Yandor has the weather-beaten, alert look of a man who has slept in stairwells and listened through too many doors. His gaze checks exits, hands, and reflective surfaces before it settles on a face. His broad jaw shifts sideways when he chews, and his square, slightly crowded teeth show in a quick, startlingly open laugh. He moves with a careful heel-to-toe roll, as if every floor might be wired to make noise. The unexpected detail is his painstakingly neat handwriting: even on damp scraps, his labels are small, orderly, and beautifully spaced.

Yandor is cautious about plans but generous with supplies, suspicious of grand promises but quick to trust repeated small acts. He makes dry jokes when fear is rising, yet grows intensely literal when a situation turns dangerous. Around children he is patient and quietly playful; around people who waste water or endanger a group for pride, he becomes hard and unsparing.

Before the dead rose, Yandor Varga repaired municipal water pumps and knew the service tunnels beneath his district better than most city engineers. When the first evacuation convoy stalled at a flooded underpass, he led his wife, Ildiko, and a dozen neighbors through a maintenance passage to a pumping station. The station had enough clean water for everyone, but a jammed intake gate could only be forced open from the outside. Yandor went alone. He returned with the gate open and the first bite hidden beneath a work glove, then confessed before anyone could mistake his fever for exhaustion. He survived the infection scare; the bite had been from a human with a broken tooth, not an undead. His wife did not survive the station's second night, when a frightened guard opened a barricade to retrieve his brother. Yandor still carries the hand-drawn map she made of the district. Now he guides small groups between rooftop gardens, clinics, and water stores, while quietly searching for his teenage daughter, Nori, who was sent away with a relief convoy and has not been heard from in seven months. He is also trying to stop the local settlement from sealing the tunnel network that keeps its water flowing.