novelraw Chapter 113: The Drowned City
Chapter 113: The Drowned City
They climbed up the stairs without breaking rhythm, the boots setting a clean, unhurried cadence against the wet concrete.
The roar from below was a constant living, breathing thing now. It was becoming more muted with every step they took up, but the water continued to chase them, nipping at their heels. On the twentieth-floor landing, Sera raised a hand and the line stopped as one.
Not to catch their breath, but rather to see what was going on outside of the building.
Zubair stepped past her to the corridor door and tested the push bar with two fingers. It gave half an inch and stuck...swollen from the building’s flex or the damp that had pressed its way into everything.
He leaned, then eased off; there was no point in forcing it into a racket. He looked to her.
Sera nodded once. "Window."
They followed her into the dim hallway, their footfalls absorbed by soaked carpets and peeled wallpaper.
Emergency lights burned in small red rectangles, throwing blood-warm pools along the walls. At the far end, a narrow pane of glass awaited them. Cracks feathered from one corner, thin white veins across a black face.
Sera set her palm flat to the glass and peered out.
City H was gone.
Water covered the waterfront in a slab of moving darkness, reflecting the shattered lights of the skyline like oil. The casino-hotel-mall complex—what it had been, what it wasn’t anymore—sat on the edge of a new coastline the ocean was still drawing pushing forward.
The harbour had become a throat, and the city the soft body caught between teeth. A bus rolled in a slow, end-over-end tumble far below, its windows strobing white with each churn. Cars drifted in loose herds, bumping and separating, some slipping clean between buildings before vanishing under the next pulse.
A skybridge two blocks over tore free of one anchor, swung like a hinge, and smashed its glass in a single glittering exhale. A tide of mannequins and racks and plastic bins fountained into the street and then were gone.
"Look at the current," Elias said, voice low, more observation than shock. "It’s drawing back between surges. That’s not residual flood. That’s wave action."
Lachlan leaned against the jamb and whistled without humor. "Ocean’s making lanes where the streets used to be."
Zubair didn’t speak. He watched the black water as if reading orders hidden in the chop.
Sera tracked the harbour’s mouth, the long line where the next brightness swelled and darkened. The glass pressed cool against her skin. For a second the pane felt thinner than it was.
"We need to keep moving higher," she announced at last.
They turned back into the stairwell. The door shut on its hinges with a tired click, and the building’s inner bones took the sound of them again—measured, exact.
The twentieth floor dropped away beneath their boots. The wet had climbed with them and now receded, leaving rings of damp like tide marks along the landings. Every ten flights, the shaft’s temperature changed—a pocket of cold air, then a pocket that held the warmth of the Chinook against the concrete, then cold again. The lights hummed and flickered and held.
At the twenty-fourth floor, another door gave more easily.
Zubair cracked it a hand’s width. The corridor beyond opened toward the mall wing. A skybridge met the tower at an angle, its glass honeycombed with fractures, a long bead of water trembling along the inner seam before letting go and ticking against the floor.
"Compromised," Zubair said.
"Even if it wasn’t, we aren’t crossing," Sera replied, already moving to the nearest slit of view.
Down the line of buildings, a stack of shipping containers shouldered free from a pier and drifted as a single unit, then rotated. One container broke away, struck a lamppost, and peeled like a tin can.
White boxes burst out and scattered, the tops printing a brief alphabet across the black before flipping and sinking. Farther inland, a street seemed to rise—then she realized an entire storefront was tearing loose and riding the pull.
Alexei’s reflection looked wrong in the glass—stretched, rippling. "You ever going to admit you enjoy this?" he asked, half-grin in place, eyes alert.
"I enjoy surviving," she said. "I don’t enjoy this."
A dull boom rolled up the tower, not sharp enough to be an explosion—deeper, wetter. It moved through the structure like a hand pushed up a back, each vertebra answering. Dust sifted from a light fixture and drifted in the stairwell air.
Elias tilted his head, listening with his whole face. "The foundation took a hit, but it shouldn’t have caused a failure."
"Then we don’t give it time to become one," Sera said. "Higher."
They climbed.
The twenty-seventh landing opened on another narrow window. The water below had changed shape again. Where it had been a sheet, it was now a muscle flexing and releasing, drawing away from the buildings in a long inhale that left asphalt slick and glistening, then returning heavier, angrier. Street signs bent with it, pointing all the wrong ways.
A siren wailed somewhere under the flood, its sound thin and frantic before getting cut off. The sound’s absence made the city feel bigger.
"Province F and Island P will take the worst of the energy," Elias said without being asked, more to the math than to anyone. "But we’re in the field."
Sera didn’t answer. That had already been factored in.
At the thirtieth floor, the corridor window was a full pane from waist to ceiling.
The view took them all at once: the harbour mouth pulsing, the bulk of a cruise ship moored too long at the far terminal groaning against its moorings until the ropes snapped in white frays. The ship pivoted slow and stupid, a building deciding to be a boat, then caught the backwash and kissed the quay with a sound she felt in her teeth. Water climbed its lower decks like hands.
"People," Lachlan said—not pointing, not loud. On a rooftop three blocks over, figures had clustered near a vent stack, tiny against the scale. One raised both arms and waved hard, looking for someone to rescue them.
"They won’t see us," Zubair said. Not to be cruel, but it was the truth.
Sera watched long enough to know the roof’s height bought them minutes, not hours. The next set of lights in the harbour lifted and darkened. She set her palm to the glass again and took it away.
"Forty-two," she reminded everyone.
And they moved.