It’s the event of the generation, the century, the millennium: all three moons’ arms linked in a tug of war to drag the tides low, low—lower. Low enough that the glistening cobbles of Tarry-by-the-Sea’s submerged original streets lay naked and exposed tonight for the first time in living memory.
Tonight, the city is alive with revelers accustomed to navigating their city by hovercraft and bridge and gondola and tether-ferry. They walk streets—streets!—littered with debris and rubble, stepping around abandoned watercraft improperly moored, slipping on cobblestones silicone-slick with muck and seaweed. It’s filthy, yet here are the gentlefolk out in their nice shoes, ignoring the mud splashing onto the silk and synthetic leather, delighting in the novelty. Three stories above, where the highest tides normally lap twice a day and the above-water portion of the city begins, windows are glazed with kaleidoscopic glass and rimmed with glaring neon and flickering screens; down here it’s all been broken out through the centuries since the tides shifted and the original city was washed through to ruin.
Sizzling streetlights fight valiantly to illuminate farther down than usual, and the city’s ubiquitous cameras, too, struggle to pierce the gloom. To fill the gap in security, drones drift overhead, quietly humming, made innocuous and cheerful with chains of bright paper lanterns strung between them, the light reflecting off the puddles and glossy-wet cobbles in a shattered neon rainbow.
Bands thrum beats into the newly-uncovered plazas, the ferrymen—their gondolas dry-docked tonight, their hovercraft unneeded—offer to guide revelers on tours of the lower levels. Giant sentry spiders, normally confined to rooftops and bridge decks, stalk the streets on spindly, robotic legs. Someone’s tied a bright nylon scarf around the leg of this one, the single unblinking eye in its belly whirs as it scans the crowd, shutter clicking at a suspicious face. It continues on.
The residents of the city’s lower half have taken cover as the residents of the upper half descend, but not all can hide. Barnacles, mussels, limpets encrust the stone walls, unable to run as enterprising foragers pry them off to be served on the night’s specials menus. Anemone clamp tight and sandy and sullen against the prodding fingers of toddlers, waiting desperately to unfurl when the tide comes in again. Crabs peer out from under crumbling walls, minnows flounder in the dwindling tidepools, splashed about by revelers.
They’re not the only ones left vulnerable tonight.
But. Peer inside the shadows beyond the upper crust’s gaiety and the tidal resident’s misery, and you’ll find an entirely different sort of game finishing up as the tide rises once more: a three-hour span of hallucinatory frenzy that was touted as the game of the generation, the century, the millennium. It’s over, and now—victorious?—Adria stands over Pandora’s smoking body with an empty gun in her hand and nowhere left to run.
Wait.
I went too fast.
Let’s give that another go.
Same story about the trio of moons and the historic tide, same poetical waxing about the citizens of the city coming down to gawk at the denizens of the deep—but I’ll put three hours back on the clock.
Same crowds, same frantic festival energy with bands soundwashing the plazas, the enterprising ferrymen and fastidious sentry spiders working the crowds. Someone’s tied a bright nylon scarf around the leg of this one, and Adria ducks underneath it to avoid a clutch of giggling society toffs, glancing up at the single unblinking eye in its belly. It whirs as it focuses on her face, then clicks and keeps moving, ignored by the rest of the crowd.
She’s on her way to the game of her generation, the century, the millennium, driven by curiosity and obligation and the wooden box in her pack—which has no right to feel as heavy as it is, given the objectively light weight of the contents. The game was advertised to its exclusive audience as an unmissable event, one where anything goes and all traces of the rules, the too-slow participants, the blood, will be washed away after the tide comes back in.
Adria has a few things she intends to leave behind for the tide.
(I know this now; when the game began, although I knew every fact about her—about all of them—I could only guess at her secret thoughts. Now, I find it impossible to separate Adria’s memories of this tale from my own.)
She slips through a broken doorway and into an abandoned courtyard, sky empty of drones and gaping wide to reveal brilliant triple moons. A small pack has gathered, all scenting blood and waiting to hear the rules of the game. There are no waivers to sign, no place to put your name. No recording devices, no media, no broadcasting, no uploading your successes to the feeds.
And no glory for the winner, but I haven’t told them that, not yet.
It’s a motley crowd, Adria thinks. Of course Techs are here, showing off their hardware mods, a knot of them swapping stats on cybernetic implants, muscle bulkers, oxygen boosters. No one knows the rules so tech isn’t cheating—but that doesn’t mean the game’s non-outwardly modded contestants will like them here. Everything else in this topsy-turvy world may be upside down tonight, but that prejudice stays the same.
Most of the other participants are who Adria would expect: street toughs and hustlers and more than a few low-level con artists like Adria herself; she exchanges a few guarded nods with her colleagues, keeps a wary eye out for past marks.
Not that they’d recognize her today. Her targets are generally corporate: her costume is heels, wigs, lipstick, and tight-fitting business suits that show off her athletic frame and siphon cognitive resources from her marks. Tonight her stocking cap is pulled low over her spiked bleached hair. She’s wearing dark gray joggers and a cheap black stealth jacket, carrying a black nylon canvas pack with the square outline of its contents ghosting against the fabric.
“Who’re those ones, then?”
A quiet voice at Adria’s shoulder startles her out of her scan of the crowd, and she turns to find a slight man with cool olive skin and dark eyes, dressed more like a tourist from the society streets than the sort of riff-raff Adria expected to see here.
“Pardon?”
The man lifts his chin to a group at the edge of the crowd: they’re not wearing uniforms but they might as well be by the stiff, uncomfortable way they hold themselves. The big one with the pale complexion, fierce braid, and hooked nose is the leader; the rest are watching her for orders, attuned like a pack of trained wolves.
“Corporate security?” Adria guesses, though what the hell would they be doing here?
“Here to shut this down?” her companion muses in answer to her unasked question. “Though they’re not alone.”
Adria follows his gaze and realizes he’s right. Another clutch of game-players have gathered at the far end of the courtyard. While the first set—Adria mentally names them wolves—are stiff and disciplined, this other corporate security team are languid as tigers, their leader lounging against the wall with his shirt half-unbuttoned and blond hair tousled, going for the look of an underworld playboy though he hasn’t bothered to hide his corporate-issue sleeve. The leader of the tigers catches her looking and gives a wink.
“Here to play,” Adria says, and her companion nods.
“Here to ruin it for the rest of us.”
The wolves and the tigers eye each other across the courtyard, clearly bristling at each other’s presence.
“Let them try,” Adria says.
Her companion laughs. “I like that.” He holds out a hand. “Logan.”
A flurry of aliases on her tongue, but she bites them back. Tonight is different. Special. The first night of a new life where she isn’t defined by her mark, or her father, or anything else in this blaze-damned city.
“Adria,” she says; the syllables taste strange.
“Nice to meet you. Any idea what this is about?”
“Nope.”
“Good. Me neither.” Logan tilts a meaningful look at the pack over her shoulder. “Were we meant to have brought a pack? I didn’t think to.”
“No—I mean, I don’t know.” Color flares in Adria’s cheeks. “It’s kind of a personal thing.”
Something about her tone must clue Logan in to the depth of pain behind tonight’s quest; something in the way his expression gentles sparks a sudden desire in Adria to explain herself.
“My father,” she says, patting the pack even while knowing that’s insufficient explanation. “He’d been looking forward to this night, you know? But he didn’t make it. So I thought I’d bring him.”
“His ashes,” Logan says, soft.
Adria feels a rush of relief that Logan didn’t tell her he was sorry for her loss—she’s not. At least, not the way she’s probably supposed to be. Her father may have finally drank himself to death two months back, but she lost the man she loved years ago. If that dull ache in her chest is grief, it’s long been scabbed over.
“He would have loved this,” she says.
And he would have: the mystery, the pageantry, the ridiculous secretive nature of the game, the chance to explore the city.
“This city’s in our blood, Ad,” he’d told her, but lately it’s felt like a cage, titanium chain link woven out of his memories and his expectations and his tangle of aliases and backstories and confidence games that she can hardly keep straight anymore.
Adria needs to find herself, and she won’t do it here. She’s been trying to leave Tarry-by-the-Sea for years, ever since her father started drinking in earnest, but she kept finding obstacles in her way. The timing of a job offer didn’t work out. Opportunities fell through. For years now there’s been something sluggish in her preparations, some maddening internal reluctance she couldn’t quite pinpoint and couldn’t quite barrel past, and although she doesn’t believe in fate or greater powers, something—don’t call it the universe, call it the City—seemed to be standing in her way.
It wasn’t her father, he’s been ashes in a box for months and she still hasn’t walked away. She’d wondered if she’d need to take him with her, but then she remembered the low tide was coming and she’d known what to do. When she heard about the game it felt like the perfect piece of the puzzle.
This is just the ridiculous sort of shit her father had lived for, before he’d lived for the bottle. She’ll take him with her, and handful by handful she’ll say goodbye and be on her way. She has her shuttle ticket for tomorrow evening. Her bags are packed. After tonight, Adria—not an alias, not a con, but Adria—is heading out into the world to freedom.
Someone has climbed a small flight of steps at the north end of the courtyard, voice mods sending their words echoing off the dripping walls and silencing the crowd.
It’s time.
I hold my metaphorical breath.
“Welcome!” The speaker is barrel chested and fit, wide shock of blue-dyed curls piled high. “The game will begin in a few minutes, as soon as everyone receives their welcome packet. It includes your personalized instructions, as well as what your bonus will be if you win.”
“I thought the prize was cash,” shouts someone near the front.
The speaker smiles. “That, and so much more.”
A murmur as that sinks over the crowd: anticipation, delight, unease.
A chill touches Adria’s neck. She’s not hung up on what the prize is, she’s hung up on the word “personalized.” Who the hell knows she’s here? Adria turns to Logan to ask what the speaker means, but a figure in a red jumpsuit steps between them, pressing a tool roll of plasticized canvas into each of their outstretched hands before moving on.
The speaker’s voice booms again. “You may share what you learn in your packet with anyone you wish, or no one at all. The game will last three hours. You’ll know it’s over when this courtyard is underwater once more.”
Adria shares a confused glance with Logan, then unties the roll to reveal a pearl-handled blade, a shimmering vial, a leaden disk, a cheap plastic lighter, each in their own pocket. A scrap of reusable newsprint falls from the parcel; she reacts quickly, scooping the fluttering chit out of the air with clawed fingers before it can land in the muck at her feet.
She smooths it open in her hand, shielding it from view.
A seedling from Cambie Downs intertwines with a cutting from the Golden Forest and an orchid from the Seathe Coast. My roots run deeper than you know, as tangled a maze as my branches.
The lines are labeled “Clue.” The words begin to flicker on the newsprint as she frowns at them, pixels swarming and resolving into a new message, labeled “Prize.”
I know who you really are.
Adria crumples the newsprint in her fist reflexively; she risks a glance to see Logan with the same strange set of tools and his own scrap of newsprint. His brows draw together as he reads it, a flicker of complicated emotion—hope, maybe, or grief?—in his eyes before he carefully folds the scrap away.
Are their clues the same? Their prizes? Should she ask? Given the silence from around the courtyard, the rest of the players are keeping their clues close to the vest. She slips the crumpled newsprint into the pocket of her joggers, but the final message tolls through her mind like a ship’s bell through the fog.
I know who you really are.
It could be a threat, a sign that she should walk away from this game right now. But it could also be a promise. And that golden barb sticks in her soul more deeply than any cash prize possibly could.
The speaker at the front calls for attention once more. “Any questions about the rules?”
“Yes!” a joker shouts back. “What are they?”
Nervous laughter from around the courtyard; the person who yelled out the question isn’t alone in their confusion.
“You’ll know,” says the speaker. And lifts a hand, clutching a wicked shape that hitches Adria’s breath, but it’s only a flare gun—still, when the speaker shoots into the air the crowd below startles with screams that are half delight, half genuine shock. Sparks cascade over them like scattered petals.
“Sure way to call security,” mutters Logan beside her, and seconds later Adria can hear the whine of drones over the hubbub of the crowd. Any moment sentry spiders will come crawling over the rooftops and descend to reel in order. The tall speaker, the rest of the organizers, they’re already running. Adria pockets the pearl-handled knife, shoves the rest of her new tool roll into her pack along with the ash-filled box.
“Good luck,” she calls to Logan. The wolf pack’s hook-nosed chief shouts for her team to follow her; the tigers slip languidly after their tousled playboy leader.
The game is on, and Adria and the other contestants scatter like rats into the maze of buildings in the City-beneath-the-City, feet squelching in seaweed, skin pricking with adrenaline and fear and anticipation and greed.
Adria knows exactly where she’s going and why: the Sevenwood Botanical Garden, to find out who she really is.