11. The Water Rises

Sia’s POV

Nobody spoke for an hour after the gray soldiers.

Skyler stared out the windshield. Marcus drove with his jaw locked. Eli kept refreshing his tablet like it might change its mind. And I sat at the end of the bench with the diary on my knees and a number in my head that I hated.

-145%.

I had told the truth, and it had cost me. I had bluffed a squad of soldiers and saved everyone from a tornado, and it hadn’t earned me a single point. At this rate, I’d reach 100% sometime after the sun burned out.

The river found us before I found a plan.

The road dipped into a valley, and the valley was full of water. A whole town lay half-drowned in it, brown water lapping at second-floor windows, with a bridge disappearing into the current like a hand slipping under. On every rooftop there were people. Waving. Shouting. A man with a megaphone was begging us to stop.

“Millbrook,” Eli read off his tablet. “The water’s rising a foot every few minutes. Something upstream is pushing it.”

“The bridge is gone.” Marcus braked hard. “We’ll have to go around.”

“How far?” Skyler asked.

“Half a day. Maybe more.”

Skyler shut his eyes briefly. When he opened them, they were as flat and tired as ever. “Then we go around. We can’t afford to lose a day.”

Someone on a rooftop was holding a small child over her head so we could see.

The cold was already crawling up my spine, and I followed it upstream, past the bridge, past the church spire poking out of the flood, to a long wooden pier at the edge of town. There was a girl at the end of it. I couldn’t see her face from here. I could only feel her. Fear, grief, panic, all of it folded together so tightly it hurt, and every bit of it was pouring into the river.

And I knew a few things at once. She was the one making the water rise. She was on day three. And in about fifteen minutes, she would burn out, and the gas would come looking for someone to take her place.

I wanted to say we should go. Everything sensible in me said go. A bridge was out, a river was rising, and someone behind us in gray coveralls was looking for us. We were on a clock.

But I had watched Skyler write a stranger’s name in a notebook with a stub of pencil. A man who did that didn’t drive past a rooftop with a child on it.

I wasn’t going to ask for sympathy. I was going to give him facts.

“Skyler.” I leaned forward, and everyone turned. “There’s a water-type on the pier, upstream, day three. The river will crest in about fifteen minutes and take the whole town with it. I can feel where the water is going to hit first, which means I can tell people where to run.”

“We don’t have time.”

“We have fifteen minutes. I’m asking for ten.”

Lena made a disgusted noise in her throat. Marcus rubbed the back of his neck. Nobody spoke.

Skyler looked at the rooftops. At the child. At the pier. A muscle ticked in his jaw.

“Eight,” he said.

Then we were out of the truck and running.

It was the fastest and worst eight minutes of my life.

I waded through knee-deep brown water with the cold humming in my bones, pointing. “That roof, there. Get them off, that one’s going first. That house is fine for ten more minutes. Move the kids to the church tower!”

Marcus hauled a ladder out of a flooded garage and swung it across a gap between roofs like it weighed nothing. Lena, who hated me, dragged an old woman through a window by both arms while swearing steadily in three languages. Jun had a rowboat pulled up beside a bus, and he was ferrying people with stiff, furious efficiency. Even Nora, white-faced, was passing children down a human chain.

And Skyler.

Skyler had gone out into the current to his chest. A toddler was stuck on a balcony that was half under, screaming, and he went up the drainpipe like the rope had been tied to him. I watched him hold the boy against his coat. I watched him take a wave in the back and not drop him. He passed him down to Marcus and turned and went right back for the next.

Something strange happened in my chest, and I didn’t have time to look at it.

“Sia!” Eli’s voice cracked from the truck roof. “Four minutes!”

The cold on my neck had turned to a scream.

I went for the pier.

She was sixteen, maybe. A school uniform soaked dark at the shoulders, a braid coming loose from its blue elastic. She sat at the very end with her knees pulled up and her palms flat on the planks, and the river climbed the pilings around her as if she’d left a tap running. She was talking to herself. Counting, I realized. One and two and three and four.

Day three. Day three people didn’t count.

“Don’t come closer,” she told her knees. “I’m trying not to hurt anyone.”

The gas hung above her head in a pale shimmer, the way heat hangs over a road, waiting. I took one step and my mouth went dry. Everything I thought of to say was too big or too stupid. I stood there with river water in my shoes and nothing to offer her at all.

A hand rested on my shoulder for exactly one second, then lifted.

Skyler walked past me. He didn’t hurry. He sat down on the planks about six feet from her, wet to the collarbone, and put his hands on his knees where she could see them.

“What’s your name?”

She looked up. One eye was swollen almost shut. “Anna.”

“I’m Skyler. Everyone’s off the roofs, Anna. That was you.”

She breathed out something that wasn’t quite a laugh. “I swim,” she said. “Two hundred free. I was going to try for nationals.”

“What’s the hardest part?”

“The third fifty.” She answered it like she’d been waiting all week for someone to ask. “Everybody goes out too fast, and then the third fifty comes and your arms just…” Her hand lifted off the wood and made a slow, heavy paddle in the air. “My coach used to count it for me. Under his breath, so nobody’d hear.”

He said nothing. He just waited, with his whole face.

The water at her feet was going down. An inch, then another. Behind me, the town’s shouting had thinned to a few voices very far away.

“They told us it wouldn’t take us if we stayed calm,” Anna said. “The men in gray. They came to the school. We practiced breathing in the gym.” She frowned, puzzled, at her own palms. “I practiced so much.”

The last of the river slid off the pier.

“It took me anyway.”

She lay back on the boards the way you’d lie down on a towel, and the braid fell across her cheek. Her fingers uncurled one at a time. The gas lifted from her in a long gray thread and went out over the water, looking for someone, and found nobody.

Nobody moved.

A gull landed on a piling and thought better of it. The river dripped off the end of the pier in slow, separate drops. She still smelled of chlorine, under the mud. I hadn’t expected that.

Skyler took out the notebook. He wrote with the pencil stub, slowly, and from where I stood I could see the page. Anna.And beside it, in his small square hand, two words: 200 free.

He closed the book. He turned it over once in his hands as though checking that it was still shut.

When he looked up at me, the wind was cold on my face, and I understood that it was cold because my face was wet. He didn’t say anything. He dipped his head, once. I did the same.

[Affection: -135%.]

Ten points. I could have laughed, or sobbed, or both.

Behind us, Millbrook had stopped screaming. People were crowding on the church tower, wet and shaking and alive, and Marcus was carrying a dog out of a shop window as if nobody was looking. Nora had her arms around a little girl. Even Lena looked wrung out.

We pulled out in the last of the light with a dozen grateful strangers waving behind us.

Nobody talked. Skyler stared at the road ahead with his notebook in his lap and one hand resting on it.

And I stared at the back of his head and thought, very clearly, oh, no.

Because I had a terrible suspicion I was in trouble. Not from the gas. Not from the soldiers. From him.

“The men in gray,” Eli said quietly, from the front. “They taught a school to stay calm.”

“I heard.” Skyler didn’t turn his head.

“It doesn’t make sense. Calm doesn’t protect you. We’ve seen it. She did everything right, and it took her.”

“I know.”

“So why would they tell kids it does?”

Skyler’s hand tightened on the notebook, and for the first time, I saw him afraid.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I’m going to find out.”