Page 20 of River Dragon’s Song

He frowned at her, clearly unconvinced. She waved him off and dug into her pack for her water bottle. While she was there, she took out her second-to-last protein bar and broke off a corner of it. She ate it slowly, sitting on the edge of an ancient spillway on Mars, and she realized with a small shock that she wasn’t afraid. She hadn’t been afraid for hours.

She was still lost, and she was still hungry and cold and running out of light, and nobody on the surface knew where she was. But she had stopped feeling like a woman who had fallen into a hole. For the first time since the ledge collapsed, she felt like herself again. She was an engineer standing in front of the most extraordinary structure she had ever seen.

She had found something that mattered, something nobody else knew existed. She thought briefly about GenCon, and about what they would do with a place like this, and she put the thought away. That was a problem for later.

She looked around the chamber again, more slowly this time, and she noticed something else. The steps of the spillway were clean. There was no silt caught in the corners, no fallen rock lying on the stone. The notches in the overflow wall were clear. Even the ventilation slots in the passage behind them had been free of dust.

Water carried silt, and rock fell. Anything left alone for millions of years should have been buried in debris. But this place was clean and working, as if someone had swept it yesterday. Someone was maintaining it.

She turned her head and looked at him. He was sitting on his heels beside her, watching the water pour over the spillway. She remembered the slab that had moved in the night, and the broken stone that had been pried loose from the ledge, and the scatter of stones swept neatly off her path.

“It’s you,” she said slowly. “Isn’t it? You take care of all this.”

He looked at her, puzzled, and she didn’t know how much he understood. But before she could try again, he lifted his head sharply and turned towards the side channel.

“What?” she asked. “What is it?”

He didn’t answer. Instead he rose to his feet and went swiftly across the chamber to the notched wall. After a moment, she got up and followed him.

The side channel was blocked. She saw it when she shone her lamp through the opening in the wall. A few meters past the entrance, the channel dropped away into a deeper section, and it was choked with debris. Rocks, gravel and a thick, grey mass of silt had piled up across it like a dam. Behind the blockage, the water had backed up into a dark, still pool. He made a low, unhappy sound in his throat.

“When did that happen?” she asked. “Was it the collapse? When I fell?”

He shook his head impatiently. “Before. Many… nights.” He frowned, clearly frustrated by the words. “Korrak clear. Water fill again. Korrak clear again.”

He unfastened the vine belt from around his hips, dropped it neatly on the dry stone at the edge of the channel, and slid into the water.

She didn’t mean to watch him. She meant to shine her lamp on the blockage and study how the silt had built up. She meant to think about flow rates and sedimentation and how often a channel like this would need to be cleared. That was what she was doing, at first.

He went under the surface in one smooth movement and came up at the edge of the blockage. He braced his feet on the channel floor, got his hands under a rock the size of a suitcase, and lifted it clear of the water. The muscles in his back and shoulders bunched and shifted beneath the fine blue-green scales as he heaved it up onto the ledge beside the channel. Then he went back for another one.

He worked steadily and with total concentration. He dug into the gravel with his hands and scooped it away. He dove to the bottom and came up with more stones, water streaming from his hair and running down the long line of his spine. When the silt at the base of the blockage wouldn’t shift, he turned sideways in the water and swept his tail through it, powerful and deliberate. A grey cloud billowed up and was carried slowly away.

He wasn’t rough about any of it. He handled the stone carefully, almost gently, setting each rock down where it wouldn’t fall back into the channel. Once, a piece of the channel wall came loose in his hand. He stopped and examined it and pressed it back into place, and his mouth moved, as if he were telling it something.

He loved this, and she could see it in every movement he made. She had thought of the cleared paths as a strange sort of instinct, but it was care, plain and simple. He was looking after this place the way a gardener looked after a garden, or the way she had looked after every habitat she had ever signed off on. He was proud of it, and he had every right to be.

And, God help her, he was beautiful doing it.

Somewhere along the way she had stopped looking at the blockage altogether. She was looking at the water running off his shoulders and at the long, lean muscles of his thighs. She was looking at the dark scales that ran down the ridges of his spine and over the curve of his hips. She was looking at his tail, which drove him through the water with an ease and strength that made her mouth go dry. She was looking at his hands, big and deft and patient against the stone. She knew perfectly well that she should look away, and she didn’t.

With a last powerful heave, he pulled a big rock free from the center of the blockage. The water behind it surged forward with a deep, rushing gurgle, tearing through the gap and sweeping the loose gravel with it. In a few seconds the dark pool had drained. The side channel was clear again, ready for the next time the stream ran high.

He stood in the water and watched it go. The smile on his face was so pure and so satisfied that her heart turned over in her chest. Then he looked up, straight at her.

She knew what he saw. She was standing on the edge of the channel with her lamp pointed at his hips and her mouth open. There was no possible way to pretend she hadn’t been staring.

“I was looking at the spillway,” she said, much too quickly.

He tilted his head curiously. He looked at her, and at the lamp, and then he looked over her shoulder.

“Spillway,” he said gravely, “is behind you.”

Her face flamed so hot that she was surprised the mask didn’t fog. She lifted her chin and tried to muster what was left of her dignity.

“Well,” she said. “It was very interesting.”

He didn’t laugh at her, although she was almost sure he wanted to. Instead he climbed out of the channel, taking his time about it, while the water ran down his body and the lamplight gleamed on his wet scales. He picked up his belt and fastened it around his hips without hurrying. Then he came and stood in front of her, close enough that she could feel the cool damp air coming off his skin. He smiled down at her with that slow, wicked smile again.