When I skid into the lab, panting and grabbing the handle of the door to stop myself from falling, Tara and Haru are already glued to the window.
“That’s a mountain!” I say, rather unnecessarily. “Tara, there’s a mountain in front of us!”
“The tides must have shifted more than we predicted with the shift of the moon’s orbit,” Tara muses. “I knew the wobble would affect the levels of the ocean, but this-”
“It pushed us upriver, didn’t it?” Haru asks, his eyes wide with wonder. “We’re actually inland now.”
“What does that mean for us, Tara?” I ask, leaning on the table. Haru absently swats at me to get me to move, but I ignore him.
“Well, nothing much, really,” she says, adjusting her glasses and finally looking away from the window. “Unless the rain lets up, we won’t be able to properly calculate the distance the coastlines have been submerged, and until the floods recede, we won’t be able to see the damage that happened inland.”
“But -” Haru raises a finger, “- since we’re inland, we could theoretically go onshore.”
“What would you do, Haru?” Tara snaps. “We’d still be waterlogged and bogged down.”
“We could save more people!” Haru shouts, slamming a hand down. The pens in his holder rattle. It seems like I have walked into an old argument.
“Where would we – what would we be rescuing them for?” Tara retorts, her eyes flashing. “There’s barely any space left on the Tower, Haru, and I refuse to let everyone here live like livestock so you can live out your saviour fantasy!”
“It’s not a saviour fantasy,” I say quietly, and they both turn to stare at me like they had forgotten my existence. “It’s not a fantasy at all, Tara.”
I would know.
“I’m one of those who risks their lives to save people who are losing everything, Tara. We-we were lucky enough to survive. We want to extend that hand to more people, that’s all.”
I remember the feeling of sinking outside my own house. One of my neighbours had been up on his roof, waving his hands to me when I stared out of my attic window. When the water lapped at the edges of his rooftop drain, he panicked and slipped, the rain turning his tiles slippery and deadly.
When you hit water, your body displaces it an amount equal to the weight you’re hitting it with and displacing. And when you fall into it, it hurts. It’s easy to forget that when you think of splashing someone with water in a pool, because everyone laughs. But when you slip and fall, it’s like hitting a brick wall.
He sank.
I jumped in after him. It was an impulse I couldn’t explain. Maybe I thought it was a depth I could handle. Maybe I thought of everything my brother told me about swimming, or at least floating. I don’t know why I jumped after him, but I do know that I watched his hand slip away from mine because he was too heavy. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I sank with him.
I watched the bubbles rise from my mouth, each one a sign of the breath that I had taken for granted. I watched the sunlight ripple against my outstretched hand, turning my faded green nail polish brighter. I felt the pressure encircle my chest, forcing out the air that kept me alive.
And I remember the hand that reached out to me and pulled me out. The same hand that held me when I tried to enter the Tower pool for the first time and froze, even the water lapping at my knees reminding me of a bottomless depth that called me to it.
Aiko reached out to me and saved me.
Why can’t I do that for others?
Sreepriya Ramesh 
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