For a long moment, he’s quiet.
“Well,” he says, “we won’t be separated again.”
He sits down, his back against a wall of hedges. He rubs at the blood on his fingers, then sighs.
“This city was too good to be true,” he says. “I should have known.”
I sit down next to him, closer than I normally do. I’m cold and wet and I’m craving the warmth of another person at my side. He idly rests his knee against mine.
If we were still in Occhia, and we were married, we would be doing whatever we wanted right now. We would be throwing a party, or holding meetings, or just sitting together in the parlor we owned. That was the way things were supposed to be. Things will be that way again, once I fix my city.
“I took something from him.”
Ale says it so quietly that for a moment, I think I imagined it. I give him a sideways look and find that he’s hunched and shamefaced.
“What did you just say?” I say.
“The brother,” he says. “When he was showing me his study—he had all these diagrams of the fountains on the wall. There was a lot of math. I didn’t understand any of it. But I noticed that there was a piece of paper on his desk that he had folded and slipped under some books, like it was a secret. The books were very boring, by the way. They were also about math. I was so disappointed. I was thinking about how this city must have so much beautiful art and so many novels that I’ve never read. Isn’t it amazing that they’ve been over here for a thousand years, making their own—”
“What’s your point, Ale?” I say.
“Oh,” he says. “I, um, I waited until he turned his back and I took the secret paper.”
“You stabbed him and stole his private documents?” I say. “What has this city done to my wholesome Alessandro?”
He squirms. “I’m not proud of it. It was terrible of me. But maybe it will have something useful. I hope it didn’t get too wet…”
He reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out the paper, unfolding it on the grass between us. I shift to get a better look. For a long moment, we’re both still, trying to figure out what we’re seeing.
It’s a drawing in red ink. There are eight circles arranged in a ring, just barely touching. In the middle of each circle is a tiny drawing of a familiar building. A cathedral. Surrounding the cathedrals are webs of painstakingly rendered streets.
One of the circles catches my eye. It’s labeled with the word Occhia.
I touch it, delicately. The drawing looks like it’s supposed to be a map, but I don’t recognize the path of the streets. I can’t find my family’s house. But after a moment of searching, I realize that maybe it’s not a map of the city above. Maybe it’s a map of the city below.
My eyes drift to one of the neighboring circles. It’s labeled as Iris. The others are labeled, too, with names I’ve never seen before.
“Ale,” I say.
“There’s—” he says.
“There’s more,” I say.
There are other cities. Six other cities.
“We’re all connected by the catacombs,” I say. “Everything around us—that’s the veil. But inside it, we’re connected. That’s how we got here.”
I trace the path between Occhia and Iris.
“Does no one know about this?” Ale’s voice is hushed. “Do the other watercreas know?”
There’s a tiny dot behind the cathedral—a tower—in every city. Except Iris.
There are six other cities. I can’t quite wrap my head around what it means. I can’t quite comprehend the fact that for my entire life, I thought Occhia was all alone, a tiny bubble inside the veil, and I was so wrong.
There are six other cities, and no one in them knows my name. No one in them knows what I have to offer. But they could.
“What do you think these marks mean?” Ale touches the outside of one of the circles.
Somebody—Theo, I would assume—has been making small tick marks next to each city. Again, Iris is the only exception. I consider.
“The water,” I guess. “He marks it off every time they steal. And they go in a circle. So each city takes a turn, and each city has time to recover.”
“They have so much water here,” Ale says. “They’re taking more than they need. Why?”
“Because they can,” I say.
“Don’t they ever think about what it does to us?” he says.
“Obviously not,” I say.
This is the reason why Occhia’s underground well is empty. Verene and Theo must have stolen the last of our water right before our watercrea disappeared. She didn’t have time to replace it. My people are panicking and rioting and afraid so that the people here can splash around in happiness and comfort.
“The rulers of these other cities…” Ale says. “The other… watercreas. They must notice when their water gets stolen. Why haven’t they stopped it?”
“They must not know how,” I say.
“Maybe they’ve tried, but they can’t,” Ale says. “If Verene and Theo were born with this, like their mamma was born with her magic…”
A cold dread is creeping down my spine. There are six other rulers out there who have a thousand years’ worth of power and knowledge. If they knew how to get their water back, they would have done it already.
I know how to fight against people. I know how to look for weaknesses in humans. But that thing we saw in the catacombs wasn’t human. It wasn’t like anything I’ve ever seen before.
“But we have to figure out a way,” Ale says.
“What?” I say.
“We have to figure out a way to stop them,” he says. “To stop that thing. If we stop it, then we can use the catacombs to get home. And we’ll have helped the other six cities. They’ll be free again. So maybe, in return, we could ask them each to give us a little bit of their water…”
And Occhia will be saved.
And Verene will
