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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Korrak had lost track of the nights since the rock came down. He only knew that the moss had brightened and dimmed many times, and that he had watched it without caring. He had stopped clearing the channels. The silt was building up in the side channel beyond the spillway, the one he had cleared while Frankie watched him. He knew it, and he couldn’t make himself go there. He had stopped going to the gardens. He ate when his body made him, a few of the purple leaves from the edge of the pool, and he tasted nothing.

Most of the time, he lay on the ledge behind the falls with her stone in one hand and her lamp in the other, and he listened to the water.

The wildness inside him had grown. He could feel it prowling under his skin. It made him restless, and it made him snarl at the falls for being too loud and at the moss for being too bright. Once he had found himself on his feet with his claws out and his tail lashing, and no memory of how he had gotten there. He had made himself lie down again. He had held the stone until his hand ached.

He knew what was happening to him. He remembered what his people had said. He did not know how long he had before he stopped remembering. So he lay in the dark and listened to the river, because it was all he had left to love. And that was how he heard her.

At first he thought it was the falls. The water made many sounds, and he knew all of them. The deep roar of the fall itself, the churning in the pool below it, the hundred small voices of the channels running away into the dark. He had listened to them for so long that he could have sung every one of them back.

This sound was not one of them.

It was faint, and it came through the water instead of the air. It was a thin, wavering thread of sound that rose up from somewhere downstream and trembled faintly through the stone of the ledge beneath him. He lifted his head, and it stopped. He lay down again, and after a moment it came back.

It was a voice, humming.

His heart slammed against his ribs. It was humming his song. It wasn’t the old lonely one. It was the new one that had come out of him in the warm shallows the night the drill first sounded, with Frankie sprawled across his chest. The song that had stopped in the same place every time, unfinished. Someone was singing it back to him through the river. And they were singing it badly, wandering off the notes and finding them again, sour on the high ones and a little too slow.

He knew that voice instantly. He would have known it anywhere, in any dark, under any stone.

It was not possible, because the shaft was gone. He had brought it down himself. He had lain in the dust afterwards and understood exactly what he had done. There was no way down and no way back for her.

He was surely dreaming. Or perhaps it was the wildness inside him, finally reaching up to take his mind. His people had said that happened, at the end. That the lonely ones began to hear voices in the water. He didn’t care. Even if it were only a dream, he would follow it anyway.

He was in the pool before he knew he had moved. The lamp was clutched against his chest and her stone was in his pouch, and he was swimming, driving himself downstream with long, powerful strokes of his tail. He went through the channel beneath the falls and down the long carved passage and past the spillways, faster than he had ever swum in his life. Every so often he stopped and held himself against the current and listened.

It was still there, and it was growing stronger. It was coming from the gardens.

He came up out of the river at the edge of the first pool, and he saw her. She was standing at the far side of the gardens. A warm stream came trickling out of a narrow crack in the wall there and ran down across the stone to join the river. Her helmet was on her head, and the light from it shone down on the water at her feet. Her mask was pulled down around her neck. There was a pack on her back that he had never seen before, and dust on her grey covering and her hands and her face.

She was humming his song, softly, with her eyes on the water, and she stopped at the place where it always stopped. She frowned and tried the last notes again, as if she was trying to find the way.

He couldn’t move. He stood in the shallows with the water streaming off him and the lamp clutched against his chest, and he couldn’t breathe. He was desperately afraid that if he moved, she would vanish, the way the dreams always did.

Then she lifted her head and saw him. The humming stopped, and the wildness suddenly surged up in him like the flood. He hadn’t expected it. It came roaring up out of the place where he had been holding it for so many nights, hot and blind. For one terrible moment he didn’t know her at all. He only knew that something bright and strange was standing in his gardens with a light on its head, and that everything that came down from above came to take.

His claws slid out. His lips drew back from his teeth, and the snarl that tore out of him echoed off the walls. The small figure by the stream flinched, but it didn’t run.

“Korrak,” it said. Its voice shook badly. “Korrak, it’s me.”

He didn’t know the words. He took a step towards her through the water, and then another, slowly, with his tail lashing and the growl still pouring out of his chest.

She should have backed away. She looked at his claws and his teeth, and her hands tightened into fists at her sides. Then she lifted her chin and began to hum again.

It was his song. It was thin and shaky and off the note, and it hit the snarling heat inside him like a splash of cold water. It was the voice that had answered him, the only one that ever had. He stopped where he was, with the river running around his legs, and the growl died in his throat. The red haze drained slowly out of his sight, and the gardens came back, green and soft and glowing. She was standing there in the middle of them with dust on her nose and tears on her cheeks, humming to him as if she would never stop.

His claws slid away. The lamp was still clutched against his chest. He looked down at his shaking hands, and then at her, and he was so ashamed that he couldn’t make a sound.

She stopped humming, but this time the beast didn’t come back. Then she was running, splashing through the shallows at the edge of the pool, and she didn’t stop until she was right in front of him. She was so close he could feel the warmth coming off her body. He smelled the dust and the sweat and the sweet, familiar scent of her underneath it. She was breathing hard, and her eyes were very bright.

She looked at him for a long moment, and then down at the lamp in his hands. She reached out, and put her hands over his, and gently took it from him. She turned it over, and found the switch, and pressed it.

The light blazed up between them, clean and white and brilliant, exactly the way it had that first night on the rock by the channel. It lit up her face, and the tears running down her cheeks and the dirt on her nose and the stubborn set of her mouth, and he saw that she was real. She was real, and she was here, and she had come back.

“You collapsed the tunnel,” she said, her voice trembling. “You absolute idiot. I had to find another way.”

A sound came out of him that he didn’t recognize. It was half a laugh and half a sob, and it hurt his chest on the way out.