Amara

Today was my twenty‑first turning.

Legend has it this used to be a cause for celebration — a clear step into adulthood, marked and shared. For us, that step comes earlier. Fifteen, give or take. Not the feasting or the songs, but the work, the expectations, the quiet understanding that you’re needed now. I feel like I’ve been an adult for a long time already, which makes days like today feel less like milestones and more like markers. Another season counted. Another one gone. I try not to look too far ahead.

I’m not sure many people noted it, aside from Marek — who greeted me this morning in the gardens with a broad grin and a tight squeeze — and Iain, who came along from the archive with this journal tucked under his arm. I’m not sure what I’m meant to do with it. He said it might help me find my place, or at least leave something of myself behind. I’m grateful. I hope he’s right. Though part of me wonders if, after years spent reading other people’s lives, he just wants one more voice on the shelves. Not that I have anything worth keeping.

The rest of the day settled into its usual shape. Garden work. I cleared and hoed the seed beds, readying them for peas, and spent far too long coaxing the old irrigation pump into motion before the weather truly turns. Charlie kept needling me to help with the potatoes — he’s slipped behind again — but the pump had other ideas and refused to behave.

I do like the gardens. There’s a calm to them, and something honest about working soil that gives back what you put into it. I spend most mornings there with the younger ones, showing them how to read the ground, how to feel when it’s ready and when it isn’t, how to plant without wasting seed or effort. They listen better outdoors. Their questions are steadier when their hands are busy.

Marek sat with me at midday and spoke, in great detail, about pruning rose bushes. We don’t grow roses in the East Bank, just vegetables, but listening to the care he gives his own patch was comforting. He knows plants the way some people know stories, and I always feel steadier after talking with him.

As an elder, though, he can’t help steering the conversation. Today was no exception. I hate seeing the way people look at you, is his usual line, but today he pressed harder. You do good work with the children, he added, as if that should count for more than it does. But that only buys you so much time. You really should find someone before it’s too late. How else will you have a chance of making it onto the council?

I know he cares. I know he’s not like those who look down their noses at me for avoiding my duty, as they call it. Still, it’s hard not to hear the limits of what he’s saying. Teaching helps. Training the children matters. But it isn’t enough on its own—not to earn trust, not to earn voice, not to earn permanence.

I don’t know if I want to be chosen into usefulness that way. Or into the council. Or into anything that feels decided before I am. Maybe he’s right. Maybe I’m just slow to see it. I only know it doesn’t feel like my reason for being here.

It’s late now. The light slipped away hours ago and the ’syth has gone quiet. I can hear Kess snoring through the wall, and somewhere farther off a door closing against the cold.

Goodnight, journal.

Iain came by the gardens today, on his way to work, mostly to say hello, but also to see how I’ve been getting on with the journal. I had to admit — somewhat sheepishly — that I’ve only managed the one entry so far. I expected disappointment, but he seemed genuinely pleased that I’d at least begun. He said that was what mattered. Starting leaves a mark, even if you don’t know yet what it will become.

Things grew strange not long after. Charlie appeared, and the air thickened almost immediately — enough that even I noticed it. There’s clearly something between them. After a few uncomfortable moments, Charlie said, Don’t you have some more beds to clear out, Amara? It wasn’t phrased as a question, and it was rich coming from him of all people. Iain didn’t linger after that and headed back toward the archive. When I asked Charlie later what that was about, he waved it away and said there was nothing going on, which only made it feel more like something.

I finished up in the gardens just after the light tipped past its best, having sown the last of the carrot seeds and finished tidying the beds. From there I went down to the yard at the bottom of the hill. That’s where we strip old machines and see what can be made to work again. Most of us in the ’syth carry more than one function. I’m both gardener and scrapper. Both matter. But the yard is where I feel most awake.

There’s something satisfying about it — finding, fixing, or salvaging parts to give them new purpose. I can lose whole stretches of time there, listening to the machines, coaxing life back into things that were written off. Sometimes I repair them. Sometimes I build something new from whatever’s left. Either way, it feels like answering a question the world is still asking.

I had time spare today, so I pulled out the old radio again. Callen says it’s a waste, that the network’s been quiet longer than he’s been alive. Still, I can’t stop wondering what might happen if it spoke. If we managed to reach farther than the paths we already know.

We trade with the nearby settlements, and we’ll head to the Nauld for the summer turnin’, same as ever. But beyond that there are only rumours, and travellers’ stories (most of which are treated with deep suspicion). To hear something for ourselves — to know what lies beyond the wall at the edge of towns — could open up opportunities none of us can even imagine. I can already imagine the elders frowning at the risks and warning of the dangers it would bring.

I think I’ll go and see Iain in the morning. Tomorrow’s Meetday, and if I’m quick with my chores I can be clear by the tenth bell, which would give us time before the council gathers. He never laughs at questions, and he’s better than most at hearing what’s not being said. Perhaps he’ll even tell me what’s really going on with Charlie.

The day’s nearly done now. Day 111 is almost behind us. Kess is snoring in the next room, steady as always, and somewhere down the hall a door has just been pulled closed.

Goodnight, journal.

It was good to see Iain this morning. I don’t know how he does it, but I always leave the archive in a better mood than when I arrive. I made it there just before the tenth bell and found him cataloguing a small pile of books that had come in from a musty old box — dragged up from one of the wards after they cleared out a long-forgotten storeroom. No doubt there will be some old medical apparatus waiting for me at the yard next time too. It all seems to surface eventually.

As Lead Archivist, Iain spends almost all his time in the archive — an old building on the edge of the gardens. He once told me it was over three hundred years old. Even back then it had been large, a house for a single family, and later a museum. It says something uncomfortable about how well people used to live: today, a house that size would hold half of ’Syth. Now it holds our memory instead.

The place is dense with shelves and boxes, the air dry and faintly dusty, everything catalogued in Iain’s precise hand. He has helpers, of course, but everyone knows the truth of it: if you need to find something — anything recorded, referenced, remembered — you go to Iain.

He seemed pleased to see me, almost as if he’d been expecting me. He showed me what he called his journals — the growing collection of personal accounts that have been donated or uncovered since the archive was established nearly fifty years ago. They belong to the community, officially, but he speaks of them with such pride that it feels wrong to correct him. He told me again, as he often does, about the value of these records: lives lived from childhood into old age, people who travelled freely, loved recklessly, fell ill, recovered, failed, succeeded, and carried on. Whole lives, end to end.

I still don’t know why, out of all that, he wants my voice added to the shelves. My days feel thin by comparison — work, meals, sleep, the slow turning of seasons. And yet he insists that the ordinary must be recorded too, that survivals unmarked become invisible. I left that conversation feeling, if not convinced, then at least less resistant.

Eventually the talk turned, as it has been circling for weeks now, to the radio.

Iain agrees that most of the other elders would object outright if they thought I was trying to reach beyond the wall. You know how they feel about anything that doesn’t directly feed us or replace us, he said. Curiosity is only tolerated when it results in food—or children. He smiled as he said it, but there was truth underneath.

After a moment’s thought, he suggested — quietly — that there might be a practical reason for me to visit the old pylon north of the gardens. It would be a bit of a climb, he said, far too casually, but it might make an ideal place for an antenna. His grin then was unmistakable. And I’m sure the yard has cable to spare. No one’s powered anything ambitious with it in decades.

He was right. Our use of electricity is so tightly controlled that most cable is effectively useless — too long, too heavy, too tempting. And yet the salvagers keep bringing it in. Kilometres of the stuff, coiled and stacked, waiting for a purpose that never quite comes.

Just as I was turning the idea over in my head, Iain disappeared into the back room. He returned a moment later with a book held carefully in both hands.

This may help, he said, and passed it to me.

The ARRL Antenna Book.

I couldn’t help grinning — but the grin faded as quickly as it came. I knew the rules as well as he did. Archive books don’t leave the building without elder permission, and that permission is rarely granted for technical works. Not ones that might change things.

Iain nodded as if he had read my mind. Reading room, he said. For now.

So I took it there, to the long table by the south window where the light is best and the watchers least attentive. The book was heavier than it looked, its pages soft from age and use, diagrams pressed deep into the paper. I ran my hand along the margin of a chapter on long‑wire antennas and felt a strange, contained excitement — like standing at the edge of a road you were never meant to notice.

I didn’t read much. Not properly. Just enough to know that this wasn’t speculation. This was instruction. And instruction, once learned, is very hard to put back on the shelf.

It wasn’t until the bell rang for the final meal, and I was halfway back toward the dining hall, that I realised I’d forgotten to ask Iain about Charlie entirely.

Well the rest of the week has been wet and uneventful. The rain has settled into a steady pattern — enough to slow work without ever quite justifying a rest day. Paths are slick, tools don’t dry properly, and everyone seems a little more tired than usual. Jobs that should take an hour stretch into most of the morning, and by the time things are finished it feels as though the effort has gone into staying upright rather than making progress. By the end of each day there hasn’t been much energy left for anything else, which is why I haven’t made it along to see Iain again since handing the book back.

That low, dragging feeling seems to be affecting everyone. Charlie, at least, has been asking me to help more than usual. Nothing urgent — mostly ordinary tasks like lifting, checking, or holding things steady. Things he’s done on his own plenty of times before. He doesn’t offer much explanation, just works through them one after another and then finds something else that needs an extra pair of hands. I can’t tell if he’s behind, unsettled, or simply filling the days. I’ve helped where I can. It feels easier to do that than to stop and ask why.

Teaching has carried on in much the same way. The children are turning up and doing what they’re asked, but the weather seems to have taken the edge off their enthusiasm. The cold flattens everything — voices, movement, attention — and it takes more effort to get through even familiar ground. We’re covering what we need to, though it feels more like maintaining momentum than making real progress. Still, keeping the rhythm matters, even when it doesn’t feel especially effective.

The yard has been the one bright spot. I spent some time there between showers and managed to find a substantial length of cable stored behind one of the old frames, coiled neatly and clearly unused. There are no markings, no signs of recent handling — nothing to suggest it belongs to any active work. It’s good quality, better than I’d hoped for, and no one will miss it. The challenge will be moving it. It’s too heavy to shift quietly on my own and too obvious to carry openly, so I’ll need to think carefully about timing and route. Even so, having something concrete lined up makes the week feel less empty.

Today was meant to be market day, and the stalls were set up despite the rain, but I avoided it. Standing around in the mud didn’t seem worth it, especially with nothing I urgently needed. By evening the weather finally eased and the sky began to clear, thin breaks opening in the cloud. The light lingered a little longer than it has all week. With Feastday tomorrow, that feels promising. If the weather holds, people might stay out longer, talk more, and let the day feel like something other than an obligation. That alone would be an improvement. I think I may even be looking forward to it.