The F-Class Awakening

Chapter Seven : Don't Touch Me

Serena was sitting on the seawall at the end of the causeway at eight the next evening, which was where she'd told him not to come.

"I said I didn't want to talk about it," she said, without turning around.

"You did. I've been respecting that for ten days, which is longer than I usually manage."

"That's not a defense."

"It's not offered as one." He sat down. Not too close. "Cassian Thorne came to my flat last night."

Serena turned her head. The wind off the estuary had flattened her hair against her cheek and she hadn't done anything about it.

"Thorne came to you," she said.

"You know him?"

"I know the coat." She looked back at the water. "What did he tell you?"

"That there's a file with ten names in it, and I'd be the eleventh. That somebody else has been reading it for three hundred years. That the last one walked into the river." Evan let a beat go by. "And that I should keep the girl out of it."

"Which girl?"

"You."

Serena was quiet.

"That's good advice," she said at last.

"It's terrible advice." He stood. "He's going to show me the file tonight. I want a second pair of eyes on it."

"Evan —"

"You told me the second line always comes three weeks before the crack. My Awakening was almost three weeks ago." He put his hands in his pockets. "That's two days, Serena."

She looked up at him for a long moment. He watched her decide not to say I know.

Then she stood and said, "You have an irritating way of being right," and started walking.

*  *  *

Getting to the Archive's eastern door meant going down into Marrow, and getting into Marrow meant wading along the drowned street, which lay under four feet of estuary water that had been standing there since before either of them was born.

The iron plates ran only as far as the old church. After that there was a shallow channel between two dead terraces. Evan waded in without comment and got about six steps before he learned two things: the bottom was pure silt that would grab a boot and not give it back, and Serena, behind him, was laughing.

"Say it," he said.

"I'm not going to say it."

"You're going to say it."

"I was going to say that the last time I remember this happening, you took your boots off first." She waded behind him with her coat hitched up and a look of enormous satisfaction. "But I'm not going to say it."

They went on. The water was cold and smelled of the river. The terraces stood three storeys high on either side, their windows gone, and inside the windows was nothing but more water, running back into the buildings as far as the light reached and then farther.

"I'll do a voice," Serena said, a street later.

"Please don't."

"You're going to catch your death in that, Evan, and it'll be your own fault for not wearing the good coat."

Evan laughed out loud. He couldn't help it. It was uncanny and it was funny, and it was his mother down to the syllable, the little rise on good, the tired affection underneath.

The laugh went flat across the water and came back off the dead terraces as nothing. It died in his throat.

"You've never met her," he said.

"No."

"Where did you hear that?"

Serena's smile went. "In the warm street," she said. "In the memories. She says it a lot." She looked down at the water. "I don't know how I know it, Evan. That's the point. I keep telling you."

Neither of them spoke.

"Right," Serena said quietly. "No noise down here."

*  *  *

The Archive's eastern door was where Cassian had said: a low iron gate set into the base of what had once been a customs house, half submerged and rusted the color of dried blood. There was no light. No sign of anyone.

Evan stopped three meters short and didn't move.

"What?" Serena said.

"Something's wrong."

"You've had that power three weeks."

"I've been noticing things my whole life." He was watching the gate, and the water around it. "The door's shut. But the water's moving."

Serena looked.

The water at the foot of the gate was rippling outward in slow, even rings, the way water does when something has passed through it from the other side and hasn't finished telling anyone.

"How long?" she said.

"Thirty seconds. Less." His hand closed on her sleeve. "Back up. Slowly. Don't splash."

They backed up four steps. Then the gate opened.

It didn't open the way a gate opens. It tore off its hinges with a shriek of corroded iron and dropped into the water, and through the gap came a man.

He walked out onto the drowned street as if it were a pavement. He wore a Registry field coat with the sigil removed; Evan could see the pale rectangle where it had been stitched. He wasn't hurrying. He came up the channel at a walk and the water didn't slow him at all. Evan understood, with cold certainty, that this was a man whose ability had nothing to do with water and everything to do with not being delayed by it.

"Evan Vale," the man said.

Behind him, farther back, more shapes were coming out of the doorway. Two. Three.

"That's a lot of paperwork for an F," Evan said.

"Nobody's sent a team after an F-Class in living memory." The man stopped eight meters away with his hands loose at his sides. "You'd know that if you'd been boring. Sit down in the water, both of you, and put your hands on your heads."

Serena said, very quietly, "Evan."

"Working on it."

"Don't do the thing."

"I only have one thing."

"Which is why," she said, "I'd like you to think about whether it's the thing for six men."

He counted. Four more, up on the terrace to the left, walking along the roofline with the easy balance of people who'd done this before.

Six.

Evan raised his hands. Serena raised hers.

"Good," the man said. "Now —"

And the terrace under the four of them gave way.

*  *  *

It wasn't Evan.

He was standing stock still with his hands up and no link open anywhere, watching it happen the way you watch a plate slide off a table.

A long, dull, structural crack, and then the entire corner of the dead terrace came down. Not in pieces, in one piece: four storeys of brick dropping in on itself and taking the men on the roof with it. A wall of water and mud came up the channel like a fist.

Evan grabbed Serena and went under.

*  *  *

It took him about a second and a half to understand that he was going to die down there.

The silt was the problem. It had taken his boots twice already and now it had both of them. The surge had shoved them sideways against the base of the other terrace, and his feet were gone into the mud to the ankle, then the knee. Serena's hand was locked on his wrist. The water was full of bricks and he couldn't see anything.

She pulled. He felt his leg come out of the silt half a centimeter, then go back a centimeter and a half.

They were going to be buried here. Eighteen years old, three weeks into a power that could move the whole world from one side of itself to the other, and he was going to die because the mud was good at its job.

His hand found the terrace wall.

A difference has to go somewhere.

No. There was nowhere to put anything. The water was full of falling building, and the difference between standing and not standing was enormous, and there was no other side to send it to.

Serena pulled again.

And Evan, out of ideas, out of time, out of air, did the only thing left.

He turned in the water, found her hand in the dark, and connected them.

*  *  *

It wasn't like the church.

In the church he had opened a door onto a life, and it had come through like weather. This was different. This was vertical, a door knocked through a floor instead of a wall, and what came up through it came all at once, like water finding the hole in a boat.

Strength first. His body moved because hers was moving, and hers was stronger than his, and he had no idea why. He came out of the silt like he was being lifted by somebody else's legs.

Then direction. He knew which way was up.

Then something he hadn't asked for and couldn't stop.

A memory came through. Not a picture. A room, its whole shape at once, with a temperature and a smell and a particular weight of light. And in it, Serena's voice, close and quiet, in the tone you use to instruct someone you love:

"Make sure he never remembers."

Someone answered. Another voice, farther off, distorted. No more than two words, impossible to make out.

Then the room closed. The silt let go of him. He and Serena came up out of the water into the air on the drowned street, on their hands and knees, coughing, alive.

*  *  *

For a while they just knelt in the mud. The channel was full of broken terrace. Where the Archive's eastern door had been there was a hole in a wall with water running into it.

Evan put a hand out to help Serena up.

She jerked away from it.

"Don't."

He froze.

"You said you wouldn't," she said. Her voice was shaking. It wasn't fear, exactly. It was worse: it was disappointment, and she was trying to keep it small. "You said all right. You said."

"You were under six feet of mud."

"I know what I was under."

"Serena —"

"I'm not saying you were wrong. I'm saying you didn't ask." She got to her feet without his help. Water came off her in sheets. "What did you see?"

Evan looked at the water.

"Nothing," he said.

It was the third time in two days he'd told that particular lie, and it was getting easier. He understood, kneeling in the mud of a city that had drowned before he was born, that this would be what finished him in the end. Not the men in stripped field coats. Not whatever was holding the far end of a thread he'd tied to a bollard. The closed mouth. His mother's one compliment. Steady hands, closed mouth.

He was going to lose people because he couldn't stop carrying things.

"Evan," Serena said.

"I said nothing."

"You're looking at me like I'm a form."

Down in the dark, in the room behind the drowned wall, something was still moving. Somebody had just dropped four storeys of brick on four men, and Evan had no idea whose side that made them.

And he'd just heard Serena, in a memory that wasn't hers or his, say Make sure he never remembers. The one person on earth who could explain it was standing in front of him, soaked and furious, and she was trusting him.

He got up.

"We need to move," he said. "Before the ones who are left find us."