Chapter 104: Hospital Cloth

Marek returned to Amara’s records that evening.

The official entry had not changed.

AMARA VALE. LAST REPORTED MOVEMENT: SOUTHWEST CIVILIAN GROUP. CURRENT LOCATION: PENDING CONFIRMATION.

It was old enough to be almost useless now. Mara had given him something better before leaving. Their mother had reached the Botanical Institute from outside the normal public routes, spoken with Venielle, made her position clear, and then left alone because she was still trying to find Marek.

That changed the search.

Amara had started choosing her own routes, slipping past registration points instead of moving wherever the civilian group went. Marek suspected Celeste knew something about it, although getting a useful answer from her had never been simple. Moreover, whenever Venielle was around, Celeste had kept strangely quiet.

Beyond the institute, shelter lamps burned at uneven intervals between damaged buildings.

"You could just tell me where my mother is," Marek said.

"No."

"Can you not tell me, or will you not?"

"That depends on the moment."

Marek frowned. The answer implied more than she had probably intended, but Celeste had already made a habit of giving him information in pieces too small to use.

"That is intentionally vague."

"Yes."

The others were gathered closer to the institute gate, checking supplies and the route ahead. Rhovan stood several meters from Marek and looked over when Marek started speaking to nobody he could see.

"Are you talking to me?"

Marek ignored him.

"My mother already found Mara. She’s looking for me. Why am I not supposed to look for her?"

Celeste did not answer.

Marek waited a few seconds longer, but the pressure behind his ear remained quiet.

Once they were ready to move, Marek changed the search method.

Names had failed often enough that Marek stopped relying on registration records and started looking for Amara’s habits instead. His mother had spent years working in hospital laundry and could not ignore contaminated cloth, badly separated linens, or anything that could spread through careless handling.

Nadia asked shelter workers whether a faint-gold-haired woman had reorganized bedding or corrected washing procedures. Eren checked supply records for unusual changes in blanket use. Silas looked for places where someone had clearly helped without appearing in the visitor logs.

The method sounded ridiculous until it worked.

At one shelter, every blanket had been divided into clean, questionable, and visibly contaminated piles. Three different knots had been tied into the corners so workers could tell them apart even under poor lighting. Nobody remembered who had started the system, but one volunteer remembered a tired woman in a gray knitted jacket showing them how during the previous dark period.

At another site, someone had written: DO NOT MIX HOSPITAL CLOTH WITH SHELTERBEDDING beside the wash station in thick black marker.

The marker made the letters rougher than usual, but Marek recognized his mother’s handwriting immediately and photographed it.

Rhovan studied the warning on the wall. "You are tracking your mother through laundry."

"Yes."

Rhovan looked at the separated bedding, then back at the writing. "It appears to be working."

Marek accepted that as the end of the observation.

The trail became more convincing when Silas began looking for absences instead of entries. At one shelter, the number of food portions handed out was one higher than the number of registered occupants. Another had listed every visitor except the woman several workers remembered spending nearly an hour reorganizing the wash area.

Amara was visible to people, and at the same time, almost absent from the systems around them.

"Your mother is deliberately avoiding records," Silas said as they compared the shelters on a map spread across the hood of an abandoned car.

"Yes."

"But she isn’t avoiding people."

’Well, she could not avoid them completely.’

Amara still stopped to help. She corrected contamination handling, asked whether anyone had seen Marek, then left before somebody thought to record where she was going next.

Rhovan tapped one of the marks. "People remember someone who made their day easier."

Marek thought of the laundry staff at Linden Central Hospital. His mother had probably been doing the same thing for years without ever thinking of it as strategy.

Rafe improved the search by ignoring the roads civilians were expected to use.

He worked from the edges of the map, marking alleys, service lanes, footbridges, loading passages, and narrow connections between blocks that avoided registration points.

Marek watched him connect three blocks through a path none of the current maps showed cleanly.

"You were already good at this before Awakening," Marek said.

Rafe kept drawing. "Yes."

"Why?"

The pencil slowed.

After a few seconds, Rafe said he had survived a plane crash when he was a child.

His mother had gotten his belt open first. He remembered her hands shaking while she pushed him toward a break in the damaged cabin and kept telling him to crawl. Rafe did because she told him to, and when he reached the other side, he turned around expecting to see her coming after him.

She was still inside.

For years afterward, that was the part he remembered most clearly. Not the impact. Not the smoke. Just waiting for his mother to appear through the same opening.

But she never did.

He was fortunate enough to survive that plane crash, but there had been no stable home waiting for him after that. He moved through temporary shelters until even those stopped being temporary, then through streets and districts where knowing which alley opened behind a market meant knowing whether he might eat that day. The first time he was arrested, he had stolen food.

Rafe gave a small shrug when he finished. "Navigation kept me fed."

He glanced at the road ahead.

"Sagittarius just made the habit unfair."

Rafe spoke about the crash in the same flat voice he used when describing broken roads. Marek did not ask what his mother’s last words had been. Rafe had already given him enough.

The search continued southwest until a collapsed section of the district forced them east, then southwest again through a service road lined with dark storefronts and shattered windows.

By then, Marek had noticed a pattern that made him uneasy.

Amara did not seem to be fleeing him. She kept reaching places he had recently passed, asking about him, then leaving too little information for him to work backward toward her.

Celeste remained connected regardless of how far they walked. Marek used the quieter stretches of road to keep testing that connection.

"You’ve never lost range."

"No."

"You knew Mara was safe before I did."

"Sometimes."

"You knew what Black Errancy was. You know Prime terminology. And you’ve told me we’ve met before."

"Yes."

Marek waited, but Celeste gave him nothing else.

Rhovan glanced toward him. "You have been doing that for a while."

"Doing what?"

"Having conversations with someone who does not appear to be here."

Marek looked at him. "Yes."

Rhovan waited.

Marek kept walking without answering.

Rhovan studied him for another few seconds before asking, "Should I be concerned?"

"Not currently."

"That answer concerns me."

Marek ignored him.

Celeste knew things Marek had no explanation for, remained connected across distances that should have mattered, and refused enough questions to make every answer create another one. None of that told him who she was, and it told him even less about what she knew of Amara.

Near the end of the dark period, they reached a civic center being used as an overflow shelter. Rows of folding beds filled the old court beneath emergency lamps, and the air smelled faintly of disinfectant and damp cloth.

An older woman working near the laundry tables recognized Amara’s photograph immediately.

"She was here two days ago," she said. "She was alone and asked whether any Ophiuchus Astrants had passed through, but she wouldn’t use the registration desk."

Marek leaned closer. "Where did she go?"

"Wouldn’t say." The woman looked at the photograph again. "She looked different, though."

His attention sharpened. "Different how?"

"Not her face. The way she stood."

A childhood memory returned without warning.

Amara stood in their kitchen during an argument with Tomas. Marek could not remember what they had been fighting about. What remained was a small change near the end of it: his mother’s shoulders settled, her posture straightened, and whatever frustration had been there seemed to disappear.

She had not raised her voice or done anything Marek could have explained afterward. She had simply seemed different for a few minutes, enough that the memory had stayed with him even though most of the argument had not.

He had never thought much about it.

The memory faded as quickly as it had returned.

The shelter worker pointed toward the southwest road.

Marek had spent more than a week finding Mara because Mara kept moving away from public systems. His mother was doing something worse.

Amara appeared to be moving toward him while refusing to let him determine where she was coming from.