Half Ration

You wake to the sound of someone counting water.

It's a woman's voice in the corridor outside your room, steady and patient, and the earpiece on the stone shelf beside your bed picks it up and murmurs the numbers to you. Four measures for the bakers' row. Two for the tanners. One for each child-house. A pause. Half for the hall.

Half.

You sit up. The room is carved straight into the canyon wall, round-cornered and cool, with a window that's really a long slot looking out over a drop so deep you can't see the bottom. Someone has left you clothes: a loose shirt, wide trousers, a sash, all far too long. Someone has also left you a water jug.

It's half full.

You hold it for a long moment before you drink, and you drink less than you want.

"Three years," Kesa says.

She hasn't softened since yesterday. She walks ahead of you down a spiral stair so fast you have to jog, her braids swinging, and she talks without looking back, in a trade-tongue the earpiece is getting better at.

"Three years the Breathers have been dying. One stopped. Then another went weak. Now there are four, and only one breathes properly, and that one coughs." She shoves open a heavy door. "So. Look. Then go away."

You look.

The chamber below Ashkeld is enormous, a cathedral carved downward into rock, and in its center stand four machines the size of houses. They're tall, ribbed, tapering cylinders of something that isn't stone and isn't any metal you know, dull bronze and green with age. Pipes run from them up into the rock like roots turned upside down. One of them is making a sound. A long, slow, rattling inhale, and then a pause that goes on too long, and then an exhale.

Breathing. They're called Breathers because they breathe.

"They pull water," Kesa says. "From deep, deep. Below the rock. They pull the wet out of the dark and send it up. Our ancestors built them." She says built the way people say gods made. "Nobody knows how anymore. We oil them. We pray at them. We hit them."

"Does hitting work?"

Kesa looks at you sideways for the first time. "Sometimes."

You walk closer to the coughing Breather. Up close you can feel it in your teeth, a low thrum, uneven. A pump with a bad rhythm. A cavitation problem, maybe, or a seal, or a pressure differential gone wrong somewhere you can't see.

Your hands itch.

"Can I look inside?"

"No."

"Kesa."

"No," she says again, and then, because the earpiece must have made you sound as stubborn as you are: "Not today. Not you. You fell out of the sky yesterday. My cousin swore his water to you in front of the Salvage Magistrate. Do you know what they're saying in the markets? That the Ishkaran has lost his mind for a sky-thing." She jerks her chin at the machines. "These are the only thing keeping my city alive. I don't let strangers touch them."

It's a fair point. You hate that it's a fair point.

"I fix things," you say. "That's my whole job. I mapped six planets' water tables before I was twenty-five. I'm not going to break your engines."

"You might," Kesa says. "And then you'd fly home, and we'd die. That is what sky-things do."

You find Daxen on the roof of the Water Hall in the hot afternoon, with Ammet and a map of the desert weighted down by four stones. He looks up when your shadow falls across it, and the gold lines down his throat brighten, very faintly, and then go still.

"You slept, Ava," he says. It isn't a question. "Good. Did you eat?"

"Bread. Something orange."

"Fire-root. It's good for you. It tastes like a punishment." He rises. He's so tall that he blocks the sun. He seems to realize it, and steps sideways so the light falls on you again. "We ride for Tor Vessa in three days, when the wind drops. Rhaze will try to delay the ratification. He'll fail."

"You sound sure."

"I'm sure of the law. I'm not sure of Rhaze." His mouth goes hard. Something in his face reminds you of the way he looked at the band on Ondrej's wrist. That stillness. It is aimed at the horizon, at Tor Vessa, at a pale man in a jeweled clasp. Never at you. "He has hated me for many years. Now he has a reason to hate me in public. That pleases him."

"What did you do to him?"

"Existed," Ammet says dryly, without looking up from the map.

Daxen glances at you. "Kesa took you to the Breathers."

"She showed me them. Then she told me to go away."

"She's afraid."

"She's right to be. One of them has a pressure problem. Maybe a seal. It sounds like a heart with a skipped beat." You hear yourself talking faster. You always do, near broken machines. "If she let me inside the casing I could at least tell you what's wrong."

Daxen looks at you for a long moment. Then he holds out his hand, palm up, the way you'd offer it to a nervous animal.

"May I?"

You don't know what he's asking. You put your hand in his anyway. His fingers close around yours, warm and dry and enormous, and he turns your hand over and looks at the calluses on your palm. The burn scar on your thumb from a plasma welder when you were nineteen.

"Engineer's hands," he says quietly. "I'll talk to Kesa, Ava." He lets go immediately, as if he's afraid to have held on even a second too long.

Your palm feels warmer than the rest of you.

"It's called a slate," you tell him that evening.

You're sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Water Hall, because the chairs here leave your feet dangling, and he's sitting cross-legged opposite you, because he apparently refuses to sit higher than you if he can help it. Between you lies your spare field slate, salvaged from your pack: a thin dark rectangle with a cracked corner.

"The earpiece only works if we're close. If you need me, or I need you, and we're not in the same room, you use this. I've paired it to mine. You press here, it wakes up."

He presses. The screen glows. He jerks his hand back like it bit him, and then, because you laugh, looks offended in a way that makes him even more ridiculously handsome.

"These are letters," you say. "My alphabet. Twenty-six of them. I'll teach you."

You teach him. It takes two hours. He learns fast, faster than anyone you've ever trained, his huge finger moving carefully across the screen, his brow furrowed. He wants to know what each letter sounds like. He wants to know why there are two kinds, big and small. He makes you say his name and then spells it, wrong, then right. D-A-X-E-N.

"And yours," he says.

You spell Ava for him. He copies it, letter by letter, then looks at it on the screen for a long time.

"There," he says softly. "Now it's written down somewhere. Now you can't be lost."

You don't know what to say to that, so you say goodnight.

Back in your room, the half-full jug is on the shelf. You lie on a bed built for someone a foot taller than you and watch the slice of dark sky through the window, and you think about Ondrej, and the copper band, and the empty fountain, and a man spelling your name like a promise.

You're nearly asleep when your slate buzzes on your chest.

One new message. Sender: DAXEN.