Two weeks into Regional Data Standards, she has learned the exact shape of the new blankness, and has decided, quietly, that she hates it more than she expected to.
The work is competent, undemanding, entirely without the particular ache that used to come from watching a sector’s name cross her screen and knowing, now, what that name might cost someone. She used to think that ache was a burden. She understands now that it was also, somehow, a form of company — the ache meant she was still connected to something real, and its absence, this clean administrative silence, feels less like relief and more like amputation.
She goes to Sector 9 on Sunday, her one full day, and finds Elias at the row, moving more carefully than he did a month ago but moving, still doing the work, still present in the specific way he’s always been present — entirely, whatever it costs him.
“I sent it,” he says, before she’s asked. “Friday. Through Daniel, through Sector 4. It should reach her within the week, if it hasn’t already.”
“How do you feel?”
He considers the question with his usual care. “Emptied, a little. In a good way, mostly. I did a true thing badly and late, which is not the same as not doing it at all, and I’ve decided to let that be enough for now.”
She sits beside him on the bench, in the spot that’s become, without either of them declaring it so, hers.
“I lost the queue,” she says. “Sector 9. It’s just gone from what I can see. Not flagged, not restricted. Subtracted.”
“That’s the same mechanism,” he says. “Applied to information instead of infrastructure. Make something unseeable, and it becomes, functionally, unfindable, without anyone having to admit they hid it.”
“I know. I’ve just never been on the losing end of it before.” She looks at the garden, doing what it does regardless of who can or can’t see it in a database somewhere. “I keep thinking — at least I can still come here. At least this part isn’t subtracted yet.”
He doesn’t answer that directly, and something in his stillness makes her look at him more closely.
“Elias.”
“There’s no order yet,” he says. “I want to be honest about that — there’s no order yet. But the corridor review closes at the end of the month. After that, I don’t know how much longer ‘yet’ holds.”
She takes his hand, the gesture now so familiar it barely needs deciding, and they sit together while the garden, unsubtracted for one more evening, does its ordinary, radiant, unbothered work around them.