The bed of Dead Creek was wide enough for three ox carts side by side, and dry enough to look as if it had never carried a drop. Round stones, polished by water that no longer existed, covered the bottom like eggs from some extinct animal. Cícero walked down the center of the riverbed, following the lines of the map he'd copied into his notebook, while Iracema's canteen pulsed faster and faster at her belt.
“Does this river have a name?” Tomé asked, tripping over a stone.
“Dead Creek,” Luzia replied. “It dried up more than a hundred years ago. My grandfather said that when he was a boy, there was still a trickle.”
“It didn't dry up,” Cícero said. He was crouched down, his palm spread over one of the riverbed stones. “It was drained. I can feel it. There's still a memory here. Not much, but it's here. The water left, but it left a trail behind.”
He closed his eyes and performed Vein Reading. It was easier now—he didn't need liquid water, only the residual moisture trapped in the rock, the ghost of the water that had once been there.
The visions came in layers.
The most recent layer was empty—decades of drought, silence, nothing. But beneath it, like sediment in a cross section of earth, there were others. Cícero descended through them as if walking down a staircase in the dark.
He saw the river full. Clear, swift water singing over the stones. People stood along the banks. Not backlanders—different people. Skin as dark as Luzia's, but with markings on their faces, bluish lines that looked like tattoos made of water. Clothes woven from fiber. Eyes that glowed when they touched the current.
The Ibiraci.
They used the river the way the backlanders used roads. They plunged their hands into the water and spoke—not with their mouths, but with their minds. Memories flowed through the current like messages. A woman upstream infused a memory into the water—the face of a child, a warning, a song—and miles downstream, someone else received it intact, as if it had been whispered in their ear.
Currentwriting. The second manifestation of Memory Water.
Cícero descended deeper into the layers. He saw Ibiraci at its height. The luminous channels. The black-stone chambers where the elders kept collective memories—the entire history of a people preserved in water, accessible to any Raincaller who touched the current. He saw the Mother Spring pulsing at the center of it all, a source rising from the heart of the earth with such intense blue light that it illuminated the entire city without any need for fire.
And then he saw the fall.
It wasn't an invasion. It wasn't a natural disaster. It was a choice.
Two sides. One wanted to open the Spring to the surface—to share the water, the memory, the knowledge with the world above. The other wanted to seal everything away. Protect it. Hide it. Water was too much power to be divided.
The war was fought with water itself. Memories used as weapons—memories of pain, fear, and madness, infused into the current and fired at the enemy. The channels grew murky. Water, which had always been language, became poison.
And then the side that wanted the seal created the guardians. They shaped the dry air and gave it a purpose: gather all the water on the surface and return it to the Spring. Seal the cycle. Cut the connection with the world above forever.
It worked. The guardians rose, drained everything, and the surface dried up. But with no one left to control them, the guardians continued. And continued. And continued. Every thirty years, the cycle repeated, because the guardians didn't know how to stop. They hadn't been made to stop.
The Rain Devourers weren't monsters. They were broken tools, carrying out an order no one could revoke.
Cícero opened his eyes. He was lying in the riverbed, with Luzia holding his head and Tomé splashing water on his face.
“How long?” he asked.
“Almost an hour,” Luzia said. Her voice was controlled, but her hands were trembling. “You stopped breathing twice.”
“I saw everything. The city. The war. The Devourers. I know how they were made. I know why they won't stop.”
He told them. Everything. Sitting in the bed of Dead Creek, with the sun sinking and the shadows stretching out, Cícero told them what he had seen. Tomé listened with his eyes wide and his mouth hanging open, forgetting even to drink. Luzia listened with a closed-off expression, processing every piece of information like someone assembling a puzzle she'd rather not solve.
When he finished, the silence lasted for a while.
“So it's not a curse,” Luzia said. “It's a machine. A broken machine.”
“Yeah.”
“And to fix it, you need to reach the source.”
“The Mother Spring. Yes.”
“And the blind old woman knows how.”
“She does.”
Luzia fell silent. Then:
“My father died of thirst. During an ordinary dry spell—it wasn't even the Great Thirst. I was sixteen. He went out to get water from a well half a day's walk away. He never came back. I went after him. Found him on the way, collapsed. Dried out.” She wasn't looking at Cícero. She was looking at the river stones. “I carried him home on my back. He weighed less than a sack of flour. The water had left him completely.”
Cícero said nothing. There was nothing to say.
“If this source can end this,” Luzia continued, “if it can truly bring the rain back, forever, then I'm not here for the money.” She finally looked at him. “I'm here because my father died for lack of something that's being kept underground because of a fight between people who died a thousand years ago. And that's not right.”
Tomé, who had stayed quiet—a personal record—cleared his throat.
“I don't have some pretty sad story to tell. My father died drunk, and my mother threw me out of the house when I was fourteen. But I like water. I like rain. I like seeing green plants and fat animals. And if I have to go down a hole beneath the earth with a crazy cartographer and a tracker who looks at me like I'm a thieving goat, then fine. I'm in.”
Luzia almost smiled. Almost.
They followed the riverbed until late afternoon. The map indicated that the passage to Ibiraci lay where the river met the base of the Dry Moon Range—where the water had once been born.
When they arrived, they found a wall of rock. Smooth, black, immense. The riverbed ended against it like a sentence cut off halfway through. There was no opening. No crack. Only stone.
Cícero checked the map. The entry point was there. He was sure of it. He placed his hand on the rock.
Cold. Colder than it should have been beneath the Backlands sun. And damp. A fine moisture, almost imperceptible, like sweat.
He pressed his palm against the stone and performed the Reading. No vision came. A sound did. From the other side of the rock, muffled by the thickness of the stone but unmistakable, came the sound of running water. Living water, in motion, singing the way it had sung in the channels of Ibiraci he had seen in the memories.
And along with the water, a voice. Weak, distant, distorted by the rock. But singing. Singing a song Cícero knew better than his own name.
His mother's lullaby.
He pulled his hand away from the rock. His heart was beating so hard it hurt.
“There’s water on the other side,” he said. His voice came out cracked. “And someone’s singing.”
“What are they singing?” Tomé asked.
Cícero didn't answer. He couldn't. Because the answer was too big to fit in his mouth, too big to fit in his chest, too big to fit in any map he'd ever drawn.
His mother was on the other side of that wall. Or her memory. Or an echo. Or a ghost. Some part of her was there, trapped in the water, singing to him the way she had when he was too young to understand that lullabies were promises parents made while knowing they might not be able to keep them.
Luzia placed a hand on his shoulder. She said nothing. She didn't need to.
Tomé looked at the wall, then at Cícero, then at the darkening sky.
“Well,” he said. “Now all we have to do is figure out how to open a mountain.”