Salt Road: Deep Water

A year after the Under Road saved Emmerlin, its water is dropping an inch a week. Amara has nine days to find what is choking a river under a hundred miles of desert — before the season turns and the channels flood to the roof.

Amara Teff was twelve now, and she had her own book.

It was bound in goat hide with a brass clip, and it had been given to her by the Emmerlin water council in a small embarrassing ceremony in the spring, and on the front, stamped in, it said: KEEPER OF THE UNDER ROAD.

That was a real job now. That was the strange part. A year ago she had been a girl who counted barrels twice a day for her uncle's salt caravan, and then there had been a sandstorm and a stowaway and a map, and they had come up out of the ground into a dying oasis town with a river underneath it that nobody had known was there. Now there was a stone gauge house built over the shaft, and a wheel, and a crew of four, and a girl with a book.

The book had one column that mattered. Every dawn, Amara climbed down eleven rungs into the cool dark and read the mark where the water touched the wall, and wrote the number down.

'Twice a day,' she reminded herself, the way she always had, on the ladder in the dark. 'Because once a day is how people end up as a story other towns tell.'

For nine months the number had barely moved.

Since midsummer it had gone down an inch a week, every week, without stopping once.