The rock cut through her gloves at the third handhold.
She knew it by the warmth, wet inside the waxed canvas, cold where air hit it. She didn’t look. Looking cost time and time cost height. She pressed her cheek against the face instead, breathed through her teeth, and found the next hold by feel.
The mountain had no name she knew. It had taken four days to reach its base and three more to climb what she’d climbed. The face above her was the same as the face below, pale, dry, crumbling at the edges like old bread. Nothing grew here. Nothing had grown here for a long time, maybe ever.
She moved up.
The wind found her at the last shelf before the summit ridge. Not a gust. A steady, horizontal push that wanted her off. She went flat against the rock and waited it out. Her arms shook from the shoulders down. Her legs had stopped aching two days ago and gone somewhere beyond it, a dull, constant pressure she’d stopped noticing the way you stop noticing a sound that never changes.
The ridge was fifteen feet above her.
She climbed it.
The top was a flat table of stone the size of a large room, split down the middle by a crack she could have laid in. She sat at the edge. Her pack came off her shoulders and she put it between her feet and she looked out.
The wasteland went in every direction.
Not desert, she’d crossed deserts. This was older. The ground below was grey-white and cracked into hexagons, water-patterned, bone-dry for longer than she could guess. There were formations out there, columns and arches, but the light hit them wrong. The shadows fell at angles that didn’t match the sun. The whole thing had a quality she couldn’t name, not dead, exactly. Like it had been made this way.
No wind down there. The air above it was perfectly still.
She looked out for a long time.
Then she opened her pack.
The bag at the bottom was canvas, salt-stained, the drawstring worn smooth. She pulled it out and set it beside her and undid the knot. Inside: a stick of chalk with one flat edge from use, a leather roll of brushes: six, each stamped with a number at the ferrule, the higher numbers barely used, the lower ones worn to stubs, a folding knife with a bone handle and a maker’s mark on the blade she’d never bothered to look up, a glass jar stopped with a rubber gasket and something moving inside it. Not moving like alive. Moving like a thought half-finished. And the charges. Twelve of them. Wrapped in cloth, each one the length of her middle finger, cold even through the wrapping.
She took out a charge and held it between her palms.
The sulphur smell came first, faint, then the warmth spread back into her hands.
She stood up.
The first one left her palm as a ball of light, pale yellow, and she threw it open-handed, a release, a direction. It fell outward and down and hit the grey flats maybe two miles out and the ground there cracked open and something dark came up through it, and then green. A single blade. Then more.
She didn’t watch it spread. She unrolled the brush leather and picked number three, the one with the split bristles that laid colour uneven, good for distance work, and pulled it through the air in front of her.
The air was tacky, paint that had skinned but not dried. The stroke held. Green where she dragged it, a long arc down toward the valley. She put number three back, took out the knife and scored a horizontal line and water ran from it, real water, she could hear it from here, a thin thread of sound cutting through the silence.
The second charge went wide, west, where the columns were. The light hit the rock face and the rock face changed colour, red to brown, brown to something with life in it, the colour of wet soil. She watched the columns, patient. Fissures appeared. Roots.
The brushstrokes built up in the air ahead of her like layers on a surface that wasn’t there, the whole face of the valley below hanging in front of her, and she was painting it, stroke by stroke, charge by charge, and the real version followed the painted version just behind.
The sun moved.
Her hands were steady.
Six charges left. The valley below her was half green, half grey, and the line between them was hard and bright and moving slowly south as the roots pushed through. She could see water now, an actual thread of it catching light in the valley floor. The arches had trees growing from their bases. The columns were covered in something dark and low.
She sat back down.
Her hands hurt again. That was good. It meant she was warm.
She picked up the jar and looked at the thing moving inside it for the first time since she’d opened the bag. It looked back. She set it at the very edge of the rock, right at the lip, worked the rubber gasket loose with her thumb, and stepped back.
The jar sat there a moment.
Then it tipped.
She watched it fall.
She turned back to the valley and took out the last six charges and laid them in a row on the stone beside her, and she started again from the north end, working toward the water.
The green line kept moving south.
