“You will die.” “I guess. I don’t know.” She shook her head, trying to pick through her feelings. “I used to think I was alive just because I kept getting away. If someone didn’t put a bullet in my head, I was winning. I was still breathing, right?” She looked at the blackened land around her, feeling tired and sad and alone. “But now I’m thinking it ain’t like that. Now I’m thinking that once you got enough dead looking over your shoulder, you’re dead anyway. Don’t matter if you’re still walking and talking, they weigh you down.”

“Alejandro saw you looking at them.” “I’m looking at you,” Mahlia said. “That mean you’re dead, too?”

“Mouse took an idle whack at some kudzu as he passed, but his face was serious. “Hell, I don’t know. Why do you care? That was right after our farm burned. They got everyone. Mom and Dad. Simon. Shane got recruited. I saw that. They shot Simon because he was too little, but they took Shane.” He knocked aside more kudzu. “Maybe I was hoping they’d just shoot me and get it over with. I was so sick of hiding and scavenging. I think I wanted the bullet.”

“You call me castoff,” Mahlia said, “Chinese throwaway, whatever.” Amaya was trying to look away, but Mahlia had her pinned, kept her eye to eye. “My old man might have been peacekeeper, but my mom was pure Drowned Cities. You want to war like that, I’m all in.” Mahlia lifted the scarred stump of her right hand, shoved it up in Amaya’s face. “Maybe I cut you the way the Army of God cut me. See how you do with just a lucky left. How’d you like that?”

“She’d survived the Drowned Cities because she wasn’t anything like Mouse. When the bullets started flying and warlords started making examples of peacekeeper collaborators, Mahlia had kept her head down, instead of standing up like Mouse. She’d looked out for herself, first. And because of that, she’d survived.”

“Water sluices away soap and grime, even some of the shame comes with it. If she were to scrub for a thousand years she would not be clean, but she is too tired to care and she has grown accustomed to scars she cannot scour away. The sweat, the alcohol, the humid salt of semen and degradation, these she can cleanse. It is enough. She is too tired to scrub harder. Too hot and too tired, always. At the end of her rinsing, she is happy to find a little water left in the bucket. She dips one ladleful and drinks it, gulping. And then in a wasteful, unrestrained gesture, she upends the bucket over her head in one glorious cathartic rush. In that moment, between the touch of the water, and the splash as it pools around her toes, she is clean.”

“Lock it away,” the half-man whispered. “You feel, after. Not now. Now you are a soldier. Now you do your duty for your pack. If you break, your Mouse will die, and you with him. Feel, after. Not now.”