Page 23 of Adrift in Currents Clean and Clear

It was a day-by-day economy, sustained by the environment’s passive interference with any form of hoarding or resource complication, and Nadya loved it. No one was wealthy. No one who had the ability to work and chose to actually do so was poor. They all had enough.

“Tables and market stalls,” Alexi agreed. “I’m decent enough at it, and I could be good if I do it for a while. Good enough to grow fruit and herbs and other nice things for a table to have.”

Nadya had been in Belyyreka long enough to recognize the shape of this conversation. She bit her lip in thought as they continued on. The docks had long since become familiar territory to her. Most of the city had, and the ebb and flow ofits days was something she understood down to the bottom of her bones. One day, those bones would be a part of the city’s foundations, and she would rest easily. But until then, there were things to do, choices to be made, a life to be led.

“I won’t be able to stay at home and raise children as Galina has done,” she said. “I’m far too fond of Burian and I like scouting. It’s what I want to do.”

“I’ve always liked staying home,” said Alexi. “It’s very possible to farm and also do the majority of the work of raising children.”

Nadya, who had done her share of childrearing at the orphanage and had not discovered an urge to do more of the same in her time under the river, made a noncommittal noise.

“It’s also possible to have a home with no children,” said Alexi. “My father’s line comes from a fallen city, my mother’s has been carried on by two sisters. If I choose not to have children of my own, but to call a swept-away or two my sons and daughters, it will cost the river nothing, and I can still be happy with my contributions.”

“Scouting carries dangers,” warned Nadya. “There might be a day when I don’t come back.”

“Boats sink when storms come in too quickly for the turtles to take them below the surface, and if the transition isn’t made smoothly, people can drown,” said Alexi. “Frogs come out of the forest and attack the farmers. I would be expected to do my share of standing guard, if I went to the fields. There might be a day when I don’t come back, either.”

Nadya looked deep into her heart and found no further objections. She stopped walking, still holding Alexi’s hand, and turned to face him.

“I think I would like to have a home with you,” she said.

He smiled, bright as anything. “Really?” He pulled his hand from hers and used it to move the hair away from her face.

“Really,” she replied, and kissed him.

11A LIFETIME

TIME DID NOT START MOVINGfaster after that, although it felt as if it did. Alexi went to the farms and Nadya scouted every day with Burian, exploring the land above the river. Most scouts chose to stay on the Wild, observing what could be seen from the water, taking note of clear land that might be of interest to the farmers or of good fishing grounds or hunting territory. They thought Nadya and Burian wild and brave for venturing onto the land.

Nadya honestly wasn’t sure why they bothered going up if they were never going to leave the Wild. Every inch of the river had been covered before, and everything they saw had been seen a dozen times before, sometimes in the same season. Things would change after a large storm, the banks shifting, the fish changing their spawning grounds, but storms large enough to reshape the river were rare. But they all got paid the same for their time, coins enough to squirrel away, to begin saving toward the rapidly approaching future. It was worth it. It was enough.

Nadya herself continued her explorations into the edges of the flooded forest, which was always damp and swampy but had yet to actually flood in her presence. She saw Artem the fox several more times, and each time he warned her away, while Burian explored the edges of the wood, looking for a way in large enough to accommodate his girth. She found more of the berry bushes she remembered from hertrip through the forest, and returned to that area the next day with a bucket, filling it to the brim and bringing it proudly home to Inna, who baked sweet hand pies and gave her half as her reward for gathering.

Time passed. The wedding, when it came, was small and simple, as befit a poor man from the lower part of the city and a swept-away who was last child of her house but first to be wed. The harbormaster officiated the ceremony, which was held outside behind the creche with Burian and all the unattached turtles in attendance, swirling around the guests in great, giddy spirals. By the end of the day, when the last of the jam tarts had been eaten and the wedding plates had been ceremonially smashed, the younger of Galina’s children had a small turtle attending her every move, and Nadya was smiling so hard her face hurt, not quite sure any longer how this could be her life.

She had been in Belyyreka for so long that she barely remembered the neighborhood where she’d been living with Carl and Pansy, remembered none of the names of the children at the school she’d been attending, not even the ones she’d considered her friends, remembered few of the matrons from the orphanage. But she remembered Maksim, and she remembered ice cream, and if it was odd that those were the only two things she ever missed from her old life, there was no one to tell her so. Not even Alexi, who found her description of ice cream interesting but not alluring, and never mocked her for missing a tortoise she had left in another country even before she left it in another world.

When they walked together into the small but empty house that would be their home from now on, to fill with love and laughter and whatever else happened to come their way, both of them still in their wedding finery, all of it Inna’s work—forboth of them, as Alexi’s mother didn’t know how to embroider and had been happy to send her son to his own marriage in a plain shirt—and Nadya with flowers braided in her hair and floating in the substance of her liquid arm, they were hand in hand, as they so often were. Alexi let go, pulling shyly away, and Nadya went after him, and they came together into what would ever afterward be their bedroom. It wasn’t the largest of the three rooms that could be used for that purpose, but they didn’t need the largest; they needed the one with the best-placed window, for Burian’s sake, and the most light, for the sake of Alexi’s plants. Only a few would grow in the heavier water beneath the river, and all of them needed as much light as possible.

But for now, there were no plants, there was no turtle, there was nothing but Nadya and Alexi and the warm, flat surface of the bed, soft sand sewn into woven cloth to form a mattress, a blanket of water-treated rabbit fur atop it, and the two of them atop that, tangled in each other’s arms and celebrating the beginning of a new life, a new tributary to swim. They would eat in their own home from now on, sleep in their own bed, and live in the city as adults, independent and contributing.

All that would begin tomorrow. Here and now, there were the two of them, and the room, and the discovery of each other’s bodies, hands on skin and all the River Wild to see them as they truly were.

When they slept, it was tangled in each other’s arms, peaceful and content and wholly sure of their place in their world.

The storm came rolling in the next day. It was the largest storm anyone had seen since before Nadya’s arrival, strong enough to shake the city, even deep as it was below the surface,the rain pounding into the water and driving itself downward like falling knives. What fell from the sky began as heavy water—what Nadya couldn’t help thinking of on some level as true water, the kind that could be drunk but not breathed—and it hurt to stand outside for too long.

All trips to the surface were canceled as people battened down and ate what they had in their homes, avoiding trips along the docks as much as possible. As for the docks themselves, they swayed alarmingly in the rough currents, and some segments broke off and dropped away, driven farther downward by the rain. Debris plummeting past the windows became a common sight, until the second day of the storm, when Nadya saw a body fall past and threw herself out the front door, shouting for Burian.

She flung herself over the edge of the dock, aiming for the body as it fell downward, still yelling in the vain hope that her beloved turtle would be close enough to hear her and intercede. She kicked to drive herself farther downward, swimming against water she could barely feel, and shot toward the body. It was a woman she didn’t recognize, the embroidery around her cuffs and collar signaling that she was one of the farmers. Alexi might know her, but Alexi was still above, safely in their home, probably cursing the wildness of his wife.

“I hope this was worth the hiding I’ll get when I get home,” muttered Nadya. Unspoken was that she hoped she wouldgethome. Falling was dangerous in part because the water was too thin to allow humans to swim back upward, and she had already fallen past at least five levels.

A trickle of blood ran down the woman’s forehead, dark and thick. Something had hit her in the head, probably knocking her off the edge in the process. Nadya frowned asshe swam closer, finally reaching out and grabbing the woman’s arm. The woman’s weight was too much for her to carry upward, and hard as she kicked, they continued to descend, until the water darkened around them and the lowest levels of the city flashed by, gray stone and white shell and then nothing apart from the stone outcropping this part of the city had been built atop. Nadya closed her eyes, expression going grim. She had never been this deep before.

She had always wanted to see the bottom of the river. She had never expected it to happen quite like this.

The woman was breathing. Nadya kicked harder, trying to slow their descent if nothing else. They would reach the bottom eventually, and she would rather delay that moment. Heavier water flowed downward, dropping through lighter water even as they were; all the rain and all the other heavy water that had entered the river would be at the very bottom. If they fell that far, they would drown. She had to at least try.

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