Useful

The offer came from an unexpected source — not Seli, not Ava, not anyone with a title Ar had bothered to translate for them, but a stooped, quiet man named Fen who ran the maintenance division for the western quarter of Oris Norma and had, apparently, heard through channels William never quite pieced together that one of the Old World visitors understood machinery.

"He wants to know if you'd look at something," Ar said, relaying the request with the faint, apologetic caution of a man unsure whether he was overstepping. "A recurring fault in one of the water reclamation arrays. He's tried everything within the scope of current engineering practice. I should warn you — Fen is not a diplomat. If you go, expect him to test you rather than thank you."

"I like being tested," William said, and meant it more than he expected to.

He'd spent four days now doing very little that felt like work — grieving, mostly, in the strange, formless way grief demanded when there was no funeral to attend, no casserole-bearing neighbors, no ritual at all beyond sitting with three other people who understood exactly what you'd lost because they'd lost the same thing simultaneously. He was good at fixing things. He had been good at fixing things his entire adult life, had built an identity out of being the person a room turned to when something stopped working, and four days of having nothing broken to point him at had left him restless in a way that felt, if he was honest with himself, worse than the grief.

"Take me to him," he said.

Fen's workspace sat at the base of a tower William hadn't yet visited, deep enough into the settlement's infrastructure that the soft ambient aesthetic of the public spaces gave way to something rawer, more functional — exposed conduit, humming machinery, the specific organized chaos of a working system rather than a showpiece. William felt something in his chest unclench the moment he stepped into it, a familiarity he hadn't expected to find anywhere on this entire planet.

Fen didn't look up from the panel he was working when they entered, didn't offer any of the careful, curious pleasantries William had grown used to from everyone else in Oris Norma. He simply said something short and pointed, which Ar translated as, "He says the array's been failing intermittently for six months, on and off, and nobody's found the actual cause. He wants to know if you're going to waste his time or actually look."

William almost laughed. "Tell him I don't waste time on machines. Only on people, sometimes."

Fen's mouth did something that might, in a more expressive man, have qualified as a smile. He gestured William over to the panel with the brusque economy of someone who'd decided, apparently on the strength of that one line, to give him a chance.

The array itself was unlike anything William had trained on — a reclamation system that processed water through some combination of filtration and molecular reconstruction he only partly understood, technology built on principles his own civilization had been circling at a theoretical level when he'd left it — but the fault, once he'd spent an hour tracing it with Fen's grudging cooperation, turned out to be something almost embarrassingly familiar underneath all the unfamiliar engineering: a feedback loop in the control system, a sensor reporting slightly inaccurate data that the array's automated logic compensated for in a way that created, over time, a cascading inefficiency nobody had thought to trace back to its actual source.

"It's not the array," William said, once he'd worked out how to explain it through Ar's translation. "It's the sensor. Everybody's been chasing the symptom instead of the cause because the symptom's bigger and louder and easier to see. Classic mistake. I've made it myself, more times than I'd like to admit."

Fen studied the diagnostic William had built — cobbled together from Fen's own tools and a stubborn refusal to accept that unfamiliar technology meant unfamiliar logic — and said something slow, considering, that Ar translated as, "He says that shouldn't be possible. The sensor's been recalibrated four times in the last six months. It should have been caught."

"Recalibrating a sensor that's reporting accurately doesn't fix a sensor that's reporting inaccurately in a way that looks accurate," William said. "You need to replace it, not recalibrate it. I'd bet good money the unit itself has degraded somewhere internal that a surface calibration wouldn't catch."

Fen crossed his arms and studied William for a long moment before firing off a rapid string of questions, faster than Ar could fully keep pace with translating — how had William known to check the sensor rather than the array itself, what had first suggested the fault sat upstream of where everyone else had been looking, whether the same diagnostic approach might apply to two other systems Fen had been quietly failing to solve for even longer than the water array. William answered each one carefully, honestly, admitting when he didn't know something rather than guessing to look competent, and watched Fen's suspicion thin out, question by question, into the specific grudging respect of one tradesman recognizing another.

Fen was quiet for a long moment, looking at William with an expression that had shifted, subtly but unmistakably, from suspicion into something closer to respect. He said something short, and Ar, translating, allowed himself a small smile of his own.

"He says you might not be as useless as he expected an Old World visitor to be."

"Tell him I'll take that as a compliment."

"I believe it was intended as one, in his particular way."

Word traveled fast, same as everything else in Oris Norma, and by the following morning William found himself with three more requests waiting — a failing transit corridor connector, a power distribution fault in one of the outer residential clusters, a stubborn problem in the settlement's atmospheric processing that had apparently frustrated engineers for the better part of a decade. He worked through each one with the same careful, methodical patience he'd brought to Hope 's equipment bay for ninety-three days, and found, somewhere in the third or fourth hour of the second problem, that he'd stopped thinking about grief entirely for the first time since the lights had gone out.

It wasn't that the grief was gone. It sat underneath everything, the same way it always did now, a low hum he'd learned to work alongside rather than through. But there was something in the specific, absorbing focus of a genuine mechanical problem — hands moving, mind narrowing down to exactly the shape of what was broken and what it would take to fix it — that gave him somewhere to put himself that wasn't just sitting with the size of everything he'd lost.

"You're better at this than you let on," Rachel said, finding him at the end of that second day, elbow-deep in a panel not unlike the ones he'd have found aboard Hope , if Hope had been built by hands slightly different from his own.

"I'm exactly as good at this as I've always let on. I'm an engineer. This is what I do." He didn't look up from the connection he was resetting. "Just didn't expect it to translate. Figured everything here would be too far past me to be useful for."

"And?"

"And it turns out broken is broken, mostly. The specifics change. The shape of the problem doesn't, not really. You've got a system that's supposed to do a thing, and something's stopping it from doing the thing, and your job is to find the something and take it out of the way." He finally glanced up, and something in his expression had shifted since the graveyard, since the airlock, since every heavy thing that had happened since the lights went out — not lighter, exactly, but steadier, like a man who'd found, unexpectedly, solid ground under a foot he'd braced for nothing but water. "Feels good, Rachel. I didn't expect that. Feels like the first thing since the jump that hasn't felt like waiting to find out how bad the next thing's going to be."

Rachel studied him for a moment, and William watched her file something away behind her eyes — not judgment, just quiet observation, the same careful attention she brought to everything. "I'm glad," she said, simply. "You deserve to have something that feels like that right now."

"How's the Ava thing going?" he asked, mostly to shift the attention off himself. "You've been spending a lot of hours over there."

"Good. Frightening, honestly. She's brilliant, and she's been carrying this alone for so long it's like watching someone finally set down something heavy — relief and exhaustion at the same time." Rachel leaned against the panel beside him, arms crossed, watching the settlement's evening light shift through the workspace's high windows. "I keep thinking about what Seli said, that first night. About not wasting the accident that brought us here. I didn't understand it then. I think I'm starting to."

"You think we're supposed to help them."

"I think I want to help them. Whether we're supposed to is a different question, and I don't think any of us gets to answer it alone." She glanced at him, something careful in her expression. "How do you feel about it? Staying long enough to actually do something here, instead of just — passing through, the way Ar keeps talking about people passing through the archive exhibit."

William didn't answer right away, turning the question over the same unhurried way he turned over a mechanical fault, looking for where it actually sat rather than where it first appeared to sit. "Ask me again once I've had more than one good day," he said, finally. "But if you want the honest read right now — I don't hate the idea. That surprises me more than it probably should."

It was Ar who found him later that evening, alone in Fen's workspace long after Fen himself had gone, still turning over the atmospheric processing problem in his head out of pure stubborn interest rather than any obligation to keep working.

"You've made quite an impression," Ar said, settling onto a low bench nearby. "Fen doesn't compliment easily. I've known him a long while. I don't believe I've ever heard him call anyone 'not as useless as expected' within his first day of meeting them."

"High praise, from what I gather."

"Extraordinarily high, from him specifically." Ar was quiet a moment, watching William work with the particular attentiveness of a historian cataloguing something he suspected might matter later. "May I ask you something, and forgive me if it's presumptuous?"

"Go ahead."

"Does this — the work, the problems, being useful in this specific way — does it feel like something you want, or something you're using to avoid feeling the rest of it?"

William set down his tools and considered the question longer than he might have, a week ago, considered anything Ar asked him. It was a fair question. He'd have asked it of anyone else in his position.

"Bit of both, probably," he said, finally. "I won't pretend it isn't partly a way of not sitting still with the rest of it. Darrell's got his grief and he manages it by staying steady for everyone else. Rachel's got hers and she manages it by throwing herself at Ava's problem like it's the only thing keeping her upright. Xavier's — " He stopped, something tightening in his chest at the thought of Xavier, of a hand that wouldn't stop shaking, of a diagnosis nobody yet had words for. "Xavier doesn't have anywhere to put his, not yet, and it's eating him alive a little more every day. Me, I fix things. Always have. It's not new, and it's not just avoidance. It's just — the shape grief takes, when it's mine."

"That sounds like a healthy enough shape, as these things go," Ar said, gently.

"Maybe. Ask me again in a month." William picked his tools back up, turning them over without really working, just needing something in his hands. "Truth is, I didn't figure I'd have anything here worth doing. Figured I'd be a curiosity same as everybody keeps treating Xavier — poked at, studied, politely tolerated until somebody decided what to actually do with us. Instead I fixed a water sensor and an old man who wouldn't look at me for the first hour called me not-useless, and it's the best I've felt since before the star went off." He shook his head slowly, something almost rueful in it. "Didn't figure that. Didn't figure I'd find anything here worth staying for."

He heard himself say it and felt the words land strangely, a beat too honest, and glanced at Ar to see if the historian had caught the weight in it the way William himself just had.

Ar's expression had gone carefully neutral, the specific neutral of someone who has noticed something significant and is choosing, deliberately, not to make the moment larger than the person who said it intended it to be.

"Well," Ar said, after a moment, standing, gathering himself to leave William to his work. "Whatever the reason, Fen will be glad of the help. As, I suspect, will quite a few others, once word finishes spreading. Oris Norma has needed a good engineer for longer than I think anyone's fully admitted to themselves."

William watched him go, and sat a while longer in the quiet, humming workspace, turning his own words back over in his head — didn't figure I'd find anything here worth staying for — and understood, with the specific, unhurried clarity that sometimes arrived only after a long day's honest work, that he hadn't misspoken at all. He'd meant it. Somewhere in four days of grief and four hours of fixing a stranger's water sensor, some small, stubborn part of him had already started building a case for a future he hadn't consciously decided to want.

He thought about his sister, then, without quite meaning to — the years of silence he'd let stretch between them, the easy assumption that there'd always be time to fix it eventually, the same lazy faith every person seemed to place in a future that turned out, in his case, to have run out four million years before he'd finished not-getting-around to calling her. He didn't have that kind of time left to waste twice. Whatever he built here, whoever he let matter to him here, he understood he was going to have to choose it on purpose, eyes open, rather than assuming it would simply keep.

He didn't say anything else about it that night, to Ar or to anyone. But he carried the thought with him back to the room he shared with Darrell, and lay awake a while in the dark, listening to his best friend's uneven breathing across the room — the particular restlessness of a man who hadn't stopped thinking about Waterlake since the moment they'd found it — and felt, for the first time since the lights went out on Hope , the quiet, unfamiliar shape of something that might, eventually, become a choice.