The gate into Namarre didn’t so much open as give way, a pair of blast doors sliding back to reveal water where a street should have been.
I stood on a raised platform, dry for the moment, looking down at rooftops poking through brown water like the backs of drowning animals.
Somewhere below, a bell tower’s clock face sat half-submerged, its hands frozen at some hour that no longer mattered.
A woman in a municipal vest grabbed my arm before I could get any further than gawking.
“Contestant?”
“Veyr. Yeah.”
“Good. We need bodies that can lift other bodies.” She shoved a slate into my hands, some kind of tally board with names scrawled in three different handwritings.
“Census says 412 residents in this district alone. We’ve confirmed 290. Water’s up a floor every nine minutes, and the dam goes at hour eighty-one no matter what we do. That’s the part nobody wants to say out loud, so I’m saying it now so you don’t waste time hoping otherwise.”
I appreciated that.
Vhaldrèche had taught me to distrust anyone who dressed up a countdown as optional.
“Ninety-five percent survival threshold,” I said, reading it off the slate.
“Of the original count, not whoever’s left when the clock runs out.”
“Correct. So every body we haven’t found yet is a body that might already be dead, and every minute we spend guessing is a minute we don’t have.” She pointed toward a skiff bobbing against the platform’s edge, half-loaded with rope and pry bars.
“Squad’s short one. Go.”
I went.
Nobody in this arena ever had to ask me twice when the alternative was standing around feeling useless while people drowned in their own basements.
The skiff crew turned out to be three locals and a contestant named Fenn, who greeted me with a grunt and a shove of an oar into my hands like that constituted an introduction.
We poled between buildings whose upper floors were the only things left above the waterline, past windows where people leaned out waving strips of cloth, past others where nobody waved because nobody was there anymore to do it.
The water had a smell to it, engine oil and sewage and something sweetish underneath.
“There.” One of the locals, an older man with a fisherman’s forearms, pointed toward a squat brick building with its door bowed outward like something had been hammering on it from the inside.
“Reported occupied. Nobody’s answered a knock in twenty minutes.”
We brought the skiff alongside a window ledge and I hopped across, boots skidding on wet brick before the traction plates in my soles caught.
Up close, the door wasn’t just bowed—it was breathing, a slow outward flex and release like something behind it was testing the hinges.
“Pressure differential,” Fenn said, climbing up after me.
“Water’s higher on the other side than in the stairwell. Door opens, we get a wave that could take somebody’s head off.”
“How many inside?”
“No idea. Census says a family of four registered to this address.”
I put my ear to the wood, ignoring how the whole panel throbbed under my cheek like something alive.
Thuds, irregular, low.
Not knocking.
Something being thrown against a wall by moving water, maybe.
Maybe not.
“I need a headcount before I do anything,” I said.
“And I need to know which way the water’s coming from, because if I open a hole in the wrong spot, I turn this into a drain and everyone inside goes with it.”
Fenn gave me a look that suggested he wasn’t used to contestants stopping to think before doing something dramatic.
“You’ve got a power.”
“I’ve got a power that runs on a timer and puts me facedown for however long it decides to. I’m not spending it blind.”
Between the two of them and a length of listening tube fished out of somebody’s toolkit, they confirmed three heartbeats through the wall, one small enough to be a child, maybe two children and an adult, though the tube wasn’t precise enough to swear to it.
The water level inside was near the ceiling on the ground floor, which meant whoever was alive in there had climbed, and climbing only bought so much time in a room with no other way out.
“Vent up top,” the fisherman said, jabbing a thumb toward a grate near the roofline, half the size of a dinner plate and rusted orange.
“Ventilation shaft for the water heater closet. If there’s a landing up there, that’s where they’d be.”
“Cut it,” I said.
“Wide enough for a body, not wide enough to blow the whole wall’s pressure balance. And somebody get a line ready, because whatever comes out of that hole is coming out fast.”
It took longer than I liked.
The grate was bolted with a design that predated whatever apocalypse the city’s engineers had planned for, and the two locals had to trade off with a handsaw while Fenn and I braced the frame so the vibration didn’t shake something loose lower down.
By the time we’d widened the gap enough to fit a shoulder through, my patience had worn down to something thin and irritable, and I could hear a child crying on the other side of the brick, muffled and exhausted in a way that told me she’d been at it a long time.
I stuck my head through first.
A landing, maybe a meter and a half of dry space left before the water swallowed the rest of the stairwell, and on it, a woman with two kids pressed against her, all three of them soaked to the waist and shaking.
The woman’s eyes found mine and did the thing I’d started to recognize from every rescue in every flooded corridor in this city: the specific look of someone deciding whether the stranger in the hole in their wall was here to save them or just here to watch.
“I’ve got you,” I said, because it was true and because it was the only thing worth saying.
“One at a time, smallest first.”
Dead Grip engaged in my boots the second the first kid’s weight settled against my chest, soles biting into brick like they’d been poured there, and I hauled him through the gap with one arm while my other hand kept the frame from crumbling under both our weights.
He was maybe six, light as a sack of laundry, and he clung to my collar the whole way through like letting go was the one thing in the world he had left any say over.
The second kid took longer, a girl old enough to be embarrassed about being carried, who insisted on climbing through herself with only my hand steadying her elbow.
The mother came last, and she was heavier and less flexible, and the vent frame groaned in a way I didn’t love, but Dead Grip held my boots to the brick like they’d been welded there, and I got her through without either of us going into the water below.
That was when the pop-up hit my visor, cheerful as ever, timed with the precision of something that had been watching the whole rescue through a lens I hadn’t noticed until that exact second.
BONUS OPPORTUNITY: Keep the rescue in frame for the next ninety seconds to unlock a sponsor multiplier from Halden Marine Salvage!
Nothing sells hope like a clear shot!
I turned my head and found the camera bolted to a support strut a meter to my left, its lens angled square into the gap I needed to lower the mother and kids through to reach the skiff.
It wasn’t in my way by accident.
Whoever positioned it had wanted this exact composition, three drowned rats and their rescuer framed against a hole in a wall, and they’d stuck the hardware directly across the one clear path down to the boat.
“Move,” I told it, like it could hear me and had a say in the matter.
It didn’t move.
Cameras never do.
I planted my elbow into the housing, and it went off the strut on the second hit, splashing down into the water below with a sound like a dropped plate.
No multiplier.
No bonus.
Just a clear path and one less lens deciding what my day was worth to somebody’s advertising department.
Fenn, halfway down the ladder with the girl already handed off to the skiff, glanced up at me with something between alarm and amusement.
“That’s going to cost you.”
“It’s going to cost me exactly nothing,” I said, “because the ledger doesn’t care whether the camera saw it.”
I checked my bracelet the second the words left my mouth, half expecting to be wrong, half hoping I wasn’t.
The credit line ticked upward anyway, three names added to a “rescued” column that apparently ran off telemetry and not footage. New chapters come out on g.com first.
Three lives, logged and counted, whether or not some marketing department in a control room got their clean shot of me being heroic for the highlight reel.
“Huh,” Fenn said, following my eyes to the display.
“Didn’t know that.”
“Neither did I.” That was true, and it meant something worth remembering for every camera I’d have to deal with after this one.
If the system tracked survival on its own wires, then every lens bolted into a rescue corridor was there for the audience, not for the score.
That distinction mattered more than it probably should have, and I filed it away next to everything else I was learning about how this show actually kept score versus how it wanted contestants to believe it kept score.
We got the mother and both kids into the skiff.
She thanked me in a language the arena’s translation layer rendered a beat too smooth, the kind of gratitude that comes out shaky no matter what words carry it.
I nodded and turned back to the landing, because a pump crew had arrived while I wasn’t looking, dragging hose lines and a portable unit up the outer wall to start pulling water off the ground floor before the whole structure decided to give up on staying vertical.
“How long can you hold this floor?” I asked the crew chief, a stocky man already elbow-deep in the pump’s intake valve.
“Long enough for you to write down what you found,” he said without looking up.
“Don’t know past that. Nobody knows past anything in this district.”
Fair enough.
I pulled the slate back out and logged what I had: the family’s names as best the mother had given them through her shaking, the state of the vent, and the ruined stairwell, which shouldn’t be trusted even after the pumps did their work.
I added a quick line noting the smashed camera, too, letting production know exactly why their establishing shot never made it to broadcast.
I was still writing when the swap warning hit, that same five-second itch behind my eyes that had come to mean the floor was about to change under me whether I liked it or not.
Five.
Four.
I scrawled faster, jamming the last of the details onto the slate before somebody else’s problem became my problem in a different city entirely.
Three.
Door integrity: compromised, do not reopen the vent gap without shoring the frame first.
Confirmed survivors: three, extracted, logged.
Water level rising, pump crew has maybe an hour before the ground floor becomes the whole floor.
Two.
I shoved the slate into the crew chief’s hands so it wouldn’t vanish with me when the swap took hold.
One.
The pump’s engine noise cut out mid-breath, replaced by the metallic hum of some enclosed space, fluorescent light flooding in where floodwater and gray sky had been a heartbeat before.
My boots hit polished concrete instead of wet brick, and the smell of oil and sewage gave way to something sterile, like a warehouse scrubbed too many times to hide what it actually stored.
A woman crouched beside a pallet a few feet away, sealed courier boxes stacked around her like a barricade, her eyes going wide the moment she registered that the man who’d been standing there half a second ago had been replaced by someone she’d never met.
“You’re not Renn,” she said.
“No,” I said, already scanning the space for exits, cameras, anything that told me what kind of trouble I’d just been handed.
“I’m not.”
“Great.” She didn’t sound thrilled, but she also didn’t sound panicked, which told me she’d been through a swap or two of her own by now.
“Ilvane. I’ve got cargo that can’t get scanned twice or the whole run’s blown, and I don’t have time to explain the plan from scratch.”
“Then don’t,” I said.
“Give me the short version and point me at the door.”