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And she smelled good, which he hadn’t expected. Down here, everything smelled of stone and water and the faint green scent of growing things. But she smelled warm. She smelled like something he had no name for, sweet and salty and alive. When he breathed it in, a slow heat rose through him and settled low in his belly. He stayed there, crouched in the dark, breathing her in.

He didn’t understand what was happening to him. He had been alone for so long that he had forgotten there was anything else to feel. He knew hunger and weariness and the deep, steady satisfaction of a channel cleared and running free. He knew the ache of singing into silence. But this was new. This heat, this pull, this sharp, bright need that made his fingers curl against the gravel. He wanted to touch her. He wanted to trace the curve of her neck with his fingertips and see if her skin was as soft as it looked. He wanted to lie down beside her and wrap himself around her small warm body and keep the dark away from her.

She shifted in her sleep and murmured something. He froze, holding his breath.

“Stay,” she mumbled, the word soft and slurred. Her brow creased. “Just… stay.”

She didn’t wake, and after a moment her face smoothed out, and her breathing settled back into its slow rhythm.

“Stay,” he whispered. The word felt strange and new in his mouth. He tried it again, even more softly. “Stay.”

He didn’t know what it meant. But he liked saying it.

He made himself move away from her before the heat inside him could push him closer. He crossed back over the gravel to the path she had followed that day. It ran along the stream and climbed over the broken rocks past the second spillway. She would follow it again tomorrow. She was determined to go downstream. He had seen it in the way she looked at the water.

And the path was not safe.

He worked his way along it slowly, testing the stones with his hands. There was a loose slab near the bottom of the climb, balanced on a smaller rock that had been worn away by dripping water. He lifted it out of the way and set it down in the shallows. Higher up, there was a crack in the ledge that ran along the side of the channel, a crack she had marked with her line and cross. He left the mark where it was, but he pried out the broken piece beneath it and dropped it into the stream so that the ledge would hold her weight. Halfway up the climb, where she had stopped to rest with her eyes closed, small stones lay scattered across the path. They were just the right size to roll under a careless foot. He swept them away with his tail.

When he was finished, he went back to the edge of her camp and sat in the shadows where he could see her. He should go. He should return to his channels and his spillways and the long, lonely work that had filled his time since he woke. The river needed him. It always needed him.

But he stayed anyway. He stayed and watched the slow rise and fall of her breathing, and the faint gleam of the moss on her loosened hair, and the small hand curled beneath her cheek. And for the first time since he had opened his eyes in this place, the silence of the cavern didn’t feel quite so empty.

CHAPTER FIVE

The slab was gone. Frankie stood at the bottom of the climb with her lamp pointed at the empty space and tried to make sense of it. Yesterday, there had been a big slab of rock here, balanced at a sickening angle on a smaller stone that the dripping water had worn half away. She had seen it and stepped carefully around it, and she had made a mental note to avoid it on her way back. She was absolutely sure of that. She remembered the exact angle of the slab and the dark wet gleam of the stone underneath it.

Now there was nothing but a smooth patch of gravel and the worn-down stone, sitting by itself in the middle of the path. She turned slowly, sweeping the light across the rocks around her. It didn’t take long to find the slab. It was lying in the shallows of the stream, a good three meters away, half-submerged, with the water rippling around its edges.

“Okay,” she said out loud. “That’s weird.”

Rocks fell, of course. She knew that better than anyone. Slabs came loose and tumbled down slopes, and water undercut ledges until they collapsed. But rocks fell down, not sideways. And they didn’t land in the stream three meters away without leaving a single scrape on the gravel between.

She crouched down to look more closely. The gravel where the slab had been was smooth, much too smooth. It looked as if something had brushed across it, leaving faint curving lines in the grit, like the marks a broom left on a dusty floor.

A chill ran down her spine.

“It fell,” she told herself firmly. “It fell during the night, and it bounced, and you just didn’t hear it over the falls. That’s all.”

It sounded reasonable, like something she might have said to a nervous construction crew. It didn’t make her feel any better.

She started up the climb anyway, because there was nothing else to do. She had packed up her camp that morning and stuffed everything back into her pack in the same order she had taken it out. She had eaten half a protein bar, one of the terrible peanut ones, and told herself it was delicious. And she had made a decision.

She was going to follow the stream.

Water had to go somewhere. It didn’t just pour out of the rock and disappear. If this stream flowed out of the cavern, then it must flow into another space, and that space must connect to something else. Lava tubes branched and joined up again all the time. It was one of the first things she had learned about them. Somewhere downstream, there was a good chance this stream would lead her to a tube that someone had mapped. Or at least to a place where her beacon could get a signal.

It was a plan. It wasn’t a very good plan, but it was better than sitting beside the falls eating protein bars until she ran out.

The climb was harder than she remembered. She went up it slowly, hand over hand, testing each hold before she trusted it, and by the time she was halfway up her head had started to swim. She stopped and pressed herself against the rock, breathing hard through the mask, and waited for the black spots to fade from the edges of her vision.

“Slow,” she muttered. “Slow and steady. You’re not in a hurry.”

When she could see properly again, she lifted her head and looked at the ledge above her.

Yesterday, she had found a crack in the rock at the edge of the path, a deep one that went all the way through the stone. She had scratched a mark beside it to remind herself to step wide. The mark was still there, a neat little line and cross in the pale rock. But the crack was gone.

She leaned closer and stared at it. The cracked piece of the ledge had been pried loose and taken away, leaving a clean, solid edge behind. The ledge beneath her mark was sound now. She tapped it with her hammer, just to be sure. It rang clear and true.