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He felt the edge of it now, in the dark. A restless, snarling heat under his skin that wanted to tear and break. It wanted to climb up through the stone and find her and drag her back down, whether she wanted to come or not. It wanted to hurt whoever had taken her.

He pressed his forehead hard against his knees and held tightly to the stone in his hand until the heat faded. It faded slowly. It didn’t go away.

On the fourth day, they came back. This time the voices came echoing down the old channel, as close as they had been before. He went swiftly up the old channel, silent in the shadows beside the rushing water, and crouched in the dark below the passage where Frankie had left him.

There were more of them this time, and they were obviously better equipped. He could see their lights through the crack in the wall, bright and harsh, and he could hear them moving around the dry chamber. Their voices were hard and quick. They weren’t searching for anyone now. They were searching eagerly for something.

“…moisture readings are way above baseline in here. It’s coming from behind that wall.”

“Get the scanner on it.”

“There’s a crack. Looks like it opens up. I can hear something.”

“Water?”

“Sounds like it.”

“Widen it. Bentley wants eyes on whatever’s back there before the end of the shift.”

His claws slid out of his fingertips before he felt it happen. They were going to open the passage. They were going to come through into the old channel with their lights and their machines, and they would hear the water and follow it down. They would find the spillways and the falls and the river and the gardens. They would find the dome with the map of all the rivers glowing on its ceiling. They would take all of it apart, the way Frankie had said they would, with her face white and her voice shaking.

She had lied for this. She had stood bravely under their lights with her heart breaking and told her people there was nothing down here, so that the river would be safe. She had given up the part of herself she had always been proudest of. She had done it for him, and for the river, and for all of it. For us, he had told her, and she had believed him.

He knew what he had to do.

He held her lamp against his chest with one arm, placed his other palm on the stone of the channel wall beside the passage, and felt for the rock above it. It was dangerously soft. The water from the waking springs had soaked into it and weakened it, the same way it had weakened the rock for the drill. He could feel it through his palm. The dry chamber and the upper end of the old channel and the shaft the drill had cut all hung together in that soft, wet stone like fruit on a vine.

If it fell, it would seal the chamber and the shaft. It would bury the upper end of the old channel under a hill of broken rock, and nobody would ever come down it again. Nobody at all.

He stood there with his hand on the stone and understood exactly what that meant. The shaft was the only way he knew of from the surface to the river. It was the way she had gone. It was the way she would have to come back, if she ever came back at all.

If he brought the rock down, he would be closing the door behind her forever. She had been angry with him, in the hollow, for deciding what was right without asking her. He was about to do it again, and this time she wasn’t even there to be angry.

On the other side of the wall, a machine began to whine. He felt the stone shiver as they set it against the crack.

He closed his eyes, and he began to sing. He sang low and deep, the way she had taught him, and then lower still. He went beneath the notes that loosened silt and woke the springs, down to the ones that reached into the heart of the stone and found where it was tired and weak and ready to let go. He felt the rock answer. It trembled and groaned, and fine dust trickled down from the roof of the channel and pattered onto his shoulders.

On the other side of the wall, the voices changed.

“What the hell is that?”

“Readings are spiking. Readings are spiking all over the place!”

“It’s the ceiling. Something’s moving in the ceiling.”

“Pull back. Pull back! Everybody out, now!”

He heard them run, heard boots on stone and shouting and the frantic whine of their machine. He held the note and held it until his throat burned and his vision swam and the stone was screaming around him. He held it until the last of the voices had faded up the shaft.

Then, finally, he let it go, and the rock came down. It came down with a roar that shook the channel and the falls cavern below and the gardens beyond. It came down in a great grinding avalanche of stone and dust, filling the dry chamber, crushing the shaft and sealing the gap. It buried the upper reaches of the old channel under a mountain of rock.

The noise went on and on. Dust billowed down the channel and rolled over him in a choking cloud. The water surged and changed its course, finding a new way down through the rubble, the way water always did.

And then, slowly, it was quiet.

He lay on the wet stone where he had fallen. He didn’t remember falling. He was shaking so hard his teeth chattered, and he was colder than he had ever been in his life. Every muscle in his body ached as though he had been carrying the weight of the mountain himself. His throat was painfully raw, and when he tried to lift his head, the channel swam around him.

The lamp was still clutched protectively against his chest. He had not let it go. He lay there in the dark, with the dust settling slowly around him and the water murmuring through the rubble, and he looked up at the wall of broken stone where the passage had been.