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“You don’t know that. I don’t even know that.” Her voice came out sharper than she meant it to, and she didn’t care. “I’ve spent eight years being told what’s right for me by people who never once asked. I didn’t expect it from you.”

His eyes widened slightly. She had never been truly angry with him before, and she saw him feel it.

“Frrankie…”

“What do you want, Korrak? Not for me. For you.”

She watched him struggle visibly with it. His jaw tightened, and the scales along his throat lifted, and for a moment she thought he was finally going to say it. She was holding her breath.

“If I ask,” he said at last, very low, “you stay for me. Because I pulled you from the water. Because you are kind.” He shook his head slowly. “I will not ask.”

“That’s not your decision to make.”

“No,” he agreed quietly. “But I will not ask.”

She stared at him. She wanted to shake him, and she wanted to kiss him. More than anything, she wanted him to say one small word, and she was not going to say it for him. She turned over again instead and lay with her back against his chest, stiff and furious, with her eyes stinging. After a long time his hand found hers in the dark, and she let him hold it. But neither of them slept much, and she was still awake when the moss began to brighten.

Four or five days, Bentley had said. She had no idea what she was going to do with them.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Korrak found the old branch on the second day after she spoke to her people. He hadn’t been looking for it. He had been sitting by the channel below the falls in the dark before the moss brightened, with his palms pressed to the stone, listening to the drill. He did that often now, because he couldn’t seem to stop. It grew steadily louder every time, a slow, heavy pounding that came down through the rock from the north like the heartbeat of some enormous creature. Every time he heard it, the snarling beast inside him lifted its head.

So he listened to it, and he hated it, and he tried to judge how close it was. And while he was listening, he heard something else. Something underneath the drill, so faint that he would never have noticed it if he hadn’t been sitting so quietly for so long. A hollow murmur in the stone, like water moving somewhere it couldn’t quite reach. It came from the west wall of the falls cavern, where a great slope of fallen rock lay piled against the stone.

He had passed that rockfall a thousand times. He had never looked at it twice, because it was only rock. He looked at it carefully now, and as he looked, something stirred in the empty places of his mind, the way it had when Frankie’s words first woke his own words. There had been a channel there once, and he could almost see it. It had been a wide, high branch of the river that climbed up through the stone towards the surface, carrying water to a chamber far above. It had been open, and it had sung.

Then the rock had fallen, and it had been silent for longer than memory. He sat there in the dark with his hands on the stone until the moss began to glow. Then he went to find her.

She was awake, sitting on a rock near the falls with the beacon in her hands, staring at the screen. She did that often now too. She hadn’t slept well since she spoke to the man called Bentley. Korrak had heard her tossing restlessly beside him in the night. Once, very late, he had heard her crying quietly into her arm, and he had pulled her close against him and held her until she stopped.

She looked up when he came, and she tried to smile. “Hey. Where did you go?”

He crouched down in front of her and took her hand and pressed it against the ground, the way he had the day he told her about the drill. Then he pointed at the rockfall.

“There,” he said. “Old way. Water, before. Goes up.”

She frowned doubtfully at the rockfall. “Up? Up where?”

He pointed at the ceiling, and then at the north wall, where the drill was pounding. “Up. Near them. But not here.” He tapped the ground by the falls. “Not the river.”

Her eyes widened as she listened, her mind racing ahead of his words.

“An upper chamber,” she said slowly. “Somewhere higher up, away from the river. If I could get there, I could signal from there instead. They’d adjust the drill to follow the beacon. They’d break into that chamber instead of this one.” She stood up so fast she nearly dropped the beacon. “Korrak, they’d never find the river. They’d find me in some empty dead cave, exactly like I told them, and they’d take me up and they’d never come down here at all.”

He had known she would see it. He had known it the moment he felt the old channel murmuring in the stone. It was a way to keep the river safe. It was a way to answer her people and keep her silence at the same time.

It was a way for her to leave.

He had told himself that he would not think about that part.

“Yes,” he said.

She was already walking eagerly towards the rockfall, the beacon forgotten in her hand. She climbed a short way up the slope, then crouched down and studied the rocks, running her hands over them and tapping them with her little hammer. He followed her and watched her work, and for a moment he forgot about the drill, and the snarling beast, and the ache. He only watched her, the stubborn set of her jaw and the quick, clever movements of her hands, and the way her eyes shone.

He loved her like this, when she was working.

The word took him by surprise. It rose up out of the dark places in his mind like all the others, and it fit so perfectly that he stood there for a long moment, tasting it. Love. He didn’t say it out loud, but he knew it for the truth.