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“It’s our time to waste.” He folded his hands again. “In the meantime, your survey team is suspended pending review. All of you. Mr. Mercer, Ms. Shah, Mr. Reed. And you, of course. We’ll need a full technical statement, your personal logs, and any data from your equipment. And Ms. Valente?” He leaned forward slightly. “I would think very carefully about that statement. Falsifying a survey report is a serious matter. It would be a shame to end such a promising career over a patch of ice.”

She sat quietly for a long moment. She looked at Harris, who was staring at the table. She looked at the woman from legal, and the blinking red light, and Bentley’s patient, pleasant smile.

She thought about eight years of never lying on a report and being the difficult one. She thought about load specifications and safety margins and standing her ground, and all the promotions she hadn’t gotten because she wouldn’t bend. Then she reached into the pocket of her borrowed jumpsuit, took out her GenCon ID, and set it face up on the table in front of him.

“I resign,” she said. “You can keep the beacon. It never worked properly anyway.”

She stood up, and nobody stopped her. She walked out through the door without looking back. It was the first time in her life she had walked out of a GenCon meeting before it was over. She could feel the ranger’s pale grey eyes on her all the way out.

Ethan was waiting in the corridor. He was leaning against the wall with his arms folded, and he straightened up the moment he saw her.

“You quit,” he said, after studying her face.

“I quit.”

“Tanjiri’s furious. She thinks you found something down there and kept it to yourself. She thinks you’re selling it to one of the independents.” He paused. “She’s wrong. Isn’t she?”

She didn’t answer. Ethan looked searchingly at her for a long moment. Then he shook his head slowly.

“I don’t know what you found down there,” he said quietly. “But I know you. You don’t lie on a report.”

She met his eyes steadily. “I do now.”

He didn’t say anything for a while. Then, to her surprise, he reached out and patted her shoulder, briefly and awkwardly.

“Then I hope it’s worth it,” he said, and walked away.

She heard about the collapse that night. She was sitting on the narrow bed in her temporary room in Iron Ridge, the one with the little window that looked out on the red dust. She hadn’t turned on the light. She had been sitting there for hours, watching the pale sun set and the stars come out, sharp and bright through the thin air, and trying not to think.

The old tablet she kept in her room chimed softly with a message from Lucas, of all people, who had never sent her anything in three weeks except work logs.

Thought you’d want to know that the entire lower section came down this afternoon, chamber and shaft and everything. Readings went crazy right before, like the rock was singing, and the team got out with about ten seconds to spare. Nobody hurt. But it opened cracks all the way back along the tube, right under the new housing block, in that rotten rock you kept flagging. The ranger’s closed the site and Bentley’s spitting nails. Guess you were right about the bolt.

She read it three times. Then she put the tablet down very carefully on the bed and pressed both hands over her mouth.

Like the rock was singing. She knew exactly what had happened. She could see it as clearly as if she had been standing there. Korrak in the darkness behind the passage, with his hands on the stone and his head thrown back, singing the rock down on top of the chamber and the shaft and the upper channel. He had protected the river and all of it, the way she had asked him to without ever saying the words.

The river was safe, for now. And the only way down to it was buried under a mountain of rock.

She had promised him faithfully. She had stood in the dark with his face in her hands and promised him she would come back. And now the shaft and the chamber were gone. The long, winding survey tube where she had first fallen was a death trap. GenCon had spent three days searching it and had found nothing. There was no other way down, not one that anyone knew.

He would think she wasn’t coming. He would sit by the falls with her lamp in his hands, and he would sing into the dark, and nothing would answer him. She curled up on her side on the narrow bed, facing the little window and the red dust and the bright, cold stars. And she cried until there was nothing left.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Frankie didn’t sleep. Somewhere in the cold, dead middle of the night she ran out of tears. She lay there for a while with her eyes burning and her head empty. Then she sat up, switched on the light, and reached for the old tablet.

She was an engineer. There was a problem in front of her, and lying on a narrow bed crying about it was not going to solve it.

She pulled up the survey maps, the ones she had drawn herself in her first week on the job. She traced the long line of the lava tube from its old mouth in the hills down to the access shaft under the housing block. She marked the side passage at marker fifteen, and the ledge, and the place where the rescue shaft had come down. Then she sat and stared at the screen and made herself think carefully about water.

Water had been eating at that ledge from below for a long time. She had seen the rotten stone herself. That meant warm, damp air had been rising through the rock beneath the tube, and air didn’t rise through solid basalt. Somewhere under that rubble there were cracks, and at least one of them went all the way down. Korrak had already taught her how to find it.

Left at the second echo. Follow the warm water.

By the time the pale sun came up over the red dust outside her window, she had filled the tablet with sketches. She had three places where the rubble might have left a gap, and a list of the equipment she would need. She had no money to buy any of it and no right to set foot on the site. She was trying to decide which of those problems to solve first when somebody knocked on her door.

She opened it with her eyes still swollen, expecting her landlord or Ethan, or a GenCon lawyer with a stack of forms. Instead, she found herself looking up at a gold star.