The first time the river spoke to her, it used her mother's voice.
It was late, the sort of late that bruises the sky purple, and the town had already folded itself into silence. Streetlamps hummed like old bees. Windows glowed and dimmed and went black, one by one, as if the night were slowly snuffing out a row of candles.
Mara walked alone along the bank, the gravel whispering under her shoes. She wasn't meant to be out—she was never meant to be out—but the house had grown too small for her thoughts, the walls too thin to hold her anger without cracking. Her father's footsteps had paced trenches into the boards. The radio had hissed the names of distant towns drowned in floodwater. Above it all, his voice had cut through: not panicked, not even raised, just tired in a way that made her chest ache.
"We'll be fine," he'd said. "If it comes to it, we move. Things can be replaced."
Mara had wanted to ask if "things" included her mother's guitar, still leaning in the corner like a person who hadn't realized the conversation was over. If "things" included the letters under her bed or the smell of orange peel and cigarette smoke that still clung to the curtains. If a life could be packed into cardboard, labeled in marker, and driven quietly away.
Instead, she'd slipped out the back door when his pacing turned into the slow stumble of sleep.
Now, by the river, the air felt wet and electric, heavy with the breath of unseen storms. The water had swallowed half the reeds, licking at the roots of the trees as if tasting them. The current moved with intent. It did not yet rage, but it no longer seemed content to simply exist.
She had grown up beside this river. It had been the backdrop to her childhood summers, the place where her mother taught her how to skim stones and listen for the world's smaller sounds: dragonflies, frogs, wind in the sedge. "Water remembers," her mother once said, kneeling in the shallows, cupping a handful that slipped between her fingers like a secret. "It carries everything it's ever touched. One day, it'll bring something back."
That was before the leaving, before the hospital rooms with their antiseptic brightness, before the kind of quiet that felt like falling.
Tonight, when the river spoke, it began as a pattern beneath the usual noise: beneath the plash and hiss, beneath the caw of some insomniac crow, a rhythm that didn't belong. Mara stopped, head tilted, the skin along her arms tightening as if the night had suddenly grown teeth.
"Mara."
It was soft and low and unmistakable.
The world contracted. The streetlamps, the distant hum of the highway, the chorus of frogs—all of it dropped away, leaving only her name, unmoored and drifting on the dark.
She turned in a slow circle, throat dry. "Dad?" she whispered, though the word felt wrong as it left her. He never said her name like that.
"Mara." Again, from the water itself this time, from the dark, gliding ribbon that had always been only water and nothing more.
She stepped closer, shoes sinking slightly into the damp bank. The river caught the sky's last light, a smear of bruised violet and dull silver. The current seemed to lean toward her, as if the whole body of water were listening back.
"You shouldn't be here," she whispered. She wasn't sure whether she meant the voice or herself.
The river answered with a sigh that wasn't quite wind. "I have always been here."
It sounded like her mother. Not perfectly—there was an echo at the edges, a hollow resonance, as if the words traveled from very far away—but the cadence, the slight upward lilt at the end of the sentence, that was her. The familiarity struck her with the force of a physical blow.
Mara's knees weakened. She remembered her mother's last day home, the way she had stood at the window watching this same river, hands wrapped around a mug she never drank from. "You listen," her mother had said without turning around. "You're good at that. Don't stop, even when you don't like what you hear."
"I'm dreaming," Mara said now, because the alternative required her to believe in something that felt more dangerous than any flood.
"Then dream with me," the river replied.
A gust of wind rushed along the surface, combing up ripples that glittered faintly. In their shifting, she thought she saw shapes—a hand reaching, a face turned sideways, a scatter of letters unmoving beneath the swirl. Her chest tightened around something sharp and unnameable.
"They're going to leave you," the river murmured. "When the water rises."
Mara swallowed, the taste of metal on her tongue. "We'll move," she said, repeating her father's words as if they were a spell. "We have time."
Silence, thick and waiting.
"Not like that," the river said at last. "They will leave, and you will stay. Because of me. Because of what you are."
The laugh tore out of her, wild and too loud in the stillness. "What I am? I'm a girl whose mother is dead and whose father can't look at her without seeing a ghost. That's what I am."
The river's next words came slower, chosen carefully, the way her mother used to fork through a plate of food when she'd already lost her appetite.
"You are mine," it said.
The frogs fell quiet, as if the world had leaned in to listen.
Something inside her recognized the statement, not the words but the weight of them. Memories unfurled: the way she'd never feared deep water, the way rain seemed to find her even on clear days, the way that, as a child, she'd known the river's moods as instinctively as her own. The way her mother's gaze sometimes lingered too long when she emerged dripping from the shallows, as if searching her for an answer.
"You mean… what?" she asked, voice small. "Cursed? Marked? Chosen?" The last word was almost a sneer. Chosen ones belonged in stories, not in a town no one bothered to put on maps.
"Bound," came the reply. "There is a difference."
Behind her, far up the hill, she heard the faint crack of a door opening, carried thin and reedy through the night. Her father, maybe, noticing the hollow where she should be. The thought of him at the threshold, calling her name into the dark, twisted something in her chest. Torn between the familiar ache of his worry and the impossible pull of the voice before her, she stood suspended, like a needle hovering over a spinning record.
"Why now?" she asked the water, though what she wanted to say was: Why didn't you come when she was dying? Why didn't you say her name then?
Because she had been listening all her life. Because it had taken the river this long to answer.
"The waters are rising," the river said. "Old borders are coming undone. There will be no place that is not touched. They will flee. They will forget. You cannot. You were born to remember. To speak when I cannot."
Mara thought of the news reports, of houses half-swallowed, of highways turned to gleaming skin. Of whispers in town that this was only the beginning, that the season had turned strange and would not turn back. She thought of her own dreams, restless and wet and filled with endless, rushing sound.
"And if I say no?" she asked.
A pause. Then, softly, "You will drown with them."
Thunder rumbled somewhere beyond the hills, low and continuous, like a beast clearing its throat. A fine spray rose from the river's surface, drifting toward her. When it touched her cheeks, it felt not like rain but like tears.
Behind her, that far-off, reedy call again, the faint shape of her name torn into pieces by the wind. Ahead, the water, dark and patient, holding entire lifetimes in its silent throat.
Mara closed her eyes.
She had always thought the word "choice" sounded clean and sharp, like the snap of a twig. But here, between the voice of the river and the voice of her father, it felt more like stepping into water at night: you only knew how deep it was when it was already around your waist.
When she finally stepped forward, the bank gave way a little under her weight.
"All right," she said, though she didn't know which of them she was answering. "Then speak. And I'll listen."
The river rose to meet her words, curling around them like fingers, and somewhere in the depths, something old and long asleep opened its eyes.