"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.


Grier rotated the spent casing one last time between his fingers, then flicked it into the puddle at his feet. The muted plink was swallowed by the rain, insignificant, like everything else these days.

“I’ve got work,” he said, the words coming out as more of a growl than a statement. He stood, his boots pulling free of the mud with a reluctant squelch. “Recycling center’s expecting me. Got me sorting through the junk of the old world again. Pieces of their empire, you know?” His expression twisted into something bitter—half a smirk, half a sneer. “Funny thing is, they never saw it coming. The end, I mean. Makes you think: what makes us so different?”

Malachai didn’t answer, just tipped the flask again in silent acknowledgment. Grier waited a moment, as though expecting something more, but when it didn’t come, he snatched his coat off the crate and slung it over his shoulders.

The doorway to the shed framed him in jagged angles of dull light and shadow, the rain beyond an endless gray curtain. He paused, glancing back as though searching for some last word to anchor himself, but none came. With a shake of his head, he stepped into the storm.

The rain enveloped him immediately, pounding against his coat and plastering his hair to his forehead. Each step through the mud echoed with a peculiar finality. For a man like Grier, who had survived where others hadn’t, the rain had always been just another obstacle—an annoyance, not a threat. It was as much a part of his world as the rubble beneath his feet or the machines in the sky.

And then it came.

A flash, brighter than the dull haze of neon and storm combined, split the heavens. For a fraction of a second, the world was made of white-hot light, and Grier was the center of it. The crack of thunder came too late, delayed as though reluctant to admit what had just happened.

Malachai’s head snapped up, the sound sharp enough to pierce even his rain-fogged thoughts. He rose instinctively, stepping to the doorway.

There, in the mire just meters away, lay Grier. Steam rose from his body, mingling with the rain in tendrils that twisted and danced like ghosts escaping into the sky. The metallic tang of ozone hung heavy in the air.

Malachai didn’t move. He stood frozen, the rain hammering against him as he stared at the broken figure crumpled before him. Somewhere, deep in the distance, the low hum of a machine sounded, the noise cutting through the storm like a blade.

“Damn it, Grier…” Malachai whispered, his voice lost in the rain.

But was it the lightning that had killed him? Or something else watching from above? Malachai’s eyes lifted, scanning the gray clouds for something more, something unseen.

The rain continued, indifferent.