The next morning, the earth was colder.
A brittle frost rimed the moss where Vincenzo Moretti knelt. Steam rose faintly from the soil where the sun touched it, a ghost of warmth that didn't reach the skin. The trench he had carved yesterday now looked crude, shallow, like a wound half-scabbed. Overnight, a hard shell had formed on the dirt, thin as trust but twice as stubborn.
He braced the heavy branch and drove it into the earth. The crust resisted with a jarring crack, sending vibration up through the blisters that already blistered beneath his calluses. One broke. A crescent of blood welled beneath the split skin of his palm. He didn't wince. He didn't even look.
Pain was a form of focus. He had learned that long ago—in Naples, in prison yards where cold mornings meant sweat and blood before breakfast, in back-alley gyms where iron was cheaper than therapy. Pain was linear. It didn't confuse. It demanded presence, and presence kept ghosts at bay.
Lucia's voice had haunted him last night. Not in words, but in the hush between wind through pine needles, in the half-formed whisper that curled in the smoke of his fire. He hadn't answered. He wouldn't. The trench was answer enough.
Strike. Break. Push. Pull.
He found rhythm in the repetition. If yesterday had been desperation, today was calculation. He was no longer just digging. He was building something—crude, yes, but with purpose. He studied the incline of the land, the natural slope that tugged downhill toward the tree line. Not much of a grade, but enough.
Drainage. He needed drainage.
In the city, water was invisible until it wasn't. Leaks. Overflow. Backed-up sewage. He remembered the stink of old buildings where gutters had collapsed inward, where rats nested in forgotten ducts. He had paid good money to the right contractors, the kind who didn't ask why the basements had to drain fast.
Here, it was simpler. There was no infrastructure to complicate. Just dirt, slope, and his hands.
He tested the soil with the heel of his boot. Mostly loam with veins of clay. Poor for speed, good for sealing. That would work in his favor. Waste would seep slower. Less risk of contamination—if he was careful.
He widened the first trench by six inches, angling the sides inward slightly. Stability. Rain might collapse it otherwise. The mound of excavated dirt beside him grew. He tamped it with his boots, then shaped it into a rudimentary berm. If the runoff flowed, it would follow that line.
He moved downhill, twenty feet, and carved a second mark into the soil with his heel. Parallel. This would be the waste trench. Human. Animal. Organic refuse. Covered frequently. Not ideal—but containment was priority, not permanence.
There were no pipes here. No lime. No bleach. Just instinct, memory, and the unspoken mathematics of survival.
A sound behind him. Light. Quick.
He turned his head.
A child stood partially behind a tree. Small. Barefoot. Eyes too large for their face. Watching him.
He didn't speak. Just nodded once, firm and slow, like a greeting from someone who'd once run crews with his eyes alone. The child didn't move. Then—swift as a sparrow—vanished into the woods.
He exhaled.
Let them watch.
Invisibility had once been his trade. He'd learned to move behind the curtain, to keep his name clean while others bore the weight of blood and consequence. To be unseen was a skill. One he had mastered in silence, the way other boys had learned to kick a ball. Now, it was armor. If they feared him, they might leave him alone. If they were curious, they might come closer.
Either was acceptable.
By midmorning, his shirt clung to his back in wet patches. The cold didn't matter now. Sweat mixed with soil, salt stiffening the fabric. He stopped only to drink from the gourd he had dipped in the stream. It tasted of leaf rot and iron, but the ache in his throat accepted it anyway. Later, he would boil it. Maybe. If he had fuel. Fire here wasn't a given. It was a choice.
He listened.
Voices. Muffled through distance.
Women. Buckets. Water sloshing. Laughter. The language was still foreign, but cadence told stories. These were not cries of hunger or alarm. Just life. Domestic and far-off. A village resuming its breath.
And still, no one approached him.
Good.
He wasn't ready to be seen yet. Not entirely.
His body ached in familiar ways. Hamstrings from the squat. Forearms from the grip. Lower back from stabilizing the swing. In another life, he'd have counted these pains as gains. Repetition built strength. More importantly, it built resilience. And if there was one thing the streets had taught him—resilience kept you alive when loyalty didn't.
He dug.
He sharpened the edges of the first trench, packed the berm, and traced the rough blueprint of a lateral channel that might, with enough depth and angle, carry runoff into the wooded dip beyond the treeline. Not a sewer. Not yet. But maybe a cradle for one. If he could find stones. If he could trade. If he could earn enough goodwill to not be exiled first.
Shadow broke across the trench.
He looked up.
An old man stood there. Barefoot. Thin as old rope. His shirt hung loose over a frame of tendon and bone. His skin was wind-creased, sun-browned, and bore the calm of someone who had outlived more seasons than he could name. In his hand, he held a wooden tool—half hoe, half shovel, with a notched blade and a handle worn slick.
The man didn't speak. Didn't nod.
He tossed the tool onto the dirt beside Vincenzo, then turned and walked away.
Vince stared after him. Then at the tool.
It wasn't crafted. It was improvised. But it was better than the branch. Better balance. Shorter handle, meant for someone who dug while squatting. He turned it in his hand. It felt awkward. Wrong in weight. But workable. Not a weapon, not entirely.
He adjusted his grip.
And dug.
By late afternoon, the trench had doubled in length. He had begun the cross-channel, a shallow sluice that—if widened and smoothed—might serve as a drain for gray water: from washing, from rain, maybe even a place to run urine away from the sleeping areas. It wasn't much. But it was a start.
Infrastructure. He had learned to respect it too late. After the raids, after the contracts, after the dirty money had come clean and started buying land. You couldn't build a legacy on violence alone. You needed foundation—literal and metaphorical. Water. Power. Roads. Sanitation. These were the real lines of power.
He remembered the way Lucia had watched him pore over city plans late at night, cigarette burning low, her voice dry:
"You want to play god, Vince? Start by building drains."
He hadn't listened then. Not really. But he was listening now.
The village moved.
He noticed the glances first. A woman with a pot stopped near the communal fire pit, her eyes fixed on his back. Two men passed by with bundles of firewood, one muttering to the other, both watching. A boy ran after a stray dog that barked once at Vince, then retreated behind a hut like it had second thoughts.
Still, no one spoke.
That night, he cleaned his hands with pine needles and ash. The abrasives stung but removed the worst of the filth. He sat again beneath the crooked pine, not for comfort, but for habit. He no longer looked up at the stars. They had nothing to tell him.
His eyes rested on the trenches.
Crude. Ugly. Uneven. But they moved. They changed the land. They imposed shape. And that meant something.
He remembered one night in Naples, after they had buried a man who wouldn't stay buried. He and Marco had dug the pit by headlight and tossed lime after the body. The smell never really left. But Marco had grinned through it, wiping sweat with a kerchief and saying, "There's an art to getting rid of shit. No one respects the art."
Vince hadn't laughed. But he had remembered.
Now, he wasn't getting rid of bodies. He was getting rid of waste. Same principle. Different purpose.
He thought of Lucia again. The way she had stood barefoot on the kitchen tiles, arms crossed, furious at him for something she hadn't yet put into words.
"The earth doesn't care if you're good," she had said. "It only cares if you're careful."
And careful—careful he could do.
Tomorrow, he would dig again.
And maybe, just maybe, he wouldn't do it alone.