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He had held it in his hand for a long time, sitting quietly on the ledge behind the falls. The memory had come to him the way the others did, slowly, and then all at once.

His people had carved stones. When one of them found the one who answered their song and the song was finally finished, they took a stone from the river. They carved it with the song, so that it would never be lost, and they gave it as a promise. The stone said that the song was hers, and would always be hers, for as long as the water ran.

He had been carving the stone ever since. He worked on it at night while Frankie slept. He worked on it in the quiet times too, when she was bent over her tablet or her tools in the new habitat, frowning and muttering at her drawings. He used the tip of one claw, slowly and carefully. He carved the flowing wave of the Nai’thara into the center of it. Around the wave, he carved the song, the way his people had written their songs, in long curving lines that rose and fell like water.

But he could only carve as far as the song went. And the song still stopped in the same place.

He sang it to himself sometimes, softly, while he worked. He sang it in the channels while he cleared the silt and in the warm shallows while she slept against his chest. Every time, it climbed and searched and faltered, stopping at the edge of the ledge, and he could not find the way down.

He had begun to wonder if he ever would.

The habitat was finished at last. She stood in the middle of the main room with her hands on her hips and her hair falling out of its tie. She looked around at it with an expression he had never seen on her face before. The walls were pale and smooth, lined with the soft, thick fabric V-512 had sent down. There was a table and two chairs, one of them far larger than the other. There was a workshop in the corner by the opening, with her tools laid out in the same careful rows she had always kept them in. There was a small humming box in the wall that made warm air, and another that made water clean. There was a shelf where she had set the grey stone with THANK YOU scratched into it.

The bed was in the sheltered alcove on the left. It was very large, so large that he had needed to carry the frame down from the survey tube in pieces. He had helped her put it together while she swore at the fittings and he tried not to laugh. There was a thick mattress on top of it and a heap of blankets. A long, low ledge ran along one side, exactly the right height for his tail.

“Well,” she said, and her voice wobbled a little. “That’s it. It’s done.”

He stood beside her and looked at the room, and then at her. He thought of the first night he had seen her, falling out of the rock into the black water, small and frightened and alone. He thought of her talking to her tools and scratching a message into a stone, and walking away from her people into the dark because she had promised him.

“It is good,” he said. “Very good, Frrankie.”

She smiled up at him, and her eyes were damp. “Yeah,” she said softly. “It is.”

He reached into the pouch at his hip, and his fingers closed around the blue stone. He felt the smooth, carved lines of the unfinished song against his fingertips.

“Come,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

He took her to the domed chamber. He had not planned it, but he knew that it was the right place. He led her by the hand out of the habitat and down through the gardens. He pushed aside the curtain of vines at the far end and led her along the curving passage into the round chamber. The warm pool was at its heart, and the map of all the rivers glowed on the walls.

She looked around, and then up at him, puzzled but smiling. “What is it? What did you want to show me?”

He didn’t know how to explain, so he didn’t try. He stood by the warm pool, with the ancient rivers shining overhead, and he began to sing.

It was her song. It rose up out of him slowly, deep and warm. He sang it with his eyes on her face. He sang it the way he had never sung anything before, with everything he had. He sang of every night alone in the dark and every morning waking beside her, and the water in the pool trembled and rippled in soft, perfect rings.

Her hands had come up to her mouth. She stood quietly and listened, and the tears began to run down her cheeks.

The song climbed and reached, and it came, as it always did, to the edge of the ledge, and faltered. He stopped abruptly. He stood there with the unfinished note in his throat and his heart pounding, and he looked at her, helpless.

She lowered her hands slowly. She looked at his face and she didn’t say anything. Then she took a deep breath, and she opened her mouth, and she sang.

It was only a few notes. They were soft and shaky and a little off-key, and they wandered, the way her humming always did. But they came in exactly where his song had stopped. They picked it up where he had faltered and carried the song forward, down from the ledge and into the open air beyond. They found the way.

His breath caught in his chest, and then he sang with her, filled with joy. He found her notes and followed them, his deep voice underneath her light one, and the song went on. It flowed and circled and came home, the way the river came home to the gardens. The water in the pool shivered and rang. On the walls, the lichen in the carved lines of the map seemed to glow brighter, pulsing gently in time. And the song came to its end, at last, in a long, low note that he held until his breath ran out and her voice faded softly into his.

The silence afterwards was anything but empty.

She was crying openly now, and so was he, and he didn’t care.

“It is finished,” he said hoarsely.

She laughed shakily through her tears. “How does it end?”

He crossed the space between them and took her face in his hands.

“With you,” he said.

Then he knelt on the floor of the dome with her beside him and carved the last lines of the song into the blue stone while she watched in silence. The new lines followed the curve of the old ones before they turned, the way her voice had turned, and met the wave of the Nai’thara at the center. When he was done, the song went all the way around the stone and came back to where it started.