Mav’s first act as the master of a World was to let the last of the air out of his life vest.
It was not a grand beginning.
A few fat bubbles wobbled up toward the surface, the orange fabric went limp, and the pack immediately resumed its attempt to drag him to the bottom.
This time, he let it.
Down was where he needed to go.
9 of his 10 Subjects were down there, and so was the deeper light he had glimpsed through the seaweed.
He had a good idea of what that light was.
If he was right, it was the most important object he would ever own, and he had never even seen it.
He folded the dead vest and stuffed it into the pack.
The patch could be glued again.
Probably.
‘You don’t throw away good equipment just because it tried to kill you.’
He sank.
The water darkened around him by degrees.
Silver turned to blue, blue turned to something close to black, and the pressure built in his ears until he had to swallow to clear them.
The cold deepened, too.
It should have frightened him more than it did.
But the coolness spreading from the back of his neck never wavered, and after a while, he stopped waiting for his chest to burn.
The seaweed guided him.
It rose past him on every side like the trunks of a drowned forest, each one glowing its soft green, and he followed it down hand over hand.
That was when he noticed the other thing.
It had been there for a while, he realized.
A faint pull at the base of his skull, right where the seaweed went in.
It was not pain.
It was more like the feeling of knowing where his own hand was in the dark.
Except that it pointed downward, and there was more than one of it.
He closed his eyes to be sure.
Nine.
9 small points of something, spread in a rough circle far below him.
He could not see them.
He simply knew where they were, the same way he knew where his feet were.
He could feel where his Subjects were.
‘…That will be useful.’
He opened his eyes and kept going.
The bottom came up out of the gloom about 60 meters down.
It was bare black rock, cracked and uneven, sloping gently inward from every side.
And at its lowest point, half sunk into the stone, sat the thing he had come to find.
It was smaller than he had expected.
The Heartstone was a rough lump of dark crystal, about as tall as his waist.
It was cloudy and unremarkable, the sort of rock a person might walk past on a beach.
But deep inside it, a pale light swelled and faded, with a slow rhythm that could not be mistaken for anything else.
It was beating.
Mav drifted down until his boots touched the rock, and stood in front of it for a long moment, filled with awe.
Every World had one.
That was one of the first things children learned about the Genesis, usually from a picture book.
A World did not begin with land or water.
It began with a heart, and everything else grew around it, layer after layer, the way Earth was wrapped around its core.
Feed the heart, and the World grew.
That was the third bar on his Status.
The second thing children learned came later, and it did not come from a picture book.
If a Heartstone was ever destroyed, its World died with it.
And so did the Awakened it belonged to.
Not later, and not slowly.
At once, wherever he happened to be standing.
Even on Earth, at his own table, with his family around him.
The idea made him feel cold.
Mav looked at the cloudy lump of crystal.
Then he looked up, at 60 meters of open water with no walls, no doors and no guards.
‘So the one thing that can kill me in a single blow is sitting on the floor, in the open.
Good.
Very convenient.’
He reached out and laid his palm on it.
It was warm, which surprised him, because everything else down here was cold.
Pale letters flickered at the edge of his vision.
[Heartstone: 0%]
“Makes sense.
I need to feed it energy to make it grow.”
His voice came out as a cloud of bubbles and a noise like a drain.
He decided not to do that again.
The other 9 seaweeds grew in a ring around the Heartstone.
Each one was rooted in a crack in the rock, as thick as his wrist at the base, rising and thinning until it vanished into the dark overhead.
Up close, they looked less like plants than like slow green flames.
There was a tenth crack, too.
It held nothing but a torn stump.
He knew where the rest of that one was.
He counted them twice anyway.
He counted most things twice.
Then he picked the nearest seaweed and simply looked at it.
The moment he did, one of the 9 points in his head grew sharper, the way a sound grows sharper when you turn toward it.
Mav hesitated.
This was stupid.
It was a plant.
‘Move.’
For a second, nothing happened.
Then the seaweed leaned toward him.
It leaned against the current.
He stared at it, amazed.
‘Left.’
It bent to the left, slowly, like a limb waking up after a long sleep.
‘Stop.’
It stopped.
Every Awakened could command their Subjects.
That was the whole point of having them.
But they did it with words, with whistles, with years of patient training.
Wolves learned their names.
Goblins learned to speak.
He had never heard of anyone who did it with a thought.
Then again, nobody he had ever heard of had one of their Subjects growing into the top of their spine.
He tried the others, one after another.
Each of them answered.
Some were quick, and others took their time, as if they were thinking it over first.
By the ninth, he could no longer tell where the order ended and the movement began.
It did not feel like commanding something.
It felt like discovering that he had always had 9 more fingers, and was only now learning to bend them.
It felt natural.
That was what he disliked about it.
Mav did not like owing things.
He liked being part of things even less.
The last time he had been part of something, it had been taken away in a single evening, and he had spent eight years making sure there was nothing left for anyone to take.
Now there were 10 of them, and one was inside him.
He let go of the seaweeds, in whatever way a person lets go of a thing like that, and reached for a canteen out of sheer habit.
His throat was dry.
His hand stopped on the cap.
He had been swallowing this water since midnight.
Whole mouthfuls of it.
His eyes had been open in it for hours, and they had never once stung.
He ran his tongue over his lips.
No salt.
It was fresh.
All of it.
100 square kilometers of clean drinking water, in every direction, as deep as it went.
Mav took the canteen out and looked at it.
There were three more just like it in the pack.
‘I paid for water, but I am standing inside more free water than I have ever seen in my life.
Great.
I won’t have to worry about water anymore.’
He considered pouring them out to save the weight.
He could not bring himself to do it.
He had a long habit of never throwing away what he owned.
He put the canteen back.
High above him, the silver sheet of the surface was beginning to dim.
The first day was ending.
And at the edge of the green light, something long and pale slid through the dark, and was gone.
Mav did not see it clearly.
He did not need to.
All 9 of his seaweeds had gone rigid at the same instant, and through the root in his neck, he felt a flinch that was not his own.
Whatever that thing was, his seaweed knew it.
And it was dangerous.
Mav felt a shiver of fear.