The Clearance

About

Eleven years after the Seln Armistice, the Kestrel Valley is still divided by fields nobody can enter and histories nobody will name. Mara Vey runs forty local deminers for Open Ground in the invented Republic of Drenava. She has thirty days of donor money left, a contract target of 100,000 square metres, and an honest forecast that falls 15,800 short. Rasen village wants a 640-metre school path opened before the rains and a pear orchard released before a crop worth 312,000 denars falls where nobody may collect it. Mara used to work a detector herself. Her damaged left ear is what remains of the blast that moved her into management, where danger arrives as a polygon, a method statement and a signature line. Her section leader Irena Sol is the best searcher in the programme and the daughter of the militia commander who ordered barriers placed across the valley. Village head Petar Daska wants the orchard first because it pays seventeen households and forty-three seasonal workers. Donor representative Elias Rook knows hectares are a crude measure and works for a committee that only reads hectares. Four kilometres away, Odan Kor, sixty, remembers laying the missing field around a stone wall the village later dismantled. Under pressure from harvest, weather and a three-day donor visit, Mara authorises a shortened technical-survey fade-out. It follows three empty lanes, an approved national standard and a map that has been trusted for twenty years. It also saves the days needed to clear the school approach. Then a mine detonates inside the white stakes. Toma Rusk loses his left leg. The detector passed. Toma followed his brief. The investigation finds the shortcut beneath Mara's signature and the reason the reader accepted when she made it. The Clearance is an adult procedural drama about the difference between work performed and confidence earned. Sixty-four scenes and five endings turn on actual square metres released, team safety, village trust, donor confidence, a damaged professional bond and whether the valley asks its most politically impossible witness. Sex is not depicted. Violence is graphic only where the accident earns it, and the script never teaches the handling of ordnance.

Cast

• Mara Vey protagonist; Open Ground task manager and former deminer
• Irena Sol section leader; the team's best searcher and daughter of a wartime commander
• Petar Daska Rasen village head and treasurer of the pear cooperative
• Elias Rook North Meridian Development Fund representative on a three-day visit
• Odan Kor former militia field engineer and missing witness to Barrier K-12
• Toma Rusk deminer in Irena's section; casualty and essential witness
• Leda Neris Open Ground medic and casevac lead
• Senn Ardo DMAD district quality officer and lead accident investigator