullets, of all the crazy things—and while the soldiers all ran and grabbed for their weapons, she’d run the other way, blood pouring from her stump, but still, alive and running, alive when she would have been chopped down to nothing but stumps and hung off a tree the way the Army of God liked to do with all the nonbelievers.

And then they’d found the doctor and he’d fixed up her stump, and it had all settled. Except that Mouse was an idealist.