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Then the shaft closed around her, and she couldn’t see him anymore.

The surface was orange. She had forgotten that. She came up out of the shaft into the afternoon light. It was so pale and dusty and enormous that she squeezed her eyes shut and clung to the harness while hands reached out to drag her onto the platform. The sky was a hazy pink overhead. The wind was thin and cold and full of grit. Rovers were parked in a ring around the drill rig. There were more people than she had seen in weeks, and all of them had turned to stare at her.

After the gardens, it all seemed impossibly big and impossibly bare. There was nothing growing anywhere, and there was no sound of water.

Someone unclipped her from the harness, and her knees gave out for real this time. She sat down hard on the edge of the platform, and nobody seemed surprised.

“Well,” said a familiar voice. “Look who decided to show up.”

Tanjiri Shah was standing over her with her arms folded, and her dark eyes were bright above her mask. Behind her, Lucas was hovering awkwardly with a water pouch in his hand. He held it out silently. She took it, and he nodded once and looked quickly away, and she realized with a small shock that his ears had gone red.

“I told them,” Tanjiri said smugly. “I told everybody you were too stubborn to die. Nobody listened to me.”

Frankie laughed, and it came out wet and shaky. “Welcome to my life.”

Tanjiri crouched down beside her. For a moment, Frankie thought Tanjiri was going to hug her, which would have been a first. Instead the geologist looked down at Frankie’s boots and frowned.

They were soaked. The dark stain of water ran all the way up past her ankles, and her suit was damp to the knee.

“Your boots are wet,” Tanjiri said slowly.

Her heart skipped a beat. “Ice melt,” she said. “I told Bentley. There was a patch at the back of the cavern. I had to stand in the runoff to fill my bottle.”

“Huh.” Tanjiri studied the boots for a moment longer. Then she looked up at Frankie’s face, and there was something thoughtful in her eyes that Frankie didn’t like at all. “Must have been a big patch.”

“Not big enough,” she said, and took a long drink from the pouch so she wouldn’t have to say anything else.

They put her in the back of a medical rover with Ethan and the medic, and the door sealed behind them with a hiss. The medic helped her peel off her mask. The cabin air was warm and stale and smelled of disinfectant. It filled her lungs easily, and it tasted of nothing at all. She sat on the narrow bench with the thermal blanket around her shoulders. Through the small rear window, she watched the rig and the rovers and the dusty hills fall away behind them.

Somewhere under those hills, the river was still running. Somewhere beneath them, he was alone in the dark, holding her lamp.

“Frankie.” Ethan was watching her from the bench opposite. He had taken off his mask too, and he looked older than she remembered, and very tired. “How did you do it? Really?”

She had known someone would ask. She had been rehearsing the answer ever since she spoke to Bentley. So she told him about the collapse, and the long fall, and the cold. She told him about the ice at the back of the cavern, and the protein bars, and the lamp she had kept alive with spare batteries and sheer stubbornness. Most of it was true, and she made herself look him in the eye while she said it.

Ethan listened quietly all the way through. When she was finished, he didn’t say anything for a long moment.

“I meant what I said on the beacon,” he said at last. “About the bolt. You were right, and I should have listened.” He rubbed a hand tiredly over his face. “But you went down that side passage alone, Frankie. Off comms, with nobody on your line. If one of us had done that, you would have had our heads.”

She opened her mouth to argue, out of habit, and slowly closed it again.

“I know,” she said quietly. “I told myself that, the first morning. I wanted to say it before anyone else did.”

“Yeah.” The corner of his mouth lifted. “Tanjiri’s going to love hearing you say it.”

He went quiet again, studying her face, and his frown slowly deepened.

“You’re different,” he said, and her hands tightened on the blanket.

“I’ve been living in a hole, Ethan.”

“That’s not what I mean.” He studied her face, frowning, as if she were a reading that didn’t make sense. “You came up out of that shaft looking like you’d left something behind.”

She didn’t answer, because she couldn’t. She turned her face towards the window instead and watched the dust roll away behind the wheels. After a while Ethan stopped waiting. He leaned his head back against the wall and closed his eyes.

She didn’t close hers. She sat there with her hands knotted in the blanket and her wet boots quickly drying, and she thought about two points of blue light in the dark, watching her go.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN