She goes after work on Thursday.

Not because it was planned. Or it was planned, in the sense that she had been not-deciding since Tuesday morning and by Thursday afternoon not-deciding had become its own kind of decision. She logs out at 17:00. The tram stop is two blocks south. She goes the other way.

The bolt-latch is the same. The gravel sounds the same. He is at the far end of the garden, the brassica rows, working along the stems with something that looks like patience from the back.

She says: “I sent it.”

He does not turn immediately. He finishes what he is doing — adjusting a leaf, she thinks, or checking the base of a stem — and then he turns.

“When?” he says.

“Tuesday. Seven in the morning.”

He nods. He looks at her for a moment and then looks back at the rows. “Good,” he says.

She had expected — she doesn’t know what she had expected. Not more than this. But she notices the space where more would have been.

She walks further into the garden. The south bed: the sweet peas have grown since Sunday, she can see it even from here — taller, the tendrils longer, one of them wound twice around the jute. She stands at the edge of the bed and looks.

“They’re moving fast,” she says.

“Once they find the string,” he says, “they go.”

She stays there for a while. The evening light is doing what it does — going horizontal, going gold. The signal gantry casts a long shadow across the left side of the yard. Somewhere beyond the perimeter wall, a tram. Someone’s heel on a grate.

“I don’t know if she’s read it yet,” Mara says. “The researcher.”

“No,” he says. “You won’t for a while.”

“I know.”

She is not disappointed. She had known it would not be fast. She had told herself this many times and she still believed it.

She watches the sweet peas. She thinks: there are thirty-seven items in her queue tomorrow morning, and the week after that, and the week after that. There is a researcher somewhere who may or may not open an attachment. There is this garden, which is growing in the usual direction, which is upward, which is what growth is.

“I should go,” she says.

He looks up. He nods once.

She walks back toward the gate. At the bolt-latch she pauses.

“The tendrils,” she says. “They do that themselves? The circling?”

“Yes,” he says. “Circumnutation. They’re looking for something to hold.”

She pushes the gate and walks out into the street.

The city resumes itself. The evening light is going flat.

She thinks: thirty-seven items tomorrow.

She thinks: it’s been sent.