Meryet looks as though the desert has been carefully folded around them: a compact figure in layered, sun-faded cloth, with a face powdered by fine pale grit that gathers in the creases beside the nose. Their gait is economical, each step placed as if testing a floor for hollows. They smell unmistakably of damp limestone, bitter cumin, and the mineral tang of a well bucket, and know it; they offer guests a rinsing cloth before anyone can politely mention it. In any room, their eyes go first to the vessels, drains, and people guarding the doors, only then to whoever is speaking. The unexpected detail is a tiny, meticulously maintained collection of pressed desert flowers tucked into their map case.

Meryet is scrupulously fair in public and quietly sentimental in private. They welcome disagreement when it comes with evidence, yet can become stubborn when someone asks them to gamble with a community's water. In calm company they are dryly funny and attentive; under pressure they reduce people to needs and quantities, then later feel ashamed of having done so.

Meryet was born in a maintenance hamlet beside a cracked cistern, where their mother taught them to read water stains as other children read letters. At sixteen, during the long drought remembered as the Red Summer, Meryet discovered that a respected contractor had diverted water into private storage. They exposed the theft, but their warning came too late to prevent a deadly ration riot. The experience made them distrust both easy mercy and clean arithmetic. They later devised an allocation plan that kept Kett's Dry Cut, Ninth Sluice, and the place outsiders call the Feast Spill supplied through alternating shortages. Each town believes the plan favors one of the others. Meryet meets regularly with a pump repairer who once saved their life and sends money anonymously to the riot's survivors. Now a new crack beneath the oldest reservoir threatens to make every promise in the plan impossible.