Chapter 10: The Fourteen Names of Avalon Ridge

Voss began with the water.

Not with the deaths, not with the structure, not with Hargrove's name — with the water table beneath Elko County, which ran fifteen metres below the hardpan and which the Covenant's agricultural systems had been drawing on since 2022 at a rate the county hydrological surveys had flagged as unsustainable. The surveys were filed with the relevant Nevada authority. The relevant Nevada authority shared its digital infrastructure with the Covenant Communities Infrastructure Collective. The flags were, as Voss put it with a flatness that was itself a form of precision, administratively resolved.

I wrote that down.