The reservoir at Craúnas was dying, and Cícero Alencar was the only one who seemed to care about recording the cause of death.
Kneeling at the edge, his pants rolled up to his knees and his feet sinking into the warm mud, he measured the distance between the current waterline and the mark he had scratched into the stone three days earlier. Forty-two centimeters. In three days. It made no sense. Not even during the worst summer Craúnas had ever faced had the water fallen this fast.
He opened the leather notebook—battered, swollen with loose pages, stained with ink and sweat—and wrote the number beside the previous ones. He drew a line connecting the points. The downward curve was far too steep, almost vertical. It wasn't evaporation. Evaporation had patience. This was something else.
“What are you measuring, Cícero?” The voice came from above the embankment. Mr. Afrânio, who came every day to fill his bucket, stopped to look at him with the expression people in Craúnas reserved especially for Cícero: a mixture of pity and suspicion. “The water's running out, boy. You don't need a ruler to see that.”
“I'm not measuring how much is left, Mr. Afrânio. I'm measuring where it's going.”
The old man furrowed his brow, spat onto the dry ground, and came down the embankment with his bucket. He didn't ask anything else. No one ever did.
Cícero wasn't offended. He was twenty-four years old and already used to being the strange fellow who drew maps of things nobody wanted to see. Maps of dead springs. Maps of trails that led nowhere. Maps of ruins the elders told him not to touch. His grandmother, Donana, said he had inherited his mother's stubbornness and the devil's curiosity, and that the two things together would end up taking him to the same place they had taken her.
Nowhere.
Cícero's mother disappeared when he was seven. She left home one drought-stricken dawn—the last Great Thirst, thirty years ago—and never came back. Donana said she had gone to fetch water. That she had gotten lost. That the Backlands had swallowed her. But Donana said it while looking at the ground, and Cícero learned early that people looked at the ground when the truth was too heavy to carry in their eyes.
He put the notebook in his leather bag, wiped his hands on his pants, and walked along the reservoir's edge, following the line where the water met the earth. Or where it used to meet it. Now there was only dark mud, cracking beneath the sun like old skin.
That's where he noticed it.
The cracks weren't random. They had a pattern—lines converging on the center of the reservoir, like veins drawing blood toward an invisible heart. Cícero stopped. He took out the notebook again. He drew the pattern. Then he looked at the drawing and felt a chill crawl up the back of his neck that had nothing to do with the forty-degree heat.
The water wasn't evaporating. It was being drawn downward.
He crouched at the edge of the mud and, without thinking, shoved his hand in. The mud was hot on the surface, but underneath—about eight inches down—it was freezing. Cold as water from a deep cistern. Cold as something that shouldn't have been there.
And then it happened.
The instant his fingers touched the damp layer beneath the mud, the world blinked. It wasn't fainting. It wasn't dizziness. It was as if someone had swapped out the image before his eyes for a second—less than a second—and then put it back.
In that flash, he saw.
A woman running in the dark. Walls of black stone all around her. Water trickling down the walls, glowing with a bluish light of its own. The woman carried something in her arms—a bundle, a package, something small. She ran like someone fleeing. And she hummed. Softly, between ragged breaths, she hummed a song Cícero knew as well as his own name.
The song his mother used to sing to him to put him to sleep.
He yanked his hand out of the mud as if he'd been shocked. He fell onto the dry ground, his heart pounding in his ears, his breathing out of control. He looked at his hand. It was coated in dark mud, and something glimmered between his fingers.
It wasn't mud.
It was a piece of black stone, polished and the size of his palm. Lines were carved into its surface—thin, precise, impossible to be natural. They looked like trails. They looked like rivers. They looked like a map.
Cícero wiped the stone with the hem of his shirt. The lines were almost invisible when dry—just shallow grooves in the dark surface. He turned the stone over, searching for marks, inscriptions, anything. Nothing. Only those ghostly lines.
He stood. His legs were trembling. He looked at the reservoir—or what remained of it—and then at the stone in his hand. The sun was sinking, staining the sky a sickly orange, and the shadows of the black-stone ruins scattered across the horizon stretched over the earth like fingers.
Mr. Afrânio had already left with his half-empty bucket. In the distance, the village sent threads of smoke from its wood-burning stoves into the air. Everything was normal. Everything as it always was.
Except for the stone in his hand. Except for the song still echoing in his head. Except for the new, raw, impossible-to-ignore certainty that his mother hadn't gotten lost in the Backlands.
She had gone beneath it.
Cícero slipped the stone into his pants pocket and walked back toward the village. Halfway there, he stopped. He took the canteen from his belt, opened it, and poured a thin stream of water over the stone.
The lines lit up.
Not like ink appearing—like light being born. A faint bluish glow traveled along every groove, every curve, every fork. A map. A real map, with paths, markings, and a central point pulsing like a tiny heart.
The water ran off, and the lines went dark. The stone became stone again.
Cícero stood in the middle of the caatinga, the canteen in one hand and the dead map in the other, while the sun vanished behind the Dry Moon Range and the first hot wind of the night carried the smell of dust and nothing at all.
He didn't know what he had found. He didn't know where the map led. He didn't know why his mother's song was buried in the mud of a dying reservoir.
But he knew he wouldn't stop until he found out.