The coupling was wrong.
Sera Grenn knelt on the engineering bay floor, her fingers tracing the junction between a Scavenger power relay and the Confederation conduit it was meant to feed. The tolerances were off by two millimeters — acceptable by Confederation standards, which treated precision as a suggestion, and criminal by Scavenger standards, which treated it as religion.
"Two millimeters," she said to Kos, the Scavenger technician working the opposite end of the relay. "Your specs say one-point-five maximum deviation."
Kos looked up from his calibration. "Your conduits say four. We split the difference."
"You don't split the difference on load-bearing junctions." She pulled a measuring rod from her belt — Scavenger-made, marked in increments finer than any Confederation tool could manage — and laid it across the coupling. "Thermal expansion under full load pushes this past three. At three-point-two, seal integrity drops below threshold. At four, you get micro-fractures. Six months later, the fractures propagate and the whole junction fails. Silently. In the middle of winter. When twelve hundred people are depending on it for heat."
Kos set down his calibration tool. "You want to rebuild it?"
"I want to build it right." She was already pulling the junction apart, her hands moving with the quick economy of someone who had been disassembling and reassembling things since she could grip a wrench. Her grandfather's hands, she'd been told. More times than she cared to count. Tomas Grenn's granddaughter — as if the shape of her fingers and the set of her jaw were inheritances she'd asked for rather than accidents of blood that strangers had turned into a story she never consented to.
The coupling came apart in eight pieces. She laid them on the floor in the order of reassembly, inspected each face for burring, and began fitting them back together to the Scavenger tolerance specification. One-point-five millimeters. The difference between a system that worked and a system that worked until it didn't.
Engineering lived in that gap. The distance between functioning and failing was almost always smaller than people wanted to believe.
The Engineering Quarter spread along New Haven's eastern edge — newer construction, mostly, built in the six months since the Treaty. Scavenger power conduits snaked through walls of Confederation stone. Glass-paneled monitoring stations overlooked rows of workbenches where engineers from both cultures collaborated on integration projects that would have been inconceivable a year ago. The quarter hummed with the particular energy of people solving problems they hadn't been allowed to solve before: the sound of competence unleashed.
Sera had worked here since the quarter's founding. She'd been the youngest lead engineer appointed to the integration project, a distinction that owed nothing to her surname and everything to the fact that she could diagnose a power system failure by the sound it made and redesign the fix before anyone else had finished writing the incident report. She was good. She was very good. And she was tired of people assuming that being good was genetic rather than earned.
The coupling clicked into place. One-point-five millimeters. Perfect tolerance.
She wiped her hands on her work trousers and stood.
***
The memorial expansion had followed her into the morning briefing, which irritated her more than the coupling ever could.
Halden, the senior Confederation engineer on the integration project, had raised it during the scheduling review. The council had approved extending the memorial garden's eastern wall — new stone, new names, new space for what Halden called honoring the foundation we've built upon. Sera had opinions about that foundation. Halden had made the mistake of inviting them.
"My grandfather didn't die so we could build statues." She'd said it standing in front of twelve engineers who had gathered to discuss power grid routing, not memorial policy. "He died because the system failed and people had to plug the gaps with their bodies. That's not heroic. It's engineering failure."
The silence that followed had the particular quality of a room that had decided she was wrong but couldn't articulate why. Sera knew that silence well. She'd been generating it since she was old enough to understand what Tomas Grenn's name meant to everyone except her.
She didn't hate her grandfather's memory. She hated what people built around it — the reverence, the cult of sacrifice that treated willing death as the highest form of service. As if the correct response to a failing system was to throw yourself into the gears instead of redesigning the gears. As if the measure of a person's worth was their willingness to die rather than their ability to build something that didn't require anyone to die at all.
Halden had cleared his throat and moved to the next agenda item. Sera had spent the rest of the briefing measuring conduit schematics and not looking at anyone.
***
Asha val Mechas was waiting at the water purification complex, leaning against the intake housing with the easy confidence of someone who had never questioned whether she belonged wherever she happened to be standing. Scavenger posture, Scavenger pragmatism, the kind of bearing that communicated I am here and that is sufficient without requiring verification from anyone present.
"You're late," Asha said.
"The coupling in Bay Seven was wrong."
"Wrong, or wrong by Sera Grenn's standards?"
"By the standards of thermal physics. Which happen to agree with mine." Sera pulled the measuring rod from her belt and aimed it at the purification complex's main housing. "Walk me through the intake modifications."
Asha pushed off the wall and led her through the entrance. The purification system was Scavenger engineering from foundation to filter — the most sophisticated piece of integrated technology the alliance had produced. Clean water for twelve hundred people, generated from sources that the Confederation had been treating with boiling and hope for thirty years.
The system was elegant. Sera admitted this the way she admitted most things that challenged her assumptions — reluctantly, precisely, and without ceding more ground than the evidence demanded.
"Triple-stage filtration," Asha said, running her hand along the primary membrane housing. "Sediment, biological, chemical. The biological stage uses a cultivated bacterial colony that consumes waterborne pathogens. Self-sustaining once established. Maintenance interval: ninety days."
"Failure mode?"
"Temperature sensitivity. Below three degrees, the colony goes dormant. Below negative two, it dies and requires reculturing — about a six-day process." Asha tapped a gauge on the housing's outer surface. "The thermal regulation jacket keeps the biological stage between eight and twenty degrees regardless of ambient conditions. Dual-layer insulation with active heating from the power relay."
Sera ran her palm along the thermal jacket, reading its thickness through her fingertips. Well-designed. Robust. Redundant in the places that mattered. The kind of engineering that kept people alive without asking them to sacrifice anything except maintenance hours and technical attention.
"Your father's people built this design?" she asked.
"Three generations of refinement. Before the Treaty, the Clans operated twelve of these systems across the eastern settlements." Asha glanced at Sera with a look that balanced pride and challenge in equal measure. "How many did the Confederation run?"
"None." Sera kept her voice level. "We boiled water and lost about six percent of children under five to waterborne illness annually. But we had very thorough memorials for them."
Asha's expression shifted — not offense, but the watchfulness of someone who had learned to recognize when Sera's humor turned from dry to cutting. "The memorials matter, Sera. People need—"
"The memorials matter to people who weren't there." Sera turned from the filtration housing and faced Asha. "My grandfather walked into a seal ritual and died. Nine thousand people walked into seal rituals and died. And the response — the cultural response, the institutional, generational response — was to carve their names into stone and call it honor. Not to ask why the containment system required nine thousand deaths to function. Not to investigate whether a better-designed protocol could have done the work without the bodies. Not to treat it as what it was — a catastrophic failure of infrastructure that was patched with human lives because nobody had built anything better."
"The Progenitor technology was ten thousand years old. Nobody understood—"
"Nobody tried to understand. That's my point." Sera's voice dropped. The anger wasn't rising — it was settling, finding its level, the way water found the lowest point in a system. "Thirty years. The seals have been active for thirty years. In that time, we've built cities, established trade routes, integrated two cultures, designed water purification and power distribution and agricultural systems that would have been fantasy when my grandfather was alive. And in that same thirty years, not one funded research program has investigated whether the seal system could be improved. Upgraded. Made sustainable without a human cost."
Asha was quiet. Her hand rested on the purification system's intake housing, and the hum of the filtration motors filled the space between them.
"My grandmother was one of the nine thousand," Asha said. "My father's mother. She walked forward because she believed it was necessary."
"It was necessary. That's not the same as acceptable." Sera's armor thinned. The cutting edge dropped from her voice, and what remained was the thing beneath it — not cynicism, not anger, but something rawer. Grief, maybe. Or the frustration of someone who could see the blueprint for a better world and couldn't get anyone to look at it. "I'm not saying they were wrong to volunteer. I'm saying we're wrong to build a culture that treats volunteering to die as the highest form of contribution. Because the next time a system fails, people will line up to throw themselves into the gears instead of asking why the gears keep breaking."
Asha studied her for a long moment — the careful evaluation of someone recalibrating a prior assessment. "You've thought about this."
"I've lived with it. Every day since I was old enough to understand why strangers treated my last name like a prayer." Sera turned back to the purification system. She pressed her palm against the thermal jacket, feeling the warmth of the bacterial colony doing its invisible, essential, unheroic work. Keeping twelve hundred people alive through chemistry and engineering and maintenance schedules. No carved names. No reverence. No cult.
"Your grandfather built the first forge that made the seal rituals possible," Asha said. "The weapons he crafted—"
"He was a blacksmith. He built tools because he was good at building tools. The fact that one of his tools happened to be used in a ritual that killed nine thousand people doesn't make him a prophet. It makes him a craftsman who did his job." She lifted her hand from the housing. "This purification system will save more lives in five years than any memorial will save in a century. Nobody's going to carve its name in stone."
Asha was quiet again. The motors hummed. Then, with a gentleness that found the gap in Sera's defenses before she could close it: "Maybe they should."
Sera looked at her. Asha looked back. Between them, the purification system filtered toxins from water, converting contamination into something that could sustain a city, through processes that required no sacrifice and no prayer — only design, and maintenance, and the accumulated knowledge of engineers whose names no one remembered.
"Show me the secondary intake," Sera said. "I want to check the thermal jacket overlap at the junction points."
Asha led her deeper into the complex. They walked side by side — Sera's hands already moving, measuring surfaces by touch, testing junction points, reading tolerances through her fingertips. The conversation had left something unfinished between them. Not a disagreement, exactly. Something more difficult. The friction of two people who respected each other across a gap that neither knew how to close.
Sera worked until the light through the intake vents turned amber with evening. Her hands moved the way they always moved — quick, precise, sure of themselves in a world that her mind insisted on questioning. Her grandfather's hands. She'd stopped resenting that observation. The hands were hers. What she built with them was her own.
The coupling in Bay Seven held at one-point-five millimeters. The purification system delivered clean water to twelve hundred people who would never learn her name.
That was enough. That had to be enough.
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