The crew arrives on Tuesday morning, earlier than the notice implied they might, while the light is still doing the pale, uncommitted thing it does before it decides what kind of day this will be.

He hears the vehicles before he sees them — a sound the garden has never had to absorb before, engines idling beyond the fence, voices that carry the particular flatness of people doing a scheduled task rather than anything they’ve chosen. He is at the gate before they’ve finished parking, not to stop them, he has no illusion that stopping is available to him, but because he has decided, across thirty years of watching systems operate, that being present and being seen matters even when it changes nothing about the outcome.

The foreman is younger than he expected, and not unkind — reads from a tablet, confirms the parcel number, explains the sequence: fencing off first, then the structures, then the clearance proper, three to four days depending on what’s found.

“There’s nothing here that needs clearing,” Elias says. “No structures. It’s a garden.”

The foreman looks past him, into the yard, and something crosses his face that isn’t quite surprise and isn’t quite indifference either — a brief, human flicker before the professional flatness reasserts itself.

“Didn’t expect that,” the foreman admits. “Says decommissioned rail infrastructure on the order. Doesn’t say anything about—” he gestures, imprecisely, at seven years of soil and structure and care, unable to find the word the system’s paperwork never bothered to include.

“It’s been a garden since 2040,” Elias says. “I’d like the record to say so, for whatever that’s worth to whoever reads it after today.”

The foreman doesn’t answer that directly, which Elias understands is its own kind of answer. He makes a note on the tablet anyway — Elias can’t see what it says, and decides not to ask, because whatever small mercy is contained in that note is not one he needs to witness to receive.

Mara arrives an hour later, having left work the moment she heard, and finds him standing at the gate exactly where the foreman left him, watching the fencing crew unload rolls of orange mesh that will, by evening, surround everything he’s built.

She doesn’t say anything. She just stands beside him, and takes his hand, and together they watch the boundary of the world they made get marked for its own ending.