THE WATER LEDGER

The settlement was named Hope, which was the kind of joke that people in the Rust Belt told when they still had a sense of humor left. It sat in the skeleton of a pre-Collapse industrial zone—rusting silos, cracked concrete foundations, a chain-link fence that had been holding things together since before the war. Inside the fence: forty-two people, three hydroponic tents, and two thousand gallons of water.

Two thousand gallons was everything they had.

Mara Kowalski was the settlement's water logistics coordinator. Her title was invented. Her job was real: she tracked every gallon that came in and every gallon that went out, and she decided who got water and when. She kept a physical ledger, because the storage shed's power cell was dying and digital meters were unreliable in the radiation zones.

Her husband, Daniel, was a survey team leader. The survey teams were small groups of three or four who ventured into the Dead Lands—twenty to fo