Part Three - Robin

i am. I think, therefore iamb.

Robin crouched under the shaking kitchen table and tried to remember what you were supposed to do in earthquakes. Her flatmate, Gretchen, skidded across the floor, lost her footing and thudded into the table leg. “What the fuck?” she said, or something like it. Robin shook her head in bewilderment – the TV was babbling random stuff at them, before degenerating into static. It blinked off once, twice, taking the lights away with it.

Robin grabbed Gretchen’s hand and hung on to the table in the dark. Then they were falling, in the dark, in a yawning void of downness.

Then they were still, and alone in the dark. At last, Robin ventured: “I think we should get out of here.” The way to the front door was blocked with a knocked over stove and crumpled kitchen shelving, so they ended up crawling out from under their table to the living room and onto to its little balcony. “What’s water doing on The Terrace?” Robin asked, for it was, lapping up the sloping street like a greedy cat – not, Robin realised, as a welling tide, but viscous fluid creeping up the street. Down the hill she could see people wading knee deep in the water, when by all rights it should have been over their heads.

“That’s seriously creepy,” Gretchen said.

“Yep.”

Night was folding over them softly. For a little while, everything was very still, the flickering street lights reflecting on the water, the shadows of the people wading in it blotting out the hesitant pools of light. Robin pulled her hand away from the balcony rail for a moment. When she placed her hand there again she could feel the vibration more clearly, the subtle repetitive thumping she was more used to feeling when the neighbours downstairs had the bass turned up. She looked back and up at their apartment building; it was twisted up and crumpled in on itself – their fifth floor balcony was overhanging the street only a few metres above the ground.

“I’m not staying here for another earthquake,” she told Gretchen, and began climbing out over the balcony, a comic figure in her pyjamas and fluffy bunny slippers. She was just looking up to see if her flatmate was following her when the building finished its lean into infinity and splashed down in the water.

.

i am.

The water was so very warm. A lavender scented bath, just barely above blood temperature; a baby floating in amniotic fluid; the yolk of a just laid egg... She opened her eyes beneath the salt sea and looked upwards at the shimmering interface between water and air. She thought about mermaids, about drowned girls in the lake, their hair floating outwards in soft tendrils, about being born. She didn’t want to leave the softness for the harsh bite of winter air in tender lungs, the shiver of south-laden wind ... much better to stay down here with the creeping tentacles of the Other. Around her, she could see others like her floating in the salt sea, pulled by the tide upwards into the world, saw them reach the shallows and stagger into a semblance of personhood. She fought against it, turned in the water, curled up into the corner of two fallen buildings until the pull of the tide receded and she could follow it down into the harbour.

The light was dim, but just enough for her to pass the old familiar buildings, the new familiar creatures that shared the warmth with her. Others had fought against the tide as well, and like minnows they dashed around the monuments of drowned Wellington. In the depths of the harbour they found The One, The Source, The Creator and she embraced it singing.

It was a time after that when she had to leave the water. Something sharp and heavy collided into her back and dragged her up screaming into the bitter air. She twisted and clawed at the thing eating into her side and then she was falling again, not to land in sweet water but a thing that was solid and hard and hurtful.

She ... it ... Robin scrambled to get upright on the solid crookedness of concrete. Making her arms and legs move properly seemed the hardest thing in the world and it was a long time before she could unpanic enough to look up. She was somewhere out in the middle of the harbour, on Carter Fountain maybe? and the world seemed to be coming to an end around her.

There was an enormous thing in the water, growing tentacles upward and spreading them over the city. There was a great pulsing sky that was lowering down to the water dropping ribbons of acid green and jerking them upwards with a vicious yank. Robin saw a person hooked by one of the ribbons fly up into the sky and disappear into the aether, and she curled into a ball and hid under the rim of the fountain to hide from the rest of them.

She wondered if the earth and the sky were coming together again, Rangi and Papa clutching for each other’s arms, heedless of whoever was caught in between them. She wondered if the kraken was waking from the deeps; or visitors from the outer darkness had come.

Robin hugged the comforting bulk of manmade concrete and steel. She was so very thirsty.