She wakes at 07:40, which is late by her own measure.

Celia is already in the kitchen — she can hear it, the particular sound of the kettle and Celia’s radio, low enough not to carry. Mara lies still for a moment. The ceiling has a hairline crack that runs from the window to the light fitting. She has been noticing it since October without doing anything about it.

She gets up and goes to the kitchen.

“There’s coffee,” Celia says, without turning from the counter. Her radio is on some kind of music feed — something slow, someone’s voice moving above a single chord.

Mara pours coffee. She stands at the window with it.

The street below is Saturday-quiet. A man walking a dog she doesn’t recognize. Two children arguing at the corner who stop as she watches. The light is good — that flat, even light of an overcast spring morning that makes everything look slightly washed.

“Are you going out?” Celia asks.

“Later,” Mara says.

Celia nods. She is preparing something at the counter — Mara can smell vegetables, something from a tin. Celia cooks on Saturdays. This is one of the fixed things.

After a while Mara goes back to her room and opens her terminal.

The queue is at thirty-seven. She does not open the queue. She checks the secondary inbox — the one linked to her personal identifier, not her division code. Nothing. She checks the researcher’s institute page, which is a public page and therefore accessible, and which has not been updated since February. She closes the browser.

This is not how it works, she knows. A document sent on a Tuesday morning is not something anyone reads immediately. The researcher may be traveling. The researcher may have filed it and not yet opened it. There is no reasonable timeline against which four days is slow.

She closes the terminal.

She sits on the edge of her bed with the coffee going cold.

She goes out at noon.

No particular direction. She walks south through the market district — not the Sector 9 market, which is on Wednesdays, but the other one, closer to her building, where three rows of stalls sell produce and clothing and the kind of secondhand goods that have circulated so long they no longer carry any particular origin. She buys two oranges. She stands for a while at the end of the row, watching people move.

She has been to this market most Saturdays since she moved here. It has always been the same — the same three stalls, the same secondhand goods. She has always walked south. She has never asked herself why she walked south and not north.

She walks home carrying the oranges.

Celia has put on more music. Something is on the hob. The apartment is warm and smells like something familiar.

She sets the oranges down on the counter.

“Good walk?” Celia says.

“Yes,” Mara says.

She sits at the kitchen table. The city moves through the window. The document is somewhere she cannot see. She waits the way you wait for something that has already left your hands.