They climbed back toward the daylight one by one, into heat that struck them like a hand — and found Tomi standing sentinel-straight beside Marta, his wooden cup held ready in both hands, as if he had known all along what they would come back needing to fill.
Chapter 11: A Trickle in the Dark
The lantern went first, lowered on a rope hand over hand, and its small yellow flame swung in air that should not have been moving.
"There it is again," Saya said from the lip of the sinkhole. "Cold, on my face."
Silas lay flat above the burned grove and watched the light sink past fallen boulders into blackness. After seventy-one days without rain, the earth below Caldera Flats was breathing cool and damp up at them, like a living thing hidden in its own grave.
Joseph Bane held the rope. "If the light goes out," he said, "I pull you up whether you call or not."
He went down slowly, boots finding purchase on stone his father might once have touched, the cracked brass compass thumping soft against his ribs. The walls narrowed, then widened. Ash gave way to clean rock, and the summer heat fell away behind him until his breath showed faint in the lantern light.
At the bottom the rope slackened. He stood in a chamber no taller than a low room, its far wall weeping darkness.
"Silas?" Saya's voice came down thin and far.
"I am standing," he called up. "Send her down."
She came without a lantern of her own, trusting his light, her medicine bag tied close at her waist. When her feet found the floor she turned her face slowly, the way a woman listens at a sick child's door.
"Do you hear it?" she whispered.
At first he heard only his own heart. Then, beneath it, came a sound so small a proud man might have missed it. A tick. A pause. Another tick, patient as prayer.
Water, moving somewhere beyond the wall.
They followed it on their knees. In a cleft where two great stones had settled together, a thread of water no thicker than a woman's little finger slid bright over black rock, gathered in a hollow worn smooth as a bowl, and vanished again into a crack in the floor.
Saya put out her hand and stopped it an inch short, as if the water might startle like a bird.
"Touch it," Silas said gently. "It is real."
Her fingers broke the thread. She gasped, then laughed, low and disbelieving, with water running shining down her wrist.
"It is cold," she said. "Silas. It is cold."
He set the lantern down with care, for his own hands were none too steady. "My father wrote that cold water under burned ground is old water. Water that has waited a long time in the dark, where the sun cannot steal it."
"Then it has waited for us," she said, "and we have waited for it, and neither of us knew the other's name."
They drank last. That was Saya's law and he honoured it without being told. First the canteen was held beneath the trickle while the thin stream found its way in, slow as mercy. They counted drips the way poor men count coins, and talked in whispers.
"When my sister died," Saya said, watching the canteen fill, "Tomi was four. He asked for her for a year. Then he stopped asking for her and started asking for water. I do not know which asking was harder to hear."
"You kept him alive through both," Silas said.
"I only portioned out what little there was and pretended the portioning was power." She pressed her wet hand to her throat. "Tonight I will say we were given this."
When the canteen would hold no more, Silas corked it and set it upright like something holy. Only then did Saya cup her hands under the trickle and drink, and he drank after her, and the water tasted of stone and iron and deep, unhurried darkness.
Above them, Joseph's voice came down, frayed with waiting. "If you have found the devil down there, say so, and I will cut the rope kindly!"
Saya called up, her voice ringing off the walls strong as a struck bell. "We have found what your grandfather prayed for, cousin. Haul us up gently. We are carrying it."
They came up into a night gone blue and enormous, the stars close over the mesas. Taklish waited seated on a stone, Old Marta beside him, his hands unfolded in his lap.
Saya knelt, set the canteen before him, and uncorked it with her own hands.
Taklish drank a single mouthful, held it long before swallowing, and closed his eyes.
"My father," he said at last, "told me the earth under the burned trees kept a secret it would only give back to the dying." He passed the canteen to Marta, who drank and wept without shame. "We are the dying, and it has given. Now we must be worthy of the keeping."
Around the fire that night, the whole camp tasted proof, one wetting of the lips apiece, no more, while Tomi slept through his share and Saya saved his in his wooden cup against the morning.