Her individual notification comes on Tuesday, three days after the general one, exactly as she predicted.

Following structural review, your role has been reassigned to Regional Data Standards, effective in fourteen days. This reassignment reflects workflow optimisation and is not a disciplinary action. Your new role does not include access to sector-specific case data.

Not a disciplinary action. She reads that sentence three times, the way she’s learned to read every sentence the Accord builds this carefully — not for what it says, but for the shape of what it’s avoiding saying. Regional Data Standards is a division she’s heard mentioned twice in two years, both times as a kind of quiet joke, the place people get moved when someone wants them gone without the paperwork of firing them.

She doesn’t feel the shock she expected to feel. She’s had weeks to rehearse this in her head, and the actual notice, when it comes, is almost anticlimactic — smaller than the dread had been, which she supposes is its own kind of mercy, though she doesn’t feel grateful for it yet.

Fourteen days.

She does the arithmetic without meaning to: fourteen days means she still has access, still has a badge that opens what it currently opens, for two more weeks. After that, whatever she can see of Sector 9 — the flags, the reviews, the quiet accumulating record of a place being administratively erased — goes dark to her entirely. She won’t lose the garden. She can still walk there as herself, on her own time, the way any citizen can walk anywhere the Accord hasn’t formally sealed. But she’ll lose the seeing — the small warnings, the shifts in status, the ability to know what’s coming before it arrives.

She thinks about telling Petra. She thinks about telling her supervisor she understands exactly what this is, and precisely why he engineered it this gently.

She does neither. She closes the notice and opens her queue instead, and works through the remaining items with a strange, hollow steadiness, aware that she is doing, for perhaps the last time, the actual work she was trained for — closing gaps, however briefly, before someone decides the gap itself was the problem all along.

She goes to Sector 9 that evening and doesn’t tell Elias yet either. Not tonight. He has enough to carry, and she has learned, finally, what he’s been trying to teach her for months: that some things need to be held alone for a while before they can be set down honestly in front of someone who loves you.