Latch League

At dawn the settlement called Gleam woke like a rusted hinge. Canvas roofs snapped in the inland breeze, tarps shivered on their frayed lines, and all around the broken overpass people moved with the careful economy of the thirsty. Nessa Rell climbed the skeleton of a billboard, boots ringing softly on the welded rungs. Her palms smelled of oxidized metal and damp mesh. The dew nets glowed faintly, jeweled with the night’s thin mercy. She drew her knife and scraped along the line, coaxing the droplets down into a jar the color of old glass. The water sang a small sound, a ribbon over stone.

“Careful, Nes,” Jae called from below, shaded eyes squinting up. He had a bandanna around his neck and a coil of plastic tubing over one shoulder. “Last ladder rung cracked yesterday.”

“It’ll hold,” she said, testing it with her weight anyway. The thread creaked. Beneath her, Gleam spread in tiers around the highway’s collapsed exit ramp: huts braced with bent signposts, a market under a patched bus shell, a ring of old tires marking the cistern square. Beyond, the salt flats blind as spilt milk stretched to a ragged horizon.

A child tugged at Jae’s shirt. Tovan, twelve and all elbows, his skin powdered with fine salt. “Is there enough to taste?” he asked, licking dry lips.

Nessa lowered the jar. “Two sips,” she said. “No swallowing the second one.” Tovan rolled his eyes, smiled anyway, and took it carefully. He tilted for one measured swallow, then held the water under his tongue like it might dissolve.

The sun tipped over the line of stalled bus carcasses. Heat started its early hum. Nessa clambered down and wiped her knife on her pant leg. Her hands were chapped, webbed with thin scars from wire and glass. She wore her father’s tool belt, patched so many times the leather had its own map of stitches, wrenches snugged into loops like ribs.

“Skyloom’s reading low,” Jae said. He glanced toward the solar condenser tower at the edge of Gleam. Its mirrored petals were tilted to the morning, their silver backs dull with dust. A thin column of steam rose where the brine outlet ran. “Marla wants you there.”

Nessa looked up. A few gulls wheeled, thin things that had learned to live off human gristle and wind. The sky was pale already. “On my way.” She squeezed Tovan’s shoulder, felt the heat there, the shallow breath. “Stay in shade. No running.”

He made a face. “I’m not five.”

“Then drink like a grown-up and help sort pipe collars,” she said, and he grinned and ran anyway, light as a dry leaf. Nessa set off toward the tower, the jar knocking against her hip, the hush in her throat that came each time she passed the cistern. The water inside always smelled faintly of tin.