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.

The slow beat through a QR lantern when a donation clears and a leaf lights up on the wall. Some people say it changes their breathing. Stand beside one for a donation and notice your own.

The quiet creek in East Austin, the one the other creeks get mentioned instead of. Eli lives near it, with a lighthouse lens in his front room, eight feet of brass and prism catching the morning.

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

You keep eleven gardens and none of them are yours. They belong to the people whose walls they grow on, and you split what they make. ReLeaf pays a little for the carrying.

A detective who once belonged to the city’s official order and now works under the Air Canopy, distrusting clean answers. Twenty-one hours without sleep, he still takes the tram. When it gets bad he pictures a jazz bar on a quiet Tuesday, a cat asleep in his lap, and then he runs.

The vine and the wall take turns. The city keeps asking how much of itself to let the vines eat. One year the answer was the insulation.

He kept the light at Port Aransas for thirty-one years, until the storms took the dune. He brought the lens inland and writes only in a bird log, between a cardinal and a red-shouldered hawk. He walked to Central because he had only ever heard it.

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.

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.

Algae built to clean the air at speed. Eva says it could fix everything or break it worse, and the Gardener’s vat of it, fed by the tainted Canopy, is the root of his control.

Twenty-faced floats set in the creeks and the lake. Each face filters, and in the afternoon they throw the sunlight onto the water in pieces. The hawkers say they were blamed for the wrong thing.

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.

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.

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

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.

The pact between people and plants that nobody signed. Harmony, say the ones who agreed. Control, says Eva, stepping out of the oak.

A thing that makes its own next one: a plotter built from a bicycle wheel that draws the pattern for its own replacement parts. That’s the whole idea, says the machinist who built it. Everything else is detail.

Soft courtesy with a sting folded inside it. Neighbors arrive with it in their smiles, polite as rattlesnakes at dusk, and the rent is gentle.

The city’s grammar. Every alley has its own syntax: bottles grown into trellises, chip bags pressed into shade. Its rhythm is measured in reuse, and it falters when a silver cube turns up with nothing to say.