I PICKED UP A CHILD IN A DUMPSTER

Kind. I thought, looking at the cup.

Food came next. Someone passed it from further back in the village, hand to hand, until it reached the woman, who brought it over with the same matter-of-fact efficiency.

Dried something. Dense. I ate it without identifying it and didn’t care.

I looked over at Jisoo.

She was holding her cup in both hands.

Kind, her face said.

I almost said something about it.

We just sat there, eating and drinking in the rain, while the village watched us figure out what to do next.

...

...

....

.....

***

Time passes?

The standoff— if you could call it that— ended when an old man pushed through the cluster of watching villagers and walked toward us like he’d decided this was his responsibility and that was final.

He was the kind of old that had earned itself— not frail, just compact, like everything unnecessary had been worked off over many years of doing things that mattered...

Alright, I’ll be specific, he has muscles head to bone, white hair, close-cropped. A jacket that had been repaired so many times the repairs were more jacket than the original.... Haha...

He walked with a slight forward lean, not from age, more like he was... uh, he was heading somewhere and had simply never stopped.

Well, to bad he stopped in front of us.... Okay... okay, I’ll stop this corny jokes.

The old man looked at me. Then at Jisoo. Then at the water we’d climbed out of.

"How did you get here," he said.

"We fell in," I said. "From the rooftops over there." I gestured vaguely then saw nothing... "uh... I swear there was a rooftop... wait. Why is there no rooftop here?"

I pinched the bridge of my nose. "Yea, we jumped rooftop to rooftop then something hit us mid-jump. We ended up in the water and got sucked by the current until we found the vine and climbed up."

He nodded slowly, processing this.

"We didn’t know the village was here," Jisoo added. "We weren’t heading for it specifically. We were just— going west."

The old man looked at us for a long moment.

Then he turned and said something to the people behind him that I didn’t catch, and a sound moved through the crowd— not a word, more like a some exhale of surprise that passed from person to person.

Several people looked at each other.

A woman near the back covered her mouth with her hand.

"What?" I asked.

He looked back at us. "No one has ever survived being eaten by the water," he said.

We sat with that for a second.

"ಠ⁠_⁠ಠ Uh what,?"

"We call it being eaten," the old man said. "Because that’s what it is. The water takes you and you don’t come back."

He looked at us again, in the specific way of someone revising a previously held piece of information. "Usually."

"We had some help," I said, which is a lie... wait, I think it’s not a lie since my skill helped me.

Well, He seemed to accept this, in the way someone accepted something they didn’t fully understand but also didn’t have a reason to argue with.

He held out his hand.

Not for a handshake— palm up, an offering gesture. "Come," he said. "You’re wet and you’ve been in the water. There are things you should see before you decide whether to stay."

He turned and walked back into the village, and we followed him because it seemed like the right thing to do, and because our options were limited to follow the old man or sit on the vine in the rain, and one of those was clearly better than the other.

The village was larger than it had looked from the water’s edge.

What I’d taken for was a cluster of structures on a few vine islands that’s actually an intconnected system— vines that had grown and tangled over years until they’d formed stable platforms, joined by rope bridges and plank walkways into something that functioned as streets, if streets could sway slightly when four people walked over them at the same time.

The old man led us through it at an unhurried pace, and I stopped counting the things that surprised me.

Kids fishing off the edge of the lower walkways, handmade spears in hand, standing still and patient in a way that kids weren’t usually still and patient about anything.

One of them threw while we watched and came up with something silver and long that thrashed until it didn’t, and held it up to show the 3 person beside her, who gave an approving nod. Regular. Normal. Agressive nod.

They’re actually so cute...

Rainwater collection everywhere— barrels and clay vessels and sheets of bark curved into funnels, all positioned to catch the continuous downpour and channel it to storage.

The rain that was a problem from the outside was a resource from the inside, and whoever had designed the collection system had thought hard about angles and flow.

Rope elevators at the taller structures— simple counterweight systems, a bucket on one end and a person on the other, moving people and goods between the walkway level and the higher platforms without stairs.

One went up while we passed, carrying what looked like a crate of something, operated by a teenager who ran it without looking at it.

Floating gardens on broad flat vine sections— not deep, maybe knee-height soil beds, but dense with things growing in them.

Greens mostly, some root vegetables. All of it adapted to whatever light made it through the cloud cover, which wasn’t much, but clearly enough.

Chickens.

Actual chickens, on some vine islands, living their chicken lives on a floating structure above a flooded city with total apparent unconcern for any of this.

They walked around pecking at whatever chickens pecked at and didn’t seem to have received the memo about the apocalypse.

I watched one cross a rope bridge by itself and arrive on the other side and keep walking like this was a completely normal commute.

Small boats pulled up at the lower platforms— not wood, these, but giant leaves, like a kind that were waxy and THICC enough to hold shape and buoyancy, folded and fixed with something that hardened them at the creases.

Two or three people to a boat, low in the water, moving between vine islands on errands too quick to do on foot.

Everything had been figured out. Not all at oncw— I could see the different generations of problem-solving layered on top of each other, the first rough solutions and the improvements built over them and the improvements on those. People had been here a while, working things out, getting it slowly more right.

"How long?" I asked the old man.

He glanced back. "Since the water came. We’ve lost count of the exact time." He said it without grief, just accuracy. "Long enough that the children born here don’t remember the ground."

We were on one of the wider walkway sections, looking down at the water below through the gaps in the planks, when a kid ran past us at full speed, launched off the edge without slowing, and disappeared into the water below.

"Hey!?" I took a step toward the edge automatically, looking down. The water was there. The kid wasn’t. "Where did he—"

The old man laughed. "That’s different," he said. "We’re in the middle right now."

"The middle of what?" Jisoo said.

He smiled and looked at both of us, and I had exactly enough time to register that the smile had something mischievous in it before both of his hands came out and pushed— one on my shoulder, one on hers— and we both went backward off the walkway edge.

"Sacrifice ouhooohoho" the old man said.

And we hit the water back-first.

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