“If I was strategic, I would have figured out how to get out of this place. Would have seen everything falling apart and got out while there were still ships to sail.”

“It’s still a load. If there was balance, the soldier boys would all be dead, and we’d be sitting pretty in the middle of the Drowned Cities, shipping marble and steel and copper and getting paid Red Chinese for every kilo. We’d be rich and they’d be dead, if there was such a thing as the Scavenge God, or his scales. And that goes double for the Deepwater priests. They’re all full of it. Nothing balances out.”

“Mahlia just waited. She was good at that. When you were a castoff, it didn’t do any good trying to talk to people, but sometimes, if you just kind of waited them out, people would get uncomfortable and feel like they had to do something.”

“But then, that was the problem with pretty toy stitches. When real life got hold of them, they always tore out.”

“Save your shaming for the girl, Doctor. If I cared for human approval, I would have been dead long ago.” He turned and started wading into the swamp. “Time is passing. I, for one, have no intention of remaining here for your betrayer to bring back the soldiers and their guns.”

“The Drowned Cities hadn’t always been broken. People broke it. First they called people traitors and said they didn’t belong. Said these people were good and those people were evil, and it kept going, because people always responded, and pretty soon the place was a roaring hell because no one took responsibility for what they did, and how it would drive others to respond.”

“Her father would return from China. He’d come back with all his soldiers. He’d pick her up in his strong arms and say that he’d never meant to leave, that he hadn’t meant to sail away and leave her and her mother alone in the canals of the Drowned Cities as the Army of God and the UPF and the Freedom Militia came down like a hammer on every single person who’d ever trafficked with the peacekeepers. A stupid little dream for a stupid little war maggot. Mahlia hated herself for dreaming it. But sometimes she curled in on herself and held the stump of her right hand to her chest and pretended that none of it had happened. That her father was still here, and she still had a hand, and everything was going to get better.”