The water came up faster than the survey had said it would.
The survey had never been aggressive in its modeling. The number in the queue had been the conservative one, and it was passed in three days. On the fourth the water stood where the notice had put it for midsummer’s end, and midsummer’s end was three weeks off. There was still no closure notice. There was, on the fifth day, a works bulletin: terrace access restricted pending assessment. The terrace was under a foot of river.
The households did not wait for the assessment. They had ships — the good ships, the deep-water ones, the fleet that steered itself off satellites and needed no one aboard who could read water. Over those days the moorings emptied. The households went with their children, their stewards, and what standing they could carry. The ships took them out through the harbor mouth in the rain, and some of the ships left before they were full. Raven watched one go with its rails half-lined, deck space enough for forty more, and no one on the quay it slowed for. It did not slow.
Hal went with the fleet. Raven did not see him go, and no one entered when, or on which hull. The steward who had signed every record in the court was absent from the only one that would have mattered. The court had no field for it.
The staff went with the households in tiers, the way everything in the court went. The stewards left first, with the families they stewarded. The house servants followed the households they were assigned to, their names moving off one register and onto the manifest of whatever ship the household took. The lower staff, who belonged to no single house, were redistributed — entered against the departing hulls wherever there was a berth and a need. The kitchen hands, the yard staff and the runners parceled out by the same office that had filed the water for two weeks and done nothing.
Raven belonged to no household. She had a household once, before the note in the drawer, and after that she had been the court’s. She had been filed under nothing that traveled. She was not a family to be evacuated. She was not staff to be reassigned. She was an entry in the betrothal correspondence and a name in the civic register. A line item held, provisionally, against a future the water was about to cancel. When the tiers moved, she was not in any of them.
She was not abandoned. No one decided to leave her.
Two of the house staff, before they went, did what their station allowed.
The head of the kitchen left a folded inventory on the shelf outside Raven’s quarters — everything in the stores, ruled and totaled in a careful hand, in case it was needed. And a clerk of the household, on the way to his household’s ship, entered a note into the system: the child Raven, quarters east, to be assigned transport pending household resolution. He filed it correctly. It routed. It logged. It received a number in the queue.
Raven read the note the evening after he filed it.
She did not wait for the transport.
Harry came to the window at four. There was no courtyard to narrate. The courtyard was under water, and the reception hall beyond was dark.
He was there anyway.
He saw Dors before Raven did. She had come to the quarters — not passing, not sent, but come, standing in the doorway with a small bag in one hand. In the crook of his frame Harry carried his charger, wrapped in a length of waterproof cloth that was not its original packing, because the original packing was in a drawer three floors down, and filling.
“The band is back together,” said Harry.
Dors did not answer him. She looked at Raven and nodded, once.
Raven took the shelf.
The string. The note. The coin. The folded paper from the very first lesson. They went with the bags already packed.
The three of them went down toward the water.
The kitchen was on the way. Raven went down the line of stores, reading the inventory against the room.
The room did not match the paper.
The dry goods were gone. The oil was gone. The salt fish that should have hung the length of the far wall was gone, and the hooks swung empty. The inventory was accurate. It had been accurate when it was written. It described, line by line, a room that no longer held any of it.
Raven folded the paper back along its creases and left it on the counter.
The field synthesizers were gone too — the rack in the corridor stood empty, taken with the outdoor equipment onto the ships. All but one. She went to the holding location she had entered on the education terminal, the quiet place off-floor. The unit was there, correctly filed under maintenance, exactly as she had left it. She took it with what feedstock she could carry.
On the way out she pulled the rain-catch from the yard store — a rigged funnel and a lidded cask, the kind of thing kept for the gardens. The rain drowning the court would be the water she drank. She did not find that strange. She had stopped finding things strange somewhere above the kitchen.
The Dark Canvas rode at her mooring, name aft. Every other berth along the low dock stood empty.
They loaded it in the rain. It did not take long.
Raven cast off. She took the vessel out from the dock and into the flooded channel that had been the lower court — the walk where she had read the datum off the third pylon, the pylons now under, the carved fish under, the whole lower terrace a grey sheet of moving water with the rain coming down into it.
Their way out went past the civic hall.
It stood at the head of the old channel, the stone hall that kept the register. The water was on the steps. Somewhere in the archive was a book with Raven’s name in it, the last dry entry on the page.
Dark Canvas came level with the hall and passed it.
Harry’s screen showed a single horizontal line and held it.
They went out through the harbor mouth into the rain.
The rain did not stop.
At Home with AI 
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