On the morning of the twenty-second day, Mav opened his pack and found one ration bar.
It was the last.
He had started with 24.
He turned the pack upside down to be sure, and nothing else fell out except the jar that had once held pickled cabbage.
It had been empty for a week.
He held the gray bar in his hand for a while, and felt a sudden pang of homesickness.
He did not need it.
He had been eating raw fish for 15 days, and there was more fish in his larder than he could finish.
But the bar had come from Earth.
It was the last thing in this World that had been bought in the market behind the foundry, on the same afternoon he had said goodbye to Ronald.
‘I’ll keep it.
I’ll eat it on the day I go home.’
He set it down on a flat stone beside the Heartstone and turned around to pick up his harpoon.
When he turned back, the bar was gone.
Six was standing over the flat stone.
The crab’s mouth was moving.
A corner of silver foil stuck out of it.
As Mav watched, the foil disappeared too.
For a second, neither of them moved.
‘…That was mine.’
Six did not seem troubled.
He felt, in Mav’s head, exactly like a creature that had found food on the ground and eaten it.
Mav opened his mouth to be angry.
What came out was a laugh.
It came out as a stream of bubbles, and once it had started, he could not stop it.
He laughed until his chest hurt.
Two and Five swam in nervous circles around his head.
Outside the wall, Seven lifted her blind face.
He could not remember the last time he had laughed.
It was certainly before the Bestowal.
It might have been years.
‘Fine.
Keep it.
You’ve earned it more than I have.’
He had fallen into a habit, and he only noticed it that morning.
Every day, before the hunt, he sat down among his Subjects and told them the plan.
He told them where they were going, which of them would stun and which would carry, who was behind and needed the next kill.
He did not say it aloud.
He pictured it, and held the picture until he felt that they had it.
He had started doing it because he had promised to.
He kept doing it because it worked.
They moved faster when they knew what he wanted.
And he had stopped feeling foolish about explaining himself to a crab.
That day, the plan was simple.
Everything went to those who were closest to rank E-.
It paid off before dark.
[A Subject has reached Rank E-.]
[A Subject has reached Rank E-.]
The first was Two.
Mav had expected that.
Two had been the first of his Subjects in everything.
The needlefish changed in front of him.
He grew until he was as long as Mav’s leg and as thick as his arm, and his thin jaws turned as hard and sharp as the blade of the harpoon.
The fins that had been torn in the fight with the eel had never healed properly.
Now the green thread ran along them.
By evening, they would be whole.
More letters followed.
[You have borrowed a skill: Dart.]
[Skill: Dart]
[The user shoots forward in a straight line, too fast for the eye to follow.
Range: 10 meters.
Recharge: 30 seconds.]
[A borrowed skill grows as its borrower grows.]
Mav read it twice.
The seaweed already had its skill, and this was not it.
This one did not belong to the seaweed.
It belonged to the needlefish.
The seaweed had pulled the fish up to rank E-, and the fish had developed the skill of its own kind.
Two tried his new skill at once.
One moment, he was hanging in front of Mav’s face.
The next, he was 10 meters away, and the water between them was still closing.
The second was Six.
Mav swam over to watch, because he had been waiting for this one.
The crab stood still, as he had four days ago.
That time, nothing had happened to him.
This time, his seaweed had outgrown him.
His gray shell split along the old crack and fell away in two pieces.
Under it, there was a new shell, darker and thicker.
When Six stood up again, he was a third larger than before, and his legs were as thick as Mav’s arms.
Then the green thread crept out of his back and ran down to the claw that the boulder had crushed.
That claw had hung useless since the ninth day.
It fell off.
It simply dropped onto the seabed, like a dead leaf.
In its place, there was a small pale bud.
The bud grew all night.
It lengthened and hardened, and turned from white to gray.
By the next morning, Six had a new claw.
It was as large as the first, and when he closed it on a stone, the stone burst.
‘Regeneration.
It can grow back a whole limb in one night.’
The claw was not the only thing that Six had gained.
[You have borrowed a skill: Stone Shell.]
[Skill: Stone Shell]
[The user’s shell or skin becomes as hard as rock.
Duration: 10 seconds.
Recharge: 2 minutes.]
[A borrowed skill grows as its borrower grows.]
Mav tried both new skills that evening.
He could not help it.
He reached for Six in his mind and pushed.
The skin of his forearm turned gray and rough.
He struck it with the handle of his knife, and it rang like a pebble.
Three seconds later, it was skin again.
His own seaweed was only rank F, and the skill was as weak as he was, so he could only hold it for three seconds instead of the full 10.
The Dart skill went worse.
He shot forward two meters, much faster than he had meant to, and hit the wall with his face.
His nose bled for a few minutes.
Later that evening, he tried to use both at the same time.
He hardened his skin and pushed for Dart.
Nothing happened.
A line appeared instead.
[Rank F: you can use only 1 borrowed skill at a time.]
He waited.
Three seconds later, his skin turned soft again, and only then did Dart answer him.
‘One at a time, then.
If I harden my skin, I can’t dash or use Discharge until it ends.
I’ll have to choose well in a fight.’
‘Three skills.
Discharge, Dart and Stone Shell.
They’re weak for now.
But they’ll grow when One does.’
He understood the difference now.
Like every Awakened, he could use the skill of his own species.
For him, that was Regeneration.
He had received it two days ago, on the night Seven reached rank E-, and it was truly his.
The skills of the beasts were another matter.
The eel, the needlefish and the crab were not his species.
No other Awakened could have used their skills at all.
Mav could, but only because of One.
The seaweed in his neck tied him to the seaweeds that held those beasts, and their skills came to him along that tie.
They were borrowed.
They would never be his own.
He looked at his own calf.
His leg had regenerated too.
On the morning after Seven reached rank E-, the long tear from the eel’s tooth had been gone, and only a pale line was left.
‘The borrowed skills grow with me, and I grow with One.
So I need to push One.
I’ve been giving every kill to the others.’
That was his own doing.
For three days, he had handed his catch to whoever was behind.
His own seaweed had fallen to the back of the line.
He checked.
[Seaweed.
Rank F.
Essence: 188/200.
Host: Maverick Silkborn.]
It was almost rank F+.
He had not looked at that entry in days.
That number mattered more than any other, and he had almost missed why.
A host grew when its seaweed outgrew it.
An Awakened had the rank of his World, and Mav’s World was rank F.
One was rank F too.
They were level.
But the moment One reached rank F+, it would outgrow him, and it would pull him up with it.
He had forgotten that he was a host too.
‘So when One climbs past me, I climb with it.
I don’t have to wait for my World, like the others.
Good.
I’ll take every bit of that.’
On the evening of the twenty-third day, the numbers were the best he had ever seen.
[Day 23]
[Rank E- Subjects: 3/10]
[Development: 38%]
[Heartstone: 22%]
Three out of 10, with seven days left.
The wall was higher than his head now, and Six had dug a second larder.
For the first time, Mav let himself think that it might be enough.
That was when he noticed that something was wrong with the sea.
He should have noticed sooner.
The signs had been there all day.
The swarm of needlefish had not come at noon.
In 23 days, it had never missed once.
The flat gray fish in the deep water had been harder to find, too.
Many of them had buried themselves in the mud, with only their eyes showing.
And the water was warm.
It was not much.
But for three weeks, the sea around his base had been the same cold temperature, day and night, and now there was a soft warmth rising from the slope.
He swam out through the gate.
Seven was not lying along the wall.
She had pressed herself into the angle between the wall and the seabed, as flat as she could make herself.
When he reached for her in his head, he found something he had not felt from her since the tunnel.
She was afraid.
‘Of what?
You’re the strongest creature in this sea.’
She had no answer that he could understand.
There was only a feeling.
Something large was coming, from below, and it was not a beast.
Mav hung in the water and looked down the slope.
There was nothing to see.
The water was dark and perfectly clear.
Then he understood what else was wrong.
The current had stopped.
It had pulled at his seaweeds from the same side since the first day.
He had built a wall against it.
So he had stopped noticing it, the way a person stops noticing the wind.
Now there was no current at all.
The seaweeds stood straight up.
Nothing moved, and Mav felt dread settle in his chest.
The whole sea was holding its breath.