The morning air carried a thread of frost, though sunlight already shimmered across the canal. Aria and Virel followed the gravel path beside it, boots crunching softly as ripples moved slow and deliberate from some distant gate upstream.

“This stretch feeds the northern reservoirs,” Virel said, brushing his fingers over the railing.

Clem’s voice chimed from Aria’s wrist, dry and exact as ever.

“Once they stopped buying fighter jets, they learned you can move water instead of weapons. Took them long enough.”

Aria smiled. The Great Projects of 2050 had repurposed the old world’s ambitions: factories that once forged armor now built solar barges, desalination towers, and canal locks. Floodwaters became lifelines, channeling through new arteries to lands that had forgotten rain.

They turned down a narrow lane toward Miller’s workshop. The air inside was warm with oil and rope. Tables overflowed with pipe fittings, salvaged valves, and stamped plates bearing the Projects’ emblem — waves entwined with gears.

Miller looked up from a valve controller as they unpacked the co-op delivery.

“Storm surge hit the coast last week,” he said. “They opened the south locks in time. Diverted the surge inland. First reservoir’s already filling.”

“That’ll reach the farms by spring,” Aria said. She thought of her cousin’s letter — of fields greening again after years of dust and silence.

Virel crouched beside Miller, testing circuits with patient precision. The workshop hummed with the rhythm of renewal.

Aria drifted toward the doorway. Outside, the canal mirrored the sky like molten glass. Her watch flickered once — not Clem’s neutral blue, but something deeper, older. A ripple spread across the digital strip, forming concentric rings that radiated outward, as if a single drop had struck from beneath.

She looked toward the ridge, though the rooftops hid it from view. The sensation stretched through earth and water alike — a heartbeat that wasn’t hers, echoing between the two.

Clem’s tone shifted, quieter now.

“That wasn’t latency. That was something listening.”

Aria said nothing. The ripple on her watch stilled.

By the time the valve passed its test, the light had begun to turn amber. Along the canal, a solar barge drifted past, stacked with carrots and sealed drums marked for the southern towns. Children fished from the docks; two teenagers wobbled on paddleboards, laughing every time the boards collided.

By nightfall, the water lay still and black beneath a sky washed clean of noise. Aria stepped outside to water the garden and stopped mid-motion. The Milky Way arched across the heavens, brighter than she remembered from before the collapse.

The air itself seemed to hold its breath.

She traced the canal’s path in her mind — locks, reservoirs, and conduits glimmering across the land like constellations in motion. Beneath the ridge, unseen, the shard pulsed in quiet reply, mapping its own luminous design below.

For the first time, the two patterns — human and cosmic, constructed and living — aligned in perfect symmetry.

Earth and sky had already agreed.

All that remained was for Aria and Virel to answer.