No History of Being Rained On

He came to the Australia's Sydney Harbour Bridge pylon most mornings, not for any reason he'd examined closely. The view was practical - you could see the foreshore approaches, the market sprawl, the flooded grid of the CBD two kilometres south where the upper floors of the old office towers rose from the harbour overflow like a second city built on the wreckage of the first. You could see who was moving and in what direction and with what kind of purpose. That was reason enough.

Ray climbed the maintenance ladder on the bridge's northern pylon before first light and settled into the angle of the upper walkway railing where the steel gave him cover on three sides. The wind off the water was sharp this early. 

He turned his collar up against it. Ray was lean in the way of people whose bodies had learned to run on less than they needed, and the wind found him anyway, cutting through the jacket - the khaki one with the badly stitched pockets he'd been meaning to fix for two years. He'd been meaning to fix a lot of things for two years. The bridge didn't care. The wind didn't care.

Below him, the foreshore was still and grey, the old Luna Park facade staring out at the harbour with its enormous painted mouth, half the upper arch collapsed inward so the face looked like something that had taken a blow and not recovered. He'd stopped seeing it years ago. This morning he noticed it again.

The light came up slowly over the eastern suburbs, a pale, flat light that turned the harbour the colour of old pewter and made the ruined skyline look almost deliberate. Ray ate half a protein bar and watched a pair of gulls work the waterline below. Irradiated, probably. They'd been irradiated for two hundred years, and they were still gulls. He respected that about them.

The markets opened early on the foreshore, a loose arrangement of stalls and salvage spreads along what had been the Milsons Point station concourse, the old platforms now used for covered trading, the tracks beneath long since stripped or flooded. Three traders setting up, moving with the efficiency of people who'd done something thousands of times. A cook fire near the old ticket hall. The smell of something frying reached him even at this height.

He was watching the cook fire when she came out of the underpass.

She emerged from the old train tunnel that ran north under the ridge and stepped into the morning light, and stopped. Just stopped, at the edge of the foreshore, and looked at the harbour. The Vault-Tec jumpsuit was blue and gold, number 47 in a white arc across the back, and it sat wrong against the landscape the way a new thing always sits wrong: too much colour, too much structural integrity, no history of being rained on. He could just about make out the faint green glow of the Pip-Boy on her left wrist.

He noted all of this.

Then he went back to what she was doing, which was looking at the harbour.

She just looked at it. The gulls worked the waterline in front of her. A piece of corrugated iron shifted somewhere in the market and clanged against something, and she turned toward the sound quickly, assessed it, and turned back to the water. Thirty seconds. Maybe more. She crouched at the promenade's edge where the paving met the harbour and put her hand in the water and held it there. Stood. Turned to look south at the drowned towers, the improvised bridges strung between upper floors, the whole vertical world Sydney had become, and the expression on her face from this distance was not fear or wonder but something closer to recognition. Like she was checking something off.

She took a notebook from her jacket pocket and wrote something in it, and put it back.

He became aware that he hadn't looked at the market approaches in some time.

He found the two men in the shadow of the collapsed station awning, eastern side, positioned well, patient, watching the vault suit with the focused stillness of people who'd done their counting and were waiting on the last figure. He knew the one on the left by reputation: a scavenger who worked the foreshore and wasn't past hurting someone for a return. He didn't know the one on the right. The way the man stood was enough.

He looked back at her.

She was facing south still, one hand loose at her side, the harbour wind moving her hair across her face. She didn't push it away. There was something in the set of her shoulders - not relaxed, not braced, something between the two that he didn't have a word for. He'd expected the suit to be the strange thing about her. The suit wasn't the strange thing.

He thought, You'll learn not to stop like that, especially if you’re fresh out of a vault.

The two men hadn't moved. They'd reach their conclusion when she stepped away from the open foreshore into the natural funnel of the market alleys, and he knew the geometry of those alleys and what they offered to people with patience.

She'd found the tunnel approach on her own. That passage wasn't marked, and the entrance wasn't visible from the main road. He turned this over once.

He was already off the railing when he noticed he'd made a decision. The rest of the protein bar went into his pocket. He took the maintenance ladder down the way he always did - quickly, without looking at his hands - and when he reached the ground, he turned toward the foreshore and put the bridge behind him.