Caio paused, studied the three marks on the bark—his straight line, my curve, Zé’s smudge—and then began to draw again, a new path that accommodated all of them. The path was clear—a dark line of hope.
But as my finger left the bark, I felt a cold knot tighten in my gut. Would this really work? Could theSussuronend up back with my people, and I have a chance to find theFlor da Lua?
CHAPTER 23
Luzia
The only light in Zé’s hut came from a single, sputtering candle. It threw long, dancing shadows that made the small space feel like a cave. In the center of that flickering light, Caio kneeled, his focus so absolute that the world seemed to shrink to the space between his hands. He was performing a ritual I did not understand, a kind of quiet, patient magic that belonged to his world of cities and books.
With a heavy stone bowl and a rounded stone, he ground the pale flesh of theMycena lux-coeli.The sound was a dry whisper, like insects skittering over dead leaves. Under his patient hand, the ghostly fungus, delicate as a moth’s wing, became a powder finer than pollen. His movements were precise, economical, his work unhurried as he ground, then paused, tilting the bowl to let the candlelight catch the dust. Fine white flour from our dwindling supplies swirled into the mix, creating a single, deceptively soft cloud.
Into a strange thing of stitched leather and wood—a device that looked like a lung he could command with a wooden crank—he loaded the finished powder. This wasn't the mere mixing of dust but the measuring of a dose of silence, the preparation of a weapon that made no sound. My faith was not in the powder but in the certainty of his hands, in the steady line of his jaw in the candlelight.
When he was done, the silence in the hut felt different. It was no longer the quiet of waiting but the heavy stillness before a lightning strike.
A shift in the shadows by the door made me turn. It was a shape detached from the deeper dark of the swamp, and Zé was there. He moved without a sound, his limp a part of the night’s rhythm. He didn’t look at the device in Caio’s hands, but he knew what it was. His gaze met mine, sharp and questioning.
He stepped forward and pressed a thin piece of dark metal, twisted at the end, into Caio’s hand. A tool for breaking. Then he turned to me. His voice was a low rasp, barely disturbing the air.
“Listen,” he said, and his eyes held mine. “When the time is right, you will hear a nightjar. It is not the season. The cry will be wrong. That is Miguel. That is your signal.”
A nightjar. A bird of dusk and deep night. He was giving me a sound, a single note in the swamp’s vast song that would mean life or death. He was giving me the life of his cousin, a man I had never seen, and trusting me to hear it. I nodded, the weight of it settling in my chest.
We moved to the river’s edge, the mud sucking at our feet. The air was cool and thick with the smell of decay and wet earth. Caio secured the waterproof pack containing the bellows, his movements practiced and sure. Then he took the rope from his belt and tied it around my waist, connecting it to his own.
He met my eyes in the darkness. There were no words left to say. We had drawn the map and had forged the weapon. Now there was only the river.
I slipped into the water first.
The cold was a blade that sliced the world of air away from me. My muscles seized, my lungs burned for the world I had just left behind, a purely human panic that lasted for a single, searing heartbeat.
Then, the river claimed me with complete possession. The shock of the cold ignited something else inside me, burning away the girl who walked on land and leaving only the creature of the water. The boundary of my skin dissolved. The water was no longer something I wasinbut a current that flowedthroughme. The river’s deep, slow pulse became my heartbeat. The muffled gurgle in my ears became a language. The river breathed, and I breathed with it. It took all my control to prevent the transformation and allow myself the advantage of being able to breathe the water.
I gave a slight tug on the rope—a distant, clumsy signal from a body that was no longer entirely mine. Caio followed, a foreign weight at the end of the line, a reminder of the world I had shed. I let the main artery of the current take us, closing my eyes because they were useless now. Sight was a lie here. Truth was something you felt.
My skin drank the water’s vibrations. I felt the frantic, sliver panic of a school of lambarí as they fled a shadow in the deeps. I felt the immense, waterlogged patience of a sunken jatobá trunk, its ancient memory bleeding into the current that flowed around it. The rope tied to my waist was a dead thing, a dull, alien pressure against the living symphony that surrounded and filled me.
This was not a place I visited. This was what I was.
For a time, I could not measure. I simply existed, a part of the river’s flow. Then, the purpose returned, a sharp thought cutting through the deep dream. The plan, theSussuron. I let the river’s thousand voices flow through me—the whisper of silt over stone, the gossip of the reeds along the bank, the deep baritone of thechannel—and I listened for the one voice that did not belong. I searched for the discord—the unnatural note.
It started as a hum, so faint I thought I might be imagining it, a vibration that had no place among the soft, living currents. It was a sour note in the river’s song. I turned my body toward it, kicking gently, pulling the weight of Caio behind me on the rope. The hum grew stronger, a steady thrum that scraped against the river’s rhythm. It was hungry. It was wrong.
I followed the feeling, the vibration resonating deeper, no longer just a sound against my skin but a pulse I could feel in my bones. It was a false current, pulling water into the belly of Silva’s fortress. The thrum grew into a deep, grinding shudder, the sound of a great beast breathing in. I reached out my hand in the murky darkness, my fingers searching for the source.
They brushed against something hard, cold, and unyielding. The vibration was strongest here, a violent shudder that traveled up my arm. My fingers traced the shape—thick, immovable bars set in a concrete wall. It was a cage set into the riverbank, and it was singing its hungry, mechanical song right into my hand.
CHAPTER 24
Luzia
The grate hummed against my palm, a deep, hungry song that vibrated up my arm and into my teeth. It was the only feeling in a world of cold, pressing darkness. Behind me, tethered by the rope, Caio was a dull, distant weight. I felt the faint, metallic scratching of Zé’s tool against the lock, a mouse gnawing at a cage. Above, through the water and earth, I could feel the land. A dull thud, heavy and rhythmic. A patrol. I flattened myself against the riverbed, willing the mud to swallow me, my hand clamped to the bars, listening to the compound’s heartbeat. The footsteps faded. The thrumming of the pump was all that remained.
A sharp scraping sound, then a clank that echoed through the water. The grate shifted. I gave the rope two sharp tugs, the signal to proceed.
The pipe swallowed me whole. The world narrowed to a crushing, round darkness that smelled of rust and rot. The roar of the water being sucked past me was deafening, a constant thunder that vibrated through the metal walls. My shouldersscraped against the slimy curve of the pipe. I could not see Caio, only feel the taut line that bound me to him, the only proof that I was not alone in the belly of the beast. I was not swimming. I was being inhaled. Every inch was a fight against the current pulling me toward whatever grinding thing lay at the end of this throat. My breath, held tight in my chest, felt like a betrayal.
I spilled from the pipe’s mouth like dirty water, gasping into a small, damp chamber of stone and metal, Caio tumbling out beside me. The air was cold and tasted of wet iron. A single drip of water from a weeping joint echoed in the sudden, ringing silence. The roar of the pipe was gone, replaced by a vulnerability so profound it felt like I had shed my skin. I scrambled into the deepest shadow, a corner where two walls met, and pulled out my knife. My body was a coiled spring.
