Page 48 of River Dragon’s Song

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Then she picked up the tablet and turned it towards him, with all her sketches from the night before.

“I think there’s another way down,” she said. “He collapsed the shaft, but the water has to go somewhere. GenCon searched that tube for days and never found it.”

V-512 took the tablet and studied the sketches for a long moment. “GenCon searched it for a woman,” he said. “They did not know what else to look for.” He handed the tablet back to her, and this time it was very nearly a smile. “You do. Tell me what you need.”

“I need to get onto the site,” she said. “And I can’t. Bentley told me yesterday that GenCon can override any claim it likes.”

“He could, yesterday morning.” V-512 put his hat back on. “Yesterday afternoon the tube cracked beneath a housing block that forty people are waiting to move into. That is not a survey matter any longer. It is a matter of settler safety, and settler safety falls under ranger jurisdiction. I closed the site last night.” He paused. “Your reports helped. Every anchor you flagged is in the record, with the date. Mr. Mercer brought them to me himself.”

Her eyes stung all over again. Ethan had done that.

“Bentley will fight it,” she said.

“He already tried. He ran his scans again at first light, to show the colonial government what was at stake.” The ranger’s grey eyes gleamed faintly. “They are blank. Whatever his instruments saw down there, it is gone.”

She stared at him. Then she understood, and she had to press her hand to her mouth. The upper channel was buried. The new water had found a deeper way down through the rubble, the way water always did, and it had taken the blue haze on Bentley’s map with it. When Korrak sealed the shaft, he had hidden the river too.

“He has a lost shaft, a cracked housing block, and an empty map,” V-512 said. “He cannot fight a closure with that. But do not mistake him, Ms. Valente. He knows what he saw, and he is not a man who forgets.”

It took eight long days. In that time, she had more video calls than she had had in the rest of her life put together. Most of them were with Dr. Addie Montgomery. She was small and blonde and brilliant, and even Frankie had heard about her work with nanite technology. She also asked sharp, clever questions about mineral rights and access easements and structural surveys.

“We’ve done this before,” Addie told her on the first call. “The fact that the rangers closed the site voids GenCon’s survey license, which means the claim on those hills reverts to open status in ten days. Nobody else will want it. It’s a collapsed lava tube under a building site nobody’s allowed to finish.” She smiled. “Except us. Bentley has until then to find grounds to contest it, and he’s looking. If he doesn’t find any, it’ll belong to a mining cooperative that only exists on paper, owned by a holding company that doesn’t exist anywhere. The only person with legal right of entry will be one very stubborn structural engineer.”

Frankie laughed for the first time in days. “Why are you doing this?”

Addie glanced away from the screen, towards the sound of children’s voices. When she looked back, her eyes were soft.

“Because GenCon isn’t going to determine the future of this planet,” she said. “And because love is what really matters.”

Frankie opened her mouth to argue, and then she closed it again. She hadn’t said the word, even to herself. But she had cried herself to sleep most nights since she came up, and she woke every morning reaching for someone who wasn’t there. She had walked away from her career without a second thought. There really wasn’t any other word for it.

“Yeah,” she said softly. “I guess it is.”

Bentley found her on the sixth day. She was coming out of the claims office with V-512, a stack of forms under her arm, when she saw Bentley waiting in the dusty lane. He was standing beside a GenCon rover with his hands clasped behind his back, as neat and patient as he had been in the debrief.

“Ms. Valente,” he said pleasantly. “Ranger.”

“Mr. Bentley,” V-512 said. He didn’t seem to move, but somehow he was suddenly standing a little in front of her.

“I won’t keep you. I only wanted to tell you that I’ve withdrawn GenCon’s objection to the closure.” He smiled his polished smile at her, and it didn’t reach his eyes. “I could hardly do otherwise. My scans are clean. There’s nothing under those hills but broken rock, exactly as you said.”

Her heart was beating so hard that she was sure the ranger could hear it. “Then we’re finished,” she said.

“You are finished with GenCon, certainly.” He glanced briefly at the forms under her arm, and then back at her face. “GenCon isn’t finished with those hills. Water doesn’t simply vanish, Ms. Valente. Neither do engineers who can live for nearly two weeks on six protein bars. The file stays open.”

“Look wherever you like,” V-512 said calmly. “You will do it from outside our jurisdiction.”

“Of course.” Bentley inclined his head politely to both of them. Then he climbed into his rover, and the door sealed behind him, and it rolled away down the lane.

She let out a long, shaky breath. “He knows.”

“No, but he suspects,” V-512 said. “He will keep digging, and one day he will dig somewhere else.” He looked down at her gravely. “That is why there are more of us than there used to be.”

On the ninth morning, V-512 drove her out past the edge of town in a battered rover. The new housing block stood dark and empty behind its seals. The GenCon equipment was completely gone. The drill rig had been dismantled and hauled away, and both shafts had been capped with slabs of scrap metal and warning signs. V-512 kept driving, up into the hills, until the track ran out at the old mouth of the lava tube. Her team had never used it, because the access shaft had been so much closer. Someone had strung a rope barrier across it, with a sign that read DANGER, UNSTABLE, NO ENTRY.

She stepped deliberately over the rope. She had a new helmet with a new lamp. She had a pack with water and food and a thermal blanket and a first-aid kit, and a new beacon that she had very little faith in. She had a map of the survey tube in her head that she had drawn and redrawn a hundred times in the last eight days. She had worked out where the ledge had collapsed, and where the rubble would have fallen, and where the water might have found its way through.

And she had an advantage GenCon didn’t have. She knew what to listen for.