Body “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

— Abraham Lincoln

“Just perfect”, his foot sank, mud oozing over the top of his left boot. Eli Rowan was squatting next to a metal cover, calf-deep in mud. Trying to convince a stubborn irrigation pump that it still had a reason to keep living.

The machine had been coughing and rattling like an old man for three days, promising that each sputter would be its last. Eli crouched beside it with a wrench in one hand and a scrap of wire in the other, mud and blood smeared across his knuckles. As he listened to the engine’s uneven rhythm and watched the water pulse erratically, he waited for the sounds to tell him what was wrong.

Machines talk, if you’re patient. This one was practically telling Eli it was ready to quit for good. He wasn’t having it. “Not today,” he said under his breath. Another twist of the bolt, a tap of the wrench for encouragement or maybe just frustration, and finally, the pump coughed, settled down, and water started rushing into the channels. The corn rows soaked it up.

Eli leaned back and wiped his hands on his trousers. The valley stretched out around him in long strips of green and brown, the Rowan farm, carved from the land by two generations of stubborn people and calloused hands.

The barn leaned slightly in the east wind, while the old windbreak trees rattled their leaves like dry paper. Above it all hung the enormous sky. Eli glanced up the way he always did.

Most farmers watched the sky for rain, but Eli watched for ships. Sometimes, if the light was right, you could see one climbing for orbit: just a flash of sunlight and a pale contrail drawing white across the blue. Every time it happened, he stopped whatever he was doing, his eyes turning skyward.

He didn’t notice Mara until she was halfway across the field. She wasn’t walking the way she normally did. Usually, she moved like someone who had grown up on uneven ground, quick and balanced. But now, she moved slowly, carefully, as if she were carrying something fragile.

“Eli,” she called.

He straightened up, raising a hand to shield his eyes from the sun, searching for her.

She held a small gray parcel in both hands. Even from across the field, he recognized the color.

Government gray. His stomach tightened; he already knew.

“What is that?” he asked when she reached him.

“The courier drone left it at the house.” Her voice was quieter than usual. She didn’t toss it the way she normally would.

Mara stepped forward, holding the parcel out with both hands, her motions slow and deliberate.

Eli took the envelope. The paper was stiff and official, stamped with the black seal of the Colonial Defence Authority. For a long moment, neither of them spoke. Mara hugged her arms around herself.

“Maybe it’s just a census update,” she said quickly.

Eli turned the envelope over. They both knew it wasn’t. Everyone knew the letters were coming; the war had been inching closer for years. Supply shortages, troop transports crossing the sky, quiet conversations adults thought younger people couldn’t hear, the signs were everywhere. The military had conscripted the last three harvests. He understood the meagre amounts they paid, but they were barely keeping the farm alive. The distant war was crushing the family.

Still, knowing something is coming isn’t the same as holding it in your hands. Eli broke the seal. The paper inside unfolded with a dry crackle. He read it once. Then again.

Mara watched his face. “What does it say?”

Eli swallowed. “They want me for pilot training.” It wasn’t just the corn they wanted anymore.

She stared at him. For a moment, she didn’t speak at all. She shook her head. “No.”

“It says I have to report in seven days.”

“No,” she said again, firmly, as if saying it might somehow change the words on the page. “You’re not even, “you’ve never.”

“I’ve flown the crop drones.”

“That’s not the same thing!”

Her voice was shaking now.

Eli folded the letter slowly. “Military service grants the farm priority markets,” he said quietly.

Mara looked out over the fields. The corn had just begun to green, thin stalks pushing up through the soil. Their father had spent weeks preparing the ground.

“If you go…” she said softly.

“If I go, they classify the farm as a strategic supply.” That meant better rates and more equipment. Pumps that worked.

She already knew that, too. It meant the government wouldn’t seize the crops, and that the farm would survive. But it also meant Eli would leave, possibly for years, possibly forever, with his share of the work falling to the rest of the family.

Mara’s eyes drifted upward. A distant aircraft flashed briefly in the sunlight as it climbed toward the edge of the sky. Her voice was almost a whisper.

“People don’t always come back from up there.”

Eli followed her gaze. He had watched ships his whole life and dreamed about them. Wondered what the world looked like from above the clouds.

The thought felt heavier than it ever had before, and terrifying, guilt bubbling to the surface. He loved the land but hated the constant broken equipment. He loved his sister and parents. Slipping the letter into his pocket, he still felt a spark of excitement burn. He was going to be a pilot.

“Dad will say you don’t have a choice,” Mara said.

Eli didn’t answer. The irrigation pump thumped steadily beside them, pushing water across the rows of corn. The farm survived. It always did.

But for the first time in his life, Eli Rowan felt the ground beneath his boots shift.

Seven days. Seven days of soil-stained hands. The dank smell of soft earth. Of family.

After that.

War…text