On Friday she goes to the public archive.

Not the Accord’s internal database — the public records office, which is a building she has walked past a hundred times and never entered. It is staffed by a woman of indeterminate age who is reading something on a tablet and looks up when Mara comes in with the specific expression of someone who is used to long stretches of being alone and is not entirely displeased by the interruption.

“Zone records,” Mara says. “Prior ZVAs and remediation orders. Outcome data.”

“Process documents are public,” the woman says. “Outcomes above a certain threshold are published. Full disposition records are available on application.”

“I want to know what happened,” Mara says. “In the zones where remediation was ordered. Where the people went.”

The woman looks at her for a moment.

“That’s the Resident Transition data,” she says. “It’s aggregated. Destination zone categories, not specific addresses.”

“That’s fine,” Mara says.

She spends three hours in the archive.

There have been eleven Zone Viability Assessments in the last decade that resulted in remediation orders. Of these, nine proceeded to full remediation. Two are pending.

The destination zone data: of the residents relocated, 73% moved to Tier C or D districts. 14% left the database entirely — the woman at the desk tells her this means either they relocated outside the Accord’s jurisdiction or they were lost to follow-up. 13% moved to Tier B. None moved to Tier A.

She copies the numbers into her notebook.

She thinks about lost to follow-up. The careful, neutral language of a system accounting for people it can no longer account for.

She asks: “Can I see the names? The zones that were remediated.”

The woman pulls a folder. Passes it across.

Nine zones. Nine names. She reads them: Coldwell Quarter. The Marsh Exchange. Beckford Station. She has heard of some of these — hazily, peripherally, the way you hear of things that happen to other people in other places. They have the quality of things that once had a specific gravity and no longer do, because there is no one left in them to give them weight.

She copies the names into her notebook.

She goes home.

That night she opens her document and adds a section at the top. She does not title it. She writes: What the record shows and what the record doesn’t show are not the same thing.

She has known this for years.

She is only now beginning to understand what to do with it.