The Sundered, Chapter One

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The world I know is flooded.

I believe it wasn’t always that way, but that doesn’t set me apart. All we know now is swamp, tufts of land here and there, occasionally islands or muddy peaks big enough to sleep or build on. Everybody knows, though, that the water wasn’t there before. That there used to be dry land all over the place. What sets me apart, makes me different, is I believe it can go back to that.

We walk on the tufts, knob-sized things that stick out of the water with limp grass all over them. When there are a lot of them, we have to carry the boats. The water’s black. You don’t go in the water. You don’t touch it. If you do, it will get you, drag you down, and you’re gone. The only safe way to interact with the black water is in a boat or inside the nets, at least if you’re a human. The Sundered can do anything they want in the water. Who knows why.

Maybe that’s one of the things I’ll learn when I find the Hope. It’s supposed to have all the answers.

“Hey, Harry!” Toddy, one of my younger travelers, is pointing at something. He straddles the black water, each boot on a different tuft, standing with the easy balance we all must learn or else we die. “There’s something over there!”

The Hope. I have to find the Hope. Whatever he wants to show me, it’s not the Hope, but I’m young, and I can fake interest. “Coming, Tod! Hold there!” I grab one of the smaller skin-skiffs and go hopping toward him, nodding at my travelers who move to other tufts so there’s room for me to leap past. The last space between us is water. I put the skiff in, untie the paddles, and skim right toward him.

“There are eyes,” Tod says, crouching now as I float near. “In the water. It’s a Sundered One, I’m sure of it.”

“Sundered? Here?” Okay, that’s pretty weird. “We’re not near any cities. Think he’s unattached?” Like Toddy would know.

“Yeah. Yeah, he must be!” Tod’s whispering now, he’s so excited. “Can I claim him? If he’s unattached, I mean? Can I?”

“No.” Fuck. I said it too sharply – I see the shock in his eyes, then the sadness, the hurt. “Not yet, Tod,” I add, making my voice gentle again. “You’re too young, and we don’t know what level he is. What if he overpowered you?”

Toddy nods, trying to be grown-up about this, but I’ve hurt him. That’ll take fixing later.

At least I didn’t mention that he never finished his Sundered training. Ouch.

I skim where he pointed.

Black water. Limp grass, perpetually brown, draping over tufts like dirty hair. Oh – he was right. Round eyes stare at me out of the water, bulging round things in a head that looks freakish-orange. This is obviously not a high-tier Sundered. It realizes I’m staring at it seconds too late, and ducks back under the water as if it thinks it can hide.

I can handle this. I’ve handled as high as third-tier. Even Toddy might be able to handle this, but I already told him no, and to go back on my word is to regress as a leader. I don’t need to know where the little orange guy went. He’s mine now.

Feel that slick-slime mind under the water, the ugly incompleteness of him, like suddenly finding parts of your brain frozen, alive but not fully functional, functional but not fully aware, aware but not really there. Taking hold of it is like slipping my fingers into already-made holes, into the holes in a living brain, holes that don’t really fit but will fit because I am forcing my fingers inside. And once they’re in, once I’m in those cracks in that ruined Sundered mind, then I pull.

Pull with will and thought and purpose, like lifting something out of mud, something that’s heavy, but I can do this. I can do this. And when the mind comes free of the mud, when it becomes easy to pull, I know I’ve got him. “Come up and let me see you.”

He hears the words. Sundered have different ears than we do. Any vibrations seem to get through.

Of course, he obeys.

He looks like a frog. An orange frog-man, with bumps all over him, with big googly eyes too wide apart for a man’s but not wide enough for an animal’s – definitely a low-tier. I hear Toddy gasping, I hear my travelers coming closer to see, but I don’t care. I’m fitting my brain to this little guy’s. “Ugly, aren’t you?”

He sort of ducks twice, like he’s acknowledging what I said with a humility so low it’s self-hate, and I realize he’s actually got webs between his fingers and what looks like suction-cups on each tip. Wow. Really low-level, then. The high Sundered look like us. This guy couldn’t pass for human if his life depended on it. “What is your name, Sundered One?”

“Gorish,” he says.

I can hear Toddy telling the others how he spotted this one, so it’s sort of his even though it’s not. Five years ago, I think I would’ve found that endearing. Not anymore. “Hello, Gorish. You know you’re mine now, right?”

“Oh, oh yes, master, sir,” he says, doing that ducking thing again and again and again.

An unattached Sundered in the middle of nowhere. This is really, really weird.

My mind goes in all the usual directions. What if he’s attached to the Hope? What if he’s part of another party, also searching for it – even though it’s been two generations since we met anyone else who believed it still exists? How could he come to be here? Alone? Did he overpower his master? No. Not this little guy. He couldn’t overpower a bug.

And I can’t ask him now, anyway. What if his answer reduces me? Diminish me in the eyes of my travelers? What if they choose not to follow me anymore on this quest? I can’t do this alone.

Okay. Gorish’s explanations will wait until we’re alone. “I need a place to make landfall, Gorish. You know anywhere around here like that?”

“Oooh, yes, yes, master!” the orange guy says, and he capers. In and out of the water, back up onto the tufts, showing off or – no, he’s just playing because it’s something he knows how to do. He looks like he really enjoys it. This guy’s head is shattered.

I bet the last one who had him was rougher on his mind than I am. “Lead the way, Gorish. It’s getting dark, and we have to set up camp by then.”

So Gorish does, and almost at once, we need the boats.

I say nothing as we go, paddling, my rare single-person skiff leading the way through the water. This wasn’t the direction I was leading them. This wasn’t even close. I went over the tufts – I prefer to, prefer the feel of land under my feet, even if it’s barely big enough for my boots, even if it’s always a little more dangerous, because it reminds me of what I search for. Gorish is leading us completely away from the tufts and into the black water.

Of course, we see land. There’s always something in sight. Islands or tufts. Sticking out of the water with mud. Sometimes there are even animals on them, cattle or something abandoned by merchants and not yet starved. It’s just a matter of size – what can handle twenty people and all their gear, their tents and a fire, and their nets so they can bathe and drink? What’s big enough, sticking out of the water, without such a dangerous slope that sleeping people won’t roll off it in the night and into the water and be gone forever? A proper landfall, that’s what. And like all the Sundered Ones, Gorish just has an instinct and knows where one is.

It’s a big stupid ball of mud, and we’re going to get messy, but I don’t care. Nobody cares. Messy is worth the ability to walk without having to balance every single step.

#

There’s a legend. About the Hope.

My travelers move around, talking, laughing, joking, cooking fish, digging a little to get at any roots that are edible. There are no signs of people or animals on this landfall – no surprise there. There isn’t enough foliage to feed anything bigger than a rat. There’s barely enough to feed us.

Gorish obediently sets up the nets, and it only takes him about fifteen seconds to do something that takes us half an hour and a lot of risk. I forgot how convenient it could be to have Sundered with you. It’s just the extra responsibility I’m not looking for. Not now.

Nobody really knows what the Hope of Humanity looks like. We know it exists. We know it could fix this planet and drain the water back. We just don’t know where it is.

“Hey, Harry!” Tomas shouts, and tosses me a sack. I catch it – another thing you learn to do quickly here, or a lot of stuff goes in the water and is never seen again. “Fruit? Are you shitting me?” Be the leader, Harry. Oh, it smells so good. Doesn’t matter. Stand up. Re-tie the bag. “This isn’t celebration time, Tomas.”

“Sure it is! We haven’t made landfall in four days!” He grins, proud of himself with mud on his face and his clothes, and I want to hurt him. I want to hit him. I want to duck his head under the water and let it take him down.

“Put the fruit back. All of you! Put it back!” Be the leader, Harry. Be the leader.

Lots of groans, good-natured bitching. But they obey. This is the thing that matters, this is what keeps us together. They obey me. Still.

“Wha’ ’bout ‘is one?” Kaia says, holding up a dried prune she’s bitten in half.

“Don’t be stupid.” Wrong answer, Harry. Fix it. “Just swallow that bite. But when we do open the dried fruit up? You’re down one piece.” And I grin at her, because that’s how people tease.

She laughs. She’s not taking me literally. That makes me angry, but at the same time, I know it’s good. It’s best. People won’t follow a guy they don’t like.

Tents go up. Little stake barriers with string get stabbed into the ground, in a perimeter. Should be enough to stop anybody from stumbling into the water in the middle of the night – we’re all trained to feel even the slightest resistance. “Hey. Gorish.”

My new little orange guy comes bouncing up to me, crouching over like a frog, though he looks misshapen – I swear that spine of his wasn’t made to bend that way. I wonder if the Sundered can de-evolve. “Yes, master!”

I have my maps, of course, but we’re not in an area I know well. “Are there any cities really close by?”

“Oh, yes, sir!”

“Close by human standards?”

“Oooh.” His eyes go all big; great. Just great. He’s dumber than I thought. “No, sir. Not for many days that way, or that way, or that way, or that way.”

North, South, East, West. Oh, yeah, this one’s a winner. Maybe he’s so dumb his master threw him away. It’s not like the Sundered live all that long, usually. “Okay, that’s what I thought. Go help the others set up.” I turn away from him and pull out my father’s map.

My father’s map. My grandfather’s map. His father before him and his father before him all owned it, wrote it, filled it. Maybe it goes back farther than that, but if so, I wasn’t told. It’s kind of useless, really. It lists the known cities, with little marks that indicate size and approximate level of technology at the time they were visited. But it doesn’t show how far apart they are. It doesn’t show how long it takes to get from one to the other, which means that these three cities in a row could be minutes from each other, or days, or months. Even years, if we have to cross the Deep Water to get to them. Yes, there are cities on the other side of the world, though I think they’re crazy to live in a place so hot that the black water steams. My own map, I’m not pulling out here. It’s too muddy, and parchment is hard to replace.

“Harry.” Demos walks up, showing me his selections for tonight’s pot.

“That’ll do. Wait – the carrots? Cut the amount in half. According to our orange host, we’re a long way from any city. I don’t want to run out.”

Demos nods and heads off to do what I say. My calculation: we have about three weeks of food left.

Easy. Easy. Deep breath. We can make it to a city by then, and still have time to explore this area.

Splashing gets my attention. The guys are bathing, enjoying the safety of the nets and being goof-offs. Right now, I don’t care.

Somewhere out there is the Hope of Humanity. I have to find it.

#

Night means we can see only as far as the flicker of our fire. So different from how it is in cities; you can stay up all night there and be perfectly safe, but you risk that on the black water, when it’s too dark to see. There’s nothing to stay up for, anyway, besides the stars. Just black water, black sky, black night-sounds.

That sound, though, was all wrong.

I know this world and how it feels. I know the tiny, cruel lapping of black water on the shore, and I know the sound of my travelers sleeping before tomorrow’s hike, all of them a little hungry and a lot used to it. I also know the sound of Sundered feet landing on a nearby tuft.

It wasn’t Gorish. He’s sitting next to me, staring at his hands.

My heart beats faster. Two free ones in the same area? That never happens. If we catch him – or her – then we’re fucking rich. With two of them, we could trade for food for a couple of weeks.

The fire crackles a little, flickering over the outlines of my travelers, all bedded down for the night. They trust me. Like their parents trusted my father, like their grandparents trusted mine. I know they don’t believe in the Hope, but they don’t want to live in the structure of the cities, and they can’t live alone. Nobody can live alone. They trust me because they have to. If I pull this off, they’ll trust me forever.

Thup-thup go the Sundered feet on a nearby tuft. They leap like fleas, and they never miss coming down, not even the stupid ones. I lick my lips. “Gorish.”

“Yes, master?”

I feel my mind-fingers, deep in his skull, filling those holes never meant for my thoughts. This one won’t last long if I over-use him. Gently. Gently. “Is there another Sundered One out there?”

Gorish looks up from the little suction cups on the ends of his fingers. “Always, master.”

Yeah, not what I was asking, but okay. “How many people are with him?”

“None, master!”

He’s so cheerfully stupid. I’m no better for asking unspecific questions. “How many humans are near him, near us?”

“None, master! Not for as far as the far, far cities!”

Another free Sundered, running around? Impossible. Wonderful. “The Sundered One is free?”

A nod.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. We’ve got it made. “Is he near enough to see us?”

Gorish sort of sniffs. “Oh, yes, master. Quite close. He’s superior!”

Superior. “High-tier?”

“Yes, master!”

No. Way.

If he’s third-tier, I’ve got him. I know how to handle that. He’s worth six of Gorish. If he’s second-tier, I’ll have a struggle on my hands. I’ve never worked with a second-tier; he might be out of my league. If he’s first-tier, then I have almost no chance at all of capturing him. He’ll fight off my mind and run away.

I’ve never even seen a first-tier. We could buy a city with what we get for him. Assuming he is a first-tier, which I really doubt, but what if he is? It’s not like he’s going to control me. There will be no reversal. It won’t cost anything if I fail. “Which way is he, Gorish?”

“He’s – ” Gorish stops and blinks. Thup-thup sounds to my left, and Gorish points there. “He’s looking at us, master.”

I bet he is. Well, little guy, your curiosity just cost your freedom. I reach out with my mind and my will, trying to find that oddly incomplete sense of a Sundered One in the dark. Emptiness, heat, everything moist and muddy and alone – and there he is.

The jolt nearly sends me toppling into the water.

Gorish stops me, catching my waist with his suction-cup hands, and I grip his wrists, aware desperately and frantically that if he lets go of me I’ll go in the water but if I don’t let go of him I can’t hold on to this new huge mind.

Huge. The holes are big enough to swallow me, to lose me, the angles too sharp, the taste too foreign. First-tier, he has to be first-tier because he’s too different from third to be second and I’m not making any sense at all –

I’m crying out, shouting, screaming, and I realize it now because people around me are shouting too, and someone’s gripping me and pulling me back because I am trying to hurl myself into the water to get closer to him.

What.

What!

He’s made me insane!

“NO!” I’m shouting, and arms are gripping my arms and someone has pulled Gorish away and – “For fuck’s sake somebody else claim him!” I scream and loose Gorish with a flick of my mental wrist, and he makes all of one leap on his own before someone else’s got him, and that’s all right. That’s good, that’s great.

That mind and I are still wrestling, still trying to swallow each other. Only now, without distraction, he’s mine.

I’m whole. He’s not.

Gripping where there is no grip. Fighting where it is my WILL against his, and he fights, he struggles, but he’s losing now, and I’m flying out of the dark and his empty spaces are conforming to me by force.

Was that… a flash of light?

Someone else is shouting. Arms are still holding me, but I’m not going into the water. No. You are coming to me!

Come.

To.

Me.

And suddenly, it’s over.

Like a rope snapped, I fall back into my travelers’ arms. They fall back, too, gasping, staring. In front of us stands a first-tier Sundered One. A Sundered like I’ve never seen.

His shape is completely human.

He even has a loin-cloth, though they always go naked unless we force them clothed. He has black skin, black hair, flawless, both the same perfect ebony, too beautiful to be human, and his irises are bright fucking orange, but his shape… he looks like a young man. Just an ordinary young man.

“Lord.” His voice is young. Like mine. Barely into manhood. Like a human servant, he kneels.

Gorish is making worried noises, no words. My travelers are scared, startled, asking me what happened. I can’t answer yet. I don’t care. I’ve bagged a first-tier Sundered. From now on, everything in my world is changed.

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