No History of Being Rained On

He came down through the market from the north, moving at the pace of someone with somewhere to be that wasn't urgent. The stalls were filling up - salvage hardware, tinned food of uncertain age, a woman selling what she claimed were pre-war pharmaceuticals from a plastic crate. Ray passed close enough to the two men under the awning to read them properly. The one on the left had a pipe weapon under his coat, carried high on the hip. The one on the right was younger than he'd looked from the bridge, and that was the more concerning detail.

He didn't look at them directly.

She was at the water's edge still, or had come back to it - he'd lost her briefly in the descent, and found her again standing at the promenade's southern end, looking at a rusted sign still bolted to its post above the flood line. CAUTION: NO DIVING. She was writing in the notebook.

He came up beside her at an angle, stopped a metre away, and looked at the sign as well. 

Up close, she was younger than the suit suggested, or the suit made her seem older - he couldn't decide which. Her pretty face was open in a way that faces in the wasteland weren't, the kind of open that came from never having needed to be otherwise; not naivety, just the particular quality of skin and expression that hadn't yet learned to close. 

The Pip-Boy was an older model, though well-maintained. The bag on her back looked as if it had been packed by someone who'd read about packing a bag rather than done it. There was harbour water still drying on her slender right hand from where she'd put it in earlier.

"You should move," he breathed.

She didn't startle. She finished writing whatever she was writing, capped the pen, and turned to look at him with an openness that he hadn't prepared for. Not challenge and not fear. Just direct. Her eyes went to his hands first, then his face, noting how they were the brown of old paper, and they were direct in a way he felt before he'd finished registering it. 

"Move where?" she said.

"South. Through the market, keep moving. Don't stop at stalls."

"Why?"

"Two men under the awning at the north end. They've been watching you since you came out of the tunnel."

"Watching for what?"

He glanced at her suit, then back to her face. She looked down at herself and then back up, and something settled in her expression - not alarm, more like a piece of information arriving in the right place.

"The suit marks you," he said. "Vault dweller, out alone. They're thinking about what's in your bag." He purposely stayed silent on another reason why two men might want to have a 'chat' with a lone, attractive woman.

"But there's nothing valuable in the bag."

"They don't know that."

She considered this briefly. Then, "Are you watching me for the same reason?"

He'd been about to say something else. He stopped. "No."

"Then why are you here?"

"To tell you to move."

She looked at him for a moment - that same directness, nothing performed about it - then closed the notebook, put it in her jacket and adjusted the bag on her back. "Alright," she said. "South."

They moved into the market together, which hadn't been the plan. He'd intended to redirect her and let her go, then double back and have a word with the two men that would settle the matter without involving her further. But she'd simply fallen into step beside him, matching his pace without being asked, and redirecting her again would have required a conversation he didn't want to have at this end of the market. 

It, of course, had nothing whatsoever to do with how he might actually enjoy being this close to her.

He walked at the right pace - unhurried, purposeful, a man moving with a person he knew through a place he knew. After thirty metres, the skin on the back of his neck said they weren't being followed, and he trusted it. He didn't look back. Looking back was an answer to a question he didn't want to ask in front of her.

The market opened onto a wide salvage plaza at the southern end, an old carpark now strung with rope lighting running off a generator that sounded like it was negotiating with itself about how long to continue. She glanced up at the lights briefly - something registered - and kept walking.

At the plaza's edge, he stopped. This was where he would go east, toward his usual route into the mid-city. It was a natural endpoint.

"You're alright from here," he said. "Stay on the elevated paths south, off street level once you're past the old highway. If you're going to the CBD, you'll need a boat, or you'll need to go around, and going around adds two hours."

"Where are you going?"

"East."

"Through the mid-city?"

He looked at her. "South end of it."

She produced the notebook and opened it to a page dense with small, precise handwriting and what looked like a hand-drawn map. She studied it, glanced at the skyline to orient herself, and looked back at the page. "I'm going here," she said, and showed him.

The map was accurate. More accurate than it had any right to be for someone who'd been outside a vault for probably less than a day. He looked at the location she'd marked - a building in the southern mid-city, above the flood line - and then at her, and she was watching him look at it with an expression of patient attention.

"That's south," he said.

"I know."

He should have said good luck then. He'd said it to people before and meant it at varying levels of sincerity, and walked away without difficulty. It was a functional phrase. It closed things.

Instead, he said, "The elevated path runs along the old highway overpass. I'll take you to the turnoff."

She held his gaze for a moment. If she understood that the turnoff was well past where east diverged from south, she didn't say so. Then she looked down at the notebook, at the map, at wherever she'd marked as the destination.

"What's your name?" she said.

"Ray."

She nodded as if confirming something. "June," she said.

They walked. The generator behind them made a sound like a long, rattling exhalation, and the lights went out, and neither of them turned to look.