The group began speaking among themselves in quick soft phrases. The language was close enough to rhythm that Elias kept thinking meaning would break through if he listened harder, but it slid away every time. One of them offered him a piece of fruit from a small woven sling. Another circled the machine at an easy distance, admiring it the way one might admire a strange sculpture left in a park.

"No," Elias said. He took a step after that one at once. "Stay away from that. If the field isn't fully dead—"

They drifted back from his tone more than his words, exchanging bright looks, not offended, only lightly surprised. And just as quickly, just as gently, their attention began to slide. He saw it happen in real time. Curiosity thinning. Focus loosening. The impossible fact of him fading from them the way a cloud shadow might fade from grass.

"Wait," he said.

A young woman with a wreath of pale leaves in her hair paused closest to him. Her face held an open, easy softness that in another place might have looked like trust. Here it looked like absence. She reached up and brushed the dirt on his sleeve with the back of her fingers, smiling as if to comfort a child after a fall.

"Come," she said in a word so old and changed he barely caught it.

Then she turned toward the deeper garden paths, and the others went with her, laughing lightly among themselves, already half forgetting the man who had fallen out of history into their perfect afternoon.