Valves of the Hollow

Rowan had a habit of letting his hands speak before his mouth did. Tonight his hands sounded blunt, decisive notes: he eased a stubborn gatewheel a half-turn, hissed steam into a peeled elbow, wedged a brass shim and tapped it home with the heel of his palm. The pump room smelled of hot metal and old coffee, the aromatic kind brewed in dented kettles and served with a rind of something preserved in oil. He liked that smell—practical, honest—unlike the sentimental fumes people sometimes wore when they appealed to one another.

The catwalk creaked under his boots as he worked. His tool roll was a strap of mismatched leather tied with shoelace: wrenches that had been introduced to pipes in three different eras, a hacksaw with a new-tooth patch, a coil of wire wrapped in onion-skin paper for insulation. Rowan fingered a screwdriver until the round-headed bolt forgot how to be obstinate.

A rusted placard overhead read SERVICE RING NO. 4, but the letters had the polite, weathered shrug of all things that had outlived their makers. On a hook near the manifold somebody had hung a small weather-flag—scrap fabric knotted to a length of pipe, a custom the Hollow kept: if a neighbor saw wind, they cut a strip and left it to flap. It made for a poor forecast and a good story. "If the flags fold in on themselves," Rowan muttered, half to the metal, half to the dim sky, "we're in for a week of practical weather." He smiled at his own joke, soft and private.

Below, the Hollow breathed: terraces of scavenged sheets and stacked shipping containers, ladders that had once been railings, gardens grown in tub-like beds. People jostled the market lane with trade calls—dried mushroom cakes for copper washers, fermented root paste for a spool of braided cord. Food was a kind of language here, and Rowan overheard negotiation as easily as he could hear a valve knocking.

"Rowan!" a voice called from the stair—a long, warm sound belonging to Sera Tilman, who ran the Hollow’s lower ring. She waited on the landing, palms dirty, a basket slung at her hip full of steamed tubers wrapped in wax strips. "You fixing the evening feed or are you drafting love letters to bolts again?"

He grinned without looking away from the manifold. "Bolts are less dramatic. They don’t ask for a cut of the firewood." He slid a new ferrule into place and cinched it tight, the metal complaining like a tired animal, then settling.

Sera came up the last step and leaned on the rail, watching him work. "We’ve got folks from Highcourse on the ridge tonight," she said. "They say their cisterns slumped after the storm. They asked me—asked if we could spare some pressure." Her voice kept a steady, practical tone. The basket on her arm made a soft clacking as a tuber nudged the rim.

Rowan glanced at her. He understood requests as mechanical things: inputs and outputs. They had a place; they required calibration. He tightened a clamp and tested the gauge with the thumb of his leather glove. The needle jittered, like a heartbeat that hadn't settled. "The manifold’s holding for now," he said. "But the equalizer’s been lazy. Someone’s been patching things with tape and good intentions." He didn’t mean to be cruel; it was the most accurate description he had.

Sera’s eyes were earnest. "Can you see what it would take to share for a while?" she asked. "We could trade motor cores, seeds—Highcourse has seed stock even after their runoff. We won’t feed them forever. Just—stretch us through the dry swing." Her request was the kind that hooked under ribs and lingered.

Rowan wrapped a rag around a coupling and wiped his hands. He was built to do a job and be done: keep flow steady, prevent surges, patch leaks. He wasn’t built for promises. Yet when he looked over the hollow’s terraces, he noticed a child holding a whittled toy that was carved to look like a tiny wrench. The child’s eyes followed his hands with that mix of reverence and calculation that apprentices gave when they loved a craft they didn't yet possess.

He shook his head, small and human, and said, "I’ll take a look. But no promises beyond the time it takes me to read the gauges." It was a hedge, a technical caution. Sera laughed softly, more relief than mockery. "Good enough," she said, and left a tuber on the rail as an offering, which Rowan accepted with a nod before she disappeared down the stair.