Thirty Days

The Council gave her thirty days, seven workers, and expressions that said they expected failure. Councillor Bhat read through three surveys from Northern Academy engineers and said their instruments had gone two hundred feet and found nothing. He said faith in folk methods was a luxury a dying city couldn't afford. Meera waited until he finished, then said she wasn't looking in the same geological formation they had looked in. This was approximately true.

She got the days and the workers. Councillor Reva, the youngest at the table, caught her arm in the corridor afterward. "Be right," she said quietly. "And be fast." Meera told her she would do her best. She didn't say out loud that her best had never failed her when it truly mattered — not because she was afraid to jinx it, but because that kind of claim felt wrong to make standing in a city that was dying of thirst.