Page 13 of Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear

Nadya didn’t know what to make of that, or of the way Galina laughed and turned to poke her tongue out at Inna, leaving them both giggling like much younger girls. So she looked to the first man she’d met, whose name she still didn’t know, and begged for an explanation with her eyes.

He took some pity on her, because he came closer and sat on the nearest low bench, saying, “This is a new place, and like all new places, it will have new rules. We’re glad to have you, and we’ll do our best not to confuse youtoobadly.”

“This is… Belyyreka?” Nadya’s tongue stumbled over the new word, although not as badly as she might have stumbled over something that felt less Russian and thus less familiar. It was like a word she’d heard before, whispered in dreams, calling her to find it. The word felt like coming home.

“Yes,” said the man. “This is Belyyreka, and I am Borya, and I, like Inna, like you, was brought here by a door when I was very young. Only the very young are capable of uncomplicated surety, you see, and so the doors seek them when they are lost and need to come home. Sometimes people, like tales, begin where they do not belong. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” lied Nadya, who was well acquainted with adults asking questions when they already knew which answer they wanted to receive.

Borya looked at her, frowning like he didn’t quite believe her. Then he nodded and said, “Those who are born here, like Inna’s sister and my brother, they belong to Belyyreka. The only doors that come for them will be the ones who recognize that this is not their home. But those who are brought here, they need something to tie them to the great lake, or their original homes may call them back, whether they wish to go or no.”

Nadya blinked, very slowly. “So are you from Colorado?” she asked.

Borya laughed. “No,” he said. “I was born in a city of towers, by an ocean I hope never to see again. The water was salt and bitterness and it wanted nothing of the people who lived on the land. The sea teemed with merfolk, and they would never forgive us for the crimes we had committed against them when our world was much younger. The city was like a coat six sizes too big for me, and it never fit, and I could never be the person I was expected to become. So when a door appeared where no door belonged, I went through, and I never looked back.”

Inna looked away from the side of the boat and said, “I came from a city called Manhattan, where my parents had seven children and no time for any of us, but always time for making more children. I was always hungry and always lonely and always serving as a mother for the children younger than myself, even though I was scarce a child myself. I fell into the harbor one day while I was begging for bread, and I found myself washed up on the banks of the River Wild, where a fishing boat brought me in as part of their day’s catch.”

“Even as we’re doing now, with you,” said Galina amiably. “Drowned Girls and Drowned Boys go to the harbormaster, who knows all the answers to all the questions, and doesn’t think any of them are foolish in the slightest.”

That was a good thing for Nadya to hear. She had already had more than her share of being looked at pityingly by adults for asking questions that seemed perfectly reasonable and important to her, but turned out to be things that “everyone knew” and thus never needed to ask about. She liked the idea of no questions being seen as foolish, even if theywere questions about the things that “everyone knew.” She liked that idea a lot.

“How many of us are there?” asked Nadya eagerly. It seemed there must be a great many, if two out of the first four people she’d met had come from other worlds, through doors, like she had.

“Quite a few,” said Borya. “More than there used to be, but not as many as some worlds have. The world I came from knew about the doors, and knew that they ran in both directions, and when children came through, we would try our best to send them back, lest their parents be sad at losing them, although the merfolk didn’t do the same; for them, when children washed up on their tides, those children were gifts of the storm, and they were kept and cosseted.”

“I think we came from the same world, Nadya,” said Inna. “At least, the name of Colorado is familiar to me, and I’ve never heard of two worlds so close together that they named things the same. Our world only knows the doors in stories and cautionary tales, and few people travel there from elsewhere.”

“Can they follow me here?” asked Nadya. “Carland— Myparents, can they find me?”

“No,” said Inna, with careful sorrow in her voice, and Nadya found that she was relieved.

They weren’t cruel to her, Carl and Pansy, were even kind in their slightly distant way, but she didn’t love them, and she knew they didn’t love her. What was love, anyway? Was it a form of possession? She had loved Maksim, very much, and that was why she had sent him away to a home where he could be happy and well cared for, all the days of his life. She liked to think that he had been happy with her, even asshe had been happy at the orphanage, but she knew he’d be better off with a home of his own, where he never had to be hidden away to keep inspectors from seeing him and rejecting him as a wild animal, where the food was always fresh and the water always clean.

By that standard, the matrons must have loved her, or they wouldn’t have sent her away to America. But she knew they hadn’t. It wasn’t hurtful knowledge: her hair was brown, her right arm ended at the elbow, the matrons never loved her. Also by that standard, Carl and Pansy loved her more than anything, because they’d given her so many wonderful things, shoes like pillows and food so delicious that sometimes it didn’t seem real.

But things weren’t love. They didn’t look to her the way some of the smaller children at the orphanage had, eyes soft and faces full of light. They looked at each other that way, if rarely, and the other parents at her school looked at their children that way, but Carl and Pansy didn’t, because they didn’t love her. Things weren’t love, and she was a thing to them, a thing that required many other things to be content, but not entirely a person.

It wasn’t like that for the other adopted children in her school, whose parents looked at them with love, who didn’t know what it was to be a thing, but it was like that for her. Sometimes a thing could be one thing for one person and another thing for someone else. Something like the way rivers couldn’t be breathed anywhere else she’d ever been, and turtles couldn’t talk, but here, both those things were possible.

“I’m glad,” said Nadya. “I didn’t like the big frog who came to eat me, but everything else has been very good, and I think I want to stay in Belyyreka.”

Vasyl swam on, and the boat moved with him, pulled alongby ropes and straps. The fishers moved around their catch, layering more nets, securing what they’d gathered, pausing only to free the small turtle before they tied it entirely down. As soon as Galina lifted him from the pile of fish, he swam upward from her hand, stubby legs thrashing against the water that seemed so much like air to Nadya but was clearly still water for him.

“Goodbye, Drowned Girl,” said the turtle to her, politely enough. He swam a circle around her head and then he was gone, shooting away into the current.

“Goodbye,” called Nadya. The boat sank lower, other boats coming closer, so she could see the majestic size of the turtles that towed them. Some were easily as large as cars, their shells broader than the span of a grown man’s arms. Others were smaller, and their boats were smaller as well, little more than coracle shells with a single fisher waving to their peers from the boat’s edge. All the turtles swam with single-minded purpose toward the same destination in the city below.

Nadya moved to the boat’s edge and leaned as far out as she dared, peering down at the bottom of the river.

They were moving toward a city.

It was made of stone, piled high and towering, gray and black and white and brown, slick and clean. Waterweeds grew up through the foundations, and a web of what looked like docks spread out in layers around each of the tallest buildings. It etched a lacy pattern in the water, impossibly delicate, too extended to have been possible without the water holding it up from all sides. There was something concretely natural about it, like even the parts that had been constructed had been built on the bones of what the river made on its own.

Nadya looked up. The surface of the water was so far above them now that it looked exactly like the sky.

Borya smiled at her. “This is why we need the turtles,” he said. “They change the shape of the distance. It compresses for them, because the rivers love them as the great lake loves us.”

“What?”

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