When Mav woke on the ninth day, the bandages had come loose in the night.
He pulled the socks away to look at his leg, and stopped.
The two grooves had closed.
Where the claw had torn his skin, a thin green thread now ran across each wound, as neat as a stitch.
The purple had faded to yellow.
When he bent his ankle, it hurt, but it bent.
He had seen that thread before.
It had appeared on the side of the first needlefish, a few minutes after his seaweed took it.
‘It heals its host.
And I am a host.’
He touched the back of his neck.
The seaweed there was cool and quiet, as always.
It had spent the night repairing him, without being asked, the same way it had been breathing for him since the first day.
Mav was not sure how he felt about that.
He decided that it was useful, and that he should not count on it for anything worse than a cut.
One of his fish had brought something back during the night, too.
The knife lay on the rock beside the Heartstone.
He had sent the fish to look for it among the boulders, and it had carried the knife home in its jaws.
He bound the knife to the second metal stay, the straight one.
He had a harpoon again.
‘I will not use it on the crab, though.
Not as a weapon.’
He spent the morning on the cliff above the hollow where the crab lived, studying rocks.
The slope was covered in boulders, as he remembered.
Most of them were sunk deep in the silt and would never move.
But near the edge, right above the ledge, one boulder as big as the crab was sitting on three smaller stones.
It leaned toward the drop.
The only thing that kept it in place was the stone under its front edge.
Mav pushed the tip of the harpoon shaft under that stone and leaned on it, very gently.
The stone shifted.
The boulder above it rocked.
He stopped at once.
‘One push, and it goes.
It will fall straight down past the ledge.
So the crab has to be standing in front of its hollow, not inside it.’
That was a job for the fish.
He gave them their orders slowly, picturing in his head what he wanted.
The four fish were to go down to the hollow and bother the crab until it came out.
They were to stay out of reach of the claws.
And they were to leave the moment he told them to.
He had learned from the day before.
This time, nobody would be within reach of those claws.
Not his fish, and not him.
‘Go.’
The fish went down.
For a while, nothing happened.
Then gray legs appeared at the mouth of the hollow.
The crab came out one step at a time, claws raised, turning after the four silver shapes that would not leave it alone.
It took one step past the ledge.
Then another.
It was standing right below the boulder.
‘Away.
Now!’
The fish scattered.
Mav threw his whole weight on the shaft.
The small stone shot out.
The boulder tipped forward, hung on the edge for an instant, and fell.
It took a dozen smaller rocks with it.
They went down in silence, the way everything fell in the water, and a great cloud of silt rolled up from the foot of the cliff and hid everything.
Mav waited, with his heart in his throat.
It took a long time for the water to clear.
When it did, he saw the crab.
The boulder had come down across its back.
The shell had cracked from one side to the other, and one of the two claws was crushed flat under the rock.
The crab was alive.
Its legs scraped slowly at the seabed, but they could not lift the weight.
It was trapped.
And it was weak.
He swam down to it.
He came from the side of the crushed claw, without making a sound.
Around his arm, he carried one of the five seaweeds that had still been rooted in the rock that morning.
It had let go the moment he asked.
The eye stalks of the crab followed him.
The good claw twitched.
It could not reach him.
‘I am sorry about the boulder.
It was the only way.’
He laid the seaweed against the crack in the shell.
The seaweed slid into the crack and disappeared, all but its tail.
Mav felt the key enter the lock.
This lock was bigger than the others, and it turned slowly.
For a moment, there was a second heart inside him, and it was nothing like the heart of a fish.
It was slow and heavy, like a drum.
Then the two hearts became one.
The legs of the crab stopped scraping.
It took him an hour to dig the crab out, with the crab pushing from below.
When it finally stood free, it looked terrible.
One claw hung useless.
The shell was split across the back.
But a green thread was already creeping along the crack, and when Mav thought ‘Come’, the crab walked after him up the slope, as steady as a cart.
He could feel it in his head.
It was not quick like the fish, but it was a heavy, patient presence, and it was strong.
When it closed its good claw on a stone at his order, the stone cracked.
He checked his Status.
[Seaweed.
Rank F-.
Essence: 2/100.
Host: Rock Crab.]
Five hosts.
Four fish and a crab.
Mav noted that the rank of the seaweed was still F-, even though it had taken a creature of a higher rank.
And there was more.
While he had been digging, a line had appeared at the edge of his vision.
He had been too busy to read it.
[A Subject has reached Rank F.]
His heart beat faster.
He opened the column and found the entry.
[Seaweed.
Rank F.
Essence: 3/200.
Host: Needlefish.]
It was the first one.
It was the stubborn seaweed that had taken a host before any of the others.
It had hunted for three days without stopping, and it had climbed the first step.
He called the fish to him and looked at it.
The change was easy to see.
The green seaweed coiled around the needlefish’s body was thicker than before, and its glow was brighter.
The fish itself had grown, too.
It was longer than his forearm now, and when it moved, it moved faster than his eye could follow.
‘So a host grows stronger when its seaweed climbs.
Good.
That is worth knowing.
I wonder what will happen when the seaweed in the crab gains a rank.’
He finally saw an improvement.
It was the first real proof that the road he was on led somewhere.
He felt proud, and he felt hopeful.
He also remembered the limit, because every child learned it together with the ranks.
The limit that held the wild beasts held Subjects too.
A Subject could rise above its World, but only by one rank.
His World was rank F.
So the highest his seaweeds could climb was rank E, with its three steps: E-, E and E+.
To go any further, the World itself would have to rise first.
But that was a problem for later.
Rank E- was all he needed for now.
That evening, he sat among his Subjects and realized that he could no longer keep them straight.
There were 10 of them.
Six had hosts and four did not, and each one felt a little different in his head.
He needed a way to tell them apart.
Other Awakened gave their Subjects names.
He had heard them at school, talking about wolves called Storm and Fang as if they were family.
Mav gave his Subjects numbers.
One was the seaweed in his own neck.
Two was the stubborn one, the first to take a fish and the first to reach rank F.
Three was the quick one from beside the wall.
Four and Five were the other two fish.
Six was the crab.
Seven, Eight, Nine and Ten were the four still rooted in the rock.
Numbers were simple.
They were easy to count, and he was good at counting.
He told himself that this was the only reason.
Before he slept, Two came to hover in front of his face.
Two had something to show him.
He did not see it with his eyes.
It was closer to remembering something he had never seen.
Past the cliff of the crab, the seabed dropped away into deeper water.
The light was weak down there.
But the fish that lived in that dark water were three times the size of a needlefish, and there were many of them.
Bigger prey meant more Essence.
‘Tomorrow, we hunt deeper.
Six comes with us as a guard.’
It was a good plan.
Deeper was where the Essence was.
It was also where the pale thing lived.