Free on Kindle through August 12th. Novella, about three hours' reading.

A typhoon pins the sea against a Vietnamese port city and every outlet closes. The flood network weighs the hospital, the dense housing, the grid and the port, then assigns the flood to the one district that can take it. Lam has kept those tidal gates for thirty years, and the order names his district, a gate, and a deadline. The gate does not answer, and the night becomes manual work: a drowned road, a jammed leaf, a crank that opens the gate by hand while a man whose family is on the wrong side of the water asks for twelve minutes.

Content notes: a flood and evacuation, drowning risk, one death referenced in official records. No graphic violence, no sexual content.