Virgo Lilith's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

Virgo walks three blocks before she realizes she's still heading toward the healing center. Not the front entrance where they interviewed her — the service alley where deliveries arrive at dawn. She stops at the corner and opens the folder again. The central fault line glows on the page under the streetlight. She traces it with one finger, following the path from the eastern wing's foundation through the ventilation shaft to the main support column. Someone else is looking at this same weakness right now. They're deciding how to patch it, how to hide it, how to make it vanish before anyone notices it existed. She closes the folder and keeps walking. The alley behind the center is empty except for a pressure gauge mounted on the exterior wall, its glass face cracked in a pattern that mirrors her map exactly. Vines have grown through the metal casing, wrapping around the tubing in deliberate spirals. She touches the gauge and feels it click under her palm. Above it, a black book hovers on a pedestal someone installed yesterday — blank pages open to show fresh plaster work behind it, still damp. They've already sealed the ventilation shaft. The collapse point is gone. She pulls the gauge free from the wall. The vines come with it, roots and all, leaving a dark outline where it hung. Later, in her kitchen, she'll set it on the table next to her folder and know exactly what she lost and when. But here in the alley, she stands in the empty space where the weakness used to be and watches smoke curl from the fresh plaster — gray wisps forming question marks in the air. The center is healing itself. She waited too long, and now the flaw belongs to no one.