The canyon kept its breath.
Wind climbed the walls in long, invisible strides, but the stone did not answer. Its silence was not indifference; it was a kind of listening Mara had no word for yet.
She walked.
Not away from the column so much as along a new edge that had been drawn inside her. The path skirting the rim was narrow, loose rock sliding now and then beneath her boots in small avalanches that never reached the bottom. The river far below flashed only in fragments, a broken ribbon caught between angles of rock. Its sound rose and fell, sometimes a roar, sometimes a murmur, like a voice speaking in another room.
"We," she said again, more quietly this time. The wind caught the word, shredded it, tried it on against the cliff face. A scrap of it came back to her, altered: ee, ee, ee. A bird's call, a warning, or laughter.
Her hand still tingled where it had pressed against the stone. When she turned it over, her palm bore no visible mark, but the skin felt thinner, as if what separated her from anything else had been worn down to a woven veil. When she flexed her fingers, she could almost feel the canyon flexing, enormous and slow, in some deeper layer of time.
"Is this what you meant?" she asked the air, though she had no clear sense of who the you might be—canyon, river, the old women in the village, her own earlier self.
There was no answer, only the clear, merciless blue and the constant drift of dust.
Below, a hawk traced an easy ellipse over the invisible current. Its shadow skated along the rock, a darker crack moving across the already cracked face. Mara watched it until her neck ached. The bird's circles tightened, then loosened, then vanished as it slipped beyond the canyon's mouth, into a brightness she could not see into without squinting.
Beyond there lay the plateau, and beyond that, the scattered teeth of the low mountains, and beyond them—if the maps she'd been shown were true—the cities.
The thought of them pressed at the back of her skull: the layered noise, the stacked rooms of light, the constant, low-level friction of so many lives rubbing edges with one another. The stories had called the cities hungry. The canyon was hungry too, in its way, but it knew how to keep its distance. The cities, she'd been told, came looking.
She had never seen one.
She had never stepped beyond the far fields. The canyon had been the boundary and the answer: Here, you end. Here, you kneel. Here, you leave your questions and go home with your hands still empty, which is to say, still yours.
And then the column had cracked.
She did not feel heroic. Mostly she felt tired, and slightly misplaced, as if she had woken up in clothes that belonged to someone else. The word we sat in her like a stone swallowed whole. It did not move easily, but it tugged at everything around it.
"We," she said, and thought of the river in flood season, licking at the upper ledges. "We," and thought of the women who had stood in this very dust, generation after generation, their hands on the same weathered surface, asking to be told what to do. "We," and thought of the way the crack had appeared exactly beneath her fingers and also entirely of its own accord.
We meant she was not the only one responsible. We meant she was never not responsible.
The path narrowed further ahead where rock had fallen from above, half blocking the way. She squeezed through sideways, her shoulder brushing fresh fracture. A flake of stone scuffed loose and dropped—a tiny, sharp sound swallowed by the canyon's larger hush.
She felt, more than heard, that hush prick.
"Sorry," she said automatically, then stopped.
It was a habit, that sorry. A word she'd learned before she'd learned much else. Sorry for asking. Sorry for existing so loudly. Sorry for wanting. Sorry for not knowing how not to want.
The canyon did not accept or reject the apology. It simply existed, massive and full of its own continuities. The wind ran fingers through her hair, gentle, almost curious.
"You'll have to get used to it," she told the stone. "To us. To me."
Her voice shook; she let it. Whatever had changed below, on that ledge with her palm pressed flat, had not rearranged her into certainty. It had left her as she was—afraid, unwilling and unwilling not to be—and had simply refused to let her pretend that fear was the whole of her.
Everything has also known how to hold, she thought again, the phrase returning like the echo of a chant. The canyon held the river. The river held the memory of glaciers and vanished rains. The air held the dust of old bones and distant fires. Her body held all of this and more: lullabies half remembered, rules she had been given and had obeyed until she didn't, the feel of other hands on hers—pulling her away from the rim as a child, pushing her toward it yesterday.
Her body had weight. Her choices would, too.
The village lay somewhere behind her, a cluster of roofs braided with smoke. Faces would be turned toward the canyon now, shading their eyes, counting—stone, sky, shadow—trying to read omens in the way the light slid down the walls. They would not yet know what had happened. They might never know it in the words she would use.
She could go back.
The thought rose, clear and clean as a spring. She could retrace her steps, say nothing about the crack, let the canyon keep its inscrutable silence while she folded herself back into the old patterns. She could be the girl who had gone to ask and come back with an answer that sounded like all the other answers, even if it didn't feel true in her mouth.
Her foot shifted. Small rocks tumbled away, skipping outward, then dropping. She watched them fall until they vanished into brightness, then ineffable depth.
Gravity as invitation.
She thought of stepping forward instead of back. Of following the rim toward the canyon's opening, where the walls fell away and the world spread itself bare. The idea frightened her in a more specific way; it had edges, directions. It would mean leaving the path that everyone knew, walking into landscapes no story had bothered to name.
Behind her: the known safety of being told.
Ahead: a long, dissonant future in which she would keep having to say everything has also known how to hold, testing the sentence against new surfaces, new refusals.
"We," she said once more, and this time the word reached farther. She felt it go out across rock and water, up into the thin blue, down into the unseen seam where stone met the molten dark. It came back thickened, weighted. A promise she had not fully made and could not fully escape.
Her hand rose again of its own accord. She did not touch the canyon this time. She held her palm out to the emptiness in front of her, as if expecting another hand to meet it. Wind pressed against her skin—less like a caress, more like a test.
"All right," she whispered. Whether to herself, to the canyon, or to that widening, nameless we, she could not say.
She turned her back on the stone and began to walk toward the mouth of the canyon, where the light gathered in a hard, bright band. The wind moved with her, around her, sometimes pushing, sometimes resisting, never quite neutral anymore.
Behind her, the cracked column stood, unchanged to any eye that had not known it whole.
Ahead, the rim tapered and then broke, and beyond that: a world that had not been waiting, but that would have to make room.
The wind, hearing itself included, rose and rose, until it was almost enough to be called a voice.