Chapter 248: Back From Hiatus.

We moved fast, or as fast as the swaying vine islands would allow, which was not very fast.

The storm had settled into something consistent and loud— not getting worse, just present, the way a problem became background after long enough.

Rain at full down. Thunder on a rotation. The vine platforms rolling in slow waves that I was getting the rhythm of, which helped with footing, but the girl behind me had not gotten the rhythm of them yet and I could hear her footsteps behind mine doing the slightly-off pattern of someone compensating for ground that wasn't cooperating.

Then thunder, loud and close, and her arms were suddenly around my back and her face was pressed between my shoulder blades and she had gone completely rigid.

I stopped. Looked back at her. She was stiff from shoulders to ankles, both arms locked, paralyzed but was handling it, and not handling it… fuck, what am I narrating.

I didn't say anything about it. I just reached back, got one arm under her knees and one across her back, and lifted her.

She didn't stop me— actually the rigidity eased slightly the moment she wasn't responsible for her own footing, like the removal of one problem freed up capacity to deal with the others.

We kept moving. She held on.

House to house— I checked each door as we went, systematically, methodically, which felt productive except that every door I tried was the same answer. Sealed. The roots that had closed them were living wood and they did not care about my opinions on the matter.

"Ahjussi." Her voice near my ear, rain in it. "Go to the edge of the vine island. There's a small opening where the vines haven't fully closed— it's a maintenance gap. We can get in from there. Only half our body will be in the water while we do it."

"Only half," I said.

"The important half will be dry."

"That's a low bar."

"Yes," she said flatly. "It is. Go toward the edge."

I went toward the edge. I was very confident I was going toward the correct edge. I went toward it at a reasonable pace, navigating the walkways and the swaying platforms and the storm. We covered the ground. I was definitely finding the edge she meant.

"...That's east," she said.

"I'm orienting."

Minutes later.

"That's the wrong direction. Again."

"I'm—"

Minutes later.

"Ahjussi."

"I see it."

"You don't see anything. You're looking at the water."

"I'm looking at th—"

She made a sound through her nose that tells more than most sentences did. The sound of someone who had warned a person about their bad sense of direction earlier in the day and was now experiencing what they had warned about.

I turned. She pointed, emphatically, with the arm she'd freed from around my neck.

I went the direction she pointed. She kept her hand out the whole way like a compass I was required to follow, which, after the second wrong turn, was fair.

We were two platforms away when the thunder hit again, closer this time, and I stopped automatically and looked up.

The jellyfish were lower.

Not dramatically— not diving toward us, not obviously descending.

Just closer than they'd been, the bells more visible in the darkness between the flashes, the tentacles hanging longer than they should be able to below the cloud level.

And in the center of each bell, in the places where jellyfish had their cores— the eggs. Or what I'd taken to be eggs earlier, the small shapes suspended in the fluid of the bell.

They were flailing. All of them, in every jellyfish I could see, moving in a thrashing uncoordinated way, a kind of movement that meant discomfort or want or urgency, none of which I wanted to know more about right now.

I looked at her.

She was looking up too, and her face said that she'd seen the same thing and had arrived at a conclusion that matched mine.

"We actually need to move," I said.

"Yes," she said. "Now, please."

We move, real speed, me navigating with her pointing and actually following the pointing because this was not the moment for directional independence.

Bridge to bridge, platform to platform, the vine surfaces rolling under us, the storm loud above and the water loud below and the distance between us and the maintenance gap closing down in a way that felt almost achievable.

Then the bridge snapped.

The bridge seems like it can't take our weight anymore, plus the thunder and Wave being aggressive.

And of course. We fell.

The water arrived before I'd decided what to do about it, and the cold at the same time, and I was already reaching for anything solid before my eyes processed where solid was.

My hand found a vine— thick, the main cluster of one of the floating islands, extending down from the platform edge above us. I gripped it with both hands and held.

Something grabbed my knee.

I looked down through the water.

The girl, both hands locked around my leg, her face turned up toward me with a super very specific expression of someone who had been in the process of being swept by the current and had grabbed the nearest available thing before the current could complete the job.

The current was trying to complete the job anyway.

I could see it in the way she moved— not freely, but against something, pulled toward the edge of the safe zone, toward the outer water that went somewhere we didn't want to go.

Her hair was everywhere. Her eyes were open and tracking me and tracking the direction the current was pulling her and doing the math in real time.

"I'M GONNA DISAPPEAR—" Her voice underwater was different, smaller, the water taking the edges off it. "PULL— PULL—"

"I KNOW," I said, which came out as bubbles and probably wasn't helpful. "I'M TRYING—"

"SHUT UP AND JUST PULL—"

I pulled. Both hands on the vine, walking my grip upward hand over hand, dragging us both against the current with everything my strength stat had in it.

The current pushed back with the patient persistence of something that didn't get tired.

I pulled anyway.

She kept both hands on my leg and didn't let go and didn't stop making her feelings about the situation very clear, which I found, more useful than silence would have been.

We came up slowly.

Then faster.

Then my head was above water and I was breathing again and I got one elbow over the vine platform edge and used it to lever myself up and then turned and reached back down and grabbed her wrist and pulled her up after me, and we both collapsed against the side of one of the sealed houses and sat there.

She was crying.

Not loudly— the sharp desperate crying from before had shifted into the quieter kind that came after, when the emergency was resolved but the body hadn't gotten the notification yet.

Tears and rain indistinguishable on her face, and she didn't seem to be doing anything about either.

Then she leaned sideways and put her face against my shoulder and stayed there.

I looked at her. "...You're welcome?"

She looked up at me. Her expression was completely flat. " ಠ⁠_⁠ಠ i'm not thanking you," she said. "I'm just tired and your shoulder is where my face ended up."

"That's the same thing."

"It's not."

"I swear it is."

"I'm not into someone older than me."

"Wha—"

Thunder.

The lightning came with it, and I looked up because I'd been trying not to and finally failed, and the flash lasted long enough to see clearly— the jellyfish above us, more of them now, lower now, the fog that had been blurring them before having thinned enough to see the detail.

And in the center of each bell, the glow of the core— red, distinct, the kind of color that meant something biological rather than random.

They turned.

Not the whole jellyfish— the cores. Just the cores. Every single one of them, in every jellyfish visible above us, rotating inside the bell of the creature to face the same direction.

Down.

Toward us.

Darkness again.

The next flash confirmed it. The cores still pointing down. At us specifically or at the platform we were on— I couldn't tell and didn't particularly want to find out.

Third flash.

More jellyfish. And every core, every red glowing center, turned during the flash and turned back in the dark and turned again on the next one.

Locked on.

Like they only had access to sensory information during the lightning and they were using every fraction of a second of it to track whatever they'd decided to track.

Which was us.

I stood up. "We need to go. Now."

She looked up at me, then up at the sky, then back at me.

She had an expression of someone doing a cost-benefit analysis on their remaining energy and arriving at an uncomfortable conclusion.

Then she sighed, and looked at me with something dangerously close to smug despite everything that had just happened.

"Carry me," she said. "I'm too tired to navigate and you have terrible direction sense anyway, so we'll call it even." A pause. "If I get eaten by the water at least I'll have someone next to me."

"ಠ_ಠ, That's extremely selfish."

"Heh." The smug expression fully arrived. "Yes."

I picked her up.

She adjusted her position with the practicality of someone who had been carried twice already and had developed preferences about it.

I started moving, and she pointed where to go, and we moved fast and quiet through the sealed village while the lightning flashed above us and the jellyfish turned their cores and followed us from the sky.

I didn't look up.

Neither did she.

"I just realized," I said, navigating a platform junction she pointed me through, "I never asked your name."

She looked at me, then forward, then back at me. Like she was deciding whether names were relevant right now.

"Alex," she said.

"Alex."

"Yes."

Thunder. Flash. Above us, the cores turned.

I kept moving.

"Mines Kim Si Hon."