THE SURGE

The city had already stopped being afraid — which was exactly when it should have started again.

In the days that followed, the city returned to its familiar rhythms. Stalls reopened, patrols relaxed, and the hunt had already started to sound less like danger and more like legend.

The rain began without thunder — thin and steady at first, softening the dust, dimming the lantern light. People moved through it with mild annoyance, cloaks drawn tighter, merchants covering their goods with canvas. By nightfall the streets were glossy black under the lamps. By midnight, it hadn't stopped.

Sals slept the way he always did — light enough to stay half-aware, not so light it counted as no rest at all. Dreams drifted through and dissolved before they gathered into anything.

Then something changed. A vibration moved through the floorboards, subtle and wrong, low enough to feel through the soles of his feet before it ever registered as sound — as if the ground itself had taken an uneasy breath.

"Sals — Sals!"

Luis's voice hit the door like something solid. Sals was upright before the second call finished, instinct ahead of thought. Bare feet found cold wood already trembling underneath him. Three strides and he had the door open.

Chaos met him on the other side. The rain wasn't falling anymore, it was attacking — driven sideways by gusts that howled through the streets like something alive. Water ran downhill in violent sheets, turning alleys into rivers full of debris and torn roofing.

But it was the horizon that stopped him cold. The sea was wrong — not rough, lifted, the whole surface drawn upward into a dark wall advancing at a speed that shouldn't have been possible. No crest. No break. Just mass, swallowing the harbor lanterns one by one.

"We need to move!" Luis was already shouting. "Higher ground, now!"

Sals didn't answer right away. He was watching the dark come in, doing math on how much time they actually had, not how far away it looked.

Then he moved.

They hit the street with water already past their knees and climbing. Neighbors fought in doorways, hauling bundles, dragging children, shouting names into the wind. A cart went over nearby, its contents spinning off like discarded toys.

"The mountain!" Sals shouted. "Leave everything — uphill, now!"

Some people obeyed instantly. Others hesitated, caught between staying alive and everything they'd spent a lifetime accumulating.

Near the upper stables, Sals and Luis's team cut the panicked horses loose and drove them uphill alongside the fleeing crowd. Stanley pushed through the flood beside them, sure-footed, herding the smaller animals forward instead of trampling past them.

The surge hit without warning — not a wave breaking, an impact, a wall of force that punched into the city like a building collapsing sideways. Structures shuddered as the water tore doors off hinges, lifted wagons whole, ripped masonry loose like it was clay.

Sals and Luis went sideways into the torrent, slammed against stone hard enough to knock the air out of both of them. The current took hold and dragged them through a churn of splinters and shattered tile and pieces of other people's lives.

Sals caught a beam and hauled himself up, chest-deep, water racing past him. Luis surfaced a few feet away, coughing, eyes wide but tracking.

"This way!" Sals pointed at a narrow rise where the ground climbed sharp between two buildings, and they fought toward it step by step, angled against the current, grabbing anything solid enough to buy them another pace forward.

A scream cut through the storm — close, not distant. Sals turned.

An elderly couple were trapped behind the iron gate of a stone mansion, water already at their chests. The gate had jammed inward under the pressure, wedging them between the bars and the rising flood. Behind them, in the courtyard, chests and ledgers floated like something out of a nightmare version of their own home.

"Help us!" the old man shouted. "My records — everything's in there!"

Sals forced his way toward them, Luis covering his back as debris slammed past. He gripped the bars and pulled. The metal shuddered. It didn't move.

"Leave it! Come through, now!"

But the man twisted back toward a drifting chest instead. "My life's work! It can't be lost!"

His wife went after the papers dissolving beside him.

"Your life isn't in that room!" Sals roared over the water. "It's in your breath!"

Another impact hit the building — the low groan of a foundation giving out.

"Now!" Luis shouted.