Chapter 1 – The Weight of the Current

MARINA

The sounding line snaps tight enough to slice skin.

I drop the nylon rope a second before it takes my fingers off. The aluminum canoe lurches violently to starboard. This tributary wasn’t supposed to have a current this deep, nor a pull this aggressive. According to the satellite data I compiled three days ago, this bend of the river should be sluggish, shallow, and entirely predictable.

It is none of those things. The water boils around the hull, thick and the color of steeped black tea.

I scramble toward the outboard motor, boots slipping on the wet metal deck. I need to cut the engine and drift before the current slams me into the submerged mangrove roots. But before my hand touches the throttle, the river surface shatters.

A hand clamps over the gunwale.

It is a human hand, pale and water-slick, but the knuckles are corded with too much raw strength. The aluminum groans. The canoe tips. I brace my weight against the opposite side, reaching for the machete tucked under the bench, but the intruder uses the leverage to haul himself up.

He breaches the foam. A man. He wears a wide-brimmed white Panama hat that somehow remains perfectly seated on his head despite the churning rapids. Beneath the brim, his eyes are impossibly dark, entirely devoid of panic.

He doesn’t try to climb aboard. He doesn’t say a word. He simply locks his gaze on me, shifts his grip on the metal rim, and violently twists his body backward into the current.

The canoe flips.

The impact hits me like a concrete wall. The world turns upside down, a mess of bubbles, roaring water, and the sudden, suffocating dark.

CAIO

The river bends because I tell it to.

It is not a request. It is the silent, heavy pressure of my will pushing against the current, forcing the water to rebel against gravity and physics. I feel the flow of the tributary as an extension of my own pulse. I shape it. I weaponize it.

I sink beneath the overturned hull of the aluminum boat, letting the familiar pressure of the deep wrap around me. I hate the metallic tang of surveyor’s instruments. I hate the smell of diesel and ambition that these humans drag into my waters. They come to measure, to map, to build their concrete walls, and then they leave.

I make sure they cannot leave. I break their boats before they can sever another vein of my home.

The woman from the boat is thrashing in the water above me. I watch her from the shadows of the submerged roots. She is fighting the undertow, kicking desperately toward the surface. She has a heavy leather cylinder strapped across her chest, pulling her down. A smart human would unbuckle it. A smart human would drop the dead weight and save herself.

I push off a sunken log, shooting upward in my human form. The water glides over my skin, offering no resistance. I break the surface just as she gasps for air.

I intend to take the leather tube. I intend to sink every piece of metal and paper she brought here, leaving her stranded on the muddy bank. Let her wait for rescue. Let her feel what it is to be left behind.

MARINA

The river is a washing machine. I kick, fighting the drag of my soaked clothes, fighting the massive weight of the leather tube strapped across my ribs.

The tube holds my rain-ink. It holds the only drafted maps I possess. It is my proof of existence, my singular leverage in a world that shifts and abandons. Without it, I have no way out. I never stay anywhere long enough to be left; I draw my own exits, and I am not dropping the ink.

The man surfaces right beside me.

Up close, the water sluices off his sharp jaw and broad shoulders. He treads water effortlessly, unaffected by the chaotic undertow pulling at my boots. He reaches for the leather strap across my chest.

I don’t scream. Screaming wastes oxygen. I don’t beg him for help. I simply twist my body away, turning my back to him, and lock both my arms tightly around the cylinder. I curl into a protective ball in the churning water, choosing the anchor that is currently drowning me over surrendering it to a stranger.

He grips my shoulder. His fingers are freezing, digging into my collarbone. He tries to pry me loose, his strength absolute and terrifying, but I clamp my jaw shut and refuse to let go. I will sink with it.

CAIO

She doesn’t fight me with her fists. She fights me with absolute, stubborn silence.

She curls around the leather tube, turning her back to the surface, willing to let the water fill her lungs rather than give up her cargo. I grip her wrist, meaning to snap the leather strap. The friction of my hand against her wet skin and the waterproof wax of the cylinder releases a scent into the humid air.

Ozone. Crushed riverbed minerals. Bitter charcoal.

Rain ink.

My lungs seize. The scent bypasses my thoughts and slams directly into a closed door in my chest. Suddenly I am not in the current. I am standing on the dry, cracked mud of a drained riverbed. I am smelling this exact same ink off the blueprints unrolled on a folding table. It is the day the concrete poured. The day the river court retreated into the deep Encante and left me on the wrong side of the spillway, abandoned because I refused to sing the human workers to their deaths.

I flinch, the memory visceral enough to make my hands shake. I pull the woman around by the shoulder, staring at her face through the spray of the rapids.

The mapmaker.

She is the one who drew the lines. She is the architect of the dam that locked my people away. My grip tightens on her wrist, no longer trying to take the tube, but locking her to me.

MARINA

His hand is a vice on my wrist. I look into his eyes, expecting violence, but what I see is a shock so profound it borders on terror.

Before I can twist away, the roar of the rapids changes pitch. It drops from a chaotic crashing into a low, deafening hum that vibrates in my teeth.

The water around us stops behaving like water.

It stops flowing downstream. The current grips my waist, but it doesn’t pull me under. It pulls me up.

I gasp as the surface of the river rears back. A wall of dark, amber water rises directly out of the channel, defying gravity, standing vertically like a cliff face made of liquid glass. The sky is blotted out. The Amazonian sun disappears behind the rising tide.

I have lost all control. My body is entirely at the mercy of a physics that no longer exists. The man holding my wrist doesn’t let go; he is staring at the vertical river with the same rigid tension I feel in my own bones.

The water reaches its peak, towering over us, a suspended ocean hanging in the air.

And then the wall collapses forward, swallowing us whole.