Tekk looks perpetually interrupted mid-repair: soot smudges the bridge of her nose, and a fine film of mineral grit catches in the seams of her weathered overalls. She moves in short, quick sidesteps, always giving pipes and doorways a wider berth than people, as though measuring the room for hidden load-bearing points. Her gaze snaps from face to ceiling to the nearest gauge. For someone who spends her days among dirty sluices and wrench-work, she keeps a tiny pressed sprig of yellow marshflower tucked into a clear sleeve over her heart, replaced whenever it wilts.

Brilliant and practical, Tekk hates being rushed but despises anyone who uses procedure to make suffering permanent. She can be blunt enough to sound indifferent while quietly taking responsibility for everyone in the room. With familiar workers she jokes dryly and shares food; when a calculation turns uncertain, her humor vanishes and she retreats into measurements.

Tekk grew up at Plenty's End, where water arrived by schedule and every family learned to read the sluice marks before they learned to read a page. She apprenticed under an old channel inspector, mastering pressure gauges, masonry joints, and the quiet art of discovering who had changed a valve setting. Years ago, during a spring surge, Tekk ordered a bypass opened to save a crowded lower platform. The maneuver worked, but the diverted pressure cracked a forgotten conduit and flooded a storehouse. No one died, yet the repair debt fell on the workers while the Claimholders kept their water rights intact. That failure made her meticulous and left her terrified of repeating it at a greater scale. Now she leads repairs at the camp, quietly teaching residents to maintain their own taps and collecting proof that the Claimholders' monopoly depends on unsafe, falsified flow records. She trades terse notes with the old inspector, who believes she is moving too fast, and keeps a wary friendship with the camp's water carriers, who need results before another dry week.