The first few hours were awful. No, the first few days, really. I ran the rooftops off the temple, thought-pushing the overseers I met, knowing only that I needed to live though I wanted to die. Got into the city and took the roofs to the only place I knew was safe: the ocean. There was no avoiding Nerimes on land. No running when I was as weak as I was, and the entire overseer army plus all of Miyara’s bloodborn would be after me. So I let the tide take me out to a Bamani barge, stripped off any robes that might identify me, and begged passage.

  That’s when I understood why I was so weak: the dagger that passed through Gaxna went a fair way into me too. Another inch, the old woman said, and it would have punctured my heart. As it was, I would have bled out without her bandages. That was after we got across the strait. Or on the boat. I don’t really remember.

  What I do remember is eyes watching me even in the Bamani port, strangers peering between the reeds of the old woman’s hut. Too-interested eyes. I negotiated passage on a Pearler trading ship as soon as I could stand, tying bandages tight across my chest to pass as a boy. They had just come from Serei, full of rumors about a bloodborn army and trouble at the Chosen’s wedding, but the Pearlers hold no love for Serei, so the captain said nothing of my violet eyes. Instead, he gave me work swabbing decks and mending sails, and we set sail for smaller ports along the Bamani coast.

  I could likely get better pay as a guard somewhere, or even as a full sailor, but this works for now. The work is simple, the weather is good, and the constant joking and storytelling of the sailors keeps my spirits from getting too heavy.

  Because I am carrying weight. The weight of my failure against Nerimes. The weight of the men that died trying to help me. The weight of a city now trapped under Nerimes and Miyara. And the weight of Gaxna.

  She couldn’t block the bloodpush to save her own life, but she blocked it to save mine. I don’t know how many sunsets along the port side rail I’ve spent wishing it’d been the other way around. Or that I’d killed Nerimes, at least. Not to save the temple or avenge my father or anything, really, but just because he deserves to die.

  Attacking him now would only end in my death. I’ve accepted that, much as I burn to leap from this ship and hunt him down. I need time, and strength, and allies. I need a plan, and for more than just him. This problem is bigger than the Chosen of Uje.

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  The Deluge is coming, and sooner than any have thought, my father wrote, in a letter now stained with salt and blood and weeks of travel. If we do not reform Ujeism, reform the beliefs of the city, we will be swept away with the rest. You must ready the city, Aletheia. Ready the world, if you can.

  I understand him and what consumed his final years better now that I’ve been immersed. What I don’t understand is how the other seers have done nothing. Nerimes said they were convinced not to—but how could you ignore that?

  I don’t understand Nerimes either. He didn’t deny that we’d all be wiped out, but he seemed to think he would be saved, along with “the best of us.” It has something to do with the thoughts I witnessed in that last battle, the secret cabal he and Miyara and Ieolat are part of. Maybe that’s where their impossible powers are coming from. Knowledge of the cabal alone is damning, but I need to learn more if I’m going to defeat him. Because I am going to face him again someday. We’re not done.

  My heart felt full when I got on this ship. Full of anger, full of sadness, full of all the emotions I iced in the days after I first fled the temple. I never got a chance to let them thaw, and so I’m doing that now, letting my rage play out in angry swabs of the deck, washing my despair with the deckwater out to sea, allowing my sadness to mellow on the evenings when I don’t have work, when I hang legs off the side rail with the crewmates, as they pass cloveleafs and tell endless stories, each one trying to top the last. The more I learn of the Pearler language, the more I realize how dirty their jokes are. Sometimes I even smile.

  But I can never forget what I’ve seen. And I know what I need to do.

  I think it’s what Gaxna would want. She tried to act like she didn’t care, but she threw me a rope when I was being chased by a pack of bloodborn that first day, and was always on the watch for runaways to help. I feel like Gaxna now, watching from the rooftops as the world runs from danger, a danger it doesn’t even know is there. I have the choice to throw my rope or not, and not throwing would be so much easier. But I can hear my ancestors’ voices, make out my father’s words in the spray off the starboard bow, and catch Regiana’s snap when I jump from a boarding skiff into the waves. They echo what I already know, that I have to do something.

  And I will. Because every day I don’t hear my lover’s voice alongside them is a reassurance she still lives. And every day the waters don’t rise is another chance to save her, and the world.