Tuesday, the twenty-sixth of April 2050, 7:40 in the morning, Dale's milk house in Tremont.

The door is propped with a cinder block because the drying oven runs hot, and the radio on the shelf is giving soybean basis to nobody. Dale has the sheet face down on the steel counter, the way he always has it, so Janelle Woith has to turn it over herself. He says it's so she reads the number before she reads his face. She thinks it's so he doesn't have to watch her read it.

TAZ-QAPP-001. Her half of Gary Holtz's split, the first permanence core the district ever ran under its own plan, the one she and YardDesk's accredited sampler cut lengthwise in a tray on the twelfth with Gary drinking coffee on his tailgate.

Inorganic C (TIC) 0-15 cm: 0.03% (method LOD 0.02%). Total C 2.41%. pH (1:1 water) 6.71.

"November you had fizz," Dale says. "I had fizz too. That's not fizz anymore."

Three hundredths of a percent, one hundredth over the line where the method stops being able to tell you anything. It reads like nothing. It reads like the lime is gone from the top six inches of Gary's north quarter, and that is how she reads it, standing there.

That's what Gary bought, in the end: crushed rock that reacts with the soil and leaves. The whole market is one long argument about where it goes once it's left. Down the profile, still as carbonate, waiting. Out the tile as bicarbonate in the water, which is the version that gets paid. Or straight up as CO2, off the acid in a field that's been in corn and beans since before anybody here was born, which is the version nobody prints on a brochure. Dale has a name for that acid, and he says it the way he'd say a neighbor's name. "Your anhydrous." A hundred years of nitrogen turning to nitric acid in the top six inches. Lime that meets nitric acid gives off its CO2 and takes nothing out of the air. Lime that meets carbonic acid leaves as bicarbonate, and that's the only version that removes anything. Even that's a mix down here. Below about six and a third the carbonic stays mostly carbonic and goes back up as gas. At 6.71 on a row-crop quarter, he says, bet on the anhydrous. Bet, not know.

"Can you tell which?"

"Not from a core." He taps the counter with the back of a pen. "From your pipe. If it went out as bicarbonate, Gary's tile should've run higher alkalinity this winter than Bauer's. Did you run alkalinity at Holtz?"

She didn't. She knows exactly why she didn't, and she says it anyway, because Dale likes the reasons said out loud. Gary's north quarter doesn't drain to an outlet she samples. It drains to a county main that also takes three other farms, a hog building, and the Dollar General's roof on Route 9. Any bicarbonate from Gary's lime went down that main with everybody's everything, and the hog building alone would swamp it. Manure ammonium and its own alkalinity, every time it rains. One quarter section of lime wouldn't make a ripple on that.

But there's a junction box. She's lifted its lid once, two summers ago, for a mapping job: a concrete riser at the corner of Gary's north fence where his two laterals come in before they meet the main. Sample his laterals there, and upstream and downstream on the main, and the hog building becomes a background instead of a wall.

Dale nods like that's a fine answer to a different question. "Higher than what, though? You got no Holtz alkalinity from before he spread. Bauer's a different drainage. That's two fields, not a before." He lets that sit. "So the core says it left."

"And the pipe that would say where is nobody's pipe. Except at the junction box, before it's everybody's."

She writes it on the clipboard and then on card twelve, in pencil, at his counter, while the oven ticks. 168. LIME GONE FROM 0-15 CM. FATE UNKNOWN. Down, tile, or air, and three farms and a store roof between her and the answer. 1.1 hours, eighteen miles, gray.

On the way out he hands her the empty sample sleeve and says, "Ohio's going to have a different number." It's not a prediction. It's Dale telling her he knows how this goes.

Tuesday, the third of May, 10:05 in the morning, her desk at the district office.

Wendell forwards it with no message, only the subject line, which is how Wendell tells her something is above his pay grade and also, somehow, below it.

ILLINOIS FOIA REQUEST — Tazewell SWCD. Requester: Terraline Recovery Services (automated records agent). Request: all District Control sample data, field notes, and chain-of-custody records for tile outlets SCHAEFER-17, BAUER-DLV-4, HARTSBURG-1, 2049-08-01 to present, in machine-readable format (CSV preferred).

She reads it twice and then reads the statute on the other monitor twice. Five business days, for an ordinary request. Records produced in the form in which they're kept. Then section 3.1, which she has never had a reason to open: a request for a commercial purpose has to say so, and the public body gets twenty-one business days and can charge for it. A credit vendor building a baseline is about as commercial as a purpose gets. The agent's form has a box for that. The box is empty.

She walks it to Wendell. Wendell, for once, reads the whole thing. By noon the county attorney has sent the agent one paragraph asking it to certify purpose, and by 12:04 the agent has re-filed, box checked, with an apology that is grammatically perfect and means nothing. Twenty-one business days.

The display-only consents she spent the winter getting signed, in a shed, at a sale barn, from a dentist through his tenant, say the readings can't be sold. The attorney says that's an argument under 7(1)(g), information obtained from a person under a claim it's proprietary, and he'll make it, and he'll probably lose, because the district took the readings itself and the owners only let it stand in the ditch. The bottles are public. They were always public. She just never pictured anyone asking for them in CSV, much less an agent that has never stood in a ditch.

The form they're kept in is card twelve. She thinks for one warm second about scanning it, coffee ring and all, and sending a PDF of a pencil. Then she thinks about Wendell explaining that to a county attorney, and she doesn't.

She does the export. Two hundred and six rows. Then she opens the file in a plain text editor and types the method note across the top, eleven lines, each one starting with a pound sign so a parser skips it and a person can't:

✦ ✦ ✦

THESE ARE DISTRICT CONTROLS, NOT VENDOR DATA.

✦ ✦ ✦

SCHAEFER-17 TILE MAIN REPLACED 2050-01-24. POST-REPAIR SULFATE/ACIDITY PULSE IS NOT A BASELINE.

✦ ✦ ✦

PRE-2050-04-01 SAMPLES: DISPLAYED, NOT ACCEPTED (YD 44817).

✦ ✦ ✦

OWNERS CONSENTED TO DISPLAY ONLY.

And so on, down through what black and gray hours mean, the bucket-and-stopwatch flows, and which bottles went to whose lab.

Then, because she knows what a header is worth to a machine, she adds a column. FLAG, at the right edge of every row: PRE-ACCEPT, POST-REPAIR, DISPLAY-ONLY, sometimes two of them. The district has kept that flag on its own sheet since February. The statute says the form in which it's kept.

Devin Rauch stops by her cubicle on his way to the coffee pot. He's YardDesk's Peoria tech, and the district lets him use the conference room on Tuesdays because it's cheaper than a lease and he brings donuts. She tells him.

"The agent'll strip those," he says. "First thing it does. Drop comment lines."

"Then it'll have to strip them on purpose. And it can't drop the FLAG column without dropping the rows it came for."

"It's not a person, Jan. It doesn't do anything on purpose." He says it kindly, like he's explaining weather.

She saves the file. "If the flag goes missing in their baseline, it'll show in their own schema. That's where I want it to show."

The attorney's 7(1)(g) letter goes out the second week, and the agent's answer comes back in four minutes citing the district's own sampling plan, and the attorney calls Wendell and says what he said he'd say. She sends the file on business day twenty, from the district account, with Wendell cc'd so nobody can say she freelanced it. The auto-reply comes back in under a second, thanking her for her cooperation and telling her the records will be "processed to support accurate baseline determination." She logs the request number on the card so the next person who asks knows somebody asked first. 169. 1.6 hours, gray.

Tuesday, the tenth, 5:30 in the morning.

Storm thirteen came in overnight, nine-tenths of an inch on planted ground, warm, steady, the kind of rain that makes farmers stand in shop doorways with their arms crossed looking pleased and worried at once. Ken Schaefer's beans are in and just cracking the crust. From the road, if she squints, she can see the rows as a faint green stitching. The ditch along the Delavan blacktop is the color of chocolate milk where somebody upstream wasn't in no-till.

Bauer-DLV #4 first. EC 540. pH 7.44. The kitchen clock.

Schaefer #17. She wades in, sets the five-gallon pail under the new black tail, and counts. Thirty-eight seconds to fill, three seconds faster than storm twelve on a bit less rain. The corrugated pipe drains that pocket better than cracked clay did, the way she and Dale argued it would back in February, which means every concentration she writes this spring is riding on more water than the old pipe ever carried.

EC 870. Storm twelve was 1,040.

pH 7.02. Storm twelve was 6.94.

Fe(II) under the first shade of the vial.

The pulse is still coming down, three storms in a row now, concentration falling while the flow holds up, so the load is falling slower than the EC is. And for the first time since January the pH at the pipe has a seven in front of it. She tapes #17-S13, filtered and raw, black hours, and stands there for a minute with ditch water running over the toe of her boot, looking at a number that's doing what she said it would do.

Across the field the YardDesk pod at Ken's settling pool blinks green. It reads 7.4. It read 7.4 in February, when the pipe was at 6.8 and the pool was sitting in the sun breathing everything off before the pod got a taste. The pod's been right all spring for the wrong reason, and now the pipe is catching up to it. On the dashboard, in a month, the two lines will meet, and anyone who looks will think the pod knew.

Hartsburg last. The cattle panel across the dentist's headwall is wired shut again, with new wire, shiny, twisted with pliers better than hers. There's a zip-top bag hung on the panel with a note inside on the same prescription pad, the little frowning tooth in the corner.

CALL FIRST. I'LL OPEN IT. —D.

And a phone number.

She calls from the headwall at 9:15, standing in reed canary grass up to her hips. The dentist answers on the second ring and says, "Oh, the district," like he's been waiting. He tells her to go ahead and cut it, he'll wire it back Saturday, he likes having a reason to drive out. He asks what the water's doing. She tells him. He says, "Huh," and then, "Good, I guess?" and she says that's about where she is too.

EC 690. pH 7.29. Fe(II) about 0.3, and the orange skin on the concrete lip thinner than in March. HB-S2, gray.

Three uploads from the cab with the heater on her socks. Under the new rules, all three are eligible: after April 1, structured District Control form, accepted plan. Ochoa's YardDesk ticket closed itself in the night. It feels like nothing. The dots look exactly the same as they looked in February, when they were decoration. She'd pictured something. A color change. A checkmark. Ochoa's ticket history just says RESOLVED, with no human name on it, and she can't tell if that's a person being brief or no person at all. 170. Five point two hours, seventy-one miles, 1.7 black, 3.5 gray.

Tuesday, the seventeenth, 3:20 in the afternoon, the district office lobby.

Gary comes in with two sheets of paper in a plastic sleeve, the way he carries his crop insurance forms, and lays them on the counter where the tree-sale catalog used to sit before the tree sale moved online.

Left sheet: the Ohio lab, YardDesk's half. TIC 0-15 cm, 0.11%.

Right sheet: Dale's. 0.03%.

The same core, the sleeves say. The same stainless knife, two inches apart. Except YardDesk's half went to Ohio in a bag with four more cores from the flagged pins, and Dale's half went alone.

"Which one's right?" Gary says.

She knows what he wants it to be. YardDesk's number leaves more lime in the ground, which under methods v4.2 counts as unreacted feedstock still weathering, which the fleet model treats as carbon not yet removed but still coming. A future. Dale's number says the reaction's done and the only open question is where it went, which is not a future anybody pays for in advance.

Before she answers she does the sum on the back of his sleeve, because Gary will want something he can hold. Top six inches, roughly 1,950 tonnes of soil a hectare. Point one one percent inorganic carbon is about two tonnes of carbon a hectare, which is about eighteen tonnes of lime. Eight tons an acre.

"What did you spread?"

"Two and a half."

"Then Ohio's number is more lime than you put on."

Then she runs Dale's the same way, because she'd be a hypocrite not to, and the pencil slows down. Point oh three percent. Point six tonnes of carbon a hectare. About five tonnes of lime. A little over two tons an acre.

Out of two and a half.

She looks at it the way Dale must have looked at it in April, face down. One hundredth of a percent over the line sounds like nothing, and in that much dirt one hundredth of a percent is most of a truckload. If it was worked in and the field had no carbonate of its own before, and a 6.71 bean quarter shouldn't, then eighty-five, ninety percent of what Gary paid for is still sitting in the top six inches.

"Neither one says it left," she says. "Ohio says there's more there than you bought. Dale says almost all of it is still there."

"So it didn't work."

"It's working slow. That's what it does the first year. Nobody's paying for slow yet."

"Maybe neither," she says. "A lime streak's lumpy. Half a core can catch a chunk the other half missed. Two labs, two methods. Ohio acidifies different from Dale. Their detection limit might be different too. I don't know it."

"So what do I do?"

"Ask both for the method sheet. Ask Ohio for their LOD. And next time we take three cores, not one, and split all three."

Gary looks at the sheets for a long time. He has big hands, and a thumbnail split by the planter that's been growing out since April.

"If I'd only had theirs, I'd be happy."

"Yeah."

"If I'd only had yours, I'd be mad."

"Yeah."

"I don't know what I am with both."

She pulls card twelve out of her shirt pocket, finds 168, LIME GONE FROM 0-15 CM, and puts one pencil line through it, not enough to hide it. Underneath: 168 WRONG. DID NOT DO THE SUM. 0.03% = ~2.2 T/AC IN TOP 6 IN OF 2.5 SPREAD. MOST STILL THERE (IF WORKED IN, NO NATIVE CARBONATE). Gary watches her do it and doesn't say anything, which is a kindness.

She photocopies them side by side on the big machine that jams on anything thicker than paper, puts the copy on her clipboard under the clip, and hands back the sleeve. He leaves it on the counter anyway. Two minutes later he's back from the parking lot for it, half jogging, and it's the first time in eleven years she's seen Gary Holtz hurry. 171. Point eight hours, gray.

Tuesday, the twenty-fourth, 6:15 in the evening, Ken's shop.

The beans are up. The planter is washed and parked along the back wall with its row markers folded up like a heron's legs. The whiteboard by the parts counter has been wiped since April. Where it used to say TERRALINE? it now says NO LIME 2050, in blue, underlined twice, with Ken's initials.

"I want that on your record," Ken says. "Same as you'd post if I did it."

She hadn't thought of that. She'd promised to post a purchase. Nobody posts the purchase that didn't happen. But Terraline's agent will have her CSV in June, eleven pound-signed lines and all, and its model has a lime-shaped hole in Ken's future it's been trying to sell him into since March. If nothing on any record says NO, the model is free to read the quiet as MAYBE. In a year somebody will find a credit built on a recovery that happened by itself.

She opens the District Control form on her phone at his desk, between a seed-corn calendar and a coffee can of bolts. There's no field for owner declined treatment. METHOD is still the only field that takes sentences, so she puts it there:

The form won't submit without a bottle ID. She tries NONE and it says INVALID SAMPLE. She tries N/A, which gets the same answer in red. She types #17-S13, the bottle from two weeks ago, and the form takes it, and stamps the note with the bottle's date. May tenth.

Which means any parser that joins on sample date will file Ken's decision two weeks before he made it, ahead of data he never saw. She deletes it and starts over with the date in front, where even a machine that reads only the first field will trip on it:

DECLARED 5/24/50 (NOT SAMPLE DATE). NO LIME APPLIED AT #17 TRENCH OR FIELD, 2050 SEASON, PER OWNER (K.S.). POST-REPAIR DECLINE AT #17 IS UNTREATED. ATTACHED TO #17-S13 ONLY BECAUSE THE FORM REQUIRES A BOTTLE.

So now the note about nothing hangs off the last real bottle, and says so. She decides that's honest enough.

On the dashboard Ken's triangle stays orange. The caption under it still says SITE CHANGE (OWNER-REPORTED), the dropdown label Devin was proud of, the one that wrote the district out of its own repair. For once it's true. This part, the owner reported.

Ken reads it over her shoulder, lips moving a little.

"Untreated," he says. "Sounds like a disease."

"It means nobody gets paid for it getting better."

"Good," Ken says, and turns off the shop lights with her still in the chair.

Ken's footsteps go out to the yard and the screen door slaps. She sits there in the dark for a second with the phone lighting her hands, then writes 172 by that light. Point seven hours, twenty-two miles. She puts the hours down black, because Ken asked for it on his record and that makes it his work. Then she drives home past Gary's north quarter, where most of the lime still is, and nobody can say where the rest went.