The irrigation weir at Ditch Nine was clogged with dead cattails and frozen foam.
A concrete pump house, built fifty years earlier by the federal soil bureau, sat half-submerged in the ditch bank. Its corrugated roof had rusted through to a lace of orange holes, but the heavy steel maintenance hatch on the southern wall was chained shut with a modern brass padlock stamped with Haven’s lightning-bolt insignia.
Gideon cut the Ford’s engine a quarter-mile back, coasting into the brush behind a stand of willow scrub.
The morning smelled of wet sulfur and dead leaves. A cold, fine drizzle drifted out of the north, sticking to the windshield in greasy beads.
Mara stepped down from the running board into four inches of gray prairie gumbo. Her boots made a wet, sucking sound with every stride. Gideon walked three paces ahead, his short twelve-gauge shotgun tucked beneath his coat, muzzle pointing toward the mud.
Behind them in the truck cab, Naomi Chen sat with Wren. Through the glass, Mara could see the girl’s small face framed by the wool collar, the brass anchor cylinder resting upright between her knees.
“There,” Gideon muttered, stopping behind a fallen cottonwood trunk.
A man was kneeling on the concrete apron of the pump house, scraping mud from the intake grate with an iron flat-shovel. He wore a heavy gray canvas mechanic’s jacket with HAVEN UTILITIES — SECTOR 3 stenciled across the shoulders in faded yellow stencil ink. A battered three-wheel utility cart, powered by a…
