No History of Being Rained On

Morning came in flat and grey off the harbour, the kind of light that made distances hard to read. Ray was up before it properly arrived, checking the approaches from the glassless window, the bridge visible to the north and the flood margin below still and dark. June was asleep on the other side of the fire's remains, her jacket folded under her head, the Pip-Boy's faint green casting a small light across her face. He looked at this longer than was necessary, and then looked back at the window.

They ate without much conversation. She was different in the mornings, he was learning - more interior, slower to surface. She ate methodically and looked at her map and made a small amendment to it in pencil and didn't explain what she'd changed. He didn't ask.

The boat was cached under a collapsed awning at the flood margin's edge, a flat-bottomed aluminium skiff he'd acquired two years ago from a trader who'd wanted a debt cleared. It was not beautiful. It moved water adequately and didn't sink, which were its two relevant qualities. June looked at it without comment and stepped in and sat at the bow. He pushed off from the wall and got the motor running on the third pull.

The flooded CBD opened up around them as they moved south. The street grid was still legible under the water - you could see the intersections, the darker lines of the submerged roads, the occasional traffic signal still standing on its pole, the light housing rusted out and a small colony of something nesting where the red light had been. Buildings rose on either side, their lower floors submerged and their upper floors alive with the particular improvised life of people who'd adapted entirely to verticality. Laundry. The smell of cook fires. A child watching them from a fourth-floor window with the incurious gaze of someone for whom boats in former streets were simply how streets worked.

June was watching the buildings on the western side when he saw the other boat.

It was sitting stationary in the shadow of what had been an office tower's parking structure, its occupants not moving, and it was the stillness that flagged it; on the water, people move, they adjust, they have reasons to be where they are that express themselves physically. These two were just watching. He recognised the one on the left from the foreshore market. The younger one, the one he hadn't known well enough.

He didn't change course. Changing course told them they'd been seen.

"Don't look left," he said quietly.

June didn't look left. She kept her eyes on the western buildings. "How many?"

"Two. Same ones from yesterday."

She was quiet for a moment. "They followed us."

"Picked up the trail somewhere. Or got lucky with the flood margin entry points." He kept his eyes on the water ahead. "There aren't many places to put in a boat."

"What do they want?"

"What they wanted yesterday. Probably not too happy to have missed out on their prize."

She looked at the water ahead, the same direction he was looking.

"There's a building two blocks east," she said. "The one with the red structural beams showing on the fifth floor. I mapped it yesterday from the overpass. Internal connection to the target block."

He thought about this. "You mapped it as a route."

"I mapped it as a contingency."

He looked at her.

"I grew up in a vault," she said. "I mapped everything."

He adjusted the motor without making the adjustment look like an adjustment - a slight angle east that could have been the current or could have been navigation. The other boat stayed where it was. They were letting Ray and June move, waiting to see where they went. He had maybe two minutes before the angle became obvious.

"When I turn in," he said, "we move fast. Leave the boat."

"Alright."

He cut the motor at the building's entry - a collapsed ground-floor window, the sill just above the waterline on the second floor - and the boat’s momentum carried them in. Dark inside, the building's lower half drowned, the water they were on a continuation of the street outside. He tied off fast, and they went up the intact internal stairwell, which changed the calculation considerably.

The fifth floor was open plan, part of the external wall gone on the eastern side, the red structural beams June had identified from the overpass visible and correct. He heard the other boat's motor start below. Less time than he'd wanted.

"Through here," June said.

She was already moving - not running, the floor state didn't allow running, but fast and certain, picking her route through the debris with a surety that suggested she'd walked it in her head from the map. He followed. This was a new experience.

They crossed to the adjacent building through a gap where the floors had partially merged - a section of collapse that had become a bridge - and went up one more level and through a corridor that ended in a fire door that wasn't locked, and then they were in the building they'd come for.

The other boat's motor cut out below. Close.

June pulled the fire door shut behind them and held it. He looked at her. She shook her head slightly - wait - and they stood in the dark corridor, close, not moving.

Below, footsteps on stairs. Two sets. They moved through the building - the other building - and paused and moved again and eventually went back down. The motor started. The sound moved away and kept moving until it was gone.

They stood in the dark a while after.

He was aware of the door at her back and the narrow space between them and her breathing, which was steadier than his. The Pip-Boy cast its faint green between them.

"Contingency," he said.

She didn't smile exactly, but something in her face shifted toward it. "Yes," she said.