CHAPTER FOUR.
What Rain Won’t Wash.
He woke to rain that sounded like static against the windows, a thin hiss that blurred neon into watercolor. The room smelled faintly of wet concrete and lemon oil—the scent of floorboards scrubbed clean, because motion steadied thought. On a low shelf near the door sat the ALPIRE placard: Housing — Public Security Support. It was an official thing and a private one at once. The rent was subsidized, the heating dependable, the curtains the same neutral gray every Warden seemed to own. The generosity always had edges. Easier to forget them when the kettle was warm.
Claymore moved through the apartment like a man tracing a memorized pattern. He folded a towel along its crease twice, then three times. He wiped the counters with a cloth squared at the edges. Every motion had an economy to it, precise as drill: no wasted reach, no rhetorical flourish. The apartment reflected the same restraint—serviceable stovetop, a bookcase with only a few titles, a chair whose foam had been replaced twice. Not a space that asked questions; one that answered them with reliability.
On the sink counter lay the handkerchief Web Beat had pressed into his hand: bright plastic yellow, a cartoon dog smiling up with cheerful, betrayed eyes. The stain across its face was not ordinary blood—thinner, almost ink. At first he had tucked it into his rig’s pouch because it felt like a thing to keep. He told himself he would wash it later. Now later had arrived.
He turned the tap, let the water run cool, and kneaded the cloth between his fingers. The stain bled out in pale ribbons, the dog’s smile softening under the suds. Claymore scrubbed until the water ran lighter, then rinsed, careful not to tear the fabric. He pressed it flat against a towel, then set it near the sill where rainlight pooled faint across the fabric.
For a moment his hands paused. The act of smoothing cloth hooked him to a memory he had not invited. Another set of hands hovered in ghost-motion beside his own—smaller, less certain, tugging corners too quickly. The sensation brushed across his skin like static before storm. Claymore pressed the fabric flat, throat tightening, and stepped back. The air felt briefly occupied. He did not name it.
The terminal blinked on the desk. He signed in with thumb and badge, obedience as habitual as breath. Messages stacked in clipped rows: shift coFor a moment his hands paused. The act of smoothing cloth hooked him to a memory he had not invited. Another set of hands hovered in ghost-motion beside his own—smaller, less certain, tugging corners too quickly. The sensation brushed across his skin like static before storm. Claymore pressed the fabric flat, throat tightening, and stepped back. The air felt briefly occupied. He did not name it.
Confirmations, supply requests, a missing courier in South Rail. A list of unclaimed items included paper hands. He scrolled with the eyes of a man searching for anomalies rather than stories.
One message thread scrolled past—“Good run last night,” followed by “Always ready when it counts.” Polite, efficient praise with brittle edges. A clap delivered at arm’s length. He filed the sentiment away and replied with the minimal: Acknowledged.
By late morning, he was pulling surveillance clips against missing-person reports. The city’s feeds were grainy, merciless. He slowed a frame: a courier ducking under an awning, chalk sigil faint against a pillar. He tabbed through other nights. Same handprints, same hurried figures.
Then, a face. Grainy, partial, but enough. Dark hair falling across a forehead, glasses catching a thread of light. Enlarged until the pixels broke, still recognizable enough to unsettle. Claymore froze, jaw hardening. He did not name it. He flagged the file, pressed the weight into silence.
The coil wound under his sternum—the pressure that always came before strain. It felt deeper than muscle, deeper than breath. He forced it down. When warmth touched the inside of his nostril, he knew the cue. Glove to face, practiced. A copper smear in the towel’s weave. Residue, nothing more. He folded the cloth, set it aside, and returned to the screen.
The draft report read like all the others: Timeline. Last seen. Witness statements. No conjecture. He could have typed the words that lingered in his mind. He could have written what the symbols suggested. Instead: Subject last seen near market; no confirmation. Surveillance recommended. Bureaucratically neat. He signed, sent. The omission weighed like a stone in his pocket, but survival demanded it.
He leaned back from the screen, the glow leaving faint shapes in his eyes. The rain pressed harder against the glass. From the shelf above the counter he drew a narrow pack of cigarettes, edges softened by use but neatly kept. He tapped one out and balanced it between his fingers before lighting it.
The first draw came shallow, then deeper. Smoke curled into the lemon-clean air, shifting the room’s register. The act wasn’t guilt, not indulgence exactly—just a measured allowance, a rhythm he permitted himself. He smoked slowly, each exhale visible in the half-light, strands unwinding toward the ceiling like faint signals.
The ash fell into a ceramic ashtray he kept by the sill, its blue glaze fractured into fine lines of crackle. It was the only decorative object in the apartment, more craft than commodity. The bowl was half-filled with gray tap-taps, each stub pressed down as carefully as his folded towels. Its presence softened the room in a way nothing else did.
He rested the cigarette in its groove and let his shoulders draw down from their square line. He watched the ember glow, watched it sink lower. The ritual steadied him, the pause extending beyond the smoke itself. For a few minutes, the room smelled not of order or duty, but of pause.
When the cigarette burned short, he pressed it cleanly into the glaze. The indulgence ended as neatly as it began.
He reached for a square sheet of paper beside the terminal—habit, not decision—and folded it down the center. Then again. Lines creased sharp beneath his thumb. The shape built itself. By the time the rain slackened, a crane perched beside the handkerchief on the sill. Its wings sagged in the damp, but it stood whole. He left it there.
***
At the patrol node, sodium lamps hummed overhead. He checked his rig; coils responsive, harness snug. The cloth bag pressed against his ribs, a small weight not yet named.
He folded into the schedule with ease: routes, checkpoints, nods to colleagues. Their praise came clipped: “Well done, Claymore. Steady as always.” The words sounded like walls. He answered with the minimal: “Copy.”
The South Rail Sector stretched in a damp mosaic—corridors of market stalls shuttered by rain tarps, narrow alleys where neon pooled in puddles, old tunnels converted into walkways. Claymore walked his assigned paths, steady, exact. The people he passed looked up at him with the courtesy due a Warden—polite nods, careful glances—but never warmth. Respect as arm’s-length distance. His presence reassured and unsettled in equal measure. He kept moving.
The rain had not washed everything clean. In one alley, a flyer clung to the brick, pulp half-melted but the print still legible: a handprint stamped in black, fingertips tapering into lines of text too blurred to read. Another wall bore chalk marks—loops and half-circles, washed thin but insistent. A vendor stacked crates outside his stall and, seeing Claymore pause, wiped the marks away with a rag too quickly, eyes fixed on the ground. None of it made a scene. All of it left a residue.
He catalogued it silently: not enough to report, not enough to dismiss. Just the edges of something persistent.
Nothing remarkable followed until a boy darted across the end of the street, chasing a paper scrap the wind had lifted. The child’s hands clutched it, folding once without thought, pressing the crease down with an awkward thumb. Claymore’s eyes caught on the motion.
The memory came not as image but as sensation: the dry rustle of thin paper, the sour-sweet smell of glue left open too long, the warmth of another body leaning close. And then—more intrusive than sight—a familiar voice, not words but cadence, the shape of breath beside him. Fingers folding too fast, creases spilling out uneven.
He blinked hard, severing it before it could take form. The rain pressed louder in his ears. A muscle in his jaw locked. The coil under his sternum tugged tight, as though marrow itself had learned to beat. For a moment he thought it might rise, cresting into something he couldn’t contain. He steadied his breath and kept walking. The memory dissolved like paper under water.
***
When he returned home, the room greeted him with silence. He set his rig aside, loosened the harness, and moved to the bathroom. The shower hissed hot against tile.
This time, when the blood rose, he did not force it back. He let the nosebleed run, pressing tissue against his face. His reflection in the fogged mirror blurred at the edges, pale and trembling under the red trace. His free hand braced against the counter. A warmth pulsed under his skin, tremor spreading through chest and ribs. The sensation built like pressure under stone, threatening fissure.
He stayed there until the bleeding slowed, tissue soaked through. His breath found its rhythm again—shallow, then steadier. He rinsed the copper taste from his mouth, dropped the crumpled paper into the bin.
After, he filled the tub and lowered himself into the warmth. Steam thickened the air, coated the tile. He let the water lap against his collarbone, let the sound of the rain bleed through the walls. Down his chest and arms there were scars kept with the persistence of a tally, some deeper than others, all of them old. His body loosened inch by inch, though the coil inside never unwound entirely.
The handkerchief dried on the sill in the other room. The paper crane sagged beside it. Claymore closed his eyes and let the hush of water and rain mingle. For a few minutes, it was enough.
Steam clung to the tile long after he let the water go. Claymore lingered in the doorway, towel around his waist, the mirror before him a blurred panel where his edges refused to hold. He did not try to sharpen them. The room was a soft, damp thing; the rain slowed to a patient drizzle and the city’s neon filtered in thin, watercolor bands across the floor.
His hands found the square and folded: edge to edge, crease exact, breath measured. Folding was the kind of discipline that didn’t require words—angles, pressure, repetition. The new crane built itself beneath his fingers, sharp where the old one had softened. He placed it beside the first and waited a little, watching the two of them together. One resilient, one surrendered. He didn’t smooth the old wing. That would have been an apology and he’d left apologies for other people.
He walked the apartment on small, procedural steps—dress, dry, fold, set down. The kettle reminded him of itself with a thin whistle. He poured water into a mug, watched steam rise and nick the glass with brief opacity. Tea became an excuse to keep his hands occupied; he let it cool until the surface went glassy, then put it aside on a stack of folded towels, untouched. The ritual of making a thing and not finishing it steadied him in a way more forceful than swallowing hot liquid ever could.
A buzz at the terminal interrupted the hush: a tasking ping, short and neutral. Secondary coverage: South Rail, supplemental sweep requested, monitor platform five during late hours. He read it twice because the word supplemental felt like a careful nudge—less urgent, more courteous—then he dressed again, harness settling like a second skin. The apartment snapped shut into its practiced angles around him; the handkerchief and both cranes watched from the sill as he left.
Outside the rain had retrenched into fine threads that made his collar damp. The city smelled of wet metal and old tar, lime paint bleached into puddles. Platforms were ghosted now—benches empty, the echo of the last passengers lingering like a film. Posters stuck to tiles in layered scales, advertising a dozen small promises no one had kept. Here and there, someone had ripped away a poster and in the exposed seam beneath, someone else had left a black handprint. It was like the city kept its wounds in catalogues.
At a stairwell the chalk marks showed through faint as a bruise. Someone had drawn a semicircle with little radiating ticks, the lines thinned by water, stubborn as a memory. A janitor with a soaked mop caught him looking and, with an instinct that was almost too quick, wiped the mark away with the back of his hand. He did not meet Claymore’s eyes. The movement was a small erasure, practiced and apologetic at once—an attempt to make nothing last that someone might blame them for. Claymore let the act stand as information, not a story. He filed it without comment.
Further down, a circle of coins lay near a drain, flattened petals folded into their center. The arrangement had the careful sloppiness of a thing done by people who wanted meaning, not spectacle. He crouched, not to touch, but to notice the way salt had crusted on the petals’ edges; the smell that rose—damp, old perfume, something like regret—got under his skin. A breeze lifted a petal and dragged it toward the rail. The circle broke and he let it go. That the ritual could be undone by wind was no comfort.
There was a hum beneath everything tonight, a low single note that might have been passing traffic, a transformer, the city’s bones shifting. He cocked his head and listened to the space where the sound sat, trying to separate it from the ordinary. For a second it seemed to bend toward the exact place beneath his sternum where something tightened like a coil; then the hum slackened into the usual city noise. He counted heartbeats for a task and kept moving. He was a man who measured worry into minutes and pocketed it away.
The kiosk by the underpass still had a light on. The owner, a woman whose apron smelled of boiled sugar and bleach, straightened when she saw his silhouette. Her face softened into the practiced civility people offered uniforms—polite and blank like a well-made mask.
“Warden,” she said, the word clipped and oddly ceremonial. “Out late. Thank you for your service.”
He inclined his head, a single, disciplined motion. “Good night.”
She hesitated, then added—because the city makes human pleasantries into a currency—“Stay dry, yeah?” Her fingers toyed with the edge of a paper cup, and when she spoke the sentence it sounded less like advice than like an attempt to belong to the ordinary transaction of neighborly care. Claymore’s chest made a small, unfamiliar sound and he left without answering. The words echoed longer than they should have.
A little farther on he found a scrap folded into a lopsided boat, abandoned at the curb. Rain had twisted its paper into a slim canoe; someone—absentmindedly, with the clumsy grace of a child—had tucked a tiny crease at the bow. He crouched, fingertips near the wet edge, and remembered the sound—something small and private—the crisp cut of paper being folded in hands that knew the rhythm. The memory came as texture: the rasp of paper, a warmth of proximity, a breath in his ear that was cadenced and half-melody. He shut it down with a blink so quick his eyes watered. The coil under his ribs tightened and then eased because that was the practice that had kept him moving so long.
Home received him the way it had the night before—quiet, efficient. He set the mug on the counter and did not drink. On the sill the first crane had long since collapsed entirely; the fresh one stood thin and patient, as if it had been built to hold what the other could not. He left them together, two states of the same thing.
He retrieved the ceramic ashtray—its glaze soft as if someone had stroked it—and turned it in his hands. It was more art than utility, blue spiderwebbing through the glaze where heat had kissed it. He polished it with the hem of his shirt and set it on the sill. Tonight, he did not light a cigarette. The attraction was there—old and small—but he let the ashtray sit like a piece of furniture that could hold time for him.
He lay back and listened to the building breathe. Somewhere, a neighbor banged a pot in a rhythm that might have been a song or might have been a language of annoyance. He let the sound be what it was. The coil under his sternum pulsed at a slow, watchful tempo, and though he could have sworn it tightened, tonight it remained contained—an unspent tension rather than an eruption. He closed his eyes and kept the exactness of the folds in his mind the way one keeps a talisman: small, mechanical, refusing to tell tales.
Outside, in the city that kept its own small rituals of paper and coin and petal, chalk marks waited to be retraced. Someone would wake and redraw them, and someone else would come with a rag. The world would cycle. Claymore breathed with it, measured and deliberate, and for now the quiet—like origami on a sill—was enough to hold him steady.
***
Rain smeared the neon into long, oily strokes across the pavement. Gianni let the puddles bend his reflection until his face looked like someone else’s. He kept his hood down as he pushed open the ramen shop door; the bell’s thin clang felt like permission. Heat rolled out to meet him, thick and salted, carrying a faint, plasticky scent from the hanging vines that always made the place feel a little unreal. Steam fogged the low windows; inside, everything leaned into being useful and beloved—shelves crammed with mismatched bowls, a string of postcards taped above the counter, a lucky cat with a chipped ear watching the room like a small, tolerant god.
Gary’s stool was empty. The absence pressed at the corner of the shop like missing furniture in a familiar room.
Instead it was the girl who met him, apron tied askew, hair pulled back in a way that made the humidity halo it with frizz. She looked at him, then through him, then offered a smile that was trying to be competent and landed somewhere between welcome and apology.
“Lil’ G,” she said, recovering the nickname like a practiced greeting. The syllables were careful, like someone balancing a tray across a crowded room.
He let his shoulders ease a fraction. “Big G sorry for deserting the temple?” he said, grinning before he could decide whether to keep it small. The joke slid out the way it always did—half armor, half invitation. He watched her relax a little. That, more than anything, steadied him.
“He’s—uh—out for maintenance,” she said, glancing toward the vacant stool like it might still anchor her. “The screen was flickering again. Said I could handle tonight.” A ladle slipped, caught just in time.
Gianni huffed a laugh, shaking his head. “Man’s getting his pixels polished. Hope he comes back with the deluxe glow.”
“You’re doing fine,” he added, softer, as he took his seat at the counter. The vinyl was cool under his palms. He let the shop’s noises fold around him: the simmer of stock, the metallic ping when a spoon met a bowl, the distant hiss of the street outside. There was care everywhere, in the smudge of soy on the counter, the careful stacking of napkin dispensers. It felt like a place wholly exempt from the city’s scratchy abrasions. For a little while, that exemption could hold him.
She blinked at him, then leaned in with the enthusiasm of someone thrilled to be trusted. “What’ll it be? The usual?”
He watched the way she searched for the shape of his order in her head—the duct of protocol and personal memory that the shop kept for him. “The usual,” he said. Then, because rituals had become small anchors he could reach for, “and the pineapple. Don’t look like you’ve never seen a competent man eat fruit in his soup.”
She did look, a tiny, betrayed wrinkle of confusion crossing her face. “Pineapple?” she echoed, and there was the exact note he loved: equal parts offense and curiosity.
“With pineapple,” he repeated, deliberately solemn. “Trust me. Gary calls it—” He let the pause stretch, savoring the absent screen-face that usually hovered here. “He calls it an abomination, but that’s just jealousy.”
She laughed, a brief, disarming sound, and scuttled off to the kitchen with the note in hand. The clatter and voice and steam became the soundtrack for him while he waited. Steam gathered on the window, dripping down in threads that blurred the street outside. For a moment, the condensation looked like chalk marks washing away. His stomach flipped, quick and sour, and he closed his eyes until the drip reshaped itself into something ordinary again.
The shop inhaled with the heat of the broth. The girl moved with the quick, imprecise efficiency of someone apprenticing to a craft while pretending she owned it. She ladled, she tasted, she adjusted. When she set the bowl in front of him there was a little flourish—nervous and proud—and the steam rose in a soft white plume that caught the overhead light. Pineapple wedges bobbed like bright islands, their yellow a small shock against the copper of the broth.
He lifted the chopsticks and found that his fingers were not steady. The first attempt to snag noodles wobbled, and a strand draped back into the bowl. He laughed a short, embarrassed laugh and tried again, slower, as if patience could smooth the wobble into competence. The broth met his mouth warm and savory; the pineapple hit almost immediately after—sweet, bright, almost insolent. It split the salt like a small sun. The sensation did something quiet in his chest—an anchor dropping into water—and for a second he felt less like a man sitting across from a hostile world and more like a man having his favorite thing done for him in a room that was trying its best.
The girl watched him out of the corner of her eye. “Is it—do you want anything else?” she asked, voice small.
He thought of saying no and then thought of saying something honest and landed at the compromise of his usual armor. “Nah. Just tell Big G I didn’t burn the place down.” The smile that came with it was softer than usual, not barbed, and she answered it with the relieved tilt of someone allowed to be young in front of a familiar face.
As he ate, his mind kept skittering back to textures—the roughness of chalk being dragged across concrete, the salt of petals crusted in a coin circle, the soft rustle of paper folding. None of it resolved into sentences. It was a collage made of small sounds and smells, and it washed over him in fragments. He dipped a piece of pickled ginger between bites and the sharpness cleared his head for a moment. The shop wrapped itself around his breathing that way; each inhalation a stitch.
Somewhere a plate clattered. Someone called an order. The world continued in small, ordinary noises, and he let those noises be an anchor. He ate slower than he might have; each swallow was a little deliberate ceremony. The sweetness of the pineapple made him smile in a way that felt like apology and prestidigitation combined—enough of a human gesture that the young woman behind the counter stopped fiddling with a towel and watched him with something like admiration.
When he finished, he paid in exact change, sliding the coins across the counter. “Tell Big G Lil’ G says he’s doing good,” he said, testing the nickname in his mouth like a well-loved coin. It made the girl laugh properly this time, the sound bright and easy as soap bubbles.
She nodded, smiling awkwardly, and tucked the coins into the register with a clatter that sounded too loud for the small room.
The bell jangled again as he stepped out. Rain had thickened, droplets racing down the plastic awning. He stood to leave and paused at the threshold, the rain hitting the awning in thin sheets. Just to the side of the door, a flyer clung to a notice board—wet at the edges, ink bleeding into the paper like bruises. He didn’t need to stop and read. The shape of it—half-memorized symbols in a configuration that had begun to mean something—settled in his chest like a new, unwelcome stone. He let the recognition sit there, folded it into the pocket of his coat, and stepped back into the street. His reflection in the puddles had regrown the features the neon had once stolen; he watched himself walk away from the warm rectangle of the shop. He felt raw and whole at once—an odd, doubled thing—and the pineapple-sweet broth lingered on his tongue like an unlikely benediction as he walked into the rain.