The drive to the first pilot village took four hours, longer than it should have, the road giving way somewhere past the second hour to the kind of rutted, red-dirt track that made conversation impossible over the jolting, and Zarina spent the last hour simply watching the landscape change, dry season dust rising behind the truck in a long, pale wake.
She had not been back to this specific site in eight months. She had seen it constantly in spreadsheets, in photographs the field team sent, in the careful, bloodless language of deployment metrics — uptime percentages, liters per household per day, the specific numbers that made a review panel lean forward in a conference room four thousand miles away. She had not, in eight months, stood in the actual dust of it, and something in her chest
