Greenwell

Asha kept her jug tilted beneath the rafter where condensation bled slow and stubborn into the crooked lip of a tin gutter. Above the market the sky hovered like old soot, a heavy curtain that never quite opened; when the clouds remembered rain it arrived tasting of iron and chemical memory, and people treated it like stolen currency. In Havenfall, the small geometries of survival mattered more than names: the angle of a roof that caught a drip, the alley where the township’s less watchful pumps leaked, which baker had the luck to toss a second roll into a vendor’s crate. Asha had learned those geometries by reputation and necessity. She had learned them for Noe.

Noe was a boy of syntax and small talismans. He folded paper cranes that never flew but hung along the wall above their cot like a ledger of wishes. The fever that shadowed him was thin as tissue and sharp as rust; his breath sometimes rattled in a way that made Asha stop and listen as if she could coax the cough back into order by sheer attention. The Council rationed medicine like dignity: carefully, with condition and receipt. Asha brought water, repaired leaky meters, ran messages between pump houses. She salvaged with a quiet thriftiness that bordered on reverence — splicing a valve, mending a brittle seal — and in return the engineers who still kept knowledge traded scraps of instruction.

Councilor Kellen Voss ruled the market’s perimeter with the steady, sanitized face of someone who had learned to make scarcity feel like civic virtue. He authorized the pumps, regulated access, and kept the militia paid well enough to look the other way when citizens traded their hours in the fields for a ration token. Voss’s speeches talked about stability and order; he liked the word stability, smoothed over its edges as if it were a cloth to bandage a wound. People accepted him because they had to; dissent meant the loss of a permit or the reallocation of a water line.

Asha’s life was stitched to routine and the hum of things that still worked. She knew the geography of refuse and salvage, the out-of-service conduits where rain pooled in chemicals but sometimes rinsed to the surface slow and quasi-clean. Those conduits were where she made her livings runs, where she found parts denied to most. On a day that smelled like old wire and sun-heated metal, she crawled through a collapsed façade to the skeleton of an old distribution hub and came upon something that blinked with the wrong kind of life.