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The passage was gone, and so were the chamber and the shaft. The river was safe. And there was no way back to it from the world above. No way for anyone to come down into the dark ever again. There was no way for her.

He held the lamp gently against his chest, and he didn’t turn it on, and he didn’t make a sound.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The medical bay at the GenCon field station was relentlessly white. The walls were white, and the floor, and the narrow bed with its crisp white sheets, and the bright panel of light in the ceiling that never quite switched off. After nearly two weeks of lichen glow and dark water, it made Frankie’s eyes ache. She lay in the bed with a monitor clipped to her finger, breathing the station’s recycled air. It was clean and cool and faintly metallic, and after the green air of the gardens, it tasted of nothing at all.

They kept her there for three days. The doctors were brisk and kind and not particularly interested in anything but her numbers. She was a little underweight, and her bruised ribs had healed badly. Her oxygen saturation was lower than they liked. But she wasn’t dehydrated, and one of the doctors frowned at that line on her chart for a long time before he moved on. They fed her protein shakes and real soup, and brought her a cup of coffee on the second morning as if they were giving her a medal. She drank it and felt nothing.

She kept thinking about the dark fruit, and the green air, and the way it had felt to breathe without anything on her face. She kept thinking about two points of blue light in the shadows, watching her rise out of the darkness. At night she lay awake and listened to the hum of the station’s oxygen generators, and she missed the sound of the river so much that it hurt to breathe.

On the fourth morning, they came for her debrief.

It was held in a small, windowless room at the end of the station’s main corridor. There was a table, and three chairs on one side of it, and one chair on the other. There was a recording light blinking red in the corner, and there was Bruce Bentley.

He was older than she had expected from his voice. He looked to be in his late fifties, with silver hair cropped close to his skull and a face that was a little too smooth for his age. There was a GenCon Special Projects pin on the collar of his immaculate suit. He rose when she came in and smiled and shook her hand, and asked how she was feeling, and he sounded as if he meant it.

She didn’t trust him for a second.

There were two others at the table with him. One was a woman from GenCon’s legal department who didn’t give her name. The other was Frankie’s supervisor, Harris, who wouldn’t meet her eyes. And standing against the wall behind them, straight and quiet, was a man she didn’t know.

He was big, bigger than anyone else in the room, with close-cropped dark hair and a long brown duster. There was a gold star pinned to his chest, and a thin line of silver ran along one side of his jaw and down his throat, as fine as a scar. His eyes were a pale, steady grey. They rested on her for a moment, and then moved away.

He was a cyborg ranger. She had seen them around Iron Ridge, riding their robot horses through the dust, keeping the peace in the settlements. She had never been in a room with one before.

“Just an observer,” Bentley said dismissively, following her glance. “V-512 assisted with your search. Please, sit.”

She sat down reluctantly.

The first hour was surprisingly easy. Bentley asked about the collapse, and the fall, and the cavern, and she told him. She had been rehearsing it for three days, and she knew it by heart. She described an old lava tube with a high, stable ceiling, basalt walls and a rubble floor. She had rationed her protein bars. She had found a patch of old ice and melted it to drink. She had heard the drill and followed the sound. She had found the dry chamber, and they had found her.

It was almost all true, and it was missing everything that mattered.

Bentley listened to all of it with his hands folded and his head tilted attentively. He nodded in the right places. When she finished, he was quiet for a moment. Then he reached down beside his chair and set a tablet on the table and turned it around to face her.

It showed a scan of the rock, and she recognized it immediately. Layers of basalt, fractures, voids, the long curving line of the survey tube. And below it, spreading out through the stone in a wide, branching web, a haze of bright blue.

“Our scans show moisture signatures, Ms. Valente,” Bentley said pleasantly. “Significant ones. Explain that.”

She looked at the blue haze. She knew exactly what it was. She could have traced the old channel through it with her finger, climbing from the river towards the dry chamber.

She lifted her eyes to his.

“Ice,” she said. “Lava tubes trap it. You found my drinking water.” She pushed the tablet back across the table. “Your instruments are almost as bad as your beacons.”

The woman from legal made a disapproving sound and Harris winced, but Bentley only smiled.

“That’s a great deal of ice,” he said.

“It’s a great deal of lava tube.”

“Hmm.” He tapped the tablet thoughtfully. “Well. Whatever it is, GenCon is going to find out. As of this morning, Special Projects is taking over the survey of the entire area. Under Section 7.3.2 of the Martian Colonial Code, GenCon has the authority to override existing claims and conduct environmental safety assessments wherever there’s a risk to settlement infrastructure.” He smiled again. “And clearly, there’s a risk. We nearly lost you.”

“There’s nothing down there to assess.”

“Then you won’t mind us looking.”

She forced herself to shrug, despite her pulse thundering in her ears. “I can’t stop you from wasting your time.”