Read Chapter 19: The 'Safe' Routes

The channel stank of oil and rot, the water thick with debris that slapped against the hull like grasping hands. Finn stood at the prow of the lead skiff, chart clutched in one fist, the other braced against the gunwale as the engine grumbled at idle. Behind him, a dozen boats strung out in a loose chain through the drowned streets—scavengers, boatmen, a few women with rifles who'd seen their homes drowned once before and refused to see it again.

"We should be past the old market by now," Anya said from the helm, her eyes scanning the rooftops. The buildings here were half-swallowed, their upper floors hollowed by years of scavenging, their windows like empty sockets staring down at them.

Finn traced Danny's lines. The chart was rough—pencil marks bleeding into water-stained paper—but the routes were clear enough. A main channel wound through what had been the district's spine, but Danny had drawn a thinner thread, a detour through the close alleys between the old warehouses. Safer, the margin notes said. Less open water for eyes to find you.

"Stay the main cut till the broken spire," Finn said, pointing. "Then we turn."

The spire rose ahead, a snapped concrete finger pointing at the grey sky. The boats turned as one, engines dropping to a purr as they slid between the warehouse walls. The water here was shallow, choked with submerged crates and the bones of delivery trucks. Finn felt the skiff's keel grate once, then again, before they found the deeper water Danny had marked.

That was when the first shot rang out.

It cracked past Finn's ear and punched into the wheelhouse behind him, splintering wood. Then the world came apart. Shock troops rose from the rooftops—grey armor, faceless helmets, rifles spitting fire. They'd been waiting. Not on the main channel, where Finn had expected them, but on the roofs above the 'safe' route Danny had drawn.

"The chart's compromised!" Anya shouted, wrenching the helm as bullets stitched the water around them.

"No—" Finn grabbed her arm, pulling her down as glass shattered overhead. "They're here for the gate, not us. They know the route because it's the only one that makes sense. Danny marked it for the current, not for cover."

He looked at the chart again, at Danny's cramped handwriting. *Safe route—low draft, avoids patrols.* But the notes below, the ones Finn hadn't fully understood until now, were about pressure. Water pressure. Current strength. How the tide pushed through the south channels at certain hours, how the shallows became raceways when the moon pulled hard.

He checked his watch. "The tide's turning in twenty minutes."

"So we wait?" Someone behind him yelled. A boatman, his face streaked with oil and blood from a graze. "We sit here and get picked off?"

"No—we use it." Finn jabbed a finger at the chart. "Danny didn't draw the safe route for stealth. He drew it for speed. The alleys funnel the tide. When it turns, the water'll push through here like a sluice gate. We ride that current—fast, unpredictable. They'll lose us in the spray and the turns."

Anya gave him a hard look, then nodded. "Loud and stupid it is."

She gunned the engine. The skiff leapt forward, and the others followed, their boats suddenly alive in the narrow channel. The water began to move beneath them—slowly at first, then with a gathering urgency that vibrated through the hull. Finn felt the current take hold, the boat surging past the troops' positions before they could adjust their aim. Shots went wide, screaming off the warehouse walls, kicking up spouts of water in their wake.

They burst out of the alley network into a wider basin, the old floodgate looming ahead—a rusted iron leviathan, streaked with mineral stains, its massive gears frozen with age. But even as Finn's eyes found it, something else caught them: a series of small lights, winking along the gate's base.

Bombs. Already set.

"No," Finn breathed. "They're not waiting for us to breach it. They're breaching it themselves."

The shock troops hadn't been lying in wait for Finn's band—they'd been guarding the demolition crew. The ambush was just a delay tactic.

The first charge went off with a sound like the world cracking. The gate shuddered, groaned, then buckled inward. Water began to pour through the breach—not a trickle but a surge, a wall of white foam that swallowed the gate's lower third in seconds. The flood swept into the basin, lifting the boats, spinning them, scattering Finn's people like leaves in a gutter.

"Finn!" Anya's voice was raw. "They're draining it early. All of it. Right now."

Finn grabbed the gunwale as the skiff spun, fighting to see through the spray. The southern district—the low zone, his home—lay open below them. The water was pouring toward it, a brown avalanche chewing through the drowned streets, and the people there, the ones he'd told to climb to the upper floors, had nowhere near high enough to go.

"They're not waiting twelve hours," he said, the words barely audible over the roar. "They're doing it now. While we're here, watching."

He turned to the boats still afloat around him, boatmen fighting their rudders, scavengers clinging to cargo nets, faces turned toward him in the chaos. The gate was open. The plan was dead. And ahead, in the flood's path, thousands of his people were about to drown.

The water kept coming.