Page 7 of River Dragon’s Song

“Please,” she whispered to it. “Please, just once, do what you’re supposed to do.”

The screen blinked. No signal. She looked at the stubborn little light for a long time. Then, without quite meaning to, she sat down on a rock beside the falls and started to cry.

It wasn’t the dramatic kind of crying. She didn’t have the energy for that, and it was awkward with the mask on anyway. It was just a slow, miserable leaking behind her eyes, and a tightness in her throat that she couldn’t swallow away. She was tired and she hurt everywhere and she was sitting at the bottom of the world with six protein bars and a taped-up lamp. And nobody knew where she was. Ethan and the others would have come back to look for her by now. They would have found the torn anchor and the empty passage and the broken ledge. They would think she was dead.

And maybe they would be right.

And it’s my fault. She made herself think it plainly, because she had never let anybody else get away with less. She had marked that passage as too small and too unstable to explore. Then she had crawled into it alone, with nothing but static on her comms and nobody on her line, because she wanted to see it first. If one of her crews had done that, she would have written them up before they had finished coughing.

She let herself have five minutes. She didn’t count them exactly, but she was an engineer and she could feel them passing. When they were over, she wiped her eyes with the back of her glove and took a deep, shaky breath.

“Right,” she said firmly. “Enough of that. Nobody panics. Especially not me.”

Shelter came next. She needed somewhere dry to rest, somewhere out of the way of falling rock, and somewhere she could keep her supplies safe from the water.

She found it a little way downstream, where the gravel bar met the wall of the cavern. The rock had formed a shallow alcove there, a sheltered hollow about the size of the back seat of a rover. The floor was dry sand. The ceiling above it was solid and sound when she tested it with her hammer, and it curved down in a way that would deflect anything that fell from higher up.

“Not bad,” she told it. “You’re not exactly five-star, but I’ve slept in worse.”

She slowly moved her supplies into the alcove one armful at a time, stopping every so often to rest and let her side stop aching. She spread the thermal blanket over the sand and weighted the corners with stones. She set the beacon on a ledge at the mouth of the alcove, as high as she could reach. She left it running in case it caught a signal while she slept. She filled her water bottle from the stream. Then she ate half of a protein bar and firmly made herself stop there.

When she was done she sat down at the mouth of the alcove and looked out at the cavern.

It was beautiful. She hadn’t let herself notice before, but she noticed it now. The blue glow on the walls wasn’t even, the way she had first thought. It came and went in slow, shifting patches, brighter in some places and dimmer in others, like breath moving through the stone. Along the stream, the long pale vines hung down almost to the water. When she looked closely, tiny drops were forming on the undersides of their leaves and falling quietly into the current. And the air smelled green. Not like the dusty, recycled air of the domes, or the thin metallic air of the surface, but like something growing.

She pulled her knees up and rested her chin on them as she studied the walls. There had been a rumor several months ago that someone had found native plant samples near one of the northern research stations. Everybody had assumed it was contamination, or a hoax. She had assumed the same, but this wasn’t a hoax and it didn’t seem like contamination.

“You’d love this, Tanjiri,” she murmured. “You’d absolutely lose your mind.”

She took a sip of water. It tasted of iron, and it was the best water she had ever had. Somewhere out in the dark, the falls roared on. She drew the edge of the thermal blanket up around her shoulders and switched her lamp off to save the battery. The darkness closed in, soft and blue and strange.

She was almost asleep when she heard it. It was so faint that at first she thought it was the water. A low, deep sound, rising and falling beneath the roar of the falls, so low that she felt it more than heard it. It seemed to come from everywhere at once, from the stone beneath her and the air around her and the dark water running past. It swelled slowly, held for a long moment, and then sank away into nothing.

She lay very quietly and listened with her heart pounding.

Water, she told herself. It was the sound of water moving through some hollow channel in the rock. Or air, pushed through the cracks by the pressure of the falls. That was all. There was always a rational explanation.

But it hadn’t sounded like water. It had sounded like singing.

She waited for it to come again, straining her ears in the darkness. It didn’t come. Only the falls roared on, and the blue glow shifted slowly across the stone, and eventually her exhausted body gave up the fight and she slept.

CHAPTER FOUR

The female talked to everything. Korrak had noticed it the first day, when she sat beside the pool and spoken to the small box in her hand as if it could answer her. He had noticed it before that, when she woke and scolded the light on her head until it flickered back to life. By the end of her first full day in his cavern, he understood that she talked to the rocks and the water. She talked to the silver blanket she wrapped around her shoulders.

Most of all, she talked to herself. Her voice never stopped for long. It rose and fell and echoed off the stone, and every living thing in the cavern must have known exactly where she was. It should have annoyed him. Instead, he found himself drifting closer and closer to the sound of it, like one of the small silver swimmers that had once risen to the warm water.

He watched her from the shadows on the far side of the stream, where the fallen rocks made a tumbled wall and the glowing moss grew thin. It was a good place to hide. He could lie there with his chin on his folded arms and see her little camp clearly. The silver blanket was spread in the hollow of the rock, and her strange belongings were laid out in careful rows beside it. She had set them out that way the first day and had put them back in exactly the same order every time she used them. He didn’t know why that pleased him so much, but it did.

On the second morning she woke early and sat up with a groan. She pressed a hand to her side and muttered something sharp under her breath. Then she crawled to the mouth of the hollow, pulled the hard shell off her head, and began to take the light apart.

He had thought the light was part of her at first, like the glow of the moss or the shine of his scales. Now he saw that it had been made by someone’s hands, as carefully as the spillways along the channel. She pried it open with her thumb and poked at the small pieces inside. She talked to it the entire time, in a low, coaxing voice that made his chest feel strangely warm.

“Come on,” she murmured. “I know you’re wet. I know you’re tired. I’m tired too. But you and me, we’re going to get through this. Okay?”

He didn’t understand the words exactly, but he understood the tone. It was the same tone he used with the river when a channel was choked with silt and the water was struggling to move. It was patient and stubborn at once.

She coaxed the light back to life, and then she frowned at it and switched it off again. After that she sat in the dark for a long time, with only the moss to see by. She ate a very small piece of something from a crinkly wrapper, slowly, one bite at a time. When she was finished, she folded the wrapper carefully around the part that was left and put it back in its place in the row.