I PICKED UP A CHILD IN A DUMPSTER

I immediately had the skill loaded and ready to teleport behind the old man, the trigger already half-pulled— and then Jisoo’s hand found mine in the fall, and her grip was wrong, or the contact was wrong, or the concentration was wrong, and the skill slipped.

Just— gone, scattered, the focus the skill ran on disrupted by the unexpected contact, and then we hit the water.

Cold. Again. I was really getting tired of being cold.

But the current wasn’t there.

I opened my eyes underwater expecting to be swept, expecting to fight, and found— clear.

Not murky and dark like before, not the deep green of the current zone. Clear, light filtering down from the surface in actual visible shafts, and below us the bottom wasn’t a flooded city floor.

It was vines— a massive net of them, dense and woven, forming a wide bowl shape maybe ten meters below, live and green and clearly intentional. A contained space.

Looking at it... this is actually so smart... and cool.

Oh, and people were in it.

Diving from the walkways overhead, swimming lazily below us, a few sitting on the vine net below just... sitting, underwater, holding their breath and looking peaceful about it.

A kid swam past me upside down with a casual competence of someone who’d been doing this their whole life and waved at me before righting himself and shooting back toward the surface.

I looked at Jisoo.

She looked at me.

We were both underwater, hair floating, no current pulling us anywhere, surrounded by people who were treating this like a perfectly normal afternoon activity.

She spread her hands in a gesture that meant something like "well, this is fine then."

I spread mine back in a gesture that meant "i suppose it is."

She smiled. I smiled. We swam back up.

We surfaced and climbed back onto the vine platform, and Jisoo turned immediately and looked at the old man, who was standing exactly where he’d been when he pushed us, watching with the expression of someone who had done this many times and it had never gotten old for him.

She stared at him.

He laughed.

She kept staring turning into more glaring.

He kept laughing.

"Why did you say sacrifice earlier? ಠ⁠益⁠ಠ I got scared."

"So you two can get immersed."

And he shrugged.

Eventually she gave up and sat down, and I sat next to her, and we dripped on the vine platform and watched the village carry on around us for a while.

***

The house they put us in was small and dry and more comfortable than anything I’d been in since the trial started.

The floor was made of a tightly woven vine material that had some give to it, slightly springy under my feet.

The walls were wood— actual planks, not scrap, suggesting someone had either salvaged very well or had worked out a way to process it properly.

A bed.

An actual bed, with a frame and a woven surface and something on top of it that served as a blanket. Small, the whole thing, but solid and real and not raining on me.

We sat on the floor still soaking through, which seemed rude to the bed, and the old man came in after a few minutes with two other people, talking and looking around and checking the room.

Then he looked at us, soaked through, and his expression did the specific thing of someone who had just remembered something.

"Come here," he said. "Both of you. Floor."

We came. He pointed at a section of the floor near the center of the room, and we stood on it, and then he did something— pressed something at the edge of the wall, some mechanism and the floor underneath us warmed and then something moved through my clothes that I couldn’t identify, a pulling sensation, even and thorough.

My jacket was dry.

I looked at my hands. Dry. My shoes— I could feel it through the soles. Dry.

I looked at Jisoo. She was looking at herself with the same expression of mine.

"The vine absorbs," the old man said, by way of explanation, and left it at that.

We had a hundred questions and asked maybe forty of them over the next hour— about the village, the water, the safe zone, how long they’d been here, where they’d come from before....

He answered most of them patiently and deflected the ones that were either too complicated or too personal with the ease of someone who’d had practice at it.

The village had been built over years by people from the surrounding area who’d survived the initial flooding by getting high enough fast enough.

About two hundred people now, more born here than came from before.

The old man’s name, offered near the end of the conversation without ceremony, was Sung.

At some point during the conversation, both of us fell asleep sitting up, and someone must have moved us to the bed because that was where I woke up.

I woke up to the rain.

Which— given that I’d been listening to rain for days— shouldn’t have been what woke me, except that it was lighter now.

The storm had eased while I slept, settling into something gentler, the drumming that had been constant reduced to a soft steady ambient sound that was almost pleasant.

Through the small window in the wall I could see the vine platforms outside, wet and gleaming, the rope bridges swaying very slightly in a wind that had also calmed.

Jisoo was still asleep. I left her there.

Outside, the village was doing its morning— the collection vessels being checked, the boats going out, someone adjusting a rope elevator mechanism with a focused expression.

I walked one of the main walkways without a destination, and the planks moved gently under my feet, and the water below was grey and still and very deep.

At the edge, one of the outer platforms, I stopped and looked down at the water.

Then I looked at the distance between me and it.

Then I thought about the clear zone below the village, the vine net, the people swimming around down there like it was nothing.

"I kind of want to take a dip," I said.

"Don’t jump into the water."

I turned. A girl, maybe 15 or 16, leaning against a roof post with her arms crossed and her dark hair hanging long and wet around her face because she hadn’t done anything about the rain that was landing on her.

Soaked clothes, the expression of someone who had registered something annoying and was deciding how much energy to spend on it.

"Why?" I said. "Is it the monsters?"

She looked at me. Then at the water. Then back at me, with an expression of someone explaining something to someone who should probably know better but clearly doesn’t.

"...No," she said.

A pause.

"Because you’ll disappear."

I looked at the water. Then at her. "But isn’t there a safe zone? In the middle?"

She sighed. Then she pushed off the post and walked over to me and reached up and bonked me on the head with her palm, which was not what I had expected...

"That’s not a safe zone," she said, pointing at the water in front of us.

"The middle is the safe zone. The part under the village. This—" she pointed again, emphatically, at the water at the edge we were standing next to, "...is where you disappear."

She dropped her hand. Her expression settled back into the baseline of someone who was used to people not knowing things and had resigned herself to explaining them.

"...How do you disappear?"

She looked at me.

"What does disappear mean? In this context. Like, where do you go?"

"Nobody knows," she said. "Because they don’t come back."

She looked at the water one more time— not scared, just matter-of-fact, the way you looked at something you’d lived next to your whole life and understood the rules of— then she raised her hand.

I stepped back.

And she looked at me.

Then, "ouuuuhhoooo~~~~ scareey."

I stared. "ಠ⁠_⁠ಠ..."

"Pussy." Then she walked away.

I just... stared at her back, for... I don’t know what reason, it was probably because I thought she’s the serious kind then suddenly she pulled that off.

I looked down at the water at the edge.

It looked back, grey and unremarkable and very, very still.

I took one careful step away from the edge. "Pussy... I’m not."

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