Nobody slept that night.
Mav sat with his back against the Heartstone and the harpoon across his knees.
Two and Five stayed in their dens under the rocks.
Six stood beside him.
Outside the wall, Seven had not moved at all.
The water grew warmer by the hour.
He went through everything he knew, looking for an answer, and found it in a lesson he had half listened to at school.
Worlds were not gardens.
That was how the teacher had put it.
Every World had its own weather, and every kind of weather had its own way of killing.
Some Worlds burned for a season each year.
Some shook.
Some drowned under storms that lasted for weeks.
The teachers called these things cycles, and they came back again and again for as long as the World lived.
Nobody could tell a new Awakened what the cycle of his World would be.
He found out on the day it hit him.
’24 days without anything.
I thought my World didn’t have one.
It was only late.’
Just before dawn, he heard it.
It was not really a sound.
It was too low for that.
He felt it in his chest and in his teeth, a long groan that came up through the rock under him.
The Heartstone shivered against his back.
Then the seabed began to shake.
‘Everyone inside the wall.
Now!
Two, Five, stay in the dens.
Six, with me.’
He swam up above the wall to look down the slope, and wished that he had not.
The deep water was coming up.
A wall of brown was climbing the slope toward him.
It stretched as far as he could see to the left and to the right, and it reached up into the dark above.
It was not a wave.
It was the sea itself, turning over.
All the cold, heavy water from the bottom was rising, and it was carrying the bottom with it.
Mud.
Stones.
Dead fish by the hundred.
A boulder as big as Six rolled over and over inside it, like a pebble in a stream.
Mav had no name for it.
One came to him anyway.
It looked as if a giant hand had reached down and stirred the whole sea with a spoon.
‘The Churn.’
It hit the base a few seconds later.
The wall did not hold.
He had been building that wall since his second day in this World, stone by stone, with his own hands and later with Six’s claws.
The Churn went through it as if it were made of sand.
The top stones flew off.
Then the whole thing leaned, broke, and was gone into the brown water.
The larder burst.
A cloud of shrimp shot out of it and vanished.
The current caught Mav in the chest and threw him backward.
He hit the seabed, rolled, and slammed into the Heartstone with his shoulder.
He wrapped both arms around it and held on.
He could see nothing.
The water had turned to mud.
There was only the pale beat of the Heartstone under his hands, the roar of the current, and the points in his head.
The points were all he had.
He counted them.
Six was right beside him, flat against the rock, with all eight legs dug in.
Seven was outside what was left of the wall, pressed to the seabed.
Eight, Nine and Ten were bent flat by the current.
He could feel their roots straining in the cracks.
Two and Five were moving.
They were moving much too fast, and they were moving away.
The dens that Six had dug for them had collapsed.
The current had torn the two fish out and was carrying them off into the dark, tumbling, faster than they could swim.
‘Two!
Five!
Get to the bottom and hold on to something!’
He did not know if they heard him.
The two points grew fainter and fainter.
Fear for them twisted in his stomach.
Then he felt something tear, very close to him, and forgot everything else.
It was Eleven.
The two sprouts were no longer than his forearm.
Their roots were thin and new.
The current had ripped Eleven out of its crack, and the little seaweed was already sliding away across the rock.
Mav let go of the Heartstone with one hand and threw himself after it.
His fingers closed around it at the last moment.
He pulled it against his chest.
It wrapped itself around his forearm at once, and held on so tightly that it hurt.
‘I’ve got you.
I’ve got you.’
Twelve came loose a second later.
He caught that one too, with the same hand, because the other was the only thing keeping him on the Heartstone.
Twelve wrapped around his wrist, just above Eleven.
Now he had one arm around the stone and two sprouts on the other, and the current was trying to pull all three of them off into the dark.
He fumbled for the cord at his belt.
It was the cord he used every night to tie himself to the rock.
Using his teeth and his free fingers, he looped it around the Heartstone, then around his own waist, and pulled the knot tight.
‘There.
Nobody else leaves.
Not while I’m here.’
He pressed the sprouts against his chest, bent his head, and held on.
The Churn went on.
He did not know for how long.
There was no light to tell the time by.
There was only the roar, the stones that struck his back and his legs, and the mud that filled his mouth each time he forgot to keep it shut.
He stopped thinking.
He only counted the points in his head, over and over, to be sure that they were still there.
Eight.
Nine.
Ten.
Six.
Seven.
Eleven and Twelve against his chest.
Two and Five were so faint now that he could barely find them.
Then Six moved.
The crab lifted himself off the rock and turned to face up the slope.
Mav felt alarm from him, sharp and sudden.
Mav could see nothing through the mud.
He did not need to.
He reached for Six in his mind, and felt what the crab was feeling through the rock under his legs.
Something heavy was coming down the slope above the base.
It was a boulder.
It was far larger than the one that had fallen on Six on the ninth day.
It was as big as a cart, and the Churn had pulled it loose from the cliff.
It was rolling, slowly, turning over and over.
It was rolling straight toward the Heartstone.
Mav went cold.
If a Heartstone was destroyed, its World died with it.
And so did the Awakened it belonged to.