Five Parts of a Trillion

The weather app said zero percent. Maya didn't believe it.

"I can smell it," she said. She was standing in the middle of Soren's dried-out vegetable patch with her eyes shut and her nose up like a dog's. "Rain. It's coming."

Soren looked at the sky. It was the same flat white it had been for three weeks. The creek behind the garden had been dust since June. He looked at his phone. Zero percent, all afternoon.

"There's nothing," he said. "No clouds. The app pulls from the actual weather station."

"The app is wrong," Maya said. "My nose isn't."

Soren wrote down the time. He wrote down zero percent. Then, because he was honest, he wrote down what Maya said, word for word. He had learned that her wrong facts and her right instincts did not always travel together, and you had to keep them in separate columns.

"What does it smell like?" he asked.

Maya opened her eyes. "Like dirt. But good dirt. Like the basement and the garden and a stone you turned over." She frowned. "That's the weird part. It smells like rain and there's no rain."

Soren crouched and put his face close to the cracked soil. He breathed in. Dust. Warm dust, and under it, very faint, the thing Maya meant. A cool, dark, mineral smell, completely out of place in a garden that hadn't been wet in weeks.

"I smell it too," he said. "But it's coming from the ground. Not the sky."

They both went quiet. That didn't fit. Rain smell from dry dirt.

"Maybe the ground remembers," Maya said.

"Ground doesn't remember."

"Then what is it."

Soren sat back on his heels. He thought about where the smell was strongest. Not the open patch. He moved along the dirt on his knees, sniffing, which felt ridiculous and he did it anyway. The smell got stronger near the edge, where the soil was lumpy and dark and full of dead roots. Where things were rotting. Where things were alive.

"It's the soil itself," he said. "Something in the soil is making it."

"Making the rain smell before the rain." Maya crouched next to him. "So the smell isn't the rain. The smell is already here. The rain just—" She stopped. Her hands moved like she was lifting something. "The rain releases it. Kicks it up."

"You can't smell it now, though. Barely."

"Barely is enough." She said it slowly, the way she did when she was a half step ahead of herself. "Soren. If it's that strong right now, when the dirt is dry and still, what does our nose actually need? To notice it?"

Soren didn't know the number. But he knew the shape of the question. The smell was incredibly faint. It was buried in dust and heat. And both of them had caught it anyway, from across a garden, with nothing in the air.

"Almost nothing," he said. "Our nose needs almost nothing."

They looked at each other. The garden suddenly seemed full of something invisible, leaking up out of every crack.

Maya stood. "Come on."

They went down the bank into the dead creek. The bed was pale cracked clay, baked into plates. It should have smelled like nothing. It smelled like a cave. Stronger here than in the garden, much stronger, a whole riverbed of the stuff sitting in the still air, and not one drop of water anywhere.

"Okay, that's not memory," Maya said. "Something living is making this. All along the creek. Right now. In the dry."

Soren pressed his palm flat against the clay. Warm. Bone dry on top. He dug his fingers down past the crust, and underneath, two knuckles deep, the clay was cooler. Not wet. But cooler, and darker, and the smell came up off his fingers so thick he could taste it.

"They're down there," he said. "Whatever's making it. They're down where it's cool and they're just—releasing it. Into the dirt. Waiting."

"Waiting for what?"

"For the rain to throw it into the air." He wiped his fingers on his shorts, slowly. "That's why you can smell rain before you see it. The smell isn't the water. The smell is them. It was here the whole time and we needed water to lift it where our nose could reach."

Maya was very still, which for Maya meant her brain was running flat out.

"Five parts of nothing," she said. "Our nose is built for this one thing. Out of everything in the air. This." She held up her dirty fingers and stared at them like they belonged to someone else. "Why would a nose be that good at smelling dirt."

Soren had no answer. He turned it over. A nose tuned, more sharply than to almost anything else, to the smell of damp earth from far away. People who could find that. People who could follow it across a dry country to where the water was.

"Maybe," he said carefully, "it isn't that we're good at smelling dirt. Maybe somebody, way back, who could smell water coming, got to the water. And we're the ones who could smell it."

Maya let out a breath. "So it's not a weird thing my nose does."

"No."

"It's the whole reason the nose is shaped like that." She almost laughed. "Everyone says I notice too much. I notice a thing nobody asked me to notice."

"You noticed the rain," Soren said, "three weeks early, with a zero percent on the screen, because a nose that notices too much is the one that found the river."

The air changed.

Not the smell. The light. A shadow slid over the cracked creek bed, and then another, and Soren looked up and the flat white sky had gone bruised and heavy at the western edge, clouds stacking where there had been nothing twenty minutes ago.

Maya didn't look up. She was watching the clay.

The first drop hit the bed a foot from her shoe and burst, and the dust jumped, a tiny grey crown of it leaping into the air. Then another. Then a hundred, each one punching a little puff of dust upward off the dry clay.

Maya knelt down in the middle of the creek bed, put her face right over the rising dust, and breathed in.