The Devourer did not pursue them.
It passed them by, some three hundred yards away, gliding over the caatinga like a wound in the air. Wherever it touched, the ground grew pale—the earth's scant moisture sucked away, leaving white dust behind. A mandacaru in the creature's path wilted in five seconds. Cícero counted. Five seconds to turn a plant that had survived years of drought into a hollow stick.
Luzia did not move until the distortion vanished over the horizon, in the direction of Craúnas.
“Craúnas,” Cícero said, and started running.
Luzia caught up with him in three strides and grabbed him by the arm.
“If that thing got there before us, running won't change anything. If it hasn't, we'll arrive together. Move fast, but keep moving.”
He hated that she was right. They walked quickly.
They reached Craúnas at dawn. The village was still standing, but it was different. The reservoir—the little that remained of it—had dried up completely overnight. Not a trace of mud remained. Not a trace of moisture. Just a crater of white, cracked earth, like a cauterized wound. The plants in the yards had wilted. The animals, restless, mooed and bleated without stopping, licking the walls of the empty troughs.
And the people were thirsty. Not the ordinary thirst of the Backlands, an old and familiar companion. This was a new thirst, urgent, burning in their throats and drying their eyes. Children cried without tears. Old people coughed dust.
Donana stood in the doorway of her house, arms crossed, staring at the dead reservoir with the expression of someone recognizing an old enemy.
“It’s begun,” she said when she saw Cícero. “Just like thirty years ago. Exactly the same.”
“Grandma, you need to tell me—”
“Not now.” Donana looked at Luzia, assessed her in two seconds—the two of them had that in common—and nodded. “Come in. There’s still water in the cistern. Not much, but there’s some.”
They spent the day in the village. Cícero helped distribute the remaining water from Donana’s cistern—the only one that still had anything in it, because it was the deepest in the village. Luzia, without anyone asking, repaired the hand pump at the community well, which had been jammed for months. It did no good. The well was dry.
Toward late afternoon, the sound of wheels and hooves came down the road.
A caravan. Three ox carts loaded with barrels of water, escorted by four men on horseback with rifles slung across their backs. At the front, riding a dun horse that gleamed with good care, came a man who did not belong in the Backlands. Heavyset, ruddy-skinned, with a thick mustache, dressed in white linen without a speck of dust on it. A fine leather hat. Polished boots.
Heitor Braga.
Cícero knew him by name and from a distance. Everyone in the Backlands did. Heitor controlled the reservoirs on the big farms, the cisterns at Tamboril Fair, and the wells in the villages lucky—or unlucky—enough to lie within his territory. He controlled the water, and whoever controlled the water in the Backlands controlled everything.
“Good afternoon, people of Craúnas!” Heitor’s voice was deep, trained to fill open spaces. He dismounted with the surprising agility of a large man and spread his arms. “I heard the reservoir dried up. I’ve come to help.”
The residents drew closer. Some with relief, others with the caution of people who knew that free help in the Backlands was the most expensive thing there was. Heitor ordered his men to open the barrels. Clean, cool, crystal-clear water. The children ran forward with cups. The old people approached slowly, dignified even in their thirst.
Cícero watched from a distance, leaning against the wall of Donana’s house. Luzia stood beside him, arms crossed.
“I don’t like him,” Luzia said.
“Nobody does. But everybody needs him.”
“That’s worse.”
Heitor handed out water with smiles and slaps on the back. But Cícero noticed something. The barrels bore a mark—a seal carved into the wood that he did not recognize. And while Heitor spoke with the villagers, he looked around with an attention that had nothing to do with charity. He looked at the dry reservoir. At the ruins on the horizon. At the ground.
He was looking for something.
Cícero made a decision. He picked up a cup, went to one of the barrels, and filled it. The water was cold, clean, tasteless. Perfect. He carried the cup to a corner, away from Heitor’s eyes, and dipped in his fingers.
Vein Reading.
Iracema had told him he could do it consciously now. He closed his eyes, touched the water with intent, and listened.
What came was not one memory. It was several. Overlapping fragments, like voices speaking at the same time in a dark room. But amid the noise, Cícero made out pieces.
An old man sitting in a chair, staring at his own hands without recognizing them. A woman screaming a name she could not remember. A child crying in the dark, calling for someone who did not answer. And beneath it all, like an underground current, a sensation—not an image, but a feeling. Emptiness. Loss. The specific terror of forgetting something you know was important but can no longer say what it was.
Cícero opened his eyes. The cup trembled in his hand.
Those were not memories of people who had touched the water naturally. They had been ripped out. Extracted. Heitor’s water was full of fragments of stolen lives.
He looked at Heitor, who at that moment was laughing at a joke he had told himself, one hand on Mr. Afrânio’s shoulder. The laugh was broad, generous, rehearsed. And his eyes—those small, calculating eyes—swept over the village like someone taking inventory.
Heitor wasn’t merely controlling the water.
He was stealing memories.
Cícero did not know how long he stood there, cup in hand and horror in his throat. Luzia brought him back, touching his shoulder.
“What is it? You look like you saw a ghost.”
“Worse.” He lowered his voice. “His water. There’s something inside it. Memories. Of people who… who were erased.”
Luzia looked at him as though deciding whether the person in front of her had gone mad or the world itself was mad. Then she looked at Heitor. Then at the water the children were drinking.
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“And he knows you know?”
Before Cícero could answer, a shadow fell over them. Heitor Braga stood there, three steps away, his smile still on his face but his eyes already somewhere else. He looked at the cup in Cícero’s hand. At his wet fingers. At the face of someone who had seen what he shouldn’t have.
“Cícero Alencar.” Heitor’s voice was soft as new leather. “The mapmaker. I heard you’ve been poking around the ruins. Drawing maps of things that don’t exist.”
“Everything exists, Colonel. You just have to know where to look.”
The two stared at each other. Heitor’s smile did not waver, but something behind it—something in his eyes—hardened. It was quick. A second. Less. The time it took for two men to recognize each other for what they truly were.
Enemies.
“Watch out for the sun, boy.” Heitor adjusted his hat. “This drought makes a person’s head boil. Makes you see things that aren’t there.”
He turned his back and returned to the caravan. He mounted his horse. He gave the order to move out. The ox carts creaked, the riders fell into formation, and the caravan left Craúnas along the same road it had come by, leaving behind empty barrels and a village that now had water in its body but something less in its soul.
Cícero stood still until the dust settled.
“He knows,” Luzia said. It wasn’t a question.
“He does.”
“And now what?”
Cícero looked toward the horizon where the caravan was disappearing. Then he looked the other way—to the north, where the Dry Moon Range cut across the sky like a dark blade.
“Now we move faster.”
That night, while Cícero and Luzia planned to leave the following day, Heitor Braga stopped the caravan in the middle of the road. He dismounted and walked to the last ox cart, where one of his men—Zé Cego, the most loyal, the quietest—waited for orders.
“The map boy. Follow him. Don’t let him out of your sight. If he finds the entrance, let me know before he goes in.”
Zé Cego nodded and vanished into the darkness.
Heitor was left alone on the road. He took a small dark-glass vial filled with water from his vest pocket. He opened it. He took a sip. He closed his eyes.
The memories came—fragments of other people, lives he had drained over the course of thirty years. Faces, names, sensations that did not belong to him. He used them as fuel, as information, as power. But lately, holes had begun appearing among the stolen memories. Blank spaces where there should have been something of his. His own memories, corroded by the constant use of the Drought Seal.
There was one hole in particular that haunted him. He knew something important had existed there, in that empty space. Something he had loved. But he could not remember what it was. Or who.
He only knew that it hurt.
He put the vial away, mounted his horse, and continued on. Behind him, at Donana’s house in Craúnas, the old woman opened her daughter’s letter one last time.
“Mother, if he finds the first piece, don’t let him go after the second. The Spring demands a price no one should have to pay. I’ll pay it because I have no choice. But he does. Don’t let my son repeat what I did.”
Donana folded the letter. She looked toward the room where Cícero slept.
He had already found the first piece. He had already found the Old Woman of the Well. He had already seen what Heitor Braga was hiding. There was no way to stop him anymore.
The Great Thirst had begun, and with it, the countdown to a choice Donana prayed her grandson would never have to make.
But prayers in the Backlands are always competing with thirst. And thirst almost always wins.