**Chapter 1 — The River’s Ledger**

****

I woke to the sound of water screaming.

Not voices—metal. The feeder pipe over my pallet shrieked as pressure dove, a knife-thin whistle that cut through my good ear. The bad one filled with ocean and throbbed. Boots hit concrete. A pail went over. Someone coughed up a slice of black lung and swore at the taste of last winter.

Name’s Ash Mercer. Twenty-three. Narrow build, close-cropped dark hair, gray eyes. One good ear, one storm. My calves are a map of lesions, so I don’t run—I pick ground. What I do run is range. I’m our sounder—a rangewright. Give me pipe or weir, I can set your flow by ear and fingertip inside five percent. Meters lie; metal sings. I collect its verses.

Two nails by my pallet hold what keeps me from dying in my sleep: mask and goggles. I grab both, plus the pry bar I trust more than men with polished boots. In my pocket: a bone-handled pocketknife that belonged to my grandfather, rusted shut. Not every inheritance should open.

The corridor tastes like burned belt and wet cardboard. Generators still hum. No alarm. Either the thieves are good, or we’re slow. Or both.

“Valves!” someone yells.

I limp toward the south alcove—the heart. Our hot-patched filtration: two blue drums, a welded manifold fed by pipes we’ve married and remarried with wire and prayer. If the heart stops, the town goes gray—sprouts, infants, old bones, tempers.

Light wobbles at the corridor’s end. Talla hits it first—early thirties, kiln-boss shoulders, hair cut for sweat, jaw that doesn’t barter. She carries a stick because fire learns faster when something teaches it. Her code: keep the flame honest, keep the door standing, don’t boast about either.

Behind her skids Jory—nineteen, spring-legged, bright-eyed; good at laughing when the room needs permission to breathe. He’ll try any job if you warn him it’s a bad idea.

“Ash!” he pops. “They bit the line. Look.”

The chain-link door hangs half off. Padlock split like a wishbone. A black smear of water runs toward the freight ramp. One drum is gone—rolled and walked quiet by hands that know the difference between loud and dead. The second drum tilts, a hose jammed in its bung and coughing bubbles.

“On me,” I say. My calves complain. I don’t take their vote.

I hook the pry bar into the rim and heave. Pain makes an ugly shape behind my teeth. Talla ducks shoulder-deep, takes weight, swears at the drum like it’s a stubborn dog. Jory braces with his whole skinny body and, for once, doesn’t try a stunt. The drum lurches upright. The hose spits.

On the manifold the inline meter is missing. Not smashed—removed. Our alarm tapline hangs snipped and taped like a neat little insult. Not luck. Practice.

“Clamp,” I say. “Jory.”

He already has the screw off his belt. I lever the clamp. The housing hums hot under my palm. I lay two fingers to the riser and count the hum’s beat—one-two-three-four—eighty-eight a minute. Low for the head we should have if both drums were breathing us. The hose kicks; a sheet of cold runs down my chest. I slam a stopper home and hammer with my palm until the drum settles into angry breathing. The feeder pipe lashes one last insult and sulks.

Elder Imani arrives with the ledger hugged to her ribs. Sixtyish, broom-thin, hair braided tight so numbers can’t escape; small crescent scar under her left eye. She moves like lines on a page—clean, no waste. Her law fits in three lines you can write in chalk and live by:

Stop the bleed. Protect the smallest. Count the loss.

On the door: chalk—circle with its middle thumb-smeared into a bruise. A blotted sun.

The bloc’s mark.

They say Hale still signs the far ledgers. Kade shakes hands at fences so others don’t have to. Lisbet keeps the books clean enough to sleep. The blotted sun belongs to Cross—order with a rifle and a smile.

The hair under my hood lifts.

“Policy?” I ask Imani.

“Stop the bleed,” she says. “Protect the smallest. Count the loss.”

“Chase?” Jory asks, itching to move.

Imani’s eyes track from my legs to the water smear to the ramp chain half melted black. Someone brought flame close to air that doesn’t mind exploding. Brave. Or dumb. Or sure.

“Not up top,” she says. “Not with this heat and that mark.”

I hate being practical when the math in my bones screams go.

“Then we block the bellies,” I say. “They’ll want the south drains. Shut two and three. Make them hate us.”

“One,” Imani nods. “Do it.”

People in a crisis become what they train to be, and Ironbound trains whether we want to or not. Talla has a team on valves in a breath, rope lines on waists so if the lights cough they still have a hand on home. Jory vanishes and returns with coil, three tie-offs, a half-good headlamp, and a grin he can’t kill when fear is loud.

“Don’t,” I tell him. He doesn’t argue. He’s seen the smear.

We put number three to heel; the manifold groans like a ship; the heart settles into for now. I lay my ear to the header and read the plant like a priest reads weather—pitch a half-step flatter than happy, micro-vibration on the flange telling me we’ll be re-packing seals by week’s end. I thumb the bleed and let a hiss of air out until the song climbs. The hum lands where it should. That’s what I’m good for: a cripple with a metronome in his head.

Our people arrive doing what they do.

Karina slides through—late thirties, brick-pallet shoulders, sleeves rolled, hair under cloth. She mothers the hall without coddling it. Habit: count to ten in her head, then shout once. “Mothers to cloths,” she orders. “If you can’t lift, you can wet.”

Reyes shows with his old paramedic bag and a new bruise—mid-forties, tender with edges. He keeps people alive with boiled rags and mean honesty. He taps my shin with two fingers as he passes—his wordless way of saying stay. “Alcohol’s thin,” he mutters.

“When isn’t it?”

“Don’t be smart.”

Moss drifts toward vents—quiet beard, listening face. He speaks in verbs: baffle, draft, purr. Lysa ghosts the rope hooks, braid long, stare longer; the horn sleeps by her bed and nobody jokes about it twice.

We count even when blood leaks out the door—counting is a salve for fear that eats. Head sheets. Filter hours. Days without a baby burial. Days with two.

While they count, I hunt the hole.

The south drains—the bellies—were cut for storms when rain came like a clock. Now they’re how you move big without waking sleeping city eyes.

The first belly hides behind sacrificial pallets. The grate looks proper—padlock on, chain tight—but dust has a neat crack and the lock is spun through one hook, not two. The kind of thing you do when you plan to return and don’t want to cut fresh chain.

“Jory,” I say.

He slides up quiet. I drop, press my good ear to the slit, palm flat on concrete, and let the dark talk. Cold iron, old spit. If you let your bones be microphones, you can hear distance. Heat. Weight trying not to wake guilt. Far off, a wheel squeaks. A hand hushes it.

“Two,” I say.

“Three,” Jory breathes. He hears better than me. But I read the echo—long tail, wide bore—city tunnel, not ours. Already south.

“Not ours to chase,” I say, hating the taste.

“You want to anyway,” he says.

“Later. When we know how much breathing we have left.”

We lock the grate like we mean it. I chalk our sign low—bent line with three bites—watch these; they’re hungry today.

Back at the heart: the count lands.

“Seventeen days on ration,” Imani says. “Children first.”

Someone curses. Same mouth whispers thank you. We are two people sharing one face.

I look at the smear again. The ghost of Cross’s sun looks back.

People tell pretty lies about the bloc. Cross counts sips like a priest counts prayers. Men who like fathers repeat it. I keep a knife that won’t open and legs that won’t run. Men with more than that stood under the Flare and the wind erased them.

“Kilns,” Talla says. Translation: if flues sulk now, a backdraft lights three rooms and Reyes is out of clean wraps.

We cross the loading bay. Charcoal bricks stacked neat—black currency. A woman counts in tens without moving her lips. A man rubs ash into the tally so it won’t blow away. Everything here is always about to drift.

The kiln hall opens like a throat. Ten mouths of fire. Hookers feeding scrap and husks. Pressers packing molds. Carriers pivoting under weight that forgives nothing. Heat braids the hair on my arms and wakes every scar. Talla stalks the catwalk with her stick. “Steady,” she calls. “Don’t starve it; don’t drown it. Keep the flame honest; it keeps your babies warm.”

A boy overfeeds Four. The vent belches back. Talla cracks rail. He corrects without trying to be brave. His sister—half his height, twice his focus—shovels sawdust with a rag over her mouth. When she coughs, she turns aside so the dust stays hers. I hate how practiced it looks.

Behind Four, the flue sings wrong—a woolly undertone in the draw. I pop the plate; ash sprays my goggles. Rags stuffed where air should breathe—lazy storage. I hold the bundle up. Talla’s mouth flattens. The boy flushes, sets it in the burn bin like contraband.

“Sorry,” he says.

“Sorry keeps children alive,” Talla answers.

All this feeds tallies. Tallies feed council. Council feeds decisions that feel like slow strangling most days. Breath traded for order.

I write numbers and head for the muster hall because avoiding chalk never saved anyone.

It’s an old freight shaft—elevator long dead—its bones a balcony where elders pretend height is wisdom. Torches throw orange against concrete. Four boards claim a wall: Population 312. Water—low. Charcoal—steady. Medicine—so small no one writes it big. Someone drew a ladder and erased it. The wall didn’t like the idea of escape.

They’re already arguing. They’re always already arguing.

Shaw hacks into a rag and points with it. Fifty. Spine like a crowbar. Lungs that hate him. Habit: praying wrong and calling it policy. “We pay tribute, we stay unseen,” he says. “Hot heads get us counted.”

Karina folds her forearms on a crate. “Everyone already counts us,” she says. “They come hat-in-hand when winter bites. We give and they call it softness. We’re not soft. We’re tired of watching children dip rags and call it supper.”

Reyes rubs the bridge of his nose. “You don’t need me to tell you what infection looks like when we don’t have clean cloth,” he says. “I pulled a nail with a spoon. The spoon was cleaner than the air. If Cross smells us angry, he brings rifles. Then I need more spoons.”

Imani lets the noise braid until a single sentence can cut it. “We lost a drum,” she says. “We were marked. The question isn’t whether Cross knows us. He does. The question is whether we meet him as a ledger entry or an equal.” Her eyes find me. “Ash Mercer. Speak.”

My scars stand up inside me like a crowd. The knife in my pocket presses a half-moon into my thigh. The plant’s hum behind me is eighty-eight a minute and the drum’s breath is steady. That’s my courage—measurements in a world that eats rulers.

“I fix pipes,” I say. “But what we really have is range. We pay tribute, it becomes tithe, becomes rent, becomes ownership. The one thing that buys us a voice is trade we choose, set on our terms. I can set the terms. I can hear when their rod pretends to be honest. Let me take bricks up. Bring back water—and something else: news, allies, a map that doesn’t end at our door.”

Shaw sniffs. “You think you can walk your grandfather’s walk,” he says. “I carried crates for your blood. We buried him without his name so the living could forgive.”

Heat climbs my neck. “You buried him because it was easier than telling the truth,” I say.

Karina doesn’t blink. “Truth is we lived because of him,” she says. “We didn’t like his choices. We like starving less.”

Imani’s pencil clicks. “Careful,” she says—meaning don’t let the dead steer you.

I remember my grandfather in pieces. Candlelight carving hollows. A man too awake to be kind. The knife carried like part of his hand. One sentence that sticks: Don’t let them see you beg. Begging gets you buried. He told the Flare like outcomes, not science—grids screaming, yards popping, phones dying, pumps and water and trucks and shelves and manners going with them; people not starving first—killing first. He liked outcomes. I learned to count them.

“I’m not asking to be him,” I say. “I’m asking to be me. Send me up. Let me pick ground. Give me one run. If I bring back empty hands, lock me in the flue room till I forget what sky felt like.”

Reyes tilts his head—he counts lives, not speeches. “One run,” he says. “What do you trade when what we have keeps our fires alive?”

“Fuel for water,” I say. “Same as always. But we pick who, where, and when to cut rope. And when Cross’s men read their rod, I’ll read the river. In the vestibule I can make the water say our number, not theirs.”

Shaw shakes his rag like surrender. “Still your old man’s walk.”

“We’re bent now,” Karina says. “If the boy wants to bend a different way for a day, let him.”

Imani watches my face like the ledger number that never adds. “Who goes?”

“Talla,” I say. “Jory.” I name four more whose hands don’t shake when rifles look at them. “Two carts. Forty sacks. No children. No one who can’t live if we don’t come back.”

The whisper tastes like hope and rot.

Imani raps the rail. “One run,” she says. “Back before second dusk or don’t come back. If terms change, you don’t argue at a barrel; you bring our people home. If you’re shot, we count you among those who kept us breathing. We will not become your legend. We have enough of those.”

When the hall breaks, work swallows talk. I stand under tally boards. Population 312. Water: low. Charcoal: steady. Medicine: rumor. I put my head to dusty board and hear the dead as if they own the wall. Don’t let them shrink the world. Build it back piece by piece. I hate him for it and love the sentence anyway.

I find the four I named and the two we still need. Pass the vats—grain poison turned to less—girls wringing rags with hands that will be old before they get to be young. I tell one to keep the bucket from flame. She rolls her eyes in the only language children trust.

You can feel midday underground. The heat turns stupid. It makes me stand still and count.

We reach the door we use when we go up. Scratches at shin height from carts; two patches of wall polished by hands that hesitate.

Imani waits there. Ledger under her arm; pencil behind her ear like the ear belongs to the pencil. No guards. She never needs them to make a point.

“You’ll take Cross’s road to the old gas station,” she says. “Kade will meet you. If someone else meets you first, you don’t die to keep a promise to a liar.”

“I don’t keep promises to liars.”

“You keep promises to the living,” she says, warm blade. “Many of us owe our lives to a man who forgot that difference. Don’t make us bury that twice.”

On the frame, low where a hand slides to push, someone drew a sun and thumbed it out. The ghost looks like a bruise that learned to write.

“Back before second dusk,” I say. Saying time out loud makes it act right.

“I count you until then,” she says. “After that, I count others.”

Talla checks the hinge for a squeak. Jory leans his forehead to the metal like he’s saying goodbye to a friend.

“You ever think about just walking?” he asks. “Not trade. Not war. Just walking ’til the wind tastes like not this.”

“Every day,” I say.

“And?”

“I don’t.” That’s the difference between a boy and a man whose knife won’t open.

We push the door. Heat comes in like a living thing.

I look back—chalk animals in the old office glass, vats, the clinic, the heart’s stubborn thrum. We turned a box into a town. That isn’t nothing. It isn’t enough either.

“Policy,” I say to the walls and the dead freight elevator that hums like a throat when the town speaks.

Stop the bleed. Protect the smallest. Count the loss.

I add one where only my good ear can hear it: Pick the ground. No mouths on the map. Read the river, not the rod.

And because the pipe screamed like an omen and the blotted sun smiled on our door like a threat, I add one more:

Make them pay for every drop.

That night, when the hall quiets, I count the day into the ledger—chalk first, ink later. Population: 312. Losses: one drum. Range: wounded; tuned. At the bottom I keep the column I haven’t shown council:

Debts the River Will Collect.

I don’t write names. I write marks—the kind only water reads. The river keeps its own book. I just learned how to hold it to my ear.