Saltbound Compass

Mira folded herself into the shadow of a girder and listened to the village breathe. Thatch slept in fits and starts: the low clank of night pumps, a distant cough that sounded like dry gravel, a single dog that had learned to bark only when the sky hinted rain. Above them the skeleton of an old highway arched across the salt flats like a broken spine. Steam ghosts rose from pools where the sun had pushed salt into brittle crystals; they smelled of iron and old batteries. Mira's fingers were stained with ink and salt. She had drawn the same corner of the ruined city three times that week, each time a little truer to the curve of a collapsed overpass or the slope of a rooftop greenhouse that still held a scrap of moss. Her maps were small rebellions—lines that insisted some shape could be remembered and carried away.

She kept the maps in a soft leather roll, the leather stolen from a mattress decades dead. Parents of small children traded comfort for cartography here; maps meant routes to the scavengers' caches and safe times for crossing the flats. Mira had not meant to be more than a scribe of alleys when she was ten. At twenty-four she had become the person people asked for directions. She measured distance by the smell of rusted metal and the angle of the sun hitting a broken billboard. People said she had a compass in her bones. When she walked, she did not simply observe; she rearranged the world in ink and memory so it would not surprise them too badly.

Her house was a single room patched between two shipping containers, the roof draped with tarps and a stitched plastic skin that kept some of the wind out. The inside smelled of tea and the faint, sweet rot of preserved fruit. Theo, who lived across the lane and taught the children to read, left his door open because he liked the noise of conversation. Mira had taken to sleeping with one eye on the maps and one ear on the pumps. Tonight the pumps made a different sound—a hiccup, then the long, thin silence of something giving up.

She could hear footsteps coming down the alley. A cart creaked: old wood, loaded with the brittle breath of small cargo. Old Ilya, who had turned ninety in a year when calendars stopped being useful, pushed the cart with a hand that trembled more from insistence than from weakness. He set two clay jugs on Mira's step and did not meet her eyes.

"Look at it for me, Mira," he said, voice sandpaper and apology. "It shudders." He pointed to the pump house with the same finger that had once traced a coast on a map for a sailor. She could taste salt and rust and worry at the back of her mouth. Ilya's hands had been kind to paper; his maps had taught her to read shadows on the wall. She ran to the pump house and kept her breath small, practiced. When she shoved the hatch and bent down, the sound inside was all teeth. The impeller shuddered and stopped. There was a smell of oil and a fine, metallic taste that made her throat go hollow.

She understood, suddenly and fully, what the village would take this to mean. The spare seals were gone. The barter jars already skimmed thin. People would whisper about leaving, about riding out to the ruins for salvage. People always spoke like that in the worst hours and rarely left. Mira rolled her map tighter until its leather cracked and put her palm flat against the lines she'd drawn of old roads, as if that could press the world back into place. There was another touch at the pump house—a child's hand. Theo's niece peered over the lip, eyes shiny with the wrong kind of knowledge. The pump coughed again, a desperate, dying thing. Mira shifted her weight and tasted the decision as if it were a bitter herb. She was the one who knew how the ruined places fit together. It felt like obligation and hunger braided into one thin, electric cord.