He hit the water hard.
It closed over his head, black and freezing, and for a moment he did not know which way was up.
Then the vest remembered what it had been paid for.
It hauled him back to the surface like a cork, and he came up coughing under the stars.
‘Alive.
Still alive.
Good.’
Mav wiped his eyes and turned in a slow circle.
Water.
It stretched away in every direction, dark and gently rolling, until it met the sky.
There was no moon.
There were no lights.
The stars were bright enough to see by, and they showed him the same thing wherever he looked: a black horizon with nothing on it.
He turned around twice more to be sure.
No shore.
No island.
Not so much as a rock.
The stone had not lied, and Mav felt his stomach drop.
‘100 square kilometers.
That’s 10 by 10.
I can’t be more than a few kilometers from an edge.’
Then he realized that he had no idea what the edge of a Mote looked like.
Maybe there wasn’t one at all.
A Mote was round, after all, like a very small planet.
He decided not to swim anywhere.
There was nowhere to go, and every stroke would cost him warmth that he could not buy back.
The sensible thing was to float, keep still, and wait for daylight.
Once he could see, he could think.
So he floated.
It was almost peaceful, for a while.
The swell lifted him and set him down.
The pack hung heavy on his shoulders, but the vest held them both.
Above him, the stars were arranged in shapes that nobody on Earth had ever named.
It occurred to him that he was the only human being for an unimaginable distance in every direction.
It also occurred to him that he owned all of this.
Every drop.
‘Lord of the puddle.’
That was when he heard the hiss.
It was a very small sound, thin and steady, close to his left ear.
Mav went still.
Then, slowly, he lifted a hand out of the water and felt along the shoulder of the vest.
His fingers found the patch.
One corner of it had peeled away.
Under his fingertip, a thread of air was escaping, cool and patient.
Mav felt a stab of fear.
He stared up at the stars for a moment.
“…He swore on his mother.”
Nobody answered.
He pressed his thumb over the leak and held it there.
Dawn came slowly.
The sky turned gray, then a washed-out blue, and the stars went out one by one.
A small white sun climbed out of the water, and its warmth finally reached his freezing body.
By its light, Mav finally saw his World as it truly was.
It looked exactly the same as it had in the dark.
There was just more of it.
By then, his arm was shaking.
He had been holding the patch closed for hours, switching hands whenever one cramped, and it had not been enough.
The vest had gone soft.
The water, which had been at his chest, was now at his collarbone.
Soon after that, it was at his chin.
He started kicking his legs to stay afloat.
At first, it was easy.
He was not a bad swimmer.
But the pack was heavy, and it grew heavier with every minute as the canvas drank its fill.
Everything he owned was in it.
12 days of food.
Four canteens.
The knife.
The cabbage.
‘Drop it.’
It was the obvious thing to do.
He knew that.
A drowning man with a pack was just a drowning man who sank faster.
But without it, he would have no food and no blade, and he would starve on this water instead of drowning in it.
Besides, he had paid 40 credits for that pack.
He kept it.
The sun crawled higher.
His legs burned, then ached, then went numb.
He stopped feeling his fingers.
He swallowed water, coughed it out, and swallowed more.
Somewhere in the long middle of the day, he noticed that he had stopped being afraid and had started being tired, which was worse.
‘This is stupid.
I was chosen.
1 in 10.
And I’m going to die on the first day because of a patch.’
He thought of Juno, stabbing her potato.
He thought of two words from his uncle.
He thought of a boy with fire drakes who had not turned his head.
‘Not like this.
Not before I…’
His legs stopped.
There was no decision in it.
They simply would not move anymore.
The water closed over his mouth, then over his eyes, and he went under without a sound.
It was quiet below, and Mav was terrified.
The pack pulled him down like a hand.
He clawed at the straps, but his fingers were made of wood, and the buckle would not give.
The light above him shrank into a pale coin.
His chest was on fire.
Every instinct he had screamed at him to breathe, and he clenched his teeth against it, because there was nothing down here to breathe.
Darker.
Colder.
And then, below him, a glow.
It was faint and green, like a lamp seen through fog.
Mav thought his eyes were failing.
But as he sank, it grew clearer.
Long seaweeds were rising out of the depths toward him, swaying slowly in the current, each one lit from within by the same soft green light.
Seaweed.
‘…Oh.
There you are.’
He would have laughed, if he had any air left.
His 10 mighty subjects.
They had come to watch him die.
His vision was going dark at the edges.
He sank among the seaweeds, and they brushed against his arms, his face, his neck.
They were cool and smooth.
One of them drifted across the back of his neck and stayed there.
It coiled.
Before he could understand what was happening, something sharp slid under his skin at the base of his skull.
It was as thin as a needle and as cold as ice, and it did not stop.
Mav screamed.
His last breath left him in a rush of silver bubbles.
Water flooded his mouth, his throat, his chest.
This was it.
This was drowning.
He waited for the dark.
It didn’t come.
The fire in his lungs flickered.
Then it faded, slowly, like a coal dropped in snow.
Something cool was spreading from the back of his neck, down through his chest and out into his arms.
His heart, which had been hammering, began to slow.
He was not breathing.
He was sure of that.
But something was breathing for him.
Mav hung in the green-lit water, perfectly still, afraid that any movement would end it.
Seconds passed.
Then a minute.
His lungs were full of water, and he was alive.
That was when the letters appeared.
They were the same pale letters he had seen in the hall, floating in front of his eyes.
Every Awakened had them.
He remembered the name from school: the Status.
It was how the Genesis spoke to those it had chosen, in lines of light that only they could read.
It spoke to him now, calm and polite, as if nothing unusual had happened.
[Welcome to your World, Maverick Silkborn.]