"Lots of soft rain this season. The harvest will be plentiful".

Iariah gazed up at Mr. Robotka, blinking absentmindedly. For a moment or two he couldn't figure out how he ended up on the porch of his neighbor. Damned humidity and summer heat do that to you. Softens your mind, blankets it, numbing memories even as close as those of cool morning air.

"Was there a bad harvest, even once?" Rebel asks. He's greeted with an oh-so-familiar facial expression of confusion. Mr. Robotka, oldest and most competent farmer of the Village seems to struggle with the question.

"Bad harvest, eh? Maybe when our forefathers built the Village on rubble and warmachines' corpses. All I know is that the soil takes care of us, and with gov'nor's help we take care of the soil. What's up with you, young man?"

"Nothin'. Just curious".

"Take an old man's advice and drop this nonsense", — the old farmer places his callosal palm on Iariah's shoulder. "'Fore you end up like your father. Although a rascal, you're an industrious fellow, and I respect that. You too could live off the soil, and not that garbage of yours. Besides, my darling, Jackie, is swooning over you. She'll be a good wife".

Iariah smiled and adjusted the straw in the corner of his mouth. It's not the first time that villagers try to bind him to the soil. It wouldn't even be the last one for sure. "Is that tobacco?" Abrupt change of topic spurred by genuine curiosity, and an old habit of protecting one's own freedom. He's not a farmer, nor is he a family man. Iariah is a salvager, a techie, a rebel. Like his father, grandfather, forefathers, he must walk light, unburdened. [Until it'll be his time to leave as well]

"What?" Robotka turns in the direction of Rebel's nod. "Ah, yes, yes it is. The gov'nor brought me seeds".

Iariah stood up and walked closer, his palm lifting up a dark green, meaty leaf. Huh. Amusement and suspicion he keeps to himself. Nobody in the Village is a smoker. That much the Village's technician is certain of, because he has a small pile of scavenged lighters, that nobody wants. While the old farmer isn't looking, Iariah picks up a couple leaves of tobacco, and hides them in the back pocket of his trousers.

It's time to leave, but with neighbors it's never that simple. "Will you stay for lunch? Jackie is making her special stew".

"Sure".

Lunch passes by just like every other meal in the Village: utterly unremarkable and banal. Tasteless even. At least Iariah speculates so much. He doesn't remember ever starving, but neither he's aware of any taste for the food that he has been subsisting on all his life.

Back at his house, he grabs his scavenger backpack, locks the door, and lifts up the lid of a big crate right beside his door. On the bottom of the lid, there's a writing in chalk: "LEAVE YOUR REPAIRS HERE, I'LL GET TO THEM ASAP". With these preparations done, he leaves the Village, whistling while walking.

The Governor says that the Perimeter is a dangerous place, and nobody should approach it. Iariah and his kin always disregarded this public service announcement. Not only because they're rebels, but from a  utilitarian standpoint — most valuable scraps are found further from  the Village. Sometimes straight under the inner edge of the Perimeter, where it is in the form of a near-impassable forest in between thick oaks that might be growing there for centuries now.

Here, on the inner rim, Iariah feels himself somewhat free. At least unconstrained by the lull of the Village, able to think. In this remote, quiet, and calm forest Iariah is able to think. Here all good ideas come to him, and all questions arise. Take tobacco that Mr. Robotka is growing up this season for... some reason. Iariah takes out one leaf out of the pocket. Weighs it on his palm, studies it, rubs between his fingers. It feels like a leaf, which is about as much as Iariah can tell. He's not a farmer, after all. Slowly, he lifts the leaf, and takes a small bite. He chews thoroughly, then spits, takes another bite, repeats.

He feels no taste.

Iariah muses over this oddity, while he's stocking up on electronic scrap in the junkyard right at the edge of the forest: bolts, copper wire, tin solder, transistors and semiconductors. Gutted parts of rebellious Machinery, out of which he assembles trinkets for the villagers.

He works quickly, for the Perimeter is dangerous. Iariah knows that his kin left through it, and he himself had seen lanky, bug-like bodies of the Machinery that occasionally crawls through these edges. He assumed that they're his colleagues, scavengers, but comparison is apocryphal: there can be no kinship between machinery and humanity.

Since then Iariah carries a sling on every scavenger hunt, and a handful of metal bearings. Under the Governor's protection, nobody in the village needs weapons. But Iariah threads no-man's land, and if anything, the Governor would be hard pressed to prove that a string and metal bearings are a weapon.

Lifting his backpack, heavy with electronics, Iariah leaves the inner rim of the Perimeter while the Sun is still high. Questions about lack of taste of even tobacco he bottles up in his mind, adding them to the collection of his other inquiries: What's out there? What the Machinery does on the edge of the Perimeter? Who is the Governor?

He's returning to his house/warehouse when the Sun is setting down for the night. On the way home his gnawing questions once again become dull, and fade away. Tiredness and routine wash over Iariah. Who cares? He thinks. And by the end of the evening he's once again lulled into the complacency comfort of the Village.

The harvest, after all, will be plentiful.
As it always was.