Page 49 of River Dragon’s Song

“I will wait here,” V-512 said behind her. “For as long as it takes.”

She turned and looked at him. He stood beside the rover with his hat on and his duster stirring in the thin wind, and his grey eyes were steady.

“Thank you,” she said. “For everything.”

“The claim opens tomorrow,” he said. “Addie will file the moment it does. If Bentley finds a way to contest it, you will hear from me on that beacon.” He paused. “Bring him to meet us. One day.”

She smiled, and turned back to the dark mouth of the tunnel, and switched on her lamp, and went in.

It took her most of the day to reach the collapse. The tube was long and dark and winding, with loose rock underfoot and the ceiling pressing close. Only the last stretch of it was the section she remembered, and her stripes of yellow paint were still bright on the anchors. At the place where the ledge had given way, there was nothing but a steep slope of rubble falling away into the dark, and a cold, still silence.

GenCon had searched here for three days, and they had found nothing. She knelt at the edge of the rubble and closed her eyes. She took off her glove and pressed her bare hand against the rock. And then she clapped, once, sharp and clear, and listened.

The echo came back quickly on the left, where the tube wall was solid, and slowly on the right, where the rubble had fallen. And somewhere below the left wall came a faint second echo, slower and softer than the first. It was an opening, a space in the dark that GenCon’s instruments had never found, because they had never known to listen for it.

She clapped again, turned her head, and listened. The same slow, soft echo answered her, down and to the left.

She climbed down into the rubble towards it. It was slow and hard and frightening. Twice she had to stop and press herself against the rock while her head swam and black spots danced at the edges of her vision. But she kept going stubbornly. She found a gap between two fallen slabs that was just wide enough to squeeze through. Beyond it was a narrow crack in the wall of the old tube that led down.

And in the bottom of the crack, trickling over the stone, was a thin thread of water. She pulled off her glove again and put her fingers in it. It was warm.

She knelt in the dark with her hand in the water and her heart pounding, and she laughed, a small, shaky, breathless sound that echoed softly off the stone.

“Left at the second echo,” she whispered to herself. “Follow the warm water.”

Then she got up, and ducked into the crack, and followed it down.

The crack went down for a long way. It was narrow and twisting and steep, barely wide enough for her shoulders in places. The warm water ran along the bottom of it in a thin, glinting thread. She went down on her hands and knees and sometimes on her backside, bracing her boots against the walls and lowering herself carefully from ledge to ledge. Her new lamp was bright and white, and it made everything look harsh and strange. After a while she switched it off to save the battery, and sat in the dark to let her eyes adjust, and felt her heart slowly settle.

It was so dark that she couldn’t see her hand in front of her face. But she could hear the water. So she followed it. She kept one hand trailing in the warm thread and the other on the rock wall beside her. She moved slowly, the way he had taught her, feeling for each step before she trusted it. When the crack forked, she stopped and clapped and listened, and waited for the echoes to come back. When the water split, she put her fingers in each branch and followed the warmer one.

She still walked into a wall, more than once. The first time, she hit it hard enough to see stars, and she sat down with her hands over her face and swore at it until her voice cracked. The second time, she only sighed and said, “Okay,” and felt her way around it.

Her head began to swim after the first hour. The crack kept climbing and then dropping away again, and her mask couldn’t keep up with her. Black spots bloomed whenever she moved too fast. So she stopped moving fast. She sat down whenever she needed to and breathed slowly through the mask until the spots faded, and then she got up and went on.

She was more frightened than she had ever been in her life. The first time she came down here, she had been hurt and lost and alone, but she hadn’t known what was waiting in the dark. She hadn’t known how much she had to lose. Now she knew exactly. Every time the crack narrowed, or the echoes came back wrong, or the warm water vanished for a few terrible meters into the gravel, she thought about the rock coming down. She thought about how easily it could come down again, and how nobody would ever know.

So she started to hum. She didn’t decide to. It simply came out of her, low and shaky. She always hummed on a job site when things were going badly. It steadied her hands and kept her mind on the work. And somewhere along the way, she found that she was humming his song.

It was the new song, the one he had sung in the warm shallows with her lying across his chest, the one he said wasn’t finished. She had heard it so many times since then that she knew most of it by heart. She couldn’t sing it the way he did. Her voice was too high and too thin, and she kept losing the notes and finding them again. But she hummed it anyway, over and over, as she crawled and climbed and felt her way down. It made the dark feel less empty, and it made her feel as though he was close.

Hours later, the air began to change. She noticed it first as a faint warmth on her face, and then as a smell. It was soft and green and alive, drifting up through the crack towards her. She stopped where she was, crouched on a ledge with her hand in the water, and breathed it in through her mask, and her eyes filled with tears.

Then, finally, she saw the light. It was very faint, only a soft blue-green glow at the bottom of the crack, but after the dark it looked brighter than the sun. She scrambled towards it, slipping and sliding, no longer caring about her hands or her knees. The crack widened, and the glow grew stronger, and suddenly the walls on either side of her fell away and she stumbled out onto smooth, wet stone.

The gardens spread out in front of her.

She stood there swaying next to the thin stream of water and looked at all of it. The pools and the vines and the dark fruit. The soft glow of the moss. The river, running quietly away into the dark. It was all exactly as she had left it, as if she had never been gone.

She pulled her mask down around her neck with shaking hands and took a long, deep breath of green air. Then she switched on her lamp and looked for him.

He wasn’t there.

The gardens were silent except for the water. There was no tall figure crouched by the pools and no gleam of blue-green scales. There was no deep voice saying her name. She listened, and heard nothing but the trickle of the water over the stone.

What if he had gone? What if the collapse had hurt him? What if he had given up waiting, and gone somewhere deeper, somewhere she could never follow?

She made herself breathe. Then she looked down at the warm water running away from her feet towards the river. The river carried everything down here. It had carried her, the very first night. So she took a shaky breath, and she began to hum his song again, softly, over the water.