Desert Reckoning

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The city was already screaming when Mara slipped out of the alley’s shadow. Sirens. Glass breaking. In the burning, wind-scoured first light, Oasis was all danger and hunger—no longer merely thirsty, but ready to bleed.

She could feel the digital evidence, cold and dense in her jacket’s lining. Every step away from the tunnels was a wager in her head. She’d expected fear; she hadn’t expected the air to taste like gunpowder, or for the streets around the desalination plant to boil with movement: people running, faces streaked with dust and sweat, shouts swelling and breaking like surf. Soldiers in pale blue fanned out in pairs, rifles swinging, demanding to see ration bands—often tearing them off, or using a baton if the answer was too slow.

Jax swung out of a side street, jacket open, eyes wild. “It’s everywhere already,” he gasped. “Someone’s leaking pieces of the Consortium logs—enough to crack the lid.”

“Mirage?” Mara felt a chill. “Or the Consortium, panicking?”

Jax shrugged, anxiety crackling off him in waves. “Who cares, it’s happening. Silt Street’s barricaded. Uptown’s looting. The old markets—they’re burning refugees out.”

She gripped his arm, hard. “How many dead?”

A slow shake of the head. “Too many. Not enough that anyone in those towers up there cares. Yet.” He thumbed the battered comm-pad he carried. “We move fast, use what you stole. Drop everything—full files, Consortium orders, all of it. Only way the city gets truth, not more blood.”

Mara took that in. Her hand hovered at her comm. The fear in her chest bloomed toxic, but under it: a deeper certainty, clear and hard as the old water pipes. The people deserved to know. But dropping the evidence all at once would be fire in a drought.

She and Jax ducked into a half-collapsed pharmacy, picking their way over glass. The sound of boots—gunfire, somewhere—echoed in waves. Jax pulled a cable from a busted old console, hotwiring into an guerilla mesh network. “Cutter’s working the west side. He can maybe slow Consortium patrols. Your friend, maybe—tonight.”

Mara keyed the encrypted files. Her thumb hesitated: this was no longer an investigation. This was a matchstick. But she pressed send. Data packets seared outward—from ration logs, to encrypted chatrooms, to dusty old citizens’ pads. The story went everywhere: lists of Mirage, orders for murder, names of hoarded water reserves, Director Harrow’s signature cold and clear. Truth, raw and damning, cascading into Oasis like broken floodgates.

Within minutes, street noise climbed another octave—anger gone radioactive. News tickers on old public screens flipped from Consortium propaganda to hacked warning banners: THEY ARE BLEEDING YOU DRY. YOU ARE THE RAINS.

Mara let the pad go limp. “It’s out.”

Jax gave a short, bitter laugh. “You really want to see what comes next?”

But there was no time. A crackle on Mara’s comm—the city’s emergency band, hijacked:

“Attention all residents. Martial status imposed. Unauthorized water access is an act of sedition. Curfew. Curfew. Lethal force authorized…”

Out the pharmacy window, Consortium vehicles lumbered past. Armed men leapt off the beds, cracking down on clusters of looters. Muffled explosions in the distance signaled water vaults being blown. The rumor—the reality—of hidden reserves sent mobs in all directions: some to survive, others to claim what was once stolen from them.

“We need the tower,” Jax said, voice tight. “Upload is good but not everyone will see a screen. Broadcast—they can’t kill every ear. You get that message on the air, you might save something in this city.”

He led her through back alleys, always in motion, two shadows pinwheeling through chaos. At a barricade where trash fires burned, a knot of slum kids and old market women swung pipes and torn street signs at armored Consortium troops. Cutter appeared at Mara’s shoulder, dusty and grim, passing her a battered ration token. “For luck,” he said, then faded back into the mêlée.

The road to the old broadcast tower cut through a warzone. Mara and Jax ran low, zigzagging beneath shattered windows as pulse-guns barked overhead. A truckload of Consortium riot troops blocked the main avenue. Jax braced Mara with one hand. “Go east. Three blocks over. There’s a service lift.”

She hesitated, saw his eyes. “You’re not coming?”

He managed a broken smile. “Somebody has to make noise over here. You break the truth; I’ll give you time.”

A moment of silence, more real than any gunshot or siren. He gripped her hand. “Go. Don’t get sentimental.” Then Jax ducked around a burned-out cab and vanished into riot smoke, drawing the patrol after him. The last thing she heard was his ragged yell: “Over here!”—a distraction, the price he paid willingly.

Mara forced herself forward, firing once across a squad’s path, then vaulting a barricade. The lift at the base of the tower stank of ozone and burnt wire, but it worked. She jammed the security override, cursing through gritted teeth as gunfire drew nearer down the alley. The elevator creaked upward, Mara’s pulse ticking double time. Halfway up, it rattled to a stop—someone had cut the emergency brakes, trying to keep her from the top.

She forced the doors open and crawled—upward, up the stairs, breath burning. Above, the glass walls of the transmitter room let in beams of sickly yellow sunlight, casting the world below in stark, desolate angles. Two Consortium enforcers blocked her exit, one leveling a riot baton.

She fired, both shots quick and clinical—one to the knee, one to the shoulder. The nearest enforcer spasmed, tumbling away as the second dropped the baton and fled, shoving past her and spilling down the stairwell. No time to check the bodies; no time for mercy.

Mara limped into the transmitter’s heart. The broadcast panel flickered red—power low, circuit cracked from disuse. But her stolen data pad found an open jack. She plugged in—staring past reflection and blood and blistered hands—to the microphone, to all the battered radios across Oasis. She keyed the broadcast and spoke, voice honed flat by loss and resolve.

“To the people of Oasis. My name is Detective Mara Keane. I have proof—irrefutable proof—that water has been stolen from you by those in power. The Consortium. Mirage. Your council. For every ration you were denied, there was a vault kept secret, hoarded by judges, directors, and their friends. Gregor Hale was murdered for trying to reveal what the powerful have done. Many others died for the same crime: wanting you to know. No more.”

She fed the files through, one by one—audio logs, names, faces, orders to kill. “They called it Project M-22. Controlled scarcity. They killed dissenters. Starved neighborhoods so others could drink. It ends now—or the city will drown in darkness forever.”

Below, the sound of gunfire rose—riot and order, rage and fear. She didn’t know if anyone would listen, or if it was already too late. But as she pulled her hand back from the console, a half-dozen channels repeated her words—echoed, chopped, re-mixed; other voices joining, shouting the first names from the files, screaming for water and justice.

Mara slumped to the floor, spent. Blood leaked from her arm—a graze, she realized dimly. Footsteps clambered up the stairs. She readied her pistol, but it was Cutter at the door, face ashen and wild. “You did it. It’s everywhere.”

Below the tower, Oasis boiled—a hundred flashpoints at once. The thunder of boots and the gurgle of thrown bottles, the jagged staccato of hope and revenge. Cutter looked at Mara, and for once, his eyes softened. “Now they’ll have to answer. The Consortium. All of them.”

Mara stared through the cracked glass at the city unspooling beneath—chaos and possibility entwined. The future was a wound, raw and dangerous. But she knew, watching the fires, hearing the voices swell, that something new had begun.

Hope, flickering and wild, at last tasted like water on the tongue.

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