He wakes at 04:50 without the alarm, which has been happening more often, and lies still for a moment cataloguing what hurts before deciding, as he always does, that cataloguing changes nothing and getting up does.

The torso thing is still there. Lower, to the left, a dull persistent fact rather than a pain exactly — pain would almost be a relief, pain has a shape you can address. This is vaguer. It has been vaguer for going on three weeks now, and vague is what worries him, because vague is what a body does before it commits to something.

He does not go to a clinic. He has not been to a clinic in eleven years, not since the mandatory intake screening he sat through the year before he left, all forms and relevance scoring disguised as care. He knows, distantly, in the part of his mind that used to build systems and still can’t stop evaluating them, that this is not a rational position. He also knows that walking into a Sector 9 clinic means being entered into a system that has, so far, entirely forgotten him, and he is not ready to hand that back yet. Not for a vague ache. Maybe not for anything.

He gets up. He makes coffee. He goes out into a garden still holding the last of the night’s cold.

The sweet peas are close now — close enough that he can see, if he looks carefully at the tightest buds, the exact place where the colour will split the seam. Not today. Perhaps not this week. But close, in the particular way that “close” means in a garden: an accumulation of small, patient, invisible work finally about to become visible all at once.

He thinks about Daniel’s forms, filed and now somewhere in a queue he cannot see into. He thinks about Mara’s document, sitting with a stranger who is, apparently, careful. He thinks about the notice on the board, curling at the corner in whatever weather has found it since.

He thinks: everything I have set in motion this spring is now somewhere I can’t watch it.

He thinks: that used to terrify him. It still does, some. But there’s a second feeling under the fear now, one he doesn’t have a clean word for — something closer to trust, though he’s wary of that word too, given what he’s done with the last thing he trusted himself to build.

He waters the row anyway.

The hitch in his back announces itself when he stands. He straightens through it, slower each week, and does not tell it what to mean.