Morning arrived over the Balance Branch carrying something subtly different than the mornings that had preceded it.
The small white flowers that had first appeared near the base of the First Road had continued spreading, though not in the way any botanist would have predicted or explained.
They grew now in cracks along the stone paths, beneath railings that hadn't been touched in years, even near equipment stations that had sat undisturbed since long before any of this began.
Researchers documented the phenomenon with the particular care of people trying to explain something that refused every explanation offered to it. Nothing in the flowers' biology accounted for their spread.
They didn't behave invasively, didn't compete with other growth, didn't follow any pattern of soil composition or sunlight exposure that would normally govern where a plant chose to take root.
