Dawn arrived like an afterthought, slipping into the world without ceremony. The sun's light spilled slowly across the treetops, brushing them in ochre and gold, but Vincenzo Moretti didn't look up to admire it. He sat cross-legged in the same place he had returned to the night before—a low rise just beyond the village's farthest hut, beneath a lopsided pine tree whose roots clawed out of the dirt like old bones.
He hadn't slept. Not fully. What little rest he'd found was light, dreamless, and easily cast off by the first cold wind of morning. His bones ached. The tunic they'd given him—if it was a gift and not just an unspoken expectation—still itched with every movement. But none of that mattered.
What mattered was the decision forming in his chest. Heavy, coiled like a spring. The walk through the village yesterday had carved it into him.
This place was dying. Not in an obvious way—there was no fire, no disease rotting the children's limbs—but in the quiet collapse of neglect. The kind of slow erosion that took root when survival became habit, not hope. He had seen it before, in the alleyways of Naples, in the courtyards of abandoned tenements where children played among rats. In prison, too. The rot of the forgotten.
They had no sanitation. No trenches for waste. He'd seen a child squat behind a pile of stacked firewood, wiping with dried leaves. The air in some corners of the village held that faint tang—ammonia, human filth. Not enough to overwhelm, not yet. But it would come.
Water came from a river half a mile away, which meant everything was carried by hand. Buckets—woven, patched, leaking. And the water wasn't clean. He'd seen the color up close. Not brown, but clouded. Soft green, with floating threads of algae and bits of insect husk. A child had drunk it, then wiped his mouth with a forearm streaked with dried blood from a scratch.
They cooked on open stone pits. No chimneys. Smoke hung low over the huts. Children coughed. Women blinked often, their eyes red from irritation. The wood they burned was damp and resinous, poorly seasoned. It wasted energy and coated everything in soot.
No system. No order. No plan. Just habit passed down from habit, until survival became rote.
He thought of Lucia.
She had been a nurse, once. Back when they still lived in that tiny apartment above the fruit vendor in Quartieri Spagnoli. She used to talk about systems, about public health. About how sanitation wasn't just a luxury, but the bones of civilization.
"They die from what they don't see," she'd said once, folding a cloth over a boy's fevered head. "Not from the wound, but from what gets in after."
Vince had shrugged then. His world had been bloodier. Faster. But he remembered her words now. They stuck like glass under the skin.
So he sat, chewing a strip of dried root someone had left near the tree last night. It was bitter, but it kept his stomach quiet.
And he thought.
He had no power here. Not yet. No one had spoken to him since that first day, and he hadn't forced the matter. He could feel the weight of their eyes on him, always at the edge of vision. Watching. Measuring. Waiting to see if he was a danger or just a shadow.
He'd be neither.
He'd be something else.
Change, in his experience, didn't begin with violence. Not the real kind. Not the kind that lasted. It began with silence. With motion. With a hand in the dirt.
He stood.
The decision had no fanfare. No cinematic swell of music. Just an exhale, slow and cold.
He would fix the waste problem first.
Trenches. Shallow. Downhill. Away from the huts and water. He'd dig them himself if he had to. Show them it could be done. Then maybe—maybe—they'd follow. Not out of gratitude. Out of imitation. That was enough.
He made his way to the edge of the village again, where the soil was soft and the moss thin. The old fire pit no one used anymore sat half-collapsed under a broken lean-to. Good. No one would bother him there.
He searched for a tool. Found none. Just a heavy branch snapped by storm or time. He tested its weight. It would do.
The first cut into the soil was slow. More tearing than digging. But he kept at it, carving out a shallow line no wider than his arm. Earth gave way in clumps. Stones pried loose. Worms stirred and vanished. Sweat beaded at his temple. His breath came heavy.
But it felt good.
Real.
He worked until his hands blistered. Until his arms throbbed. Until a small, useless trench curved fifteen feet through the moss like a scar. He stared at it. Ugly. Imperfect. But there.
Then he sat. Waited.
Hours passed. No one came. But someone had seen. He knew it. Eyes in the huts, behind the reed screens.
Good.
Let them wonder.
That night, he returned to his tree. He ate nothing. Drank little. But he watched the stars.
They didn't look like the stars of Earth.
But they were still stars.
And he felt, for the first time, not at peace—but in motion.
Tomorrow, he would dig again.