Rocher nded on the first foothold hard enough that wet grit shot out from beneath his boots.

  For an instant he windmilled, arms spreading wide over the bck water below, and Francine squealed from where she clung to the back of his tunic.

  "Still there?" he asked.

  "Barely," she muttered.

  The stone beneath his boots was little more than a rounded knob protruding from the bck water below. Another foothold waited several yards ahead, half submerged and slick with mineral film. Beyond that, the cavern wall sloped downward into a long pale bank of silt.

  Evelyn made the jump behind him with a cleaner nding, one hand brushing the wall for bance before she straightened.

  "Move," she said. "You're blocking the only decent spot."

  Rocher nodded and shifted his stance.

  Francine leaned instinctively with him, learning the rhythm now. The first few crossings had been ugly. They had nearly gone into the water twice.

  The second foothold dipped under his weight. Cold water spshed over his boots. Francine's Holy Light swung violently, throwing wild shadows across the cavern wall.

  "Almost there," he told her.

  He unched himself toward the sloping rock shelf ahead.

  This nding he did not stick.

  His boots hit the slick incline and immediately lost purchase. The slope dropped faster than expected. He tried to dig in, failed, and both of them slid down the wet rock together in a spray of grit and silt.

  Francine yelped as they skidded.

  Rocher dug a heel sideways, caught briefly, then slid the rest of the way down until the slope ended in a pale bank of soft sediment.

  They came to rest in a cloud of disturbed silt.

  Francine lifted the light to his face, almost accusingly.

  "You meant to do that?"

  "Obviously."

  He couldn't meet her eyes as he said it.

  Rocher pushed himself upright and helped her down from his back.

  The cavern here was wider than the st stretch they had crossed. The ceiling rose into darkness so complete that even Francine's light seemed to vanish upward after only a few yards. The air was wet and cold enough to cling to his skin. Water moved through the chamber in slow bck channels separated by bars of pale silt and uneven stone. Here and there long curtains of mineral runoff hung from the walls like dead roots turned to stone.

  Something y half-embedded in the bank beside his boot.

  He bent and drew it free.

  A strip of cloth, knotted once near one end.

  Even stained with cave muck he recognized it instantly.

  Evelyn slid down the rock a moment ter, boots cutting twin tracks through the silt before she caught herself beside him.

  "What'd you find?"

  Rocher held up the cloth.

  Her expression sharpened immediately. "Another ribbon?"

  He nodded. "Cire must be leaving them for us."

  Something in his chest loosened.

  He had believed she was alive. He had kept believing it because the alternative was unacceptable. But belief and proof were not the same thing, and the wet strip of torn cloth felt absurdly warm in his palm.

  Evelyn exhaled through her nose and gnced down the branching channels ahead of them.

  "She sure brought us a hell of a long way," she compined, but there was relief under it.

  Rocher turned the ribbon over once between his fingers before tucking it carefully into his belt. Ahead, the cave narrowed again where the channels converged beneath a wall of broken stone.

  Evelyn was suddenly very still.

  Her head tilted. Her ears perked up.

  "Smell that?"

  Rocher frowned. All he smelled was stone. Wet mineral, mud, the cold metallic tang that had saturated everything since they entered the aquifer depths.

  "No."

  "It's faint, but...," Evelyn said. Her mouth twitched upward in disbelief.

  She inhaled again, sharper this time, then licked her lips.

  "It smells good."

  Rocher tried again, drawing air slowly through his nose. Mineral. Silt. Damp stone. A faint rot from some stagnant branch of water nearby.

  Then, underneath it, so slight he almost convinced himself he had imagined it, something warmer.

  Not smoke exactly.

  Rendered fat. Charred flesh.

  His stomach tightened with sudden, humiliating hunger.

  "I can smell it now, too," he said.

  Evelyn's expression shifted instantly from amusement to focus. She raised one hand and pointed.

  High on the wall to their left, nearly hidden by a curtain of mineral deposits, a dark opening split the stone. It was narrow and easy to miss from below, but the draft coming from it moved differently than the colder currents lower in the cavern.

  "Up there," she said. "That's where it's strongest."

  Rocher did not wait for more.

  He backed up three paces through the silt, measured the angle once, and ran. His first leap took him onto a jut of stone along the wall. His second carried him to a tilted shelf scarcely wider than both feet together. He caught a hanging seam of rock with one hand, pulled himself higher, then sprang again.

  The dark hole in the wall rushed toward him.

  He caught its lower lip with both hands, boots scraping sparks of stone, and hauled himself into the opening.

  The tunnel beyond was cramped and rough, little more than a natural split widened by old water erosion. It snted upward just enough that the darkness ahead pooled thickly even around Francine's glow.

  But Evelyn was right.

  The smell was stronger here.

  Rocher twisted, braced one arm against the tunnel mouth, and shouted down into the cavern.

  "Seraphine! Come back! We found something!"

  His voice rolled across the open chamber and fractured into echoes. Below, the blue runelight paused. A moment ter it began moving toward them fast.

  Rocher turned back into the tunnel and stared into the dark.

  His pulse had already started to climb.

  Cire was near. He knew it with unreasonable certainty.

  He dropped lightly from the mouth of the tunnel to a shelf just inside, then moved forward a few paces and stopped.

  The passage bent sharply to the right. Beyond that bend he could see the faint sheen of disturbed sediment on stone.

  Tracks, maybe. Or the drag marks of someone living here, trying not to die.

  He swallowed.

  "Cire," he said, too low for anyone else to hear.

  Sleep should have come easily.

  My stomach was full for the first time since the fall. The cavefish had been revolting to clean, uglier to cook, and deeply offensive to think about for any longer than necessary, but hot protein had still beaten starvation by a wide margin.

  Unfortunately, satiety did not make the rock beneath me any less rock-shaped.

  I shifted for what felt like the hundredth time and immediately regretted it when my hip found a new point of pressure.

  The shelf I had chosen for camp narrowed toward the water, but its inner corner dipped into a shallow depression just deep enough that I no longer had to fear myself rolling in my sleep and sliding off the edge.

  So that was a point in its favor.

  Its disadvantages were numerous.

  The stone was hard.

  And cold.

  And lumpy in ways that felt motivated.

  A faint, intermittent crackle came from the small fire resting a safe distance from my feet. My st Fire in a Bottle had burned down to embers, the kindling and cloth reduced to a dull red pulse that occasionally spat a weak thread of sparks. It no longer gave off much heat, but the tiny sound of it was strangely companionable in the dark.

  I exhaled and looked down.

  Phymera rested on my chest with all the ease of something that had never had muscles cramp, never lost feeling in an arm from sleeping on it wrong, and never once in her life had to negotiate acceptable spinal alignment against rock.

  Her small metal body was tucked neatly into itself. Her tail curled along the line of my ribs. Her head rested just below my colrbone, angled as if she were asleep.

  I knew she wasn't. She had told me explicitly that she did not require it. But since I was horizontal and not presently doing anything, she seemed content to be idle in a posture that resembled repose.

  I put one hand under my head and grimaced as a protruding edge of stone found the exact spot behind my shoulder that hurt most.

  "Phymera."

  One eye opened.

  "Yes?"

  "Can you turn into something soft?"

  There was a pause.

  "Soft," she repeated.

  "Like a bnket. Or a pillow. Anything in that general category."

  Her other eye opened as well, and even upside down in the dim red pulse of the dying fire I could feel her judgment.

  "Even if my mass permitted such a transformation," she said, "metal would not differ meaningfully from the rock beneath you."

  "Not even if you get creative with it?"

  "No."

  I sighed.

  "You're very committed to being unhelpful."

  "I helped you catch food."

  "Fair."

  That was difficult to argue with. I had, after all, used her as fishing tackle.

  I had a sudden thought.

  "What about a very small hammock?"

  Phymera lifted her head a fraction.

  "You have become increasingly unrealistic since eating."

  "That's probably the hope talking."

  She lowered her head again, apparently satisfied that the matter had been addressed.

  I stared up at the invisible ceiling and closed my eyes.

  The dark behind them was no different from the dark outside them. Water moved somewhere beyond the shelf in slow murmuring shifts. Sediment whispered along stone. Every now and then a drop struck somewhere in the cavern with a tiny sound that seemed magnified by the stillness around it.

  I tried counting breaths and gave up.

  Then Phymera's body went rigid against my chest. Her head snapped toward the water.

  "Shh," she said.

  I froze.

  The crackle of the dying ember suddenly seemed very loud.

  "What is it?" Slowly, I pushed myself up onto my elbows. "What do you see?"

  Phymera did not answer immediately. Her gaze remained fixed out across the dark water beyond the shelf, so I followed it.

  At first I saw nothing.

  Then, far away through yers of suspended silt and shifting dark, a faint point of light moved.

  I sat up fully.

  Another point flickered beside it. Then vanished behind some jut of stone and reappeared.

  My exhaustion disappeared so quickly it left me almost dizzy.

  Rescue.

  The ribbons. The trail of bread crumbs I'd left. It had worked.

  "That's them," I said, already reaching for the light gathering instinctively in my palm. "They found me."

  Phymera turned her head sharply toward me.

  "Wait!"

  But I was already on my feet.

  Holy Light bloomed above my hand in a clear gold sphere, bright enough to strike gleams from the wet stone around us and paint the slow water in shivering amber bands. The cavern woke around me in sudden definition—my crude camp, the fish bones pushed to one side, the guttering Fire in a Bottle.

  I stood and waved the light high.

  "Over here!" I shouted, voice cracking slightly from disuse and surprise. "I'm over here!"

  The words rang out across the water and came back broken.

  For one glorious heartbeat nothing happened.

  Then Phymera said, very quietly, "Cire."

  More lights appeared in the dark.

  Not one. Not two.

  Many.

  They fred at different heights across the far waterline and along ledges I had thought were empty stone. Pale blue. Sickly white. A dull submerged green. Small lights, each no rger than a fist, hanging or drifting or held at the level where a head might be.

  They had been invisible until my own light gave them something to answer.

  The first one blinked once.

  Then another.

  Then all of them, one after another, in a staggered pattern across the cavern.

  Back at me.