Trace
The first word is help. After that, she cannot look away.
They are not just writings, she realizes, tracing the crooked lines with her fingers. They are the last trace of terrible things, left to rot on hidden walls. Their echo fills her brain in waves, slowed down by panic — the voice in her mind is thirsty and scared and dying. She finishes reading.
She starts over, from the upper corner of the wall; and her need to escape grows more desperate with each letter, clenching her chest in an iron grip, just before she remembers there is no way out. In the faint glow of the lamp, she reads it all again.
Over and over, until she loses track of herself. As she studies each corner, the warnings remain, engraved in her eyes. She scrapes the old glue from the posters, crouches, touches the pans — the oily metal chokes her with its smell, red showering from the guts of the place.
Whatever is in there is long forgotten, and reminds her of death more than anything else.
She drifts on to meet the steel net, a sealed door just out of her reach. It is terrifying, she thinks, how those words yearned for salvation. She stays still for a long time, fingers entwined with cold wire, as the fan throws deceitful white light on her face.
She dreams of what may lie behind that door, and the broken messages rebuild themselves. She imagines a tight, difficult path, to be torn in the blocks of concrete; she pictures greasy catwalks and acid and danger, the necessary steps, the cost of the hope to see the light again.
Alone, in front of the writings, she decides to fight her way out.
The ghosts of red and black graffiti outline the rest of her path. It is only later, in the bloody darkness of several hours in the future, that she entrusts her life to them — she follows them as a sequence, which was always meant to capture her eyes.
Like fingerprints and footsteps, she studies them, curled in a square corner of salvation. At last, she fully understands how they work.
They are half of a truth, and the rest is hers to find out.