I’d not hardly opened my eyes and I was throwing up what little was inside me. My head swirled, and I clutched the mud as if I could stop the earth from moving. I felt hands on me, stroking the hair from my eyes. I was wriggling around and shivering, my skin all thorny and pricked.

“He’s burning up,” Sal yelled, his voice piercing through the blur.

The pain howled in my arm, and I reached slippery fingers to where the nail had worked its way deep.

Eyes closed. Eyes open. It didn’t matter. My guts twitched and I heaved again, and not a single drop squeezed out.

In a different world, I could hear the ramp cranking down amid a stampede of boots and voices. Then the smell of old leather filled me with nausea as hands grappled hold of my shoulders and grabbed at my feet.

“How many more days we got to keep them?” said the woman at my legs, her fingers sharp on my ankles.

“I quit counting,” the voice right above me shot back, and the sound vibrated through me as the pirate woman sank my head against her chest. Her breath reeked like smoke she’d swallowed a thousand years prior. “Flip him,” she said. “He’s gonna lose his lunch.”

Lunch.

The word jabbed at me as they turned me facedown and rushed me up the ramp. And I could almost taste burned corn and warm water, feel the breeze atop a finished forest. Me and Pop and a meal fit for kings. My old man trading me kernels so as to double my rations. And if I died now, then there’d be no one to go looking for him. No one to care.

In the distance there was music, a guitar stopping and starting and the sound of women singing. I strained my ears to listen. Blinked my eyes open.

I was stretched on a lumpy cot beneath a corrugated ceiling, little bits of sky poking through the metal, revealing the pink of a sun giving up or a sun coming back.

I shivered. Ran my hands on my tender skin. Naked. I clutched my stomach and it felt swollen and sticky. I tried to raise up my head but a hand eased me back.

“Rest,” the girl said.

It was her. Alpha. The one who’d plugged me with the nail in the first place. I struggled against her and felt at my arm. The wound was bandaged now, the skin puffy.

“Pulled it out,” Alpha said as I squinted up at her. “Can’t have you dying on us.”

“Shouldn’t have shot me, then,” I whispered, feeling a searing pain up the back of my skull.

“You tried to shoot me first, bud. Remember?”

She swabbed a damp cloth at my chest and I tensed as the water dripped and tickled. I remembered how this girl had looked with the baby on her hip — like someone who hadn’t had all the sweetness beat out of her. And then the pain came tearing at my eyeballs again, and I blacked out hard and cold.

Went on like this for hours. Rolling back and forth on the cot, coming to, then passing out again. The voices quivering in the distance, singing and laughing. And Alpha returning to bathe me and check on my wound.

The holes in the ceiling became plugged with night, then turned pale with morning. And I didn’t think of my pals down in the mud pit. Not even once.

I’d been left alone and was drowsy and spent when the door came open and a new girl came in. She pulled a sheet across me and sat beside me on the cot.

“Alpha tells me you’re a tree builder,” the girl said. She looked young, and much too small for a pirate.

“Used to be,” I muttered, turning away from her. “Lost all my tools.”

“I don’t think it’s the tools that matter. Either you are something or you’re not.”

I stayed silent.

“Let me see your hands,” she said, not giving me much choice in the matter. She studied my fingertips, felt at my palms.

“I want you to build something for us,” the girl said, looking satisfied. “To finish something.”

I tried to sit up on the cot but was too weak, so I just blinked at her. She was handsome, in a stern sort of way. Her braided hair was blond, and cleaner than it had any right to be in a town so full of filth.

“Who the hell are you?” I said.

“You can call me Jawbone. Though most here call me Captain.”

“Thought Alpha was in charge.”

“Alpha answers to me.”

“You don’t look much like a captain.”

She smiled, all patient and shit. I started to say something else but she cut me off.

“You should feel honored. Your work will leave quite the legacy.” The girl spoke smart, like she’d been schooled or something, not grown up here south of the forty.

“You’ll have to excuse me not giving a damn,” I said.

“I imagine you give a damn about one thing. Yourself.”

“You can imagine all you want.”

“If you build for us, then you’ll go free.”

I stopped cold at that, felt my guard slip.

“Another few days and King Harvest will be here,” she went on. “You can be part of our trade with him. Or not.”

Build or be traded. Easy enough choice.

“I got a friend, though,” I said, surprising myself with the word. “Little fat kid, down in your pit.”

“You can take my terms or reject them. But they’re not to be altered.”

“Then you’d better let me sleep,” I told her. “I’ll start building once the heat wears down.”

“I’m sorry about your friend,” the girl said, standing. “I’d like nothing more than to free all of them.”

“So why don’t you?”

“Because King Harvest requires we meet our quota. One way or another.”

At sunset, I was strong enough to stand, and I took to the walkways with Alpha on one side of me and Jawbone on the other.

We worked our way wordlessly through Old Orleans, pausing only when I needed to rest, my arm still swollen and aching, my whole body drained to its core. I’d lean up on the metal railing and study the strange, dustless sky or examine the foundations of buildings that had once stood tall. The brown water sat stagnant below us, filling the air with a dampness as sour as it was soft.

The pirate women gazed at me as I passed them, some of them winking or smiling, their faces blurring into one. Jawbone walked with her mouth stern and the women gave way as their captain hustled by. But Alpha joked with her compadres, slapping at their outstretched hands.

In the distance, I heard generators growl and the music started again, guitars crashing and drums surging and each one fighting the other for control.

“Here we are,” Jawbone said finally. We were right in the middle of the city and on the edge of a clearing, an empty stretch of concrete and mud. And in the middle of that clearing was what they’d brought me to see.

I stopped dead and felt dizzy just trying to take in the sight of it.

It was incredible work. Stunning. Even though the years had caked everything in rust.

A low canopy of copper ferns mingled with cypress. Palm leaves, carved from tin, dangled from crooked spokes. The shortness gave the forest a softness, a sweetness I’d rarely considered, always striving for the biggest, tallest trees, always climbing as high as the scaffold would take me. But the lack of height had another purpose. It served to accentuate what had been built at the center.

I stumbled as I stared up at the unfinished statue. I fell against jagged shrubs, and Alpha grabbed me, pulling me so I could lean against her.

“What do you think?” said Jawbone, peering with me at the rusty masterpiece.