Lina slowed beside the first one. "These are happy walls," she said, like that settled the matter.

"That usually means they want something from you," Elias said.

She looked at him, unsure whether that was a joke. He gave a small lift of one shoulder. With anyone else, he might have had to soften the line. Lina only stepped closer to the wall and studied it because he did.

The pictures were simple, almost childlike. Rings in the sky. Wide smiling faces beneath trees. Streams of small square shapes moving from one bright place to another. Hands raised upward. Hands lowered toward baskets, tables, beds. The colors had faded unevenly. Blues had gone gray. Gold had turned to dirty cream. Several caption strips were flaked almost blank, leaving only broken marks and half-letters that meant nothing at first glance.

Elias moved along the wall with his fingers hovering over the damaged paint, not touching. Art, maybe. Civic teaching, more likely. Public reassurance. The same image grammar repeated with tiny shifts. Rings above. Surface below. Smiling caretakers in between, always open-handed, always receiving, never making.

"What do they say?" Lina asked.

"Not enough." He bent to read a lower strip and the world tipped for a second. He caught the rail, waited for the dizziness to pass, and tried again. "This one might have been distribution. Or continuity. Hard to tell. A lot of the key marks are gone."

She pointed to a figure painted with long pale arms spread over a cluster of sleeping people. "This is comfort."

"How do you know?" Elias asked.