The net came up grey again.
Cael hauled it over the side of the flat-bottomed skiff, arm over arm, the rope slick with the particular cold that had nothing to do with temperature — the Mississippi cold, the dead-water cold that had been creeping up from the Gulf for two years now. The catch writhed in the mesh: three catfish, a handful of crawfish, and one thing that was probably a catfish but had too many eyes and moved wrong. He threw that one back without looking at it directly. Looking at the wrong things directly was how you got interesting questions from the wrong people.
"Not bad," he said, to no one. He'd developed a habit of talking to the water. The water, at least, didn't ask for papers.
The skiff drifted through what used to be Magazine Street. The rooftops made an irregular skyline below him — terracotta chimneys poking up from the murk, wrought-iron balconies trailing Spanish moss and the waterlogged remains of someone's curtains, an old Creole townhouse with its second floor just barely above the waterline, its windows sealed with boards that had gone the color of old bone. The Garden District had drowned slowly, then all at once. That was two years ago. Cael had been here for most of it, though he tried not to keep close count.
He told himself he liked it. The flooding made the streets into channels, and the channels made him useful, and useful meant unremarkable. Cal Maren, fisherman. Quiet kid. Keeps to himself. Good enough with a net to trade his catch at the levee market, not good enough to attract attention. He had calibrated himself to the precise center of not worth noticing, and he wore it like the fingerless gloves he wore every day — practical, unremarkable, hiding something.
The grey water hissed against the hull. Overhead, the sky was the color of old pewter, which it had been, every day, since the Titans sealed what they called the Divine Concession and everyone else called the end of everything. The clouds never quite cleared anymore. The sun got through sometimes, thin and apologetic, like it was asking permission.
Cael shipped his paddle and let the skiff coast through the shadow of a half-submerged live oak. The tree was dead — had been dead since the water came up — but its branches still reached, grey and skeletal, above the surface. Something had tied strips of cloth to them. Orange and white, the colors so faded he could barely read them as colors at all. He'd seen it before, this tree. He'd seen it three hundred times and never asked who left the cloth.
He was making a very deliberate practice of not asking.
The patrol boat announced itself with its engine before he could see it — a low, mechanical snarl that didn't fit with the city's new rhythm of silence and water-sounds. Cael let his posture settle. Shoulders down. Jaw loose. He reached into his catch bucket and pulled out one of the catfish and held it up by the tail, examining it with the expression of a man who is deeply, exclusively concerned with the quality of his fish.
The Hollow Warden patrol boat came around the drowned corner of Prytania, its hull matte black, its bow light cutting a flat white disc through the grey morning. Two Wardens stood at the rail. They wore the grey-and-iron armor that had replaced police uniforms, riot gear, everything else — functional and deliberately inhuman, the visors on their helmets reflecting back whatever they looked at, so that when they looked at you, you saw yourself. Just yourself, small and dim, in a borrowed reflection.
Cael had been told, once, that this was intentional. That Kronos's architects had specifically designed the Warden armor to ensure that mortals facing enforcers would see only themselves, and be reminded that the only thing between them and safety was their own cooperation. He'd been told this by someone who was now dead, which was most people who'd told him anything important.
He kept his eyes on the fish.
The patrol boat slowed. Didn't stop. One of the Wardens tracked him with that mirrored visor for a long moment — he could feel it, a pressure between his shoulder blades, even without looking — and then the boat moved on, its wake lifting the skiff in a slow, rocking surge that sent water sloshing over the gunwale.
Cael watched the wake.
It was wrong. The water moved wrong, bunching up on his side of the skiff in a small, eager swell, like it was trying to greet him. Like it had recognized him and couldn't help itself. He pressed his palm flat against the hull, below the waterline, and thought very deliberately about nothing. About fish. About the grey-brown color of the water and how it tasted like metal and old pennies and something that wasn't quite blood. He thought about those things until the water subsided and lay flat and dead and behaved itself.
That was the third time this week.
He needed to be more careful.
He paddled back toward the levee market through the back channels, where the water was too shallow for patrol boats and deep enough to hide the older floods' damage — the ghost streets beneath the current surface, the pre-war city existing in a kind of drowned archaeology under his keel. He knew these channels the way he used to know the layout of a place he didn't let himself think about by name. He knew where the underwater obstacles were, where the current ran strange, which buildings had collapsed and which were still standing beneath the surface like they were waiting for something.
He knew the water the way his father knew the water, and that was the problem, and he tried not to think about his father, and he mostly failed.
The levee market occupied the crown of an old earthen floodwall that had kept the neighborhood around it above water, mostly by coincidence. People had built up onto it over the past two years: canvas-roofed stalls, plank-and-barrel platforms, a kind of improvised floating extension that bobbed alongside the fixed ground. It smelled like fish and mildew and the particular human sweat of people who were working very hard not to think about how things used to be. Cael found this smell deeply, specifically comforting.
He sold the catfish to an old man named Broussard who never asked questions and who, by Cael's estimate, was the closest thing to a just man left in the Garden District. He traded two of the crawfish for a newspaper — a real one, printed on a press somewhere upstream, folded twice and passed hand-to-hand until it arrived here weeks late and slightly damp. The headline that was visible read TITAN ADMINISTRATIVE COUNCIL ANNOUNCES NEW DESIGNATION PROTOCOLS, which meant something bad for someone, which meant he should read it carefully later.
He bought a cup of chicory coffee from a woman who'd rigged a charcoal brazier on the back of a pontoon dock and sold it for whatever people had. He gave her a crawfish. She gave him the coffee without meeting his eyes, the way most people in the city had learned not to make sustained eye contact with strangers, because sustained eye contact was a form of witness and witnesses had a way of becoming complications.
He stood at the edge of the levee and drank the coffee and looked at the river.
The Mississippi was grey. Not the grey of storms or silt — a specific, metallic grey, the color of a mirror in bad light. It had been that color for two years, since the war's end, since the divine order unraveled and whatever ichor the battle had bled into the watershed had spread downstream and saturated everything. The water still ran. The current still moved. But nothing lived in the Mississippi anymore, not really. The fish he caught came from the side channels, the edges, the places the dead-grey current hadn't fully reached. The river itself was a kind of slow wound, still seeping.
He watched a piece of debris float past — a board, waterlogged, half-painted with something he couldn't read. Then another. Then, far downstream, the dark silhouette of a Hollow Warden cutter moving upriver, slow and methodical as a held breath.
He finished the coffee. He paddled home.
His shanty occupied the upper floor of what had been a narrow shotgun house on the edge of the Marigny. The ground floor was underwater; the entry was through a second-floor window, accessed by a rope ladder he pulled up after himself. It was cramped and smelled of damp wood and salted fish and the particular mold that colonized everything in submerged New Orleans regardless of what you did, and it contained, in total: a mattress, a single-burner propane stove, a box of items he didn't think about, and a shelf of practical things. One change of clothes. A coil of rope. A sharpening stone for the knife he kept in his boot.
Nothing with a name on it except Cal Maren's.
He lit the stove and started on the crawfish and was reading the late newspaper's account of the Titan Administrative Council's new protocols — which were, as predicted, bad for someone, specifically for anyone with documented ties to what the Council's official language called "divine heritage anomalies," which was the current bureaucratic term for demigod — when the storm came in.
It came fast, the way Gulf storms came fast, or used to. In two years, the weather had gotten worse. The Titan mandate over the atmosphere was a blunt instrument; they controlled the broad strokes but not the particulars, and the particulars had gone feral. Lightning without thunder. Rain in one district and none in the next. Winds that came from directions that didn't correspond to any compass point Cael had learned.
This one came from the south, and it hit the city like a door slamming.
The rain hammered the tin roof of his upper floor in a deafening percussion. The water below surged, slapping against the building's exterior in sudden, agitated waves. Through the single window he could see the canal channels churning, the surface going white with foam, debris spinning in new currents.
And he could feel the storm.
That was the thing nobody could understand unless they'd felt it — the way water spoke when you had the blood that let you hear it. The storm hit the channels and the channels hit him, a wave of sensation that was equal parts physical and something else, something that ran under his skin and behind his sternum. The water wanted something. It always wanted something around him, a kind of pressure, the way a dog learns to lean against a familiar leg. Two years of suppression hadn't changed what the water wanted. It had only made Cael better at pretending he couldn't hear it.
The surge below jumped. One of the channels overtopped something — a plank walkway, a floating dock, something — and he heard the crash of it, and the water in the surrounding canals amplified upward, and without thinking, without any decision being made at all, he pressed his hand against the window glass and felt the storm and thought stop —
The water stopped.
Not the rain. Not the wind. But the surge in the nearest canal went flat in the space between one breath and the next. The waves that had been building against the walls of the adjacent buildings simply smoothed out, as if someone had run a hand across a wrinkled cloth. The dock that had been in the process of breaking apart settled back into the water with a soft, unlikely gentleness.
He yanked his hand away from the glass.
He stood very still and listened to the rain and did not let himself breathe until he had counted thirty seconds without hearing the sound of a patrol boat engine.
Forty seconds. A minute. Two minutes.
Nothing.
He sat down on the mattress with his back against the wall and his knees up and his hands between them and stared at the opposite wall until his heartbeat finished being something he had to manage consciously and became automatic again.
That was stupid, he thought. That was extraordinarily, specifically stupid.
He had gotten through two years without a slip larger than the water waking up when a patrol boat came too close. Two years of keeping it small, keeping it internal, keeping it so thoroughly compressed that sometimes he could almost believe there was nothing there to compress. He was Cal Maren. He had an alias and a fishing skiff and a propane stove and a sharpening stone, and he did not have a father who was imprisoned somewhere in a mountain that stood where the sky used to hold something different, and he did not have a name carved into the divine order of the world, and he had not just calmed a canal in the middle of a patrol sweep.
Except.
He hadn't heard any response, which either meant the Wardens hadn't detected anything, or they had detected something and were choosing not to respond immediately, which was in some ways worse. The Hollow Wardens had a term for detected but unconfirmed anomalies. He had heard the term exactly once, from someone who was now dead. They called it a ghost flag. Ghost flags didn't get immediate response. Ghost flags got patient, methodical, expanding surveillance.
He looked around his shanty. Two years of deliberate impermanence: nothing he couldn't walk away from in under three minutes, nothing that couldn't be replaced. He'd been strict about that. He'd been strict about it because some part of him, below the level of conscious decision-making, had always known that the leaving day would come.
He told that part of himself to shut up.
The storm passed the way Gulf storms passed — all at once, like a held breath finally released. The rain stopped. The wind dropped. The water went back to its usual grey stillness, and the city emerged from the deluge slightly more waterlogged than before, which was its only consistent trajectory.
Cael finished the newspaper. He did not finish the crawfish. He lay on the mattress in the dark and listened to the city drip.
He'd first noticed the watcher three days ago.
Not clearly — never clearly, because the watcher was good. A shadow in his peripheral vision two streets over when he was coming back from the market. A ripple in the canal behind his skiff that didn't match his wake. Once, a hooded figure at the edge of the levee market who had disappeared between one blink and the next, leaving only the impression of someone standing very still in the middle of movement and being good at it.
He was used to being watched. The city was a surveillance organism. The Hollow Wardens had informants, and the informants had neighbors, and the neighbors were people who were afraid, and fear was an effective monitoring system. He was used to accounting for eyes. He had been accounting for them for two years.
But this was different.
This was someone who knew how to avoid being seen and was only barely failing at it, which meant they either wanted him to know he was being followed or they were operating at the edge of some limit. Either way, it was not the Wardens. The Wardens didn't almost avoid being seen. They were seen on purpose, in the deliberate way of authority that knows being visible is its own instrument.
This was something else.
He told himself he'd made a decision about that. He told himself the decision was to do nothing. He'd made similar decisions before and they'd been the right ones, and the fact that his hands weren't quite still on the mattress didn't change that.
The knock, when it came, wasn't a knock.
It was a weight — a body, striking the exterior wall below his window with the specific, unmistakable impact of someone who has stopped being able to hold themselves upright. He heard the splash as they hit the floating boards of his dock extension, and then nothing, and the nothing was worse than the sound.
He was at the window in three seconds.
She was on the dock below, crumpled against the rope ladder, one hand still gripping the lowest rung. Hooded, the way she'd been every time he'd almost-seen her. The hood had fallen back in the fall and he could see her face: a woman, maybe forty, maybe much older in the way of certain people who have been through certain things, her eyes closed. Her hair was dark and plastered wet against her face.
And she was bleeding light.
Not blood. Or not only blood. There was blood — dark, against the pale wood of the dock — but also something else leaking from a wound at her side that had no business being a wound: a silver-white luminescence that pulsed with an organic rhythm and pooled at the edge of the dock and dripped into the canal and did not dissolve the way normal things dissolved in water. It sat on the surface like oil. It glowed.
He had seen ichor exactly once before. He had hoped to go significantly longer before seeing it again.
She was still breathing. Barely. Her fingers on the rope ladder were white-knuckled and trembling, the grip of someone whose body was still fighting even after the rest had given out.
He looked up and down the canal. No boats. No lights except the ordinary, furtive lights of the district's above-water life — the candles, the oil lamps, the careful human fire. No sound from the rooftops. No sound from the patrol routes.
He looked at the woman on his dock, bleeding impossible light into his canal, and thought about the decision he'd made.
He dropped the rope ladder and went down to get her.