Excerpt

Amri hadn't wanted to scavenge the edge of the old city, but the well was dry again and the old streambeds of the high pastures were just trickles of muddy sludge. That meant everyone was on the hunt for water from worse places, no matter they'd have to boil it twice over before it was even safe to pour into the irrigation channels. No matter that any crops growing under that poison rain would taste like metal and turn your insides to runny butter. Better sick than starve, even though both killed.

A hard year for the Rabbit people, when even their patron starved. They'd scratched their living on the slopes above the city since anyone could remember, and the years had swung between hard and harder, but right now the sun was a cruel nail in the sky and the earth cracked and blew away on the hot wind. At the bottom of the well, when they'd let Amri down in the bucket, had been dust and small bones.

Yet there was always somewhere to scavenge, for water. The Clawfoot Pigeon people, who lived closer to the city on one side, had a great metal tank buried in the earth at the heart of their village that held a dozen years of rain, and sometimes they would trade. Remus had gone to them, because his second wife was one of their daughters. In a hard year everyone held onto what they had, but blood bought water—a truth that had become a saying, over the years.

And there was the sea, and days ago Hailfoot had gone with a handcart of cans and bottles, heading down the river to the great salt expanse of it. Salt, but it could be boiled, enough of it saved to keep a few meagre gardens green. And every poison river fed into the sea, but the sea was vast and the poison spread through it until you hardly got sick at all. Drink the river before it entered the city, and you'd be raving, vomiting, on your back with the shivers and seeing dead people. Drink it after it had coursed through that ravaged tangle of broken concrete and metal, plastic and tarmac, and you'd die. It took something as mighty as the sea to conquer the toxins and the heavy metals and the oily rainbow slick of it, and even then the sea struggled. The sea was full of tiny pieces of the old days, said Old Emma, just like all water was. They built up inside you, the more of the sea you drank. You got as old as Old Emma, then parts of you just plain stopped working, you coughed all the time and pissed blood. Everyone knew she'd not see her thirty-fourth winter.

Amri would rather have gone with Remus to the Clawfoot Pigeon and their watertank. She'd rather have gone with Hailfoot and his weird, twitchy boy downriver to the sea, and risk the King Crab people and their hooked clubs and raiding boats. Rather any of that than the city.

Now here she was in the shadow of its outermost buildings, which had already been picked clean by scavengers who knew the ground better. The city was haunted, and ate Rabbits, everyone knew. Some said the ghosts ate them. Some said that it was the dogs, that had their own hierarchies and tribes, and parcelled out the innards of the city between them. Some said it was the rats, that were as big as dogs sometimes, and boiled up from the flooded world below, bristling with the diseases and poisons they had grown resistant to. Amri had a bow and a metal bladed knife, and she'd brave animals, because animals weren't brave. Amri was more worried about Seagulls. This was their place now, and they hated Rabbits coming to steal even the least that was theirs.

She'd argued, back at the village. She'd all but refused, but then she wouldn't have had her share even of the meagre stores they had left. But Amri was a Nothing from a Nobody family. One step above an outlaw. She and a handful of others from the list of the most despised were sent out each alone to gather not water, but fuel. Fuel to go under the constantly roiling cauldrons that turned bad water into less-bad water fit to go on crops, or the steam caught and condensed on the big tarpaulins to make water fit for drinking. Nobody went into the city for its vast sunken reservoirs of poison water, but there was still plenty to burn.

In Amri's mother's day, the Rat people had held this part of the city, and they had been fat and traded metal and wood, and kept gardens atop some of the stumps of ancient buildings. They'd had dances and celebrations, Amri had heard. On festival days you could look down from the hills and see a profligacy of fires strung from ruin to ruin. But they'd been soft, and the Seagull had come upriver in their boats and driven the Rat people deep into the city, where nobody went, or at least came back from. The Seagull, who traded for nothing but only took, except they hadn't been strong enough to stop the King Crab taking from them, and so had left their coastal haunts for easier pickings inland. Amri was profoundly scared of the Seagull. They offered human bodies to their patron, it was said. When the storms came in from the estuary and drove the white birds in wheeling, shrieking flocks over the vast expanse of ruin, the Seagull staked out their still-living prisoners with opened guts and invited their feathered cousins down to feast. Or so people said, and so Amri firmly believed.

But the city always had something to burn, and even though the ancient roads were cracked and broken, you could still wheel a cart down most of them.

"Even you," Old Emma had told her bitterly, "can come back with a heaped load of wood from the city. That is a task that is within the capabilities of even a Nothing like you. Or if the Seagull take you, that's one less mouth in a hard year."

I will just run, Amri had told herself when she set off down the mosaic road towards the city's edge. She'd said the same when she first camped, setting herself into the least space of an old house where the roof had fallen in, and mice fought vicious territorial wars over and beneath the decayed floors. And she'd snared three mice and imagined them pleading with her not to kill them in their inaudibly shrill voices, citing mouse children and elders they were responsible for, mouse dreams they'd had about their futures. And she, cruel and hungry god as she was to them, had killed them, skinned and gutted them, cooked their tiny carcases over her tiny fire and nibbled their bones. In her dreams that night she'd seen little mouse handcarts left, knocked askew and abandoned, heard the wailing of mouse families, and known no pity. If the Seagull caught her, if she fell into the city's carious below-spaces and broke a leg, nobody would wail for her. She was the least toe of the Rabbit.

I will just run, she told herself, as she entered the city proper—not just the vast scavenged ruinscape that extended up the hills in decreasing gradations of density, but that part where the tall bones of the ancient world still rose, the great rusted girders, the crazed concrete sagging in fractured indolence against corded iron cables. Where the ground crunched with tiny sharp pebbles that gleamed in the sun, not that the sun could fight its way down here very often. She had wrapped her rabbit-skin shoes with old cloth three times over, and she knew that she'd need to do it again each morning, because the constant abrasion of the sharp ground would chew into them with every step she took. Glass, it was called. Like the dirt of the hills, like the sand of the sea-beaches. Even the earth of the city had a razor-thirst for blood.

I will just run and never come back, she said on her way into the teeth of the city, but knew she wouldn't. What was a lone Rabbit, after all?

There was precious little on the hillsides that would burn which hadn't already been burned. What there was, they needed. Stunted little hedges whose roots held the fields together. The barriers that discouraged wild dogs and wilder vagrants. Even they were mostly plastic and metal, the bones of the old days. Every hard year was like a plague of locusts as the children of the Rabbit scoured for everything burnable within a rabbit's run of the village. Amri had done the same, when she was a child and it was the village's business to give her an easy run. Now she was grown, no close kin, no friends. To earn her place, she had to put her head in the snare.

End of the first day of scavenging and the little cart was mostly full. There was some loose wood left over from the old days here. The Seagull, and the Rat before them, weren't poor like the Rabbit. They didn't need to send their thin children out for every last seed and scrap. They collected water in tanks high on the stumps where they roosted that hardly needed boiling at all. Amri could creep into the lower floors of buildings and find where the rain hadn't turned everything to rot, and the groundwater hadn't crept its poison damp up the walls. Find desiccated boards of ancient furniture or wall panels, the crackling tinder of books that hadn't degraded yet, sifting rags of ancient cloth. All of it went on the cart. It would keep the fires going beneath the cauldrons. It would buy her shelter and food amongst her own people. Because in a hard year, the Rabbit gnawed at itself to escape starvation's trap. She was its least toe, first to go between its teeth. And she kept telling herself she'd leave, but the thought filled her with misery and terror.