Air

Rosemary, lavender, then a metallic tang. You can taste the third one before you can name it.

Air Canopy

The city’s air system. It filters, and each morning it announces a scent: today, Summer BBQ with a Hint of Jasmine. Nobody asked for the scent. The week it sagged, everyone noticed how much shade they had been living under.

Anemone

A writer at Vintage. She touched a railing without noticing, and the iron warmed. She tends to hear the question under a story before the story is finished.

Biomimicry

Asking the termite mound how to cool a building, and the leaf how to hold water, and writing down the answers. Credit goes to the termites.

Bottle Oracle

A bottle of Strawbactus wine that will tell you what next year tastes like, if you wait. It does not hurry.

Clandestine Collective

Whoever planted the wall at dawn. They work in the hours nobody is watching and sign nothing, and a garden shows up on a Tuesday and everyone says it was always there.

Drone Murmur

The hum of the swarms over the lake, like a restless congregation. By day it carries rumor. At 3 a.m. the freight drones reroute around the tents so no one wakes.

Eva Marquette

A ReLeaf scientist who turned rebel when she saw what the Gardener was doing to the ecosystems. In Tangled Frequencies she steps out of an oak’s bark on her own, changed, still herself enough. Her voice rattles Langley’s chest.

Fort Branch

A small waterway in East Austin, less famous than Shoal or Waller. It has been mended more than once, and now wildlife and neighbors both use it.

Future Austin

Austin, a few decades on: the same creek, the same bridge at dusk, a few more vines than the zoning allows. Everything here happens to people who are trying, and are not always right.

Historic Homelessness

No one sleeps under the bridges now. The houses float, tethered to footings along the creek, and the city says it is solved. Joe, on a bench, says there is a second kind of homeless, the kind that happens inside a house, and it is a different kind of work.

Historic Hunger

Hunger has gone mythic, something grandparents say to make children finish their bread. Kids toss pears over the bike lane, and a boy misses one, and his friend catches it behind his back.

KudzuPorch

A compostable dwelling that creeps block by block like a vine and insists on a porch as proof of humanity. By July it sags, and by August the neighbors are sitting on it.

Lady Bird Lake

The wide place in the river, where the festivals and the protests and the blooms of algae all stand and look at their reflections. An island in it has a boathouse, and people live there.

Library of Renewal

A back room at the bookstore where a woman slides you a sheet of paper and the words rise on their own. You are meant to add to it.

Neighbors

The diner counter, the other side of the fence, the stranger who says the curl on your neck looks like it grew there on purpose. Enough of it and the air changes. That is Ringweather.

Also called Community Engagement.

Noir

Rain, neon, a collar turned up. The city is a witness who will not testify. Mira says it was never about the money.

Organic Media and Fiction

Stories and songs made to be copied by hand, repaired, and let go. Each one is tied to a planter, a wall or a bench somewhere in the city.

ReLeaf

The cooperative that keeps the gardens, the stories and the van. Nora Sanchez started it, and whoever tends it owns a share. The name is a leaf turned over.

Shadow Sprawl

The unmapped city under the mapped one: tunnels past the loading dock, rooms that are not in the plans, a council that meets beneath the Library and is on no blueprint. It grows next to everything that was approved.

Sync Vein

The current that locks a heartbeat to a foundation. It rises through the crack, alive, and keeps your time. Stand still and your chest agrees.

Verdancy Pact

An agreement between people and plants, written in drip lines and roots, to look after the same ground. Unlike the Root Covenant, this one has terms. The water goes where the roots go.