Chapter 1: The Pull
The morning of the migration tasted like iron. It was the taste of a bitten tongue, a familiar flavor to Elias.
He sat on the edge of the pier, his bare feet dangling inches above the water of the Obol. The river was slate-grey today, churning with a heavy, muscular current that suggested things were moving violently just beneath the surface.
Elias was twelve. Tomorrow, he would be thirteen.
And because geography was time, his body knew it before his mind did. He felt the Pull. It was a physical sickness, a hook snagged in his intestines, tugging him relentlessly downstream. It was the world's way of saying: You don't belong here anymore. Move, or rot.
He hated the Pull. He hated the River. But mostly, he hated the waiting.
"Stop kicking the pylon, Elias," a voice droned.
Elias didn't look back. He kept driving his heel into the barnacle-encrusted wood of the pier support. Thud. Scrape. Thud. His heel was bleeding. He didn't care. The pain was better than the hook in his gut.
"I said stop."
Elias turned his head slowly. Standing behind him was a Warden—one of the Water-Evolved. The creature looked like a man who had been drowned and forgotten for a week, only to stand up and put on a uniform. His skin was the color of a bruise, slick with a natural mucous that kept him hydrated in the open air. Ridges of cartilage flared along his jawline, pulsing softly as he breathed.
"It's my foot," Elias said, his voice cracking mid-sentence. "It's my blood. It's my pylon."
The Warden blinked. His inner eyelids slid sideways, a translucent membrane clearing the grit from his pale, fish-like eyes. He didn't get angry. The Evolved rarely got angry at Earth-Dwellers. You don't get angry at livestock; you just herd them.
"The transport leaves in an hour," the Warden burred, the sound vibrating in his chest. "If you miss the tide, the mental degradation will set in by sunset. You'll be drooling on yourself before the moon rises."
"Maybe I like drooling," Elias snapped.
He turned back to the water, resuming his kicking. Thud.
The Warden sighed—a wet, rattling sound—and walked away, his webbed feet slapping softly against the dock boards.
Elias wasn't trying to be brave. He wasn't trying to be rebellious. He was just vibrating with a frequency of rage that he didn't know how to ground. He was the snake on the saw. The Pull was hurting him, so he wanted to hurt the world back, even if all he could do was bloody his own heel against a piece of dead wood.
Around him, the Zone 8-12 island was packing up. It was a small, frantic colony of children and pre-teens, managed by the Evolved caretakers. There were no parents here. Parents were miles downstream, in the 30s and 40s zones. Elias couldn't remember his mother's face, only the smell of dried kelp and the warmth of a hand he hadn't held in six years.
He looked down at his reflection in the water. Brown skin, tangled black hair, eyes that looked too sharp for a face so young.
"Thirteen," he whispered to the reflection.
The water rippled, distorting his face into a monster.
A horn blew. A deep, mournful sound that resonated in the hollow of his chest. The transport ship was docking. It was a massive, ugly barge, constructed of ironwood and whalebone, designed to ferry the "aged-out" children to the next island chain.
Elias stood up. The Pull yanked hard at his navel, nearly doubling him over. He grit his teeth, grabbed his small canvas sack—containing nothing but a spare tunic and a rock he found interesting—and marched toward the gangplank.
He didn't look back at the island. There was nothing there but lost years.
Chapter 2: Ballast
The transport barge, the Gilded Fin, smelled of unwashed bodies and fear.
There were forty of them crowded onto the open deck. Forty kids turning thirteen, fourteen, or fifteen, all being shuttled to the Adolescent Zone. The air was thick with the sound of crying. Some kids were terrified of the River. Others were terrified of the stories about the new island—the bullying, the labor, the gangs.
Elias stood near the railing, gripping the cold iron until his knuckles turned white. He wasn't crying. He was watching the water.
They were in the deep channel now. The safety of the shallows was miles behind them. Here, the Obol was a monster. Massive shapes moved in the indigo depths—shadows as big as houses, drifting with predatory grace.
"Hey."
Elias ignored the nudge.
"Hey, Runt."
Elias turned. It was a boy named Kael. Kael was fifteen, big for his age, with the beginnings of a beard and a cruelty that he wore like a badge. He was traveling late; he should have moved two years ago, and his eyes had the slightly vacant, foggy look of someone who had stayed in a young zone too long. The degradation had touched him, making him slow but aggressive.
"What?" Elias said.
"Move," Kael grunted, pointing to the spot by the railing. "I want to see."
"It's a big boat," Elias said, not moving. "Pick another spot."
Kael blinked, processing the defiance slowly. Then he grinned. It wasn't a nice grin. He shoved Elias, hard.
Elias stumbled back, hitting a crate. The "snake" in his brain uncoiled. He didn't think about Kael's size. He didn't think about the Evolved guards watching from the upper deck. He just saw the saw that cut him, and he attacked.
Elias launched himself at Kael, fists flailing. He landed a solid punch on Kael's nose, feeling cartilage crunch.
Kael roared and grabbed him by the throat.
Sudden movement from the upper deck. A shadow fell over them.
"Disruptive," a voice said.
It was the Captain. A massive Water-Evolved female, her skin a deep, iridescent blue. She didn't use the stairs; she simply vaulted over the railing, landing silently between the two boys.
With one hand, she backhanded Kael, sending the fifteen-year-old sprawling across the deck. With the other, she grabbed Elias by the back of his tunic and lifted him into the air like a kitten.
Elias kicked and thrashed, spitting at her. "Put me down, you wet-skinned freak!"
The Captain brought him close to her face. Her eyes were golden, pupil-less, and utterly void of empathy. She smelled of brine and old blood.
"We are heavy," she said. Her voice was calm, conversational. "The currents are strong today. The engine is straining."
"I don't care!" Elias screamed, clawing at her wrist. His fingernails made no mark on her rubbery skin.
"We need to shed weight," she continued, as if discussing the weather. She looked at Kael, who was cowering on the deck, then back at the small, feral boy in her grip. "Discipline is heavy. Chaos is heavy."
She walked to the railing.
Elias froze. The water churned thirty feet below. Dark. Cold. Hungry.
"Wait," Elias whispered. The rage evaporated, replaced instantly by the cold void of terror. "Wait, I'm supposed to go to the Thirteens. It's the law. The Migration Law says—"
"The River is the law," the Captain said. "And the River eats what falls."
She opened her hand.
Elias didn't scream as he fell. The air was sucked out of his lungs. He hit the water not with a splash, but with a bone-jarring slam that felt like hitting concrete.
Cold.
Instant, paralyzing cold.
He plunged deep, the light of the surface vanishing into a murky green twilight. The pressure squeezed his chest. He thrashed, disoriented, bubbles escaping his nose. Up. Must go up.
He kicked, his lungs burning. He broke the surface, gasping, coughing up brackish water.
"Hey!" he screamed, waving his arm. "HEY!"
The Gilded Fin was already a hundred yards away, churning black smoke, moving steadily downstream. No one looked back.
Elias trod water, his clothes heavy, his boots dragging him down. He was alone in the middle of the Obol.
Something brushed his leg.
It wasn't a log. It was slimy, muscular, and alive.
Elias stopped breathing. He pulled his legs up, curling into a ball, drifting.
A few yards away, the water bubbled. A head surfaced. It was a toad, but the size of a pony. Its skin was a mottled grey-green, covered in weeping sores. It had three eyes, one of which was clouded and white.
It croaked—a wet, gurgling sound—and dipped below the surface.
Elias saw the creature's back leg as it submerged. It was mangled, bent at a sickening angle, dragging uselessly. A cripple. A scavenger, forced to hunt in the dangerous open waters because it couldn't compete in the shallows.
It was a Stage 3 Metamorph Bombardier. The Sputterer.
And it had seen him.
Elias swam. He didn't swim with technique; he swam with the frantic, drowning stroke of a boy who knows he is already dead. He saw a shape in the distance—a jagged berg of white rock or ice drifting in the current.
He swam for it. Behind him, the water hissed.
Chapter 3: The Cold and the Spark
He made the rock.
He hauled himself up the slippery, guano-slicked slope, his fingernails tearing on the jagged surface. He collapsed on a flat shelf five feet above the waterline, chest heaving, vomiting up river water.
Below him, the Sputterer circled. It tried to climb the rock, its webbed forelegs scrabbling for purchase, but the broken back leg made it clumsy. It slid back down with a frustrated splash. It waited.
Elias lay on his back, staring at the sky.
The sky was wrong.
It had been a hot, humid morning. But now, the clouds were turning a bruised purple. The wind had stopped. The birds had stopped. The River, usually a cacophony of rushing water, seemed to be holding its breath.
Elias closed his eyes. Exhaustion pulled him down.
I'll just rest, he thought. Just for a minute.
He slept. And while he slept, the world ended.
He woke up screaming, but the scream was muffled.
Weight. Heavy, crushing weight. Darkness.
Panic flared. He was underwater. He had fallen in. He was being eaten.
He thrashed, punching upward. His hand broke through something crisp and powdery.
Snow.
Elias dug himself out, gasping. The air that hit his face was sharp enough to slice his lungs. It was cold—impossibly, violently cold.
He sat up, shivering so hard his teeth rattled like dice in a cup. He looked around, and his brain refused to process the image.
The River was gone.
In its place was a white, uneven plain stretching to the horizon. The Obol had frozen. The waves were caught in mid-curl, solidified into jagged sculptures of ice. The sky was a pale, blinding white.
"What?" Elias croaked. His breath puffed out in a thick white cloud.
He looked down at his clothes. His tunic was frozen stiff, like a board. His skin was blue. He couldn't feel his toes.
Hypothermia, his mind supplied. Stage two. Maybe three.
He had to move. If he stayed on this rock, he would die.
He tried to stand, but his knees buckled. He crawled toward the edge of the rock shelf.
Below him, on the ice, was a lump of grey-green flesh.
The Sputterer.
The giant toad had been caught by the freeze. It was encased in the ice from the waist down, its broken leg trapped in the solidified river. But it was alive. Its upper body was free, twitching sluggishly. Its good eye tracked Elias as he peered over the edge.
It let out a low, miserable hiss. Steam vented from the pores on its back—biological heat, a defense mechanism.
Elias stared at the steam. Heat.
The creature was warm. It was a furnace of living biology.
Elias didn't have a plan. He didn't have a weapon. He just had the saw in his chest and the cold in his bones. He slid down the side of the rock, landing on the ice a few feet from the trapped monster.
The Sputterer lunged. It was slow, sluggish from the cold, but its jaws were still wide enough to take Elias's head off.
Elias dodged, slipping on the ice. He fell hard on his hip. The toad snapped, its teeth catching the sleeve of his frozen tunic, ripping the fabric.
Elias screamed in frustration. He scrambled up, grabbed a loose chunk of sharp ice, and slammed it into the toad's snout. The ice shattered. The toad didn't even flinch. It reared back, the glands on its neck swelling.
It's going to spray, Elias realized. Boiling acid.
He should have run.
Instead, he lunged forward. He wrapped his arms around the creature's slimy, freezing neck, burying his face in its flesh to avoid the spray.
The heat coming off the toad was intoxicating. It was life.
The toad thrashed, slamming Elias against the ice. Elias held on. He was crying now, tears freezing on his cheeks. He hated this thing. He hated the Captain. He hated the River.
"Die!" he shrieked into the creature's skin. "Just die!"
The toad's skin tasted foul—bitter slime and musk. But beneath that... beneath that was the pulse.
Elias bit down.
He didn't mean to. It was a spasm of jaw muscles locked by cold and rage. His teeth tore through the rubbery skin. He tasted hot, copper blood. He swallowed.
Burn.
It wasn't a stomach ache. It was an explosion.
A shockwave of heat erupted in his belly and shot outward. It raced through his veins like liquid fire. His vision went red. The shivering stopped instantly.
Elias gasped, pulling his head back. His mouth was smeared with dark blood.
He looked at his hands. They were gripping the toad's neck. Where his fingers touched the skin, the toad was smoking.
The creature shrieked—a high, bubbling sound of agony. The flesh under Elias's hands was turning black, blistering, cooking rapidly.
Elias scrambled back, horrified. He looked at his palms. They looked normal, but the air around them shimmered. He could feel the heat radiating from them, like he was holding invisible coals.
The Sputterer slumped forward. The heat Elias had drawn from it—or forced into it?—had done something fatal. The glands on its neck had ruptured internally. It twitched once, and died.
Elias sat on the ice, panting. The unnatural warmth in his body was fading, receding like a tide. The cold was creeping back in.
He looked at the dead toad. He looked at the charred handprints on its neck.
His stomach growled. A deep, cavernous sound that hurt.
He crawled back to the corpse. He picked up a jagged shard of the toad's own leg bone that had snapped off in the struggle. It was sharp.
He began to cut.
He sliced a strip of meat from the creature's flank. It was raw, pink, and revolting.
He held it in his hands. He closed his eyes and tried to remember the feeling of the fire. The rage. Burn.
Nothing happened.
He squeezed the meat, focusing on the hatred. I am the saw.
A faint warmth. Then, a sizzle. The meat in his hands turned grey, then brown. The smell of cooked flesh rose into the frozen air—a savory, rich scent that had no business existing in this white hell.
Elias ate.
He ate until his stomach hurt. He ate until the warmth in his hands died out completely, leaving him just a boy with bloody lips on a frozen river.
As he chewed, he looked west. He thought it was upstream. He didn't know he was wrong. He didn't know he was walking toward nothing.
He just knew he was warm, and he had a knife made of bone.
Elias stood up and began to walk.