The soil here is called loam.

Elias had looked it up once, a long time ago, in a reference document he no longer has access to. Loam: a mixture of sand, silt, and clay in roughly equal proportions. Retains moisture without becoming waterlogged. Crumbles when compressed. Releases slowly what it holds.

He presses a handful between his fingers now and lets it fall back between the rows. It does not resist him. It simply opens, and gives.

Thirty-two beetroots. Fourteen cabbages. A stand of kale that survived the February freeze and seems, as a result, vaguely smug about it. At the far end of the yard, where the old switching gear rusted long ago into the ground, three raised beds of things he grows not because they are useful but because he has forgotten how to stop: sorrel, bronze fennel, a climbing rose that reached the remnant of a signal gantry last autumn and has been moving along it ever since with a patience he finds either admirable or unsettling, depending on the morning.

The city runs beyond the perimeter fence. He can hear it the way you hear a river — not any particular sound, but the accumulated fact of it. Always present. Always moving. Never asking.

His wristband vibrates at 06:14. He does not look at it. He knows what it says. He has known what it would say since 2036, when he wrote the first version of the model that generates it — not those words specifically; those came later, from other people who understood that numbers needed language around them to be accepted. But the logic underneath: the weights, the thresholds, the calculation of what a district deserves based on what it contributes. That was his. His and four others, in a glass room on the fortieth floor that no longer exists, in a building that has since been repurposed for something the Accord considers more relevant.

ACCORD RESOURCE ALLOCATION — SECTOR 9
Date: March 15, 2047
District relevance index: 0.31 (below threshold)
Infrastructure maintenance: deferred (cycle 14)
Healthcare access: Tier C
Housing stability: maintained

He dismisses the notification without reading it. Pulls a weed. Drops it to the side. Reaches for the next one.

This is what the morning is for. Not thinking. Pulling. Releasing. Moving along the row.

The garden is approximately forty metres by twenty. He measured it in his second year here, pacing it out in October with the cold coming down from the north. It is not registered anywhere. The Accord’s survey system shows this yard as unclassified infrastructure — legacy rail, decommissioned, remediation status unknown. He checked once, seven years ago, and has not checked since. Some things are better left unexamined.

He is working on the third row when he hears it.

A sound from beyond the fence. Not an animal — animals don’t pause the way this pauses, don’t recalibrate mid-step, don’t carry the specific quality of stillness that follows a mistake. This is something that moves, and stops, and listens, and moves again.

Something careful.

Something that does not want to be heard.

Elias does not straighten up. He does not turn around. He pulls another weed and drops it into the row beside him.

He waits.