The warrant describes me thus: Sea-Overturning Yaksha. Former shift-leader, Seventh Shift, sea-patrol corps. Mutinied by night, abandoned the sealed order, deserted the corps. Kill on sight.
Every word accurate. One passage missing. The missing passage would burn a hole through the whole warrant.
In my years as shift-leader I was the most regulation-bound soldier in the corps. Seal unbroken, heads uncounted, nothing carried beyond the corps — I could recite the three articles better than anyone, and I kept them harder than anyone. The young ones called me Iron-Face behind my back, and I confess it pleased me. Rules are a dike, I truly believed: every degree the dike holds harder, the people under the water live a degree longer.
Then came the year the lots were drawn, and the Seventh Shift drew gate-bottom rotation.
The old shift-leaders' warnings washed past me: that gate-bottom duty is a companionship posting, that those who go down come back changed. I put no stock in spook-talk. Orders are orders; into fire or flood you go.
What the gate-foot is like, I may tell you only the part regulation permits: black. Cold. Chains winding from overhead down into a depth no eye can find. Our duty was to patrol along the chains — twelve to a shift, one circuit per incense-stick, no stopping, and no looking at where the chains end.
Yes. Article three. In force only at the gate-foot, transmitted only by mouth: do not look at the end.
Eighty-one days I patrolled, and kept the article, and did not look.
On the eighty-second day, the youngest of my shift — a milk-toothed recruit — stopped dead at mid-circuit. I watched him tilt his head back, follow the chains with his eyes, toward the direction that is not to be looked at. And look.
What happened next I will remember for the rest of my life.
There was no sound. No light. Nothing happened at all. The boy simply stood and looked for a full incense-stick. Then he turned, resumed his circuit, not a step out of place. I let out my breath and resolved to discipline him back at barracks.
At shift-change I counted heads: twelve. Not one missing. I read the muster roll; at his name, he answered. The voice was right. The face was right.
But after he answered, he smiled at me.
I trained that boy three years. He was terrified of me. He never once dared smile at me.
It was not him. The skin was his, the bones were his, the voice that answered the roll was his. But the thing inside the skin was whatever had looked back from the end of the chains.
I reported it through channels, by regulation. The reply from above was four words: As normal. No discussion.
As normal. No discussion. I stared at those four words through one entire night, and understood one thing: they know. They have always known. The names wiped from the muster rolls are not the dead — they are the replaced, and the replaced remain in the corps, standing at your shoulder, patrolling beside you, eating from the same pot. And the Water Court's remedy is not to stop it. It is to look away.
The dike was hollow. The dike I had believed in all my life was hollow at the core.
That same night I mutinied, taking with me the seven brothers who were still themselves. We broke two shifts that barred the way, cut out through the flood-sluice, and ran south. The pursuit lasted three months. I scattered my brothers into the fishing villages along the coast — new names now, mending nets by day, and by night keeping watch over the sea for the fisherfolk.
I stayed out in the storm-belt off Seagaze Station. The warrant calls me Sea-Overturning, says my anger can flip an ocean. Let them write. Every wave I have raised was aimed at one thing: a ship in whose crew that kind of thing was hiding — overturned. An official transport ferrying fresh recruits down to the gate-bottom — overturned.
Children from the shore: you mean to open the gate. I will not stop you — what lies at the gate-foot should have seen daylight long ago.
I have only one sentence for you, bought with this deserter's name of mine. Fix it in your bones:
when the gate opens, if anything urges you to "just glance at the end of the chains, one glance" —
however much the voice sounds like someone you love —
do not look.