The first story that took shape inside her was not a story at all, but a sound.
It was the sound of rain on tin—sharp, irregular, a tapping that turned to drumming, that turned to a single sheet of noise. It struck the inside of her skull, light at first, then heavier, until she could feel every drop landing in the soft places of her.
She saw a roof then, patched with pieces of different metals, each one stolen or scavenged. The seams were smeared with something dark, something meant to keep the water out, but the water came anyway. It threaded itself through the smallest cracks, found the smallest surrenders.
A girl sat beneath that roof, counting the leaks in bowls and cups and a plastic basin gone clouded with age. She moved them as the water found new ways through. A choreography of containment.
Mara knew that girl and did not know her. Knew the ache in her shoulders, the tension of waiting for the next drop to announce itself. Knew the bone-deep certainty that there would always, always be another leak. Did not know the woman's voice in the next room, low and fraying, saying, "Just for this year. Just until we can afford to fix it."
"The river was in the sky, before it was river," the current said, sliding through the vision. "It has always wanted down."
Mara stood, in herself, at the threshold of that tin-roofed house and understood: the flood was not a villain. It was an answer to gravity, to the simplest of pulls. It was a yes.
The stories braided tighter. The rain became footsteps on stone, regular as a heartbeat. Mara's perspective tilted—she was no longer inside a house but on a high street in a town she might have once passed through. The sky had the heavy, waiting look of late afternoon in summer. Thunder was somewhere else, promising. No one believed it yet.
She walked as someone else, her spine a little straighter, her mouth a line tightened against words she wished she had not swallowed. People glanced and looked away, aware in the way that people are when they sense that something is about to break and hope they will not be the one toward whom the breaking is directed.
A hand closed around her wrist—no, not her wrist. The woman's—this other self whose skin she wore for a moment. Rough fingers, work-thickened, that had mended nets and torn shirts and the frayed edges of tempers for years.
"Don't," the owner of the hand said. A man, older. His voice had the river's gravel without its tenderness. "We do not air what is ours in the street."
"What is ours," the woman said, "is drowning me."
His grip tightened. "Then drown quiet."
Mara felt the flare of rage as if it were her own. It was her own. It was the river's. It was the rage of every narrowing channel, every forced turning, every denial of the simple right to run where one must.
"This is how banks speak," the river murmured. "Not only with soil and stone. With hands. With words that stack around you until you think they are the world."
Mara, inside the woman, did not pull her hand back. She did not shout. She did something smaller, something the man would not notice until it had already rewritten her path. She turned her wrist, slowly, deliberately, until his grip could no longer hold the same way. His fingers slipped to the back of her hand; his control became contact only.
She walked on. He walked with her, thinking he still led.
Mara felt the satisfaction bloom—thin but bright. The first secret channel cut through packed earth.
The scenes shifted again, threads sliding against threads. For a moment she was in ten places; her body hummed, full to the brink. A boy on a dry hillside, digging for water where his grandfather had said a spring once was. A woman by a wide, sluggish river, dropping stones into it one by one, each stone carrying a single word she no longer wished to house in her chest. An old man in a city of glass, looking up as the first cracks feathered across a window that had been promised unbreakable.
"This is how floods begin," the river said, its voice inside all their mouths. "Not with catastrophe, but with accumulation. A look not returned. A question not answered. A truth told to an empty room. Every stone you throw, every leak you do not stop, every wrist you turn."
Mara wanted to ask how she was supposed to live like this, with all these lives in her, all these currents splintering and rejoining, but the question dissolved before it reached her tongue. It was the wrong shape. The river did not answer shapes that did not fit its bed.
Instead, another story rose, slower. It came with the smell of algae and rust, with the quiet of a place no one visited because they had forgotten it existed.
An underpass. Concrete pillars streaked with old water lines, grafitti faded to bruised colors. Puddles collected where the road dipped. Above, cars hissed past, their drivers unaware of the shadowed country beneath their tires.
A child—Mara could not tell if it was herself or some other future or past—stood at the edge of one puddle. It should have been shallow, a mirror of the underside of the world, but it had a depth that defied its size. When the child dropped a stone into it, expecting a soft plunk, there was instead a sound like distant thunder, low and rolling. Ripples moved outward and did not stop at the edge. They climbed the concrete, climbed the pillars, climbed the air itself.
The child laughed, delighted and terrified. She dropped another stone.
Thunder again. The world above did not notice, but something in the foundations did. Hairline cracks, long dormant, widened by a breath.
"Paths change shape slowly," the river whispered. "And then all at once. When you speak, when you listen, when you refuse to hold your breath any longer—you are throwing stones. Do not pretend otherwise."
Mara's pulse beat hard at her throat. She remembered the cold of the river on her knees, the slick weight of the real stones in her hands. How small they had seemed. How large they felt now, in hindsight.
"What if I flood the wrong thing?" she asked, the question forming like mist. "What if I break what is not meant to be broken?"
The river did not answer quickly. Silence filled her, not empty but thick. In that silence she saw banks: walls furred with moss, walls built of stacked sandbags that leaked anyway, walls of faces arranged in disapproval. She saw what happened when water rose against them. Sometimes the walls held. Sometimes they did not. Sometimes they collapsed upstream, and the village downstream never knew how close it had come.
Finally, the current spoke. "There is no not-breaking. There is only choosing what will bear your weight and what will not. You cannot keep every stone dry."
"That is not an answer," Mara said.
"It is the only one you will get."
The hum inside her shifted then. It was less like bees, more like distant chanting—the sound of many mouths forming the same syllable, over and over. She could not catch the language, only the rhythm. It vibrated in her bones, in the tender places behind her eyes.
She opened them.
The canyon came back in pieces—the tilt of the sky between its walls, the sharp smell of wet rock, the shadow of a bird skimming the water's surface. Her hands were empty. She could still feel the ghost-weight of stones in them.
The river ran on, unconcerned with whether she had understood perfectly. Its body glittered and darkened in the changing light.
Somewhere along her shins there was a faint outline where the water had kissed and left. A line of cold that was not quite gone. She traced it with her fingertips and felt, briefly, as if someone else's hand lay over hers, guiding.
"Walk," the river said, gentler now. "Not away. Not toward. Just—walk. Banks are not broken all at once. They are tested."
"To where?" she asked.
"You will know by the way the ground gives under your feet."
The cliff-edge feeling rose in her again, that paradox of fear as invitation. Her life as she had known it waited somewhere behind her: narrow, contained, patched like the tin roof against the worst of the weather, but never truly dry. Ahead, no map. Only the promise of mud and stone and the possibility of breaking what had been insisted unbreakable.
Mara stepped back from the river.
For one dizzy heartbeat she expected the current to reach for her, to drag at her ankles, to protest. It did not. It merely adjusted its surface around the absence of her body, closing cleanly, as if she had never been there and as if she always had.
The canyon's path stretched out, twisting with the water's course. Up above, the sky was a narrow seam. To follow the sunlight she would need to climb, leave the river's immediate side. To follow the river, she would need to trust that the dark turns would open again.
She looked once more at the glitter of broken light on water. The humming inside her rose in answer, no longer something separate but a new organ insisting on its right to exist.
"Then listen," the river had said. She had listened. Now there was the other half of the promise.
She put her hand flat against the nearest wall of rock. It was cool, patient. Beneath her palm she felt the faint, impossible sensation of movement—the rock remembering being sediment, remembering being mud, remembering the time before it had agreed to hold its current shape.
"Everything has been softer than this," she murmured, not sure whether she was speaking to the stone, to the river, or to herself. "Everything has known how to let go."
The wind sent a thin shiver down the canyon, smelling of places she had not yet seen: dust and pine, smoke and something sweet and sharp like crushed nettles.
Mara took her hand from the wall.
She began to walk.