Chương 10: The Merfolk’s Warning

Having so many cities was simply unsustainable. The pollution alone made it untenable. With most of life now virtual, the need for office space had largely vanished, and the rising water levels had already begun reclaiming the coastlines where most major cities sat. Over the last few centuries, a global project has replaced cities of concrete with numerous smaller, sustainable settlements. People migrate between them, allowing each settlement time to replenish before the next band moves through.

In a way, it is a return to the hunter-gatherer model - except this time, we're at the top of the food chain and our bodies and minds are suited to it in ways our ancestors' were not. - From the memoirs of Tina McBrigade, Ninth Head of the First Brain's Faction He woke up to something landing on him. The hood came undone in the scramble and the macaque that had made the navigational error of jumping onto an invisible surface found itself face to face with a human, at close range, in a tree, at dawn.

The scream it produced was immediate and comprehensive. Within seconds the forest around him was a wall of sound - macaques and birds registering their collective opinion of the situation from every available branch. Kara sat up, assessed himself, and concluded that he had survived his first night in an unknown Area without incident, which was the standard he was currently working towards. The light through the canopy was the pale grey of very early morning.

He stretched - the morning routine Pranky had drilled into him had become so habitual that his body began it before he had consciously decided to - and looked around for breakfast. The tree had figs, or something close enough to figs that the distinction was academic. He ate several and pocketed several more. As he reached for the pocket he remembered the egg, and checked it with the care of someone handling something irreplaceable. Still whole.

It looked, possibly, marginally larger than he remembered, but eggs did not grow, so that was almost certainly his imagination. He climbed down and followed the coastline. About an hour in, a river met the sea - wide, slow-moving, the kind that suggested habitation upstream.

He turned and followed it, moving through the trees alongside the bank rather than along the ground, partly from habit and partly because three years on the island had permanently adjusted his relationship with the forest floor from default route to last resort. His interface picked up a signal after another hour - Area 11, which meant he was closer to home than he had expected. Pranky's aim had been better than strictly necessary, which he put among the things he was choosing not to be grateful for yet.

He picked up his pace. The trees began showing the signs of a settlement at regular intervals - branches picked clean at reachable heights, the faint chemical undertone of insect repellent threading through the forest smell. He climbed to get a view before he went in. More than a hundred buildings spread through the trees, one to three stories, built from stone and reclaimed materials in the practical style of settlements that had been here long enough to be comfortable.

People moved between the buildings the easy way a community moves when it knows its own rhythms. The clothing was what he expected - practical, temperature-regulating, green and brown tones for the men, kaftans for the women. Everyone appeared human. No one was looking in his direction. He considered the tunic and trousers he was wearing, which were comfortable and well-made and had not been designed for public appearances.

He pulled up his interface, found his credit account still active - lower than he would have liked, but sufficient - and placed an order. The drone arrived quietly, solar-powered, and deposited a basic toga and a bag at his feet without ceremony. He changed, packed the rest, and walked in. The settlement had no entry point as such. Bands came and went; loners and travellers were not unusual. Nobody looked at him twice, which was exactly what he wanted.

He found the transportation hub near the river without difficulty - settlements near water tended to organise around it - and rented a small water-powered boat, programmed his destination, and pushed off. He was on the water before the sun was halfway through the sky, which felt like progress. The next three days settled into a rhythm that was either peaceful or monotonous depending on which direction he looked at it.

He fished, which he was good at, having learned it out of necessity and kept at it long enough to find it satisfying. He ate. He watched the river widen and the traffic on it increase as he moved north - other boats, people riding with marine partners, dolphins and orcas and things that were neither but had borrowed from both. He kept his distance. He had never been particularly social, and three years on an island with four companions had not changed that. He tried his parents' contact multiple times.

Out of coverage, which was unusual - his parents were not the kind of people who went deep into areas without signals unless circumstances required it. He tried Gomot too, but no response. He would be at the university. They would see each other there. On the fourth morning his interface flagged the University 11 city, and he came up through the widening river mouth into the tidal reach where it met the sea, and felt something loosen in him that had been held for a long time. He was almost home.

The traffic thickened as he approached - boats of various sizes, marine creatures moving with purpose, the general organised busyness of a place that ran on a schedule. He slowed, and waited, and watched the bubbles rise before the merfolk surfaced beside his boat. Two of them - a male and a female, streamlined, navy-suited, webbed hands resting on the side of his boat, entirely at ease in their element. Behind them, just visible below the surface, the bulk of an oversized orca moved in a slow holding pattern.

Kara had heard that the university employed merfolk. He had not quite processed what encountering them in person would feel like.

"Are you a student?" the female asked. Straight, flat, without warmth. He had heard merfolk were frosty. This matched.

"No. I'm the brother of a student. His name is Gomot." They looked at each other. Then at him. The look was not the one he had expected - somewhere between recognition and surprise, but not quite. Something more careful than that.

"He is no longer here." The words landed oddly. He sorted through the possible meanings. Absent today. Absent this week. Not here at all.

"What do you mean he's not here? After graduation, students and family are allowed a few months - what about my parents? They should be in the city."

"They are not here either. You cannot enter." A pause, briefer than it felt.

"On a personal note - it is best you get as far away from here as you can." They were gone before he had finished processing it. The orca's bulk receded into the dark water. The surface closed over where they had been and gave nothing back. Kara sat in his boat and looked at the water where they had been and turned the words over. He is no longer here. They are not here either. Present, technically. Somewhere.

But not here - the careful phrasing of people delivering what they had been told to deliver and then, once, stepping outside it. On a personal note. He turned the boat around. He began heading back. Then he stopped. The current moved past him in both directions at once in the tidal reach, the river pushing out and the sea pushing in, the boat sitting between them without deciding. He thought about the warning. He thought about what a personal note from a merfolk meant.

Something said at a personal cost, aimed at him specifically, about something they knew and could not say. If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. He thought about his parents out of coverage for three days. About Gomot not here, with months still left before they had to vacate. About the way the merfolk had looked at each other when he said his brother's name. He did not turn the boat back around.

He pulled it to the bank instead, into a section where the overhang was dense enough to break the sightline from the water, and moored it and covered it with what the bank offered. Then he climbed the nearest tree and looked out. He was going to need information before he went anywhere. The dungeon had taught him that - the quieter lesson underneath all the obvious ones: the shape of a problem determined the shape of a solution, and you had to understand the shape before you could do anything useful about it.

Going in blind was the tree with the constrictor. He had learned that the hard way. His family was gone. The merfolk had warned him away. Something had happened, and Gomot was gone too, and none of it made sense yet but the pieces were there to be assembled if he stayed and looked. He settled into the branch. Below him the river moved toward the sea, indifferent and unstoppable, water that had somewhere to be.

Above and around him the canopy was thick enough to make him invisible to anyone on the water, which was what he needed. He watched the merfolk's patrol route and began mapping it. One month earlier All things considered, Tomas was feeling rather pleased with himself. It had required some political manoeuvring, more than he would have liked, if he was being honest. Manoeuvring was his bread and butter, though, and the result had justified the investment.

Three Task Force members, their animal partners, all at minimum Tier 8, with Shim leading them at Tier 10. Local enforcement alongside, Tier 7 across the board, their own partners in tow. Overkill, on paper. Against most targets, embarrassingly so. But this was not most targets. This was a freshly graduated university student with a skillset that had made him very difficult to pin down, and difficult was not a term Tomas had patience for. The overkill was intentional. When you closed a net, you closed it properly.

In front of him, in the middle of the swamp, stood an exhausted-looking middle-aged couple. He felt something that was adjacent to pity and decided to let it pass. They were collateral, unfortunate but inevitable. The boy was the target, and the boy was not visible, which was entirely expected. Making himself invisible and launching a distraction to extract his parents was the pattern - Tomas had seen it enough times over the past three weeks to anticipate it.

It was a naive strategy, and it had kept working because Tomas had been using reasonable resources. Today, reasonable was no longer on the menu. He let Shim take the formal approach first. The speech, the assurances, the promise of a fair trial. Tomas had his own speech ready, because the legal machinery required certain boxes to be checked - a fair trial was beside the point, and everyone present understood that - and he had spent considerable money and influence ensuring those boxes were checked.

When Shim finished, Tomas stepped forward.

"It is rather disheartening to see you in this state." He looked at the couple with the expression of a man who meant every word he said, because he had practiced the expression until it was indistinguishable from sincerity, which was one of his more useful skills.

"But I'm sure, as parents, you understand that I have to find justice for my daughter, after what your son did to her. It is rather unfortunate that he has not been taught about the basic workings of society. Don't worry though - we will make sure to teach him thoroughly on your behalf." He really did enjoy this part. People made mistakes when they were not thinking clearly, and nothing disrupted clear thinking like emotion, and nothing produced emotion like a man who smiled while he threatened you.

It was a formula he had refined over decades. The father looked at him. Then began to clap. Slowly. Deliberately. The applause of a man with nothing left to lose and opinions he intended to share.

"A wonderful speech as usual. Too bad your paid followers aren't here to appreciate it. Should I end with a Hail Tomas too?" Tomas's eye twitched. The father's composure was either genuine courage or the performance of it, and either way it was going to cost the family in ways they had not yet calculated. He was about to respond when Shim stepped in, which was probably wise for everyone involved. The exchange continued.

The mother made a point about the boy attacking when his parents were insulted in front of him, which landed on Shim with a visible effect that Tomas noted with mild interest. Shim was not a man with much visible effect. He was a professional. The mother had found a gap in him that Tomas had not known was there, which was interesting and irrelevant. He was not listening very carefully to the words anymore. He was watching the edges of the clearing, because the boy was here.

He was always here at these moments, which was the pattern, which was why Tomas had specifically selected this clearing and this approach. The swamp had one reliable entry, and Tomas had people stationed in all directions. They were surrounded. He was about to signal Shim to move when the pressure arrived. It simply came into being out of nowhere, and then it was everywhere, and Tomas's knees made a unilateral decision about the situation before his brain had finished processing it. He was on the ground.

Everyone was on the ground. The Task Force, the enforcement team, Shim - on the ground, breathing with the careful deliberateness of people whose bodies were having a serious conversation with an external force and losing. Tomas raised his eyes. A man. Dark-skinned, loose white clothing, standing at the edge of the clearing, relaxed, like a man who had arrived somewhere he was always meant to be.

Beside him, a bull - black in a way that went beyond colour, the kind of black that suggested the light around it had made a considered decision to go elsewhere. The pressure was coming from the bull. Tomas could tell that much. What was coming from the man was different, but it sat above anything in Tomas's considerable experience of powerful people. The man looked at Shim the way a teacher looked at a student who had made a disappointing choice.

"Is this what the Task Force has reduced to these days? Bullying young students and scraping to political powers?" He knelt in front of Shim. The pressure around the Task Force leader eased slightly, which did not appear to be something Shim found comforting given the circumstances.

"Doesn't feel so nice to be bullied, now does it?" Shim, to his credit, managed a response. He asked who the man was, which was the right question and which Tomas very much wanted the answer to. A symbol appeared on the man's forehead. Tomas did not recognise it.

He looked at Shim's face when Shim saw it, and what he saw there - the complete evacuation of composure from a Tier 10 Task Force leader who had put the most dangerous people on Earth on the ground without visible effort - told him that he had made a significant miscalculation somewhere, and that the miscalculation had a symbol he did not recognise. The man spoke. He spoke about codes and fair pursuit and the impropriety of using parents as leverage, each point delivered patiently.

Shim agreed to give the boy a one-day lead. Shim, who had arrived today with the full weight of the Task Force behind him, agreed without argument. The man smiled, a mission completed successfully.

"Alright, child. You heard that. You can come out now." From right beside Tomas, one of the local enforcement members stood up. Tomas looked at him. He had been standing there for the last fifteen minutes. Tomas had registered him as enforcement, had noted his position, had factored him into the geometry of the clearing in the way you factored in furniture. He had not considered, for a single moment, that the enforcement member might not be an enforcement member. The boy bowed.

Made sounds that meant nothing to Tomas and apparently meant something to the man in white, who listened with the attention of someone receiving information rather than noise. He responded briefly in a language Tomas did not understand. The boy went to his parents. There was an exchange that Tomas watched from the ground, a man observing the conclusion of a situation he had designed and which had concluded in entirely the wrong direction. Then they were gone. The man in white, the bull, the parents - all gone.

The pressure lifted. The sounds of the swamp came back. The Task Force and the enforcement team remained where they were for a while, catching their breath with the dignity of people who had just been delivered a thorough lesson and were not yet ready to stand up and pretend otherwise. Tomas got to his feet. He made his way to Shim, because he needed to understand what the symbol had meant and because understanding things was how he had gotten to where he was.

The look Shim gave him when he asked made him wish he hadn't.

"You have no idea what you've gotten yourself and us into." Shim's voice had the flat quality of a man speaking from somewhere past anger.

"We will continue pursuing Ghilim. But don't expect any of our elite teams. And I would strongly advise you to let this go entirely." Tomas knew when to advance and when to retreat. It was, arguably, his most reliable skill, and it had served him better than almost anything else over the course of a long career. He looked at where the man in white had been standing. He thought about the symbol on his forehead and the thing it had done to Shim's face. He had researched the boy thoroughly before moving on him.

Had found no connections of note, no backing, no protection. He would be finding a way to characterise this, publicly, as a trivial misunderstanding. The boy and his family were not, on reflection, all that bad. Everyone made mistakes. Including, occasionally, himself.