Chapter 243: West... is BULLSHIT.
Jisoo was getting farther, the current was winning.
My legs were telling me things about effort that I was choosing not to listen to, and my lungs were starting to feel like they wanted a conversation about how I was going to need to have them soon get air.
I tried to angle harder into the current.
The current did not care.
Okay... okay okay.
I used a building to propell myself, it didn’t work.
Then.
I closed my eyes.
And suddenly, I was somewhere, for a millisecond took a fast breath because water was gone and the cold was gone and then suddenly the cold was back because I was beside Jisoo and the current was trying to take both of us now.
I immediately reached for her face— both hands, cupping her jaw, turning her toward me— and breathed out once and then breathed in toward her, sharing what I had left.
Her hands came up and locked onto my arms and she looked at me through the dark water with an expression I couldn’t fully read but that probably contained several things.
This isn’t romantic. I thought, very specifically, while she took the air I’d just offered. She is literally stealing my oxygen. This is a medical situation.
She pushed off me and started pulling upward, which I took as confirmation she had enough air to make a decision, and I followed her up through the dark water toward the grey light above.
The surface arrived with a gasp that I didn’t manage to make sound dignified.
I got my head above water and took three full breaths and looked around and the vine was right there— a massive section of it, as wide as a car, floating with the solidity of something that had been floating for long enough to be furniture-grade realable... rilable. Yes.
Dark green, thick, moving with the surface current but not fast.
I grabbed it with both hands and it held, the living roots inside it catching my weight, and I pulled Jisoo up beside me and we both hung there for a moment just breathing.
The air was cold and wet and smelled like rain and deep water and something green-organic underneath both.
I took all of it regardless.
"Amazing," I said, eventually.
"Y-yey," Jisoo said, beside me.
We climbed.
The vine had enough surface variation to make it climbable— not easy, wet and slippery and requiring both hands and both feet committed at the same time— but possible, and we got ourselves up out of the water and onto the surface of it, lying flat for a second before sitting up.
I looked back at the water.
At the spot where we’d surfaced.
And I could see, underwater, something was moving between buildings below, massive... too massive. Well, I made a decision not to look closer.
I turned forward instead.
And then I saw it.
The vine we were on wasn’t alone— it was part of something larger, a cluster of them, massive floating islands of vegetation that had come together and tangled over time into something stable enough to build on.
And they had built on it.
Crude wooden structures, some with actual walls, some just roofed platforms, sitting directly on the vine surfaces and tied down with rope and living root in a dozen different improvisational ways.
Narrow plank walkways connected one vine island to the next, swaying slightly with the movement of the water below, and rope bridges— proper rope bridges, spaced correctly, tied correctly— linked the higher structures to each other across the gaps.
It was a village.
Floating on vines, sitting above the flooded western city, put together by people who had looked at their situation and built something functional in response to it.
Jisoo climbed up beside me, dripping, and saw it at the same time I did.
Her hand found my arm automatically.
And then we both noticed the people.
They’d been there already— standing on the walkways, on the platforms, a few leaning out from doorways.
Looking at us. Not approaching. Not retreating. Just watching, with a particular stillness of a community that had learned to assess new arrivals carefully before deciding what to do with them.
Some... were, mouth wides, some was frowning, some were... glaring... some were.. yea.
Wet, the two of us. Breathing hard. Sitting on the edge of one of their vine islands uninvited, having arrived out of the water with no warning and no explanation.
I raised one hand in the direction of the nearest person.
Nobody waved back.
The rain kept coming down across all of it— the village, the water, the two of us, the faces watching us... steady and continuous.
Well. We found people. Good. Now we just have to figure out if that’s the good kind of finding or the other kind.
I looked at Jisoo.
She looked at me.
Then she leaned sideways until her head rested against my shoulder, dripping water onto my already-soaked jacket, and sighed the kind of sigh that meant she was calculating everything simultaneously and had arrived somewhere between exhausted and curious and was not sure which was winning.
"So," she said.
"So," I agreed.
The people watched us.
The rain kept falling.
Somewhere below the vine island, deep in the flooded city, something enormous moved through the dark water and didn’t surface.
***
We sat there on the edge of the vine and let the rain come down on us and didn’t say anything for a while, which felt like the right response to everything that had just happened.
Then, cautiously, someone poked me.
I looked up. A woman, middle-aged, rain-soaked, with a particular expression of someone who had decided to do something and was going to see it through regardless of how it went.
She poked my shoulder again, checking— alive, apparently confirmed, then held out a clay cup. Water. Clean, or clean enough.
I took it.
She waited until I drank, then handed one to Jisoo, then retreated a few steps and talked with two other people in low voices while watching us like we were animals that had climbed out of the sea and might or might not be dangerous.