The rain came like a hand that could not let go, relentless and cold, washing the neon and the grime into one indistinguishable smear. Streetlights trembled through the wet air, and the river beneath the bridge swallowed the city's reflections as if the whole world were trying to forget itself. John sat on the cold metal railing with a rationed bottle in one hand and a photograph in the other, the paper gone soft at the edges from the damp. The photograph showed a woman smiling at him—Vidya Joyce—full of light as if even the image could not contain her warmth. Her hand lay on the swell of a belly that had once been their small, shared miracle.
He had not slept in days. He had not eaten properly in longer. His eyes had become two hard stones that reflected his own failures: the failed education, the cricket dreams strangled by poverty, the music he had played into empty rooms while Vidya cheered from behind a chipped teacup. He had fought, he had bribed, he had given away everything he owned in the courthouse corridors, in the oily coffeeshops where lawyers whispered and judges struck deals. All of it had dissolved into a single bitter thing: injustice.
"They called her a drunk," John murmured to himself, pressing the photograph to his lips until the cheap ink rubbed against his skin. "They said she crossed the road. They said—" He laughed, but it was a small, shattered sound that the rain swallowed. "They said a lot of things about Vidya. None of them true."
A bus growled past behind him. Lights ghosted his face. On the far bank, a neon sign blinked as if in answer: HOPE — the letters kept flickering out, never steady. He drained more liquor from the bottle. The warmth was brief; the echo of his wife's laugh lasted longer and then receded.
He remembered her voice in the small room where they had married—no pomp, just two people who believed in the soft sanctity of each other. He remembered the way she had taken his small, hopeless hands and turned them into something brave.
"You do too much for people who don't deserve it," she had scolded, pressing a kiss to his forehead on nights when the world crowed loud with injustice. "But you're stubborn. That's why I love you. Don't let them make you small."
"You always put God in the middle of everything," he'd replied once, exasperated and tired. "Faith won't pay the bills."
She had only smiled and said, "God watches even when courts sleep." She carried their child like a secret majesty and made food taste like a blessing. She had a laugh that could cut through the smog.
The memory of her accusing, night-of-death scene in the hospital was sharper than any court transcript. He had held her hand while the machines made impossible calculations. He'd listened to the hollowness of a doctor's words and not believed them. He had sworn at the drunk who had driven his car like a weapon—had sworn until the breath left him. He had spent everything to buy the best lawyer he could find, to buy an investigator, to buy witnesses, to buy for the truth to be recognized. But money had not been the thing to buy justice; it had only been the currency of their indifference.
At the courthouse, men in clean clothes and cleaner consciences had nodded at each other and let the truth be spiced into something palatable. The drunk driver walked free with an apology that smelled like perfume and schedule.
"You should have been there," one of the men had said afterwards. "She crossed the road, sir. Witnesses saw—"
"Witnesses planted," John spat. "The driver broke the law. He drove like a beast—"
"Beasts sometimes have money," the man said. "Money speaks." Then the man had adjusted his tie and turned away.
He had screamed at the judges. He had screamed at the policemen who took bribes and at the journalists who took pictures. He had wept in dark alleys over a child he would never see. He had stood under a hot afternoon and ripped up his own pleas for mercy. The world had answered with the quiet, bureaucratic shrug of a thing built to ignore pain.
So he drank now, on a bridge where the city moved indifferent and loud. The bottle was emptying like a clock counting down.
"If there is another life," he whispered to the dark, fingers numb on the photograph, "I want to live it with her. I want our child to be cradled. I want to tear out every rotten root that feeds this damn world and plant trees that actually grow justice."
He could taste bile. He could taste the iron of his failure. He thought of the times he had been expelled as a boy for standing up to a bully—how a teacher had smiled at a note left in a drawer and the truth had been swallowed by a lie. He remembered the cricket bat in the corner, long unplayed, his fingers stiff from the withheld swings of a life of poverty. He thought of the hours with his guitar, of Vidya's whispered encouragement at ungodly hours, of the lullabies she hummed when the city slept.
"Why me?" he shouted into the rain, voice cracking like glass. "Why her? Why our child? What did I do to deserve this punishment? I stood for the right thing—I chose to not bend. I lost everything for it."
No answer came except the river and the rain. Around him the city pulsed—undeferential, practiced in forgetting.
The bottle slipped to the floor and rolled against the metal, jangling against earth and the bridge's bones. His hands trembled. He could feel the ground beneath his boots give way, a hollow in his chest making the world tilt. For a fraction of a second he thought of the moments that had sustained him: Vidya's small fingers in his hair, the look she gave him when she believed he could do anything, even when it was clear he could do nothing. He thought of his mother's voice—"Pray, John"—and of the countless small kindnesses he had given in a world that would not give back.
"God," he said, not with faith so much as a raw, tired demand. "If You're there—if anyone's listening—why? Tell me why being righteous is the sin here. Tell me why the wicked prosper. Tell me why I can't—"
The rain muffled his words and transformed them into something indistinct.
He laughed then, a single, ugly inhale that made his chest splinter. "If goodness is a crime—then I have been convicted. I can't even pay for the trial. I don't have money. I don't have status. I gave everything for a woman who was stolen, and I am left with nothing but the echo of her name."
The bridge seemed lower now. He put one foot over the railing and felt the wind beneath, tasting the river's cold. He closed his eyes and pictured Vidya's face—how she had touched his temple that last evening, how she had said, "If anything happens to me, take care… for our child." Her hand had been cool; he had promised her forever like a child promising to live forever.
"Forgive me, Vidya," he whispered, the confession spilling out of him like a last coin. "Forgive me for failing you."
He pushed. The world fell away in a dozen small, bright sensations: the sky splitting open like a rent cloth, the wind ripping his thoughts into strips, Vidya's smile sharpening into a painful perfect memory—the final image of warmth—and then the river.
Everything slowed as he fell, a ridiculous quiet in the middle of all that noise. The bottle tumbled after him like a satellite losing orbit. For a moment there was weightless suspension—he felt both the sting of shame and the sweetness of one last prayer welled up in his throat. The city's lights bled into diamonds; he could see the courthouse balcony, the faces that had turned away, the slickness of the drunk driver's suit as he shook hands with a man in a dark car. He saw Vidya's last kiss pressed like a seal upon a promise.
The world contracted to a single thin thread of sound—a voice that was not like any voice he had ever known. There was no echo, no tremor of breath. It filled the space of his fall as surely as the rain filled the gutters.
"John," the voice said. It was neither male nor female, neither old nor young. It was the warmth beneath a hearth and the vastness of a cathedral in the same breath. It was pure light made speech.
He could not find his voice to answer. His chest ached; his lungs remembered air and could not take it.
"You did not do wrong," the voice said, more a touch than a sentence, as if it had always known the shape of every bruise on his soul. "You were victim, and your love was true. The world you leave was marred—not by you, but by the hands of those who think themselves gods. I will not say this pain is meaningless. I will not say that your anger is folly. But you will have another chance."
John's mind, in the last flush of consciousness, clung to the single word: chance.
"A chance—" he began, voice thin as glass, but the words were already slipping. "I only want—" He coughed; his breath ran like spent coins.
The light enveloped him, not hot but exact, filling his bones with a presence that vibrated beneath his skin. He felt fingers, not hands but fingers of sunlight, threading through the sinew of his memory, setting them like beads on an invisible string, aligning the jagged shards of his life into a pattern he had not been able to see.
"We are offering you three gifts," the voice said, and in the saying it made each word a covenant. "Three gifts that will not remove the consequence of choices, but will give you means to shape new ones. Use them with wisdom, and with love. Use them with caution."
He tried to laugh, a swallow of disbelief. "Gifts?" he managed. "From— from God?"
"Yes," the voice answered. "From light, from truth, from the force that watches until the last breath. First: I give you the Gift of Healing and Adaptation. Your body will mend. Your flesh will adapt. You will be able to endure wounds that would end others. It is not a license for recklessness, but a shield to guard your purpose."
John's chest tightened. "Like a superhero," he choked, but his laugh was a small, tragic thing.
"Laughter has its place," the light said gently. "The second gift is a System: a Life Simulation that will be available to you. Each month, you may enter a simulation—one life, lived as if from birth—to foresee paths, to practice choices, to understand consequences. It will not be infallible. It will not grant certainty. It will teach."
John's mind spun. The idea of seeing paths—of trying again, of rehearsing courage—made the ache in his chest loosen like a knot.
"And the third," the light continued, "is the Broadcast. A way to make your deeds visible, to shine them across hearts and minds in a world that, in your last life, hid truth behind curtains. This gift will carry your voice further than you can walk. You may choose to whisper, and the world will hear. But with visibility comes responsibility. Hearts are fragile; fame is a blade with two edges."
Tears came to his eyes, a hot, unexpected rain; they mingled with the cold rain around him and with the light that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. "What do I do?" he asked, voice smaller than before, frightened by the cruel, honest truth that his wounds were not being taken away but transformed into instruments.
"You will discover how to use them," the voice said, no condescension in its tone, only a fierce, unblinking compassion. "You will be given space to learn. You will be sent to a place where love and hatred grow in the same soil. There your gifts may shape history, or they may fracture it. You must choose which. You must remember the face of Vidya, but you must also remember that your mission is not only to reclaim what was lost to you. It is to bring balance where cruelty has been allowed to grow."
"Will I… will I see her there?" The question lodged in his throat like a splinter. He had no right to hope. Hope, until then, had been a luxury.
"You will see what your heart needs to see," the light said, and its voice trembled with a tenderness that made him sob. "Go with this in your heart: love is not a currency to be bargained. It is a light to be carried."
There was no more time. Or perhaps time had become something malleable; he did not know. He felt warmth like being wrapped in both a hug and a command. He felt the city's din recede like a tide. He could picture Vidya again in exquisite detail: the small mole at the corner of her mouth, the way her hand had always found his. He said her name like a prayer.
"Vidya," he whispered, and the sound felt right and wrong at once.
"Go," the voice said, as if releasing a bird. "Go and be just. Go and be kind where you can. And remember: you asked for another life. Live it fully."
He drifted. The river accepted him like a liquid bed. The last thing he saw before the darkness completed its gentle takeover was a shard of light, like a promise, sewing itself into his chest.