Fallow Sky

The sky had narrowed to a single pale stripe by the time Maren Kestrel made her rounds. It lay over the settlement like a lid, a thin bruise of sun that shaded nothing but made the air harder to breathe. The pumps hissed and coughed in their wells, spitting up water that smelled faintly of iron and old rust; every drop carried a memory of places where rivers had once run bold enough to drown a person. Maren moved among the machines with the careful motions of someone who had mapped danger into habit — tighten this coupling, crimp that hose, ease the seal until the line finds its patience. Her palms still had the calluses from years of coaxing recalcitrant filters back into tolerance.

She kept to the work the way people keep to a rhythm in a town that has no clock: because the tasks would not stop, because a pause might mean a child’s fever worsening, because the settlement could tolerate negligence only so long. Tonight the ration queues were longer than usual; she had seen a woman from the north ward hold a bucket like a talisman and weep when she turned it. Lira had coughed twice on the walk home and drawn half a breath like someone afraid to use what precious lung remained. Maren had made up her mind at the same time she tightened a clogged membrane — she would find more life for Lira if life could still be found.

Kade Rul, who kept order by measuring risk in strict units, would have called it foolhardy. He kept maps of permitted travel in his head and delivered warnings from the council with the same flat emphasis: leave the borders alone, keep to the old irrigation ruins, do not follow bright rumor. Sera, who used to teach people how to read old schematics, had turned her hands to worn conduits and muttered in the dark, but she had no taste for the kind of gambles that might fracture the fragile comfort they had. Toma, half apprentice, half stray, had a grin that suggested he was hungry for anything larger than the boundaries Kade enforced. He’d come to the pumps in the last light to hand Maren a spanner and a scrap of salvaged wire and leave with two jokes and a look that asked whether she felt alive enough to break a rule.

Maren did not feel like she could break rules; she felt that rules alone would not keep the small ones alive. Lira was ten and had once traced constellations on the underside of the bakery’s roof in the black hours, naming stars with childish firmness. Lira’s cough had a thick sound to it now that did not want to be soothed by palliative teas. The soil had given up its generosity; root medicine that used to bind fevers was brittle and sparse. They burned the last of a mild analgesic for visitors last week and rationed the rest until no one spoke of it at all.

On her last walk along the service canal, where water ran shallow and slow and sang to rusty grates, Maren found something that refused to be ordinary. It had the sickly gloss of old polymer and lay half-buried in silt beneath an overturned sluice. Her hands went to it before her breath could make a list of reasons not to touch: someone had placed this scrap and left it, or weather had set it loose; either way it was not part of a pump flange or a filter. The object fit her palm with an uncomfortable familiarity, as if it remembered being clutched by a hand with more options.

She wiped the grime with the hem of her sleeve. Beneath the encrustation there was a ring of faint letters and a symbol that looked like a tower encircled by vines. Her fingers found a seam and the unit gave a tired click. For a moment she only held the thing and let the night mean what it pleased. Then the lid opened and a small blue light breathed into existence, so thin and stubborn that for a second she thought it might be a trick of her washed-out vision.

Voices are rare here; recordings are rarer. The shard coughed with a thin data burst that smelled like dust and old electricity. When it put a voice into the air, the sound was not a recording clipped for instruction but a human voice, worn and urgent. It said one clear thing between static and the long hiss of failing storage: “It needs partners, not puppets.”

Maren froze, a hand on the edge of the canal as if she could hold the world steady by resisting a slip. The three words settled around her like a verdict. Hope, sharp and raw, arrived wearing dread for a collar. The device hummed and went dark. She wrapped it in cloth and tucked it beneath her jacket at the small of her back. On the walk back, the pumps stitched up a momentary protest behind her and the night smelled of burned grass and something like promise.

She did not plan, not yet. Plans were heavy things that Kade could impound and Sera could test to ash with a single skeptical question. She walked toward the cluster of domes where Lira slept, counting threadbare reasons to keep what she had and feeling, with every step, the pressure of a possibility that might break the settlement into pieces or remake it whole.