Shadows in the Rain

Jin saw the first one on the morning of the third day.

He was standing at the window of Suite 4, with a cup of Mrs. Pruitt's coffee going cold in his hand, watching the traffic crawl along Larkin Street. It was a gray, ordinary morning. The trams clanged by. The baker's boy ran past with a tray on his head. Across the road a man in a dark coat and a low hat stood under a shop awning, lighting a cigarette.

He lit it badly. That was what made Jin look twice. The match struck, flared, and went out, and the man lit another, and it flared and went out in precisely the same way, at precisely the same angle, with precisely the same little puff of smoke. And again. And again. A film loop, ten seconds long, running over and over in the corner of the world.

"Archie," said Jin. "Come here."

"What is it?"

"Tell me what you see."

Archie came and looked. For a moment he saw nothing but the man, the awning, the rain. Then the cigarette flared, and went out, and flared, and he felt the skin tighten at the back of his neck.

"He's repeating."

"Yes."

"The Guardians repeat. Elena did. Tom does." Archie's voice was low. "But that's not Tom. That's not anyone. He's got no face."

"No." Jin put down the cup. "And look at his edges."

The man's outline wavered. Along his sleeve ran a faint fine thread of light, white and horizontal, like the scan line of an old television. As Jin watched, a strip of the man's coat flickered and turned a different color, then flickered back. "That's compression artifact," he said slowly. "That's data loss. That's what happens when you route a signal through a bad connection. It's not the Dimension. It's something on top of the Dimension. Something that's been laid on it."

"Laid on by who?"

"By someone with a camera," said Jin.

Neither of them said the name. Neither of them needed to.

Archie thought of a tall man in a gray suit at the glass of the observation suite, with a tablet in his hand and a faint pleasant smile. He thought of the polite, unrushed voice saying, A backup monitoring feed. Standard safety protocol. He thought of what it meant to smile at a number.

It wasn't for our safety, he thought. It was for his.

…

They closed ranks that day.

Archie did not tell the others everything. He told them what Jin had seen, and he told them what he suspected, and he told them to stay together and to stay away from the man with the cigarette. He did not say William. He did not yet have the right. He had a suspicion, a bad feeling, and a long habit of keeping both to himself. But when he looked at Zoe, in her borrowed red dress, bent over the file with a pencil in her hair, he found that the habit had lost something of its grip.

Tell her, he thought. She'll want to know.

He put it off. It was a small thing, a day's delay, and he told himself it didn't matter.

By afternoon there were four of them in the street.

They were stationed at the corners of the block, in the rain, pretending to be pedestrians: the man with the cigarette, a woman who stood motionless beside a pillar box, a pair of boys who tossed the same ball back and forth, back and forth, with the same stiff arc of the arm. They did not approach. They did not do anything. They simply were, staring through the gaps in the world with their faces smeared.

"They're not hostile," Venn said, pressing his nose to the glass. "Are they?"

"They're not doing anything," said Jin. "Yet."

"Maybe they're just, you know. Looking."

"That is the problem."

…

It was a little after eleven that night when the bar began to shake.

They were all at The Last Note, since there was nowhere else to be. It was the one place in Ashmore where the air seemed to settle. The rain had come on thick and loud. Fitz was playing his fifth song to the half-empty room. Bridie the nurse had propped her paperback on the bar and was reading the same page for the third time. Tom was drying a glass, as he always was, with his eyes on nothing.

Then he stopped.

He stopped in the middle of a stroke, with the cloth bunched in his fist. The glass in his other hand tipped, and fell, and burst on the floor. He did not seem to hear it.

"Tom?" said Zoe.

"The little girl," Tom said.

His voice was a dry whisper. His eyes had gone wide and unfocused, staring at the wall across the room, at something that was not there. "She was four. She had a stuffed rabbit. She wouldn't go to sleep without the song. Da, da-da, da-dum. She said it was the rabbit's. Said the rabbit liked it." His breath hitched. "Nell. Her name was Nell."

"Tom, sit down—"

"I had a cough." The words came faster. "I thought it was nothing. A cold. I was drawing the library, I was nearly done, I was so—" His hands came up and pressed against his temples. "And the doctor said it was in my bones. And I thought, there isn't time. And then a man came with a paper, and he said, there's a chance, Mr. Crane, there's a chance, we need volunteers—"

The mirrors behind the bar cracked from corner to corner.

"Tom!"

"—and I said yes. I said yes. I said it to a man in a white coat, and I kissed her goodnight, and I said, Daddy will be back in a few days, and I—"

He screamed.

It was an awful sound, raw and animal, and it went through the bar like a physical blow. The lights flared white. Bottles leapt from the shelves and smashed. Fitz fell off the piano stool. The old sisters threw themselves under their table. The whole room heaved, as if the building had a heart and the heart had been struck, and in the midst of it Tom stood with his head thrown back and his mouth open, remembering, remembering, remembering.

"Get down!" Archie bellowed. "Everybody get down!"

The glass in the front window blew inward.

…

They came through the shattered pane in a silent, flickering, uncanny wave.

The man with the cigarette. The woman by the pillar box. The two boys with the ball. A dozen more behind them, men and women and children, all with the same blurred, unfinished faces and the same jerking looped movements. They poured over the sill without a sound. They had a strange wrongness in their motion: a stutter, a skip, as if some frames of their passage had been cut out.

"The Static!" Jin shouted. He had grabbed a bar stool and was holding it before him like a lion tamer's chair. "The noise! They're drawn to the disturbance! Tom's remembering and it's making a signal—"

"What do we do?"

"I don't know!"

Venn took the first one on the end of a broken bottle. It did not fall. The bottle went through it as through a column of smoke, and the figure kept coming, and then Venn's face went rigid, because the thing had touched him, and where its hand had been a line of white pixels ran up his arm and he buzzed. He crumpled to one knee. His teeth were chattering.

"Hurts," he gasped. "It hurts. It's like. Like pins."

"Don't let them touch you!"

"Thank you, I got that!"

Zoe had a bottle in each hand. She hurled one at the man with the cigarette and it burst against his chest in a shower of amber and he stuttered, froze, and fell apart into a rain of pale squares. She gave a gasp of amazement. "Iron!" she cried. "It's the rye! It's got to be—it's something about the proof—Jin, Jin, throw the drinks!"

"What?"

"Throw the drinks!"

For a moment, absurdly, nobody moved. Then Bridie the nurse stood up, with a bottle of gin in her fist and a look of cold fury, and said, in a perfectly steady voice: "I've been serving this district for ten years, and I've never once been so insulted." And hurled it.

It was a magnificent throw. The whole bar rose. The usher grabbed a decanter. Fitz, half-blind, fumbling on the floor, came up with a siphon of soda and began to spray. The old sisters, with a ferocious glee, tipped a bottle of sherry across the floor in the path of the advancing Static and watched the figures dissolve in it like paper in a bath. For ten or twelve glorious seconds the Last Note held, and the bar was a hurricane of glass and liquor and shouting, and in the center of it Tom stood with his hands over his face, weeping.

Then Zoe screamed.

…

It was not a sound he would ever forget.

He had been fighting, he realized, in the way that a man fights when he is more afraid than he can say: blindly, with his hands, at the nearest thing. He had broken a chair over a shape and put his shoulder into another. He had not looked up. He looked up now, at the sound of that cry, and saw her across the room, backed against the bar with a long bright line of white pixels running up her left arm from the wrist to the shoulder.

She was staring at it. Her mouth was open. Her face was colorless.

"Archie," she said.

He could not afterward have said how he crossed the room. He remembered nothing between the two points. He remembered only that it was suddenly very quiet, and that he had her in his arms. She was shaking. Her eyes were wide and glassy and her skin was ice-cold, and the white lines had faded, thank God, and left behind a long raw wound. He held her up with one arm round her back and the other under her knees, and felt the whole weight of her go slack against him.

The Static stopped.

It stopped all at once, as if a switch had been thrown. The figures stood where they were, a dozen blurred shapes in the wreck of the bar, jerking faintly. Then they flickered, and thinned, and fell apart one by one into a drift of pale light that settled to the floor like snow and was gone.

In the ringing silence, Archie held Zoe against his chest and could not let go.

"You okay?" he said. His voice was a rasp. "Zoe. Talk to me. Are you—"

"I'm fine."

"You're not fine. You're bleeding."

"I'm fine," she said again. She was looking up at him from inches away, and her breath was warm against his collarbone, and her eyes, large and dark and a little dazed, were fixed on his face. "You caught me."

"I did."

"Again."

"I'm sorry?"

"You always catch me." A wobbly smile was forming. "You keep doing it. It's getting to be a habit. First the shadow, and now this."

He opened his mouth. He found, to his horror, that he had no idea what to say. The room had gone very small. He was aware of her hand, which had crept up and curled in the lapel of his trench coat, and of her hair, which smelled of rain and smoke and something faintly sweet, and of his own heart going like a trip-hammer in his chest.

"Bad habit," he managed.

"Terrible."

"I'll work on it."

"Don't you dare," said Zoe.

She began to laugh. It started as a hiccup and became a real laugh, a helpless one, shaking against him, and he found that he was laughing too. They stood there in the ruins of the bar with the glass crunching under their feet and the rain blowing in through the broken window, laughing like two people who had just remembered how.

"Hey," said Venn, from the floor. "Hey. I'm bleeding too. Does nobody care?"

"We care," said Jin.

"I'm fine. I only mention it."

…

It was Tom who spoke first, when the room had stilled.

He was sitting on a bar stool, in the center of the wreckage, with the dust settling around him. Bridie had wrapped a blanket round his shoulders. His face was wet. But something in it had changed. The slackness was gone. The heavy bulldog look had slid away from his features like a mask, and in its place was a long, lean, humorous, sorrowful face, that of a man in his late thirties, with a high forehead and dark hollows under the eyes.

He looked up, and found Archie's gaze.

"My name," he said, with a kind of tremulous precision, "is Thomas Jeremiah Crane."

The room was perfectly silent.

"I was thirty-eight years old. I was an architect. I designed a library that I never saw built." He drew a shuddering breath. "I have a daughter named Nell, who is nineteen now, if the numbers are right, and who thinks her father walked out on her, because I never told her I was ill. And I have been in this room for twenty years, though they tell me it is fifteen out there." His voice cracked. "I want to go home. Please. I want to go home."

"We know," said Zoe, softly.

"I'm so tired."

"We know."

Archie crossed to him and knelt, as he'd knelt in the throne room, so that their eyes were level. He did not say anything for a long moment. Then he took Tom's hand, the scarred one, the one with the crescent on the back, and held it.

"Thomas," he said. "I'm Archie Moran. I'm an architect. I think the library's beautiful."

Thomas Crane put his head on Archie's shoulder and wept.

…

The door opened an hour before dawn.

It had been there all along, Thomas said. A small plain door at the end of the cellar, behind the kegs, which he had walked past every day for twenty years and never once seen. They went down together by lamplight, the five of them, past the sleeping regulars and the shattered bottles, and stood before it. It was white at the edges.

Before they went in, Thomas stopped. He put a hand on Archie's sleeve.

"There's something you ought to know."

"What is it?"

"I felt it just now. When the Static came." His brow furrowed. "I thought it was only noise. But it wasn't. It had a... a shape. A purpose. It was a thing that was looking." He lowered his voice. "Someone's watching these Dimensions from the outside, Archie. Someone who isn't Luca. I can't see his face. But he wants something. He's been taking something from every Space, little by little, like a man siphoning petrol from a car."

"I think I know who," said Archie, quietly.

"Then be careful." Thomas's grip tightened. "Please. I couldn't bear it if—" He stopped. "Be careful."

Behind them, in the dark of the cellar, the first gray light of morning crept in through the broken window, and the rain, which had not ceased in twenty years, fell for the first time at an ordinary slant. Somewhere above their heads Fitz began to play the lullaby, slowly, clumsily, right to the end. Nell's song. The rabbit's song.

It ended on a long major chord.