She does not know what she expected.

She had been to sites before, for actual Compliance assessments — empty lots, abandoned structures, decommissioned utilities. She knew the vocabulary of disused space: the grey, the settled rust, the particular quality of things that have been relinquished. She had been efficient at those assessments. She had processed what needed processing and left.

This is different.

The garden is small enough to see all at once and large enough that you cannot see everything at the same time. It is organized and not organized — beds at right angles, paths between them, but also an opportunism, a willingness to let things be where they are if where they are is working. Things have been allowed to become large. The kale at the north end stands nearly to her shoulder.

She follows him between the rows without being asked. He does not look at her as he moves. He simply works, and she follows, and occasionally he says a word — sorrel, there. The cold frame, against the wall. Early lettuce — too early, probably, we’ll see.

We’ll see. She notes this.

She crouches beside the south bed. The soil is dark and damp, recently worked. She can see, if she looks closely, the slight surface irregularity of newly pressed holes, evenly spaced.

“Did you plant something?” she asks.

“Yesterday,” he says.

“What?”

He pauses. Looks at the bed for a moment.

“You’ll see,” he says.

She puts her hand flat on the soil. She doesn’t know why. It is cold and gives slightly under her palm, like something breathing slowly.

She has not touched soil in — she tries to remember. Her grandmother’s garden, maybe. She was eight. Her grandmother had grown things she’d never been able to name in the language she spoke then, and there were beetles, and a smell like something green being crushed, and she had got dirty and her mother had not been pleased.

She sits back on her heels.

“My mother worked in data before the Accord,” she says. She doesn’t know why she says this either. “A different kind. Commercial. She used to say the data cleaned things up — removed the noise, so you could see what was actually there.”

He is listening, though he doesn’t stop working.

“I think I believed that,” she says. “For a long time.”

He straightens up. Looks at her.

“What do you believe now?” he asks.

She looks at the bed. At the barely visible rows, the subtle disturbed surface, the seeds below that she can’t see but knows are there.

“I believe something’s there,” she says. “I’m not sure the data is the same thing as the something.”

He considers this for a moment.

“No,” he says. “It isn’t.”

He bends back down to the row.

She stays crouched for a while, her hand on the soil.