Five Parts of a Trillion

The path had been dust for three weeks. Every step Maya took pushed up a little cloud that hung and then sank, and the cloud smelled like nothing, like heat, like the inside of a cardboard box left in the sun.

Then it didn't.

Maya stopped walking. Soren walked into her backpack.

"Rain," she said.

Soren looked up. The sky was still white and hard and cloudless in every direction he checked, and he checked all of them, turning a full circle on the dry path.

"There's nothing up there," he said.

"I know. But smell it."

He breathed in through his nose the way you do when someone tells you to smell something, too hard, so all he got the first time was hot dust and his own sweat. He tried again, slower. And there it was, underneath everything, low and dark and green, the smell that meant a downpour was already falling somewhere he couldn't see.

"That's the rain smell," Soren said. "But it isn't raining."

"Not here." Maya turned her head slowly, the way a dog does when it is listening to something behind a wall. "Over there, maybe."

They stood on the dry hillside and smelled a storm neither of them could point to.

Soren crouched down and put his face close to the path, close to the cracked gray dirt with its little curled edges. The smell was stronger down there. Much stronger. It was coming up out of the ground.

"It's in the dirt," he said. "Maya. It's coming out of the dirt, not out of the sky."

She crouched beside him. She pressed two fingers into the dust and it powdered apart, dry all the way down as far as her fingers went. No wet. No mud. Nothing that should smell like anything at all.

"That's not possible," she said, delighted, which was how she said that's not possible. "It's bone dry. Dry things don't smell."

"This one does."

A breeze came over the hill then, and it carried more of it, a whole wall of the smell, thick enough that Maya could almost taste it at the back of her throat, cold and mineral and alive.

Soren sat back on his heels. "Somewhere it's already raining," he said slowly, working it out with his hands in the air. "And the first drops are hitting ground that's as dry as this. And when they hit, something comes up. Something small enough that the wind can carry it all the way here before the clouds even get here."

"Something the dirt was holding," Maya said. "The whole time. Waiting."

They looked at the ground under them differently now. Not a path. A lid.

Maya put her nose right down to the crack in the dirt and breathed, and the smell filled her completely, and she thought about how far away the actual rain must be, over the far ridge maybe, minutes away still, and yet here it was in her nose already, arriving early, a message running ahead of the weather.

"How much of it is there even," she said. "For us to smell it this far."

"Has to be a lot."

"No." She sat up. "That's the thing. It doesn't. It could be almost nothing."

Soren looked at her.

"Think about it," Maya said, faster now. "The wind's spreading it across the whole hillside. Across all this air. If it were a lot, it'd be everywhere, it'd be like walking into a wall. But it isn't. It's just, there. Right at the edge of what you can catch. Which means our noses are catching almost nothing and still getting it."

"How little is nothing," Soren said.

"Littler than you can picture," Maya said. "Littler than a drop in a swimming pool. Littler than a drop in a lake."

Soren reached into his jacket and got out the notebook and the stub of pencil, and his hand moved on the page, dust smudging under the side of his palm. He wrote the smell of rain comes out of the ground before the rain. He wrote we can smell it when there is almost none. Then he stopped, because he didn't have the number, and he didn't like writing around a hole where a number should be.

"Sharks," Maya said suddenly.

"What?"

"Sharks smell blood in the water. Everybody says that. One drop, miles away, whatever." She was grinning now, the crack in the dirt forgotten, looking at Soren instead. "What if we're better? At this. What if a person, right here, standing in the dust, is better at catching the rain smell than a shark is at catching blood?"

Soren stared at her. He wanted to say that couldn't be right, that a shark's whole body was practically a nose, that people were bad at smelling compared to almost every animal. All of that was true. He had read all of that.

And yet he was crouched on a dry path smelling rain that was still on the other side of a hill, from a compound spread so thin across so much air that Maya was right, it had to be almost nothing, and he had caught it anyway. His nose had. Everybody's nose had. The thing humans supposedly weren't good at.

"We might be," he said, quiet. "For this one thing. We actually might be."

The wind gusted again and the smell rolled over both of them, and it wasn't the smell of nothing anymore, it was the smell of the ground being alive, of something down there that had been waiting through the whole long drought to send this one message the instant water touched it, a message so small it shouldn't count as anything, tuned to a nose that shouldn't be able to hear it, and could.

Over the far ridge the sky had gone from white to a bruised gray while they weren't looking.

Maya stood up and turned toward it and opened her mouth a little, the way you do to taste air.

The first cold drop hit the dust between her feet, and the dust jumped.