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an hour. Suddenly, those people ,” she stressed, looking at Claudia, “started gathering, yelling. Eventually they attacked. So we ran for the port. And thank God we did. Thank you—all of you.” She did her best to take in my men with her hands—before they faltered and she ended up pressing them to her chest. “I didn’t know some of us would attack. Those poor living souls.”
    “Those living people targeted us for no reason! There are more of us out there, still!” Claudia argued. “Groups that broke off. If the whole city is like this, we can’t just stay here. In a government boat, no less. We have to go help them!”
    Tom pointed out, “You can’t leave the ship yet. For your own safety.”
    “You guys haven’t heard the news?” Coalhouse’s eye was back in. He sounded sulky.
    “News?” Mártira’s innocent expression told me they hadn’t. “What news?”
    Before I could launch into an explanation, Evola came up behind me. “What’re we looking at?”
    “Look, any of you need medical attention?” I directed my question to Mártira.
    “Yes,” said a voice I hadn’t heard before.
    “Laura!” Mártira cried, looking around frantically at the sound of it.
    Another zombie girl materialized from within the crowd, her arm curled about the shoulders of a young dead boy. At first I thought she was wearing some sort of fanciful circus costume, something from a play or show. It wasn’t until she reached Mártira’sside, the smell of flowers intensifying, that I realized what it was.
    The girl was a walking garden. Flowers and vines had sprouted from within her very flesh, and were looped through hundreds of buttonholes and slits made in her shabby maroon gown for their passage. Once outside they were wrapped around her limbs and waist. The otherwise baggy dress was thus almost grafted to her, stems and thorns pinning the excess material to her body. A kerchief partially covered her apricot-hued hair, but her gentle, blood-bronzed features were readily visible. She might’ve been extremely pretty when she was alive. She looked about fourteen or so.
    “Whoa,” I heard Coalhouse breathe, sulkiness gone.
    “Dog was hurt.” The boy huddled closer to her at the sound of his name, refusing to look at any of us. “He won’t show me.”
    “Bring him.” Even Evola seemed to be transfixed by her.
    “You see?” Mártira said to Claudia. “Our sister knows what’s important.”
    Claudia opened her mouth to continue arguing, but then just shook her head and stormed away.
    “Brief them,” I told Tom and Coalhouse. “And stay with them.”
    We took Laura and Dog to one of the cloth-partitioned makeshift hospital rooms, walking by a few other repairs in process—a dead man’s leg being laced shut, a woman having a pump installed in her wrist for medication. She’d probably get a matching valve in her thigh for drainage. It took a lot of work to keep us going, work that Dr. Dearly had largely pioneered.
    “I need a better address than ‘by the fire hydrant in the Morgue,’ ” one tech said to her patient, pulling a curtain in front of us as we passed.
    Once we were alone we sat the boy, soon to be the latest recipient of Dr. Dearly’s work, on a stainless steel table. There we discovered his hand dangling from his wrist, useless, the bones crushed.
    “Oh God, Dog.” Laura turned her troubled eyes on us. “He never says anything. I didn’t know he got his hand under it. We were separated by a carriage for a minute. When I got to him he’d fallen down …”
    “It’s all right.” Evola started digging about in a nearby crash cart. “We could stabilize it with pins, or a splint. It won’t work, but it won’t do him any harm. Or …” He looked at the boy. “We could cut it off. Might be cleaner.”
    Dog appeared around ten years of age. He was dressed in a patchwork silk jacket and faded blue trousers, with a turban of dirty cloth wrapped about his head. At Evola’s suggestion