Tarek has the compact, weather-seasoned look of someone shaped by salt wind and years spent bent over other people's neglected things. His skin is warm brown with a fine, pale bloom of salt that gathers at his temples after long work. His close-cropped hair is threaded with gray, and his dark eyes linger on the rims and seams of every vessel in a room before they settle on its people. He moves with economical care, setting each foot as if testing a slick quay plank. His most unexpected feature is a tiny, exquisitely stitched patch of bright yellow cloth inside his otherwise workaday collar, visible whenever he turns his head.

Tarek is patient enough to spend an hour finding a hairline leak, yet impatient with anyone who treats preventable danger as somebody else's problem. He notices the condition of a room's water vessels before he notices its decorations. With strangers he is reserved and exact; with children and trusted neighbors he is unexpectedly dryly funny. When criticized, he first tries to fix the practical issue, but if he feels trapped he shuts down rather than admitting he needs support.

Tarek was raised among the salt sheds and cisterns of Reedwash, where his mother, Salla, kept communal water jars clean and his father repaired their stoppers and spigots. His first inheritance was a squat copper measure with a dent in its lip, passed through several generations of working hands. Tarek learned to read its scratches as a record of repairs, not as damage to hide. As a young adult, he accepted a job maintaining the reservoir at Thistle Bend. During a dry season, a hurried overseer ordered him to seal a cistern before he had finished testing its water. Tarek obeyed, and a whole work crew fell ill. He helped nurse them through the sickness, then left the overseer's service and made a promise to test before he trusted. Now he mends containers, checks wells, and keeps the water stations at Reedwash running. His sister Salla, a blunt and capable ferryperson, wants him to stop carrying every failure alone. Their relationship is loving but strained by his habit of vanishing into work when he feels blamed. A new seep beneath the old reservoir has turned the water faintly bitter, and Tarek suspects someone is concealing the cause.