Renaissance Pose

Lily stirred in the pale light filtering through the cracked storm shelter hatch and blinked against the haze of sleep. Her back ached from the concrete floor, her arm was completely numb from where it had served as a makeshift pillow, and her throat was dry from the still air below ground. She sat up slowly, rubbing her eyes with the heel of her palm. Hep was already awake, sitting cross-legged near the door with his back straight and his hands resting on his knees like some patient old monk waiting for the world to start again. “You been up long?” she asked, her voice rough with sleep.

“Couple hours,” he said with a shrug, eyes scanning the small patch of sky visible through the cracked door. “Didn’t feel right goin’ back to sleep.”

Lily nodded, stretching the stiffness from her limbs. “Guess we should figure out our plan.”

Hep glanced at her, then at the dim mess of shadows near the back of the shelter. “Well, we need something better than a candle stub and good intentions if they come back.”

She followed his gaze and sighed. “You think there’s anything useful back there?”

“Only one way to find out,” he said, already rising to his feet.

They pushed aside the remnants of the night—a crumpled pack, the worn candle stub, the picture frame nestled inside Lily’s coat—and approached the back wall of the shelter. In the deeper dark beyond their sleeping space, they’d noticed vague shapes the night before but hadn’t had the energy or visibility to explore them. Now, with the morning sun creeping through the open hatch, beams of soft light fell across mounds of detritus: warped wooden doors, broken shutters, old boards warped with time and rot. Dust motes danced lazily in the shafts of light like ash in water. Hep grabbed the edge of a leaning door and shifted it carefully. The whole pile groaned in protest, but didn’t collapse. Lily crouched beside him and tugged a broken shutter aside, the slats worn and brittle with age. They weren’t even sure what they were looking for—anything hard, sharp, or heavy would qualify as a weapon in a pinch—but what they found instead made Lily pause. One of the boards, resting beneath a half-rotten shutter, was carved. Not fancy like the picture frame, but the markings had the same rhythm, the same language of careful hands and meaningful curves. She brushed the dust away with her sleeve and ran her fingers across it. There were symbols—numbers, compass points, a small looping S shape like a snake coiled in on itself. Her mind lit up with recognition. “This is his,” she said, breath catching. “This is Marcus’s.”

Hep leaned over. “The guy who made the frame?” Lily nodded slowly, eyes tracing the wood. “Yeah. He must’ve gotten the frame’s wood from here. These are his practice pieces. He used to—he’d always test the blade on something before starting the real thing. I think... I think he was trying to hide something. Or maybe map something.” They moved a few more pieces aside, uncovering more scraps—some with half-finished symbols, others with what looked like false starts or mis-carvings, all sharing the same signature groove. “This place... he must’ve come here. Before.” She trailed off, lost in the implications. Hep looked impressed, if a little daunted. “Then we’re on the right trail,” he said, giving her a small nod.

But before she could say anything else, Lily tugged at a particularly stubborn old shutter leaning precariously on a narrow board. As she did, a chain reaction of groaning wood and shifting weight tumbled loose like a lumber avalanche in miniature. A long, thin plank slapped her in the backside just as she tried to duck, sending her off balance and sprawling backward. Her foot hit an old window frame, flipping it up into the air just as a warped cabinet door fell like a guillotine, landing with a soft thunk on top of her legs. Another shutter leaned over from the side like a nosy neighbor, its slats arranged in such a way that it looked, for all the world, like a pair of judgmental eyes glaring down at her from above. Her arms were splayed out like a chalk outline, one knee bent awkwardly beneath the cabinet door, the window frame somehow haloing her head perfectly. She blinked up at Hep, stunned.

And then Hep let out the first real laugh Lily had heard in the real world in what felt like years. A belly-deep, contagious laugh that echoed through the shelter like music.

“Oh my god,” he said, wiping a tear from his eye. “You look like some kind of weird Renaissance painting of a disappointed saint.”

Lily groaned, not bothering to move. “Glad I could be your art exhibit.”

He doubled over laughing again. “No, no, don’t move. I want to remember this forever.”

“You’re lucky I like you, old man,” she muttered, half-laughing herself. “Otherwise I’d use one of these planks to redecorate your skull.”

Still snorting, Hep stepped forward to help her up, and the two made their way toward Marcus’s picture frame glinting in the corner where they’d left it by the door of the shelter.

Lily dusted off the ornate frame and set it carefully in the center of the floor, the dim gray light from the open storm shelter door falling across the carved wood like a stage spotlight. She and Hep crouched beside it, shoulder to shoulder, knees popping with fatigue and age. The storm shelter still smelled of cold earth and dried wood, but it was beginning to feel less like a tomb and more like a bunker—one filled with questions waiting to be solved.

“Alright,” Lily muttered, tracing her fingers along the outer edge of the frame. “Let’s start simple.”

The markings were undeniably intentional. Not decorative, not random whittling. They spiraled and darted, repeated in subtle ways, as though whoever carved them had more to say than art would allow. A curled ‘3’ appeared near the top and again lower down, followed by a looping triangle shape beside a sharp ‘V’. A half-circle nestled into the corner like a moonrise over a hill. Lily narrowed her eyes, chewing her lip. “These... they repeat. But not always in the same order.”

Hep leaned in, squinting. “You think it’s letters?”

“Maybe.”

She stood, stretched her sore legs, and walked to the far end of the shelter where a few palm-sized rocks lay scattered near the entry lip. Picking one up, she came back and squatted, then started scraping the flat edge across the concrete floor, the rough grit leaving pale lines behind. “We’re gonna need a map of this mess,” she muttered, tongue sticking slightly out the side of her mouth as she drew.

She started copying symbols. One row for the shapes carved on the top border of the frame. Another row for the left-hand side. Right and bottom followed. The concrete floor became a living diagram beneath them—chalkboard, cipher pad, and battleground all at once.

Hep watched in silence for a while, then leaned over and pointed. “You see this one?” He tapped a triangular spiral. “Shows up three times. Two on the left. Once on the bottom.”

“Yeah,” Lily said. “It’s like a space. Or maybe it means something changes.”

She began listing the symbols in rows, trying to pair each shape with a letter. “Let’s just say this one’s an A.” She pointed to the simplest swirl. “Then if that’s A, maybe this one’s B.” She looked up at Hep. “We need a phrase. Something he might’ve carved.”

Hep frowned, thinking. “What was his last painting titled?”

Lily hesitated. “North by Memory.” Her voice was quieter now. “That was the one we found. The one the men were after.”

“Alright,” Hep said. “Let’s try that.”

So began the first attempt. They picked out symbols and matched them to letters from the phrase. The markings didn’t always line up, but they forced it anyway, hungry for any sign they were right. When they finished, Lily looked at the sequence they’d carved on the floor and sighed. “Nope. Doesn't make any damn sense.”

She swiped part of it away with her sleeve and tried again. New phrase. New pairings. Still nothing. Again. Still nonsense.

Time passed in murmurs and scrawls, the dust thickening in their throats, the air growing warmer as the sun climbed outside. The hatch stood open, but neither of them looked up anymore. Their world was lines and shapes, guesswork and frustration.

Hep stood up and paced. “What if it’s not static?” he muttered. “What if the code changes?”

Lily blinked up at him. “Like... like a shifting cipher?”

“Yeah. A rotating one,” he said, more sure now. “Something that updates itself. Not just letter for letter, but the rule changes as you go.”

Lily sat back on her heels, sweat glistening on her forehead. “Like... like a Vigenère cipher.”

“A what-now?” Hep raised an eyebrow.

“It’s a code,” she said, standing up and pacing now too. “I read about it once. In school. You use a keyword, and each letter of the keyword shifts the alphabet. So instead of just A becomes D or whatever, every letter has its own shift based on the keyword.”

Hep nodded slowly. “Alright... that explains why none of our phrases work.”

“Exactly. Because we were using the same shift the whole time.”

They sat again. Lily’s knuckles were scraped from crawling and chalking. Hep’s knees cracked every time he moved. But they were moving faster now, animated by the possibility of progress.

They tried using “North” as a keyword. Still gibberish. They tried “Memory.” Better, maybe, but not right. Then Hep suggested “MOTR.”

Lily stared at him. “Why?”

“Because it was on the map. That abandoned mine. That’s where the painting pointed. Maybe this is the key to the next step.”

They started over. Lily wrote out the standard alphabet along the edge of a clean corner of concrete. Hep listed the letters in MOTR. They assigned each letter a rotation—M equals 13, O equals 15, and so on—and started shifting the symbols accordingly. One symbol at a time, each assigned to the next letter in the sequence, and when the word ran out, they looped back to the beginning.

Something began to click.

The nonsense shapes didn’t form complete words, not yet—but pieces of them started to resemble language. An S. A T. Maybe a P. They couldn’t be sure, but the symbols stopped feeling random. They felt... heavy. Weighted with intention.

After an hour, Lily leaned back and exhaled sharply. “I think we’re onto it. Whatever this thing says, we’re close to cracking it. But it’s gonna take time.”

Hep rubbed his neck. “Time we might not have.”

“Then we don’t waste any more of it,” she said, firm now. “We’ll work through it tonight. Line by line. But we need to find a better place than this.”

Hep nodded, gaze lingering on the picture frame like it might whisper the rest if he stared hard enough. “Alright, teacher,” he said with a small smile. “Let’s get movin’.”

Part 13 of a series