Sunny was quiet for a moment after he checked his status screen. Then he looked up and told them he had an Echo.
The conversation that followed had the quality of people receiving good news in a bad place — genuine, but contained, because the bad place was still there and hadn't changed its opinion about them. They talked through what the Echo could do and what that meant for the group going forward, and Nephis listened with the focused attention she gave to anything that affected their tactical situation, which was everything.
When they were done talking, Nephis helped Cassie climb onto the Echo's back, steadying her until she had her balance and something to hold onto. The creature accepted the weight with the patience of something that had been told to be patient and intended to honor that instruction.
They moved.
They had been walking for a while when Sunny stopped.
The first drops hit the ground around them — not rain exactly, not yet, but the advance notice of it, the way a sky that's about to do something serious announces itself before committing. Sunny felt it before he understood what he was feeling, and the feeling was enough. He grabbed Nephis by the arm and Quinn by the sleeve and pulled them forward without explaining why, and simultaneously told the Echo to move, and the Echo moved.
Cassie grabbed the Echo's back and held on. "What's happening?"
Nephis looked at her. Her voice came out heavier than usual, weighted with the specific gravity of understatement. "A storm is coming."
"Better outrun it," Quinn added, from slightly behind her, "or there'll be a four-dish buffet for the scavengers later."
Nobody argued about turning back. The path behind them had already become a different path from the one they'd walked that morning — the rain was rewriting the terrain as it fell, and the water was starting to move in ways that suggested the shore had opinions about where things should go. They pushed forward instead, toward the cliff face that rose from the shore ahead of them.
The storm had its own timeline and it was considerably more aggressive than anyone had planned for.
By the time they reached the base of the cliff, the rain was serious. Nephis went up first, Cassie on her back — her arms locked around Nephis's neck, her face pressed against the back of her shoulder, trusting entirely in a person she had known for less than a week to carry her up a wet rock face in a storm. Quinn thought, briefly, that this said something significant about either Cassie's trust or her available options.
He started climbing.
The rock was slick in the way that rock gets slick when water has been working on it — not immediately dangerous, but the kind of dangerous that accumulated, where each handhold required more attention than the last and the margin for error kept quietly shrinking. Stones came loose above them as the rain undermined their purchase, and Quinn had to read the sound of each one and decide in the half-second available whether to move or absorb. Twice he let rocks pass through him, the ability burning a thin thread of spiritual energy each time, careful not to use more than the situation strictly required.
Sunny had no such option for the third one.
Quinn heard the scrape of the stone dislodging above and the sharp exhale as Sunny twisted to avoid it, the sound of a hand losing its grip, and then — a beat that stretched — the sound of a hand finding something else to hold.
He looked down.
Sunny was still on the cliff. Barely.
Below them both, the black water was rising.
It came up the rock face with the patient indifference of water that had somewhere to be and intended to get there regardless of what was currently in the way. Quinn climbed. Sunny climbed. The water climbed alongside them, and it was not in a hurry because it didn't need to be — it was winning by simply continuing.
Sunny was close to the top when the water reached his shoulders.
Quinn had pulled himself over the edge and was on his knees on the cliff top, his hands bleeding from the rock, his lungs doing the bare minimum required to keep functioning. He looked down.
The water was at Sunny's jaw. Then his nose. Then the current took him and his hands slipped and for a moment there was just the black water and the rain and the sound of the storm doing what storms do.
The golden rope went over the edge.
Quinn didn't think about it — he was already moving, grabbing the rope, pulling. Nephis was pulling beside him. The weight on the other end was real and then it was lighter and then Sunny's hands appeared at the edge and Quinn let go of the rope and grabbed him instead, one hand around his wrist, the axe already out with the other hand, cutting through the ropes of seaweed that had wrapped themselves around Sunny's arms and shoulders in the water, each strand giving way with a wet snap.
Sunny came over the edge and lay down on the rock and stayed there.
Quinn sat back against a stone and breathed.
Nephis was on her back a few feet away, her chest moving with the specific rhythm of someone who has used everything they had and is now waiting for it to come back. Cassie sat near the cliff edge with her knees pulled up, Sunny Echo settled beside her, both of them still in the way that things are still after something has passed.
Quinn looked at all of them. Then he looked at the black water below, the surface broken by the rain, churning and dark and full of things that didn't need to surface to be present.
Something felt wrong. Not the storm — the storm was over, or at least over for them. Something underneath it. Something in the water or near it or connected to it in a way he couldn't place yet.
He looked up at the sky instead. The grey was still there, doing what it always did. He was alive. They were all alive. He was still breathing, which was more than the black water had wanted for him five minutes ago.
But alive.
For now, that was enough.