The Lattice Beneath

Tamsin learned to read the city by the taste of its dust. On clear mornings it was citrus and old copper; after a storm, a metallic tang that hinted at storms swallowed by the lower blocks long ago. Her hands remembered the weight of soil the way other people remembered names. She moved through the rooftop plots of Hearthquarter like a conductor, palms skimming the leaves, listening for stress. The garden was a thin miracle stitched across broken concrete—rows of dwarf beans, a stubborn pear tree in a barrel, trays of moss that condensed enough dew to keep a baby alive for a week if used sparingly. Around her, the neighborhood rose from the carcass of a shopping arcade, its glassless atrium a pale blue memory. Laundry lines hung like flags for the living.

She kept the distiller 'Wren' in a metal crate against the parapet where it could catch wind. Wren coughed and spat and gave Tamsin a ration each sunrise; it was an old system scavenged from the spine of the city, and everyone in Hearthquarter had learned the rhythms of its temper. At twenty-two Tamsin still surprised herself by how fiercely she loved simple tech—gaskets, seals, the way a leaky pipe told you what it needed if you were patient enough to listen.

That morning Wren tolerated less patience than usual. Hissing and a clunky wheeze, it made a sound like a long sigh and then stopped. Tamsin's fingers were copper-stained where she pried the casing open. Inside, a pump sputtered in a pool of salt scum. She felt the cold in the bones of the machine and understood, with a small, sinking certainty, that it had taken too many winters. Hearthquarter's cisterns held a month of water, two at most, if rationed for seedlings. News moved through the rooftop like smoke: Gale, the mechanic from the west stair, banged on the skin of an oil drum and said the tanker runs had dwindled. The convoy from the east had been chased and forced to reroute. A ledger at the communal table showed the numbers—less every week. A thin, practical panic spread, not the hot, sharp panic of theft but the slow fevered arithmetic of lack.

Tamsin closed Wren's casing and wiped her hands. Old voices gathered at the glassless windows: Edda the seed-keeper, Jonas the map-signer with a face like a weathered page, children trading the bones of sugar for a handful of seeds. They argued about barter, about going east to the riverbed and trying to dig, about raiders known as Teeth who took more than they needed. Tamsin felt the city settling into the grooves of another hard winter and tasted the memory of her sister's cough when the wells turned sour two years prior. She had learned the shape of scarcity like a second skin. When Edda said softly, "If the cistern drops another inch, we'll have to choose who lives," the conversation became not abstract but a list of names. Tamsin felt the weight in her chest like a stone and stood up.