The sweet peas have their first colour.

Not open yet — that’s still weeks off, if the pattern of other years holds — but the buds have gone from tight green knots to something with a hint of what’s coming folded inside them, a paleness at the seam that will, eventually, split into whatever this year’s plants decide to be. He has grown this variety long enough to know the general range and never quite knows the specifics until they arrive. Mara didn’t say what colour when she left the packet through the fence. Maybe she didn’t know either.

He crouches at the row for longer than the work requires.

Daniel’s forms went in on Tuesday — he walked with him to the district office himself, which he has not done in years, has in fact avoided doing for exactly as long as he’s lived in Sector 9, because walking into an Accord building means being seen by systems that have, for the most part, forgotten he exists. He decided it was worth it. Daniel needed someone who knew which counter, which form number, which tone of voice moved a queue faster.

Nobody at the counter recognised him. Nobody would. He is a man whose formal address is a room the system has stopped checking, filing a supplementary document under someone else’s case number. He felt, walking out, something he didn’t expect: not fear, though there was some of that, but a kind of use. He had forgotten what it felt like to be useful in the specific way he used to be useful, before it curdled into what it became.

He straightens, and the small hitch in his lower back that has been there for weeks announces itself again, familiar now, almost companionable in its persistence.

He thinks about telling someone. Mara, specifically — she would ask the right questions, the ones he hasn’t let himself ask.

He does not tell her. Not today.

He goes instead to the shed and takes down the jar of Owen’s seeds, turns it in the light. Still nothing he recognises. He plants three more anyway, in the gap at the end of the row where nothing else has taken, and tells himself, as he has told himself every year for seven years, that this is the year he’ll find out what they are.

It has never once been the year.

He waters them anyway, because that’s the whole practice — not knowing, and doing it regardless.