The Hollow Years

Before the fall, Mara Velez had been an EMT.

She remembered the sirens. Not just the mechanical ones, but the human ones—the endless chorus of crying, screaming, pleading. It started with the protests, morphed into riots, and then became something else entirely. The institutions she once trusted had turned against her. Medical neutrality no longer mattered. She wasn’t patching people up anymore—she was expected to choose sides. Administer aid only to those who passed the ideological purity tests, leave others to bleed.

She didn’t choose. So they cast her out.

The final straw came when she tried to save a child—burned in one of the “celebration” fires, lit after a police precinct was stormed and torched. The crowd around her jeered. “Wrong colors.” “Let him burn.”

She slapped one of them. Her last act of defiance above ground.

She never saw sunlight again.

The tunnels welcomed her like a crypt. She wandered them with only a flashlight, a canteen, and a satchel of old medical supplies. Graffiti turned to warnings. Rats replaced pedestrians. The deeper she went, the less she thought of herself as human. She saw others down there—junkies, outcasts, broken things—but no one spoke. Civilization had drowned in its own slogans.

Her hands never stopped shaking those first weeks. Hunger and grief made her weak. She stitched her own wounds. Learned to drink from condensation pipes. Slept beneath junction boxes and between the tracks.

But she listened.

And she heard the stories.

Of a man called Solace.

Of a movement—hidden deep where even the city’s rot hadn’t reached. A place where people spoke freely again. Where they trained for something larger. Where the lies had no reach.

She chased rumors. Traded scraps for knowledge. Learned the old tunnel maps, followed the signs carved in subtle marks—chalk sigils, paint splotches under blacklight. She evaded ferals and enforcers alike. She learned how to fight. How to vanish. How to make a tourniquet from pant legs and a filter from rat bones and cloth.

She became more than a survivor.

She became ready.

It took her three months to find them.

She was starving, leaning against a tiled wall, nearly unconscious, when a figure emerged from the dark in a reclaimed subway uniform.

“Name?” he asked, voice low.

She didn’t answer. She just pulled from her satchel an old armband—red cross on a white field. Bloodstained. Torn.

The man nodded. “Come with me.”

That night, she met Solace.

And for the first time since the collapse, Mara slept—not from exhaustion, but from purpose.