First Time

Prologue - INGRESSION

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Prologue: First Time

Paysha

My first time with Tom is abysmal. He’s patient, but I’m a poor student. The mask restricts my vision. I struggle to breathe, unused to the rubber filling my mouth. Hand signals aren’t enough. I go down too deep, too fast; impatient to learn. But he persists, controlling my fear, nurturing seeds of confidence.

His torch lights up a submerged street, a bright spotlight on a dark stage. It’s my first glimpse of our City since the sea’s night-time rampage almost three years ago. Fish dart between redundant lampposts and seaweed-draped signs. I follow Tom along a familiar street, the broken windows accusing our still breathing bodies. A pub sign poking from an overturned car triggers teenage memories: the illicit thrill of temporary independence, of snug safe places, of a life that heard laughter.

A child looms out of the darkness, its half-eaten body suspended in an open doorway. Tom had warned me about the hidden aftermath of the Flood. He signals for me to control my breathing as a writhing eel emerges from the fish-flayed skull. Instead, my mind fuses vivid imaginings with nocturnal terrors to overwhelm all rational thought. I try to scream, expelled air erupting around me as I twist to escape my ghouls. Weightlessness is now a burden and my finned feet lack any purchase to flee. So I panic.

Never do that down here if you want to stay alive – and I’m desperate to, despite my body’s intransigence. It’s been almost a decade since I was told of my inexorable fate. This isn’t how indifferent doctors had said I would die. This is too quick, too painless. My aberrant genes won’t be so compassionate or benign.

Strong hands grasp my arms and our masks align. Tom’s wide eyes bore into mine, urging me to stop struggling. Yes, I remember. We can’t go up, not yet. Look at my buddy and forget the child. Forget the cascading, deadly waves. Look through them and bury the past. Look up instead, at the bright sunlight glinting on the waters of another uncertain day. Look at Tom. Breathe…calmly. Again. Good. Rise…slowly. You’ve got this, Paysha.

Except I haven’t. I rip off my mask as soon as we reach sparkling daylight, desperate to breathe proper air. Tom hauls me, spluttering in protest, into his hover.

This first dive has only replenished my survivor’s guilt and re-opened the wounds of a personal and collective catastrophe. I huddle in the craft’s hard shell, a shaking ball of futility, spilling tears of self-pity. My knight in neoprene uses the opportunity to comfort me with less than words, removing my helmet to stroke my hair and brush away my tears. He yearns for someone to reciprocate; to embrace him with the same affection. Someone who can never be me.

When the tidal wave of seawater inundated our City, most of its citizens drowned in the false safety of their beds. Many of the survivors, huddled sodden and cold on rooftops and in cliff crevices, gave up hope. Minds numb with the absence of all they knew, they waded with empty gazes into the salty morass, to be reunited with lost family and friends.

Tom and I were amongst those who didn’t give up the fight for life. It meant either scavenging from whatever the tide washed up amongst countless bloated bodies, or diving into the remains of our decomposing City. We’ve chosen the latter, becoming bubble-blowing rats pillaging a gloomy graveyard for whatever we can eat, reuse or barter.

For most, it’s enough to remain alive. But not me. My body’s life-spring isn’t wound as tight. Less than two years remain of the twenty-five my ticking genome had granted me from conception. My body will soon disintegrate in a pointless war with itself. Slowly at first, my father had said. Then more painfully.

Despite what’s happened to me, I refuse to accept a fate dictated by parental chance. I don’t want to die here, teetering on a decaying margin of pitiable humanity.

I don’t want to die at all.

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