The Masters did not believe in idle hands. If we were to eat from the island's soil, we were to tend it. That was the rule, stated plainly on our second morning, and no one argued with it. Not even me, though I had never in my life dug anything out of the ground.

  The lower valley was a narrow strip of dark, damp earth wedged between two cliffs where the wind did not reach and the moss grew thick and black over everything. We worked in the gray morning light, hunched over in the wet, digging for heirun roots, thick purple tubers that tasted, I would later discover, almost exactly like what they smelled like coming out of the ground. I had traded my white silk for a rough-spun wool tunic but I still wore my red leather pauldrons. They were the only piece of home I had left and I was not ready to put them down yet.

  I was not good at this. I knew I was not good at it and I knew everyone could see I was not good at it, and I gripped the trowel and dug anyway.

  "You are holding it like a royal scepter," a voice said behind me.

  I turned. Warren was leaning against a jagged rock a few feet away, his basket already half full, his sleeves rolled to the elbow despite the cold. He was watching me with that particular expression he had, the one that was not quite a smirk and not quite a smile, somewhere between the two.

  "On Misith we have people for this," I said.

  "I know you do." He pushed off the rock and crouched beside me, and without asking permission he reached over and adjusted my grip on the trowel, his hand closing briefly over mine. His skin was warm. The contrast with the cold air was startling enough that I forgot for a moment to be self-conscious about being bad at gardening. "Lower angle. Like you are part of the ground. Not visiting it."

  "Is that how you instruct all the initiates?" I asked. "With soil philosophy?"

  "Only the ones who look like they have never been below the third floor of anything."

  I laughed before I could stop myself. It came out small and a little surprised, and he looked at me when it happened as though he had been waiting to hear what it sounded like.

  Then he winked at Mobe-Joan as she passed with a heavy crate on her shoulder and said something that made her huff out a low sound of reluctant amusement, and I turned back to my trowel and reminded myself what I knew about scavengers. They collect things. They move on. The wink he gave me and the wink he gave Mobe-Joan cost him exactly the same amount.

  I dug my root out of the ground and put it in my basket and reached for the next one.

  The crack came without warning.

  Not thunder. Something deeper than thunder, a sound that came up through the soles of my boots before it reached my ears, the sound of the island itself splitting along a seam. We all looked up at the same moment. On the northern cliff face a massive shelf of black shale had sheered away from the rock and was moving, slowly at first and then not slowly at all, directly toward the Lanai village below.

  The dust cloud rose before the sound finished echoing.

  Kit was already running. Warren dropped his basket and followed. I left the trowel in the ground and ran.

  The path to the village was steep and wet and I slipped twice on the moss and caught myself and kept going. By the time we reached the outer edge of the settlement the dust was still hanging in the air and the sound had become something worse than sound, the high, piercing distress calls of the Lanai cutting through the gray morning like something tearing.

  It was bad.

  Half the village was gone. The beehive huts on the northern side had been swallowed entirely under tons of dark rock, the round stone walls crumpled as though they had been made of paper. The Lanai were everywhere at once, scurrying through the rubble in their gray robes, their bird-like faces open with a panic that needed no translation. Beneath several of the collapsed walls I could see movement. Limbs. The flutter of gray cloth.

  Warren looked at the scale of it and I saw the calculation move across his face. He opened his mouth.

  "Kit, Mobe-Joan, the northern shelf," I said. My voice came out with an authority I did not plan. "It is still unstable. If it shifts again it will take the eastern huts too. Hold it."

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  Kit looked at me for a half second. Then he moved.

  Warren closed his mouth.

  Mobe-Joan was already bracing, her feet wide on the rubble, her bark-textured face set with concentration. Kit took position beside her and together they reached up with the Force and caught the remaining shelf, thousands of pounds of shale suspended in the air above the eastern huts, trembling slightly in their combined grip.

  "Warren, the wall on the left," I said. "There are people underneath. Pull the stones from the top down, not the sides or it will collapse inward."

  He went without a word.

  "Vane." I turned. Vane was standing at the edge of the rubble with her arms crossed, her scarred eyebrow raised, wearing the expression she kept specifically for me.

  "You are not a Master," she said.

  "No," I said. "And those are children under that wall. So you can stand there or you can help me. But I am going either way."

  I turned and went.

  Behind me, after a pause long enough to make her feelings clear, I heard Vane's boots on the rubble.

  I moved through the village in a systematic line, the way I had learned to move through a ward on Misith when there were too many patients and not enough hands. You do not look at the whole of it. You look at what is directly in front of you and you address it and you move to the next thing. I knelt beside a collapsed doorway and pressed my hands to the stone and felt through it for what was inside, the way I would feel through a body for the location of a break. There. Two of them. Alive.

  "Here," I said to the nearest Lanai. "Dig from the left corner. I will stabilize them when you reach them."

  The Lanai looked at me with those wide, unblinking eyes and then began to dig.

  Warren had uncovered a section of wall on the far side and was pulling people out with his bare hands, passing them back to the Lanai behind him without stopping. I watched him work for half a second, the efficient and tireless way he moved, and then I went back to my own corner.

  We worked for a long time. The dust settled slowly. The distress calls of the Lanai shifted in pitch as more survivors were found, moving from panic toward something more complicated, grief and relief together, a sound that had no equivalent in any language I spoke.

  I healed as I went. A crushed arm. Three broken ribs on an elderly Lanai whose heart was laboring badly enough that I held my hands over his chest for nearly two full minutes before I felt it steady. A young one, barely larger than a human child, whose leg had been pinned under a stone long enough that the damage was serious and deep and I had to work slowly and carefully while Warren held the rock above it and Kit kept the northern shelf in place and the world balanced on everyone's concentration at once.

  The young Lanai sat up when I finished. It looked at its leg. It looked at me. Then it made a sound I had not heard before, a single sustained note, pure and clear, that rang off the surrounding rock.

  One of the elders heard it and stopped moving and turned toward us.

  Then another stopped. And another.

  The note spread. Other voices joined it, building from that single clear sound into something layered and ancient, a chord that seemed to come up from the stones themselves rather than from the small gray-robed figures standing among them. The Lanai who had been digging set down their tools. The ones who had been carrying survivors to safety set them down gently and stood. Even the ones still in shock, still searching, paused and added their voices to the sound.

  It moved through me like the Force does when healing is going very well, that particular feeling of being a channel for something larger than yourself. I sat back on my heels in the rubble with my hands still warm and my wool tunic ruined and my red leather pauldrons gray with dust and I let the song go through me and did not try to hold it or name it.

  After a while the song changed, and several of the elder Lanai came forward. They moved with a deliberateness that was different from their usual quick scurrying. They stopped in front of me and bowed, low and slow, the kind of bow that is not a social gesture but a sacred one.

  I did not know what to do with that. I bowed back.

  We made the long climb up the mountain in the last of the evening light, the Lanai following behind us the whole way with their small lanterns lit, the song continuing in a quieter, walking register, a sound like the island itself was breathing. When we reached the temple, Morvin and Thorne were waiting on the steps.

  Morvin watched the procession, the lanterns, the Lanai still singing, the students dusty and tired, and his ancient eyes moved finally to me.

  "A beacon, you are," he said. "The balance shifts when the healer walks."

  I was aware of Vane behind me without looking. I was aware of the particular quality of silence that surrounded her, the held breath of someone who has too many things to say and has chosen to say none of them. To her left, two of the others who had helped near the end were quiet in a different way, tired and genuine. Mobe-Joan stood with her arms loose at her sides and her eyes on the ground, which on her was something close to peace.

  I did not feel triumphant. I felt wrung out and grateful and very aware that the mountain of resentment between me and the others had not been moved today, only climbed over, and that it would still be there tomorrow.

  Thorne was writing. He was always writing.

  The Lanai began to make their way back down the path, the lanterns descending into the dark below the cliff like a slow fall of stars. I stood on the temple steps and watched them go until the last light disappeared around the curve of the rock.

  Then I felt a hand close around the back of my neck for just a moment, a warm and deliberate pressure, and release.

  I turned. Warren was already walking away toward the barracks, his jacket slung over one shoulder, not looking back.

  I stood there in the dark with the warmth of his hand still on my skin and the echo of the Lanai song still in the stone beneath my feet and tried very hard to be sensible about both of them.

  I was not particularly successful.