I PICKED UP A CHILD IN A DUMPSTER

Jisoo stood beside me and looked at all of it for a long moment.

Then she looked at me. "This is kind of scary," she said, with the matter-of-fact tone of someone stating a fact. "I’m actually scared of water. Hehe."

"Since when."

"Since right now, looking at that." She gestured at the expanse of the flooded city with one hand. "I don’t know how deep it is."

"It’s very deep," I said, which was not helpful.

"Thank you, Hon Hon."

We stood there for a while.

I was staring checking— rooftop distances, the visibility through the fog, whether the buildings were spaced close enough to jump between without dropping into the water.

The rooftops I could see ranged from clean and clear to slanted at uncomfortable angles to partially collapsed, and the gap between jumping distance and falling-into-deep-water-with-unknown-contents was a gap I didn’t love the size of.... Some were even TILT and I could tell I’ll slip!

"We should wait," I said. "Observe from here for a bit. Figure out the layout before we go."

Jisoo looked at me.

"There could be patterns to the building, you know? Places where the rooftops are closer together, safer to cross. If we check it first we’ll have a better route and—"

"Let’s go," she said.

"I’m saying we should—"

"Let’s go."

"Jisoo."

"Hon Hon...?"

I looked at her. She looked back with a patient bright expression of someone who had already decided.

FUCK... if I don’t do what she said, will she became another abusive Jisoo? Yea, don’t wanna risk it.

"Alright," I said. "Let’s go."

She jumped onto my back before I’d finished the sentence.

We went building by building.

I jumped the gaps and Jisoo rode it and the water below us was grey and still at the surface and clearly not still underneath, the current showing itself in the slow movement of the things floating inet.

Vines, long sections of them, drifting in formations that moved against the wind direction, carried by whatever was running below.

Wooden planks, some in clusters that suggested they’d been built into something and had come apart.

A whole section of what might have been a raft, the rope lashing still visible, the wood still mostly intact, moving somewhere with a current like it had somewhere to be.

Evidence of people, yep... pepper.

Recent enough that the rope hadn’t fully degraded. Recent enough that the wood still had its shape.

I kept this and kept jumping.

Someone was here for sure. Or is here. The west might not be empty... okay let’s not be a dumbass... of course there’s people here, what does that raft means then.

I just thought as I jumped building to building.

The rooftops under my feet were wet and the fog cut visibility every few jumps to the point where I was landing partly on faith and partly on what the [Focus Eye] And my Somehow useful [weak glare]now could show me through the greyfog.

Jisoo kept quiet— scanning, I could tell by the quality of her silence, the alert quiet that meant she was paying attention to something and hadn’t decided what to do with it yet...

Wish she says it to me... I’m kind of scared actually.

We saw more creatures through the fog and the water surface as we went.

The long ones— vague shapes below the surface, some moving fast, some moving slow.

Something with too many limbs that broke the surface twice and then went back under.

I didn’t use [Focus Eye] on any of them. Some information was better gathered from a rooftop.... Okay, It’s actually BECAUSE I’M SCARED TO THE BONES.

Then, mid-jump over a wider gap, something hit me from the side.

Not something small.

The impact came in at the hip, hard and cold and moving fast, and the world tilted and I grabbed for Jisoo instinctively and then there was nothing under my feet and a lot of water everywhere at once.

The cold hit harder than I expected.

I hit the water sideways, my lungs contracting, my ears getting molested by dozens of water getting inside.

I got my focus in under two seconds— up was where the light was, faint and grey through the surface above— and looked around.

Saw Jisoo.

She was already being pulled.

The current was there under the surface, invisible from above, and it had her.

She’s tumbling, violent— pulling her aggressively faster than she could fight it, her arms working against it and losing.

Her face was the face of someone trying not to panic who was also not entirely succeeding at that.

I swam toward her.

Hard, full effort, cutting through the current at an angle to try to close the distance.

The water was dark.

Visibility under the surface was maybe 5 or 9 meters, luckily... because of my [Slight Night Vision] and past that was a greenish murk that my eyes couldn’t resolve into anything specific.

I pushed harder.

Then a giraffe??? walked past.

I saw it at maybe six meters depth— it didn’t need to come up for air, apparently, or didn’t need to come up now, or had stopped needing air as part of whatever had happened to it.

The neck was what I recognized first, absurdly long, extending down into the deeper dark and up toward something I couldn’t see at the surface, its neck was curving, in a way that necks weren’t supposed to be, bending in curves rather than straight lines, weaving through the flooded building, dead animal around it like an eel moving through coral.

The body was far below, just a shape in the murk, walking the flooded street like it was still a street.

Then the elephant resolved out of the dark further away, and I had to check several times.

The barnacles were visible even at this distance— crusted across its back and head in dense formations, the skin between them scaled now rather than the rough grey I’d have expected.

The trunk extended outward into the flooded buildings around it, threading through windows, reaching into gaps, searching with a patience of something that wasn’t in a hurry.

Its trunk was 40meters, maybe more, feeling its way through the dark water with a gentle attention of something that had been doing this long enough to know exactly what it was looking for.

I scanned all of that in about two seconds and then focused back on Jisoo because priorities first.

She was further now.