Tiziri.

Finding a leak is mostly about not moving. Stopping in the middle of the road, waiting for the city to finish going quiet, walking twenty meters, and stopping again. The body cools fast once it's been standing still out in the open for a while — the desert loses its heat the moment the sun goes down — and on a night shift, that's solved with clothing. The sand cat's terrain runs from -25°C on a January night to the 50 or 58°C the ground can hit in full summer, and the animal holds up through both ends of the year.

The order the sectors get walked in was left to her, written by hand, by Ammi Bakir, who taught her the trade and had spent half his life walking that network. He died without retiring. Tiziri hasn't changed the order. And the route still starts at the corner by the old reservoir, which has been out of service for years and is no longer easy to enter from that side. When someone points it out, she shrugs and goes in the way she goes in, in January just the same as in August.