The rose has changed direction.

He noticed it on Friday, but it took the weekend to be certain — the way you need to see something more than once before you’re willing to believe it’s real. It has been moving along the eastern strut of the gantry since last autumn, growing eastward in a slow and purposeful way that he had grown comfortable with. Now it has turned. The new growth — the pale shoots, still soft, still not yet committed to their colour — is curving upward, reaching for the topmost strut rather than continuing along the horizontal.

He does not know why. Possibly the light. Possibly something structural in the gantry that he cannot see. Possibly just the rose, which has its own opinions about where it’s going and has never been particularly forthcoming about explaining them.

He stands looking at it for a while. The morning is clear, which is unusual for March, and the light on the gantry catches the rust at an angle that makes it look almost warm — almost intentional, as if someone designed the colour.

He has been thinking about intention.

He thinks about 2036. He thinks about the glass room on the fortieth floor and the four other people and the particular quality of excitement that comes from being part of something that works. The model worked. They ran the projections and the projections were clean, the logic held, the outputs made sense. There had been something almost aesthetic about it — the elegance of a system that could see across a whole city and determine, with confidence, where the weight should fall.

He had been proud of it.

He is not proud of it now.

He is not sure at what point pride became the thing it is now — not shame, exactly. Something heavier and more complicated than shame. The understanding that you can do something well and wrong at the same time, and that the doing well does not cancel the wrong, and that you knew this at some level and continued anyway because the work was good and the work was yours and you wanted it to continue.

The rose puts out another pale shoot.

It is going where it’s going.

He thinks: maybe that is the difference between a rose and a model. A rose does not know what it’s doing to the gantry. A model’s creator does.

He goes back to work.