Friday, and the researcher sends a short message with no request attached, which is somehow more unsettling than the ones that ask something of her.

Meeting with my colleagues went well. We’re going to proceed carefully — a piece that uses the interval framing without naming a source, a sector, or a timeframe close enough to identify you. It will take weeks, not days. Publishing responsibly is slower than publishing. I wanted you to know it’s moving, even if it doesn’t feel like it yet.

She reads it on the tram, standing, one hand on the rail, and finds that she believes it — not because the researcher has earned unconditional trust, but because “weeks, not days” is the kind of unglamorous, deflating honesty that people trying to impress you rarely bother with.

At Meridian Street, her supervisor doesn’t call her in again. Doesn’t need to; she has been careful, or careful enough, working her queue at a pace that reads as ordinary, running no more searches outside her scope. It costs her something she hadn’t measured before — the specific fatigue of doing a job while withholding the part of yourself that used to make the job bearable.

Petra brings her coffee again, without comment this time, and Mara understands it as a kind of ongoing forgiveness for a conversation neither of them will reopen.

In the queue, an item from Sector 9 crosses her screen — routine, unrelated to Elias’s block, a drainage report she closes in under a minute. She notices herself noticing it. She has started, without deciding to, watching for the sector’s name the way you watch for a person’s face in a crowd once you’ve learned to love them: automatically, and slightly against your will.

At the end of the day she stops at the window, the ceiling panels beginning their long slow fade toward evening simulation, and thinks about the researcher’s sentence — it’s moving, even if it doesn’t feel like it yet.

She thinks: that’s true of more than the document.

She thinks about Elias, about the ache he mentioned once and dismissed, about the way he straightened more slowly than he used to when she wasn’t looking, though she has looked, and has said nothing, because she doesn’t yet know what saying something would accomplish beyond making him carry the saying of it too.

She rides the tram home the long way, past her stop and back, for no reason she names even to herself, and gets in twenty minutes later than usual, and Celia doesn’t ask, and she doesn’t offer.