Chapter 230: A Place of Return
I jog a few short steps to catch up to Oliver while the memory finishes clicking into place in my head.
His silhouette walking ahead, hammer balanced on his shoulder like a broom that weighs too much, drags back a memory I didn’t even know I’d kept whole.
It wasn’t the Oliver of this timeline. Not exactly. The posture was different, the profession was different, even the energy around him seemed to have been pulled down a different road.
Still, some things stayed the same from one world to the next: the stubborn kindness, the practical intelligence, and that laugh too big to fit in small places.
Oliver Kaminski.
Lifeguard of the WaterMarks’ first patrol.
Of course I wouldn’t have recognized him right away.
In the other timeline, he wasn’t a WaterStrand farmer lost in an abandoned subway, nor a man hauling Motorhead around as if life were a sequence of problems that could be solved with strength, patience, and a nagging wife.
He belonged to a brief memory, nearly swallowed by the years, and I’d already survived too much to expect every face from the past to stay clean inside my head.
But now, watching him walk like that, light, hopeful, with no idea the future had once torn everything away from him, the memory comes back with a cruel clarity.
The problem is that it also raises a question too wrong to ignore. If I hadn’t altered anything about his past before meeting him, why was Oliver already so different? Did he live the same life in the first timeline?
I doubt it.
The Oliver who marched into the trenches wouldn’t have spent years trapped in that abandoned subway alongside Danton, Brendon, and the others. Something had changed before I arrived, or something about him was always deeper than the surface let on.
Those answers might only come if I used Memory of Lightwaves on him once we were back on Earth. Even the idea feels invasive enough to set aside, though not to discard.
In the first timeline, right after the tide collapse, my first incursion into the abyss trenches was less a decision and more a summons that reeked of patriotic blackmail.
I was still weak, scared, and a long way from the man I am now. I remember my hands shaking after accepting an almost forced enlistment, badly paid, announced as if all of humanity hinged on the courage of people who’d barely learned to survive in "everyday" Thirstfall.
And then Oliver Kaminski climbed onto a crate in front of fifty Divers, laughed as if we were about to unload sandbags instead of entering the Abyss Trench, and spoke.
It wasn’t a beautiful speech. Not in any literary sense. But it worked. He made terrified men and women straighten their backs, adjust their weapons, check their masks, and walk toward the trench mouth as if death had made the administrative error of booking an appointment with the wrong person.
That patrol claimed the first sector quadrant of the Ursa Major constellation. Humanity’s first real reclamation in that great battle.
But... Oliver never came back from it.
"Oliver Kaminski!"
He glances sideways, right eyebrow raised, visibly suspicious. As far as he knows, I’ve never called him by his surname. Maybe he doesn’t even remember not telling me, or maybe he’s decided this is just one more of my tricks that healthy people should know better than to poke.
"Put that hammer away," I say, pointing at Motorhead. "You’re inside the city, looking like a caveman with a club."
Oliver looks at the weapon on his own shoulder, as if only now remembering he’s carrying a block of metal big enough to frighten honest merchants, and laughs as he returns it to his inventory.
"Force of habit, boss."
"That habit’s going to get some guard charging us a tax for visual intimidation."
"If a tax like that exists here, I figure you’d find it before I would."
Unfortunately, he’s probably right.
We head toward the center of the city, and as we walk, I circle back to the real reason I need him so much.
I knew how to fight, how to read people under pressure, how to break a battle’s rhythm and survive where better men died.
But the administration of Thirstfall was a different monster entirely.
I was never an executive, an accountant, a personnel manager, or any respectable variation of responsible adult. In my past life, I worked alone for too long. What I gathered was mine. What I sold, I sold without going through institutions whenever I could. Loot, titling, labor contracts, material processing, origin certification... all of it was a bureaucratic swamp I always skirted with the elegance of a rat avoiding light.
Oliver, on the other hand, had been a WaterStrand farmer in this timeline. He knew the machinery of the market from the inside. Farmers went into dungeons, mining zones, dangerous routes, and exploration areas; afterward, everything that came back had to be sorted, registered, processed, and converted into something a city would buy without pretending to be disgusted.
"What do we do now?" I ask.
"Contractor Central," he answers without hesitating. "If we want people for the warehouse, that’s where we start."
"No Divers."
"Don’t worry. No Divers." Oliver looks at me out of the corner of his eye. "Drowneds are more reliable for keeping secrets down here. I know that much."
The walk takes about fifteen minutes.
Contractor Central sits in a building that looks like it was built by humans trying to reproduce the worst part of Earth in a world that already had problems enough.
Pale stone, high windows, lines split by ribbons, numbered counters, forms hanging off clipboards, and a big board listing fees, categories, and penalties with an almost nostalgic coldness. There were guards, clerks, résumé assessors, and an entire room dedicated to labor disputes, because apparently humanity crossed dimensions and decided to bring along its need for stamps and trouble.
Even so, there’s something almost dignified about the place. Most of Thirstfall’s great structures seem to serve guilds, kings, commerce, or war. This one exists because, despite all the rivalry between Divers and Drowneds, someone at some point remembered that those souls had still come from Earth.
People who died of Black Thirst, woke up on the other side with no body to return to, and had to keep existing in a world that never promised anyone a place.
We fill out papers long enough for my patience to age three years. Then we go through a thick stack of résumés at a side table, Oliver flagging useful profiles while I cut anything that smells like too much curiosity, too much ambition, or too much connection to the wrong guilds.
We need twenty workers. Not heroes, not adventurers, not opportunists in worker’s clothing. Discreet people, able to learn a process, keep their mouths shut, and understand that fair pay comes with strict rules.
"Pure Drowneds only, boss?" Oliver asks, checking a card.
"Exactly."
There were two main ways to become a Drowned: die of Black Thirst and arrive directly in Thirstfall, or lose your body on Earth while your mind was already here as a Diver. The second option could carry too many vices, contacts, and contaminations from the local system.
I wanted the first. Recent souls, with no deep ties to guilds, no years of dirty survival teaching them the wrong shortcuts.
By the time we finish, night is already taking the streets. Oliver looks tired, but his goodwill stays intact, which is a kind of endurance rarer than most combat skill.
"Go rest," I say. "Tomorrow the factory starts turning into a real problem."
"Finally. I was starting to worry it’d stay a theoretical one."
We part with a simple wave, and I watch Oliver vanish among the city lights before touching the general communicator.
"Veric, Rhayne. You two all right?"
A long yawn comes first.
"Yeah," Veric answers. "All quiet on our end. Thanks for the deep concern, delivered in the tone of an audit."
Good. Oliver isn’t with me, Veric and Rhayne are safe, and for a few minutes maybe Chaos Theory won’t find anyone obvious to bite.
Before I rest, though, there’s still one thing I need to do.
