Lina hauled compost for the Eastside co-op, and for three weeks her bins had been coming back too light.

She noticed it the way you notice a stair that isn't there. Forty bins on the Tuesday route, the same forty houses, the same coffee grounds and onion skins and gone-soft celery. The scale at the depot said the route weighed what it always weighed. The bins, when she swung them off the truck, said otherwise.

On Saturday she went to the market at Republic Square with her hood up and walked the stalls slowly, past the Fredericksburg peaches and the woman who sold tamales out of a blue cooler, listening. Markets talk. By the time she reached the knife-sharpener at the far end she had heard it twice. Whole batches, gone before they reach the plant. And then, from a man folding up his table: "Ryo's looking into it."

She knew the name. Everyone did. Ryo kept no office and answered no messages. It had found the Wheatsville bike thief by watching a puddle.

---

It was kneeling over a shallow dish of water when she found it, in the courtyard off Pedernales where it liked to work, a dropper of ink in one jointed hand. It was smaller than she had expected, the color of an old trumpet, and it wore a felt hat someone had given it years ago and that it had never once taken off.

"Patterns don't lie," it said, without looking up.

It let one drop fall. The ink opened on the water into a ring, and the ring into rings, and Ryo leaned over them the way her grandmother used to lean over the Sunday crossword. Lina waited. The courtyard smelled of wet limestone. Somewhere a grackle was doing its rusty-gate impression.

"Your bins are light," Ryo said.

She hadn't told it anything. "How do you—"

"Everyone's are." It touched the water with the tip of the dropper, and the rings leaned, slowly, toward one side of the dish. "It starts underground. Near the river."

---

They found the hatch at dusk, under the muscadine on the bank below the old Holly Street plant, where nobody went because there was nothing there. Iron, rusted to the color of the vines around it. Ryo set its dish on the hatch, dropped ink, and waited for the water to settle. Lina, who had not planned on being part of any of this, held the flashlight.

"A ladder," Ryo said. "Worn in the middle of every rung. Someone uses it every night."

Lina worked her knife into the latch and leaned. The hatch came up with a sound like a held breath let go.

---

The tunnel smelled of damp earth, and under the earth, of something she couldn't name until she put her palm on the wall and it came away smelling like the inside of a new car. The passage opened into a room as long as a city block, lit by tubes that buzzed. Leaves were stacked to the ceiling in clean bales. Vines on spools. Soil in bags with a logo she didn't recognize.

She picked up a leaf. It was a good leaf: the right green, veined, a little waxy, a little dusty at the tip. Ryo held it up to its lens.

"Look at the middle," it said.

There was a seam running down it, fine as a hair, where two halves had been pressed together.

"Nothing that grows has a seam."

Voices at the far end. They crouched behind the bales. The people who came in wore no masks and carried no weapons, only the good canvas jackets you buy for fieldwork and never take into a field. They gathered at a table with a map spread over it. Lina caught pieces. Phase one. By spring. The word replacement, said fondly, the way you might say the name of a child.

When they had gone, Ryo went to the table, and Lina went after it. The map was Austin, every street and creek of it, and every garden in the city had been marked with a small, neat X. The rooftop beds on Seventh. The lot on Chicon. The school plots. Her mother's raised boxes on Cesar Chavez, the ones she had helped build out of pallets the summer she was twelve.

Ryo made a record the only way it knew how. It set the dish on the map and let three drops fall, and the ink spread across the water and found the Xs underneath, one by one, as if they were heavier than the paper around them.

"Patterns don't lie," it said quietly, as if apologizing to someone.

---

By morning the pattern was everywhere. Ryo had laid a sheet of paper on the water and lifted the ink off whole, and then done it again, and again, a thousand times, and the prints went up on the co-op boards and the library doors and into lunch boxes, and people who had never read a map in their lives stood in front of them and found their own gardens.

Lina's Tuesday route came back heavy the next week. She weighed every bin herself, twice.

She kept one of the leaves. It sits on the shelf above her sink, still perfectly green after a year, and some mornings, filling the kettle, she catches herself checking whether it has grown. Once, she would swear, it had.