Celia is the one who mentions it first, over breakfast, scrolling a feed Mara doesn’t usually look at.

“There’s a piece going around,” Celia says. “Policy thing. Says the allocation model has some kind of compounding problem — zones that go down can’t come back up. People are arguing about it already.”

Mara doesn’t move for a second longer than is natural.

“Does it name a sector?”

“No. Keeps it general. Reads like it’s trying not to get anyone in trouble.” Celia glances at her. “You okay? You’ve gone a colour.”

“Didn’t sleep well.”

She finds the piece herself an hour later, at the library terminal, standing rather than sitting because sitting felt like it would take too long to get up from. It is careful, exactly as careful as the researcher promised — no sector named, no timeframe close enough to trace, the interval framing rendered in the researcher’s own words but unmistakably built from what Mara sent. The model does not see what happens between the numbers. It cannot account for the interval. Almost her sentence. Not quite. Enough distance to be safe, enough closeness to feel, reading it, like watching something private become suddenly, irreversibly public.

She reads the comments beneath it despite telling herself not to. Most of them argue about methodology, about whether the researcher has proven causation or merely correlation, the specific bloodless argument of people for whom this is an abstraction. A few, further down, say something closer to I’ve seen this happen where I live. Those are the ones she reads twice.

She thinks about Elias, about the years he spent believing he’d said his piece and been filed under noted. She thinks: this is what it looks like when it finally isn’t filed away. It looks like an argument in a comments section. It looks like almost nothing, and also like the only thing that’s ever moved at all.

She doesn’t go to Sector 9 that evening. She wants to tell him, but the telling feels like it should happen in person, and she has already been three times this week, and she is trying, badly, to be the kind of careful her supervisor asked for.

She writes it in her notebook instead: It’s out. It’s small. It’s real.

She reads the sentence back and adds one more line beneath it, smaller, more honest: I don’t know if it’s enough. I don’t think anything is, yet. But it’s not nothing.