*
Tuva came back. Her boots were wet to the ankle from the creek edge.
"The water's good," she said quietly, for my ears. "Soil's better than it looks. You could feed more than twenty families off the lower strip if someone cleared it properly."
I nodded once.
Bjorn caught the exchange. "You two planning to camp and move on, or is there a point to the inspection?"
I could have given him the easy version—passing through, needed water, moving south by morning. It would have been clean. It would have left this bowl of broken houses exactly as we found it.
Instead I looked at the patched thatch, the garden plots, the children who had started edging closer now that no one was shouting, and the way Marta stood like she was already bracing for whatever disappointment came next.
"I've built watches and walls for other people's ground," I said. "I've held lines that weren't mine. I'm tired of leaving places the moment they stop being a problem someone else assigned me."
