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They worked all that day and into the next. It was hard, slow work. The rockfall was huge and old and packed tight, and some of the stones were far too big even for him to move. She showed him where to dig and where to leave the rock alone, where the pile was holding itself up and where it would slide if they disturbed it. She called it load paths. He didn’t know the words, but he understood exactly what she meant. It was what he had always felt in the stone without knowing how to say it.

They gradually cleared a narrow tunnel into the pile, stone by stone. He did most of the lifting. She did most of the thinking. And sometimes, when a stone was stuck fast and wouldn’t shift no matter how hard he pulled, he found himself humming under his breath without meaning to, the way he did when he cleared the channels alone at night.

The first time it happened, she stopped in the middle of what she was saying and turned to stare at him.

“Do that again,” she said.

He blinked uncertainly at her. “What?”

“That. The humming. Do it again. Right there, with your hands on the rock.”

He didn’t understand, but he did it. He put his hands on the stuck stone and hummed, low and steady, the way it came to him. The stone shivered, and he felt it clearly under his palms, a faint trembling, as if it were waking up. A trickle of grit drifted out from around its edges. When he pulled, it came loose far more easily than it should have.

She was staring at him with her mouth open.

“Korrak,” she breathed. “Oh my God. Do you know what you just did?”

He looked at the stone in his hands. “Moved rock?”

“You tuned it.” She scrambled closer, her eyes blazing. “Every material has a resonant frequency. If you hit it at exactly the right pitch, it vibrates. Loose material shakes loose. Packed silt fluidizes. That’s why you hum when you clear the channels. It’s engineering.” She laughed, breathless and delighted. “Your people didn’t just carve the channels. They sang to them. They used sound to keep them clear.”

He didn’t know half of what she was saying. But he felt the truth of it, deep in his bones, in the same place the words came from. When he sang to the stone, the stone listened. He had always known that, but he had never known why.

She had gone suddenly quiet. She was staring blankly at the rock under her hands, and he could almost hear her thinking.

“The seismic anomalies,” she said slowly. “Korrak, that’s why we were down here in the first place. GenCon’s sensors picked up something months ago. Odd, rhythmic pulses in the rock that nobody could explain.” She turned to look at him, and her eyes were very wide. “It was you. It was you, singing to the river every night.”

He didn’t know what a sensor was. But he understood that her people had heard him, long before she fell. He had sung into the dark for an answer, and all that time their machines had been listening.

“And the flood,” she went on, more quietly. “The old channel that had been dry since you woke. It came the day after we sang together in the gardens. I felt the rock hum under my feet, and I thought I was imagining it.” She pressed her hand against the stone. “We did that, the two of us. We woke something up.”

“Yes,” he said. He had felt it in every current since that day. He simply hadn’t known what it was.

She laughed unsteadily and shook her head. “No wonder they sent Special Projects. If the river keeps waking up, Bentley isn’t going to need me to tell him it’s here.”

Neither of them said anything for a moment. Then she squared her shoulders and turned back to the rockfall.

“Again,” she said. “Try this one. It’s bigger.”

He put his hands on the next stone and hummed. It trembled, but it didn’t shift.

“Try it half a step lower,” she said, crouching beside him with her palm against the rock.

He frowned at her doubtfully. “I do not know what half a step is.”

She thought about it briefly. Then she grinned at him, a quick, wicked grin that he felt low in his belly.

“Lower,” she said. “Sexier.”

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he turned back to the stone, and put his hands on it, and sang lower. He sang it the way he had sung to her in the shallows, deep and slow and rough. The stone shivered beneath his hands. It shivered harder, and harder, and then all at once an entire seam of silt behind it gave way and poured loose in a soft grey rush. The stone slid free and rolled away down the slope.

Behind it there was darkness, and from somewhere in that darkness, very faintly, came the sound of water.

It went quickly after that. She told him where to sing, and he sang, and the rockfall came apart in front of them. Stones that had been locked together for longer than memory trembled and slid and tumbled away, and silt poured loose. The old channel opened in front of them, wide and dark and dry, climbing steeply up into the stone exactly where he had seen it in his mind.

At the top of it, there was a plug of packed silt and rubble where the last of the rockfall had jammed. Behind it, he could hear the water, trapped and waiting.

He braced himself on a ledge beside the plug, with her on the rock behind him, and put his hands on it. She put her hand on his back, between the ridges on either side of his spine, warm and steady.