Mara has no reason to go to Sector 9. She goes anyway.

She logs it as a site review — irregular land use, environmental flag, preliminary assessment prior to Compliance referral. The language is precise and technically defensible and has the additional virtue of being close enough to true that she doesn’t have to think about it too carefully. She takes the C-line tram to the outer ring and walks from there.

The district changes as she moves through it. On Meridian Street, the buildings are maintained — not well, but maintained, the way things are maintained when they’re considered worth maintaining. Facades patched, windows replaced when they break, the pedestrian lighting functional on most nights. Three stops out, the upkeep becomes inconsistent. Six stops out, it stops being a priority. By the time she steps off the tram at the Sector 9 boundary marker, the buildings on either side of the road have begun the slow process of becoming something else, and the something else is not yet clear.

She walks for twelve minutes following the coordinates. The streets here are quieter in a way that is not peaceful. A few people, moving with the particular efficiency of people who have somewhere specific to be and no interest in anything that isn’t that. No shops open at this hour. A water collection point, maintained, because water is always maintained. A community notice board with three notices on it, one of them legible.

The rail yard appears between two warehouses. The perimeter fence is older than she expected, chain-link reinforced with corrugated panel in places, a layer of weather on everything that suggests years of not being anyone’s responsibility.

She finds the gap at the left side where a panel has pulled away from its post.

She does not think about what she is doing. She simply does it — stands at the gap and looks through.

Green.

She knew it was there. She saw it in the satellite imagery. But satellite imagery is flat and old and does not prepare you for the specific quality of this — green in March, in a dead district, in a yard that should contain only gravel and rust. It is not large. The beds are simple, unmistakable in their deliberateness. Whoever built them knew what they were doing.

She is looking at the rose when she realises something has changed.

Not a sound. Not a movement. A quality of attention, directed at her, from somewhere inside the yard.

She looks up.

An old man is standing at the far end of the third row, completely still, watching her. He is tall and thin and has the unhurried posture of someone who has been standing in fields since before she was born. His hands are at his sides. His expression is not readable from this distance, but it is also, she understands without quite knowing how, not alarmed.

He is simply waiting.

She should go. She knows she should go. She has no protocol for this moment, no form that covers it, no category that fits what she is doing or what he is doing or what either of them is about to do next.

She stays.