She sends it at 07:12 on Tuesday morning, before she has eaten anything.

She wrote the cover message the night before — a rough version in her notebook in pencil, then typed and retyped on the screen until the tone was right. Not formal. Not deferential. Just: I have attached a document that may be relevant to your work on remediation zones. I would be glad to speak with you, if you think it warrants a conversation.

The researcher’s address was in the public footer of every paper she had published. Mara had found it in three seconds and then not done anything with it for five days.

She attaches the document. The file name she changed four times: first something bureaucratic, then something that gave too much away, and finally just what it is — Sector 9, Interval Study. Twenty-two pages. She knows what each of those pages contains. She has read them many times. She is not reading them again now.

She presses send.

The interface does what interfaces do. A small animation. Then: Sent.

She sits in front of her screen and looks at that word.

She does not feel what she expected to feel. She cannot now reconstruct what she expected. Her hands are in her lap. The flat is quiet — Celia left early, the door had closed soft at six, Mara had heard it and stayed in bed for another forty minutes not sleeping.

Outside the window: the back face of the building opposite, grey-rendered, a drainpipe running vertically, a bicycle chained to a drain bracket at the ground floor. Someone has put a milk crate on the saddle. She does not know why she notices this. She looks at it for a while.

She gets up and starts the kettle.

While the water heats she stands at the counter. She thinks about the researcher — whether she will open the attachment this morning, or flag it for later, or not open it at all. She thinks: I have no way of knowing. She thinks: I had no way of knowing what would happen with the flag I closed in March either. And then she stops thinking about it.

The kettle takes four minutes. She listens to it.

She makes the coffee and carries it back to her desk. Her inbox shows nine items, none urgent. The sent folder has one item with today’s date.

07:12.

She realises, for the first time this morning, that she has no way to tell him.

He has no system presence — no registered address, no device profile she has ever found. She knows where to find him. If she wants to tell him she has done what she said she would do, she will have to go to Sector 9.

She may do that.

She opens her queue. There are forty-one items. She begins.