After the Red Rain

by Lyga, Barry

  Staring at the pendant until it doubled his vision, he thought back to the moment he’d taken it. No, “thought back” wasn’t strong enough. He relived that moment. He sank into, wallowed in it. The thrill he’d experienced when his hand closed around it, the charge that shocked his heart when he felt the necklace snap and come free to him, the look in Deedra’s eyes—anger and helplessness and resignation.

  Oh, that moment! That moment when he’d seen it, when he’d realized what it was! The pattern, the size… a perfect match to something he’d seen before.

  What were the odds?

  He decided he didn’t care. He’d spent his whole life trying to prove himself to his father, his whole life under that man’s thumb. And now the universe was rewarding his patience.

  He grinned.

  Rose was still out there, of course. Rose, who was a witness to the incident on the rooftop. Rose, who seemed to think something was amiss at L-Twelve. And Deedra, too.

  But she could be dealt with easily. And if Rose showed up again, well… this time, Jaron wouldn’t give him the chance to run. This time, Jaron would overwhelm him with swift, unrelenting force.

  Despite Max Ludo’s fears, Jaron knew that he was strong and smart. He’d misplayed his last encounter with Rose, but he learned from it. Next time would be different.

  A bleating chime interrupted his reverie. Someone was at the door.

  It was after curfew. Who could be out?

  He knew the answer already: One of his idiot Bang Boys. Probably mistimed curfew and couldn’t make it home. This happened at least once a month, one of those morons at his door, begging for a waiver or at least to crash at his place for the night.

  Probably Kent, Jaron thought. Kent had rat turds for a brain.

  Jaron hauled himself out of bed. Still, he would let Kent in. Because that’s what leaders did—they protected the people who were loyal to them. Right?

  Right.

  He threw on a robe, tossed the pendant on a shelf, and went out into the main room. Mounted to the wall was a screen connected to the building’s security grid. Jaron checked the cam feed. Most people didn’t have security like this, but most people weren’t the only son of the Magistrate.

  Vaguely visible on the screen was a figure outside his door. The picture was fuzzy and pixelated, as always. He kept telling his father that everything needed to be upgraded. His father—when he bothered to respond at all—usually said, “The whole world needs to be upgraded, Jaron. Get in line.”

  Nice. Nice way to talk to his only son. When Jaron was Magistrate, he would run things differently. He would give people everything it was in his power to give. He would march on the Dalcord Territory and more than double the size of Ludo. His people would happily go to war for him; he would be beloved. With the resources of Dalcord and none of the people, he could make the new Ludo Territory a paradise for those who obeyed him.

  He tapped the cam-feed screen, trying to zoom. Sometimes that straightened out the pixels. Not this time, though.

  It wasn’t Kent, that much was for sure. Kent’s gigantic frame would have been instantly recognizable even through static and digital fuzz. Maybe it was Lio. Lio thought he was something special, a breed apart from the other Bang Boys. Always trying to curry favor with Jaron, always laughing too loud and too soon at Jaron’s jokes. Jaron appreciated the attempt, but it had lost its luster a long time ago. Once, Lio would have been his second-in-command, his Vice-Magistrate, but the idea of hearing that hideous chuckle all day long…

  The chime sounded again.

  Screw it.

  He thumbed open the door.

  Oh.

  “What are you doing here?” Jaron demanded. “And what the hell do you want?”

  Other than some screams and the occasional whimper, it was the last sound he ever made.

  CHAPTER 19

  What are you? Deedra asked, and a part of Rose winced and retreated at the impersonality of the question, at the stone-dead thud of the word what.

  But another, larger part of him admitted: He had asked himself the same question over and over in the years of his wandering.

  What am I?

  And it is this question, with its ineffable, undiscovered answer, and the horror of harming the one person who has accepted him that chase him through the night. Clouded, blank sky above and cooling ground below, he races to a familiar building.

  Alone, there is no fear of hurting someone else, and he allows his tendrils to lash out. With light, elegant movements more akin to dance than to climbing, he rises higher until attaining the sole open window, his tendrils snapping silently into the dark, finding crevices and holds.

  Inside, the man waits for him, lurking in darkness. Together, they slip into a hidden staircase, then down, down, down, into the basement, the way lit by handheld fluoro-tubes.

  Soon Rose lies on the table again as his companion fusses with tools and wires and needles and scalpels.

  “You’re late tonight,” the man says, annoyed.

  “I spoke to her again,” Rose says, staring up at the ceiling. He has become inordinately familiar with the intricacies of this ceiling over the past month. He knows every bend of every pipe, knows the shadowy junctures. A spiderweb glistens in one corner, a little larger each time he visits. He has never seen the spider that weaves this web, and he longs to do so.

  “I see.” The voice is a study in neutrality, but Rose is aware of the discontent beneath it. He does not want to fight—not now, not tonight, not with the scent and the heat of her still lingering—so he says nothing.

  “What did you speak about? With the girl?” The tone has changed, just slightly. The discontent bleeds into resignation. There will be no fight.

  “Me.”

  A pause, a surgical knife held just so. “Did you speak to her of the… work we perform together?”

  Rose shakes his head. “I don’t even know how to describe…”

  “Best that you don’t. People… need the familiar. They crave normalcy. If we were to tell people what we’re trying to do, it could be disastrous. Do you understand?”

  Rose understands, but he does not understand. More precisely, he understands the desire for secrecy, but not the need for it.

  Still, he has traveled long and hard. He has suffered pain and longing and isolation for longer than he cares to remember. And though he does not care to remember, he has no choice but to remember, for memory is a tide, relentless and constant, its every ebb presaging a surge. He can forget his past for stretches of time, but always, always, it returns, washing against him.

  “I just need someone to talk to sometimes,” he says, knowing—even as he does so—that the response will be…

  “You have me.”

  And then the scalpel comes down.

  CHAPTER 20

  In a filthy nighttime fog, Rose stands atop a building that overlooks Deedra’s. He keeps watch there, gaze fixed on the black rectangle of her window.

  He is troubled. By what he’s done.

  Good and evil, right and wrong, were easier concepts to grapple with when there was so little at stake. Alone on his trek through the world, he could decide what mattered and what did not with no fear of anger or reprisals or disapproval. The world had been so simple.

  Simple. He’d told Deedra that the world was simple, and now he knows it is not. She brought warmth and compassion into his life, but she also brought complexity.

  The line between right and wrong no longer seems as easy to discern. The world has gone as gray as the mist.

  He’s been trying to protect Deedra all along. From himself. From what he knew to be true. But Deedra doesn’t need his protection. She survived this world for many years before he came along. She risked herself to pull him from the river.

  She deserves the truth. All of it.

  A wind buffets him; Rose anchors himself to the rooftop by wrapping a tendril around an old ventilation pipe. He perches there and settles his gaze on what he holds in h
is hand.

  Deedra’s pendant.

  He whistles, but the sound does nothing to cheer him.

  CHAPTER 21

  She tended to her cuts—they were minor, not worthy of the guilt he’d felt and expressed—and managed to sleep. When she awoke, he was still gone. In those first muzzy moments of waking, she thought maybe he might have returned, entering through the window. But she was alone in a bed that, for the first time, seemed too big. She could have been disappointed or agitated.

  But, instead, she found herself thrilled. She’d kissed him.

  That kiss… it had been too short, and afterward they’d both been flustered and in shock, but it had been perfect nonetheless. The memory of it made her woozy, a pleasant and unpleasant feeling at the same time. She could replay the kiss too easily. She could feel his lips lingering on hers, long after the kiss had been broken. She wanted another. But who knew if Rose would even come back?

  Optimism was hard to come by in Ludo Territory.

  Until recently, he’d said. Until recently, I’d never seen anything beautiful in the world.

  Did he mean…

  He couldn’t mean.

  No, he didn’t mean.

  She touched her scar, wishing—as she often did—that she could sink her fingers into it, prize up an edge, then peel it all off. But she knew what lay beneath—blood and bone, not fresh, new skin.

  If only it were that easy. If only you could tear away the old and the ugly and reveal something new and beautiful and perfect.

  Like the City itself, maybe, and its broken, crumbling facade.

  What lay beneath the buildings and roads of the City? If she could peel them back the way she wished she could husk her own skin, would the building equivalent of arteries and bones be revealed to her? Or was there something else under there? Something horrifying and deadly?

  Something mysterious and grand?

  Something beautiful?

  It could be anything, she realized.

  She’d spent her life in these buildings, on these roads, so certain that the Territory and the wider City and the Cities beyond were the same in every direction.

  Never thinking to look down.

  CHAPTER 22

  She threw on her poncho, as always, and grabbed a sleeve of fruit discs to eat on the way. They were old, but fruit discs were genetically modified to last just short of forever. They’d be stiff but edible.

  Air quality was mixed. She slipped on her mask, just to be safe.

  She stood stock-still in the doorway. With reflexes born of thousands of repetitive days, she’d prepared for work.…

  But she wasn’t really going to work today, was she?

  It would be crazy to go to L-Twelve. She couldn’t imagine what Jaron had in store for her, but it couldn’t be good. He couldn’t let her mingle with everyone else. Not now. She wasn’t entirely certain he would kill her to eliminate one of the witnesses from the rooftop… but what else might he do? He could have the Bang Boys throw her out of the Territory, sure. He could trump up some kind of charge and have her arrested, even.

  But she kept coming back to the easiest, most obvious solution. He and the Bang Boys had chased Rose down, and she didn’t think they were just going to drag him out of Ludo if they’d caught him. It was wholly possible that Jaron had decided that the best, safest course of action was to kill Rose and her, after all. And Jaron, she knew, would do whatever was best for Jaron.

  Meaning she should stay home, where it was—

  Where it was no safer than L-Twelve. He could send the Bang Boys there just as easily as he could send them to the factory floor.

  She was shaking. She took deep breaths and leaned against the doorjamb. What was the best move? She couldn’t stay home. She couldn’t go to L-Twelve.

  Hide. She had to hide. But where? The Territory was empty and crowded at the same time. The empty places were just as dangerous as the full ones, maybe more so. She could stumble into a nest of tooth-weed and a death that would make her long for the Bang Boys and their pipes.

  I have to leave, she realized. I have to leave the Territory.

  It was a thought so huge and impossible that there seemed not to be room in her head for it. She couldn’t just leave. It didn’t work that way. She would have to cross the river into Sendar. No way she would go to Dalcord. And what would the people in Sendar think when she showed up with her Ludo brand? How would they treat her?

  And what about Rose? She couldn’t just disappear on him.… But hadn’t he done precisely that to her? Was she supposed to stay in Ludo and hope he would come back? Or should she vanish into safety?

  You have to figure this out, Dee. It’s up to you. What are you going to do?

  Maybe Jaron wasn’t going to kill her. He could have done so yesterday, easily. Just as easily as taking her pendant. Maybe he would let her live.

  For now. But once he became Magistrate, his power in the Territory would be complete. What then?

  She would spend the rest of her life in Ludo wondering.

  Self-exile? A life on the run in some other Territory? Or life here in Ludo, terrified and wondering? Both solutions sucked. There was no other way to put it. No matter what she did, she would be in danger.

  But the danger in another Territory was hypothetical. The danger here was real.

  She took off at a run toward L-Twelve. If nothing else, she had to intercept Lissa before she got there. So she could tell her best friend she was leaving, and why. She owed Lissa much, much more than a quick good-bye, but it was all she had to offer.

  Deedra was halfway to L-Twelve when Rose appeared from nowhere, hustling up to her, grabbing her by the arm. It took her a moment to process him, to realize that it really was him, out on the street as though nothing had happened, as though nothing had changed.

  “Act normal,” he told her, and she laughed because she had no idea what the word meant anymore.

  She slowed down, but only to about half speed, not a normal walking pace. “Normal? Are you kidding me?”

  “No need to draw attention or act suspicious.” As he said it, though, he darted his gaze around. It made him look completely suspicious.

  “You act normal,” she chided him. She dug out a fruit disc and handed it to him. Distracted, he stopped peering around like a fugitive and took it with one hand. At the same moment, he brought up his other hand, opening it.

  On his palm lay her pendant.

  Deedra gasped. Where the chain had broken when Jaron yanked it from around her neck, a little bead of resin—probably from a discarded ration pack—healed the breach. “Where did you—”

  “Don’t ask.” He shook his head. “You don’t want to know. Like I said, act normal.”

  “But—”

  “I have something else for you, too.” He looked around. “Not here, though. At work.”

  “Work? I’m not going to L-Twelve.”

  “Why not?”

  She gaped. “We can’t go there. Neither of us, but especially you. You humiliated him. He’ll kill you.”

  “I’m not worried about Jaron,” Rose said with brute confidence.

  “He’s the boss. And he’s the Magistrate’s son. He can do anything.”

  He cocked his head, a small smile playing at his lips. “Do you really think he can hurt me?”

  “If you can do the… things you do, why didn’t you stop Jaron and the Bang Boys yesterday? Why did you just let them chase you and hit you?” A bruise had formed overnight along his jaw, flaring tender and purple against his fair skin. “Was it worth it?” she asked.

  He shrugged, scrutinizing the fruit disc, then gingerly tapped at the bruise. “It didn’t really hurt me. And I guess it made them happy.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Who cares about making them happy? They’re wrong.”

  “True. And they need to realize they’re wrong. But if I overpower them and force them to stop, all they learn is to hate and be afraid of something stronger than them.”


  “If I were stronger than them, I would love for them to be afraid of me.”

  “And they would just exorcise that fear by bullying the people under them even more. And you would be no better than them.”

  As she considered that, they kept walking. It wasn’t raining, but the humidity was high, sweltering. “It doesn’t matter anymore. We can’t go to L-Twelve. And you might not be in the system, but I am—I have to run. I don’t have a choice.”

  “You don’t need to run anywhere,” he told her. “I’ll protect you.”

  “I don’t need your protection.”

  “You might be right. But you’re getting it anyway.” He raised the fruit disc to his nose and sniffed. His expression said it all.

  Deedra chewed her way through a plum-melon disc. “They taste better than they smell,” she confided.

  “They would have to.”

  “Try it.”

  He sniffed it again, this time even more gingerly. The downturn of his lips was sad and hilarious at the same time. How could he have gone all this time without eating a fruit disc? They were one of the few food items the government had figured out how to mass-produce at the necessary scale. One of Deedra’s first memories was tasting a fruit disc at the orphanage. (One of her other first memories was of spitting it out, but still.)

  “I really can’t,” he said at last.

  “It won’t hurt you. Everyone eats them.”

  “No, I mean I can’t. I’m sure it’s… good.” The disbelief written blatantly on his face made his lie funny, and they both laughed at it. The laughter was a relief and a danger at the same time, given the circumstances. “No, really! I’m sure it is! But I don’t need this.” He handed it back to her. “I take nutrients from the soil.”

  “You do what? From that little patch? You, what, absorb it through your feet or something?” She looked down, but Rose’s feet were unremarkable.

  He smiled. “There are some other spots, too. Not many.” His expression, so mournful, made her think someone had died. Or, worse, had been hauled away by the DeeCees. “Everywhere I go, I find more and more of the world is dead.”