# The Upward Waterfall

The water rises. This is the first thing you notice, and you cannot stop noticing it.

A waterfall should fall. The word contains its function -- fall, descend, the submission of water to gravity, the oldest agreement between element and force. But the Flow Gate's water has broken that agreement, or perhaps never made it, and the result is a thirty-foot sheet of blue-silver light ascending from a pool in the chamber's floor toward a darkness above that the light does not reach.

The sound is not the sound of water. It is deeper. A hum that you feel in your sternum before your ears register it, a frequency that lives in the space between hearing and knowing -- the vibration that bones perceive when the body is asked to pay attention to something larger than the body.

Ren stands at the pool's edge with his sketchbook open, and the watercolor has already started. He did not begin drawing. The pencil touched the page and the page responded, and now colors bloom on the paper in shades of blue and silver that his kit does not contain and never has. He holds the sketchbook at arm's length, studying the marks the way a cartographer studies a coastline he did not map.

"There are colors in the water that shouldn't exist," he says. His voice is quiet, the particular quietness of someone stating a fact so strange that volume would make it sound like fiction. "The blue at the base is cobalt, but the blue at the apex is -- I don't have a name for it. It's further than violet on the spectrum. My eye shouldn't be able to perceive it."

His pencil moves again, involuntary, tracing the impossible blue on his page. The watercolor appears in real-time, wet and luminous, and the color on the paper matches the color in the water, which means that Ren's art is seeing something his eyes cannot.

"But my hand can draw it," he says. And the wonder in his voice is a crack in the wall of control that his art has always been.

Solenne stands three steps behind Ren, and her bare feet are on the stone, and she is not floating. This is new. She has been floating -- an inch, a breath, the smallest distance -- since the Foundation Gate refused her. But the water's resonance has settled something in the architecture of her body, the way a tuning fork settles into silence after it has found its note, and for the first time since the crew assembled, gravity and Solenne are cooperating.

"The water is calling," she says. The harmonics are in her voice -- she cannot help them here, in this chamber, in this element's domain. The overtones carry the pitch of the ascending waterfall, and her butterfly-wing patterns are cycling in configurations she has never produced before: blue and silver, water-patterns, tidal and fluid. "Not calling us to it. Calling something out of us. Something that wants to rise."

Her galactic eyes are fixed on the waterfall's surface, and in both irises, the galaxies have changed. They are not showing stars. They are showing water -- the deep, luminous water of the Deepcurrent, reflected in the cosmic mirrors that her mother's blood gave her. Solenne is seeing the waterfall from the inside, seeing its structure the way she sees the Starweave's threads, and what she sees is making her stand very still.

"There are voices in the flow," she whispers. "Everyone who has ever stood here. Every person who asked the water to carry them. They are all still in the current. The water never let them go."

On Axiom's shoulder, Jinx uncurls.

The fragment-creature's scales have shifted to full iridescence -- every color at once, cycling through the spectrum in time with the waterfall's hum. The two normal eyes are fixed on the ascending water with the sharp, acquisitive gaze of a predator tracking movement. But the third eye -- the flickering one, the fragment of Yumiko's vast perception -- is pointed downward.

At the pool.

Jinx extends one claw -- small, translucent, sharp as glass -- and dips it into the water.

The contact lasts half a second. The claw breaks the surface and the third eye blazes, steady for the first time since the chamber, and in that half-second of contact, Jinx sees everything the river holds: every layer, every memory, every crew that has ever stood in this chamber and heard the water ask its question. The vision cascades through the three-eyed perception in a torrent of image and feeling, compressed into the space between one heartbeat and the next.

Jinx pulls the claw back. Coils tight on Axiom's shoulder. All three eyes blink in rapid, arrhythmic sequence -- the processing state, the overwhelm, the too-much-data flicker that means the fragment of divine perception has encountered something larger than the fragment can hold.

Then, slowly, the third eye steadies. And Jinx sends a single image to Ren and Solenne -- not the full cascade, not the overwhelming torrent. A single frame, selected with the editorial precision that is Jinx's particular gift: choosing, from infinite information, the one image that matters most.

The image is the ascending waterfall, seen from below. The water rising. And within the water, faintly visible, like figures seen through frosted glass: shapes. People. Past and present, layered and transparent, all of them ascending with the current.

They are not drowning. They are not trapped.

They are being carried.

The image fades. Jinx's eyes dim. The fragment-creature presses closer to Axiom's warm stone and makes a sound -- small, percussive, somewhere between a chirp and a click -- that carries, in its particular register, the weight of a revelation that words cannot hold.

The waterfall rises. The hum continues. The chamber waits.

And the water asks, in no voice and every voice, the question that will be different for each of them and the same for all:

*Can you let yourself be carried?*