Page 20 of Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear

“Big as anisland,then! Big as a wholehouse!” She wasn’t actually sure which of those two things was bigger, but it seemed to be the right thing to say, every time she said it. Here and now, standing back and watching as Burian was fitted, she half-listened to the lecture Anna was delivering on the responsibility attendant with being a turtle-rider, how important it was that she never go anywhere without telling Inna and the harbormaster where they were going to be and when they were going to be back. Things could happen to riders. Bad things, even, when no one knew how to find and help them.

Nadya bristled at the implication that she and Burian wouldn’t be able to handle anything that came their way. She was brave and clever and almost grown! She had been in Belyyreka for so long that no traces of the world she’d come from remained, her clothes long since gone to rot and dissolution, her shoes replaced a dozen times, even her body changed by the passing of time and the pressures of puberty. She might not be an adult yet, even as the river measured such things, but she was closer than she was distant, and she could handle herself and her companion when she needed to. But she smiled and thanked Anna for the advice all the same, and Anna, who had seen hundreds of hopeful riderscome through, reins in their hands and dreams of adventure in their eyes, knew full well that not all of them came back.

And some of those who did didn’t come back complete. They lost their steeds or they lost pieces of themselves, and the river didn’t always see fit to gift them with replacements as it had Nadya. She could lose more than she imagined if she wasn’t careful, and Anna wanted to spare her and Burian both the pain of that, if she could.

But she couldn’t, of course, and she knew that even as she lectured and Nadya’s eyes shone with the thrill of her impending freedom. No one can warn the eager and excited away from their own future. A future is a monster of its own breed, different for everyone, and ever inescapable.

Nadya and Burian left the city together the minute they were cleared, not even stopping by the house to get sandwiches from Inna.

They had a world to see.

NADYA HELD HER BREATHas they broke the surface of the River Wild, an old reflex that always seemed to take over when she approached a transition between the types of water. Burian gasped, taking a breath of the thinner water above, and looked down at the river’s surface, which seemed suddenly so much thicker than it had been from below.

“Nadya, your arm?” he asked, turning his head to look at her.

She smiled and held up her right hand, wiggling her fingers at him. “It always stays. The river gave it to me, and it’s mine now.” She had been worried, the first time she rode the boats up into the above-river to fish, that it would stay below. It was an easy thing, to grow accustomed to having an arm,even after spending so much time without one. She would do fine without it, but if she could keep it, that was her preference. Like a knife or a fisher’s hook, it was an easy tool that made things easier.

“Ah,” said Burian, who never accompanied the fishing boat. That was Vasyl’s territory. He looked around, to the endless river in one direction and the towering wood in the other. “Where shall we go?”

The fishing boats rarely went ashore. The farming boats did, to plant and tend and harvest, but Inna’s house was a fishing house, and so Nadya had rarely been entirely outside the River Wild since coming to Belyyreka. “The wood,” she said. “The flooded forest. I had… I had a friend there once. I wonder if he might still be around.”

She didn’t know how long foxes lived, but with everything else in Belyyreka being the way it was, it might be a long, long time. Maybe they were like turtles and simply got larger as they aged, and when she approached the forest’s edge, a fox the size of a horse would come trotting out to meet her. Burian nodded and turned against the current, swimming toward the shore.

He was no tortoise, to spend his days on dry land and walk everywhere, but neither was he a sea turtle, with wide paddles for legs and no real grace on land. As they reached the shallows, his swimming became walking, until finally he was standing and stepping up onto the shore, clawed feet digging into the mud. His belly skirted the ground, and Nadya shifted uncomfortably atop him, feeling the weight of the thin-water world settle on her shoulders. They weren’t dry here—what she had taken for dryness on her first arrival was simply a different form of damp, delicate and so all-encompassing it was almost imperceptible—but shefeltdry by comparison. She felt likeshe was edging back toward the world of her birth, and she never wanted to return there. Not today, not ever. She was sure.

Burian stopped near the edge of the wood, looking dubiously at the trees. “They seem very close together,” he said. “I’m not sure I can go in there.”

Nadya slid off his back. “It’s all right,” she said. “You don’t have to go into the woods. If we want to see the River Winsome, we’ll have to find a way around, but that can happen later, when everyone’s more used to us coming and going.” She gave his shell a pat, then took a few steps toward the tree line, pausing a decent distance back to cup her hands around her mouth and call, “Artyom! Artyom the fox!”

She waited until the echoes of her shout had faded before she turned back to Burian, trying not to look as disappointed as she felt. “I suppose it was silly to hope he’d still be here, it’s been so long,” she said. “I just thought this part of the wood might be his home.”

“It was,” said a voice behind her. She turned again, and there was a fox sitting at the edge of the wood, fur a rosy gold, tail wrapped around its feet. It was watching her with sharp, clever eyes, body tensed in a way that told her it would bolt and disappear if she took so much as a step in its direction. “He’s not here anymore.”

“Did he move elsewhere in the wood?”

“No.” The fox continued to watch her with sharp, sharp eyes. “A frog came out of the River Winsome ages ago and ate him up with a snap. He was my grandfather.”

It didn’t ease the sting to know that while time might be different for foxes, her friend the fox had died by other means. Nadya grimaced. “I’m so sorry.”

“Did you know him?”

“He helped me cross the flooded forest when I was just a little girl.”

The fox looked at her. “You’re the human child he found on the banks of the Winsome. Nadezhda.”

No one called Nadya by the full form of her name anymore, but it made something in her chest feel warm to know that Artyom had remembered her. She had never forgotten him, exactly, but somehow time had gotten away from her down beneath the river, and she’d been able to convince herself, time and again, that one day soon she would go to the surface with the intent to go back into the flooded forest, one day soon she would let him know she was all right. One day.

And somewhere in the middle of all those unkept promises, a terrible thing had come out of another river and swallowed him down, quick as anything. It wasn’t fair. It was still true.

“My name is Artem,” said the fox. “He spoke well of you, my grandfather did. Said you were quick and clever and willing to listen when he told you what to do. He rarely spoke that well of humans.”

“I was very lost and he helped me find my home,” said Nadya, voice small. “I was grateful. I still am.”

“Then go home,” said Artem. “Get back on your turtle and go back beneath the surface of the river and be happy, human child. Never come here again. The flooded forest is not for you.”

Nadya blinked. Of all the welcomes she could have expected, this was the least expected. “I’m a rider now,” she said. “We scout for the city, to find good fishing and good farmland. It’s my duty to be here.”

“Do you really think there’s anything left along the river’s length that your people haven’t already seen and studied andlearned to understand?” asked Artem. “Humans are curious things. They want toknow.They want the answers to questions that had no business ever being asked, and so they’re never truly sure of anything, not even their own desires. They’re too busy chasing their tails to see the rabbits. There are no wonders for you here, Nadezhda. No mysteries to solve, no monsters to fight. Only a place you need not be, like so many other places you need not be. Only a danger.”

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