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The river did not know she was gone. It ran on the same as always. It poured over the falls and churned in the deep pool beneath them, and it slid through the long carved channel and down the spillways and out across the gardens. The new water from the old branch came roaring down to join it, cold and clean, and the river took it in and carried it on. It didn’t care that there was one less heartbeat beside it in the dark, and it never had.

Korrak cared, and he soon found that he cared about nothing else.

He went back to his work stubbornly, because he didn’t know what else to do. On the first night after she left, he waded into the channels below the gardens. He cleared the silt the way he always had, with his hands and his tail and the low hum in his throat. He did it again the next night, and the next, and he listened patiently at the spillways. He pried stones from the channel walls where the new flow had loosened them, and set them aside. He checked the overflow in the notched wall to make sure it was running clear.

It was what he had done before she came, and it was what he was, so it should have been enough. It wasn’t nearly enough. Everywhere he went, she had been there first.

He passed the smooth slab by the stream where she had sat and eaten her tiny pieces of food and talked to her tools. He passed the little tower of stones where she had left her message, and the basin where she had found his leaf cup. He went into the gardens, and there was the rock where she had sat with her bare feet in the pool and whispered that she didn’t have to leave. There was the hollow he had made for her, with the vine curtain still hanging across its mouth, and the dip where she had slept still pressed into the moss.

He didn’t go into the hollow. He stood outside it for a long time on the first night, and then he turned away.

He slept by the falls instead, on the ledge in the warm place behind the water where he had slept before she came. Her stone was still there, the smooth grey one with the marks she had scratched into it. He had hidden the grey tablet and the little bottle of water beside it, as she had asked, high up where the spray couldn’t reach. He had learned to read the marks since then. She had taught him one night in the gardens, laughing when he got the letters wrong, and now he could read them easily. THANK YOU.

He lay on the ledge and held the stone in one hand and her lamp in the other, and he didn’t sleep.

He didn’t turn the lamp on. On the second night, he wanted to so badly that his hands shook. He wanted to see the clean white light blaze up in the dark the way it had when she first pressed the switch, and remember her face when she looked at him across it. But he knew now that the light didn’t last forever. He had watched her lights fade and yellow and die. And she had told him to keep it for her.

So he kept it carefully, and he didn’t use any of the light. He saved it for her, in case.

In case. He turned the words over and over in his mind until they wore smooth. She had said she would come back. She had said it fiercely, with her hands on his face and her eyes wet, and he had believed her. He still believed her, most of the time. But the nights were long, and in the dark middle of them, a colder voice began to speak.

Of course, she had gone back to her people. She had a world up there, full of light and domes and windows and people who belonged to her, and who had dug through the rock for days to find her. The man called Ethan had held her and wept. They had wrapped her in blankets and carried her up into the light. And why would she come back down into the dark, to the cold and the thin air and a creature who could barely speak her language, when she had all of that?

She belonged on the surface, and he had known that from the start. He had been a fool to let himself forget it.

Late on the second night, when the cold voice would not be quiet, he went into the hollow after all. He didn’t mean to. He had gone down to the gardens to clear a drift of leaves from the first pool. When he was done, he found himself standing at the curtain of vines with his hand already lifting it aside. He stood there for a long moment. Then he ducked his head and went in.

It still smelled of her. The scent was fainter than it had been, but it was there in the moss and the broad pale leaves, warm and sweet and salty. It hit him so sharply that he had to put his hand on the rock to steady himself.

She had left almost nothing behind. She had taken her pack and her tools and her silver blanket, and her careful rows of belongings were gone. But in the corner, tucked against the stone, lay a small, neat pile of the wrappers from her food. She had folded every one of them and kept them. She had told him once, laughing at herself, that she couldn’t bring herself to leave trash anywhere, not even at the bottom of the world.

He picked one up and held it for a long time. It crinkled softly in his fingers.

Then he lay down in the hollow where she had slept, in the soft place her body had pressed into the moss, and he curled around the empty space where she should have been.

He tried to sing her song. It was the new one, the one that had come out of him in the warm shallows with her lying across his chest. He sang it softly, so softly that the vines barely stirred, but warm and deep and searching. For a few moments, with her scent all around him, it was almost as though she were there. He could almost feel her weight against him and the tickle of her hair under his chin. He could almost hear her humming along, off-key and wandering, the way she always did when she thought he wasn’t listening.

The song climbed and swelled and came to the same place it always came to. Then it stopped.

He tried again. He tried a different note, and then another, and every one of them was wrong. They fell away into the dark, and the silence came rushing in after them.

He had thought the song was unfinished because he didn’t know yet how it ended. Lying there with the wrapper clasped in his hand, he began to understand that there was more to it than that. It was her song. It had come out of him because of her, and without her, it could not go anywhere at all.

He lay in the hollow until the moss began to brighten. Then he got up and went back to the falls, and he didn’t go into the hollow again.

On the third night, he sang. He went to the edge of the deep pool beneath the falls, where he had always gone, and he tipped his head back and sang into the dark. It was the old song, the lonely one, the one he had sung every night for all the long months before she came. He sang it the way he always had, and he listened for an answer.

Nothing answered.

He sang it again, more softly. The falls roared and the water churned. Far above, in the sealed chambers, the new springs murmured to themselves. But no voice rose to meet his. No off-key humming came wandering out of the dark, finding its way in and out of his notes. He knew perfectly well there wouldn’t be, but he sang anyway.

When he stopped, the silence afterwards was worse than it had ever been. Before she came, the silence had simply been the way things were. He had not known there was anything else. Now he knew better. Now the silence was a place where she should have been, and she wasn’t there.

“Lirra,” he said softly, into the dark. Nothing sang back.

He crouched wearily at the edge of the pool with his arms wrapped around his knees and his tail curled tight around his feet, and he felt something shift inside him. It was cold and hard and dangerous, and it frightened him.

He remembered this too, now, from the flood of memory that had come with the springs. His people had spoken of it. When one of them found the voice that answered their song and then lost it, something in them could go wrong. They grew restless, and then they grew wild. The loneliness turned inwards and sharpened, and became something that bit and clawed and forgot the difference between the river and the rock. His people had feared it deeply, and they had kept each other close so that it would never happen. He had sung alone for all those months and never felt it, because he had not known then what he was missing.