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He didn’t know what that meant, but her voice shook. She turned around to face him, and her eyes were huge and bright. “Korrak, I can breathe. Without that mask on my face.”

She reached up with both hands and, very slowly, very carefully, she pulled the mask away from her face. He held his breath anxiously.

She took a small, cautious breath, and then a deeper one. Then another, and another, each one longer than the last, until her shoulders were rising and falling and her eyes had closed. She tipped her head back and breathed in the green air as if she were drinking it. And then she laughed.

It was a wild, wonderful sound, breathless and shaky and so happy that it made his chest hurt. It rang through the cavern and echoed back from the high walls. She laughed and breathed and laughed again. Then her face crumpled and she was crying too, tears running down her cheeks while she pressed the mask against her chest with both hands.

He didn’t know what to do. He had never seen anyone cry and laugh at the same time. So he stepped close to her and stood there, near enough to touch, and waited.

After a while she wiped her face with the back of her hand and looked up at him. “Sorry,” she said thickly. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I haven’t taken a real breath in so long. Not since I fell. I didn’t even know how much I missed it.”

The mask had left a red mark across her face. It ran over the bridge of her nose and down across her cheeks, a thin angry line where it had pressed against her skin for days. He had never seen her face without it before. He had never seen her mouth and nose and chin all at once, soft and flushed and wet with tears, and she was even lovelier than he had imagined.

He lifted his hand without thinking and touched her cheek lightly, just along the red line. She didn’t pull away. Instead she looked up at him, and her lips parted, and for a moment neither of them moved.

Then her stomach growled loudly, and she laughed again and turned bright red.

He fed her, and he had never enjoyed anything so much in his life. He picked the dark fruit from the tallest stalks, where it was ripest, and brought it to her in his cupped hands. She eyed it suspiciously and waved the small panel on her wrist over it, and then she eyed it again.

“How do I know this won’t kill me?” she asked.

He put one of the fruits in his mouth and ate it. Then he held out his hands again and waited.

“That’s not exactly scientific proof,” she said. But she took one anyway, and bit into it cautiously, and her eyes went wide. “Oh. Oh, that’s good.”

She ate the rest of the handful so fast that he went back for more. After the fruit, he broke off a length of the water vine and showed her how to squeeze it so the cool, sweet water ran out of the end. She drank from it and laughed. He brought her some of the purple leaves too. She took one bite and made a face so horrified that he had to turn away to hide his grin.

“You eat those?” she demanded. “On purpose?”

“Good,” he told her, and ate one to prove it.

“You have no taste buds,” she decided. “That’s the only explanation.”

Afterwards she sat on a smooth, warm rock at the edge of the pool with her boots off and her bare feet trailing in the water. She looked around at the gardens for a long time without saying anything. It was the quietest he had ever seen her.

He sat down on the rock beside her and waited.

“There’s air here,” she said at last, softly, as if she was talking to herself. “And water, and food. I could live here. I could actually live here.”

She looked down at her hands, at the mask still clutched in her lap.

“I don’t have to leave,” she whispered.

He heard the words, and he understood every one of them. For days, he had known that she would go. He had watched her ration her food and shake her dying light and look downstream with that stubborn set to her chin. He had known that some day she would find her way out of his river and back to her people, and that he would be alone again. He had told himself firmly that it was right and that it was what she needed. He would find a way to bear it.

Now she was sitting beside him with her feet in his river, breathing his air, and she didn’t have to go. The joy that filled him was so fierce that he had to close his eyes. And right behind it, cold and quick, came the fear. Because she hadn’t said that she wanted to stay. She had only said that she could.

He didn’t say anything, because he didn’t trust himself to.

Later, when she had rested, she took a thin grey tablet out of her bag. She made marks on it with her finger, frowning thoughtfully at the pools and the channels between them. She walked slowly from one pool to the next, crouching down to look at the stone, poking at the vines, making more marks. He followed her, and he didn’t understand what she was doing, but he liked watching her do it.

Somewhere along the way, she started to hum. He didn’t think she knew she was doing it. It was soft at first, just a few notes under her breath while she bent over the edge of the pool. It was the same wandering tune he had heard that first night by the falls, the one that couldn’t quite find its way. Some of the notes were wrong, and it didn’t matter.

He stopped where he was and listened. It filled him the way it had before, warm and aching. But this time, he was standing across the pool from her in the heart of his river, where the water ran and every sound carried. Her voice didn’t simply fill the air. It went into the water and into the rock. He could feel it under his feet, faint and sweet, humming up through the stone and into his bones.

For all the long nights since he woke, he had sung into the dark and listened for an answer, and nothing had ever come. Now, finally, something had.

He didn’t consciously decide to sing. It rose out of him the same way the words had, from some deep place he couldn’t reach, and he let it. He opened his mouth and a low note came out, soft and rolling, and it slid underneath her humming and held it up.