After the Red Rain

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T
he clank and rattle of what he thought of as The System had long since faded into mere background noise to Gus. Or maybe he was just going deaf. He was certainly old enough—beyond old enough—for it. In any event, it didn’t matter. He was the only one tending to The System, so he was the only one to talk to. And he’d gotten bored with himself a long, long time ago. Stooped and twisted with age—nearly fifty years, if he remembered correctly, an almost unheard-of longevity—he limped around the chamber with only himself for company.

The System was a series of belts, tubes, pulleys, and wheels arranged in a circuitous route through a large chamber. It began at an inclined chute at one end and wended its clacking, whirring way through the chamber to the opposite end.

The System was all about bodies.

Tall, short, thin, fat, young, old, frail, robust, every color and shade decreed by Nature or by God—take your pick. The bodies wound through The System day and night, hauled along as machines snapped and plucked at them, stripping them of clothing, jewelry, and all the
other accoutrements of the living world. They entered The System as they’d died; they left it as they’d been born: naked and alone.

Gus monitored The System. He attended to its needs. Though he had his suspicions, he didn’t know where the bodies came from or where they went. Long ago he’d decided that it was best simply to be grateful he wasn’t one of them.

This day, a sound came to him, pitched high above the muted rumble of the machinery. At first, he thought it had to be his imagination. Then he thought it must be his ears finally giving up the ghost after so many years of abuse. He scrabbled at one ear, then the other, with his little finger, digging around.

The sound persisted. High-pitched and abjectly terrified and definitely alive, not mechanical.

He peered around the chamber, seeking the source of the sound. In the echoing confines of The System, it was difficult to pinpoint a specific noise. Especially with ears fading, as his were. Standing still, he listened intently. Rotated and took a few steps. Paused again to listen, willing the sound to become louder.

Miraculously, it did. It rose to a bloodcurdling howl.

Gus rushed to the tunnel that opened up into The System. The noise had come from there, he knew it.

He gaped at what he saw.

Gus had worked The System as long as he could remember. Most of his life, really. Decades. He’d never tried to count the bodies that came through, and even if he had, he would have given up on tallying them long ago.

But this, he knew, was the first time he’d ever seen a living one.

A baby.

A tiny, defenseless baby lay on a series of grinding cylinders that bore the bodies into The System. She—for she was naked—squawked
and squalled, waving one pudgy fist in terrified indignation, kicking her chubby legs.

She was stuck. As she’d slid down the chute, her left shoulder had been caught in the gears of the machinery. It pinched there, purple-going-black, and she howled.

Sometimes bodies got stuck like this. Gus had tools to break them loose. But such tools were for dead bodies, not living ones, and he froze for an instant, unsure what to do.

She cried out again, her face going purple now.

There was no time to hit the emergency shutdown switch—she would be ripped to shreds before then. And besides, hitting the switch would mean questions, and Gus understood that it was best not to have questions when he had no answers.

Wincing in sympathetic pain, he tugged at her, gently at first and then, finally, with all his strength when
gently
didn’t suffice. With a yowl of pain, she came free from the machine, leaving behind an inch-wide strip of flesh from high up on her neck to her shoulder. Bright red blood spilled, and Gus nearly lost his grip on her as it flowed down to his hands, making her slippery.

“Shush, shush,” he cooed, almost by instinct. A baby. When was the last time he’d seen a baby?

A
living
baby, he amended.

“Hush-a, hush-a,” he tried, and still she wailed. He couldn’t blame her.

He knew what he should do. He knew his job. Bodies came into The System, and bodies went through The System, and bodies left The System. His job was to make sure everything ran smoothly. And while he’d always assumed the bodies would be dead and had always
seen
only dead bodies… no one had ever specified dead.

He should put her on the rolling cylinders and let her leave The System as everyone else did, to go wherever they went.

She screamed and whimpered, and her blood spilled. Gus chewed at his bottom lip.

It had been so long since he’d cried that he didn’t even realize he was doing it until the first fat tears splashed onto her round, little belly.

“Hush-a, hush-a,” he whispered, bouncing her lightly. “Hush-a, hush-a. That ain’t gonna heal on its own. Sorry, no. But I think old Gus can do what he can do.”

He carried her to his workbench and swept his tools aside. The bench was dirty and scarred with age, but better than whatever lay beyond The System. He set her down and began rummaging in his toolbox, muttering to himself.

“Fishing line, fishing line…” He hadn’t fished since he was a boy, and even then the rivers had been dead. But the line came in handy for a number of tasks, so he always kept a supply. He dug it out now and then found a needle from the kit he used to repair his clothes.

“This ain’t gonna feel so good right now,” he warned her, threading the needle with the fine, light filament, “but it’ll feel better later, I promise.”

He took a deep breath. He held her down and began to sew.

D
eedra wouldn’t have seen the blue rat that morning if not for her best friend, Lissa.

“What are you thinking about?” Lissa asked, and Deedra realized she’d been staring up at the bridge that crossed the river on the edge of the Territory. The bridge that
used
to cross the river, actually. Halfway, the bridge had crumbled—when the river ran low, you could still see chunks of concrete, sprouted with spider legs of steel, resting in the water where they’d fallen. She and Lissa had hiked out from the center of the Territory toward the border, maneuvering past the Wreck. Now they stood on the shell of what had once been a train car, or a truck or some kind of vehicle, turned on its side and rusting into oblivion. From here, they could see the whole putrid shoreline of the river.

Deedra shrugged. “Nothing,” she lied, and held up a hand to shield her eyes from the nonexistent sun. On a good day there would be maybe a half hour of direct sunlight, usually in the morning. The rest of the time, like now, the sky clouded over, steeping the Territory and the wider City in gray murk.

Along one edge of the bridge, some long-ago vandal had spray-painted
WAITING FOR THE RAIN
. The words were black, except for the last one, which had been sprayed bloodred.

“You’re thinking of climbing the bridge,” Lissa said knowingly, and Deedra couldn’t help but smirk. Her friend knew her too well. Deedra was the risk-taker, the climber.

One time, years ago, she’d found a bird’s nest out by the bridge. Birds were rare, a nest a rarer wonder still. It was up high, built of bits of wire and cabling and trash, more a web than a nest, caught in the spot where a fallen beam crossed a jutting bit of concrete. She had to figure out how to climb all the way up there, using a bunch of broken packing crates and some discarded lengths of wire to fashion a sort of flexible ladder. It swayed and dipped when she so much as blinked, but she made it, coaching herself along the way under her breath:
You can do this, Deedra. You can make it. You can do it.

In the nest were four perfect little eggs. They were delicious.

“You’re thinking of the
eggs
,” Lissa said even more confidently, and Deedra groaned.

“Okay, yeah, you got me. I was thinking of the eggs.”

“Lucky day,” Lissa said with a shrug. “You’re not going to get that lucky again.”

Probably not. The odds of finding anything alive and edible in the Territory were slim. The rations they earned from working at one of the Territory factories were synthesized in laboratories, using DNA spliced from extinct species like turkeys and asparagus. Such rations kept them alive, but scavenging for something to eat could make the difference between simple survival and quelling the rumble of a never-full belly. Plus, it tasted a whole lot better.

The bridge was Deedra’s personal challenge to herself. She swore to one day climb its supports and reach the top. “Who knows what’s
up there?” she asked, focusing on it as if she could zoom in. “I’ve never heard of anyone going up there. There could be all kinds of—”

“No one’s ever gone up there because there’s nothing worth seeing,” Lissa said drily. “If there was anything worthwhile up there, don’t you think the Magistrate would have claimed it already?”

Deedra shrugged. “The Magistrate doesn’t know everything. No one ever even comes out here.”

“Who can blame ’em?” Lissa hooked her thumb over her shoulder at the Wreck: easily a mile—maybe two, who was counting?—of old automobiles and other such vehicles, jammed together at angles, piled atop one another, packing the route back into the heart of the Territory. Picking a path through the Wreck was dangerous—any of the precariously positioned cars could tilt and crash down at any minute. Pieces of them—weakened by rust—had been known to drop off without warning, crushing or slashing the unwary.

“I can’t believe I let you talk me into coming back out here,” Lissa grumbled. “We get one day a week out of L-Twelve, and I’m spending it out here. You’re going to get me killed one of these days.”

“Not going to happen.”

“Give it time. Oh, look!”

Deedra followed Lissa’s pointing finger, then watched as her friend carefully clambered down from their vantage point to the ground.

Lissa was smaller than Deedra, with a mountain of wild jet-black hair that would have added two or three more inches to her height had it not been tied back in a tight, efficient ponytail. Like Deedra, she wore a gray poncho that covered her torso and arms, with black pants and boots underneath. A breathing mask dangled around her neck—the air quality wasn’t too bad today, so they were bare-facing it.

She reached down for something on the ground, cried out triumphantly, and held up her prize.

Squinting, Deedra couldn’t tell what it was, so she joined Lissa on the ground. Lissa held up a small, perfectly round disc. It was just the right size to be held with one hand. It had a similarly perfect hole in its center, and its face was smudged and scratched, but when Lissa flipped it over, the opposite side was clean and shiny.

“What is it?” Deedra asked.

“I thought you might know. You’re the one who scavenges every free minute.”

Deedra examined the disc. On the smudged side, she could barely make out what appeared to be letters: Two
D
s, with a
V
between them.

“I don’t know what it is.”

Lissa suddenly exclaimed with excitement. “Wait! Let me try.…”

She snatched back the disc and poked her finger through the hole in the middle, then held it with the shiny side out. “See? It’s a mirror! You put your finger through to hold it and look at yourself in the shiny side.”

Deedra’s lip curled at the sight of herself. It was something she usually tried to avoid. Her muddy-brown hair was down around her shoulders, even though it was more practical to tie it up while out scavenging. Even around her best friend, though, she couldn’t abide the idea of exposing her scar. It was a knotty, twisted cable of dead-white flesh that wended from under her left earlobe all the way down to her shoulder, standing out a good half inch from her body. She flinched at her reflection and turned away.

“Sorry,” Lissa mumbled. “Sorry, wasn’t thinking—”

Deedra immediately felt terrible. The scar wasn’t Lissa’s fault. “Don’t. It’s okay. And I think you’re right.” She took Lissa’s wrist and turned the disc so that it reflected Lissa instead. “It’s a mirror. Very cool. Check out the pretty girl.”

Lissa chuckled. She tucked the disc into her pack, which she’d slung over one shoulder. Already, it bulged with junk she’d scavenged on their careful slog through the Wreck. Lissa was a good friend but
a terrible scavenger. She kept
everything
. Deedra had tried to tell her:
Save your pack for the trip back. It’s less to carry that way, and it means you can save your space for the very best stuff you come across.
But Lissa never learned. She wanted it all.

The wind shifted and they caught a whiff of the river, which made them gag. Lissa slipped on her breathing mask. “Disgusting. We’re not getting any closer, are we?”

Deedra shrugged. She’d come out here for one reason. And, yes, getting closer was a part of it. The river formed part of the boundary with Sendar Territory. Deedra and Lissa lived in Ludo Territory, under the auspices of Magistrate Max Ludo. Ludo and Sendar were part of the City, which—as far as anyone knew—didn’t have a name. It didn’t need one. It was the City.

Ludo Territory was under terms of a peace treaty with Sendar… but even long-standing peace treaties had been known to change without warning. So being out by the river was at least a little bit dangerous, and not just for the risk of breathing in the toxic brew.

Still, she wanted to climb the bridge. And today would be the day.

“Check it out!” Lissa cried, pointing.

Deedra turned and saw—right out in the open—an enormous rat. It had to be at least a foot long, standing three or four inches tall, and it had paused to scratch at the loose gravel on the ground.

“I see dinner,” Lissa singsonged, and rummaged for her slingshot.

“Uh-uh.” Deedra held out a hand to stop her. “Not that one. Look closer.”

The rat stood still, shivering. It bore blue tufts of mangy fur.

“Mutant,” she told Lissa. “You eat him, he’ll be your last meal.”

For weeks now, drones had swooped low over the Territory, warning everyone about the danger of the hybrid rats that had begun edging into the Territory.
Citizens should not harvest and eat blue rats
, they’d boomed.
Hybrid rats are a dangerous food source.

“Citizens should not eat anything I don’t give them,” Lissa said, aping the Magistrate’s voice. “Citizens should not blah blah blah.”

“You want to risk it?” Deedra asked.

“Not a chance.”

“Didn’t think so.”

Deedra picked up a nearby rock and tossed it at the rat. It landed in front of the rat and off to one side. The rat stared for a second, totally unafraid, then loped off toward the river.

“I’m going to follow it,” Deedra said casually.

Lissa wrinkled her nose. “Why?”

“Maybe it shares a nest with normal rats.”

“And maybe you just want to get closer to the bridge.”

Deedra shrugged with exaggerated innocence but didn’t deny it.

“I was wrong before,” Lissa said. “You’re not going to get
me
killed—you’re going to get yourself killed. Go have fun doing it. I’m going to check over there.” She pointed off to an overturned truck in the near distance. “Meet back here in ten?”

“Make it twenty.” She didn’t want to climb the bridge and have to come right back down.

They separated. The smell from the river grew more intense as she got closer, following the blue rat as it scampered away. She slid on her own breathing mask. It got twisted up in her necklace, so she paused for a moment to disentangle the pendant before slipping the mask over her mouth and nose.

The rat stopped and looked back at her. Deedra picked up a crushed tin can and hurled it. The rat ran a little way, then turned around again. Deedra stomped after it, scooped up the can, and threw it again. She chased the rat nearly to the water before it disappeared into a pile of scrap and garbage.

The chase had taken her around to the far side of the abutment. A collapsed chunk of pavement leaned against the column. The pavement
was nearly vertical, but she thought she could use the cracks in it as handholds and scale her way up to the bridge itself.

She could hardly believe her good luck. She had thought she would have to climb one of the other abutments, which didn’t have nearly so many handholds.

“You’re my hero, ugly mutant blue rat,” she called. The rat, if it heard her, didn’t bother to answer.

She tied her hair back to keep it out of her eyes as she climbed. “You can do this,” she muttered. “You can do this.…”

It was hard going, but she fell into a rhythm soon enough, using her legs to push herself up rather than pulling with her arms. That was the trick—using the bigger, stronger leg muscles for movement and the smaller arm muscles for balance and direction. She’d gotten about twenty feet up and was pretty pleased with herself. Below and off to her left, the river glimmered, oily and slick. Sometimes, in the rare sunlight, it was almost beautiful. Not today.

She kept a tight grip with her right hand and wiped sweat from her brow.

Stop daydreaming, Deedra. Get moving. Lissa will be waiting.

With a heavy sigh, she reached for the next handhold, flexing her legs for distance.

And the pavement under her right foot crumbled and peeled away.

Deedra gasped as her whole right side listed, suddenly hanging out in open air. Her right hand hadn’t reached the new handhold yet, and her entire left side was already protesting the strain of holding her up. She flailed for a handhold, for a foothold, for anything at all, but her motion made her position only more precarious.

She glanced down. The ground swam at her.

It was only twenty feet, but the ground was studded with chunks of concrete, sharp bits of steel, and heavy rocks. If she dropped, she could easily bash her head open or break her back.

Her right hand slapped against the pavement, seeking purchase. She lifted her head; looking at the ground was stupid when she needed to find a handhold instead.

Across the river, something caught her attention. It was so unexpected that she actually forgot her situation for an instant.

Something—some
one
—was across the river, in Sendar Territory.

Running toward the river.

It was another girl.

Deedra flattened herself against the pavement and reached straight up with her free hand. She had to twist into a contorted, painful position, but she found a grip. Planting the heel of her loose foot against the wall, she stabilized herself.

Deep breaths. Deep, deep breaths.

When she looked into Sendar again, the other girl had made it to the opposite shore. At that distance, she almost disappeared into the background clutter of crumbled concrete, twisted steel, and broken glass.