No History of Being Rained On

She woke before him, which she hadn't done before.

He was asleep on his side, facing the wall, one hand open on the floor beside him. She looked at him for a moment - the angular face, the jacket he'd kept on against the cold, the particular stillness of someone whose sleep was light enough to be useful. She'd spent two days reading him through his behaviour, and here was something different: the unguarded version, the one that existed when there was no one to be guarded for. He looked younger. Not young, just closer to whatever he'd been before the city and the bridge and the six years of mornings on the pylon.

She laced her boots and did it quietly.

The Pip-Boy read 05:43. Outside the glassless window, the sky was beginning to separate from the harbour, the darkness going from solid to layered. She stood at the window for a while and looked north, the bridge just visible in the early grey, and thought about the pylon and what you could see from up there, and how he came every morning not for the sight lines, or not only for that.

She put her hand in her jacket pocket and found the coin.

She'd put it there in the shelter two nights ago and hadn't taken it out since, which was a choice she'd been aware of making and hadn't examined. It was his. He hadn't asked for it back, which was also a choice. She turned it over in her fingers - the now-familiar edge of it, the date she now knew by a different kind of weight than the first time she'd read it. 2074. Three years before everything.

She put it back in her jacket.

He was awake when she turned around. Not recently - he'd been awake for a while, she thought, watching her at the window with the same quality of attention she'd felt from the first moment on the foreshore. He didn't pretend otherwise.

"I'm going back," she said.

Ray sat up. He didn't say, I know, or when, or any of the things the moment seemed to ask for. He looked at her with the directness she'd had to grow into over two days and that he'd apparently always had, just aimed outward rather than in.

"The Overseer needs to be told," she said. "Not reported to. Told." She'd been working out the difference in the hours before sleep, and it still felt right in the morning. "And not just him. All of them. A hundred and twelve people who think the new world is thirty years old. They need to know it's been two hundred. They need to know that he knew. They need to know the outside is survivable." She paused. "Someone has to go back and say that out loud, in the vault, where it can't be filed away or controlled."

"That's not a small thing to walk back into."

"No."

He picked up a piece of rubble from the floor beside him, turned it over in his fingers, and then set it back down again.

"That man I mentioned, Cal," she said, "he will be relieved to see me, and will immediately begin to be certain about what I should do next." She paused. "I'm going to disappoint him."

Ray looked at her. Something in his face that wasn't quite a smile, the same register she'd felt in the dark corridor the day before.

She picked up her bag. The notebook was in her jacket. The Pip-Boy showed 05:51.

"I don't know how long it takes," she said. "To do what needs doing."

He said nothing. This was the version of him she'd learned to read: the silence that wasn't withholding but waiting, leaving the room she usually filled.

She didn't fill it.

They went down together and outside into the early grey, the city cold and salt-smelling, and walked north toward the flood margin without discussing it. The walk had the particular ease of two people who'd learned each other's pace.

At the flood margin, he stopped. She kept walking two more paces before she registered it and turned.

He was standing in the flat morning light, the bridge behind him. He looked like the city - weathered into the landscape, belonging to it in the specific way of things that had survived by adapting. She thought: I'll write this down. She didn't reach for the notebook.

She crossed back to him. She put her hand against his jaw for a moment - just a moment, the roughness of it, the warmth - and then she dropped her hand and stepped back.

He didn't move.

"The best place in the city," she said.

She turned and walked north, the vault suit bright against the morning, and told herself she would not look back.

That was a lie. Fifty metres on, she looked back.

He was still there, at the flood margin, not having moved. She couldn't read his expression at this distance. She thought of him on the bridge pylon that first morning - the height, the distance, the way he watched everything from a place where nothing could reach him. Off the pylon now. On the ground.

She turned back to the path.

The Blue Mountains were three hours west on a good route, and she knew two good routes. She knew the road conditions for the first hour, the water sources, the places to avoid, and the places that were safer than they looked. Two days ago she'd known none of this. She walked through the mid-city on the elevated path, the same way they'd come, past the hotel where Doyle had met his business partners and the vending machine with the cartoon sun, still promising its two-hundred-year-old promise.

She stopped in front of it.

She didn't take out the notebook. She just looked at it - the thing itself, the dull brown under the blue paint, the cheerful image - and tried to hold both things at once: the object it had been and the object it was. The promise and the ruin of the promise and the fact that someone had thought it worth cementing into a wall anyway.

She thought she almost had it.

She kept walking.

THE END