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He thought of the map on the dome, and all the glowing rivers running across it. And he thought of the scar low on the far side, where the lines had been gouged and scraped away, and the lichen would not grow. The place where someone had deliberately scratched out a part of the world so that no one would know it was there.

The song was coming from that direction. From somewhere the river had never carried light.

He looked down at Frankie, asleep against his chest with the blue stone in her hand. He thought about waking her, and didn’t. There would be time for that. There would be time for all of it. For now, he only held her, and listened.

The hidden song went on for a long time, faint and careful and alone. Then, slowly, it faded away into the stone, and was gone.

He pressed his lips to Frankie’s hair, and closed his eyes, and slept.

EPILOGUE

Five weeks later…

Frankie woke up to the sound of water and the smell of green, and for a few seconds she didn’t open her eyes. She didn’t need to, because she knew exactly where she was. She was in the big bed in the sheltered alcove, under a heap of blankets. The heater was humming in the far wall, and the warm weight of Korrak’s arm was draped across her waist. His tail was curled around her ankle. It usually was, when she woke. She had stopped teasing him about it weeks ago, mostly because she had discovered that she liked it.

Beyond the opening, the moss was brightening. She could see it faintly through her eyelashes, soft blue and green on the walls of the gardens. She could hear the warm stream trickling down to the pools, and beyond that, faint and steady, the river.

She lay there and listened to it for a while. Then she slid carefully out from under his arm and pulled on the oversized shirt she had taken from one of the supply crates. She padded barefoot across the main room to the workshop.

She had been down here for five weeks now. She knew the count because she had marked it on the wall beside her workbench, one small line for every morning, the way she marked the stages of a build. She hadn’t needed to count them. She had simply wanted to see them there.

The habitat looked lived in now. There were tools scattered across the workbench that she hadn’t put away. There was a heap of dark fruit in a bowl on the table with a half-finished cup of real coffee beside it, courtesy of V-512. Korrak had brought in a long, pale vine from the gardens and lovingly wound it around the edge of the opening. He said the room looked lonely without something green in it. On the shelf sat her grey stone with THANK YOU scratched into it. Next to it sat the blue one, carved with a song.

She leaned against the workbench with her arms folded and looked at all of it. She had checked domes and barracks and greenhouses and mine shafts that other people had built. She had crawled through their foundations and tested their welds and written up every crack. Then she had packed her tools and moved on to the next site. She had never thought about why. She had only known that there was always another job, and another settlement, and another team that didn’t quite want her.

She had been the odd one out all her life, always keeping other people’s places standing and never finding one for herself.

She looked at the vine around the opening and the heap of fruit. She looked at the big, ridiculous bed in the alcove, where a very large dragon was still peacefully asleep with his tail hanging off the ledge.

“I spent my entire career inspecting other people’s buildings,” she said softly. “This one’s mine.”

“Ours,” said a sleepy voice from the bed.

She laughed, because she hadn’t known he was awake. She turned and found him watching her from the tangle of blankets, propped on one elbow, his blue-black hair in his eyes and a slow, lazy smile on his face.

“Ours,” she agreed, and went back to bed.

The message from Ethan came that afternoon. The comms relay chimed while she was in the workshop. She was adjusting the flow on the water filter for the third time that week, because she didn’t entirely trust it yet. She wiped her hands on her shirt and picked up the tablet, and saw his name, and her stomach gave a small, odd twist.

She hadn’t heard from him since the corridor at the GenCon field station. She had thought about writing to him a dozen times, and had never known what to say.

She had managed it with her mother, in the end. It had taken her most of an evening to write three lines to Earth, and she had rewritten them endlessly. I found a place. I found someone. He likes my singing. Her mother’s answer had come back a week later, and it was only one line long. Does he know you do it to your homework? Her father had added a postscript asking what the man did for a living, and she was still working on that one.

She opened the message nervously.

Heard through a friend of a friend that you’re doing okay. Didn’t ask where. Figured you’d tell me if you wanted me to know. The team’s been cleared, by the way. Lucas and Tanjiri are back on survey rotation. Tanjiri went through Bentley’s new scans herself, line by line, looking for whatever you were hiding. Nothing but old ice and broken rock. She says she owes you an apology and a drink, and that you were right about the bolt. Don’t tell her I told you. Bentley’s still asking about you, and he isn’t asking nicely. I told him you’re a stubborn pain in the neck who was always right. One more thing. Your last call before the ledge went was mostly static. Not all of it. I never put the rest in the log. Whatever you found, I still hope it’s worth it.

She read it twice. Then she sat down slowly on the edge of the workbench and looked out through the opening at the gardens.

Korrak was down by the first pool. He was waist-deep in the water, with his head bent and his hands in the stream bed. He was patiently clearing a little drift of silt that had built up at the edge of the warm stream. She could hear him humming, very softly, under his breath. It was her song, and he hummed it constantly now, while he worked, while he ate, while he lay beside her in the dark. She didn’t think he knew he was doing it.

As she watched, the silt stirred and loosened and drifted away, and the water ran clear.

She smiled and picked up the tablet again. She typed two words and sent them before she could change her mind.

It is.

Korrak took her up that night.