Unalome, arrow and lotus flash sheet

The message was a flat stone with an arrow cut into it, its head pointing up the mountain. The keeper of the cistern was Ilse Corrow, who wore a crescent blade at her belt and had not come down in eleven years. Ama climbed with the stone held against her chest. At the three-hundredth turn the spiral tightened into loops so close she had to climb sideways, and at the four-hundredth a lotus of pale iron opened out of the rock, the first flower she had ever seen that did not need watering.

Ilse was waiting at the rim of the basin with the blade across her knees. She read the stone, then ran her thumb along Ama's cord without counting the knots. 'You came the long way,' she said. 'Everyone does. The road only straightens for someone who has stopped trying to finish it.' She cut one knot free and gave the cord back. Below them the dust sea shimmered like a dropped mirror, and the arrow on the stone, Ama saw now, pointed down the mountain.

She walked home by the road she had come, untying a knot at every turn. By dusk the cord was bare. Her mother asked where the message had gone, and Ama said it had been read, and that the water was still there, and that she had decided the mountain could keep its count. She slept with the empty cord under her pillow, and in the morning she carried the stone's arrow down into the town and set it in the square, pointing at her own front door.