The east terrace had been a loading dock and was now a place where people brought fruit they were willing to share and arguments they were not. Edan was early, which meant he was nervous. He had their mother's mouth and a ship badge he kept touching, as if it might evaporate and take his courage with it.

"You look like a person who has practiced a sentence," Mira said.

"I practiced three. They were all worse than talking."

They stood with the city below them: glass, salt grass, the pale road of the nursery, a crane that had been repairing the same seam for a month because the seam deserved a month. Edan had brought the cutting list. It was short. The Common Graft wanted a sleeve of the salt-oak, a handful of the stubborn tomato, and a note in Mira's handwriting about what had failed. Failures traveled better than slogans. Mars, he said, was full of people who had been promised a garden and given a manual.

"Then give them the manual," Mira said. "And the part where the manual was wrong."

"That's what I'm asking to carry. You're hearing a farewell."

"I'm hearing a person who wants the farewell to be clean."

A wind came up off the water and made the loose sign on the clinic rattle. Edan watched it as if rattling were a technical problem he might still be assigned. "If I stay, I become the man who almost went. You know what this city does with almost. It puts you on a committee so your regret has minutes."

"And if you go, you become the man who kept a pump alive, which is not nothing, and you miss the decade these oaks are for. Both are real. Stop arranging them into a moral."

He laughed, once, without much joy. "You used to be worse at this. You used to cry and then pretend you were angry about a hose."

"The hose was also a problem."

They ate the tomatoes he had brought, which were flawed in the exact way the scaffold variety always was: too much skin, a sweetness that arrived late, like a person apologizing after they had already helped you move a table. Juice ran down Mira's wrist. She did not wipe it immediately. There were years in the taste, and also a meeting she was glad she could not currently attend.

Below them the Quiet Channel refreshed on the public slate. Surge window narrowed. Gate A or Gate B. Costs attached. No recommendation.

Edan read it aloud anyway, because numbers steadied him. Gate A kept the nursery road and gave the lower tool shed to the water. Gate B saved the shed, the spare pumps, the dry records, and put the east beds under salt for a season. Eleven centimeters had become a choice with nouns.

"They'll want you in the room," he said.

"They'll want someone who can say oak without making it a hymn. I can do the first. I'm unreliable about the second."

"I'll move the shed either way," he said, too quickly. "Before I go. Don't look at me like that. It isn't a symbol. The pumps are heavy and I still live here."

Mira put her hand on the rail between them, not on him. The city made its small sounds. Somewhere a child was being talked out of a dramatic opinion about ice. The future, which people discussed as if it were a gate that either opened or didn't, sat down beside them as a list: a sleeve, a shed, a road, a brother, nine days, a tree that did not know it was loved.

"Four o'clock was a good time to ask," she said. "I'll be worse at dawn."

"You're worse at dawn even when you like me."

"I like you," she said, and the sentence was so plain that neither of them improved it.

The room they used for votes had been a boathouse. Rain found the usual places. People stood because the benches were saving themselves for the elderly and for anyone carrying a child, a rule so old nobody remembered voting for it. The slate on the wall showed Gate A and Gate B the way the Channel always showed things: costs, uncertainties, and a blank where a wiser machine might have put a finger on the scale.

Mira had mud on her cuff and a page of cultivar notes she did not intend to wave. Edan stood at the back with three neighbors and a handcart, already looking like a man who had decided his job was objects. Iria kept the clinic board under her arm as if a meeting might try to adjourn medicine.

A man from the scaffold terraces spoke first, and he was righteously tired, which Mira respected. The shed held the spare pumps. Pumps moved water. Water was not a poem. If the east beds salted, they would replant; they had replanted before; the oaks were an experiment and the pumps were a fact.

"The oaks are also a fact," said a woman Mira knew from the Graft. "In ten years they are shade on a road children actually use. The shed is a building. We have lost buildings without losing the trick of making them."

Numbers followed. The Channel's uncertainty band was honest and therefore unsatisfying. Someone asked, not for the first time, whether the Guardian could simply choose. The slate did not change. A clerk who had drawn the short straw read the standing answer, which was pinned to the wall in ordinary type: Irreversible acts are yours. The intelligence can show you the price.

Mira spoke without stepping onto the little platform, because platforms made her voice do something she disliked.

"Gate B saves equipment I also want saved," she said. "I am not going to pretend a pump is vulgar. Gate A saves the road and the east beds, including a row that is finally, boringly, working. If we salt that row we don't get a tragic lesson. We get a delay. The city is full of delays that dressed themselves up as wisdom. I would like the shade on time, and I would like the people who move pumps to be paid the same respect as the people who talk about shade. Edan is going to move the shed's guts onto the high racks tonight if we pick A. He has said so. That doesn't make A free. It makes it possible."

Edan, at the back, lifted a hand just enough to be counted as a person and not a parable.

They voted with scraps, because the city had tried a prettier system and the prettier system had failed in a way that produced a lawsuit and a song. The count was close. Gate A, by nineteen. A groan, not a cheer. The groan was the sound of people who would still have to do the thing. Iria posted the result under the clinic waits, a juxtaposition several visitors would later call insensitive and which the patients found clarifying.

Night in the nursery was mostly work. They hauled. They swore at a crate that had been packed by an optimist. The lower shed took on the look of a place that knew it might be rinsed and was not sentimental about it. Edan was good at this, better than he was at terraces. He labeled boxes in a block hand. He made an intern drink water. At one point he stood in the doorway and looked at the oaks as if they might thank him, then snorted at himself and went back for the last pump coupling.

Near dawn the surge arrived with less theater than the word surge suggested. Water took the floor of the shed. It left a line of salt and a smell of cold metal. The nursery road stayed a road. Two panes in the small glasshouse cracked, because the wind had opinions the model had marked as unlikely. Unlikely was not the same as forbidden. Mira wrote that down too.

The Guardian did not congratulate them. The Channel recorded the vote, the waterline, and the time. Power, when it was working, was mostly a good clerk.

The day Edan left was bright in a way that felt tactless. Mira cut the oak in the cool, before the speeches that were not officially speeches could begin at the dock. The sleeve was a piece of graft technology that looked like a thermos and had been argued over by people who loved trees and people who loved not carrying extra mass. She wrote the failure note on paper, because the Graft had learned that a screen could be updated into amnesia. Brown edge on bed west-four. Not fatal. Do not tell a story about resilience until you have a second season.

Edan weighed the sleeve twice and then, absurdly, a third time, the way a person knocks on a table after the house has already agreed to stand.

"If it dies in transit," he said, "I won't make it mean something."

"If it lives, don't make that mean something either. Write down the light it got. Mars will lie to you about light if you let it."

"Kestrel has a bud that likes being corrected. I'll get along."

They walked down to the dock with the city doing what it did on convoy mornings: pretending not to watch, and watching. Children were present. A banner had been proposed and defeated, which Mira considered a sign of municipal adulthood. Iria pressed a paper bag into Edan's hand.

"Pears," she said. "They bruise. So do you. Try to notice which is which."

The MV Salt Ledger was not beautiful. It was a long instrument for keeping people and a few living things unruined across a distance that did not care about their reasons. Its departure would be slow enough that you could walk beside the thought of it for several minutes before the gap became official. Edan hugged his sister like a man who had been told that hugs were allowed to be clumsy if they were complete.

"Move the rest of the shed when it dries," he said into her hair. "Not because of me. Because the couplings will seize."

"I know why to move a coupling."

"I know you know. I'm talking so I don't do the other thing."

He went up the gangway. The sleeve went with him, unlabeled except for the Graft mark and Mira's initials, which were not a farewell, only a way for a stranger to ask a question later. The ship made a sound like a large animal changing its mind and then committing. Mira stayed until staying became a performance, and then she left, which was its own skill.

On the nursery road the cracked glasshouse ticked as it warmed. An intern had already taped the panes, badly, with devotion. The tomatoes that could be saved had been saved; the ones that couldn't had been eaten by whoever was standing nearby, a policy Mira intended to formalize only if someone forced her to write a policy. Salt traced the shed floor in a map of the night. It would have to be scraped. Scraping was not a symbol. It was Thursday.

She knelt by west-four. The cut tree looked like what it was: a young oak missing a piece, not a sacrifice. The browned leaf was still there. She logged it again, because repetition was how you told the truth from a mood. Above the ridge the kite turned. The Channel, if she had looked, would have shown her a ship on a plotted patience and a city with its ordinary emergencies: a sprained wrist, a late tram, a wait time that had improved by nine minutes and been celebrated by no one.

Mira put her hands in the warm soil. Somewhere between worlds her brother was learning the particular quiet of a corridor, and a cutting was beginning the long, unheroic work of staying alive. The light on the marsh was the same light as yesterday. That was the part worth keeping. Not a blaze. A continuance. She had mud under her nails, a list, and a city that had chosen, by nineteen, to try again in the morning.