Chapter 1: The Deluge

Down from the city edges, across the locks that let the massive, unmanned merchant haulers into the loading docks, through the Mud that carried in its depths ages of unnamed objects, was a small, clean river that trickled down from Siren's Watch. It trickled from a leaky gate at the end of a waste pipe, but the pipe never let off any waste. Just clear, clean water. The only clean water in the city. Liam and Quinn had found it when they were nine and eleven respectively in an attempt to flee the city. They'd never seen the boundless seas, so they had come to the conclusion that the seas were just a tale told to children to keep them in line. They were wrong, of course. The seas surrounded the city on all sides, relentlessly beating the white stone walls, but they'd never made it to the tops of the walls to see the seas for themselves. Nobody had done this in a long while. Very long. It was a long way, longer than they had expected, and on this attempt, they'd never even made it past the Mud or into the nightmarish Old City. They never made it, because the moment they found this clear, clean trickle of water, they'd stopped, drank, played, and felt truly joyful, and had refilled their emotional wells enough to turn back and face the city once more. 

"I really shouldn't," Liam said again, for the tenth, no, eleventh time. At least eleventh. Maybe even twelfth. Quinn wished she'd been counting, so that she could gauge how irritated she should be at him. "My mom told me to be home before nightfall, and we'll be lucky if we make it back before dinner, at this rate."

"Go back, then," Quinn said, sounding more confident than she was. She didn't want to go alone, and if Liam turned back, she probably would, too. But she didn't tell him that. 

Liam made a sound like an argument had both arisen and died simultaneously in his mouth. 

"Just a few minutes, and then we'll turn back. We haven't seen the river in months, and now that I'm sixteen and old enough for school, we won't have any time unless we come after dark."

"River," Liam scoffed under his breath. "It's hardly a stream. Or a creek. Or a trickle."

"It's better than all the nasty water in the city they call rivers, so it's a-" Quinn nearly lost her footing on one of the forgotten things that rolled in the mud beneath her feet. She righted herself, finding more secure footing. "So it's a river."

The stream was hard to see from a distance, because, as Liam was so keen to point out, it wasn't very large at all. But when it arrived, the sound of water breaking across broken things, the sparkle of it cascading through the filth, it still took his breath away. It made everything, the risk, the mud, even the future punishment, completely worth it. They laughed together as they ran toward it, nearly spraining their ankles countless times, as they had countless times before. It was just as clean and delicious as it had always been, and they drank deeply before splashing into it, soaking their clothes through. They allowed themselves far more than a few minutes, but it was Quinn, not Liam, who pointed out the passage of time.

"It's starting to get dark," she said, holding her fingers up to where the sun was disappearing behind the wall. Already, it cast an orange glow over everything, and the jagged edges of the Old City against the white wall had become nearly invisible. "We have twenty, maybe thirty minutes until nightfall."

Liam's face fell as he, too, held up his fingers to the wall. He was about to argue, to tell her that her calculations were incorrect, although he knew they weren't, when a groan stopped him. Not a groan from a person. A deep, thrumming groan, that made the core of him shiver. His water-soaked clothes were glued suffocatingly tight to his skin, and he swallowed. As he listened, the groan grew louder, and higher, until it was a screech that disappeared, echoing into the distance.

"Quinn," he whispered, and she shook her head, eyes wide, focused up the Mud from where they stood. Her short brown hair had turned black with the water and was plastered to her face, her eyes bright white between the strands. He turned to look, but there was nothing except the familiar trickle of their stream, bouncing against the forgotten things, as if nothing had happened. "Quinn," he whispered again, and this time, her hand shot out, pressing so tight against his mouth that he tasted metal.

He had heard stories of the Old City. Nightmare things that crept between the buildings, as tall as three light posts stacked on end and as broad as three city streets. The stories said they never left the Old City. The stories said they moved silently. The stories said they were harmless, probably, as long as you stayed far away, and deadly up close. But stories weren't always true, and the more they looked, the more the familiar Mud hill seemed to grow and sway and loom and breathe above them.

"We need to move," Quinn whispered, her voice shaking, which scared Liam more than anything else. 

As if in response, the groan started again, low and angry, and their feet scrambled against the Mud, rolling and shoving lost things below the surface. Their desired speed made them slow, their feet sinking into the mud with every step. The groan reached screeching height again, and then stopped, replaced with a deafening pop, and a roar. Quinn looked up the hill, feeling something wet hit her face, and opened her mouth to scream as she realized it wasn't a monster at all. The blast from the water hit her, mouth open, sweeping her and Liam off their feet and down the slope. They were thrown across the Mud, tumbled across forgotten things almost all made smooth by water and years. Quinn thought she heard something, high pitched and frail, but as she'd never heard a scream underwater, she couldn't have known. Slowly, her lungs burning, taking in more water with every breath, the water began spilling off to the surrounding area, allowing them to begin clawing their way to ground. The water sloshed and rolled them across the mud, but when they finally came to a halt, they were only yards from one another. Liam was choking sobs, curled over himself, and Quinn was coughing up water and mud and little bits of things she had no names for. They lay there, gasping, sobbing, as the roar of the water left them, seeping into the mud around them, making it slick and shiny in the red-orange light. 

Once Quinn felt like she could take in a breath without coughing, she rasped, "Liam?" The word sent her into another fit of coughs, and sent Liam into another fit of sobs. This scared her, and despite her coughing, she crept over to him, slinging an arm around his shoulder. There was mud all over his face and arms. Over hers, too, she realized. It explained why she was having trouble seeing. She dared not go back to the water to clean it off. "Are you okay?"

He kept sobbing, although she thought she heard the attempts of words in some of the cries. 

"Uyh… Huuu— huuaand…" he sobbed, and as she leaned closer, trying to get a sense of what he was saying, she saw it through the mud.

His arm.

Below the right elbow, it was gone. Slick mud lay across the wound, mixing with blood she knew had to be there, although in the orange light, she couldn't see it. Or maybe the blood was the only thing she could see. It was hard to tell. 

"We… we have to get home," she croaked, trying to pick him up, hands shaking, but he crumpled down again, curling in on himself, rocking back and forth as he wrapped around what was left of his arm. "We have to get home. We have to get home." She said it like a mantra, repeating it until it didn't sound like anything anymore. She tried getting him on his feet several more times with no more luck than the first. After a while, his sobs started to die down, although that didn't make her feel better. She knew about bleeding. About silence. "We have to get home." So they could… do what? He'd lost his good arm. He couldn't serve. He'd never go to school. Never work. He'd be hungry, and cold, and sad. Forever. 

"Have to go…" she tried not to throw up, her mind spinning. In the corner of her eye, something sparkled. "Go…" The water? It was moving, but not across the ground. Up, and over. Not water, but something out of the water. Legs, slick and dark and shimmering red and gold in the sunset, just like the water. 

"Go… where?" it asked. Each syllable fell like rain, hushed and separate from the other, as if the thoughts may not have been connected at all. It took Quinn a moment to realize what the glimmering person (was it a person?) was asking.

"Marshall District, 3rd Way," Quinn said automatically, her voice feeling like it came from someone else. Such responses had been hardwired into their minds at an early age, as separation from family as a youngster could be deadly. 

There was a long pause, as if the stranger didn't know what to do with this information. That idea never crossed Quinn's mind, however, as everyone knew where everything was. 

"Far?" He asked instead, and she nodded, nearly breaking into tears again. Another long pause, thoughtful.

"Go home," the stranger said. Quinn hadn't noticed Liam pass out, but she did notice the smooth, flowing motions the stranger used to pick him up, as if he weighed less than nothing. As if it were more natural for Liam to be afloat on the air. She noticed the glimmering, dark knuckles the stranger wrapped around Liam's limp body, and the smooth facial features that looked down with concern on his muddy face and stump of an arm. As the stranger began to walk away, she numbly watching the rise and fall of his heels, soft and uncalloused, expertly picking only the most solid footholds in the mud and never once slipping or tripping on the forgotten things.

She failed to notice two important things, however. The first, in the distance, far up Mud hill, several figures were emerging from the broken pipe, which still trickled the cleanest of water in a steady, but now harmless way. They looked in every direction, their copper badges gleaming in the dusk light with every panicked turn, but they saw nothing. The second, now barely visible, was the wall and the Old City, looming darkly in the distance, casting a long shadow across the Mud. Liam and the stranger disappeared silently into this shadow, and Quinn, in an action that she would later feel to be the biggest, most humiliating regret of her life, turned and ran home to her mother.