On Thursday he plants onion sets.

He does not need more onions. He has a full harvest from last autumn still in storage — laid out in a single layer in the shallow trays in the lean-to, where the temperature is consistent and the air moves. They will last until June. He has enough onions.

He plants the sets anyway.

He does this sometimes. Plants things not because the garden needs them but because he does — because the motion of it, the small deliberate act of setting something into soil and covering it and moving along the row, is the form that thinking takes when it needs to be quiet. His mind works better in his hands than in his head. Always has.

He presses in the sets one by one, spaced correctly, in the bed he prepared last week. Onions want firm soil. They want to sit at soil level, just the tip above ground, in the patient way of things that are mostly doing their work underground, invisibly, taking their time.

He thinks about Mara’s document.

She mentioned it yesterday — not what it contained, only that she had been writing something and didn’t know yet what it was. He had not pressed her. He has spent enough time around the Accord’s processes to know what shape a thing needs to take before it can be named, and he had recognised in her the particular quality of someone doing the work of finding out.

He presses in another set.

He thinks about what it might be. What form is available to her. She has the records — but records of a process that followed its own rules are not evidence of wrongdoing, only evidence of intent. And intent is difficult to argue in a system that defines its own objectives. She has the date discrepancy and the redacted authorisation, which point at something but do not prove it.

What she might have, he thinks — and this is a thought he has been circling since Monday — is a perspective. A ground-level view of what the model produces that is different from what the model says it produces. Not technical. Personal. Specific.

You can document what the model does. You cannot argue against it with a counter-argument it was designed to absorb. But you might be able to argue against what it sees and what it misses.

She is writing something.

He does not know if it will matter.

He plants the last set. Presses the soil. Stands up slowly.

The yard is quiet. The sweet peas are eight centimetres tall now, still pale, reaching.

He’ll put the supports in next week.