The item is not in her queue.

This is the first thing she checks, when she arrives at her terminal on Tuesday morning with the feeling she has been carrying since Friday — a low, persistent sensation, not quite dread, not quite anticipation, the feeling of something that hasn’t happened yet but is going to. She opens the queue. Fifty-nine items. She scans them for Sector 9. Nothing.

She processes the morning’s items. She is thorough and efficient. She closes forty-one flags before noon.

After lunch, she goes to the Compliance database and runs a location search on Sector 9.

There are seven active items. Her closure on March 16th is there — sensor anomaly, non-organic origin probable, no further action required. She reads her own words with a feeling she does not examine. The other items are routine: infrastructure assessments, a deferred drainage report, a cycle-12 maintenance item marked for review.

And then, at the bottom of the list, not in her queue, not flagged to her division:

ACCORD STRATEGIC PLANNING — INTERNAL
Item type: Zone Viability Assessment
Zone: Sector 9 and adjacent
Initiated: January 14, 2047
Status: Preliminary analysis complete. Secondary review pending.
Assigned: Division 4 (Strategic Infrastructure)

January 14th.

She reads it twice. Her flag was on March 16th. The zone assessment began two months before she ever saw the environmental alert. Two months of preliminary analysis, running in a division she has no access to, on a sector she routinely processes at the lower level.

She pulls the associated documentation. Most of it is restricted. What she can see is this: a standard Zone Viability Assessment, which is the Accord’s procedure for determining whether a given area warrants continued infrastructure maintenance, is a prerequisite to what the documentation calls “Remediation and Repurposing.”

She knows what remediation means in practice. She has processed the downstream items often enough — the relocation notices, the disconnection orders, the infrastructure handover forms. She has always closed them efficiently.

She closes the database.

She sits with her hands in her lap for a long time.

Outside, the tram moves past the building. She can hear it through the glass — not the sound exactly, but the vibration of it, passing through the frame of the window and into her hands.

She needs to tell him.

She has not yet decided if that is a good idea or simply the only one she has.