A drop detached from a riveted seam and began its slow descent.
It gathered other drops as it went, found a rhythm in the draft. Somewhere below, someone lifted a pan to meet it, instinct older than memory. KLING. The drop struck metal and shattered into silver dust. An elderly couple steadied the bowl between them, wrists trembling, faces tilted up like sunflowers toward a false sky.
A child darted past their knees with a tin cup, grinning at the sound of water on metal. His shoes left quick dark prints in the film of moisture on the walkway. His mother hissed a warning and laughed at the same time, the laugh carried away and shredded by a fan.
A priest stood under the main conduit, his robe woven from hammered plate and frayed wiring. He touched the pipe with the reverence of a doctor checking a pulse.
"May it run," he murmured. "May it run at twelve and at eighteen."
Around him, people lifted bowls, jars, and their own faces. Twice a day the city drank. It was the law that outlasted every other law.
It dropped for kilometers, a lung of steel and concrete inhaling its own exhaust. Far above, past a veiled ceiling of scaffolds and ductwork, a pale reactor's glow seeped down the shaft like tired daylight. The light made everything the color of old paper. It pooled in gutters, in the polish on handrails, in the lenses of cameras that never blinked.
Pipes threaded every surface—fat mains that groaned and shivered, braids of capillaries that hummed with pressure. They were arteries and cathedrals at once. Men were born under them, grew old under them, learned to listen to their moods like weather.
An engine coughed to life and ruined the prayer.
It wasn't loud at first. Just a throat-clearing somewhere in the grid of alleys. Then it rose into a clean animal howl and sliced the humid quiet in two. Heads turned. Hands tightened on bowls. The child with the tin cup forgot to breathe. A ribbon of white light—headlamp glare refracted through steam—knifed through a curtain of condensation.
The motorcycle came on like a bullet fired from the wrong direction.
It shot out of a service tunnel and onto a service road, back tire fanning a curtain of water. Behind it, three narrow-bodied pursuit rigs fishtailed and regained their line, the kind of off-the-books interceptors that corporate security pretended not to own. Their strobes weren't the hot blue of police; they pulsed an ice-white like surgery lamps.
On the motorcycle, the rider leaned into the glide, shoulders low. Under the visor, a cigarette rode the corner of his mouth, rain chewing at the paper. A slash of scar ran like a line of bad welding from cheek to jaw, disappearing under the collar of a milspec jacket that had seen too many owners.
"…always late, Breuk," he muttered into his own collar, and the cigarette bobbed with the words.
He dropped a gear, the rear shifted, and the bike became a thought—nothing mechanical, just decision and reaction. The first rig clawed for him, cut the angle; he slid under a thread of dangling cable, the cable kissed his visor and pinged off the tail of the helmet. The second rig surged to pen him in. The third kept its distance, patient, like a hunter saving its cartridge.
They ran past a balcony full of hanging laundry and rust. Steam bled from a flange on a pipe the width of a truck. The rider glanced. His hand left the grip for half a heartbeat and tore at a wheel-valve. The valve gave with a mournful squeal. A geyser of white heat screamed into the corridor. The first rig hit it and vanished in its own howl; brakes shrieked; plastic softened and slumped.
The second rig slithered wide and rebounded off a guardrail. Its driver swore in a voice too young for the job. The third rig stayed steady. The rider never looked back.
He slalomed through stacked crates and bundles of conduit, then up a narrow incline where two walkways crossed and made a false horizon. The bridge ahead was only a bridge in the generous sense—three beams stapled together and skinned with plates. The plating slicked under his tires and offered him to gravity like a joke. It caught, finally, and he went light as a thought.
He left the bridge for a heartbeat. He hung over the rain.
Below, the world arranged itself into flares of neon and hunched shoulders. Children ran with bowls like beggars in a carnival. Old men braced their knees and held pans until their elbows shuddered from the weight. The motorcycle's headlamp painted everyone in a thin halo as it flew, a mechanical saint.
Then he hit, the bike bucked, and sparks stitched a bright seam across sheet metal. Behind him, something blew. He didn't see what. He only heard metal complain like an injured animal and someone yell a word that sounded like Scheiße in a voice that didn't have time to be angry.
The city closed around him, the way it always did for anyone with the gods' nerve and the devils' map. He found a slot between two buildings that were only buildings by consensus. It was a corridor no wider than a bus on its side. Dark except for the glow that showed up on cameras but not to eyes. The sound fell away. Smell took over—wet metal, cold oil, old breath.
He let the throttle fall, coasted, and killed the engine.
Silence in Nadir wasn't silence. It was the sound of the reactor-hum stretching itself. It was pipes tick-tick-ticking as pressure settled, fans inhaling and exhaling like enormous sleepers. The rider took off his helmet. Wet hair clung to his forehead. The scar along his jaw looked pale in the yellow light.
He blew out the cigarette to keep the ember from giving him away, then lit a new one because there was no point pretending not to be himself. The first draw burned like a factory. He held the smoke and let it bleed into the air through his nose. Rain tapped the visor shell he'd set on his tank. Drops hissed when they hit the cigarette's cherry.
Somewhere down the block, children sang. The tune was older than any song and newer than any child. It had only one lyric the city would allow them—rain comes, light comes—and they stretched it into stories with their voices.
He watched them. He didn't smile. The work had filed most of his expressions down to useful shapes.
The jacket creaked when he reached under it. He pulled out a small silver cylinder the length of his palm. Frosted, scuffed, the top stamped with a symbol you saw on priest collars and water carts alike—three lines converging into a drop. He turned it once. The cylinder's weight felt wrong for its size, like dense script locked inside the metal.
His hand closed around it until the knuckles paled, then he slid it back into the inside pocket. There were reasons to keep it. There were reasons to throw it into the black and listen for nothing.
He chose the reasons that delayed the problem.
Somewhere above, the reactor fluttered. The light dimmed, then came back with a cough. He put the helmet on. The world narrowed to the black foam cradle and the rectangle of vision that always felt too small.
He thumbed the starter. The bike shivered awake. He didn't open it up. Instead, he rolled the throttle slow and let the machine move him like a river moved a stick. Nadir revealed itself in layers—the sleek new walkway with its municipal logos, the patched section where someone had welded over bullet pits and covered the welds with slogans, the crooked run where a market would spring up at dusk and vanish before the wrong uniforms took a headcount.
He threaded through it all like a rumor. No one stopped him. Everyone noticed him. That was how it went when you'd lived long enough to be a story but not long enough to be a legend.
At some point, he angled the bike toward an open span that pretended to be a street. It ended in rail. Beyond the rail, the chasm punished the idea of edge with more edge—a hundred platforms and ledges stacked like badly shuffled cards. He put one foot down, let the bike idle, and looked up.
Nadir did not have a sky. It had a direction. Up was where the light came from. Up was where rich men disappeared behind glass that didn't sweat and ate vegetables with knives made of printed silver. Up was a rumor shaped like hope. Up was a myth named surface.
A distant bell rang. It didn't ring so much as travel as a vibration through the metal bones of the city. You could feel it in your teeth if you pressed your tongue just right against the molar where the enamel had failed.
Eleven fifty-nine.
People began to gather without deciding to gather. Mothers with empty pots. Men with dents in their pans that traced the genealogy of their families. The priest with the wired robe came out of a side door and stood under the main pipe and tilted his head back and closed his eyes like he was going to be kissed.
The rider—Breuk, if you wanted his name—checked the cheap clock glued to the inside of his visor. The second hand marched with bureaucratic purpose.
He said nothing. He loosened his hand on the grip. The cigarette had burned down to a dark ring and died on its own.
You could hear the city inhale.
At twelve, it exhaled.
It began with a note too low for speakers. A pressure. The pipes swelled like a chest gathering breath. The smallest vents went first, the quick rat-a-tat of droplets against tin. Then the mains thundered. Water hammered down through the system with the solemnity of a machine that had never failed in recorded history, and when it came out into the air it made good on every promise it had ever made.
Rain.
Not gentle rain. Not domestic rain. Not polite weather. It fell in ropes and sheets, in veils that spun and tore, in curtains that lifted and slapped back down. It threw its own fog out in rings. It made a sound like millions of coins hitting a million plates.
People held bowls like they were holding their own hearts. Children shouted. The priest lifted his hands and forgot his words and then remembered them again, a syllable late, as if the world had stumbled and learned to walk in water.
Breuk kicked the stand up, rolled the throttle, and leaned into the wall of falling. It hit him like cold forgiveness. It hit the visor and went white and then cleared in a slide as the hydrophobic coating did what an engineer had begged it to do. He tasted metal and something green from the old lines.
The engine tone changed under the weight but didn't falter. He rode straight through the center of the ritual as if the ritual had been drawn for the possibility of him.
People flinched from spray and laughed and cursed and didn't mind at all. They were good at not minding things that weren't meant for them.
He didn't grin or whoop or throw both arms wide like you see in movies. The mouth did something small at one corner, an up-tilt that most faces reserve for private jokes and funerals that go the right kind of wrong. The scar made it look like an error in the light.
"Right on time," he said.
He cut between a tangle of scaffolds and let the water wash the road clean in front of him. The mothers' bowls were full now. The children had been warned back from the slick edges. The priest shook his hands out and laughed like a man who'd expected to cry and found he didn't have to.
Nadir felt—for a minute and a half—like someone loved it.
Breuk let the minute pass, then the half-minute, then the hangover of dripping that always followed the deluge. When you've been hunted long enough, you learn the city's schedules better than your own. A man could be born under the noon rain, Breuk thought, and he wouldn't ever get lost so long as he remembered when to stop and look up.
He didn't remember being born here. He didn't remember being born anywhere.
He remembered falling.
The thought came and went. The city offered a ramp. He took it. Wet tires made a conversation with painted lane lines. The engine lowered its voice as if the job were over. There would be other noise soon—the white strobes of someone else's problem, the scrape of boots in a stairwell, the personal arithmetic of debt.
For the length of a breath, the world consisted of pipes that sang, air that bit, and a man and a machine that understood one another well enough to pass for friends.
He turned into the next corridor and was gone.
The rain kept time.