The sun was barely up when I heard a sharp knock at the rickety old door to the room. I groaned, rolling out of the bed with all the grace of half dead squirrel.

“Time for your tour,” Lena called from the other side of the door. “The elders want to meet you afterward, so try to make yourself at least somewhat presentable. I put a mirror, bowl of water and some towels on the table next to the bed for you.”

I rubbed my eyes and glanced at my reflection in the cracked hand mirror. My reflection wasn’t reassuring, I still looked like a half-starved vagrant. The clothes Darrin had given me were an improvement, but the coarse fabric itched, and the patched trousers hung awkwardly on my lean frame. Plus, sleeping in them had not done the clothes, and myself, any favors. I splashed some water on my face from a basin, raked my fingers through my hair, and decided that “slightly less disheveled” would have to do.

When I stepped out of the little room, Lena was waiting, her bow slung across her back.

“We need to be armed even inside the village?”, I asked while staring at her bow.

“No,” She replied. “I just like to be prepared. You never know when the elders will want me to run an errand for them or a spirit beast will wander into town. Like they say, ‘be prepared’”.

“Isn’t that the Boy Scouts moto?”

“Who are the boy scouts”, Lena replied.

“Never mind”, I said. I gestured towards the door leading outside and said in my best butler voice, “After you!”

The village stretched out before us, a patchwork of eras and ingenuity. Cobblestone streets crisscrossed between timber-framed houses with mismatched modern additions: salvaged solar panels mounted on thatched roofs, chimneys spewing steam or smoke alongside old-fashioned weather vanes and piping cobbled together from scraps of metal. The faint clang of a blacksmith’s hammer echoed in the distance, mingling with the chatter of villagers starting their day.

“Welcome to the village,” Lena said, gesturing broadly. Seeing my face, she added, “Try not to gawk too much.”

I couldn’t help the faint smile. “No promises.”

Lena led me to the village square, a bustling hub of activity surrounded by buildings that were as eclectic as the villagers themselves. A clock tower rose in the center and I could just imagine its gears turning with steady precision. Beneath its shadow, vendors had set up stalls offering goods ranging from fresh produce to scavenged mechanical parts and hand-crafted tools.

A blacksmith worked at an outdoor forge nearby, the glow of molten metal illuminating his sweat-streaked face. What appeared to be a young, but very muscular boy pumped the bellows and as they wheezed rhythmically, the even more muscular blacksmith hammered on a glowing horseshoe. Nearby, a group of children darted past, laughing as they chased a kite cobbled together from scraps of fabric and wood.

“You seem to blend a lot of eras together,” I said, nodding toward a vendor selling preserved food in obviously repurposed jars. Their factory labels having long ago been washed off.

“We do what we can to survive,” Lena replied. “Most pre-fall tech stopped working or became unreliable after the Collapse. What’s left, the older stuff, we patch up and keep running as long as we can.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t you say that the Sect frown on that?”

Lena’s expression darkened. “The Sect does more than frown. But the magistrate goes a step further. He takes joy in cracking down on anything he considers ‘heretical technology.’ The blacksmith had his old power hammer destroyed last month. Claimed it ‘violated the natural order.’ As you can see, he is back to swinging a hammer.”

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I frowned. “And you’re supposed to make do with what? Stone tools and flint arrowheads?”

“Pretty much,” Lena said grimly. “If the magistrate decides to destroy more of what’s left, we’ll have a hard time getting through the next winter.”

I nodded thoughtfully. “Sounds like they’re setting you up to fail.”

Lena shrugged. “Failure keeps us dependent on the Sect. They like it that way. It seems they won’t be happy until we are all living only by the grace of the Sect.”

Next, Lena took me to the edge of the village, where a water mill churned steadily in a wide stream. The wheel, fashioned from salvaged steel and wood, drove a series of grinding stones inside the millhouse. Villagers carried sacks of grain in and out, their chatter blending with the rhythmic creak of the wheel.

“This is one of our most important structures,” Lena explained. “Keeps us fed and gives us something to trade with the other villages.”

I peered at the mill. “Impressive craftsmanship. Who maintains it?”

“The engineers,” Lena said. “We’ve got a few people who can manage basic repairs, but if something breaks, it can take weeks to fix. The tools we need are either lost or banned.”

As we walked, the farm kid in me could not stop evaluating the land and its bounty. Silicon Valley used to be known as Santa Clara Valley and had highly productive agribusinesses because of its highly fertile soil. Santa Clara Valley is now, or was before the fall, highly urbanized. Looks like it reverted to farmland again.

She led me further along the stream to a series of makeshift canals and ditches branching into the fields. The canals didn’t connect to the stream. The water level in the canals were about four feet higher than the stream. “This is our irrigation system. It’s not much, but it works.”

It was a far cry from the center pivot irrigation systems that I had grew up with.

I crouched to examine one of the ditches, noting the haphazard reinforcements made from salvaged plastic and crumbling cement. “Barely,” I muttered. “How are you pumping the water up to the canals?”

Lena sighed. “With a pump.”

She seemed just a bit defensive. I reminded myself that I was an outsider but I just had to ask, “A powered pump?”

She blinked.

“I grew up in farm country”, I hear myself say, “and I know how irrigation makes marginal land productive and increases yield on already productive land. I also know that this land is VERY productive but the summers are very dry. Irrigation is needed to maximize productivity … to feed everyone.”

Lena just stared at me a moment before she said, “The pump system is hidden because if the Magistrate ever destroyed them, this village would die”.

I clenched my fists, suppressing a sudden surge of anger. “And you’re just supposed to let the crops wither and die?”

Lena’s face hardened. “What choice do we have?”

By midday, we arrived at the meeting hall, a large structure made entirely of salvaged materials. The walls were reinforced with beams salvaged from old industrial buildings, and the roof—a patchwork of corrugated metal—gleamed dully in the sunlight. Inside, the air was cool and smelled faintly of oil and wood smoke.

A long wooden table dominated the room, surrounded by chairs of various makes and sizes. The elders were already seated, their faces a mix of curiosity and suspicion as they watched me enter.

Elder Cogwin sat at the head of the table, his weathered face impassive but his sharp eyes tracking my every move. The other elders—a mix of men and women, all seasoned by years of survival, murmured quietly among themselves.

“So,” Elder Cogwin said, his voice firm. “You’ve seen our village. Now tell us, stranger, what do you bring to it? What skills do you have that make you worth feeding?”

I hesitated, weighing my words carefully. I couldn’t reveal too much—not yet. “I have some experience with machinery and farming,” I said finally. “I grew up on a farm and as an adult, I worked with systems. Making them more efficient.”

The elders exchanged skeptical glances. “Efficiency, you say?” one of them asked. “You mean you improved processes or actual machines?”

I nodded. “Something like that, I was an Engineer.”

“Can you prove it?” another elder demanded, her tone sharp.

I smiled faintly. “Give me something broken, and I’ll fix it.”

The room fell silent. Finally, Elder Cogwin leaned back in his chair. “We’ll hold you to that. But first, what do we call you? You haven’t even given us your name.”

I hesitated for the briefest moment before answering. “Rip,” I said, my tone steady. “My name is Rip.”

Elder Cogwin nodded. “Very well, Rip. For now, you’ll work under Lena’s supervision. Consider it a trial period.”

I inclined my head. “Fair enough.”

As the meeting ended and the elders filed out, Lena gave me a questioning look. “Rip? As in Rip van Winkle? Really?”

I grinned. “Seemed fitting.”

Lena shook her head but didn’t press further. “Come on. If you’re serious about fixing things, I’ve got something for you to look at.”

As we stepped back into the sunlight, I felt a flicker of something I hadn’t felt since I woke up, purpose. The village might be a mess of contradictions, but it was alive. And for now, that was enough.