Page 25

By the end of the afternoon, she could find her way back to the gardens from three different passages with her eyes closed. She clapped and listened and trailed her fingers in the water. It wasn’t graceful, and she walked into a wall twice, but she did it. And every time she got it right, he made a low, pleased rumble in his chest that made her want to get it right again.

“Left at the second echo,” she muttered to herself, turning. “Follow the warm water.”

“Frrankie learns fast,” he said, and she laughed and told him he had no idea.

It happened on the way back, when she was tired and not paying attention. He had taken a shortcut through an old channel that branched away from the main stream. It was dry, and it looked as if it had been dry for a long time. The floor was smooth and dusty. The walls rose steeply on either side, carved in the same careful slopes as the passage near the spillway. She was walking just ahead of him, clapping softly to herself and listening to the echoes. Mostly she was thinking about how good it would feel to take the mask off again.

He stopped so suddenly that she turned to look at him and nearly walked into a wall for the third time.

“What?” she said.

He didn’t answer. He had turned his head and was listening intently. The scales along his neck and shoulders rose slightly, the way a cat’s fur did.

Then she felt it too, a faint trembling in the rock beneath her boots, so small that she thought at first she was imagining it. It grew steadily stronger. A low, deep rumble rolled through the stone from somewhere far up the channel, and the dust on the floor began to shiver and dance.

“What is that?” she whispered. “Korrak, what is that?”

“Water,” he said, and his voice was tight with something she had never heard in it before. “Water in the old way.”

She turned and looked up the dry channel. There was nothing there but darkness. But the rumble was getting louder. Now she could hear something else underneath it, a roaring rush that grew and grew until it filled her ears.

He grabbed her without asking. He swept her off her feet and ran. She clung to his neck and saw the wall of water come around the curve of the channel behind them, grey and churning and full of stones. It thundered down the channel like a train. He leapt for the side wall, where a narrow ledge jutted out above the floor. He got one arm over the edge and heaved them both up onto it just as the water roared past beneath their feet.

The channel shook around them. Spray hit her in the face. And above them, with a sharp, horrible crack that she felt in her stomach, a slab of rock tore loose from the wall. She saw it coming and opened her mouth to scream, and he shoved her down against the ledge and covered her with his body.

The slab hit him squarely, and she felt it through him, a heavy, jarring blow that drove him down against her and knocked the breath out of both of them. He made a sound, a short, harsh grunt of pain, and his body jerked above hers. Then the rock slid off his back and tumbled away into the torrent below, and the water swallowed it and roared on.

For a long time neither of them moved. The water thundered past below them. The ledge trembled beneath her cheek. His body was heavy and warm on top of her, his arms braced on either side of her head. His heart pounded against her back as hard as hers was pounding against the rock.

Slowly, the roar began to fade. The rushing water slowed to a hurried, murmuring flow. The trembling in the stone died away.

He lifted his weight off her. “Frrankie,” he said roughly. “Hurt?”

“No,” she said, and her voice shook. She rolled over and sat up, and she looked at him, and her heart stopped.

There was blood running down his arm.

“Let me see,” she said. “Korrak, let me see it.”

“Is nothing,” he said.

“It is not nothing. Turn around.”

He looked at her, and whatever he saw in her face made him turn around without another word. The gash ran across the top of his left shoulder, just above the blade. It was long and deep and ragged where the edge of the slab had torn through the scales and into the skin beneath. It was bleeding freely, and the dark blood ran in thick lines down his back. Her stomach lurched. She swallowed hard and made herself breathe.

“Okay,” she said, mostly to herself. “Okay. First aid. I can do first aid.”

She dragged her pack off her shoulders and dug through it for the little emergency kit that every survey tech carried and nobody ever used. It held antiseptic wipes, a roll of gauze and a tube of sealant gel, and she had never been so glad to see anything in her life. She knelt behind him on the narrow ledge and got to work.

She cleaned the wound first, as gently as she could. He didn’t flinch once, not even when the antiseptic must have stung, but the muscles in his back tightened beneath her fingers. His skin was warm, much warmer than usual, and the scales around the gash were hot to the touch.

She was very aware of him. She tried not to be, and she couldn’t help it. She was kneeling so close behind him that her knees pressed against the base of his spine. Every time she leaned forward, her breath stirred his damp hair. His shoulders were so broad that she had to reach to clean the far edge of the wound. She could see every ridge of muscle in his back and every line of the fine, dark scales that ran down his spine. On either side of it was a long, raised seam beneath the scales that she had never noticed before. She wanted to touch them, and she wanted to touch all of him.

She made herself concentrate on the gash.

And then she noticed that it was already closing. She stared at it in disbelief. The edges of the wound, which had been ragged and gaping a few minutes before, had drawn together. The bleeding had slowed to a sluggish ooze. At one end, where the cut was shallowest, fresh skin was forming.

“You heal fast,” she said faintly.