The warehouse in North Jakarta did not have air conditioning, and by 2 PM the heat had turned the faded blue tarp into a soft, warm island. Hana, Ethan, and Maya had not left. Neither had the twenty-three families. What had started as a circle of stools had become something else, a working table without a table, where Ibu Laras's log, Maya's diagram, and Hana's eye-filled squares lay side by side, three different ways of asking the same question.
Pak Karim's soil sample, the gray one from near the canal, was now in the center, not as an accusation but as a case study. Around it, the twelve leaves with paper tags had been rearranged, not by sensor number, but by family, by plot, by the green ink that had been there all along.
"We have been wrong about what the sensor is for," Ibu Laras sa
