They left before dawn, like fugitives.
Donana didn't try to stop them. She stood in the doorway with her arms crossed over her chest and her eyes dry—too dry, as if she'd cried everything she could during the night and now only the salt remained. When Cícero hugged her, she held his face between her hands and said:
“When you get there, remember who you are. Not what you want. Who you are.”
He didn't understand. He held on to the words anyway, the way he held on to everything that didn't fit on the map—in his back pocket, close to his body, to examine later.
Luzia was waiting at the edge of the village, her pack on her back and her knife at her belt. She didn't say good morning. She didn't need to. The fact that she was there was enough.
They headed north, guided by the clay canteen Iracema had given Cícero. The canteen didn't point directions like a compass—it was subtler than that. When Cícero held it and concentrated, he could feel the pulse of the water inside change rhythm. Faster when he was going in the right direction. Slower when he veered off course. Like a heart that grew excited as it drew closer to home.
The terrain changed over the course of the day. The sparse caatinga gave way to a more rugged landscape—slabs of gray stone, dry ravines, rock formations that looked like the bones of giants buried standing up. The heat was brutal, but different from ordinary heat. It had a sucking quality, as if the air were hungry.
“More Devourers?” Luzia asked, feeling the same thing.
“I don't know. Maybe it's just being close to the ruins. Iracema said the land near Ibiraci is drier because the source draws the moisture downward.”
“Great. So the closer we get, the thirstier we become.”
“Basically.”
“Lovely.”
In the middle of the afternoon, they found Tomé.
The peddler was sitting on a rock in the middle of nowhere, a waterskin in his lap and a smile that was trying to look casual and failing miserably.
“Well, well. What a coincidence.”
“Tomé.” Cícero stopped. “What are you doing here?”
“Business. I have a client somewhere in the direction of the Dry Moon Range. Buys medicinal herbs. Pays well.”
“There isn't anyone in the direction of the Dry Moon Range,” Luzia said. “I know every soul living within fifty miles of here. In that direction, there isn't a single soul.”
Tomé kept smiling for three more seconds. Then he sighed, took off his hat, and scratched his head.
“Okay. I followed you.”
“Why?”
“Because I'm curious. And because”—he hesitated, and for the first time Cícero saw something on Tomé's face that wasn't an act. It was shame.—“Because Heitor Braga asked me to follow you.”
The silence that followed was the kind that came before violent decisions. Luzia took a step toward Tomé, her hand on her knife. Cícero grabbed her arm.
“Wait.” He looked at Tomé. “Asked you how?”
“The way he asks for everything. With a smile and a threat.” Tomé put his hat back on. “I owe him money, Cícero. A lot of money. Money I don't have and never will. He said if I followed you and sent word about where you were headed, the debt would disappear.”
“And you agreed.”
“I did.” Tomé looked at the ground. “But I haven't sent word yet. And I won't.”
“Why should I believe that?” Luzia asked.
“Because I'm standing here in front of you telling the truth instead of hiding behind a rock and sending a message.” Tomé stood up. He was shorter than either of them, older, weaker. But his eyes held the desperate clarity of someone who had made a decision and knew he couldn't turn back. “I've seen what Heitor does, Cícero. Not the way you saw it, in the water. I saw it with my own eyes. I saw smart people become stupid. I saw people who remembered everything forget their own names. I saw Heitor approach those people and walk away with that fat smile, like he'd just finished eating. I know what he is. And I don't want to work for him anymore.”
Cícero looked at Luzia. Luzia looked at Tomé with the gaze of someone assessing a wounded animal—deciding whether it was worth caring for or safer to leave behind.
“If he lies,” Luzia said to Cícero, without taking her eyes off Tomé, “I'll handle it.”
“Fair enough,” Tomé said. “Fair enough.”
The three of them continued on.
Tomé was useful, despite everything. He knew the Backlands from the seat of an ox cart, as he'd said, which meant he knew every road, every shortcut, every water source between the villages. He knew where abandoned cisterns were, where the shade lasted longest, where the ground was firm enough to sleep on without waking up with a scorpion in his boot.
And he told stories. He couldn't help it. For him, it was like breathing.
“My grandfather used to say the Dry Moon Range got its name because when the moon passed over it, it dried out too. Lost its shine. Turned dull, like stone. He said it was because the range drank the moonlight the same way it drank the water from the earth.”
“Was your grandfather a scientist?” Cícero asked.
“My grandfather was a drunk. But a good drunk sees things scientists don't.”
Luzia didn't laugh at Tomé's stories. But she stopped looking at him like a threat. It was progress.
They camped at the foot of a rock formation that offered shade and protection from the wind. Cícero rationed the water—they had Iracema's canteen, his own canteen, and Tomé's waterskin. Luzia had her own supply, which she showed no one and which seemed to last longer than it should have.
They ate dried meat and flour. Tomé shared a piece of sugarcane candy he'd had in his pocket. No one said much. It was the kind of exhaustion that ate words.
Cícero stayed awake after the others fell asleep. He sat with Iracema's canteen in his lap, feeling the pulse of the water inside. He thought of his mother. Of the song. Of the face he saw whenever he closed his eyes—the only face of hers he had, blurred by time, more sensation than image. Lips moving. A voice that vibrated in his chest before reaching his ears. The lullaby that was less a melody than a promise: I'm here, I'm here, I'm here.
If he lost that memory, what would be left?
A name. A story told by others. Photographs that didn't exist, because no one in Craúnas had a camera. The abstract certainty that he'd had a mother, without the concrete weight of remembering what it had been like to have her.
Would that be enough?
He didn't know. And not knowing was worse than any thirst.
He was about to lie down when he saw Luzia. She was sitting about thirty feet from the camp, her back to him, staring into the darkness. She wasn't moving. Cícero was about to lie back down when he realized she was holding something in her lap.
Iracema's canteen. She'd taken it without him noticing.
Cícero approached slowly. When he was close enough, he saw.
Luzia was crying.
Without a sound. Without moving. Just tears rolling down her face, one after another, falling into the canteen she held in both hands. And where the tears touched the clay, the water inside glowed. A faint bluish glow, pulsing in time with the tears.
Cícero stopped. He said nothing. He didn't move any closer. He stayed there, thirty feet away, guarding the moment without intruding on it, like someone drawing a map of a sacred place—recording its existence without setting foot inside.
Luzia wasn't a Raincaller. Iracema had said so. But her tears made the water from the Spring glow.
Cícero returned to camp and lay down. He didn't sleep. He stared at the stars—the few the dusty sky allowed him to see—and thought that maybe the gift wasn't the only way to touch water. Maybe pain worked too.
Maybe pain was the oldest way of all.