Chapter 3
Delphine
I got the town because nobody else would walk me through it.
That's the only reason. I asked Marisol and Marisol said ask the President. I asked Malachi and Malachi said ask the President, and made a note about having been asked. I asked a fourteen-year-old carrying a bucket and the fourteen-year-old ran.
So on day two I stood outside Tower Two at six in the morning with my case, and when he came out I said, "You're my assistant today," and he said, "No," and then he came.
"On what authority," he said.
"On the authority that nobody else in this town will let me within four meters of a pump, and that I have three days, and that you gave me the three days, which makes them yours as much as mine."
"That's not how authority works."
"It's exactly how authority works. You've just never had anyone use it on you."
He was a terrible assistant.
"Hold this."
"What is it?"
"It's a tape. Hold the end on the mark."
"Which mark?"
"The mark I'm pointing at."
"You're pointing at four things."
"I have one arm out, Ruin."
"You've got a whole hand out. There's five directions on a hand."
I got the measurement eventually. It took nine minutes. I have taken that measurement, alone, in a swamp, in the rain, in under two.
But here's the thing I didn't expect.
He asked what it was for. Every time. Not to challenge me — he'd stopped doing that somewhere in the first hour — but because he genuinely wanted the mechanism, the way some men want the inside of an engine.
And when I explained it he didn't nod politely.
He held onto it, and forty minutes later he'd come back with the second half of the thought.
"So if the wall's not sinking and the water's not rising as fast as your number—"
"Then?"
"Then the ground's going down."
"Yes."
"How much of it's ground?"
"About a third here. Maybe more. You've got compaction from a century of groundwater draw plus whatever the salt domes are doing, and it doesn't reverse."
He walked in silence for a bit.
"So we're not being flooded," he said. "We're being lowered."
"That's the most accurate sentence anyone in this town has said to me."
"Don't sound so surprised."
"I'm not surprised, I'm disappointed. I had a whole speech."
"Use it on Cash. He likes speeches. He mostly likes the ones he's giving, but he's flexible."
"He seems fond of you."
"He's appalling."
"Those aren't exclusive."
"He's been appalling since we were nine," Ruin said. "He once told my mother I'd stolen a bicycle so that she'd search my container, because he'd hidden a birthday present in there and wanted it found. I got two weeks of chores and he got a party."
"That's genuinely brilliant."
"It's sociopathy, Doctor."
"It's brilliant sociopathy," I said, "and you've made him your Vice President, which suggests you agree with me."
By eight I had a shadow, and the shadow was nine.
"Are you the water lady."
"I'm a hydrologist."
"That's what I said."
"It is approximately what you said." I handed him the tape reel, because a child with a job is a child who isn't asking questions, which turned out to be the single worst prediction I made in Bastion. "Hold that. Don't let it spool."
"Why's the water going up."
"It isn't, mostly. The ground's going down."
He considered this with the total seriousness of a person who has recently been beaten by six sevens.
"That's worse," he said.
"Yes."
"Because you can't put the ground back."
I stopped and looked at him.
"What's your name?"
"Tobias. Not the big Tobias. The little one."
"Tobias," I said, "in eleven years of doing this, you are the fourth person to get there that fast, and one of the other three was a machine."
He was insufferable for the rest of the morning and I'd do it again.
Bastion at seven in the morning is bells and children and a smell like hot iron and coffee that isn't coffee.
Two rings: draw your water. I stood at the standpipe with a woman named Ana who'd had a baby on Tuesday and who told me the entire history of her marriage in the four minutes it takes to fill twelve liters.
"You're the one with the numbers."
"I am."
"Are we drowning?"
Ruin, six feet away, went absolutely still.
And I understood the shape of the thing I was standing in — that this was the exact moment he'd been protecting the town from, and that I had somewhere between one and two seconds to decide who I was going to be here.
"Yes," I said. "Slowly. Slowly enough that there's time to be clever about it."
Ana thought about it.
"Okay," she said, and picked up her jugs, and went.
That's it. That's the whole reaction.
I watched her go and then I turned around, ready to be shouted at.
He wasn't looking at me. He was looking at Ana's back with an expression I'd never seen on him and have only seen a few times since, which is the face of a man discovering that the thing he's been carrying alone was maybe not as heavy as advertised.
"She just left," he said.
"She has a baby and twelve liters. Where was she going to go, a town hall?"
"I thought—"
"You thought they'd panic. They're not going to panic, Ruin. Panic is for people with options." I picked up my case. "That's the actual bad news, if you want it."
Three rings on the bell at half past seven, which is get inside, except nobody moved.
"That's a drill," Ruin said, before I could ask.
"How does anyone know?"
"Because Bishop rings the third one flat." He shrugged. "He does it on purpose. He'd deny it, but he's been doing it eleven years and he's never once rung it flat when it was real."
"That's — Ruin, that's a safety system based on one man's musical ear."
"Yes."
"That's insane."
"It's worked eleven years."
"So has not being struck by lightning," I said, "and I don't recommend it as a policy."
He laughed. Not the polite thing men do — an actual laugh, short and surprised, like it got out before he'd cleared it.
Every single person within thirty meters turned around.
He didn't notice. I noticed. I noticed the way eleven people looked at their President laughing in a yard at eight in the morning and then looked at each other, and I filed it, because I am a person who files things, and because it was the first hard evidence I had that this town was not what it thought it was.
The school is in a bank vault.
I'd seen the children go down. I hadn't been inside, and he took me in without comment, and I don't think he understood what he was doing.
Three feet of steel door, permanently open, rust bloomed around the hinge pins like coral. Inside: eleven meters by six. Ceiling lights running off the plant. Slates. A map of Texas from before, with the coast drawn in pencil over the printed line, twice, at two different dates.
"Who drew the pencil?"
"Their teacher. Mrs. Adeyemi. She does it every couple years."
"Does she know what she's drawing?"
"She's seventy-eight and she taught geography for forty years," he said. "She knows exactly what she's drawing."
The kids ignored us with tremendous professionalism. One of them, about nine, was standing at the front doing multiplication badly and loudly.
"Six sevens," said Mrs. Adeyemi.
"Forty-eight."
"Forty-eight."
"...Forty-nine?"
"Better. Guess again, closer this time. Hello, Emmett."
He winced.
I have never in my life enjoyed anything as much as I enjoyed the sound of that.
"Ma'am," he said.
"You're standing in my doorway blocking my light."
"Yes ma'am."
"And you." She looked at me over her glasses. "You're the water woman."
"Delphine."
"Is it forty-two?" said the nine-year-old, desperately.
"It is forty-two, sit down." She turned back to me. "How long?"
The whole room was listening. All of them. Nine children pretending to do sums.
I looked at Ruin. He looked back and, very slightly, tipped his head.
I've thought about that tip a great deal. It was permission, and it was the first thing he ever gave me.
"Long enough for them to finish school here," I said. "Not long enough for their kids to."
Mrs. Adeyemi nodded once, like a woman receiving a delivery she'd ordered years ago.
"Thank you," she said. "Six eights, Tobias."
Outside, in the stairwell up from the vault, he stopped me with two fingers on my elbow and let go immediately, like the contact had gone off in his hand.
"That was a lot to hand nine children."
"It was a lot to hand one woman who's seventy-eight and has been drawing that coastline in pencil for a decade waiting for somebody to confirm it.
" I shifted the case. "She wasn't asking for the children, Ruin.
She was asking for herself. The children were her cover story, which is the oldest trick in teaching. "
He absorbed that.
"You do this everywhere you go?"
"I do this everywhere I'm let."
"And how often are you let?"
"You're the fourth town in six years," I said, "that didn't put me back on the road inside a day."
"What happened to the other three?"
"Two of them moved," I said. "One of them is under nine feet of water and I got a letter from a man there once, and I'd rather not discuss the letter."
Doc Ramos let me into the infirmary at noon because she wanted my opinion on her water, and gave me an education instead.
"Twelve beds. Four in use. That one's a broken wrist, that one's a burn, that one's ninety-one and dying at his own pace, and that one—" she tipped her chin at a curtain "—is a girl with an arrhythmia I manage with a drug I buy."
"Buy from where?"
"Three suppliers. Two are unreliable and one is Cortland." She wrote something on a chart. "Every four months I put a number in front of Malachi and Malachi puts it in front of Ruin and Ruin signs it, and the number goes up every time, and nobody has ever once said no."
"That's good."
"That's leverage," Ramos said. "You've been here two days and you've already worked out that this town has one refinery. It also has one pharmacy and it's four hundred miles away and it doesn't like us."
I looked at the curtain.
"How old?"
"Eleven."