At twenty-five, Finn stood under a site shelter and watched heavy excavators dig through mud all night, tearing out a tangled belt of shrubland that had survived several centuries of storms, so that a start-of-work report could beat the quarterly results. The next morning his manager clapped him on the shoulder and said: stop staring, go back and make the carbon-offset report look good. He walked into the washroom, saw a twenty-five-year-old with a grey face in the mirror, and vomited into the sink. He understood, all at once, that he was no different from the shrubs: pruned, force-ripened, drained, and discarded by the same machine called efficiency and prospects.
A serious lung infection after forty hours of overtime put him in an emergency corridor. With his boss's messages still arriving one after another, Finn pulled the IV from his hand, dropped his staff badge in the medical bin, removed the SIM card from his phone, and climbed onto a refrigerated truck carrying fresh cabbages. He slept for half a month in a half-collapsed old glasshouse at the far end of a small town. When he first stepped barefoot into warm, loose soil and watched a weed split a discarded concrete brick, he hid his face in his hands and found his breath again. He never repaired the broken panes; wild grapevine hangs through the iron dome to this day.