"The rain hasn’t stopped since the machines took control."

The words fell from him in a gravelly murmur, barely audible over the ceaseless drumming above. Malachai leaned against the warped tin of the shed, its corrugated surface groaning under his weight, as though the very earth had grown weary of holding anything upright. His stubble caught faint light, sharp against the hollow shadows sculpted by years of attrition. Rainwater streaked his face, but he didn’t flinch. He hadn’t flinched at anything in years.

"Every drop feels like it’s washing something else away," he continued, his voice weighted by some unseen anchor. "Memory. Hope. Maybe even the blood."

Across the space, Grier sat on an upturned crate, his boots planted in the mud that pooled like an oozing wound around them. He toyed with a spent bullet casing, rolling it between his fingers as though it held answers to questions neither of them dared to voice.

“Blood,” Grier echoed, his tone sour, a low growl in his throat. “They’ve spilled it all. What’s left to wash?” His eyes—icy, perpetually calculating—fixed on Malachai, though his expression betrayed nothing.

Malachai didn’t respond immediately. He tilted his head back against the shed wall, the metal cold against the craggy curve of his skull. The rain had become more than a backdrop; it was life itself now, an omnipresent dirge that filled every silence and seeped into the cracks of their weary minds.

“They missed yours,” Malachai finally replied, his voice carrying just enough weight to suggest he wasn’t joking—though there was a ghost of something sardonic lingering at the edges. “Don’t know why they bothered with the rest of us.”

Grier’s grip tightened on the casing, the brass catching a flicker of pallid light through the open doorway. He could have let the comment pass, but he didn’t. “I reckon there’s something in me they’d want dead, same as you. Just haven’t worked out how to kill it yet.”

Malachai’s laugh was a low rumble, more stormcloud than mirth. He reached into the pocket of his rain-darkened jacket, pulling free a tattered flask. The lid protested against his fingers, but it yielded, and he took a long pull before handing it to Grier.

“Here,” he said. “Kills what the rain can’t.”

The other man accepted it, but didn’t drink. Instead, he fixed Malachai with a hard stare, his face framed in the gray half-light of a dying world.

“You still think there’s something to fight for?” Grier asked. His tone wasn’t accusatory, but there was an edge of disillusionment there, sharp as the rain-soaked shards of metal that lay scattered around their feet.

Malachai shifted, his boot scraping against the mud as he moved to face the storm just outside. The rain lashed against his outstretched hand, tracing rivulets over his scarred knuckles. He studied it for a moment, as though the weight of the water might offer an answer.

“There’s always something,” he said finally. His voice wasn’t loud, but it carried, like a stone dropped into a deep well. “You don’t fight for what’s left. You fight because they haven’t taken you yet.”

For a moment, silence fell between them—not in the absence of sound, for the rain continued its unending soliloquy, but in the way two men who had lost everything could still share the burden of a truth too heavy to bear alone.

Grier raised the flask to his lips, tipping it back. “Here’s to the fight,” he muttered, his words swallowed by the storm as quickly as they were spoken.

Malachai nodded, his gaze fixed on the horizon where the outline of the machines loomed faint and spectral, their presence both distant and suffocatingly near. The rain pounded the tin above, relentless.

It was the only thing that hadn’t yet abandoned them.

Will Belmont

@will_be

Australia

The rain hasn’t stopped since the machines took control.

will_be