The Wasteland Chronicles Table (2)

Jason De'Harden woke before dawn in Dustfall to hear Darro and Cael stealing two of Petra’s wax-sealed trading bottles from the canvas-covered crate. Jason followed the pair onto the hardpan with a cudgel, confronted them before they could leave, and called out loudly enough to bring Petra and Mira from the settlement. Darro surrendered the bottles when Petra demanded them. Petra reminded Cael and Darro that the bottles purchased medicine, needles, and crop salt, then ordered both men to explain in the morning where they intended to trade them and whom they meant to meet. Inside Dustfall, Jason refused Petra’s offered cup of water because Jason had supplies of Jason’s own. Cael and Darro remained seated under Petra’s watch, while Mira listened nearby with her knife in her lap. Pressed for the truth, Jason said Jason had been raised by drifters after losing Jason’s family, had survived through odd jobs, brawling, and scavenging, answered to no faction or lord, and had wandered for years without knowing what Jason sought. Petra, whose well had fallen three feet in two months, asked Jason to find another water source for Dustfall’s forty-one people. In exchange for shelter, food, and enough water to stay on Jason’s feet, with further terms to be discussed if Jason found something valuable, Jason accepted—but required a sling or leather for one and suitable wood to make a flatbow. Petra gave Jason a strip of cured hide saved for boot repairs and directed Jason toward a dry creek bed two miles northeast, where willow might still stand. Jason and Petra sealed the agreement with a handshake.

At the creek bed, Jason found two dead willows: one fallen and rotten, the other still standing, dry and firm, with a forearm-thick trunk suitable for a functional flatbow despite being willow rather than ash or yew. Before cutting it, Jason followed the creek’s deepening westward channel and discovered a pre-collapse concrete culvert blocked deliberately with rubble, stones, and a damp clay plug. The cool, wet underside of the plug showed that water still moved beyond it. A line of evenly placed stones above the culvert marked an apparent boundary or claim. Jason crossed the stone line and tracked damp ground for roughly a quarter mile to a full or nearly full pre-collapse cistern in a limestone hollow. The cistern, about fifteen feet across and four feet deep, had a recently fitted wooden cover, a rubber hose leading to a maintained hand-pump, and a nearby lean-to containing a tightly rolled bedroll, tin plate, and a still-moist clay jug. Its absent keeper had been there recently, and the arrangement showed that someone had diverted Dustfall’s water through the culvert and claimed it in secret.

Jason touched nothing, instead noting the cistern’s pump, hose, weighted cover, and the direction from which its keeper likely approached. Jason left the standing willow uncut, crossed back over the claim markers, and began walking east toward Dustfall, whose overpass shadow later came into view. Jason now carried no physical proof beyond observation, but knew the water was accessible and that someone with a camp, routine, and marked claim had taken it while Dustfall’s well declined.

Jason De'Harden reported to Petra at Dustfall that he had found a plugged culvert diverting water through damp ground beyond a stone boundary line to a concrete cistern, covered in wood and fitted with a hand pump, large enough to sustain Dustfall’s forty-one people for months. A lean-to, bedroll, and still-moist jug showed that someone occupied the site. Petra, seeing the settlement’s wilted bean vines, warned that the claimant might be one person or the advance of a larger group and asked Jason to return and watch without being seen. Jason spent much of an hour felling a dead standing willow with his cudgel, splitting two possible bow staves; one splintered, and Jason kept the other despite its backward curve. From a limestone notch above the cistern, Jason watched a lean, weathered woman in patched canvas and cracked leather arrive with two empty clay jugs on a yoke. The iron-gray-braided woman pumped water into both jugs and carried them south along the ridge. Jason followed, leaving the stave hidden in the rocks, and saw her reach a concealed basin camp of corrugated walls, a canvas roof, and a banked fire. A broad man with a sunburned neck took one jug to a covered barrel, while a shorter young woman and a third person by the far wall remained nearby.

Hidden above the basin, Jason made a workable sling from a hide strip and confirmed four people in the camp, including the woman he regarded as the Cistern Keeper. Jason circled through a dry wash to the camp’s western side and overheard the broad man say they might need to “make the run north” in two or three days; the Keeper ended the discussion by saying they would go when she said. Jason also saw the fourth member clearly: an older man, gray at the temples, with a scar from jaw to collarbone, awake and holding a tin cup. Jason withdrew without discovery, returned to Dustfall in about an hour, and told Petra that four organized people controlled the full cistern and stored water while Dustfall’s water failed, and that they planned to move north within two or three days. Petra ordered Jason to take a full cup of water and said they would discuss what came next in the morning. Petra departed for the tin-walled structure with her ledger, while Jason remained at Dustfall’s edge under the first stars, a sling looped around Jason’s wrist, knowing the cistern’s location and its keepers.