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For a long moment after the silence, neither of them moved. Frankie lay on the wet stone shelf beside the channel with Korrak braced over her, his hands still on her waist, and her heart thudding against her ribs. Her body was still trembling, the cold spray beading on her bare skin. The water roared past below them, white and fast. Somewhere above them, the springs were murmuring as they filled, but the drill had stopped. After days of that slow, steady pounding, the silence in the rock was so loud it hurt her ears.

Then she heard the voices. They were faint at first, drifting down from somewhere high above, thin and echoing, the way sound carried through a long tunnel. Men were calling to each other. A motor whined, and one metallic clank followed another.

Then came the light, spilling down through a crack in the rock above the channel in a thin white shaft. After so many days of soft lichen glow, it was so bright that it made her eyes water. It swung slowly back and forth, and dust drifted through it, glittering.

“They’re here,” she whispered. “Oh God, Korrak. They’re already here.”

She scrambled up, her hands shaking so badly she could barely drag her suit back onto her body. He helped her with the fastening, his big fingers careful and quick, and neither of them said a word. Then she pulled her mask back up over her nose.

It wasn’t supposed to be now. Bentley had said four or five days. She had thought there would be time to reach the upper chamber and signal from there, and time to plan what she would say, and time to say goodbye. But the waking springs had softened the rock, and the drill had punched straight through. Now there were men with lights in the stone above her, and there was no time at all.

She looked up at the crack, and the light, and her mind raced. The drill had come down somewhere above the channel. If she stayed here, if she waited for them to come looking, they would follow the sound of the water. They would climb down into the old channel with their lights and their equipment, and they would find the spillways, and the falls, and the river. They would find him.

She had to go to them. She had to go up, right now, before they came down. She turned quickly to Korrak. He was already looking at her, and she saw in his eyes that he had understood before she did. His face was calm, but his hands tightened on her waist.

“Up there,” she said. “There’s a chamber, isn’t there? Where the drill came through?”

He nodded reluctantly. “Dry place. Beside the water. Not the springs.”

“Can you get me there? Without them seeing you?”

For a moment he didn’t answer. His jaw clenched, and something moved in his eyes, dark and raw and painful. Then he nodded again, once.

“Yes,” he said.

He carried her up the old channel, and she didn’t argue this time. The slope was steep and slick with spray, and the new water was racing down beside them in a white torrent. She would never have made it by herself. He went up the channel with her cradled against his chest, sure-footed and silent, finding holds in the wet rock that she couldn’t even see. She held onto his neck and pressed her cheek against his shoulder and breathed him in, clean water and green spice, and tried to memorize the feel of him.

Near the top, where the channel bent sharply to the left, he stopped. There was a short, narrow passage in the right-hand wall, barely wide enough for her to slip through. Beyond it, the light was brighter. The voices were clear now. A man was giving hard, clipped orders, and someone was coughing.

And someone else was calling her name.

“Frankie! Frankie, can you hear me?”

It was Ethan, and her chest suddenly ached.

Korrak set her down on her feet in the shadow of the gap. The water rushed past behind him, loud enough to cover their voices, but he kept his low anyway.

“Go,” he said. “Safe.”

She stared up at him helplessly. The light from the gap fell across his face in a thin white stripe, and she could see everything. The sapphire blue of his eyes. The fine blue-green scales along his jaw, still faintly flushed from everything the drill had interrupted. The tight, careful line of his mouth, as if he was holding something inside and couldn’t let it out.

He wasn’t going to ask her to stay. He was never going to ask.

“Korrak,” she said, and her voice broke.

Then she remembered what was in her pack, and her stomach dropped. Her tablet was in there, with every note and sketch she had made of the gardens and the spillways and the map on the dome. So was the sealed vial of river water from her first morning. They would take all of it from her the moment she walked through that gap.

She dug them out with shaking hands and pushed them urgently at him. “Hide these. Somewhere dry. Don’t let anyone find them.” Then she held down the button on her wrist unit until the screen blinked, and every reading it had logged since she fell was gone.

She didn’t know what else to say. There was too much, and there was no time for any of it. So she reached into her pack one more time and pulled out the lamp. It was the spare lamp, the one she had lost in the pool beneath the falls on the first night. The one he had dived for and kept and given back to her the night she first saw his face. It was the first light he had ever seen of her.

She pressed it into his hands.

“Keep it for me,” she whispered. “I’ll come back for it.”

He looked down at the lamp in his hands, and then back at her. He didn’t say anything, but his fingers closed around it slowly, the way they closed around her.

“I’ll come back,” she said again, fiercely. “Do you understand me? I’ll come back. I promise.”