It was an animal.

This is what Elias tells himself on the walk from his room to the yard. A fox, probably, or one of the feral cats that move through this district in circuits he has never managed to map. They come and go. They are careful in a way that resembles intention but isn’t. He has lived here long enough to know the difference.

He lets himself in through the gate and latches it behind him. The morning is colder than yesterday. A thin frost on the far beds — the ones nearest the building, where the drainage is worse — and the bronze fennel wearing it like something it chose. He starts the boiler first. Fills the watering cans while it heats. Checks the temperature gauge on the cold frame, which reads two degrees warmer than outside, which is the minimum and also the margin. Everything is fine. Everything is within tolerance.

He tells himself he is not watching the fence.

He works through the second bed and into the third. Pulls a late-season weed he missed yesterday. Adjusts the cloches over the early brassicas. When he reaches the far end of the third row — the end nearest the fence — he stops, and turns, and looks.

Nothing. Rails. The perimeter wall beyond them. A section of corrugated fencing that has begun to pull away from its post on the left side, the way it does every winter, and that he will repair in spring the way he does every spring.

He bends down.

In the mud, two metres from the fence line, there is a partial impression. Not his — he knows his own boot, has worn the same size for thirty years. This one is smaller, lighter. The heel sank deeper than the toe, which means whoever made it was standing still. Standing still and looking through the fence.

Not an animal.

He looks at the impression for a long time. Then he straightens up, and goes back to work, and tries to understand what he feels.

Not afraid. That would be simpler.

There are only a few people who know about this place. The man who rented him the room on the fourth floor of Fenwick Block — Owen, who died four years ago. The woman at the hardware store on Sector 8’s edge who sometimes sets aside seedstock for him without comment. And the Accord, which knows in the way it knows everything: as a data point in a category that has not yet attracted sufficient attention to become a problem.

He has lived with that last knowledge for seven years. He has made his peace with it, or something that functions like peace.

What he has not made peace with is the print in the mud. The print means a person. A person means a choice, made deliberately — to come here, to stand here, to watch through the gap in the fence.

He starts on the fourth row.

At 08:40, a heron lands on top of the signal gantry and surveys the yard with the cold authority of something that has not yet been assigned a relevance score.

Elias finds this mildly comforting.

He does not examine why.