VII
Occupied by the earlier conversation, Nick walked on in his mind down the corridor.
He intended to check how Tomi was progressing with his electronics work.
Nick didn't understand much of that part of the work, but he had to occupy himself with something to keep himself from thinking and from the gloomy thoughts waiting somewhere in the corners of his mind.
He walked on down the corridor to the so-called shopping mall.
He stopped for a moment at the security room where the weapons were.
The fact was he didn't know what to do with those weapons.
He only knew he had to hide them somewhere, even from the security.
For now he had to be content with just a locked door and the fact that, apart from him, Nika, and Tomi, no one knew of the existence of the dangerous tools.
He knew he could trust Tomi, and Nika seemed trustworthy too, so he believed she'd keep it to herself.
Nick frowned. Not even a day in the shelter and he already had secrets and was planning to withhold information from people.
And that idea about the council that Nika was pushing.
Should they be told? He wasn't convinced of the quality of the people who would be elected to the council in these first days.
Nick walked on down the corridor toward the maintenance room.
He was still thinking about the council, but he knew Ana would be able to resolve any possible disagreements.
Arriving at engineering, Nick hurried toward the chief engineer's office, but his gaze was drawn once more to the red doors in the depths of the room.
Those doors were an enigma, and Nick didn't like unknowns.
Nick decided to look for the answer in the blueprints.
A minute later he was already in the control room, where he found Tomi asleep at the console in front of the computer keyboard.
Tomi had, it seemed, fallen asleep mid-work, overcome by fatigue, and his body position betrayed that the pose wasn't unfamiliar to him.
Nick quietly took the tube with the rolled-up blueprint and, stepping carefully so as not to wake his friend, left the room.
He went down to the chief engineer's office and sat in the comfortable chair behind the massive desk.
He took the blueprint out of the tube and spread it across the massive desk.
With his finger he oriented himself among the known rooms and huffed in disappointment when he found that the doors were on the blueprint, but not what was hidden behind them.
The only remaining unexplored space was the one where the research was conducted.
The laboratory was massive and led into several caves on the side, and connected via corridors to the clinic.
He studied the blueprint a while longer, but fatigue slowly overcame him.
He settled more comfortably into the armchair while his thoughts wandered, and finally fell into the sleep of an exhausted righteous man.