The civic shelter smelled of boiled cabbage, although nobody had cabbage left.
It had settled into the curtains before the first evacuation and survived everything that came afterward. Mara noticed it because she had expected another place full of damp lint and frightened breath. Different buildings kept different pieces of their old lives.
Jonah met them at the side entrance. His sleeve was rolled up, and someone had drawn a short line across his wrist in blue pencil.
“Theo,” he said when Mara looked. “He’s marking people who came back. He knows it washes off.”
Tessa put down her tool bag. Before leaving Candlewake she had moved the spare cot from dark Nine into Five, checked the exit with Keisha, and helped Luis settle beside Keisha and Ben. June had asked to sleep in Seven with Mara. Her folding mattress came out of Eleven; Wren kept Eleven’s other bed. Luis’s old place in Seven was now June’s, not an extra bed created by a new name on the list.
“Does he?”
“He’s trying it out.”
They went in through an ordinary steel door, then stopped at the actual protected threshold three steps beyond it. The outer entrance had been left outside the charged footprint; coats, buckets, and a broken umbrella stood in the gap. Jonah waited for the attendant to acknowledge their visit before bringing them across.
