The Drowned Cities Read Online Free PDF Page B

hasty temper was one of the greatest faults a general could have, and people who were provoked by insults were easy to defeat. Mahlia had done what Drowned Cities people always did: She’d fought without thinking.
    Her father would have called her an animal for that.

4
     
    D OCTOR M AHFOUZ’S SQUAT was tucked into a five-story war ruin. Missiles and bullets had left holes in its concrete walls, and the upper floors were missing entirely, showing where bombs had dropped down through the roof and blown the top to smithereens. But even with all the wreckage, the building still had good iron bones, and the doctor had chosen to nestle his squat in the second story, amongst those solid iron ribs.
    A home.
    When the doctor first took Mahlia and Mouse into his care, the squat had barely been sufficient to hold a single person. Not because the squat was tiny—which it was—but because its shadowy interior had been so filled with moldering books that the doctor was forced to sleep in theopen air whenever it wasn’t raining, all because his books were more important to keep safe than he was.
    But with the intrusion of the castoff girl from the heart of the Drowned Cities and the orphan boy from the torched village of Brighton, the doctor at last admitted that his home was inadequate.
    With Mouse’s help, and later Mahlia’s as the stump of her right arm healed, they laid rough planking across the I beams and expanded the doctor’s floor space. Using scavenged rusty tin and rough-cut plastic, they made a larger roof to keep off downpours. They’d used plastic for the walls as well, at first. It wasn’t like they needed walls for warmth, not even during the dark season. Swamp panthers sometimes leaped up to the second story to prowl, so they’d also cut bamboo for walls and chinked them with mud and straw until they’d made a solid defended space both for people and for even more of the doctor’s moldy books.
    On the ground floor, the doctor kept his kitchen and a small emergency surgery. The kitchen was stocked with dented pans that hung from bits of bent iron rebar. A large pot that Mahlia used for boiling surgical items sat at the ready atop a cylindrical metal cookstove, one of the many that the peacekeepers had given away in the villages around the Drowned Cities. The humanitarian message on the side of the stove read, BEST WISHES FOR PEACE, FROM THE PEOPLE OF ISLAND SHANGHAI , in English and Chinese.
    A little away from their squat, Doctor Mahfouz hadbuilt a livestock house out of carefully masoned rubble, making it so that it stood almost as straight and square as the buildings must have looked during the Accelerated Age, but most important, strong enough to keep out coywolv and panthers. Gabby, their goat, was standing tethered beside the house, placidly chewing kudzu. Mahlia went over to her. Gabby bleated.
    “You’ve already been milked,” Mahlia said. “Stop pushing on me.”
    Mahlia checked the rest of the house. The buckets for washing had already been filled from the pool formed in the basement of the neighboring collapsed building. From that evidence, Mouse was nearby.
    Mahlia climbed up the squat’s log ladder and levered herself through the trapdoor. The smell of sawdust and rotten paper enveloped her, the smells that she most associated with the doctor. Books lay everywhere, stacked and piled, crowding rough-cut shelves, every wall covered. The man couldn’t bear to leave a library alone. Mahlia picked her way around the piles.
    “Mouse?”
    Nothing.
    When Mouse and Mahlia had first arrived, they’d rolled their eyes at the man’s obsession with books. There was no point saving books, unless you were going to use them to start a fire. Books didn’t save you from a bullet. But Mahfouz had stood tall for Mahlia and Mouse, so if the doctor wanted to keep books stacked to the ceiling until theytumbled over on you, or if he asked you to hike all the way to a place he called Alexandria, then Mahlia and