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“Yes,” he said.

“How fast?”

He shrugged, and then winced, and she felt a little savage satisfaction that at least it still hurt him. “Fast.”

She pressed the gel into the deepest part of the wound anyway and began to wrap the gauze around his shoulder. Only then did she realize that her hands were trembling so badly she could barely hold the roll.

She had seen plenty of blood on job sites, so that wasn’t the problem. It was the memory of the slab tearing loose from the wall above her, and the feel of his body jerking when it struck him. It was that short, harsh sound of pain. He had seen it coming. He had seen it, and he had put himself between it and her without even stopping to think.

If it had hit her, it would have killed her, and she knew it. And it could just as easily have killed him.

She tied off the bandage with a sharp little tug. He turned his head to look at her over his shoulder.

“Don’t you ever do that again,” she told him fiercely.

He looked at her for a long moment, his eyes dark and steady. “I will do again,” he said.

“Then don’t you ever get hurt doing it.”

He turned all the way around on the ledge to face her. He looked down at her hands, which were still trembling in her lap and smeared with his blood. He took them gently in his.

“Hands shaking,” he said quietly.

“They do that when I’m furious,” she said, and her voice broke.

He didn’t say anything. He simply held her hands between his, warm and steady, until they stopped shaking. She sat there on a narrow ledge above a river that shouldn’t have been running, with her heart still pounding and her eyes stinging above her mask. She understood something that frightened her more than the water had.

She cared about him. She liked him and she wanted him, but she also cared what happened to him. The thought of him hurt made her feel sick and cold inside, in a way nothing had in years.

She looked down at the channel below them, where the water still hurried past, dark and swift.

“Korrak,” she said slowly. “This channel. It was dry, wasn’t it? Before?”

He followed her gaze, and his eyes grew wondering and uncertain.

“Dry,” he agreed. “Always dry. Since I woke.”

“Then where did all this water come from?”

He shook his head. The water rushed past in the old carved channel, where it hadn’t flowed for longer than either of them could guess. And watching it, she had the strangest feeling that the water didn’t know either. But it was starting to remember.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Korrak made Frankie a place to sleep. He did it that night, after they came back to the gardens. His shoulder ached where the stone had struck it, a deep, hot throb beneath the gauze she had wrapped so carefully around it, but he barely noticed. He couldn’t stop thinking about the water.

The old channel had been dry since he woke. He had walked it a hundred times, and he had never once heard water in it, not even a trickle. And then the water had come thundering out of the dark, grey and roaring and full of stones, and she had been standing right in the middle of it.

He kept seeing it over and over. He kept feeling her small body clinging to his neck as he ran, and the slab tearing loose above them. And he kept seeing the way she had looked at him afterwards, with her eyes so wide and frightened behind the mask.

She had not been frightened for herself. She had been frightened for him. He didn’t know what to do with that, so he did what he could. He made her a safe place.

He chose a hollow at the far end of the gardens, where a warm pool lay tucked beneath a shelf of overhanging rock. It was far from the old channel and high above the river, and the stone around it was solid and sound. He tested every piece of it with his hands. He gathered armfuls of the thick moss that grew along the water’s edge and piled it into the hollow until it made a deep, springy bed. He laid the broad pale leaves over the moss so that the damp wouldn’t reach her. And he found a tangle of trailing vine to hang across the mouth of the hollow, so that the light from the gardens came through it soft and green.

She watched him from the edge of the pool with her arms wrapped around her knees. She didn’t say anything while he worked. But when he finally stepped back and gestured for her to come and see, she got up and walked over and looked inside for a long time.

“You made this,” she said. “For me?”

“Safe,” he told her. “Solid rock. No water.”