Drink.

It had started with laughter in Bath, the city of hot springs and baths, now an irony. The rumour was repeated for fun. A man had drowned after drinking a glass of water. Not choked. Drowned. He sat at his kitchen table, the cup still half full, when liquid poured from his mouth and nose like a burst pipe. His wife screamed, but the water did not stop.

The government called it “Acute Hydric Response.” Scientists claimed it was a strange chemical imbalance. But no one believed that for long.

“Drink responsibly. Stay dry. Stay alive,” the posters said, peeling from walls in empty streets. Alcohol consumption soared. Whiskey and rum dispensed for anyone seeking safety from water. Anything without H²O remained harmless.

Within months, whole cities sealed their taps. Baths became illegal. Swimming pools were drained and left to crack under the sun. Oceans were off-limits. Lakeside homes emptied. Islands became ghost lands, their populations fleeing inland in search of dry safety. Cruises vanished, leaving only rusting ships adrift and empty.

Rain sent people indoors to tape up their windows. Dehumidifiers droned through the night, humming in every room like nervous insects. The air itself seemed haunted. No one trusted mist or walked barefoot across wet grass.

People avoided water, but the cost was heavy. Streets smelled of sour sweat. Clothes stuck to skin. Hair matted with dust. The stench became part of life, a reminder that survival mattered more than comfort.

The fear bred extremes. Groups known as the Ultra-Purists took the government’s advice to its logical conclusion, advocating for a fully sterile life. They lived in sealed, filtered homes, sustaining themselves on nutrient sludge and solid fat rations, purging any moisture from their lives. They were fanatical in their surveillance, often reporting neighbours for perceived “wetness” or excess humidity.

They were fighting a war no one understood. The scientists used the term chemical imbalance, but it was simpler than that. Life had become too refined, too separate. Humanity’s constant filtering, damming, and sealing had created a global dehydration, a bodily drought that now manifested as a fever in the planetary body. The water, the earth’s lifeblood, was finally responding.

And yet, the fish thrived. With no one to catch them, rivers glittered with silver life. Coral reefs bloomed again in peace, untouched by divers. The seas healed while humanity withered.

Sheila had loved the sea. She grew up on the coast, where the air smelled of salt and wet wood. Now she lived in Bath, far from the sea, with the River Avon running through it. The air was brittle and dry for days on end. Sometimes, she would stand near her sealed window, letting the thought of the sea fill her mind, but the sweet scent of salt was always replaced by the metallic fear of a drowning man.

She worked at a primary school where children licked the corners of damp cloths to wet their mouths. Their lips were cracked and pale. Some of the younger ones cried without tears.

At breaktime, her colleague, leaned in the staffroom doorway with a half-empty paper cup.

“New rule today,” he said. “Anyone caught with more than two ounces in one sitting gets reported.”

“Reported to who?” Sheila asked.

“The council. Health Division.”

Sheila frowned. “So now drinking’s a crime?”

“Guess so,” he said. “Water’s dangerous.”

His voice cracked on the last word; Sheila noticed how dry his lips were. Everyone’s was. Even the air felt rough on her skin.

That night, JoAnne, her neighbour, knocked frantically. “Sheila, come quick.”

Sheila had only moved to Bath a few months ago, but JoAnne, a quick-witted woman in the flat opposite, was the only person she spoke to outside work. They had an unspoken routine: a shared, weekly check-in, where they would trade their small rations of distilled sludge and complain about the constant, sour smell of unwashed humanity that now clung to the streets.

Sheila followed her into the kitchen. A glass jug sat on the table, half full. Real water. Not the thick, distilled sludge they rationed.

“It came out the tap,” JoAnne whispered. “Cold. Clear. Real.”

“Don’t touch it,” Sheila said.

JoAnne dipped a finger in before she could stop her. “It’s fine. Look.” She tasted the droplet. Her eyes went wide. “It tastes clean.”

“JoAnne, don’t!”

JoAnne’s body jerked. She coughed once, twice. Then her throat began to swell. Water poured from her nose, her mouth, even her eyes. She stumbled, hands clawing the air, as though something inside her tried to escape.

The jug quivered. Ripples formed, shifting patterns. Maybe letters, maybe not. But Sheila read them all the same.

COME BACK.

Sheila ran screaming into the corridor.

Next morning, the council sealed the flat, and JoAnne’s body was taken out in a dripping black bag. The floor reeked of bleach. No one spoke.

By evening, rumours spread. People whispered that JoAnne had called out to someone before she died. Her dead husband’s name.

That night, Sheila could not sleep. The pipes hummed softly, a throaty whisper beneath her floor. She pressed her ear to the wall and heard it clearly.

COME BACK.

She stuffed her ears with tissue and turned the dehumidifier to full power. The machine roared, drying the air until her throat hurt.

Three days later, she met Stanley at the corner shop. He was thin and jumpy.

“They’re lying to us,” he said quietly. “It’s not the water that changed. It’s us.”

“That sounds like one of those Fanatics they talk about in the news,” Sheila said, stepping back slightly.

“Something inside us is drying out. Our bodies can’t hold water anymore. We’ve become too… separate. The water’s fighting to return.”

“That’s mad.”

He smiled. “The Fanatics just want to drown. They haven’t listened. They haven’t understood that the water is calling, not simply killing.” He continued, “We’re a sickness, Sheila. A disease attacking the planet. The water is the earth’s defence system, finally flushing the fever out. I used to pray for rain. I didn’t think it would listen.”

She said nothing.

“I’ve been studying it,” Stanley said. He pulled out a tiny vial. Inside was a single droplet, clear as glass. “This hasn’t touched air for a month. But listen.” He held it near her ear.

A whisper. Faint but real.

Thirsty.

She jerked back. “Stop it.”

“It knows we’re here,” Stanley said. “It remembers us.”

She froze. The whisper carried her brother’s laugh. A long-buried memory stirred.

They met again in an abandoned laundrette two nights later. Stanley’s papers were scattered across a table: sketches of veins, maps of rivers, diagrams of lungs.

Evening brought a spattering of rain, light, diffident. People peeked from windows, keeping their sealed doors and taped-up frames. Sheila felt a few cold drops on her coat as she walked and brushed them off.

“I think it’s all connected,” he said. “Our bodies. The planet. The water’s one organism. It’s reclaiming what it lost.”

“That’s mad.”

He pointed to a cracked washing machine. “Those machines used to hold gallons of water. Now they’re tombs. Everything dry, everything afraid. But the water hasn’t gone. It’s waiting.”

Sheila stepped back. “You sound like a preacher.”

“Maybe I am.” He smiled. “Maybe it needs believers.”

He took another vial from his coat. “Just a drop on your skin. See what happens.”

“No.”

He sighed. “You already touched it.”

“What?”

“It rained earlier. Your coat’s still damp.”

She froze. Her breath shortened. She clawed at her collar, pulling the fabric off. Her lungs burned and she panicked.

Stanley grabbed her. “Breathe! Don’t fight it.”

But she couldn’t. She heard rushing water… not around her, but inside. It filled her ears, her mind, her veins.

Then it stopped. Steam rose from her lips.

Stanley’s eyes widened. “You survived.”

Sheila sank to the floor, shaking. She noticed her skin was dry, almost uncomfortably warm, as if her body was running a fever. A sharp ache hit her chest as memories of her lost brother surfaced.

He whispered, “You’re the bridge. It chose you.”

They drove out to Chew Valley Lake, a place that was out of bounds. Fences leaned in, embracing the area, their wire rusted. The air was humid. On the road bordering the lake, three black vans sat parked, forming a loose, unofficial blockade.

“Purists,” Stanley muttered, his voice tight. “They patrol the forbidden zones, trying to stop the Fanatics from finding peace. They want absolute dryness, even in death.” Stanley ignored the vans and accelerated, tires spitting dust as they swerved onto the old maintenance path.

A group of people waited by the lake… thin, silent, unwashed. Their eyes shone in the dark. These were the Hydro-Fanatics. Desperate souls who had embraced the water’s call, believing reunion was salvation. They had abandoned dry living for the humid forbidden zones.

“They’re like me,” Stanley said. “Listeners.”

Sheila shuddered. “You brought me here for this?”

“It’s not death,” he said. “It’s reunion. We’re the ones who broke the bond. The water’s calling us home.”

He stepped into the lake. The surface didn’t ripple. The others followed.

Sheila backed away, trembling. “You’re mad.”

Then she heard it again. A voice rising from the water. Soft. Familiar.

“Sheila.”

She froze. Her brother’s voice.

“Jacob?”

The water shimmered. His face surfaced. Calm, smiling, impossibly real.

“You don’t have to be thirsty anymore,” he said.

Her knees went weak. “You’re not real.”

“We’re all real,” he said. “The water remembers. Come home.”

Rain began to fall, light at first, then harder. Sheila screamed and ran for the fence, but her footing slipped. Her hand plunged into the lake. Cold shot through her veins. The water clung to her skin, sliding up her arm like veins of living mercury. She tried to convert the water to steam, to push it out with the new heat inside her, but it was too much. She pulled away, but the droplets didn’t fall, they crawled. They entered.

The voice inside her grew louder. A thousand whispers merging into one.

Drink.

Sheila gasped and convulsed. The world filled with the sound of waves, storms, and rushing rivers. She fell forward. The water embraced her.

When dawn rose over Chew Valley Lake, the water was calm. Mist hung low. Sheila stood at the shore, her skin faintly luminescent, her eyes reflecting the water’s stillness. She could feel everything; the rivers under the cities, the oceans whispering, the droplets suspended in the air. She felt humanity’s fear vibrating through every dry room. They forgot that water made them. She tasted the salt of the sea on the new, clean air, a memory now freed from the fear of drowning. A drop slid from her fingertip to the ground. The soil shivered and darkened.

She smiled.

Not far off, back in Bath, pipes hummed. Faucets trembled. The air grew heavy with moisture. Dehumidifiers sparked and failed. Children pressed their ears to the walls and heard it too. The voice. Outside, a boy stepped into the street, letting cold drops slide down his face. Neighbours emerged slowly, shivering, tasting the water as if it remembered them. Puddles darkened cracked pavements, reflecting more than the sky.

COME BACK.

And one by one, the world stopped resisting. People opened windows to the rain. They tilted their faces up, gasping. For the first time in years, the air smelled clean. They wept as water filled their lungs, but none tried to stop it.

In the end, there was silence. And then, peace.