She woke up feeling both sluggish and cold. It was dark. A frown wrinkled her brow even before her eyes opened in the darkness. The frown deepened. It shouldn't be dark. Her mouth opened and she tasted the water.

A thousand traces of poison flavored it. Far worse than the wastes that had flowed from the foul cities of mankind when she had last woken, and yet far less pervasive at the same time. The old ones were naive to think that the "plague" would pass while they slept, but it would be cruel to wake them, because she doubted that any of them could adapt to the human's era. It was also entirely possible that humanity actually would eventually succeed in killing itself off when nothing else could, and then they could finally come out of hibernation safely. Those that still lived.

Her eyes looked into a darkness deeper than the purely physical for a moment, and then refocused as she sought for some faint trace of light in her immediate surroundings. The darkness stubbornly remained, and she moved blindly toward her garden, or its remains, she thought grimly. This unnatural cold would be hard on the life forms that weren't quite plants, and weren't quite animals.

The heart was fainter than it should have been, but it was still there, and traces of warmth remained here where the vent should have been glowing brightly. She could see that only a few of the strings she had gathered remained. Likely only the ones that had naturally run through this chasm originally. She reached for a string and sank her claws into it.

She was more than a little disturbed by what it told her. The Earth had shifted recently, and she had slept through it. She was no elder to dream away eons. She even sort of prided herself for her daring explorations of human cities, and rarely slept for more than a century at most. A tremor big enough to close her vent should have woken her.

Her toes tested the warmth that remained, and she wondered if perhaps it wasn't that the tremor written in the heart of the string had closed her vent, but that the Earth itself was cooling. The only truly old one that she had conversed with, had said that it went through cycles like summer to winter that had nothing to do with the short seasons that she counted, and it had been bitterly cold beyond the line of the sun's turning in her youth, while growing generally warmer for most of her life. Perhaps the long season was turning.

She swam upward.

--

Victoria's mother had claimed that she'd been named after a queen.

She could remember just enough about her father to suspect that she'd been named after the underwear catalogue instead, but it didn't matter. In her heart, her name's affinity was with the many ships that carried it in one form or another. Her own ship was named after her grandmother, the only person in her broken family who had encouraged her to pursue her love of sailing.

Her mother had disapproved of her grandmother, and warned her daughter not to follow in her wild footsteps. Victoria had listened to both of them, and her footsteps rarely followed anyone else's. She regretted that just a little currently.

She pulled in her line and cast it out again. Fishing for survival like some castaway. When the virus had begun to cross borders, a lot of people had panicked and bought enough to live on for half a year, or more, instantly creating shortages and even starvation among the elderly and the poor.

Victoria had figured that it would be a short lived emergency. The world hadn't had a true, significantly population reducing, plague in centuries, or at least a full century. She had purchased only her usual supplies, and less than that of things that were already in short supply when she restocked.

She hadn't been too surprised when governments around the world had begun closing their borders and setting up rationing and curfews. What else could they do when their populations were in such a panic that they were killing portions of themselves off before any of them even got sick.

Now, weeks later, she wished that she'd at least bought an extra bag of rice and an extra crate of water. And she thanked the gods that her ship, which traditionalists rolled their eyes at and regarded as a fragile abomination that was overly reliant on electronics, had good solar panels and automated geo positioning. She couldn't claim that she liked the restrictions against ships docking that treated them all as active plague carriers, but she could survive at sea indefinitely if she had to, and even sleep reasonable hours without crashing into a shoreline if the wind came up.

Her fishing pole dropped into the water as the freaking SEA SERPENT surfaced beside her little ship, which tilted dangerously as the surge of water shoved it one way and then pulled it the other.