Brine and Sunlight

The tarp above the common roof snapped like a tired sail, and the air tasted of salt and metal. Aisha crouched by the drip lines, her fingers stained with rust and the black grit of improvised fittings. She twisted a cracked valve until the bean vines sighed, leaves lifting as droplets found them. The whole block murmured the way it did every morning: pans clanking, a baby complaining, someone hacking up the night’s cough. Beyond the edge, the city spread as a quilt of flooded rooftops and skeletal signs, a grid of canals where streets used to be. The tide pushed foam through a collapsed supermarket, and gulls perched on a tilted bus like judges waiting for a mistake.

“Done arguing with the pipes?” Tomas asked. He came up with a coil of wire slung over his shoulder, gray hair stuck to his forehead. His forearms were crisscrossed with burns from a lifetime of coaxing stubborn machines. “They never listen.”

“They complain, and then they give in,” Aisha said. She wiped her hands on her shorts. “Like you.”

“Ha. I’m old enough to be wise,” he said, then glanced at the sky. The sun glared from a white haze. “And wise enough to dread days like this. Heat index off the chart.”

Ration line rustled along the central stair. People shuffled, plastic jugs flapping at their knees. Elder Margo stood by the tank with her ledger and whistle, lips pursed as if wrangling numbers could fight weather. The water in the big bladder sloshed low and slow, the sound of worry.

Aisha leaned on the parapet, scanning the canal. A skiff slid by with scavenged solar sheets strapped like wings, oars slipping silently. Rowan rode the bow, barely seventeen and all angles, his hair tied with blue cord. He waved something at her—half a tomato, red as a wound. He took a theatrical bite and grinned until Margo blew her whistle.

“That boy,” Tomas sighed. “If charm were food, he’d feed us all.”

“The pump room upstairs needs another inspection,” Aisha said. “Filter’s throwing grit back. It’ll clog the drip heads by noon.”

“Your hands say otherwise.” He pointed to her knuckles. “You’ve bled enough for filters.”

She watched a gull unpack a dead fish on an air conditioner. The day smelled of tar and warmed aluminum. Somewhere a radio clicked on, syllables warped into static by a dying battery. Under everything there was an itch, not of skin but of time; the tank seemed to shrink as the sun climbed. Aisha rubbed her wrist where the rubber band of her old access badge had left a pale line. It was a habit—touching the ghost of what she’d been before the roads grew useless and the bay climbed over them. Junior technician at the coast plant. A neat desk in a cool room. Numbers that behaved.

“Hey,” Tomas said softly. “Your face went far away.”

“Just thinking how plants don’t argue much when they’re full,” she said, straightening. “Let’s keep them at least civil.”