‘Seven.
Go.’
A seaweed could not move by itself.
Someone had to carry it to its prey.
So Mav stretched out his left arm, with the last of his strength, until his wrist lay against the broken jaw of the eel.
Seven let go of his wrist.
Seven had never had a host.
It had been rooted in the same crack of rock for its whole life, and now it lay against the strongest creature in the sea.
Mav could do nothing more.
He could barely keep his eyes open.
The tip of the seaweed slid along the pale skin, found the place where the bone had cracked, and went in.
The eel shuddered.
Mav felt the key enter the lock.
He had felt it with four fish and a crab, but never like this.
This lock was enormous.
It was old, and cold, and it did not want to turn.
For a long moment, he felt a third heart inside him, slow and heavy, and with it came everything the eel was feeling.
It was pain.
It was hunger.
And under both of those, there was a fear that the eel had never known before tonight.
Seven pushed deeper.
The lock turned.
The fear stopped.
The hunger stayed, but it was no longer aimed at him.
Seven wrapped itself around the thick white neck, coil after coil, and its green glow lit the tunnel.
Mav opened the entry with the last of his strength.
[Seaweed.
Rank F-.
Essence: 9/100.
Host: Pale Eel.]
He read it twice.
Then he let his head fall back against the rock, weak with relief.
The seaweed was still rank F-.
Its host was rank E-.
It was the same thing he had noticed with the crab.
A seaweed did not take the rank of the beast it controlled.
It only took the beast.
There was something else, too.
He had not known it a minute ago, and now he knew it as surely as he knew his own name.
The eel was a female.
‘So Seven is a she now.
Fine.’
Above him, Six was still holding on to her jaw with all his strength.
‘Six.
Let go.
She’s ours.’
The claw opened.
It took a long time to get everyone out of the tunnel.
Seven backed out first, a little at a time, the whole four meters of her.
Her broken jaw hung to one side.
A thin green thread was already creeping along the crack, but it was slow.
She would not be able to bite anything for days.
Mav crawled out after her.
His left leg dragged behind him, and his shoulder burned every time he moved his arm.
Two and Five stayed close to his face the whole way, as if they were afraid he would stop moving.
When he was finally out in the open water, he turned around and looked at what he owned.
She hung in front of him in the dark, pale and enormous, with a green seaweed around her neck.
She was as long as two grown men.
Eight days ago, she had swallowed Three and Four whole.
For a week, she had kept him a prisoner in his own base.
Now she was waiting for orders.
‘Come.’
She came.
It was the strangest feeling of his life.
He could feel her in his head, exactly as he felt the others, but she was so much larger.
Two was a quick, bright point.
Six was a heavy one.
Seven was like a cold river running through the back of his skull.
She followed him up the slope, all the way to the wall.
There, she stopped.
Mav felt why at once.
To her, the Heartstone was not a stone.
It was a noise.
It hummed so loudly in her senses that it drowned out everything else, and when she came close to it, she could feel nothing at all.
Near the Heartstone, she was truly blind.
‘So that’s why you never came in.
I guessed right.’
He did not force her.
‘Stay outside the wall, then.
Guard the gate.’
She curled her long body around the outside of the wall and went still.
Mav looked at her for a while.
The monster that had hunted them every night was now lying across their door.
For the first time in eight days, nothing was hunting them.
Mav felt safe, and he had almost forgotten what that was like.
He should have slept.
But he was too curious.
There was a rule he had been waiting to test for 18 days, and until tonight, he had never had the means.
Every Awakened could use the skills of his own species.
It was the main reason people prayed for a strong species at the Bestowal.
A boy with fire drakes would breathe fire himself one day.
A girl with wolves would run like a wolf and smell what a wolf could smell.
The stronger the species, the stronger its master.
But there was a condition.
A species had no skill at all at rank F.
It developed its first skill when it reached rank E, a second one at rank D, a third at rank C, and so on up to the top.
That was why the first weeks were so hard for everyone.
A new Awakened had no skill to use.
Mav had even less than that.
His seaweeds were rank F, and they were plants.
The eel was different.
She was a wild beast, born at rank E-.
She had exactly one skill.
She was not his species, though.
An Awakened could only use the skills of his own species, and the eel was a host.
By the rules, her skill should have been out of his reach.
But Seven was wrapped around her neck, and One was rooted in his.
Every one of his seaweeds was tied to the others.
He wondered if a skill could travel along that tie, from the eel to Seven, and from Seven to One.
If it could, it would not be his own skill.
It would only be borrowed.
He sat down against the Heartstone, closed his eyes, and reached for Seven in his mind.
He did not give her an order.
He only looked for the cold river in his head and followed it down, to the place where her power lived.
It was there.
He could feel it, like a button waiting to be pushed.
He pushed.
[You have borrowed a skill: Discharge.]
[Skill: Discharge]
[Borrowed from: Pale Eel]
[Releases an electric shock into everything around the user.
It stuns weak creatures and can kill them.
Range: 5 meters.
Recharge: 100 seconds.]
Mav read the lines carefully.
A talent came with a name and nothing else.
A skill was different.
The Genesis described every skill plainly, the way a seller describes a tool before handing it over.
There was one more line under the others.
[A borrowed skill grows as its borrower grows.]
His own seaweed was still rank F-.
He understood what that meant a moment later.
Blue light crawled over his fingers.
It was small, and nothing like the white flash that had stopped his heart, but it was real.
Thin threads of light jumped between his fingertips, and a shrimp that had been walking over a stone beside his hand went stiff and fell on its side.
Mav stared at his hand in wonder.
Then the pain arrived.
It felt as if he had closed his fist around a hot wire.
He let go of the skill at once, and the light went out.
His whole arm was numb to the shoulder, and his head was spinning as if he had not eaten in two days.
‘One small spark, and I’m empty.
I’ll need a lot of practice before this is any use.’
He was grinning anyway.
He could not stop.
Every other Awakened in his year would use the skills of one species, for life.
Cassian would have fire.
Dorian would have whatever his hounds gave him.
Mav’s seaweeds had no skill of their own yet.
But they could take a beast that had one.
And if they took another beast tomorrow, with another skill, he could borrow that one too, through One.
‘Nobody in that hall would believe this.
A boy with seaweed, throwing lightning.’
He stopped grinning.
‘Nobody can know, either.
Not for now, at least.
If the houses learn what Host really does, I’m dead.’
He checked one more line before he slept.
He had been hoping, without admitting it.
[Potential: E]
It had not moved.
He had taken the strongest beast in his sea, and his ceiling was exactly where it had been on the first day.
He felt a stab of disappointment.
‘Fine.
One problem at a time.’
He looked at the three bars.
[Day 18]
[Rank E- Subjects: 0/10]
[Development: 12%]
[Heartstone: 0%]
He had 12 days left, and all three bars were almost empty.
It seemed that owning a rank E- beast did not count toward the first bar.
Only the rank of the seaweed itself did.
But the deep water was no longer closed to him.
Tomorrow, the creature that owned it would be hunting on his side.