11. A Lifetime

11

A LIFETIME

TIME DID NOT START MOVING faster after that, although it felt as if it did. Alexi went to the farms and Nadya scouted every day with Burian, exploring the land above the river. Most scouts chose to stay on the Wild, observing what could be seen from the water, taking note of clear land that might be of interest to the farmers or of good fishing grounds or hunting territory. They thought Nadya and Burian wild and brave for venturing onto the land.

Nadya honestly wasn’t sure why they bothered going up if they were never going to leave the Wild. Every inch of the river had been covered before, and everything they saw had been seen a dozen times before, sometimes in the same season. Things would change after a large storm, the banks shifting, the fish changing their spawning grounds, but storms large enough to reshape the river were rare. But they all got paid the same for their time, coins enough to squirrel away, to begin saving toward the rapidly approaching future. It was worth it. It was enough.

Nadya herself continued her explorations into the edges of the flooded forest, which was always damp and swampy but had yet to actually flood in her presence. She saw Artem the fox several more times, and each time he warned her away, while Burian explored the edges of the wood, looking for a way in large enough to accommodate his girth. She found more of the berry bushes she remembered from her trip through the forest, and returned to that area the next day with a bucket, filling it to the brim and bringing it proudly home to Inna, who baked sweet hand pies and gave her half as her reward for gathering.

Time passed. The wedding, when it came, was small and simple, as befit a poor man from the lower part of the city and a swept-away who was last child of her house but first to be wed. The harbormaster officiated the ceremony, which was held outside behind the creche with Burian and all the unattached turtles in attendance, swirling around the guests in great, giddy spirals. By the end of the day, when the last of the jam tarts had been eaten and the wedding plates had been ceremonially smashed, the younger of Galina’s children had a small turtle attending her every move, and Nadya was smiling so hard her face hurt, not quite sure any longer how this could be her life.

She had been in Belyyreka for so long that she barely remembered the neighborhood where she’d been living with Carl and Pansy, remembered none of the names of the children at the school she’d been attending, not even the ones she’d considered her friends, remembered few of the matrons from the orphanage. But she remembered Maksim, and she remembered ice cream, and if it was odd that those were the only two things she ever missed from her old life, there was no one to tell her so. Not even Alexi, who found her description of ice cream interesting but not alluring, and never mocked her for missing a tortoise she had left in another country even before she left it in another world.

When they walked together into the small but empty house that would be their home from now on, to fill with love and laughter and whatever else happened to come their way, both of them still in their wedding finery, all of it Inna’s work—for both of them, as Alexi’s mother didn’t know how to embroider and had been happy to send her son to his own marriage in a plain shirt—and Nadya with flowers braided in her hair and floating in the substance of her liquid arm, they were hand in hand, as they so often were. Alexi let go, pulling shyly away, and Nadya went after him, and they came together into what would ever afterward be their bedroom. It wasn’t the largest of the three rooms that could be used for that purpose, but they didn’t need the largest; they needed the one with the best-placed window, for Burian’s sake, and the most light, for the sake of Alexi’s plants. Only a few would grow in the heavier water beneath the river, and all of them needed as much light as possible.

But for now, there were no plants, there was no turtle, there was nothing but Nadya and Alexi and the warm, flat surface of the bed, soft sand sewn into woven cloth to form a mattress, a blanket of water-treated rabbit fur atop it, and the two of them atop that, tangled in each other’s arms and celebrating the beginning of a new life, a new tributary to swim. They would eat in their own home from now on, sleep in their own bed, and live in the city as adults, independent and contributing.

All that would begin tomorrow. Here and now, there were the two of them, and the room, and the discovery of each other’s bodies, hands on skin and all the River Wild to see them as they truly were.

When they slept, it was tangled in each other’s arms, peaceful and content and wholly sure of their place in their world.

The storm came rolling in the next day. It was the largest storm anyone had seen since before Nadya’s arrival, strong enough to shake the city, even deep as it was below the surface, the rain pounding into the water and driving itself downward like falling knives. What fell from the sky began as heavy water—what Nadya couldn’t help thinking of on some level as true water, the kind that could be drunk but not breathed—and it hurt to stand outside for too long.

All trips to the surface were canceled as people battened down and ate what they had in their homes, avoiding trips along the docks as much as possible. As for the docks themselves, they swayed alarmingly in the rough currents, and some segments broke off and dropped away, driven farther downward by the rain. Debris plummeting past the windows became a common sight, until the second day of the storm, when Nadya saw a body fall past and threw herself out the front door, shouting for Burian.

She flung herself over the edge of the dock, aiming for the body as it fell downward, still yelling in the vain hope that her beloved turtle would be close enough to hear her and intercede. She kicked to drive herself farther downward, swimming against water she could barely feel, and shot toward the body. It was a woman she didn’t recognize, the embroidery around her cuffs and collar signaling that she was one of the farmers. Alexi might know her, but Alexi was still above, safely in their home, probably cursing the wildness of his wife.

“I hope this was worth the hiding I’ll get when I get home,” muttered Nadya. Unspoken was that she hoped she would get home. Falling was dangerous in part because the water was too thin to allow humans to swim back upward, and she had already fallen past at least five levels.

A trickle of blood ran down the woman’s forehead, dark and thick. Something had hit her in the head, probably knocking her off the edge in the process. Nadya frowned as she swam closer, finally reaching out and grabbing the woman’s arm. The woman’s weight was too much for her to carry upward, and hard as she kicked, they continued to descend, until the water darkened around them and the lowest levels of the city flashed by, gray stone and white shell and then nothing apart from the stone outcropping this part of the city had been built atop. Nadya closed her eyes, expression going grim. She had never been this deep before.

She had always wanted to see the bottom of the river. She had never expected it to happen quite like this.

The woman was breathing. Nadya kicked harder, trying to slow their descent if nothing else. They would reach the bottom eventually, and she would rather delay that moment. Heavier water flowed downward, dropping through lighter water even as they were; all the rain and all the other heavy water that had entered the river would be at the very bottom. If they fell that far, they would drown. She had to at least try.

They didn’t move any higher, didn’t regain any of the ground they’d lost, didn’t even stop falling, but it felt like they slowed down, and so she kept kicking. It might not be doing any actual good. It was better than doing nothing.

The wall of stone that held up the city was getting closer to them. It was clearly more of an underwater mountain than a sheer cliff. Nadya began kicking toward it, holding the woman against her, trying to reach something she could hang on to. A fish flashed by, one of the largest she had ever seen, moving with the ease she normally saw only near the surface, and it was getting harder to breathe. The water was definitely heavier here.

The idea of drowning in the river where she lived was ridiculous to her. It was stupid, it was impossible, and it was going to happen if she didn’t move very quickly and get very lucky. She kicked again, harder than before, reaching out with her right hand to grab the wall.

Balls of rain were falling all around them, too heavy to join with the river. A string of them flowed into her hand, coalescing into a long rope with a loop at one end. Nadya took in a sharp breath, coughing as the increasing heaviness of the water stung her lungs and the back of her throat, and hurled the loop as hard as she could at the wall.

She had never lassoed anything in her life. She didn’t even know the name for the tool she was attempting to use. There was no grace or elegance to the move, no sign that she had any idea what she was doing, and so no one could have been more surprised than she when the “rope” snagged around an outcropping of rock. She tightened her hold on the woman and stopped kicking as they fell, allowing the rope to snap taut and swing them up against the wall.

Impact wasn’t as hard as it would have been if they’d been falling in the air of the world where Nadya had been born, but was hard enough to be jarring and make Nadya’s teeth rattle. She managed not to lose her grip on the woman, and she couldn’t lose her grip on the rope, which was connected to her hand in a way that made it more like a finger than an actual tool.

Holding that comparison firmly in mind, she began pulling herself up the rope, pausing every few seconds to think about how nice and convenient it would be if the rope were shorter, if she didn’t have to worry about dropping back to the place where they first stopped. Her shoulders ached, her torso felt tight and too small, the effort of the climb reverberated through every inch of her body, and still she climbed, even as the woman she held so tightly against her began to whimper and stir.

When the woman opened her eyes, she screamed.

Nadya winced. “Stop that. You’re right against my ear.”

“Y-you’re Inna’s girl,” said the woman, still terrified. “The scout.”

“Yes, and right now we’re both very far from the city, although straight down isn’t usually a direction I scout in!” Nadya continued pulling them along. The rope wasn’t pooling in her hand or dangling beneath them; it did indeed seem to be getting shorter at her silent command. That was something. “Can you hold on to me if I let go?”

The woman shrieked and thrashed. “Don’t let go, don’t let go!”

“I’m not going to let you fall, but this would go faster if I could pull us up with both hands,” snapped Nadya. “Can you hold on?”

The woman hesitated, then snaked her arms around Nadya’s neck, clinging so tight that for a moment, Nadya couldn’t breathe. Then the woman slackened her grip and Nadya exhaled, relieved, before saying, “Good,” unwinding her own arm from around the woman, and beginning to pull them upward with both hands.

It was faster this way, and in short order they had reached the outcropping where her rope was snagged, and she was able to pull them onto the narrow ledge. They fell no farther. She looked up. The wall was sheer and impassable. Nadya sighed, watching as the rope melted back into her arm. “We may be here awhile,” she said. “I suppose you’d best tell me your name.”