Night closed over the water like a lid.
Mav watched it happen from below.
The pale sheet of the surface dimmed to gray, then to nothing, and the last of the daylight drained out of his World.
What remained was the green glow of 9 seaweeds and the slow pulse of the Heartstone.
Beyond those lay a darkness so complete that it seemed to have weight.
Something was out there in it.
Something long and pale.
It had not come back.
He had waited an hour to be sure, with his back against the Heartstone and the knife in his fist, feeling faintly ridiculous.
A knife.
Against whatever lived at the bottom of an ocean.
‘A knife will not be enough down here.
I need a real weapon.’
Eventually, his arm grew tired, and he had to accept that he could not stand guard for 30 days.
So he did what he always did when a problem was too large to look at directly.
He counted what he had.
The pack came open on the rock in front of him.
24 ration bars, gray, sealed in foil.
The seller had called that 12 days.
A jar of pickled cabbage.
Four canteens of water he did not need.
A knife.
A coil of cord.
A dented whistle.
One pair of wool socks, soaked through.
One flotation vest, deceased.
One credit.
And a loaf of bread, wrapped in cloth, that the sea had turned into a heavy gray sponge.
He looked at the loaf for a while.
His aunt had baked it that morning, and he missed her already.
He ate it anyway.
All of it.
It tasted like the bottom of the ocean, and eating underwater turned out to mean swallowing a mouthful of his World with every bite.
But it was food, and he had none to waste.
Then he did the arithmetic.
30 days.
24 bars.
At one bar a day, half of what the seller had intended, the bars would last 24 days.
The cabbage might stretch that to 26.
That left four days with nothing at all, at the very end, when he would be at his weakest and would need his strength the most.
It did not add up.
He would have to find food on his World.
‘With a stronger species and a better World, this would have been enough.
With mine, it is not.’
He had seen small shapes flickering at the edge of the light all afternoon.
Fish.
He put them on the list for tomorrow.
When everything was packed away again, he took the cord, looped it around a spur of rock next to the Heartstone, and tied the other end around his waist.
He had no intention of waking up a kilometer away because a current had carried him off in his sleep.
Then he lay down among the roots of his Subjects and closed his eyes.
Sleep did not come.
He lay there and listened.
There was nothing to hear, so he listened to the other thing instead.
9 slow, steady presences, arranged in a ring around him.
They did not think.
He was fairly sure of that.
They were simply there, the way other people are there in a dark room when you can hear them breathing.
It should have disturbed him.
He had not shared a room with anyone since he was 10.
Instead, it was almost…
He stopped that thought before it could finish.
But it was too late.
The thought had already opened a door, and the rest came through.
He had been 10 years old, and he had been away from home for six days.
His uncle Garrett was a distant relative on his mother’s side, the only one who had never wanted anything from his father.
Mav had liked him.
He had liked the foundry, too, with its noise and its sparks and its machines the size of houses.
For a 10-year-old boy, it had been a wonder.
It had been the best week of his year.
His uncle walked him home on the last evening.
The door was open.
That was what he remembered best.
Not what came after.
The door.
His mother never left it open.
He remembered the smell.
He remembered that the house was quiet, and that a house with a six-year-old in it was never quiet.
His sister was six.
He remembered a small yellow shoe lying on its side at the foot of the stairs.
And he remembered his uncle’s hand closing over his eyes, one second too late.
Mav saw it all.
His father, Corwin Silkborn, lay dead on the floor, his head severed.
His mother, Elise, lay beside him, with deep slashes across her whole body.
And his sister, Wren, who was six years old and had never been a traitor to anything, had been burned to death.
From where she lay, she must have watched her parents die first.
It was the worst day of Mav’s life.
After that, his uncle took him in and cared for him.
It took Mav two years to act almost normal again.
The official version came out three months after the murders.
Corwin Silkborn had been found guilty of treason against the Concord, the government that ruled Earth on paper, and had been executed.
It did not mention a trial, because there had not been one.
It did not mention his wife or his daughter at all.
Mav knew the other version.
Earth belonged to 10 families.
People called them the Imperial Houses, or simply the Ten.
Their Worlds had been growing for centuries, and so had they.
Talent ran in the blood, so the child of a rare talent was nearly always born with one.
Wealth fed the next generation before it could even walk.
And so the same 10 names sat at the top, generation after generation, as fixed as stars.
Below them were the noble houses that served them.
Below those, everyone else.
The commoners.
Almost all of them were either Worldless or very weak Awakened.
Corwin Silkborn, Mav’s father, had been everyone else.
He was a commoner, born in the same district where his son would later grow up.
But his World had grown, and it had kept on growing, far past the point where a commoner’s World was supposed to stop.
By the end, he had stood one step below a height that only the Ten and their closest servants had ever reached.
Worse, he had talked.
He had said, loudly and often, that the ladder was rigged.
He had said he would prove it by climbing to the top.
The Ten had not waited to find out whether he could.
More than one house had sent its people that night.
Mav knew that much.
He knew one of the names for certain, and that name was Pyrecrest.
The others, he had been collecting for eight years.
Patiently.
One overheard word at a time.
They had known about the boy, of course.
His uncle had hidden him for the first few months, in a back room, under another name.
It had not been necessary.
A 10-year-old with no World was nothing to them.
Leaving him alive was even useful.
The traitor’s son, walking around for everyone to see.
A warning with a face.
Mav opened his eyes.
It was still the middle of the night.
Black water.
Green light.
The slow pulse of the Heartstone against his shoulder.
He did not cry.
He had used all of that up at 10, and nobody had restocked it since.
The grief was still there, though, as heavy as ever.
What he had instead was a list.
It was a long list, and he could not reach a single name on it.
He had an E potential, an ocean, and 10 weeds.
‘It is not much.
But it is where I start.
My potential worries me the most.
There are said to be rare ways to raise it, and I need to find one.
That is my main long-term goal.’
Something touched his face.
His heart leaped, and he had the knife out before he saw what it was.
One of the nine had bent down over him in the dark, all the way from its root, until its glowing tip hung just above his forehead.
He had not ordered that.
He was certain.
‘I didn’t ask.’
The seaweed stayed where it was.
Through the root in his neck, he felt it there, steady and close.
It was not thinking anything.
It was only near.
Mav looked at it for a long time.
He did not send it away.
For the first time in years, he felt a little less alone.
At some point, pale letters lit up in the dark above him.
[Day 2]
29 left.
He had to advance before the 30th day.
For a commoner, not being in an academy was a death sentence.
He closed his eyes.
Somehow, he slept.