The first rain forecast in forty-seven years arrived while Sera was counting dried beans into a drum.
She used three handfuls for the soft patter, five for hard rain, and a brass tray for water striking stone. The children of Halden could identify all three with their eyes closed. They had practised for months.
Outside the rehearsal hall, the valley lay bare beneath the crescent of its parent planet. Houses climbed the red slopes in close terraces. The last storm had fallen before most of the children's parents were born.
Halden's settlers had built the Rain Rehearsal as a safety drill. When the atmospheric mills shifted the cloud paths north, the drill survived as an annual performance. Children learned the rhythms on tins and seed pods. Adults came to hear what their grandparents had heard.
Sera's mother had conducted the first twenty performances. She used to say the difficult part was not making the rain loud, but leaving the right spaces between drops. Now Sera conducted, and her daughter Imri had the opening solo.
'Do we still play if it really rains?' Imri asked.
The notice glowed on Sera's wrist: VAPOUR FRONT FROM THE WEST. PRECIPITATION POSSIBLE AFTER NIGHTFALL. CONFIDENCE: MODERATE.
'If it rains, we'll have a better audience than usual,' Sera said.
At midday Pell from the works department arrived carrying a folded plan as broad as the rehearsal table. He placed it across the musical score. 'I need the inspection hatch under your stage.'
'The hatch was closed before you were born.'
'That's the problem.'
The hall had once been a pumping station. A stone overflow channel ran beneath the floor to a vacant cistern beyond the school. During the dry years, workers laid a stage across it, then screwed the boards down to keep dust out of performances.
'The forecast may be wrong,' Sera said.
'Probably will be, one way or the other.' Pell tapped a narrow blue line on his plan. 'If the water goes down the street instead, it meets the school doors first. We haven't opened this channel in eighteen years.'
He wanted the stage dismantled before evening. There would be no time to replace it if the storm passed.
Sera pictured the instruments stacked in a corridor. Imri had practised until the skin at the base of her thumb grew hard.
'I could put the drums on chairs.'
'Not over the hatch.'
After he left, Sera found her mother's old score in a cupboard. Later copies printed only the notes. This one had measurements between the staves: GATE WIDTH, CLEARANCE, FALL TO LOWER TANK.
On the back her mother had drawn the stage with an arrow through its centre. DON'T FASTEN THIS SECTION, she had written.
Sera's mother had been gone six years. Sera herself had ordered the final row of screws, after a loose board tripped a child.
At four, families arrived with bowls of food. Silver streamers hung from the rafters. Imri sat on the stage practising the first quiet measure with her palms.
Sera gathered everyone and explained the forecast, the channel, and Pell's request. Some adults nodded. Others looked toward the painted backdrop, on which children had spent weeks making clouds.
'We don't know there'll be rain,' said Davi, who had repaired the bass drums.
'No,' Sera said. 'But we know where the water would go if there is.'
'Couldn't we lift a board when we hear it?'
She showed him the plan. The hatch ran beneath the drum platform, and its bolts had not moved in years. Opening it would take longer than a song.
Imri asked, 'Can we carry the drums out ourselves?'
'Yes.'
'Then tell us which ones first.'
The children moved before the adults finished discussing the odds. They carried seed trays into the corridor two at a time. Davi rolled up the backdrop. Sera found a screwdriver with a cracked yellow handle.
By sunset, seven boards leaned against the wall. Beneath them were a rusted ring and a darkness that smelled of mineral dust. Pell returned with a lamp and climbed down.
He struck the gate with a wrench. 'It's full of silt. Hand me a bucket.'
They worked by turns. Pell loosened sediment with a short shovel while Sera passed it up in buckets. Red powder had settled into a crust as hard as plaster. Several times she wanted to stop and call it enough.
From the corridor came a familiar rush of beans. Imri was practising by herself.
'Listen,' Pell said.
Sera opened her mouth, then heard it: a second, much fainter tapping on the roof.
The first drops struck the skylights separately. Children ran to the doorway. Beyond them, a pale line of rain crossed the lower terraces in ragged sections.
Imri held her drum in both hands. 'It's quieter than ours,' she said.
'For now.' Sera set the drum on a chair. 'We need the buckets back.'
Water slipped under the hall door before they cleared the last bend. Davi held the lamp while Pell struck the gate's hinge. Sera hooked both hands into the ring and pulled until the metal shifted.
A sour breath of trapped air rose from below. Then a dark ribbon of water crossed the floor and dropped through the hatch.
'It's running,' Pell said.
They stood back. The channel gurgled, caught on something, then cleared with a noise like a cart rolling over stones. Outside, water stopped gathering at the school wall and began draining toward the empty cistern.
Nobody cheered. They were wet to the knees, watching for a blockage. Sera sent Davi to check the school doors. Imri wrung out a cloth and pushed it under the leaking window.
When Davi returned with his thumbs raised, the audience was sitting on the floor among the instruments. The silver streamers had come loose. Rain struck the roof in bursts, thinned, then came harder on one corner of the skylight.
Imri retrieved the brass tray. She held it in her lap, ready to add the missing notes. Sera watched her listen. After a while the girl put the tray down.
Under the open stage, water went on running through the channel her grandmother had marked in blue. For the first time all evening, nobody was counting.