Sunblind Serpent: The Zodiac Without A House

Marek did not pack much.

The first version of the bag contained enough supplies for several days. Marek removed most of them after weighing it. He did not know how far he would need to travel to find his family. Carrying things for problems he might never encounter would only slow him down and burn all the stamina he needed to find them.

Only two bottles of water were left in his bag, along with packaged food, sterile gauze, disinfectant, adhesive tape, a working flashlight, and one change of clothing.

He also packed a power bank from the nurses’ station. It did not belong to him, but nobody had touched it since the previous shift. He would return it. Probably.

His phone stayed despite being almost useless. The network had appeared several times during the previous light period and disappeared before he could send anything, but the storage still worked. Old photographs remained there, along with several maps of Linden downloaded before Day 367.

The maps were useless for navigation now. Marek kept them anyway. Knowing where something had been could be occasionally useful when trying to understand where it had gone.

Mara’s registration record had not changed. His mother’s ended with the same southwest civilian group and the same pending confirmation. Marek checked both before closing the registry, then watched Henry review another occupied-center patient from the opposite side of the ward¹.

Henry did not need him. Neither did Clara. Cooper probably did, but considerably less than yesterday.

Marek returned to the evacuation diagram he had copied during the previous dark period¹. The western mechanical corridor² remained the obvious route. It connected the exhibition halls to the generator yard, and the temporary quarantine fence opened several times each day for service vehicles. If Marek had only needed to leave a normal building, he would have used it.

The Exhibition Center had stopped being a normal building almost a week ago.

Security had added another checkpoint near the generator yard after two civilians attempted to leave through a service vehicle lane. The movement log had been amended beneath the copy Marek used. Anyone without an external assignment was returned to the interior processing desks. Celeste had been correct about that part. The facility would not authorize him.

Marek spent most of the next hour looking for a better way through the fence before realizing the fence was not the part he should have been studying.

The updated evacuation diagram covered everything above ground. The older maintenance plan did not.

Marek found it taped beside a cabinet near the utility station. Most of the paper had been covered with handwritten corrections since Day 367. Electrical feeds had been crossed out. Two water lines now connected to temporary tanks. A drainage channel beneath the western exhibition halls had been marked with a question mark large enough to cover three original labels.

The line was designated W-14¹. According to the original plan, it began beneath the western loading area, crossed under the generator yard and ended at a municipal inspection chamber² two hundred and twelve meters from the building.

Someone had written a new measurement beside it.

638 M — CAMERA SIGNAL LOST.¹

A second note had been added underneath.

NO TERMINATION FOUND.

Marek checked the scale on the plan twice. The Exhibition Center had not grown four hundred meters.

He took a photograph of the diagram and opened the old map on his phone. The municipal inspection chamber had once sat beside Nasipit Street, a short road beyond the western parking structure. Nasipit Street still existed on the emergency route maps, although half of it now ended against an unfamiliar ridge.

Six hundred thirty-eight meters west of the utility station was different.

Before Day 367, that distance would have placed the inspection camera beneath a residential block.

The block was almost eight kilometers away now.

Marek zoomed out.

West District had shifted upon Earth’s awakening. Not all of it, but enough that roads no longer connected where they used to. The emergency maps treated the change as a surface problem because those were the routes people needed. Nobody seemed particularly concerned about where a maintenance conduit¹ beneath a convention complex now ended.

Marek spent another twenty minutes reading every handwritten note around W-14. Maintenance had sent an inspection crawler¹ into the conduit twice. The first attempt returned distorted video after three hundred meters. The second continued beyond six hundred before the signal disappeared. Neither team had entered physically. The crawler had disappeared inside a tunnel that was not leaking, flooding or interfering with anything important. With several thousand civilians and half the building already developing problems of its own, nobody had gone after it.

Marek agreed with their priorities. He also appreciated them. The access hatch was inside the facility. Whatever waited at the other end might not be.

He copied the maintenance notes into his notebook and returned to the ward. Henry, Clara and Cooper were still working. Nobody had attempted an uncontrolled intake¹ while he was gone. A nurse had added another page of observations beside Devin’s bed, including the exact times the black center moved. Marek checked them, corrected one entry, then stopped himself before reaching for the rest of the stack.

Cooper noticed the bag beneath the table several minutes later. His attention remained there long enough that Marek stopped pretending he had not.

"..."

"You’re actually going," Cooper said.

"Yes."

Henry looked up from the records. Clara stopped writing.

For several seconds, neither of them said anything. Henry’s attention eventually moved from the bag to the procedures spread across the table, then to the transparent Stillglass over his own Mark.

"The Seals," he said.

Marek knew what he meant.

"You weren’t only preparing us for the ward."

"No."

Henry remained quiet for a moment. The procedures, the practice, and the three Stillglass Seals had all been necessary regardless of whether Marek stayed. They simply had another purpose now that the bag was sitting beneath the table.

Clara glanced at it again but said nothing.

Marek took the two family registration pages from his notebook and placed them on the table. There was little point hiding the reason anymore.

Mara had last been registered west. Their mother had gone southwest. The records were old enough that either could have moved again, but waiting for another courier had already produced two periods of darkness without an update.

Henry read the pages and returned them. "Which one first?"

"Mara."

Marek did not explain. Mara was fourteen and had been transferred to a facility without either of them. His mother, at least, had been travelling with a civilian group when she was last registered. Between the two, Mara came first.

Marek trusted his mother to manage longer on her own.

Clara added several medical supplies to Marek’s bag even after he pointed out that he already had most of them. Henry checked the flashlight Marek had packed, discovered that it no longer worked, and replaced it with one from the ward.

Henry remained beside the table afterward. For a moment, Marek thought he had forgotten something, but Henry reached into his wallet instead and removed a photograph that had been folded once through the middle.

Marek recognized the young man immediately.

Henry’s son.

The photograph was different from the one Henry had shown him before. This one had been taken outside what looked like a university building. Henry stood beside him with one hand resting on his shoulder. His son was smiling at whoever had taken the picture. Henry was not, although Marek suspected that had more to do with the camera than the company.

Henry held the photograph out. "Keep it."

Marek looked at him. Henry did not explain why, but he did not need to. Marek took the photograph and studied the young man’s face more carefully than he had the first time. The shape of his eyes, his hair, the line of his jaw. Anything that might remain recognizable if he happened to see him somewhere else.

Henry watched him for a while before asking, "What are you doing?"

"Remembering him."

Something in Henry’s expression shifted, but he only nodded.

Marek placed the photograph inside his notebook beside Mara’s and his mother’s records. He had no reason to expect Henry’s son to be anywhere near Linden. Before Day 367, that would have made carrying the picture almost pointless. Now, Marek was preparing to follow a utility passage that had already become longer than the building containing it.

Distance had stopped being a convincing reason.

Henry glanced at the notebook after Marek closed it. "You don’t have to look for him."

"I know."

"You already have enough people to find," Henry said.

Marek adjusted the bag on the table. "If I see him, I won’t walk past him."

Henry remained quiet for a moment before reaching for the flashlight and pushing it farther inside Marek’s bag. "Then don’t lose the flashlight either."

"I wasn’t planning to."

"You weren’t planning to pack a broken one either."

Marek had no useful response to that.

Cooper searched his pockets after that and eventually pulled out a sealed packet of crackers.

Marek looked at it.

"I already packed food."

"I noticed."

Cooper continued holding it out.

Marek took the crackers and added them to the bag.

The public-address system announced another personnel rotation. Marek used the movement around the ward to leave for the western halls without drawing attention. The route looked almost identical to the one he had copied earlier, but Marek passed the turn leading to the generator yard without slowing down.

The pressure behind his ear returned.

"You missed it," Celeste said.

"No."

"The service corridor is behind you."

"I know."

Marek continued downstairs.

The utility access sat behind a storage room filled with folded partitions, broken display stands and unused event equipment. Someone had moved a metal shelf in front of the hatch after the second inspection attempt. Marek removed the smaller boxes first, then pulled the shelf far enough aside to reach the circular handle.

Cold air entered when Marek opened the hatch. The smell of wet concrete, rust and stagnant water came with it, replacing the disinfectant and recycled air of the Exhibition Center almost immediately.

He turned on the flashlight.

The conduit was wide enough for a maintenance worker to walk through without crouching. Thick pipes ran along one side of the wall, their surfaces damp from condensation before disappearing into the darkness ahead. Water had collected along the edge of the floor, although most of the passage remained dry.

Marek stayed near the entrance for several seconds and listened. Water dripped somewhere farther inside. Nothing else moved.

The temperature was lower than it had been inside the building, but not enough to explain how cold the air coming through the passage had felt when he opened the hatch.

Marek aimed the flashlight farther ahead.

He still could not see where the conduit ended.

Marek stepped inside and closed the hatch.

Celeste had stopped speaking.

He followed the conduit west.

At two hundred and twelve meters, there was no municipal inspection chamber. At three hundred, the concrete walls changed.

Somewhere after four hundred, the pipes ended against a seam where two completely different structures had been forced together. Exhibition Center concrete stopped at an uneven line. White ceramic tile continued beyond it.

Marek remained there for several seconds before crossing. An old advertisement panel appeared farther ahead. Then a metal bench bolted to the wall.

The passage widened.

His flashlight crossed a faded route map protected behind cracked plastic.

Marek raised the light.

The map belonged to Linden’s old transit system.

He knew the station name before he finished reading it.

WEST DISTRICT CENTRAL.

Marek opened his notebook and checked the distance.

Roughly four hundred and forty meters.

Before Day 367, West District Central had been 8.2 kilometers from the Exhibition Center.

Marek looked back toward the tunnel behind him.

He had found a way out. West District Central had once been more than eight kilometers away.

Marek had reached it in less than half a kilometer.