Emerald Refuge

The first garden died on a Tuesday, which Diego remembered because Tuesday was the day the water truck came to the Camp and everyone stood in line with their jugs and their news.

It was one of the small ReLeaf gardens, nine floors of kale and sweet potato vine on the south face of a building that had been a parking garage the year he arrived. Someone had cut the drip lines on every floor. Not torn them. Cut them, cleanly, with something sharp, and taped the ends back together so the pressure gauges would read normal for a day. By the time anyone noticed, the leaves had gone soft as old lettuce in the heat.

He stood on the seventh floor with the building's steward, a woman named Odile who had grown up in Port-au-Prince and still said gade when she wanted him to look at something. She held up one of the taped lines.

Gade. Whoever did this was careful.

He turned it in his hands. The tape was the blue kind the Communitere workshop handed out by the roll, the kind half the Camp used to patch everything from shoes to solar panels. That narrowed it to roughly four thousand people.

Diego had come to Austin with one bag and three languages and had picked up two more in the line for water. He'd learned early that a place tells you things if you listen to the order in which it says them: who greets whom first, which stalls open before the heat, which doors stay shut on which days. He'd solved his first case that way, a stolen battery bank, by noticing that the man who sold coffee had started opening an hour later. He had not set out to be a detective. People had simply started bringing him their puzzles, the way they brought his neighbor their broken radios.

That evening he walked the Camp the long way. Creole and Spanish and Dari drifted out of open windows with the smell of frying plantain. Children were chalking a hopscotch grid across the road where the trucks used to idle. At the corner by the clinic, a speaker on a windowsill was playing ExMemory's "Solar Grid," the song that had been everywhere the summer the first gardens went up, and he stopped, as he always did, until it finished.

Three more gardens died that month. Each time the lines were cut and taped. Each time the tape was blue.

The pattern, when he finally saw it, was not in the gardens at all. It was in the days. Every cut came the night before a delivery from the r0g_agency people, who brought seeds and spare pumps up from the coast. Someone wanted the gardens to look as though they were failing just before the help arrived.

He did not know yet who, or why. He knew only that whoever it was had watched the Camp as closely as he had, had learned its grammar, and was using it to lie.

Diego could read a city's grammar the way other people read weather.

He folded the length of blue tape into his notebook, between the pages where he kept the names of everyone who had ever handed him a puzzle, and went to find Odile.