No History of Being Rained On

The elevated path ran along the old highway overpass, eight metres above the street, and from up here you could see the shape the city had made of itself in two hundred years of trying to survive. Buildings that had been offices were now warrens, their windows bricked or boarded at the lower levels, and opened up again at the top where the light was and the flood risk wasn't. Rope bridges between rooftops. Tarpaulin lean-tos stacked in what had been an architectural firm's top two floors, laundry strung between the old corporate signage. The city hadn't been rebuilt so much as re-inhabited, the way a hermit crab re-inhabits - taking the available structure and making it serve a different animal.

June walked beside him and looked at things. Not the gawking of someone overwhelmed - she turned toward what interested her, assessed it, moved on. She had the map out occasionally, checking her position, and she was accurate each time. He stopped trying to anticipate when she'd check it.

"What was it?" she said. They were passing the upper floors of what had been a hotel, its facade still bearing a faded logo above the sixth floor, where the flood line gave way to wind damage.

"Hotel."

"Before the war?"

"And after. Few years after. Someone ran it as a trading post." He considered. "Man named Doyle, apparently. He had a gift for hospitality and very bad taste in business partners."

She wrote something in the notebook without breaking stride. "What happened to him?"

"Business partners happened to him."

June looked up at the hotel facade as they passed. "Were you here for that?"

"No. That was before my time in the city."

"How long have you been here?"

"Six years."

She nodded, filing it. Then, "Where before?"

He thought about how to answer this and found he didn't have a short version that was also accurate. "Moving around," he said. "Caravan work, mostly."

"From where, originally?"

"Blue Mountains."

June stopped walking.

He went two more paces before he registered it and turned. She was standing on the overpass looking at him with an expression he hadn't seen from her yet - not the directness, something that had come up from underneath it.

"The Blue Mountains," she repeated.

"Western side. Long time ago."

June looked west, though you couldn't see the mountains from here - too much city, too much haze. "Is that why you're here? In the city?"

He looked at the harbour, the long grey reach of it to the south. "Partly." He paused. "Someone I knew went into a vault out there. Not yours. One that opened briefly, took people in, and sealed back up." He said it the way you say something you've finished being angry about. "That was a long time ago, too."

June looked at him for a moment. Then she looked back at the mountains she couldn't see, and whatever had surfaced went back down, and she started walking again. He fell back into step beside her and didn't ask about the expression, and she didn't ask anything further about the vault.

They walked in silence for a while. It wasn't uncomfortable, exactly, and she seemed to be a person who didn't fill it unnecessarily, which he noted and did not say anything about.

The overpass descended toward the mid-city proper, and the streets below came up to meet them - the upper registers of buildings, the city compressed vertically by the water that had claimed the lower floors and never left. You could see waterlines on the buildings from here, successive high-water marks over two centuries, each flood leaving its record on the concrete before the water went back down to wherever it went.

"What's the water from?" June said.

"Harbour overflow. Storm surge originally - the seawalls went in the war. Storms kept coming, drains blocked, and no one to maintain them. Took about forty years, supposedly."

She was looking at the waterlines. "Supposedly."

"Wasn't here for it."

"But someone wrote it down," she said, half to herself. Then, back to him, "Where did you read it?"

"Trader. Older woman, used to sell documents out of the old library building. History, maps, pre-war technical manuals." He paused. "She had a system."

June looked at him with an expression he couldn't read, and looked back at the waterlines, and he had the sense he'd said something that landed somewhere specific without knowing where.

They reached a junction where the overpass forked: east toward his usual territory, south toward hers. He registered the fork and kept going south.

In a salvage market built into the upper floors of what had been a department store, they stopped for water. His was running low, and she'd underestimated what moving in open air would take from her, though she said nothing about it. He watched her look at her bottle when it was a quarter full - the expression of someone adjusting a figure in a column - and then look up at the trader's stall.

She bought a refill without asking the price. He waited until they'd moved on.

"Ask first," he said.

"I know. I was looking at something else."

He followed her gaze back to a pre-war display cabinet still bolted to the wall above the trader's stall, its glass intact, the merchandise inside - watches, or what had once been watches - reduced to corrosion and strap leather. She'd already looked away.

The path south took them through a narrow passage between two buildings where someone had, at some point, cemented a Nescafé vending machine into the wall and painted it blue.

"Territorial marker," he said as they approached. "Blue means the passage is—"

"That's not why I stopped."

He looked at her. June was looking at the vending machine with an attention that had nothing to do with passage rights. He looked at it too - at the dull brown of old steel showing through the paint, the product image still faintly visible on the fascia, a cartoon sun above a steaming cup, the whole cheerful promise of it intact and legible and two hundred years past any ability to deliver. Whatever the machine had once been for. Whatever someone had decided it was worth cementing into a wall.

"Come on," he said.

The afternoon light turned amber as the mid-city gave way to the flood margin. The street level here was three metres underwater, and the crossing points were either elevated bridges - rope and salvaged timber - or boats, and the bridges only reached so far before the gap between structures became too wide. He knew where a boat was. He'd been intending to mention it.

June stood at the flood margin and looked south at the drowned streets, the long reach of still dark water between the building tops, the CBD beyond catching the late light. He stood beside her and was aware of the warmth of her, the specific proximity of another person after a day of walking close. He looked at the water.

"Tomorrow," he said. "The CBD crossings are difficult the first time; you need the light to read the water and find the bridges. Do it blind and you'll miss a crossing and have to double back."

She didn't answer immediately. He waited, watching the light on the water, conscious of her beside him in a way that had been building since the market, and that he hadn't found a way to set down.

She looked at him sidelong. "Is that the reason," she said, "or is that a reason?"

He kept his eyes on the water. "Does it matter?"

She considered this for a moment. Then she looked back at the flooded street, the last of the light going off the water, and said nothing further, which was either an answer or a decision not to give one.