Chapter 7
Delphine
I decided at approximately six in the morning to be extremely professional about it.
This lasted until six-forty.
"Morning, Doctor," said Ruiz at the standpipe, and then his entire face fell off.
"Ruiz."
"Nothing."
"You didn't say anything."
"I know! That's what I'm doing! I'm not saying anything!" He picked up a jug that was not his. "That's my jug. This is my jug. I'm going."
Here is what nobody in Bastion did that morning.
Nobody looked at me. Nobody asked. Nobody made a joke, nudged an elbow, or so much as raised an eyebrow in my direction.
Here is what Bastion did instead.
Somebody moved my survey case from the machine shop bench to a shelf in the machine shop office, which is a room with a door.
Somebody left a second chair at the plotting table.
Pike, who had not spoken to me in eight days, said "Ma'am" with the reverence of a man addressing a visiting bishop, and then held a gate open for me that did not need holding, and that I in fact had to walk sixteen extra feet to go through so as not to embarrass him.
Mrs. Adeyemi sent a child.
"Miss says are you coming Thursday to do the water lesson."
"I— she hasn't asked me to do a water lesson."
"She said you'd say that," said the child, "and I'm to say the lesson's at ten."
By nine I had established the following, empirically.
Nobody would meet my eye. Everybody would meet Ruin's, and then look immediately at me, which is a worse system and I'd like whoever designed it spoken to.
Three separate people asked whether I'd like a chair brought outside.
Somebody had swept the walkway to container nine. It has never been swept. It is a walkway made of gravel and mud. There is no mechanism by which it can be swept. It had been swept.
And Pike had begun referring to me, in the third person, at volume, as "the Doctor" — with an audible capital, the way you'd say "the Bishop," which was confusing given that we also have a Bishop.
"Morning, Doctor."
"Morning, Pike."
"Fine day."
"It's overcast."
"It's a fine day," said Pike, with meaning, and walked off, and I stood in the mud and considered leaving the continent.
I found Doc Ramos in the infirmary and shut the door.
"Is it obvious?"
"Is what obvious." She didn't look up from the splint she was wrapping.
"Ramos."
"Del, I have been in this town for nine years." She tied off. "Last night I stitched a man who put a hook through his palm, and the entire conversation was about whether you'd want the north container or the south one, because the north one has the better stove but the south one's quieter."
"That's — they were housing us?"
"They were housing you at seven forty-five in the evening, before you'd even gone down the ladder. This town has three hundred years of collective boredom, Delphine. You are the most interesting thing to happen here since the barge."
"What did you say?"
"I said north," said Ramos. "You strike me as a woman who'd rather have heat than peace."
I went to see Malachi at eight, because I had decided that the only cure for being written about is to be present at the writing.
"Doctor."
"Malachi."
"Sit down. Would you like to see the entry?"
"...I would like that very much, actually."
He turned the ledger around.
Sat. — E. cistern weir. Two persons, eight hrs lamp. Weir incomplete. Recommend crew reassignment.
"That's it?"
"What did you expect?"
"Something worse."
"Doctor Okonkwo." He closed the book with enormous dignity. "I am the Treasurer of a town of six hundred and forty-one people. I record fuel, water, stores, and labor. I do not record romance. Romance is not a commodity."
"Thank you."
"I record it elsewhere," he said, and produced a second, smaller notebook from his cardigan, "because I am also ninety percent of this town's institutional memory and one day somebody will want to know how any of this happened. Would you like to correct anything?"
"What have you got?"
He opened it. He read, in a flat voice:
"Day one — she told him about a gasket. He put the wrench down."
I sat down on the crate opposite him.
"That's the first entry?"
"That's the only entry until Thursday," Malachi said. "I'm not a gossip, Doctor. I'm an archivist. There's a considerable difference and it is chiefly one of tone."
The one person who behaved normally was Cash, and that was worse.
"Doctor."
"Don't."
"I haven't said anything."
"Your face is saying things. Your face is giving a keynote."
He fell into step beside me with his hands in his pockets, radiating unbearable contentment.
"I'd just like to say," he said, "that I called it on day one."
"You did not."
"I called it out loud, to his face, and he threw a rag at me. Ask him." He tipped his head back happily. "Eleven days. I'd bet eleven weeks, and I want it understood that I lost money on my own prediction because I underestimated you both, and I consider that money well spent."
"There was a pool?"
"There is always a pool. Del. Sweetheart. We have no television."
They came in at eleven, and the bell rang twice for water and then a third time, wrong, and everything stopped.
Three vehicles. Not bikes — vehicles, actual functioning trucks, matte white with a logo on the door that I recognized instantly because I'd spent two years of my life applying to them for research money and being refused.
Cortland Oil.
The woman who got out of the lead truck was about fifty-five, in a field jacket that had never been in a field, and she had good boots and a soft handshake and a name I want spelled correctly: Regina Faulk.
"Mr. Vasquez."
"Ms. Faulk."
"It's been a while."
"It's been fourteen months and three price adjustments," said Malachi, from behind him, and I decided in that moment that I would defend that man with my life.
They set up in the yard, which was their first tell.
Not in the chapel. Not in a room. They set out a folding table in the open where six hundred people could drift past and hear, and Faulk spoke at a volume calibrated for exactly that, and I watched Ruin understand it about four seconds after I did.
Before she opened the folder she did something I've thought about ever since: she asked for water.
Not for herself. She asked whether her drivers could draw, and when Ruiz said the bells had already gone, she said, "Then they'll wait for the next one," and made two grown men in Cortland jackets stand in a yard for forty minutes with dry mouths in front of six hundred people who were rationed.
It was flawless. It cost her nothing. And every person in that yard registered it.
"She's good," I said, under my breath.
"She's very good," Ruin said.
"How much of that was theater?"
"All of it. That's not the same as it being false." He didn't take his eyes off her. "That's what nobody understands about this. You can mean it and stage it. I do it four times a week."
"We'd like to buy the refinery," she said.
Nobody moved.
"I'm going to be direct, because I think you've been managed at, and I don't think it's worked.
" She had one folder. She set it down. "Cortland's position is that Bastion is not viable past the medium term.
Not because of anything you've done — your operation is, frankly, better run than three of ours. Because of the water."
A murmur went through the yard like wind in a field.
"We're prepared to purchase the plant at a valuation that reflects its current output rather than its remaining life, and to fund relocation of this community to a site north of the subsidence field, with priority hiring at our Hartwell facility."
She let it sit.
"You have eighteen months," Regina Faulk said. "Maybe twenty-two. We'd like to give you twenty years."
I want to describe what that did to the yard, because I've never seen anything like it.
It was relief.
Not all of them. But enough — enough faces went soft in the exact way faces go when someone finally says out loud the thing you've been carrying, and offers to take it.
And why not? It was my number. It was my recommendation.
It was, functionally, everything I'd ridden eleven hundred kilometers to make happen.
I should have been vindicated.
Instead I was looking at the folder.
Because she'd opened it, and she'd turned it around to face the yard the way you do when you want people to see that a thing exists rather than read it, and I could see the top sheet from three meters away.
It was a subsidence map.
It was my subsidence map.
I knew it the way you know your own handwriting from across a room.
The projection was mine — an equal-area I'd chosen years ago because it was slightly wrong for the region and I liked it anyway.
The station points were mine, including the two I'd had to interpolate off a bad tide record near Sabine, which I had marked in my own files with a small open circle because I'd wanted to remember they were weak.
The open circles were on her map.
Someone had taken my file. Not a copy of my published work — I'd never published this. My working file, the one that lived on a laptop with a cracked bezel in a shipping container with a door that sticks.
"May I see that," I said.
Faulk looked up, pleasantly. "And you are?"
"Delphine Okonkwo."
She didn't blink. She's very good. But there's a thing the eyes do, a tiny recalculation, and I saw it.
"Doctor Okonkwo. I've read your work."
"Which of it?"
"Sorry?"
"Which of my work have you read?" I put my hand flat on the table. "Because there's the published record, which is four papers and a chapter, and then there's this, which is unpublished, unfinished, and mine."
The yard had gone very quiet.
"This is Cortland's regional model," Faulk said.
"This is my regional model with the confidence intervals removed.
" I turned the sheet around. "There. There, and there.
Every place I flagged uncertainty, someone's cleaned it up.
You've taken a map that says probably and made it say definitely, because definitely is what you need to buy a town at a discount. "
Here's the part I hate.