Fourteen families today. Eleven yesterday. Nine the day before that.

Gabriel stood in the shade of the cashew tree and counted them, his left thumb tapping each fingertip in sequence — pinky, ring, middle, index — as his lips moved with the numbers. The queue at the water point curved past the concrete apron where the new pump sat humming on its solar-powered motor, then bent along the dirt track toward the latrines, then kept going. A woman he didn't recognize had brought two twenty-liter jerricans and a plastic basin. She'd be there an hour. The pump worked. That was the problem. Word had reached families in the outer blocks, families who'd been walking forty minutes to the borehole near the school, and now they came here instead, because this water tasted different and everyone knew why. The caladrite panel on its aluminum frame caught the westward sun and threw a blade of light across the ground that nobody stepped on, as if by agreement.

He watched Senhor Macuácua's granddaughter fill a pot and carry it away on her head without holding it. She was maybe eight. The water was clear. Three weeks ago it had come out of a hand pump that seized every dry season, brown and tasting of rust, and Amelia Chirindza's youngest had gotten the skin infection on his calf that wouldn't close. Gabriel had seen the wound. He'd smelled it. Now Amelia was fourth in line, holding a clean cloth and a bottle she'd use to irrigate the wound with water that was actually clean, and the boy was sitting in the dirt beside her, drawing something with a stick. The boy was fine. The water was fine. The panel hummed. Gabriel's hands kept counting.

The ENC field liaison's white Land Cruiser pulled off the road at 16:40, ten minutes late. Sofia Nhantumbo was twenty-six, had a degree from Eduardo Mondlane, and wore her ENC lanyard even on Tuesdays when she was technically off-rotation. She stepped out holding a tablet and a paper cup of something from the café in town. Gabriel pushed off the tree and crossed toward her, the folded list already in his hand.

"Senhor Cossa." She smiled. She always smiled first.

"Sofia." He held up the list. "Three names. The Dambaza family, Amelia Chirindza, and Senhor Macuácua. For the next allocation."

She took the paper, unfolded it, read it. Her eyes moved the way educated eyes move over handwriting, patient, slightly strained. A gecko clung to the Land Cruiser's side mirror, pale belly pulsing.

"Macuácua," she said. "His plot is flagged for proximity review."

"What does that mean?"

"It means his land is within the updated perimeter buffer. Six hundred meters, I think. There's an administrative process."

"Administrative process for what?"

"For determining usage status." She said it the way she said everything bureaucratic, with a slight upward tilt that meant she was reading the phrase from memory and didn't love it either. "It doesn't affect the energy allocation. It's separate."

Gabriel's thumb found his pinky. Tapped. Ring. Middle. Index. "He's been waiting since the resettlement, Sofia. He was here before there was a queue."

"I know." She looked past him at the water point, at the line of people, at the panel throwing its blade of light. "Can we sit?"

They sat on the concrete lip of an unfinished drainage channel. Sofia set her tablet on her knee and opened something. Charts. Colors. Gabriel could read them upside down but didn't need to. He already knew it was going to be bad, because she'd asked to sit.

"The next expansion phase has been delayed," she said. "The caladrite allocation for energy pilots this quarter was redirected. Half to the Johns Hopkins trial shipment, half to the Caia remediation project." She paused. "Three districts were promised power. Nhamacurra, Cheringoma, Muanza. Now one gets it this quarter. Two wait."

Gabriel said nothing. He looked at the pump, the queue thinning as the afternoon stretched. Clean water for fourteen families. Because someone, somewhere, had chosen this pump for this village for this quarter. Someone else's village had waited. He had never thought about that. He had received the pump as a thing that arrived, like weather.

"I need community input," Sofia said. "Which district should go first."

The question sat between them on the warm concrete. Gabriel looked at the queue. Amelia Chirindza was kneeling now, pouring clean water over her son's calf, the boy squirming but not crying. The caladrite panel on its frame was a different grade than the fragments Gabriel had seen pass through Tomás's hands last month, the dull grey pieces wrapped in newspaper that moved south toward Beira in rice sacks. He knew the grade by color. The panel was pharmaceutical-white, laboratory-pure. The street fragments were darker, unrefined. He did the math without deciding to. The panel was worth, at grey-market rates, enough to run Macuácua's household for a year. Maybe two. He was watching a child's wound get washed with clean water and pricing the machine that made the water clean, and both of these things were true at the same time, and neither cancelled the other.

"You're asking me to choose who doesn't get power," he said.

"I'm asking you to help me understand the community's priorities."

"Those are the same sentence, Sofia."

She didn't argue. She closed the tablet. In the distance, past the road, past the new security fencing, the extraction perimeter cut its line across the hillside. Gabriel noticed that the soil along the fence had changed. A band of rust-orange about two meters wide, the color of old laterite but too uniform, too neat. Road construction runoff, probably. They'd been grading the access road all month.

"There's something else," Sofia said. She said it lightly, which meant it wasn't light. "A community health worker in Caia reported unusual soil crusting in the remediation zone. Which is actually good. It means the caladrite treatment is binding the contaminants. The program is working."

"Good," Gabriel said.

"I need a fourth name," she said, and nodded at the list in his hand. "For the waiting tier. In case one of the three can't be processed."

He looked at her. She looked at the queue. She was not being cruel. She was being thorough, and thoroughness in this context was its own kind of cruelty, the way a form is cruel when it asks you to rank your children by need.

He wrote a fourth name. Fernando Dambaza's cousin, who had a newborn with breathing problems. He wrote it below the other three and handed the list back, and Sofia folded it into her tablet case without looking at it again.

"Thursday," she said. "I'll have the allocation confirmed by Thursday."

She drove away. The gecko was gone from the mirror.

Gabriel walked home in the last of the light. The road took him past the extraction perimeter fence, where the rust-orange band of soil glowed faintly in the lowering sun. He did not stop. In his pocket, the list. Sofia had given it back; he'd need it for his records. Four names in his handwriting. Three slots. He would have to cross one out before Thursday. His thumb moved against his fingers. Pinky. Ring. Middle. Index.

The list was damp from his hand. He folded it once, then again, then once more, until it was a tight square the size of a matchbox. Small enough to lose in a pocket. He walked. The pump behind him was still running. He could hear it, or imagined he could, a faint mechanical heartbeat carrying clean water to people who deserved it in quantities that would never be enough. He thought about Beatriz, who would ask how it went, and what he would say, and whether the rice was already on. The sky over the strewn field turned the color of a bruise, green at the edges, and somewhere a radio was playing a song he almost recognized but couldn't name.