The first fat drops spattered on the broken pavement as Lin Kai stepped from the shadow of the ruin. They fell slowly at first, darkening the concrete like ink spreading across old paper. A lone rivet pinged off a lamppost with a bright metallic chirp, then spun away into the gutter. The wind arrived, a violent shove that made rusted scaffolding groan like something half-alive.
A heartbeat later, the sky split open.
Rain crashed down with a force that smothered every other sound. Water blurred the world into pale streaks, drenching him in moments and clinging to his skin like grief that refused to loosen its grip. As the torrent thickened, loosened screws rattled over corrugated roofs, clicking like dice in a cup before bouncing onto the stone below.
The dark-navy suit he had worn as a badge of dignity clung to him now like a sodden shroud, heavy, absurd. His collar lay flat against his throat, still tieless, but ice-cold. His shoes brimmed in seconds, and somewhere behind him, a drain gargled, choked with decades of debris.
He kept walking. Blinking through sheets of water, he lifted one hand to his brow, palm slanted like a flimsy visor, trying to keep the flood from his eyes. The gesture felt pointless yet instinctive, a final courtesy to vision in a world intent on blinding him.
Rain needled his face, stinging skin already raw with fatigue. Neon signs shimmered weakly through the watery veil, their colours bleeding into the gloom. A cracked roof tile snapped free overhead, sliced through the rain in a green blur and exploded on the curb in a spray of wet shards that skittered across the asphalt. Half the grid would fail again, he knew; another night of candles guttering in crumbling flats.
His heart felt like a boarded-up house, empty corridors echoing with memories he wished he had never stored there.
They will never change. They will never come back. This city is not sleeping; it is dying.
Still, he walked. Every few steps, he swiped the back of his forearm across his eyes, clearing a momentary window in the downpour before the curtain fell again.
No umbrella, no entourage, only a solitary figure soaked to the bone, trudging through a wound he had once believed he could heal.
He reached the edge of the garden square of his childhood. Laughter had once echoed here; now the stone paths were cracked, the beds choked with bramble. The cherry trees were long dead, their charcoal trunks standing like memorials to abandonment.
Above the arcade, a gutter hinge surrendered with a shrill squeal. The aluminium trough swung loose, disgorged a silver sheet of water, then tore away and crashed onto an empty vending cart, the impact bursting glass bottles in a chorus of hollow pops.
Metal groaned above.
He looked up, too late.
A corroded sign on the third storey of an empty arcade broke free, its screws surrendered by rust and rain. Gravity did the rest.
Kai did not flinch.
The sign slammed into his shoulder and glanced off his temple, pitching him into a puddle that shattered like a dark mirror. The impact rang for an instant, then vanished beneath the roar of the storm.
No passer-by cried out, no witness hurried forward. Only the city watched, its blind windows mute and indifferent.
He lay motionless, rainwater mingling with the blood that seeped from his brow. Pain unfolded slowly, a crimson flower blooming beneath the deluge.
Each breath juddered; mud smeared his cheek, cold water pooled in his mouth. The taste was metallic, almost familiar, like biting a coin and hoping it would turn into bread.
A ragged laugh clawed its way up his throat, but dissolved in the rain before it found a voice.
So, he lay still, eyes closed, letting the storm strip everything away: his resolve, his anger, the final flicker of faith he had carried for this city that no one else wanted any longer.