Read Chapter 17: The Chart of Regrets

The boat's engine coughed twice before catching, a low diesel grumble that Finn felt in his ribs. Every breath pulled against the bandage wrapped tight around his torso, and his leg had gone from screaming to a dull, throbbing weight that he mostly dragged behind him.

Dawn was breaking over the low zone, pale and sickly through the haze. The water had risen another foot overnight. He could tell by the stains on the walls—the tide marks creeping higher on the rusted ladder rungs, the way the lower windows of the tenement blocks sat half-submerged where yesterday they'd been dry.

Anya stood at the prow, scanning the channel ahead. She hadn't said much since they'd slipped through the lock gate and back into the low zone. Neither had he. The deal with Voss sat in his gut like a stone.

"You sure about this route?" she asked without turning.

"It's the only one that gets us to Wu's without crossing the market square."

"The square's faster."

"Also crowded. And I don't know who's been bought since yesterday."

She nodded, said nothing more. The skiff nosed between two half-sunken warehouses, their upper stories bristling with makeshift homes—laundry lines strung between satellite dishes, children leaning over railings to watch them pass. A few heads turned. Most didn't look twice. Another boatman, another run. That was the thing about the low zone. Everyone was too busy surviving to pay attention.

Except today, something was different.

Finn heard it first as a ripple in the morning quiet—voices, raised and many. Then the thrum of boat engines converging. As they cleared the warehouse channel and came into the wider basin before Wu's, he saw the crowd.

Hundreds of people packed the jetties and floating platforms. Boats of every description jammed the water—rusted skiffs, flat-bottomed barges, even a few paddleboats someone had hauled out of a park. The air crackled with argument.

"Pull up here," Finn said.

Anya angled the skiff toward a gap between two moored punts. Finn killed the engine and let momentum carry them in. He grabbed a mooring line, and the effort of tying the knot sent a spike of pain through his side that made him see stars.

"Easy," Anya said, steadying his arm.

"I'm fine."

"You're bleeding through the bandage."

He looked down. A dark stain had bloomed over his ribs. He pressed a palm against it and didn't let himself think about how much blood he had left.

They pushed through the crowd. Finn recognized faces—Wu's people, mostly. Scavengers and fishermen and a few of the shopkeepers from the floating market. At the center of the knot, standing on the deck of a converted grain barge, was Mistress Wu herself. Her grey hair was in a tight knot, and she held a megaphone in one hand.

"You've seen the watermarks," she was saying. "You've felt the ground shake. That's not rain. That's the pumps reversed. They're pulling the river toward the floodgates, and we're standing in the way."

A man in a wet-suit jacket shouted back. "And go where? The high zone won't take us. The marshlands are dead. There's nowhere to run."

"Then you stay and drown?"

"Better than dying of exposure in the ruins."

The crowd murmured, split. Some looked ready to fight. Others looked lost.

Finn pushed to the edge of the barge. Wu caught his eye and her expression shifted—relief, then something harder when she saw his wounds.

"You look like hell, boatman."

"Feel like it." He hauled himself onto the deck. "Tess?"

"Inside. Resting. She'll live." Wu's eyes searched his face. "The broadcast—we saw part of it. Then it cut. What happened?"

"I stalled them. Bought us time." He didn't say how much. He didn't want to say that twelve hours had become nine, maybe fewer.

Wu studied him a long moment, then turned back to the crowd and raised the megaphone. "Listen! We have information. The drain plan is real. The high zone is going to empty our basin to protect their towers, their banks, their—"

"We've heard all this," the wet-suit man called. "What's the plan? You got boats? There's not enough fuel in the whole zone to move everyone."

Wu looked at Finn. The crowd looked at Finn.

He stepped forward, and the movement sent fire through his leg. He leaned on a crate to keep his weight off it. "There's another way," he said.

The murmuring died.

"An old floodgate. East of here, past the breaker yards. It was part of the original storm system—before they built the main wall. The maps show a redirect channel that routes overflow into the old riverbed, the dead channel past the marshlands."

The wet-suit man laughed. "That gate's been derelict for thirty years. It's rusted shut. Even if it wasn't, the redirect channel's been filled in. Nothing goes through there."

"That's what they want you to think." Finn pulled a folded chart from inside his jacket. It was stained and worn, the paper soft as cloth from years of folding and unfolding. Danny's chart. He'd taken it off his brother's boat the day Danny disappeared, and he'd never known why Danny had scrawled in its margins until now.

He spread it on the crate, and the crowd pressed closer.

The chart showed the low zone as it had been—before the floods, before the walls. Street names and park boundaries, all of it underwater now. But Danny had drawn over it in fine pen strokes. Not the current waterways. Something else.

"These lines," Finn said, tracing a series of dotted markings that ran from the east breaker yards toward the marshlands. "I thought Danny was mapping salvage routes. But look at the elevations." He tapped the contour numbers Danny had written in each section. "The old riverbed sits lower than the current basin. It always did. They built the redirect channel to drain overflow into it when the tide topped six meters."

"But the channel was sealed," someone said. "Backed up with debris."

"Parts of it. Not all." Finn traced a clean line Danny had highlighted in faded red. "My brother was a surveyor before the water came. He knew the old infrastructure better than anyone. This line—it cuts through the breaker yards to an access point. A maintenance tunnel. If the gate can be opened, even partially, the water'll have somewhere to go. The basin level drops. The high zone can't drain what isn't there to move."

A long silence. Then the wet-suit man said, "That might save the basin. Not the people in it."

"It gives us time," Finn said. "Time to move people to higher ground, time to get the evidence out, time to make them deal. But first we need to open that gate."

"Who's 'we'?"

Finn looked at the crowd. Tired faces. Angry faces. A few that were just scared. He'd known most of these people his whole life. He'd ferried their goods, their sick, their dead. He owed them more than a half-decent lie.

"There's a corpse on the crest of the high wall who told me the gate's been disused for years," Finn said. "He laughed about it. Said it was a monument to waste. But Danny marked it. My brother wasn't a hoarder of dead paper—if he charted it, he'd been there. Last year I patched a hull for a breaker who swore she'd seen light in the maintenance tunnel. She thought it was squatters. I didn't ask more." He let that land. "But now I'm thinking Danny was using that tunnel to move things between zones. Things no one wanted tracked."

The crowd stirred. The wet-suit man's eyes went narrow and calculating.

Finn went on: "So here's what happens next. Some of you start moving families to the upper tiers, the crane platforms on the west side. They're tall enough to stay dry for days. Others of you, come with me. We need boats, ropes, pry bars, and if anyone's got explosives, bring them."

"Explosives for what?"

"The gate's been shut for decades. It's probably rusted solid. But if we can get to the control housing, there might be a manual winch. If not—" He shrugged. "We make our own opening."

The wet-suit man crossed his arms. "You're asking us to trust a map your dead brother drew and a boatman who just got back from the high zone looking like he lost a fight with a propeller."

"I am."

"Why should we?"

Finn looked down at the chart. At Danny's neat, small handwriting in the margins: *south gate, remember. current takes pressure north. open east first.* He'd underlined the last three words three times.

"Because my brother drew me a way out," Finn said. "And I've seen the alternative. The high zone has a plan, and it doesn't include anyone in this basin living past sunset. You can stay and wait, or you can come and try."

He rolled the chart up and tucked it back inside his jacket.

The crowd shifted. Wu stepped forward and raised her megaphone. "Boatmen to the east jetty. Families to the crane platforms. Anyone with tools or fuel to the grain barge. Move now—we don't have long."

People began to peel away, grudgingly at first, then faster. Arguments sputtered and died as momentum took over.

Wu lowered the megaphone and turned to Finn, her voice quiet. "Your brother was a good man, Finn. I hope you're reading his map right."

"So do I."

He glanced back at the skiff, where Anya was already unloading fuel cans and coil rope. She caught his eye and nodded. Ready.

Finn looked at the chart again, at Danny's repeated warnings in the margins. *The gate will hold the water or the water will hold the gate. Choose the timing; the rest will follow.* He didn't know what it meant yet. But something in the way Danny had pressed the pen into the paper made him think his brother had known exactly how much would be resting on this gate.

He limped toward the jetty, the weight of the key against his chest, and tried not to think about how much ground they had to cover before the floodgates opened.