SOLACE

Panel 1.1

FULL-BLEED, underwater. Black Puget Sound, total dark except a rain-stippled membrane of surface far above, dim as a far-off ceiling. Nothing else in frame. The water is the whole world.

Panel 1.2

CLOSE at the waterline: only Ian's eyes and the top of his scarred, bald skull break the surface. Ice-blue eyes fixed on the dark shore. Rain walks across the water around him. He swims around the Alki barrier the way other men walk around a locked gate — patiently, without comment.

Panel 1.3

His hand rises out of the black water and takes hold of the seawall's wet edge — tattooed forearm, scarred knuckles, a knife sheathed at his belt below the surface, the shape of a damaged pistol against his back.

Panel 1.4

The shore from the water: the Alki beachfront after dark, shuttered and drowned-looking. No streetlights. No windows. One headland of black buildings against a blacker sky.

Panel 2.1

Ian hauls himself over the seawall in the rain, soaked through, water sheeting off him. Seawall glass and saltwater open shallow cuts across his knuckles and knees as he comes over. He doesn't notice. He catalogues the pain the way he catalogues everything: later, maybe. Never now.

Panel 2.2

CLOSE: his boots on wet concrete. He stands still a full panel, dripping, listening. Rain on awnings. Water in a storm drain. Something far off that might be a gull and might not be anything alive.

Panel 2.3

He checks the damaged pistol with the economy of a man checking a stove he already knows is off. One look. Away.

Panel 2.4

WIDE: Ian alone on the empty promenade, small against the shuttered beachfront, the broken bridge a black absence beyond the point. His white tank is already grey with salt and rain. This panel is the before picture.

Panel 3.1

The Alki boardwalk, deserted, rain-polished. Shuttered cafés, a fish-and-chips stand with its menu still chalked, bicycles locked to a rail nobody will unlock. Everything preserved and everything abandoned.

Panel 3.2

Between the shuttered storefronts, shapes drift — infected, moving with the terrible patience of people who have nowhere to be. A jogger's reflective vest. A barista's apron. A ferry crew hi-vis.

Panel 3.3

Ian moves along the lee of the storefronts, low, unhurried, reading the street the way he used to read rooms: exits, sightlines, weight. His hand never quite goes to the knife. Restraint is a physical skill and he is practicing it in the rain.

Panel 3.4

A flooded shopfront window: inside, mannequins in summer clothes stand ankle-deep in black water, smiling at the dark. Ian's reflection crosses the glass and does not stop.

Panel 4.1

The ferry terminal, rain through a broken canopy. A small cluster of infected stands in the old queue lanes, swaying in the weather like people waiting for a boat that is late by months.

Panel 4.2

One of the cluster stands apart: a turned crewman in a torn orange vest. The vest is ripped at the shoulder — torn where a running man's hand once grabbed it and held on.

Panel 4.3

Ian, very still, in the rain at the edge of the lanes. The tactical part of him maps the cluster in half a second — and is overruled by something older and less efficient.

Panel 4.4

WIDE: Ian takes the long way around — out into the open rain, exposed, slower — giving the terminal and its crewman a wide, deliberate berth. The cluster does not turn. The vest does not turn.

RAE (radio, later): "You went around. Why?"

Panel 5.1

A beachfront café, dark, chairs up on tables. Rain at the windows. On the counter: a hand-cranked emergency radio, and beside it a dead till, a tip jar with two coins, a child's drawing taped to the register — a house, a sun, figures holding hands.

Panel 5.2

CLOSE: Ian's scarred hand on the crank, turning it in slow, even rotations. The radio coughs static — the sound of a dead band breathing.

Panel 5.3

The radio's dial glow, weak and green-grey. Through the static, a carrier repeats — a broken recorded message, looping out of California Avenue: a call sign, an interval, a fragment of procedure.

RADIO (static, broken): "—peat… Missy's call sign… High Point… any station—"

Panel 5.4

Ian frozen mid-crank, head up, listening the way a man listens at a door in his own house at 3 a.m. The rain, the static, the loop — and under all of it, his own breathing, carefully level.

IAN: "Say it again."

Panel 6.1

The café back room, revealed: a radio desk built from café tables, batteries in a milk crate, antenna wire running up through a cracked vent. RAE MERCER — twenty-four, exhausted, a dispatcher's posture — sits with one headphone cupped to her ear. She has clearly been living in this room.

Panel 6.2

The doorway. Ian fills it, soaked, huge, silent. Rae looks up — and her hand does NOT go to any weapon. It goes, with professional calm, to the transmit key she is deciding whether to press.

RAE: "You're wet through. State your business."

Panel 6.3

CLOSE on the counter radio, still looping its broken carrier. Rae's eyes move from Ian to the radio and back, doing arithmetic no one taught her.

RADIO (static, broken): "—call sign… High Point—"

RAE: "That's her sign. She's alive. High Point."

Panel 6.4

Two-shot across the radio desk. The news lands on Ian without moving his face at all — which is how Rae learns that it has moved everything else. The panel holds on the stillness.

IAN: "Where?"

Panel 7.1

HERO IMAGE (above): the café from the street, one warm window burning in a black, rain-drowned block. Weak. Warm. Visible through wet glass a long way off.

Panel 7.2

Inside: the café lit amber-warm at the bulb only — everything else rain-grey. Rae at the window, Ian a shape behind her. Two silhouettes in the only lit room on the boardwalk.

RAE: "Good. Somebody sees that, they know the light stays on."

Panel 7.3

Across the street, high in a dark apartment block: a curtain moves. A face — old, careful — looks down at the café light for a long moment. Then, one floor up from her, a second curtain moves.

Panel 7.4

Ian at the café glass, looking out at the black street and the blacker hillside above it, where High Point's repeater would be if the fog ever lifted.

IAN: "Where?"

RAE: "No road. You'd have to make one."

Panel 8.1

Dawn the color of wet ash. The café, transformed by use: shutters rigged, a rain barrel under the gutter, names and tallies chalked on the menu board. The first warm room on the water.

Panel 8.2

Survivors at the counter — the old woman from the window, a fisherman with a bandaged hand, two teenagers doing excellent impressions of furniture. All of them watching Ian the way you watch weather coming over water.

Panel 8.3

CLOSE: the map on the counter, weighted down by a coffee mug. Ian's finger does not trace routes. It taps, once, at High Point, and stops.

IAN: "What opens?"

RAE: "Nothing. Everything out of Alki is blocked."

IAN: "How many?"

Panel 8.4

Rae, arms folded, unimpressed in a way that is clearly a professional skill. Ian waits. The panel is a standoff between a question and the question behind it.

RAE: "Ask the other one."

IAN: "…"

Panel 9.1

A flooded public bathhouse down the beach, black water to the knee, benches and lockers standing in it like a drowned locker-room of the world before. First aid cabinets mounted high on the far wall.

Panel 9.2

Ian wades the black water without ripples worth mentioning, knife low, moving between the locker rows. His reflection and the room's reflection make a second, inverted bathhouse beneath him.

Panel 9.3

CLOSE: the cabinet open. Antiseptic, sutures, a med pouch — and a child's inflatable armband, still inflated, hooked on the cabinet handle like it was left there yesterday.

Panel 9.4

The bathhouse door from inside: Ian slipping out through a service hatch into the rain as Runner shapes pass the frosted glass beyond, unseeing. The med pouch rides high and dry on his shoulder.

RAE (radio): "Reading you. Come home."

Panel 10.1

Beneath the Alki pier at low tide: a cathedral of barnacled piles, wet sand shining like poured concrete, the Sound gone out and left its floor behind. Ian crosses it in the open, exposed from three sides.

Panel 10.2

A tunnel mouth in the seawall embankment — a storm drain, dark, breathing cold air. Ian crouches, marks it with survey chalk: a line, a number, an arrow. Professional. Unhurried.

Panel 10.3

The second tunnel: something has dragged a gull, a traffic cone, and a child's bicycle halfway into the dark, arranging its life at the threshold. Ian marks this one from further back.

Panel 10.4

The tide coming back in fast sheets over the sand as Ian chalks the third tunnel and steps up onto the seawall rocks, the route closing behind him like a door the ocean keeps.

RAE (radio): "That's the third. Tide's turning."

IAN: "Marked."

Panel 11.1

A small bandit skiff tied at the Alki dock, engine cowl off, fuel cans racked along the gunwale. Two bandits argue over the engine. A third — barely grown, a lookout — stands in the bow with a flare gun and terror doing the job of experience.

Panel 11.2

Ian comes up out of the dark water alongside the skiff — the swimmer again — and takes the stern line in one tattooed hand. The boat shifts. Nobody has noticed. Yet.

Panel 11.3

CLOSE: the lookout, face to face with Ian at arm's length — the boy's flare gun trembling, Ian's empty hands open and visible, at the height of his shoulders, the international sign for a conversation instead of an ending.

IAN: "Run, or watch. Choose."

Panel 11.4

The skiff pulling away into the rain-dark, one fuel can lighter, its crew rowing hard and not looking back. The lookout looks back. Ian stands on the dock with the can, watching them go like a man watching weather leave.

Panel 12.1

Open water off the point: a navigation buoy riding the swell, its bell swinging in the wind — clang, pause, clang — and in the shallows, infected wading steadily toward the sound, drawn like filings to a magnet.

Panel 12.2

Ian swims the buoy line in the dark, knife ready for rope work, the damaged pistol left behind on shore by choice. The buoy looms, barnacled and iron, bell swinging above his head.

Panel 12.3

CLOSE: Ian wedged in the buoy's frame, wrapping the bell's clapper in strips torn from his own shirt, muffling it knot by knot while the swell throws the whole structure around like a toy.

Panel 12.4

The shallows, after: the wading infected stand stalled in the water, heads raised, listening for a sound that has stopped explaining where to go. They drift. They turn, slowly, nowhere in particular.

RAE (radio): "Street's gone quiet."

IAN: "Keep it."

Panel 13.1

A shuttered fish-market freezer, its door chained and its wired-glass porthole fogged from the inside — fogged by breath. Two hands press flat against the glass from within, alive, slow with cold.

Panel 13.2

Ian works the chain and the frozen lock with a fish knife and patience, breath short in the cold rolling off the door. No gunfire. No pry-bar heroics. Small sounds, in a street that punishes loud ones.

Panel 13.3

The door opens on darkness and a man sitting upright against the shelving in a freezer suit of frost — alive, furious about it, dignity intact. Ian gets an arm under him without ceremony.

WORKER: "Took… your time."

IAN: "You're welcome."

Panel 13.4

The freed worker, wrapped in café blankets an hour later, presses something into Ian's hands by way of payment: gloves, a tool roll, and a lock bypass kit in a greasy canvas pouch.

RAE (radio): "That's the whole list, Ian."

Panel 14.1

Two children — siblings, nine and six, matching raincoats two sizes large — need to cross four blocks of open seawall to reach an aunt's barricaded flat. The route is all sightlines and no cover.

Panel 14.2

Ian walks the seawall at a child's pace, the small one riding his shadow exactly, the older one holding the tail of his jacket like a tow rope. His hands stay empty and visible. The damaged pistol stays holstered. That is the whole tactic.

Panel 14.3

A Runner crosses the promenade ahead, mid-stride, hunting something else. Ian simply stops. The children stop inside his stillness the way ducklings stop. The Runner passes. The rain keeps their secret.

Panel 14.4

A barricaded door opening two inches, an aunt's face, then the door wide and the children gone inside like water into a drain. The aunt looks at Ian for a long moment and nods once — not thanks. Recognition.

IAN: "Lock it behind me."

Panel 15.1

The café map again — but now Rae has drawn on it in grease pencil: three routes out of Alki, each ending in a grease-pencil X. The room is quiet. The survivors watch the map the way congregations watch weather vanes.

RAE: "Three ways out. All of them bad. Pick the order."

Panel 15.2

VISION PANEL — THE NEST: a waterfront nest of the infected webbed across the base of the Admiral climb, a fused, breathing barricade of bodies and wreckage at the stairs.

RAE: "Nest on the Admiral stairs. Burn it, the climb opens. That's Admiral — power, pumps, the repeater."

Panel 15.3

VISION PANEL — THE WRECK: an evacuation bus on its side across the Junction ramp, winch cables and wreckage, Runners nesting in the undercarriage dark.

RAE: "The wreck seals the Junction ramp. Winch it aside, California Avenue opens. That's people. Medicine. Roofs."

Panel 15.4

VISION PANEL — THE SLEEPING SHORE: the southern shoreline in total dark, pale Apex shapes sleeping in the tide flats like beached moons — beautiful, enormous, one wrong footfall from the end of the world.

RAE: "Or the shore. Sleeping Apex, all the way to Lincoln Park. Cross quiet, or don't cross at all."

Panel 15.5

Ian standing over the map, rain still drying on him, looking at three X's. The panel gives him the whole frame and no help at all.

Panel 16.1

The café, lamplight, all faces turned toward Ian. Rae leans on the counter with the patience of a woman who has hosted this exact silence before, with other men, about other roads.

RAE: "Before you choose. You should know what it buys you."

Panel 16.2

CLOSE on Rae, lit warm at one side, the radio behind her breathing static. She counts the three roads off on her fingers like departures on a board.

RAE: "Cross the shore like nothing happened — they'll call you a ghost. Open the Junction — a builder. Burn the nest—"

Panel 16.3

Ian's face, ice-blue eyes on the map's first X — the nest, the stairs, the climb above it. Whatever he is deciding, it is not about tactics. The panel can tell. So can Rae.

RAE: "—they'll call you a weapon. First words stick out here, Ian. Choose the word."

Panel 16.4

Ian's tattooed hand comes down flat on the map, over the nest. Not a slam. A signature.

IAN: "The stairs first."

Panel 16.5

The radio desk: Rae keys the mic and speaks into the net, steady as a timetable. Across the room, the old woman from the window crosses her arms and says it to the fisherman, first, like a headline:

RAE (radio): "Alki station. The stairs open at first dark. Pass it on."

SURVIVOR: "The weapon's going up."

Panel 17.1

Dusk, the waterfront stairs at the base of the Admiral climb. The nest fills the stairwell throat — a fused mass of infected and wreckage, shifting, breathing. Below it, the tide flat; above it, the dark of Admiral. Ian stands at the foot of the stairs with a fuel can and the café's last road flare.

Panel 17.2

The flare goes in. Fire takes the nest in a rolling, wet-chemical bloom — the only warm light in the panel, real firelight on wet concrete, on Ian's face, on the stairs.

Panel 17.3

The stairs, mid-fight: Ian holds the choke point alone, shoulder braced into a toppled turnstile, the Breaker Shoulder — weight, not speed. Shapes come down out of the smoke at him one at a time, which is the only mercy a stairwell offers.

Panel 17.4

The last of the nest burning down to embers and wet ash at the stair foot. Ian stands in the smoke, breathing hard, one knee cut fresh through the salt-scars. Above him: open stairs, climbing into the dark toward Admiral.

RAE (radio): "Stairs are clear. Say again, stairs are clear."

IAN: "Clear."

Panel 18.1

The boardwalk by day, grey and rinsed: survivors on the promenade again — the fisherman mending a net, children at a distance measured by a grandmother's eye, the café door propped open. A place, resuming.

Panel 18.2

CLOSE: Ian washing seawall glass out of his knuckles at the café sink, wincing at nothing, the white tank grey-stained past laundering. Rae holds a strip of cloth out to him without looking up from the log book.

Panel 18.3

The map on the counter, updated in grease pencil: the Admiral route drawn in, solid. The Junction wreck and the sleeping shore still X'd — waiting, in every sense.

RAE: "Junction waits. Lincoln waits."

IAN: "They'll keep."

Panel 18.4

WIDE, evening: the café light coming on at dusk like a kept appointment. Above the beach, the hillside of Admiral rises into fog, and somewhere up there a dead substation waits with the city's power in its hands.

RAE: "Tomorrow you climb."

IAN: "Tomorrow."

Panel 19.1

The base of the Admiral climb at first light: a service corridor of switchback stairs, catwalks, and maintenance ladders bolted to the hillside, rising out of the beach mist into fog. The Sound below, grey as poured steel.

Panel 19.2

Ian climbing — heavy vault over a broken gate, pack high, the lock bypass kit already earning its keep on a chained service door. Below him the café light shrinks to a coal.

Panel 19.3

At the corridor's choke point, Ian lowers the first permanent ladder — a heavy extension ladder, roped and pinned, dropping down to the landing below with a rattle that echoes off the wet walls.

Panel 19.4

From the corridor rail: fog at the height of the rooftops, and above it — first sight — the Admiral substation's dead gantry and the High Point repeater mast beyond, dark against a colourless sky.

RAE (radio): "Visual on the substation?"

IAN: "Dead grid. All of it."

Panel 20.1

HERO IMAGE (above): the Admiral pressure substation — transformer yard, breaker halls, catwalks — drowned in fog, dead and dripping, the High Point repeater mast rising behind it like a church spire for a faith of static.

Panel 20.2

Ian in the substation control room: dead gauges, a log book open to the last entry in a careful hand — dated the week of the sealing — and a kettle on a hotplate that never got to boil.

Panel 20.3

A wall schematic, rain-spotted: substation → pumps → two flooded basements; substation → elevators → the tower blocks; substation → repeater → High Point. Ian's finger rests on the repeater line.

Panel 20.4

Below the control room windows: the utility corridor doors, chained, breathing cold — and behind the grilles, in the dark, the faintest suggestion of shapes standing where the trapped infected have stood for months, patient as plumbing.

RAE (radio): "Say again — every restart wakes them?"

IAN: "Every restart."

Panel 21.1

A flooded Admiral apartment block: stairwell water black to the third step, doors swollen open, a child's tricycle on a landing, upside down, patient.

Panel 21.2

The machine room: Ian shoulders the pump rotor — a cast-iron heart of a thing, made to be moved by two men and a hoist — and takes its full weight across his back, knees bending once, then holding.

Panel 21.3

The stairwell carry, landing by landing: Ian moving under the rotor's weight past open doorways where infected stand in flooded kitchens, heads turning at the creak of his steps, his pace never changing.

Panel 21.4

The rotor seated in the pump housing with a soft, final iron sound. Ian's hands stay on it a moment, steadying, the way you'd steady a carried person set down at last.

RAE (radio): "Rotor's home. One pump breathing."

Panel 22.1

A church basement under Admiral: stacked pews as barricades, a banner fallen across a piano, candle stubs in jars. Between the pews, infected sleep in the postures of a congregation that lay down mid-hymn.

Panel 22.2

Ian moves down the center aisle in the dark, a thrown bottle ready in one hand, his bulk somehow negotiated between sleeping shapes with the delicacy of a man carrying soup through a nursery.

Panel 22.3

A bottle arcs, slow and beautiful, into the far vestry doorway — glass music — and every sleeping head in the basement turns toward the sound as Ian's shadow crosses the feeder panel behind them.

Panel 22.4

The feeder switch thrown. In the dark above the basement, distantly, a single bank of the substation coughs and holds. The congregation sleeps on, undisturbed, faces turned to the vestry like flowers to a window.

RAE (radio): "Feeder's live. Quiet as church."

IAN: "It is church."

Panel 23.1

An Admiral street of dark houses, rain. Ian moves porch to porch with the tool roll, reconnecting service lines house by house, each reconnection a small negotiation with breakers, corrosion, and whatever sleeps in crawl spaces.

Panel 23.2

The first window lights — a kitchen, a woman standing in it with both hands over her mouth, an old man behind her already putting the kettle on out of purest reflex.

Panel 23.3

The choice, drawn on the substation whiteboard in Ian's block capitals: CLINIC — circuits for refrigeration, light for surgery; WORKSHOP — circuits for benches, tools, the making of answers. Rae's voice in his ear, the marker in his fist.

RAE (radio): "Clinic or workshop, Ian. Grid can't carry both yet."

IAN: "Clinic."

Panel 23.4

The clinic window lit down the street, steady, clinical, white. In its light, a queue already forms — silhouettes with the patience of people who have learned how to wait for everything.

Panel 24.1

Admiral's tower balconies at dusk, connected by planks and laundry lines. A Runner pack is moving through the lit and unlit flats window to window, hunting the reconnected homes by their light.

Panel 24.2

Ian crosses the balconies at the pack's pace, roof to rail to plank, the whole skyline a wet obstacle course. He is not chasing them. He is herding them — cutting angles, closing doors, narrowing the world ahead of the pack to one lit corridor.

Panel 24.3

A family's balcony door: a father with a kitchen knife, a mother holding a lamp high like a flag. Ian lands between them and the corridor mouth without a word, and the lamp light steadies behind him like he's a wall that arrived on time.

Panel 24.4

The corridor's end: the last of the pack turned aside into a dead service shaft and the shaft door dropped and barred. Ian's hand rests on the bar a moment. Sunset the color of wet iron goes down over the Sound.

RAE (radio): "Balconies clear. Sunset held."

Panel 25.1

The substation's valve hall: dripping manifolds, gauge faces fogged, a great wheel valve at center. Beyond a vent grille, the infected utility tunnel — and the shapes in it, awake now, interested.

Panel 25.2

Ian on the wheel with both hands, arms corded, holding it at the vent mark. Through the grille: allies' lamp beams in the tunnel dark, and the shapes moving between the beams like weather.

Panel 25.3

CLOSE: the pipe maul across his back, unused. His hands on the wheel, knuckles white over old scars. A shape slams the grille once — the whole hall rings — and his hands do not move.

Panel 25.4

The needle falls to rest. The vent sighs out. In the tunnel, the lamp beams turn for home. Ian rolls his shoulders once, like a man setting down a house.

RAE (radio): "Tunnel's vented. Crew's clear."

IAN: "Next."

Panel 26.1

The fifth floor of an Admiral tower: a family pinned in a back flat, the hallway beyond their door full of infected drawn by a fallen shelf's crash. Their barricade is furniture and terror.

Panel 26.2

The flat next door, empty, dark: Ian stands facing the shared wall with the pipe maul, measuring it with his eyes — studs, pipes, the cheap bones of the building — a man reading a sentence before he says it.

Panel 26.3

The maul falls — panel by panel the wall comes apart in a controlled collapse of plaster and lath, dust blooming, Ian working like a man demolishing a lie: fast, exact, and only the false part.

Panel 26.4

Through the breach, lamplight: the family comes through one at a time — father, mother, a grandmother carrying the child — into the cleared flat, blinking in the dust like people being born in a small, grey way.

GRANDMOTHER: "You're the—"

IAN: "Through. Keep moving."

Panel 27.1

Admiral's rooftops in total fog: a construction crane's jib spans between two towers, vanishing into white at both ends. Below the fog: nothing. The city has been erased except for sound.

Panel 27.2

Ian at the jib's foot, head cocked, listening. In his ear, the radio: Rae, counting. The panel is white and grey and almost empty — a man, a beam, a voice.

RAE (radio): "Wind's west. Gusts on my ten-count."

IAN: "Count it."

Panel 27.3

The crossing, mid-jib: Ian moving on the count, freezing on the gusts, fog streaming past him like the city is a river and he is wading it at height. His balance is a conversation between his feet and Rae's voice.

RAE (radio): "…seven… eight… hold— hold— …go."

Panel 27.4

The far tower's roof: Ian's hand closes on the repeater junction box as the fog tears for one second — the whole lit thread of Alki below, the café a coal at the shore — then closes again.

Panel 28.1

The substation yard at full night: dead grid, black machinery, fog at ankle height. Ian moves through it with a UV handlamp from the café stores, its violet edge the only color statement the night allows.

Panel 28.2

The UV light sweeps a catwalk — and the dark answers: traces fluoresce along the rail, handprints too large, a route written in residue, regular as a bus schedule.

Panel 28.3

Ian chalks the route onto the yard's schematic board under UV light — arcs, times, a corridor of safety marked through the middle of it — while somewhere beyond the fence the real patrol passes, huge and soundless, unseen except as a moving interruption in the fog.

Panel 28.4

CLOSE: Ian's forearm under the UV lamp as he works — tattoos, old scars, the unburned skin of a man whose Admiral account is still, for one more page, balanced.

RAE (radio): "Route's marked. Grid's ready, Ian."

IAN: "Then we wake it."

Panel 29.1

The restart: breaker halls on two floors, four rooms, allies at the pumps and vents — the vent crew, the clinic orderly, the fisherman — each at a station, each with a lamp, all of them listening to one voice count the sequence down.

RAE (radio): "Breakers in four. Ian calls it."

IAN: "One."

Panel 29.2

Room by room the grid wakes — and as canon promised, every restart wakes the corridors: infected pour from the utility doors toward the noise and light, and the defense of four rooms becomes a single held breath across two floors.

Panel 29.3

THE BURN: a breaker blows as the vent crew works beneath it — arc flash, white-blue, the world overexposed for one panel. Ian is already moving: he takes the failing breaker's contacts in his left hand and holds the circuit closed with his own arm in the path, teeth set, while the crew clears below.

Panel 29.4

CLOSE: Ian's left forearm in the aftermath — the arc burn branching white up through the tattoos, a lightning signature written over older ink. His right hand turns the ruined sleeve down over it, once — then stops, and leaves it bare.

RAE (radio): "…Ian. Your arm."

IAN: "Grid's up."

Panel 30.1

Admiral after the restart, seen from the substation rail: pumps draining the drowned basements street by street, a community hall lit gold and full of people, the tower elevators sighing awake one by one.

Panel 30.2

The control room: Rae's map, three hundred miles of static away by wire and relay — the High Point perimeter appears on the substation plot as a newly lit boundary, drawn in grease pencil by a shaking hand that isn't Ian's. It's the orderly's. Everyone wanted to be the one to draw it.

Panel 30.3

The repeater mast against the fog. Ian at its base, burned arm bare, keying the transmitter for one burst — his call sign, the café's, proof of a road — out into the wet dark toward High Point.

Panel 30.4

High Point, unseen except as a light behind fog — and in the control room, silence on the channel. The repeater's reply lamp stays dark. Rae's voice comes through very quietly, with the care of a woman delivering a verdict she's already triple-checked.

RAE (radio): "She heard you. The repeater caught her listening. She can't answer — her grid won't carry it."

IAN: "Then she knows."

Panel 30.5

FULL-BLEED CLOSER: Ian on the substation rail above a sea of fog, the lit thread of Admiral below him, the café's coal of light far down at the shore, rain beginning again. His burned forearm rests on the rail, white scar against the tattoos, sleeve left up. Behind him, the repeater lamp blinks its patient, one-way blink.

IAN: "Tomorrow, the wreck."