Two hundred and eighty four freed slaves was too many for Haven. An emergency town meeting that included Ora and Tengu, but none of the rest, concluded swiftly that they would need to simply give land to all the strangers who had just arrived. There was no town meeting to decide that they would need to give food, clothes, and other supplies to the new strangers in town, and yet that was what the people of Haven did.

Like Ora, the newly freed people from Outer Light wished for a break from having to work. Unlike Ora, they didn’t have that opportunity upon arriving into Haven. There was work to be done, before they could have a break.

The first bunkhouse had taken nearly a month for Ora and Tengu to build. The second and third were finished within a day. Those strangers who could not fit in the bunkhouses stayed in the shop by the western gate, and those who could not fit in the shop stayed in people’s homes.

While the people of Haven were willing to have strangers in their houses, the older residents were much happier with the knowledge that it was a temporary solution.

A third well was refurbished. It took two days for two more bunkhouses to go up. The delay was to give the concrete foundations time to set. It was numbers and not hard work that raised twenty six new houses and a two-storey block of small apartments over the course of a week.

Crops dwindled in Haven, meat did not.

For the first time in living memory, industry emerged. A butcher and tanner near the shop at the western gate. A carpenter, a mason, and a brickmaker were sprinkled through the new construction. Two more, big common gardens were dug and irrigated and sown.

In a month, the second and third bunkhouses were torn down to have concrete foundations poured. In their place was built a storehouse and a smith. The older residents of Haven were glad that, despite the new industry, the town quieted down again.

Even the shopkeep didn’t mind the sudden dearth of food to sell to passing traders and travellers. He had never had enough to established Haven as a useful place to restock, and those passers-by he talked to about the situation were all very sympathetic and even happy to hear it. Some even donated food and old clothes and excess supplies to the effort.

The shopkeep’s partner didn’t even suggest he ought to sell the donated supplies. The situation was clearly getting dire.

After two months, as winter was just starting to turn the desert heat pleasant, the only resource still in short supply in Haven was power. Electricity was at the bottom of the priority list. There was enough to power all three wells, and those older houses that were wired into the transformer still had as much power as they ever had. No one worked at night, anyway, and the majority of those freed from the Lord’s House didn’t even much like being awake once dusk had passed through.

Still, the search for electricity marked the first big expedition from Haven. Just over sixty people, including Tengu and Ora, were gone for a little more than a month.

When they returned, they were rather better equipped than when they’d left. They returned with camels and goats. They pulled carts loaded down with iron and copper, dried meat and rawhide. And twelve more strangers to add to the mix.

The upgrade of Haven’s power system took a great deal longer than expected. The optimistic in town had predicted a month or two. It was closer to a year. Part of the trouble was that it was still at the bottom of the priority list, other things got in the way.

More houses were built. A glazier was set up. Wooden walls and shutters were replaced with brick and plaster and glass windows. There was even less demand for lights or heaters.

People left Haven more often, even some who had spent their whole lives in the suburb by the western wall. Sometimes they returned with more people to move into the bunkhouses or apartments. More times, they returned with meat or shoddy clothes and weapons.

A tailor was set up. Almost everyone in Haven took turns sewing themselves new clothes. They repurposed or swapped old clothes. The tailor expanded to include a laundry, where people took turns washing whatever clothes were in to be washed. Someone from Kzara, who had been freed from a caravan bound for Ovek, mentioned a device that they’d heard of called a ‘washing machine’.

Some people in Haven suspected that even Tengu’s endless knowledge wasn’t up to the job of improving the power grid. Surely it would have been done by now if she had put her mind to it.

Ora knew that Tengu would have loved to put her mind to it, and may even have gotten it done months earlier. Except that Tengu was kept quite busy by the advent of the town militia.

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At first it was just an archery range, over by the eastern gate where people didn’t usually go. Quite a number of residents were interested in the prospect, and it was the closest to and organised sport in Haven.

The trouble was that there were only a couple of proficient archers in town, and Ora was one of the more knowledgeable on the subject. She suggested they see if the Sand Crawlers wanted to come and join in.

It was a surprise to no one was that Tengu was an expert archer. If pressed on the question of why she didn’t carry a bow for hunting, Tengu would find something else to do.

It was a surprise to many when Jules and some of the other Sand Crawlers visited Haven from time to time, to relief Tengu from the burden of teaching archery, and to trade or even donate the various shoddy gear that seemed to accumulate in the wastes.

Jules, eager to show off, started training people in the use of spears because, in her words: ‘it’s the best weapon out there and don’t let anyone tell you different’. And, coincidentally, spears are very easy to make.

Tengu, starting to get on some people’s nerves a bit, turned out to be very proficient at spear fighting. When Jules challenged her to a ‘friendly’ bout of sparring, she left to help build turbines.

It was a woman called Weir who led the final step in the rewiring of Haven. Armed with a pre-enslavement background in farming and a book that someone had found in one of the various expeditions out of the wastes, Weir set about building a mill.

As most with building projects in Haven, the mill did not take long to build. Quite a few of the people working on the new wind turbines jumped on the opportunity to make something similar but distinctly less complicated.

It was a wind-powered mill off by the southern entrance of Haven, where the walls weren’t too high and there were no turbines facing the same breeze. Haven was abuzz with excitement at the prospect of making flour without having to use a mortar and pestle.

Weir told them all to piss off. She had a grander vision. She, and she alone knew of a perfect solution to the wires in the turbines occasionally melting or zapping people. As she was not pressed on the topic, Weir did not concede that anyone else who’d read this book might also be aware of the solution.

The first millstone carved for Weir’s windmill had a tall lip and was largely shaped like a funnel. The first plant to go into Weir’s windmill was a woody shrub covered in fine silver hairs that felt waxy to the touch.

Something that Weir knew from her old life was that when thoroughly crushed, guayule bushes could be filtered and processed into rubber. What Weir knew from this book that someone had found, was that rubber could serve to insulate and protect electrical wires. What Weir knew from spear hunting expeditions, was the locations of three large guayule stands.

Once the rubber from the guayule bushes had been processed and hundreds of metres of copper wire had been insulated, it was only another two months before a whole new electrical grid was wired into Haven. The next issue was batteries, and the last was transformers.

Tengu, of course, knew of a largely non-perishable method for making batteries that was not covered in Weir’s old book about electronics. A big, cylindrical hole was dug near the western wall of Haven, and lined with smooth plaster to help it keep its shape and ensure that it could be sealed with Weir’s rubber.

When the electrical grid was producing excess power, a pair of motors connected to chains slowly pulled a heavy, stone plug up the cylindrical hole. When the grid was underproducing, the plug dropped slowly back down, spinning another turbine and making up the deficit. There was also a heavy, copper bar sunk into the ground much further from any residents of Haven when excess could be dumped into the ground if the need arose.

The final step in completing the power grid were the transformers. Haven’s old transformer, connected directly to the few remaining wind turbines, could only just cope with continuing to power the forty-odd houses it had been powering for however long it had been there. It struggled mightily with the three wells.

The solution, proposed by a man called Osmond, who had been a smith for quite a long time, was to completely turn off all the power in Haven and cut the transformer open to see how it worked.

Weir pointed to the diagram in her book on how transformers worked. Osmond said ‘but wouldn’t it be more interesting to see?’ and his argument won the day. Weir made a very strong point of demonstrating that the knowledge gained by sawing open the transformer while everyone it town drank out of bottles and buckets was identical or inferior to the knowledge found in her book.

Weir had not spent any time in the Lord’s House, or she might have chosen different phrasing to make her point.

The power was out in Haven for two days, then it was on for about three minutes, then it was out again for two hours, and then it was back. The old wiring got pulled out of all the old houses and wells, and the shop. The new wiring came in an off-white colour and the lights were much less prone to flickering.

Despite following the Osmond method of ‘cut it open and have a look’, not even Tengu had any luck replicating the ancient lights in Haven’s old houses. While some were leftover in the shop from the demolished buildings, there weren’t enough to light more than a couple of the workshops.

While there was a diagram of a lightbulb in Weir’s book, it was a different book, currently sitting in the storehouse and half-remembered by a man called Brash, that provided enough detail to start lighting more of the buildings in Haven.

Luckily for that solid copper grounding rod, not very many people in Haven actually wanted lights in their houses. Pleasantly for those less-diurnal residents of Haven, street lights were set up through the populated part of town, largely because people were quite excited about the production of lightbulbs.