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He lay on his side on the sand a little distance away from her, propped on one elbow, and listened. He understood almost all of it now.

That was the strange part, because the words were waking far faster than he could have imagined. Each time she spoke, more of them rose out of the dark places in his mind, like bubbles from the bottom of the deep pool, and burst into meaning. Bolt, schedule, fool. He knew them the moment he heard them, as if he had always known them and had only been waiting for someone to say them out loud. They were not the words from before, but he knew them just the same.

“And then he had the nerve to tell me I was being difficult,” she said indignantly. “Me. Difficult. When he was the one who wanted to skip the inspection.” She stopped and looked at him. “Did you get any of that?”

He considered the question carefully, his head tilted.

“Some,” he said.

She sighed heavily. “I don’t even know why I’m telling you. You probably think I’m crazy.”

He did not think she was crazy. He thought she was the most interesting creature he had ever seen. He wanted her to keep talking until the moss went dark and bright again. But he didn’t have to tell her that. If she thought he only understood a little, she would keep explaining things to him. She would say them twice, slowly, with her hands moving in the air, and her eyes would stay fixed on his face the entire time.

He liked that very much, and he wasn’t going to ruin it.

“Crazy,” he repeated thoughtfully, as if he were testing it.

“Great,” she muttered. “That’s the one you pick up.”

He hid his smile against his arm.

She slept that night on the sand beside the pools, wrapped in her silver blanket. This time he didn’t have to hide in the shadows to watch her. He lay a few body lengths away with his back to the wall and his tail curled around him, between her and the dark. He told himself it was because this was a good place to keep watch. Which was true, but it wasn’t the only reason.

He watched her breathe, and he watched the glow from the pools move softly across her face, and the loose strands of her dark hair stir when she sighed. She had taken off her boots, and one bare foot had crept out from under the blanket. He looked at it for a long time. It was ridiculous to stare at a foot, but everything about her was so small and so soft and so different from him that he couldn’t stop.

Her scent drifted to him across the sand. It was stronger now than it had been that first night, warm and sweet and salty, and it was tangled up in his memory with the feel of her pressed tightly against his chest when he had pulled her away from the falling rock. He remembered how she had fit there, with her head tucked under his chin and her heart pounding against him. He remembered the curve of her waist beneath his arm.

The heat that rose in him was slow and deep and relentless, and it didn’t go away when he closed his eyes. He wanted to go to her. He wanted to lie down beside her and draw her back against him and wrap his arms around her. He wanted to bury his face in the soft place where her neck met her shoulder and breathe her in until her scent was all he knew. He wanted to feel her small hands on his shoulders again, and then on his chest, and then everywhere.

And underneath the want there was something older and stronger, something that rose up from the same deep place as the words. It was a word too, and it wanted to be spoken.

Mine.

He didn’t say it. Instead he held it in his mouth the way he had held her humming, and he tasted it silently in the dark.

Mine. The female sleeping on the sand, with her bare foot and her tangled hair and her terrible humming. The one who had come falling out of the rock into his river, and talked to her tools, and left him a message on a stone.

Mine.

It felt right, so right that it frightened him a little. He knew perfectly well that she didn’t belong to him, and that she had not chosen him. She had pressed her lips against his cheek because he had saved her life. She had called it a thank-you and told him it would not happen again. She was lost and far from her people, and some day she would want to go back to them. But she was here now, and he would keep her safe. That much, at least, he could do.

He lay awake long after the pools had dimmed, and he didn’t speak the word aloud.

In the morning he showed her the way. He had not meant to take her downstream so soon. He had thought she would want to rest after the fall into the channel. He wanted to keep her here by the quiet pools, where the water was gentle, but she woke up determined. She packed her bag in the same careful order as always and pulled on her boots and looked down the passage where the stream ran out of the chamber.

The bright lamp he had brought back to her went in first, wrapped in one of her spare coverings. “Saving it,” she told him, when she saw him watching. Then she switched on the old, tired light on her hard shell instead.

“I need to keep going,” she said. “There has to be a way out somewhere. Or at least somewhere my beacon works.” She lifted the small box and frowned at it. “Downstream. Water goes somewhere.”

He knew exactly where the water went. He had spent more nights than he could count making sure that it did. But he could see from the set of her chin that she wasn’t going to stay, so he rose to his feet and went ahead of her. It was easier than he’d expected. He simply walked where it was safe and let her follow him.

She followed closely, her lamp pointed at his heels, and she didn’t stop to tap the stone with her hammer anymore. She stepped exactly where he stepped. When he paused to test a ledge, she paused too, and waited, and watched his hands. When he went wide around a stretch of dark rock that looked perfectly sound, she went wide too, without asking why. Once, he stopped and looked back at her, and she lifted her eyebrows at him.

“What?” she said. “You obviously know this place better than I do. I’m an engineer, not an idiot.”

He didn’t know what an engineer was yet. But he thought that she had just said she trusted him, and warmth spread through his chest.

She talked as they walked, just as she had the day before. She told him about the domes where she lived and the people who grew their food under glass. She told him about the little room where she slept, with a window that looked out on red dust. She told him she’d come from another place where there were too many people, and he struggled to imagine it even as some part of him seemed to recognize it.