Keisha Grant sat on an overturned paraffin drum, her swollen ankle resting on Dale Clanton’s canvas satchel.
She had unbuttoned the cuffs of her gray dormitory smock, rolling them up to reveal forearms covered in pale, circular scars—burns from old solder drips and steam lines. For four years, before Venn had reorganized the intake wings, Keisha had worked as a junior shift tender in Haven’s secondary power vault.
“Jonah’s tracing is right,” Keisha said, pointing a calloused finger at the blue-line linen schematic spread across the cable spool. “The regional collector isn’t the central Archive. Venn tells the new arrivals that the whole settlement runs off one big dynamo in the basement, but that’s a lie to make them think pulling a wire will freeze their babies.”
Mara leaned over the drawing, her elbows propped on the wooden rim of the spool.
The schematic was three feet long, smelling of ammonia and moldy drafting linen. It showed Haven’s power grid laid out in concentric rings. At the center sat the Archive—a dense, cross-hatched block marked Vault Seven: Primary Retention and Memory Core. Radiating outward like spokes were the domestic circuits: Dormitories One through Six, the hospital infirmary, the communal kitchens, and the agricultural green-rooms.
