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“Here,” she said, and tapped her tablet. “The main room goes here, against the back wall. Sleeping area in that alcove on the left, where it’s sheltered. Workshop on the right, near the opening, so I get the light. Water from the warm stream, filtered, because I’m not taking any chances. A small heater and an oxygen generator for backup, in case the gardens ever have a bad day.” She glanced up. “And a comms relay, running up through the survey tube to the surface, so V-512 can reach us if he needs to. And Addie. And Ethan, maybe, one day.”

She didn’t add that none of it was theirs yet. The claim had opened the morning after she came down. For all she knew, Bentley was standing in the claims office right now with some new piece of paper. The new beacon had been sitting silent on the shelf beside her for three days. She had looked at it more often than she wanted to admit.

Korrak was crouched beside her with his tail curled around his feet, looking over her shoulder at the screen. He had been doing that for the last two days, and she had expected him to get bored with it, but he hadn’t. He watched every line she drew with the same total concentration he gave to clearing a channel. Every so often he asked a question that made her stop and think.

“Here,” he said now, and reached past her to touch the screen. His claw tapped the place where she had drawn the back wall of the main room. “Not here.”

“Why not? It’s solid rock.”

He shook his head firmly. Then he got up and walked across the chamber to the back wall, and put both hands on the stone, and hummed. It was a low, quiet sound, deep in his chest, and it rose steadily. She had heard it dozens of times now. But the hair still rose on her arms when the rock answered, a faint, trembling ring that she could feel through the shelf beneath her.

He stopped and cocked his head, listening. Then he moved a few steps to the left and did it again, and then a few steps more.

“There,” he said at last, and tapped the wall. “Here is solid.” He pointed back at the first spot. “There is tired. Old crack, deep inside. Not today. Not tomorrow. But one day, it moves.”

She stared at him, and then at the wall. Then she went and got her hammer and her scanner, and spent twenty minutes tapping and scanning, and found it. A hairline fracture, deep in the rock, running at an angle she never would have spotted from the surface. It wasn’t dangerous now, but in twenty years, with the weight of a habitat pressing on it, it might have been.

“You can hear that,” she said slowly. “You can hear the fractures.”

He shrugged, the way he always did when she was impressed with him, as if it was nothing special. But she saw the pleased curve at the corner of his mouth.

“Stone talks,” he said. “You listen.”

She laughed and shook her head, and went back to her tablet and moved the wall.

It went on like that for days. She drew, and he listened. She measured, and he sang. She calculated load paths and airflow and heat loss. He patiently told her where the rock was sleeping and where it was restless, and where the water would want to go if she ever gave it the chance. She had worked with a hundred engineers, and she had never once had a partner who could hear the inside of a wall.

He had opinions too, which she hadn’t expected. When she drew a drain to carry the waste water away from the habitat, he looked at it for a long time and then shook his head.

“No,” he said. “Not to the river.”

“It’ll be filtered,” she said. “It’ll be cleaner than the stream by the time it gets there.”

“No.” He was firm about it. He took her hand and led her out of the chamber and down along the edge of the gardens, to where the warm stream joined the first pool. He crouched down and put his hand in the water, and made her do the same. “This water goes to the gardens. The gardens make the air. The air…” He touched her lips, lightly. “…is for you. Everything here, all together. You take something out, you put something in, it all changes.” He looked at her seriously. “Careful.”

She knelt there with her hand in the warm water and looked thoughtfully at the gardens. She looked at the pale vines and the dark fruit and the pools stepping down one after another towards the river. She thought of the map on the dome, with all its glowing lines. She thought of his people, carrying the water from the poles to the equator for longer than anyone could remember, and never taking more than they gave.

“Careful,” she agreed softly.

She went back and redesigned the waste system. It took her a day and a half, and it was better. The water went into a sealed recycling loop, and nothing returned to the stream but clean water. He looked at the new drawing for a long time. Then he nodded, once, satisfied, and she felt absurdly proud.

V-512 brought the first load of supplies on the sixth day.

By then the crack was ready for them. It had been barely wide enough for her and far too narrow for Korrak, so he had spent three days singing to it. He worked his way slowly up it with his hands on the walls, humming low notes. The rotten rock on either side shivered loose and slid away, and the sound stone stayed exactly where it was. She followed closely behind him with her hammer and tested every meter. When he was finished, it was a steep, narrow stair that he could climb with a crate on each shoulder.

The ranger didn’t come down, because he had told her he wouldn’t, not until Korrak was ready. He left the crates at the bottom of the survey tube, where the crack began. Then he sent her a message on the new beacon, which to her great surprise worked perfectly. It was only two lines long. Supplies at the bottom of the tube. Claim registered this morning, uncontested.

She read the second line four times. Then she sat down on the nearest rock and laughed until Korrak came to see what was wrong with her. He carried the crates the rest of the way, two at a time, with a look of deep suspicion on his face.

“What is this?” he asked, holding up a roll of insulated fabric.

“Walls. Well, part of the walls.”

“And this?”

“A water filter.”

“And this?”